Retreating from Reality

September 24^th 2007

G’day Mates,

This is Baba Brinkman writing from the hemispheric Southside, and today is a balmy Spring day.  I have been rambling around Australia for about two and a half weeks now, which has been the greatest Edinburgh after-party I could possibly ask for, but before I ramble about it any further, I’d like to attend to some music business.  Aaron Ross’s album “Butterfly Man” is now available on the iTunes Music Store and other digital download sites.  In case you are just tuning in, Aaron Ross is a friend and folk singer from Vancouver whose debut album will soon be released on my record label, Lit Fuse Records.  This is the first project I have taken on beyond my own rap releases, and the soulful result has been turning heads from Vancouver to the Royal Mile and all the way to Oz.  The official release is set for October 30th, but advance copies of the record can be downloaded now.  Click on the link below to receive aural pleasure via the internet, and if you like Aaron’s sound then please help us spread the word.

The other new musical offering I have is a fresh episode of my Lit-Hop Podcast, which I wrote while I was in Edinburgh and recorded in London before catching my flight here.  The Lit-HopCast is a mix of intelligent hip-hop tracks cut together like a collage or dialogue, and interspersed with original rhymes I compose while on the road, a kind of hip-hop travelogue.  For those of you tired of waiting for me to get it together to put out another album (hopefully in April), you can download these mini mix-tapes for free in the meantime and keep your appetite whet.  You can also subscribe to the Lit-HopCast through the iTunes Music Store and it will be automatically loaded into your iPod whenever I record a new episode.

As for my Australian experience so far, where do I start?  I am here as a guest of the Brisbane Writers Festival, which generously covered all of my flights and also accommodation for the first two weeks of my stay.  As soon as I touched down I caught a flight to Hervey Bay and then took a ferry to the Kingfisher Bay Resort on Fraser Island National Park for a Writer’s Retreat, which was a courtesy trip (understatement) provided for eight of the international writers to decompress and get to know each other.  We were fed the kind of quality and quantity of fine food and wine that I hope to be able to afford someday, many years from now, and each day we were taken on adventures such as a 4X4 trip into the rainforest, canoeing in a mangrove estuary, and a whale-watching tour where we got to see hump-backs doing what hump-backs do in the Spring.  I also got to scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef last weekend, but that was part of a different trip.  

I’m still not really sure why I was chosen for this incredible retreat, since I was by far the nestling of the bunch and they were all accomplished in ways that I hope to be by the time I can finally afford the kind of fine food and wine we were constantly being plied with.  They were a group of legends, including literary award-winners, a graphic novel pioneer, a Booker Prize Nominee, a writer whose book was made into a feature Disney film, and...the rap Chaucer guy.  Well, I might have been a bit out of my league, but we all got along famously nonetheless, and I now have some friends in high places (at least on the bookshelf).

Determined not to be taken for a one-trick pony, I accepted a special assignment offered me by the Writer’s Festival.  They gave me a list of all 80 of the sponsors who made the festival happen, and I wove them all into a custom-written rap piece, which I penned while trucking around Fraser Island from rainforest to crystal lake.  A rap thanking the sponsors?  Sounds boring doesn’t it?  Well, therein lay the challenge.  You can watch the video on YouTube and be transported to the Writer’s Festival’s opening night at the link below:




The other highlight of the festival for me was getting to perform at an event called The Chaser Interviews.  For those of you who haven’t heard of The Chaser, they are the Australian comedy troupe who managed to infiltrate APEC a few weeks ago by impersonating a Canadian motorcade, and actually got through every check-point and right up to the front door of George Bush’s hotel deep inside the security perimeter.  Thanks to this brilliant stunt a number of them are now facing criminal charges, but pending trial they were able to come to the Brisbane Writer’s Festival to interview some of the biggest authors there in a special comedy talk show event that sold out a massive venue called the Powerhouse.  My job at the Chaser Interviews was to sit in the audience and take notes throughout the show, and then get up at the end and roast both the guests and the hosts with an improvised on-the-spot rap.  It went down a storm as the grand finale.  I don’t have a video of that bit, but I encourage you to check out the footage of their APEC stunt, which was pure comedy gold.

The Chaser’s Stunt at APEC:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=iJPlqDcPE3s

Now I’m in Melbourne getting ready for the Fringe, which begins on Friday, and in three weeks I’ll finally be heading home.  I’ve literally been living out of my suitcase since the beginning of April on this six-month festival safari, so it will be something of a relief to sleep under my own roof again.  But I’d better not get ahead of myself.  Melbourne is an amazing city and I have twelve solo shows to put on, people to meet, books and CDs to sell, and more trails to blaze.  Time to tap those hidden energy stores.

‘Til next time, may your lives be well-spiced,

baba