Session 42: Vacuum Hose – Featuring Mother Booze Author, Allison Tyra

Join Allison Tyra, author of Mother Booze: Slursery Rhymes for your Alcoholic Inner Child, and try to suck up as much creative inspiration as possible!

Allison Tyra is an American transplant to Sydney, where she works in arts marketing and development, spends a lot of time petting animals and taking notes while her friends drink, for research and blackmail purposes. Allison also created and manages CulturalJobs.org, a searchable database of more than 600 job banks in the creative industries, as well as thousands of links directly to organisations’ employment pages. You can find her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/amtyra/ and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-tyra-5b1aab12/.

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36190442-mother-booze

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Booze-Updated-Slursery-Drinking-ebook/dp/B075VLKSBN/

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/au/listing/561317467/mother-booze-update-slursery-rhymes-for

Sounds

  • Vacuum Hose
  • Shower Time
  • Carnival Games
  • Scotch Tape
  • Farmer’s Market Passerby
  • Wine Bottle Fun
  • Old School Pyramid Game

Allison’s Result

Industrial dryer, hotel workers sharing stories and conversation at the end of a long day

Garage band jam session with improvised instruments, setting up a baseline and experimenting with accompanying sounds. the “performers” are not teen boys, but middle-aged women seeking creative release from their daily lives, using pieces from those lives.

Rushing water filling a bathtub, something wrong with the pipes (banging, inconsistent water flow) – when you call in the plumbers, they discover something far worse than you could have ever imagined

 
Carnival ride – third date, he’s trying to impress her by bringing his nephew, but she’s not thrilled with either the carnival or his pseudo-parenting skills
 
Trying to clean the aforementioned bathtub (scraping and water noises)
 
Sitting still in a busy place while the world blurs past, lost in your own thoughts, everything else is indistinct and unimportant – even as it surrounds you, it does not touch you. Sometimes you need this escape, but you have indulged too often and it is becoming increasingly more difficult for you to reconnect
 
Tuning an instrument while someone else types – two people co-existing in the same space, aware of each other but not interacting, they are at peace and comfortable with the arrangement of many years’ living together. The peace, but not the comfort, are disrupted with the arrival of friends and family.

Lucas’s Result

Whirlygig washer cleaning the crud off the corner of my eyes in the morning. That’s a good feeling.

There’s a rhythm these days. You know it wasn’t always like this. Machines used to be cold and dead. Stabbing their knives and decapitating the flow of the moment.

Teeth are cleaned, clothes on straight, here we go, straight black tie, no time to wait.

Pan right, center, there you go.

This is shower is frickin’ ridiculous. Freezing one moment and burning my face off the next. Is the water coming out of the head brown or am I just that dirty. I hope I’m just dirty. Uggghhh. I’m hungover. I should have drank more water last night. Brown or not, I sure as hell would have felt better.

Okay, pull the camera out a bit. Now twist it to the side.

Step on up folks. Every shot you make the prize gets bigger! We’ve got monster trucks, nuclear missiles, skyscrapers. We even got the great pyramids! Great Wall of China! You’re guaranteed a prize. Step right up!

Hey their chief, step on up for the water race! Grab your gun and blast the smiling penguin in the mouth! Step right up!

Pan right again. I think we’re getting on the right track. I can see the shadow of some lady’s lashes. Things are all weird though. Distorted. Is this how it really looked when they took the picture? I don’t believe it. Maybe that’s the thing though. Maybe this is how things look all the time. We just tape the pieces together to make it look like something we read in old fairytales.

Zoom in. Zoom in.

That’s it. That’s what we’re after. See the crowd how they’re walking with their dogs? There’s a Scottish terrier over there smelling a Pomeranian’s butt. Hear the notes from the band snaking around the fountain? The zuchinnis and the bicycles. Now watch how it all comes out on the other side. A miracle that everything doesn’t just turn into a gelatinous mass. Guys sharpening knives don’t just slit the old woman’s throat. But it does turn out. And we didn’t have anything to do with it. We might play the notes, but we’re just pulling out pieces that are woven into the fabric of time and space.

I wonder what piece of the universe laughter is emulating? She’ll let us play, but sometimes she doesn’t tell us the rules. That’s her game. To watch us learn and wonder.

Carolyn’s Result

Wind Tunnel

We are in a wind tunnel
or – I am the tunnel and the wind is all around me.
The bottom is dropping out
the walls are made of spacetime
and I am bending it into being
by being here – my nervous system
the rooted network – it is dark inside
the brain – light is chemical –
a neon Mandelbrot fractal,
each photon as alike as hydrogen,
quark and antiquark whooshed apart.

I am glad for wind – for steam,
for affect arising out of action,
that the universe should be equipped to move,
and I in it worshipping the illusion
of stillness – every action making it bigger—
stay in and you win,
two bottles in a bucket:
bottlenecking – evolution bubbled down
to the zinger in the vinegar.

Of course this suggests that there is a wall.
Some outer substrate to hinge on.
That somewhere out in the void
our radio signals will bump blackness
and turn tail, whisking themselves
over under backward – echoing
our old rhymes into the future.

That isn’t going to happen –
so how do we account for cosmic acoustics?
What of the microwave wind noise,
solar interference, gravitational slingshots,
airlessness – only the breath we give it.
I and you and they are borrowers –
breath givers – let me do mouth to mouth
with a square meter of empty space –
one hydrogen atom in it,
one photon and one mystery boson whirling through.

My lips are the tunnel – my tongue
terra firma – branching lungs – bronchia
the tract of the fractal repeating.