The C Word – from Clover to Schumer to Alphamama

A pretty ballsy show this week! as we decided NOT to dodge the C word. It just kept raising its pretty head.

First up – apparently the Sydney business community decided to put its money on the big C over the weekend. Clover Moore’s detractors must have been cursing to find themselves in the minority. The sustainable super-green Lord Mayor was returned to office with 60% of the vote despite the attempted gerrymander by the state government of the City of Sydney which led to 23,000 businesses receiving two votes compared to 117,000 residents’ one each.  Congratulations on a very well organised, bravely fought and fantastically successful campaign – and hello cycle ways and a vibrant greener Sydney for another 4 years! The people have spoken.

The language got sharper however when we interviewed Peter Stevens from the Wolli Creek Preservation Society. Eastsiders still smarting over the Baird government’s bulldozing of our heritage figs in Randwick and Moore Park will be Commiserating with locals in Tempe and Kingsgrove over the levelling of a critical ecological community in Wolli Creek Valley for the creation of a “temporary” carpark to house machinery for WestConnex. It’s nesting season across Sydney and locals were horrified to watch as nesting birds, their chicks, and attendant vegetation were mulched to a pulp every day last week. Powerful owls, flying grey foxes, paperbarks and heathermyrtle were all lost in the Carnage – there’s a C-word for you.

Our Monday Drive technology manager, Cassie DeRosa is posting our interviews as podcasts now, and if you’d like to follow the campaign to save Sydney’s bushland and parks go to SOS Green Spaces and StandUp4Nature. Here’s a video interview with Corinne Fisher who was hauled off the Wolli Creek site by police when she tried to stop the bulldozers clearing classified “endangered” species on, believe it or not, “Threatened Species Day”.

I also reviewed Amy Schumer’s biography, The Girl With The Lower Back Tattoo – a fitting follow up for anyone who read Lena Dunham’s equally barefaced Not That Kind Of Girl last year. Amy definitely is that kinda girl, who lovingly treats her vagina like a cross between her favourite handbag and a confidante. If Dunham is the fast talking intellectual spawned by artists in a Manhattan loft, Schumer is self professed dirty-mouthed Long Island trash who worked her way up the stand up comedy ladder one joke at a time.  Her writing style is as bumptious frank and merry as her on screen persona. She scatters brass tacks whether discussing one night stands, her parent’s divorce, or the mass shooting in a Louisiana cinema during the screening of her first feature film Trainwreck which has made her a fierce opponent of America’s hyper-vigilant gun lobby. Schumer’s star has shot so fast into the sky, its remarkable she’s topped a hit TV show, and a feature film with a bestselling memoir – but there is clearly no stopping a smart young c-word like this.

Then it was a quick trip to the Arctic Circle with intrepid Aussie doco maker Janet Merewether who is screening Reindeer In My Saami Heart at OzDox next Tuesday September 20th, with a Q&A run by diva filmmaker Ruth Cullen (The Dream House, Tightrope Dancer). Merewether spent a couple of years following the reindeer herders and interviewing the poet and educator Inghilda Tapio, one of the last Saami to grow up in a teepee before being taken by the Swedish government for assimilation.

We rounded off our C-fest with the supercool ecologist, feminista, Alphamama live in the studio who did a glorious rendition of her single Arse in the Front after talking about growing up singing in the church of her pastor father, who hasn’t quite got his head around her performance art and may not be coming to her Sydney Fringe Festival show Queen Cunt, this week at the Midnight Shift in Oxford Street. But we’ll be there. Alpha has a fabulous voice, flaming blue lipstick, sensational style and a lot to say about feminine sexuality, the planet and the cosmos. Don’t miss her show!

Till next week, keep your ears peeled!

Ruth, Riley, Cassie