by Quentin Cockburn

The end is nigh.  Grim Reaper has come for the local car industry.  ‘Local’?  I hear you say, ‘Pshaww’ I say.  Twas never local.  ‘Employment’?  Not really.  It took almost as many people to prop up the industry than sustain it.  And Innovative?  Dynamic?  Desirable?

I think the end happened early in 71.  Dad bought the new Datsun 1200 coupe.  It had a radio, reclining bucket seats, cheap to run, quite fast, comfortable, heater and de-mister.  It worked, started regularly, didn’t weigh fifteen tons, the paint and trim were all good.  A hatchback.  How convenient?  That was the end, the last forty years, just the reality biting.  And finally, both Ford and Holden, gone the way of its motorcycle counterparts, the BSA, the Velocette, and the Norton Commando.  Consigned to history’s rubbish bin.  Designing to the very end cars the majority of us didn’t want, and worse still, were not considered to be chic nor desirable.

What went wrong?

I’ll tell you, it happened in the sixties.  Thinking since then got stuck.  It was about the time when the last Morris JB van rolled off the line at the Morris plant in Birmingham.  That was about the same time the new improved Morris Major Elite, ‘up engineered’ by Australians rolled off the assembly lines in Adelaide and Sydney.  These were real cars, now considered to be classics.  This is how empires rise and fall.  At its apogee, the Morris empire and its proud Australian subsidiary were doomed.

Its nemesis came as the first locally manufactured world car, the Morris/Austin 1100 with hydrostatic suspension; “It Floats on Fluid”!  It offered the latest in choice and comfort.  It also killed Morris.  It eschewed a tradition of “nice looking cars”.  Not grunty enough, not adaptable, (except for the superb Austin Kimberley six),  and there just wasn’t much you could do to tweak the transverse front wheel drive engine.  From thereon, all downhill.  Death was spelt ‘Marina’, and in turn codified as ‘P76’.  Morris, engulfed by Leyland, vanished.  Innovation gone wrong.  Gone for ever.  Innovate and be damned!  GMH and Ford saw and concurred.

In the new century what have we witnessed?  It’s ‘Back to the Future’ in car design.  The VW Bug, the Morris Mini, the Fiat Bambino, all making a splash, a sensational amalgam of 50’s and sixties design chic and desirability.  What’s happened?  Everyone wants one.  The world is now full of retro make believe.  Even Bugatti is there at the top end with the Bugatti Veyron, all 1000 hp of multi point space age carbon fibre grunt and penile projection.

A new future beckons for the local car industry.  We propose a revisitation of the sixties.  Take those familiar styles, and re-engineer them for todays market.  There was nothing wrong with the Morris marque.  The Minor, the Major, the Oxford, and the Morris JB.  We can rebuild!  Same external appearance, same trendoid, beret wearing desirable aesthetic, with new brakes, drive trains, transmissions, cooling systems and electrics.  The Ambassador, (Morris Oxford) prevails in india, not because theres no choice, but it’s a cultural institution, a valued status symbol.  No one cares about collecting Commodores, they are naf and dull, whereas, even Bendigo possess, two Morris Minor Clubs, and a Morris Major Club.

I’ve been told plans are afoot to retool the Elizabeth plant to create Australia’s’ new car.  The plant, as rumour has it will be run, owned and operated by locals.  For Australia there’s exports world wide.  The marque, “Austral” will be our new manufacturing emblem.  The Austral demonstrates to the world that we are not lackeys but innovators of the first order.  All Austral models will have Trafficators.  The commercial vehicles will possess door operated semaphore hand signalling.  Both electric and crank start will be included in all models!  The future is ours to hold.  And cherish.

This is just a beginning.  From the design staff, the draft sketches promise much, it’s within our grasp.  Make it happen!!!

by Cecil Poole

Yes, it was the cover that attracted me first to this book.  And then I picked it up, and flicked through some pages.  I looked and was arrested.  Each opening has three parts.  The upper left is original Kraus writing, in its German.  The upper right is Franzen’s English translation.  And, best of all, the bottom of both pages is filled with footnotes.  Not just dry explanation but luscious detail and arguement from not just the author but from two other Kraus scholars as well.  This book becomes a many sided discussion exploring avenues and taking tacks that mirror the rich diversity of society.

I paid my money and took the book home and to bed with me – as is my want.  Where I would luxuriate in reading the German – and understanding little.  In that I think I am not alone, for the preface informs me that Kraus himself said of one of his critics “If he understands one sentence of my essay I’ll retract the whole thing.”  It is dense, convoluted.   I would read the English translation, with much greater comprehension, then I’d read the footnotes.  Sometimes I’d get pages ahead in the footnotes, at other times it was the footnotes that would lag.  It seemed to make no difference, within each of the three parts there was unexpected (and random) stimulus for my mind.

I’m a slow reader.  Lying in bed early one Saturday reading, reading, I was suddenly struck by immense doubt.  Surely this book, this writing titled “The Kraus Project” is just a self indulgent wank.  Hmmm.  Better get a second opinion.  So I checked online reviews.  Yes, self indulgent wanker they seemed to say.  Review after review full of criticism.  The Wall Street Journal’s review by Modris Eksteins seems highly critical of Kraus, Franzen and the book, suggesting towards the end that Kraus’ vitriolic analysis and criticism of popular culture helped “pave the way for victory of the vulgar.”  And opening the door for Nazism and Hitler.  Heavy stuff for the publisher of Passive Complicity.  Review after review seemed to pour scorn over Kranzen’s work.  Two stars here, two and half there.  “The cranky author finds a kindred spirit in the Austrian critic Karl Kraus” writes Zsuzsi Gartner in a most amusing piece in The Globe and Mail.  Gartner writes “… Jonathan Franzen may be the most discontented (and least liked) successful author in America” and “with less protective armour than a softshell crab (as a writer for The Daily Beast put it, “He makes himself a fat, juicy target”).  I had to chuckle.

Then I read in the Los Angeles Review of Books.  Aha, at last some-one who felt as I.  (Is it not wonderful that I have time to search till I find the result I want?)  The opening sentence, “the most impressive thing about Kraus as a thinker may be how early and clearly he recognised the divergence of technological progress from moral and spiritual progress.”  Kraus, Franzen, and indeed Winer express concern that our society is being blinded by the medium – the iPad, the Smart Phone, the web – to the extent that it limits our ability to decipher the message.

However I’ll let Gartner have the penultimate words:

“I am delighted to have been introduced to this untiring enemy of sentimentality, false emotion, and “linguistic fraud.” ….. The Kraus Project gave me renewed respect for his (Franzen’s) commitment to challenging the techno-social orthodoxies of our day.  Kraus, a century ago, nailed it: “We were complicated enough to build machines and too primitive to make them serve us.”

First another quote from Errol – Flynn, that is.
I generally deny that I was ever a good actor, but I know I have turned in a half-dozen good performances. from ‘My wicked wicked ways” by Errol Flynn 1959

The week started with our irregular column “Table Talk”.  This week a fundamentally important and detailed instruction on “How to be a social butterfly”  was presented in two parts, (so as not to overwhelm) and can be accessed here and here.  This instructive work will enable you to “avoid the hideous and debilitating obligations of funerals, christenings, orations, and obligatory functions, (Private School Speech nights) where your spirit may be stilled, and compromised by the fug of boredom.”  Thanks to Quentin Cockburn.

A review of British Comedian Jane’s Bussman’s new show “Bono and Geldof are c**ts” by Rosa Ellis filled our page on Wednesday under the title The misery industry.  Bussman has written for South Park, among other satirical shows and uses this opportunity to suggest there are “flaws and contradictions in their (Bono and Geldhof) attempt to help” others who they portray as “pathetic, disease ridden and incompetent.”  

Quentin returned with thoughts on the life and work of Martin Sharp. On the right is his portrait of Gulpillil, on the thousand dollar note for the Archibald Prize.  The obituary of Sharp by Richard Neville is also worth reading – here.  Neville suggests he is a philosopher using paint.

Friday’s post posed the question “Do you love your country?” in an article lifted from The Guardian.  The answer (to this TRICK question) is in the pause between the end of the question and the start of the answer.

Our Musical Dispatch this week discusses the importance of language and some difficulties that arise from differing values.  It follows on from our previous piece about  Liam Jurrah.

Ira Maine excelled even his standards in Poetry Sunday looking at “The Lake Poets”  For their sins they were ridiculed by Byron who saw them as hayseeds who rejected all that was thrilling  about the modern world.

Good reading, join the conversation.

Cheers
Cecil Poole

o god let me die
after bono
so that he will not deliver
a filmed tribute
upon my demise

he is older than me
(but not much)
and his people will attempt to keep him alive
for as long as possible
through means financial
medical
and spiritual
in order to maximise the time he has
for penning tributes
to the living
and the dead

o god let me die after bono
for I have seen his tributes
to the living
and to the dead
in countless documentaries and biopics:

presley
cash
bukowski
kerouac
lennon

all hailed by the man who wrote
a mole digging in a hole
digging up my soul
and
lemon
bob dylan
the dalai llama
the living beatles
shane mcgowan
seamus heaney
zig
zag
peter o’toole
the man from the paper shop down the road
who used to sell him cigarettes
chris de burgh

all walk a thin line
under threat of filmed tribute
and – although I am safe whilst still alive –
o god let me die after bono

o god let me die after bono
so when he dies I can witness his
pre-recorded tribute to himself
rendering all others
unnecessary

he will be in heaven
waiting at the table
of the great artists

lennon
kerouac
cash
presley
chris de burgh

humming the opening bars of vertigo
he will be lucky if he picks up
a good line or two
amongst the scraps
falling from their table

oh god let me die after bono
by Andy White  2011, from Stolen Moments.
Cecil and Quentin heard the author recite this poem recently and asked to be allowed to reproduce it here, and link to our recent post “The Misery Industry”

The Vienese group Mnozil Brass were commissioned by the City of Bayreuth to write and perform a work to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner’s birth.

Leonhard Paul explains the process

Richard Wagner’s 200th birthday and Hojotoho Reflections by Mnozil Brass

He actually did it!  the man turned 200.  Two-hundred years!  And they all came, congratulating and delivering their best wishes.  Celebrating him with everything you’d normally say on such an occassion, like “you must keep well and fit, since health is most important….”, or “You have to drink a lot…… you never drink enough, you hear!” Things like that, you know.  The best sculptors carved his likeness in the most exquisite and rarest stones; the most expensive canvas was just adequate to imbibe his portrait, conserving it for a truly astonishing posterity.  All symphony and philharmonic orchestras of the entire globe, duly queuing up, did pass the mic to each other to celebrate HIM.

And we are right in the middle: those seven gentlemen of the group Mnozil Brass, representing the wildest offshoot of a special committee hastily summoned in the cause of Richard Wagner and his jubilee.  Well, there we were, mulling things over.  what is the appropriate gift handing over to a man who just turned 200?

Money, of course, that had always come in handy to him…  But that would look rather inappropriate.  Maybe a bottle of wine of his vintage?  Not available any more, unfortunately.  Or the inevitable elegant gift hamper with goose live pate beyond expiration together with a small bottle of eau-de-vie?  Not suited either, since he clearly has been cutting down on eating recently.  Or perhaps an opera ticket, hey why not an entire opera, in his case meaning an entire new ring, while we’re at it?  He had passed the word that there’d be no need for that, since he’d composed more than enough of that by himself anyway….  without giving an inch of leeway to any doubt in this respect.

So how do you face a giant such as Wagner (entre nous, we simply call him Uncle Richard)?  How to come to terms with a person who, to begin with, made himself imperative, unavoidable in the first place?  A person you may either perceive positively, negatively or with diplomatic reserve, but are unable not to perceive at all, there is no doubt about that.  A person easily crumbling any superlative, at the same time teaching you humbleness time and time again.

Wrong track here – we’d clearly get stuck.  The only possibility to encounter Richard Wagner was to meet him on equal footing.  to face him eye to eye, neither going down on our knees, lashing our back, nor approaching him with a pretentious attitude, treating him condescendingly or criticising him…..  No, you do not shift an old tree without it dying.
(Sick of reading? then listen to this  Wm Tell Overture)
So, no adaptation of the interlude of Lohengrin or perhaps even the entire overture to the Mastersingers (even abridged, if need be) for seven brass instruments.  That would rather sound like “the poor man’s Wagner”.  completely out of the question.  Thus we chose the hard way:

1. First, what we have here is the birthday boy Wagner, his entire work of art; and we have those past two-hundred years not being able to annihilate this oeuvre (despite some ferocious attempts).  Furthermore we have a downright endless abundance of characters, phantasms, worlds completely unknown to us as well as inexplicable phenomena, that all lie dormant deep within us.  So we start celebrating Wagner’s birth.
2. Wotan, a god, a wanderer between the worlds, a seeker too, not of ignoble attitude, but attached to violence.  He takes what he needs and likewise destroys out of the same reason.  He turns into a dictator due to deprivation of love or due to disappointment or both.  Every one of us is a Wotan – deep down within ourselves.  we celebrate the birth of our childhood, witness it subsequently veering off the right track and, finally, experience its end.
3. Siegfried, at first glance perhaps the character we all like most.  He’s not afraid of anything, because he knows that fear exists.  He rejoices and mourns without knowing joy and grief.  He’s constantly hungry, he does not understand but is far from being stupid, since this attribute is unknown to him as well.  We have a somehow sympathetic compassion for him.  He seems to be invincible, although, in default of any knowledge about winning and getting defeated, subsequently becomes the tragic victim of this same belief (and as to him, he does not believe anything).  In the process we discover a Siegfried in each of us, are happy for him and are suffering for him, can laugh about him and are equally appalled by this capability.
4. This part we call the “part of the green hill”, so to speak the place where everybody runs into each other: Wagner meets Wotan and even assists him; Siegfried is here too, but not much of a help.  Ludwig stops by briefly and of course Brunhilde, Venus, Elisabeth – simply everybody is showing up, leading to the inevitable single result: the showdown.  We realise the hopelessness, experience the end of Wagner provoked by hatred, the fall of Wotan evoking the end of our childhood, Ludwig’s death brought about by an unsuspecting Siegfried (completely unable to anticipate anything – maybe as an allegory of the destruction of the currently predominant global financial conduct). We perceive Siegfried’s death as the consequence of an impregnability yet to be defeated.  Wagner’s  last days in terms of music, we have to fall back on Puccini.  In this state of sheer hopelessness there seems to be only one possible salvation: jazz.

by Leonard Paul.  Member of Mnozil Brass.

In this dispatch (of 25 November 2013) our correspondent discusses the importance of language and some difficulties that arise from differing values.

Selamat pagi teman-teman saya,

Since 1788 there has been a huge Communication Gap between the First Australians and the new arrivals.  The Gap that the assimilationists have defined and are determined to close pales into insignificance when compared to the massive Communication Breakdown….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5PvAi8PTsI between ‘white’ and ‘black’ Australia.

In July 2012, Chris Graham wrote an article in Tracker Magazine.  The article contrasted Liam Jurrah the AFL footballer and Liam Jurrah Jungarrayi the Warlpiri man.  A quote from the article:

“When you strip it all back – when you take out all the politics and the history – one of the main problems between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians is a massive Gap in Understanding”

….people talking without speaking, people hearing without listening….and no one dared disturb the sound of silence…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a0hdxnw24g

Brett told whoever cared to listen that he felt greatly honoured for having been ‘given’ an Aboriginal name: ‘Mangarri’.

‘Mangarri’ is what Warlpiri people call Bread.

Wendy Baarda was sometime jokingly referred to as Mrs. Jara by her pupils.

‘Jara’ is what Warlpiri people call Butter.

A white lady was part of an ‘initiative’ to convert Aboriginal language school books into ‘talking books’ as an aid to teaching literacy to those children whose mother tongue is an Aboriginal language.

Like European languages, Aboriginal languages encompass regional dialects that can vary significantly in pronunciation and vocabulary.  This lady took a bundle of books written in a southern dialect to a place where a northern dialect was spoken.  She got some local ladies to read the books into a recording device.  An observer noticed that the words being recorded weren’t the same as those in the written text.  When the observer pointed this disparity out to the lady making the recordings, the rebuttal was “No, this is how the ladies want it” “This is how they pronounce it”

Very clever that, a talking book, ‘talking’ in another dialect!  That surely will help Aboriginal children learn to read!

In fact the Aboriginal ladies got it right.  Making writing meaningful is the first step in attaining literacy, word recognition and matching sounds to the writing comes next.  If the sounds, words (such as from another dialect or language) and/or text are meaningless to a child, the chances of that child learning to read are slim indeed.  Something the NT Dept. of Education, with its English literacy first policy, hasn’t picked up yet.

From Dr.Seuss’  DID I EVER TELL YOU HOW LUCKY YOU ARE ?:

And how fortunate _you’re_ not Professor de Breeze
who has spent the past thirty-two years, if you please,
trying to teach Irish ducks how to read Jivvanese.

A quote from the 1998 Wentworth Lecture by Dr. Raymattja Marika :
“We believe that our children have a right to know and understand their own cultural beliefs within the model bilingual program.  Learning literacy in the children’s first language takes precedence in the first primary schooling years from Transition to Level 3.  The focus of the English learning during this period is very much an oral one, helping the children to become a confident speaker of English before they have to grapple with English literacy and concepts.  Once children have mastered literacy skills in their first language they can then transfer them to English literacy.”

……teach your children well…. And feed them on your dreams…..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq6rusc_EjM

Note: nothing about “learning their own language”; they already know it when they enter school.  A common misunderstanding regarding “bilingual education” in the case of those places fortunate enough to retain their Aboriginal languages is that it is about teaching two languages, rather than about teaching children to be literate and numerate and to think and to be inspired to learn.

A white schoolteacher had lost her little boy.  She searched everywhere in the school yard.  “Yes” she was told outside a class room “your boy was here, probably looking for you”.  “How do you know?  “Look, here are his footprints”  “Oh, is that what my boy’s footprints look like!”  “Fancy not knowing your own son’s footprints!”  the incredulous Warlpiri teachers remarked.

At a meeting held in English,  Nungarrayi got up and made an impassioned speech from the heart.  What she wanted was for her children and grandchildren to grow up as confident literate Warlpiri people who retained their language whilst having competence in English, who retained their Warlpiri identity and values in relation to family and land and so on…
As told to me, when Nungarrayi sat down, the meeting went on where it had left off in English ‘management speak’.  It was as if Nungarrayi didn’t exist.

….such are promises. All lies and jests. Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60vZ__-uJCQ

A white teacher was given the task to give ‘Luritja lessons’ to school children.  She was of the opinion that learning the language should not be too difficult.  After all, she thought, these are 40,000 year old simple languages.

…. And here a song in Luritja… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1baOxLwccB8 (if this song had been recently recorded, there is a good chance the musicians would have gone straight back to gaol, for traffic offences!)

So there she was in a class “teaching” their own language to some pupils.  As she told it, for no apparent reason the children kept slapping her.  “I think they have some behaviour problems”  she said.

I wonder why they were slapping her?  Maybe they got the idea from this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhJQp-q1Y1s

Team teaching:  A boy who owned a shiny new bicycle (a long time ago when there were very few bicycles in Yuendumu) was allowed to keep his bike in the class room.  Another non school attending boy, a close relative of the bike owner, came into the class to ask to borrow the bike, seeing as it wasn’t being used.  A conversation took place in Warlpiri amongst the children and the Aboriginal teacher.  The Warlpiri teacher then gave permission to the boy to lend his bike.  The white teacher that hadn’t understood a word that transpired then put a stop to all of this, and was much enraged by the impertinence of the school wagging child to come in and ask for the bike.  The bike stayed put.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CTPLUcQAjk

Have a think about this vignette….. It illustrates so much that is different about ‘western culture’ to the culture of often confused Warlpiri people.  Chris Graham’s Gap in Understanding.  Attitudes to possessions, family obligations, school attendance (for its own sake), discipline, reward and punishment. But foremost, who is in charge.

More team teaching:  A Warlpiri teacher told the class in Warlpiri to go and sit on the floor mats.  The white teacher then told the kids in English to go and sit at their desks.  Both teachers then chastised those children sitting on the mats.

Terima kasih untuk memperhatikan

Hamba Frank

dan sekarang lagu yang bagus untuk kepentingan diri sendiri

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7HKOP55AQ

by Anne Perkins, (First published in The Guardian 4 December 2013)

Do you love your country? When Keith Vaz, the MP who chairs the home affairs committee put the question to the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, midway through yesterday’s evidence session on the NSA leaks, it was, almost certainly, meant helpfully. It was that lawyerly thing of getting out into the open the answer to the opposition’s charge (the rather hefty one of treason) before the opposition had a chance to put it themselves. Cue unqualified affirmation!

But do you love your country? Well do you? Quite right, it’s a trick question. The answer’s not what you say, or even the way that you say it. The answer is in the pause between the end of the question and the start of the answer. If you need to stop and think about it, then you might just as well say no. You almost certainly don’t love your country in the way that the person who asked the question meant.

All the same, it’s a question that needs answering. Because the more nebulous the idea of country becomes – the more multi-layered national identity and the less certain national boundaries – the more important it is to understand how you identify yourself, if only to see off the people who want the answer to be an unqualified yes, delivered with all the plausibility of a besotted suitor. Just see the Mail’s attack on Ed Miliband’s father to see how potent it can be. The question can’t be avoided, so it has to be reframed.

People have been making communities probably at least since they discovered two people could hunt down a bison better than one. That’s what got us where we are. But all sorts of things happen once you begin creating communities. For a start, it has some implication of exclusion. Probably early hunting tribes weren’t all that kind to people who were a bit rubbish with a bow and arrow. Recognising people we think are like us is not just about self-definition, it’s about self-protection.

In time, an evolutionary convenience developed, the way these things do, into a handy way of keeping people in line. That’s why Samuel Johnson declared patriotism the last refuge of the scoundrel (leaving Boswell to explain that he meant the kind of patriotism that was really a mask for self-interest). But Johnson had already spotted its capacity to be a lethal political idea. Sure enough it became the deadly force that moulded 19th and 20th-century Europe into warring factions, the glue to empire and a straitjacket for the social order. Feel free to add in your own particular grudge. Patriotism has a long history as the weapon of the establishment against the challenger.

But it has also, from time to time, been a way of defending what matters against an establishment with other ideas. When John of Gaunt first defined England as a sceptred isle, he was despairing of Richard II who was going to leave it “bound in with shame”. Alex Salmond is running the referendum campaign on similar lines. He’s framing it in the context of how the union is stopping Scotland being the country that destiny intended. He’s suggesting it’s impossible to be truly Scottish if you also think of yourself as British.

For nationalism depends on a kind of exceptionalism. National pride means imagining that your country has something unique and irreplaceable about it. It becomes all too easily an intolerant concept. I love my country, in so far as I love inanimate objects at all. But I love mycountry, and quite likely it’s different from yours

by Quentin Cockburn

“Who could look at a beach and not be inspired by God the creator?”  What a fucken load of bull I thought whilst watching Martin Sharp say this on the 7.30 Report.    I was absorbed in another Sharp bio earlier in the year, saw him with the respirator (emphysema), and thought, ‘jeez mate your time is well and truly up’.  He was a contradiction of sorts, clearly difficult material for the art industry, self defined, marketable, yet mercurial. They couldn’t capture this one.  A man in the right place, the wrong place and my place all at the same time.

Martin Sharp deserves better.  Never knew him, but became aware via my big brother’s record collection that he was, for a brief time, a genius.  Later I began to think of him as a conservative.  That was unfair, but I felt that like so many of his generation he came back to us not as a radical but as a keeper of the status quo.  Also unfair.  But in his time he burnt brightly.  He put light on the ordinary.  His paintings – the album cover Disraeli Gears was more than luminous, it pulsed, like so much of his art.

He gave us that much and along the way had something to do with the rejuvenation of Sydney’s Luna Park.  But that was a superficial love, the gaping maw, the inscrutable face, whilst behind it, the rotor, the dodgem cars, the fairy cave fell into despair, and now Luna Park, preserved, but strangely lost amidst the late night curfews and the creep of gentrification.  I felt this.  Perhaps it was because our own Melbourne Luna Park lingered on along the St Kilda foreshore with the pimps, the prostitutes, the drug afflicted well into the 90’s until, like the Palace and the St Kilda triangle, it started to crush itself, killed off beneath the weight of property development and the incoming tide of suburban values.  The Melbourne Luna Park was always grittier, more tactile and sleazy in comparison, like all of Sydney Harbour, window dressed to the max, and behind the facade, an ego…..

Back to Disraeli Gears.  Cream were around for such a short time.  That’s the sixties, episodic and rich.  Cream for three years, just, several records and I had no idea that Sharp wrote ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’ for Eric Clapton.  These days an album like that and they’d be doing farewell concerts, product syndication and all the rest for the next thirty years, milking it for all its worth.  And for the record I have a copy of Ginger Bakers Flying Circus, another Sharp masterpiece.  For a period so fleeting, the radicalism, the nurturing in the UK, the recognition, the scandal and validation by being ‘famous’ in the UK, and then recognised by Australia.  And through it all this textured sinuous weaving of art, design, and incisive social commentary.  Not all undergraduate either, but infused with desire to improve the status quo, and ask questions, a thinking realm of participation and activation.  Now, it seems we only think in certainty, bricks and mortar and share portfolios..

So how do we equip ourselves to be and not to be?

I was shocked when after all that experimentation he’d become what I understand to be insular in that Australian kind of way, once a radical, and now a conservative.  That’s really sad.  And what have they left us?  I love Disraeli Gears, but sorry we’ve cashed ourselves in for comfort , complacency and complicity.  But that’s my naive inner self, his was a great oeuvre, his portrait of Gulpillil, on the thousand dollar note for the Archibald wipes away all my posturing.  In that one instance, and perhaps for all time, Sharp has left us with a legacy we can all appreciate, and without the crutch of ‘art-speak’.

He spoke to all of us, but got one thing  wrong.  Beaches are the inspiration, not the idea of a Creationist God.

Oh yes, another weekly wrap, and only two days late!

And another quote from Errol – Flynn, that is.
“I will do a great deal for a buck; then when I get it I will throw it away, or let it be taken from me.” from ‘My wicked wicked ways” by Errol Flynn 1959  (Reminds me of a friend who says she just seems to repel money.)

Tarquin O’Flaherty opened the week with another “Man as Machine” in which he showed how little has changed writing that the British Government “Forbade ‘treasonous’ conversation, moved ‘suspicious’ people out of reading rooms and coffee houses and threatened the owners with closure.  Even the mail was intercepted and examined for ‘sedition’.”  Tarquin returned later in the week with a further Man as Machine – the Fourteenth Part – in which he talks of ‘Mad King George (III)” and that ‘famous drinker and fornicator’, the prince Regent, later King George IV.

This was followed by a discussion on the Denigration of Women lead by Poetry Editor Ira Maine, building on comments made about Jonathon Swifts Poem “A description of the morning”

Ira Maine got physical with his account of the Fourth Blackstone Funicular Singularity, though what this really has to do with Endette Hall is yet to be enunciated. Suffice to say it involves Obadiah Clampe and the Lesser Booming Whooping Hooper.

Beauty Profaned returned with impressions of Bunbury WA, and the influence of disgraced Developer Alan Bond on the built fabric, where his singular high rise (colloquially known as The Milk Carton) stands, in Quentin Cockburn’s words, as an “upended middle finger to notions of decency and taste, community and township”.

Poet Ali Cobby Eckermann returned with “I tell you true”, from “Little Bit Long Time’ 2009.  This poem won First Prize at the inaugural ATSI Survival Competition 2006.

Good reading, join the conversation.

Cheers
Cecil Poole