Election posters are going up. As I walked home from the station last night I spotted this young man’s picture fastened to the railings on the bridge over the Cooks River.
He is Connor Parissis, Greens candidate for Barton.
I’ve got a lot of respect for Linda Burney, the ALP incumbent, but before I vote for her I doubt if I will be able to resist expressing a prior preference.
Explanation of the title of this post is here.
On Saturday, with my Chinese-Australian friend Z, I drove to Canberra.
The purpose was to shift some stuff in my late father’s house which was too bulky for me to deal with on my own.
We reached Canberra about an hour after sundown. We had paused on the way to view the Easter moon as it rose over Lake George.
We came in down the now tree-denuded Northbourne Avenue. The avenue of trees was felled to make way for the light rail.
Hang on! Wasn’t Saturday the first day of Canberra’s new light rail? I knew some festivities had been planned. A quick internet check revealed that it was to be a fare-free day.
This was our moment to help make history! We left the car in the car park of the former ACT motor registry and sauntered to Dickson light rail stop. The first tram which arrived was headed to Gungahlin and we hopped aboard.
It was a bit silly really. From the brightly lit carriage we could scarcely make out any scenery. We resorted to people-watching.
The tram was liberally staffed attendants clad in red with dinky Akubras. It’s the bush capital, y’know. From time to time there was a bit of fussing around about one thing or another: they are still on a learning curve.
Canberra has its fair share of bogan elements but on the light rail we were more a mixture of would-be urbanites/public transport nerds and families of subcontinental background with small children. I pointed out to Z examples of a special kind of Canberra youth which you hardly ever see in Sydney. I’ve had a theory about this ever since I met boys from Canberra when I first went to university. They seem gentler than their Sydney counterparts; sometimes a little precious. I’ve wondered if it was the lack of the example of the very poor before them in such a middle-class city; an ex-Canberran friend offered the view that it is more to do with Canberra being a very large country town. At 440,000 on last announcement I spotted, it is just under twice the population it was when I lived there fresh out of uni, now more than 35 years ago.
Z shared with me a code he and his (“Western”) friend use when wishing to point out to each other beguiling (I guess young) men in public places. If “Asian,” “panda;” if “Western,” “kangaroo.”
Z wanted something to eat at Gungahlin, but the restaurants he liked the look of were all closing, even though it was scarcely 8pm. An enormous Coles was still open.
Time to linger was short as we still needed to get something to cook for dinner. We took the next tram back to the other end of the line in Civic, stayed on it and rode back to Dickson. By pressing my face closer to the window I was able to get a better view of the scenery, such as it was.
This is not the first time I have seen this.
On the Guardian/Australia website, an ad for News Limited, specifically, for subscriptions to The Australian:
“Be informed this election. $5 a week for 8 weeks.”
I expect News Limited is wasting its money, but I’m a bit shocked that The Guardian is taking it all the same.
A nun once caused quite a commotion
When she played, weeping tears of emotion,
The “Moonlight” Sonata
Whilst suffering stigmata
At the Good Friday three hours’ devotion.
In breaking news, Melissa Parke, former member for Fremantle and “star candidate” for Julie Bishop’s former seat of Curtin, has withdrawn her candidature following criticism of pro-Palestinian views expressed by her.
It is not possible for such views or even the mildest suggestion of even-handedness between two sides in this dispute to be expressed in Australia by a mainstream career politician. Politicians who do wish to express such views have to wait until they are retired or at least on the home stretch to retirement – the brief outbreak of UN abstention when Bob Carr was foreign affairs minister is an example of the latter.
Meanwhile, Australian parliamentarians routinely go on “information tours” of Israel which, however dressed-up, could only occur if state-sponsored by Israel. This happens without a murmur from those who are quickest to denounce “foreign influence” when it comes from other directions.
Australia is a global outlier when it comes to Israel and Palestine. The circumscription of permissible public discourse underwrites this. There must be ramifications for our international relations. It should be possible in a democracy for these questions to be entertained in mainstream political debate, but at present it is not.
This is not a healthy situation. How long can it be sustained?
PS, 15/4: Now Josh Wilson, Parke’s successor as member for Fremantle, is also under fire. Video here:
“They are going to turn Palestine into Swiss cheese and that is what is happening,” Mr Wilson is seen as saying.
Executive director of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council Colin Rubenstein told the West Mr Wilson’s comments were “both insulting and insidious and should have no role in our national debate”.
The “Swiss cheese” line was a throwaway; most of the video is about the ordeal of going through check points.
More of this saga here.
See also here. There’s also a party line. Some Labor MPs/senators together with some Greens and independents were prepared to criticise Israeli treatment of Palestinians (in this case, Palestinian children in Gaza, I think, or maybe the West Bank). Not one Liberal-Coalition MP or senator did so.
Update – see comment 2 below – apparently some coalition parliamentarians did express a view in 2019.
A bare record:
16 3 Australia Ensemble
I missed the beginning of this concert as I had to attend a surprise 70th birthday party. I got there half way through the Dvořák violin Sonatina – a piece which I realised I must have played in my past life as a school pianist. I was let in between movements upstairs at the back. I normally sit right up close in the front row, but sitting way back does have its charms. There’s something peaceful about sitting all on your own without neighbours and acoustically distance, though it reduces the volume, clarifies the perspective.
Inexplicably, almost all of the core members of the ensemble weren’t playing in this concert: only clarinetist David Griffiths and pianist Ian Munro were there. The next concert will also be without the same members, and the flautist Geoffrey Collins doesn’t appear before September. What’s going on? Is this a question of long-service leave? I think an upfront explanation should have been proffered rather than leaving things to the fine print of guest artists for each concert. We have the unedifying example of the Australian String Quartet before us when management presume to think that the identity of an “ensemble” is their own brand rather than the players which make it up.
The other items I heard were:
Steampunk by David Bruce and Saint-Saens’ piano quartet No 2 (No 1 is a posthumously published juvenile effort). As ever with S-S, the piano part had lots of notes. I thought I would be familiar with it, but found that I wasn’t. It’s a strangely Bachian number – in that respect a bit like the first movement of the second piano concerto – with Mendelssohnian aspects.
25 3 Alessio Bax recital
I was too late to the party to get to AB’s Mozart concerto performance the previous week which had the added attraction of Beethoven 8 at Angel Place. I went to the recital after a torrid day in court but managed to stave off drowsiness. The program was mostly in d or D. I was disappointed with the second section of the Dante Sonata (roughly speaking, pages 3 and 4) which didn’t feel despairing/dolorous enough, but AB was saving more for later.
After the concert, the mother of one of those long-ago youthful violinists (he is now a violist in a UK orchestra) by pre-arrangement gave me some discs of video recordings of some performances from that era which she has recently transferred from videotape. I haven’t been able to find a means of playing the discs yet.
26 3 Salome
My fourth time. I swapped a row D seat for a marked-down front row one. Lisa Rindstrom terrific still in the title role. My neighbour, who had engaged in a little discreet lap-conducting throughout, was astounded to hear it was my fourth time – he said he was exhausted after just once.
29 3 SSO Barry Douglas, Laurence Renes, SSO – Sibelius 7, Brahms piano concerto No 2
Also an opening number by Richard Mills, who was present. A babe in arms and/or a toddler also made their presence known. Why are infants admitted?
On Saturday afternoon I caught most of the live broadcast of a repeat of this program. The Brahms is much more splendid when the engineers can give the piano a hand; ditto for the assistance offered to the woodwind (always hard to hear in the SOH stalls) in the Sibelius.
The unsatisfactory thing about the internet is that nothing is permanent.
If you really want to keep something you should copy or download it while it is up.
History is constantly being rewritten. (Let’s not get started on links, which on many of my own older posts on this blog no longer work, even for things such as judgments which you might think should keep a permanent place.)
Yesterday I noticed that a decision of Magistrate David Heilpern from September 2017, [2017] NSWLC 19, had been amended. Specifically, the text of the decision, including the name of the parties, is “restricted.”
What could possibly be so explosive or sensitive about an almost year-and-a-half old Local Court judgment that we should not be permitted to read it?
Wonderment increased when I discovered that the original decision, Commonwealth DPP v Adam James Easton, had been overturned on appeal by the DPP before Justice N Adams in Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions v Easton [2018] NSWSC 1516 . Actually you can read quite a lot of the original judgment there.
Magistrate Heilpern’s (overturned) decision had dismissed charges against Mr Easton for failing to vote at the July 2016 Federal election. Mr Easton had claimed he did not vote for conscientious grounds which would have excused him. On appeal Justice Adams held that Mr Easton’s claims did not cut the mustard, or, rather, that Magistrate Heilpern’s consideration of them did not. The matter was sent back to the Local Court for rehearing.
According to quite a good summary here at Buzzfeed, it was probably the publication by Magistrate Heilpern which provoked the appeal. The Commonwealth couldn’t stand the publicity.
So why has the judgment been suppressed now?
Yesterday I got an sms out of the blue:
[Md] has passed away in Thailand.
As it was an international SMS from Malaysia I knew it had to be from H, whom Md and I had both taught in 1996-97 when H came to Sydney from Malaysia on an obscure music scholarship offered through the school where Md and I worked.
I replied by text and then H rang from Malaysia. He explained that Tx had been posting updates on Md’s condition on Facebook which were “tagged” to Md. Md’s Facebook friends™ could then read them. The messages were in Thai but you could click “translate.” There were also hospital pictures which hardly required translation, but no-one ever looks good in those, do they?
I’m not on Facebook so all of this came as a shock. I’d sent Md an email at the beginning of February and was beginning to wonder/worry when he hadn’t replied. I now see that he was in the hospital by then.
In a way this was the end of a journey that D and I helped set Md upon. In about 1998, Md had just broken up with his partner of about 15 years. D and I suggested he come along to the Katana Club to cheer up.
The Katana Club was an on-again-off-again night-club which operated within other licensed venues, aimed at the then fairly ghettoized “gay asian” scene. It features in Tony Ayres’ film, China Dolls. It was in its final throes at this stage, operating in the Globe Nightclub in the former DSS premises in Newtown opposite the Greek Orthodox Church and the Performing Arts High School.
D and I arrived to find that Md had been there pretty much since the doors opened at the beginning of the evening. Inevitably, his companions had been the oldest “western” men and the youngest “Asian” men. Md, who was a large man and whose recently ex boyfriend had also been a strapping specimen, was uncomfortable with this. “I feel like Dolly Dunn,” he said.
But a spark had been lit. Quite soon Md was spending every available holiday in the flesh pots of SE Asia. Once, Md showed us some trophy snaps of sexy young men he had met. “To die for!” he exclaimed. D could not bear the Pinkertonism.
Md made two attempts to import suitable partners. The classic way is for the love interest to come on a student visa and do a Uni or TAFE course (TAFE is cheaper) to enable the relationship to be established, and then the application to be made with a bridging visa until it all comes through. These enterprises are notoriously beset with opportunism and heartache, and not always because canny sweet young things have taken love-sick oldies for a ride.
The first was Nx. Nx became a permanent resident and is probably now a citizen. There were two little dogs. Md continued his SE-Asian excursions. Eventually Nx found someone else. Nx and his new partner minded the dogs when the now-single Md went away.
The next, Ox, did not last as long. Md could not accept that Ox was having daytime threesomes just up the road when Ox should have been at TAFE. Not that skipping class was the problem.
In 2011 Md, who had finished working, sold up and went to Chiang Mai to live with Tx. Nx and his new partner took the dogs.
Foreigners cannot buy land in Thailand, apparently, and so at some point Tx became the legal owner of Md’s townhouse. Money was lost on various business ventures that Md tried to set Tx up in. Eventually the townhouse was sold and a smaller place bought. By about 2014-15 health problems had emerged, including impaired mobility as a result of an injury to Md’s foot.
There was much tsk-tsking amongst Sydney friends, some of whom had become ex-friends in the wake of bitter words typed by Md, probably with a drink by the keyboard, when requests for quite sizeable loans were rebuffed. I hadn’t come under much pressure in that department, probably because Md didn’t consider me such a close friend or prosperous person.
Quite a lot of tsk-tsking focused on Md’s relationship with Tx and what it had cost Md. Md, who must have complained about some of this to the friends at times, nevertheless insisted to me that Tx was a great help to him.
I cried a bit yesterday afternoon. After work I had a drink with PP at the spot where we lunched with Md on his last return visit to Sydney. PP brought me up to speed on the Facebook stuff. It turns out that a blood infection from the foot injury finally did for Md. You have to wonder if that could have been treated better in Australia or even in Thailand if Md had more money. The latter was H’s view. H sells life insurance these days so probably has a professional predisposition to see things that way.
Md was PP’s music teacher for 5 years of high school, and PP had only good memories of Md’s kindness. Grief is a hard thing to do alone and I felt a lot better after our own mini-wake.
This is a belated post.
Opera Australia has just mounted Alban Berg’s c 1920 opera, Wozzeck. The big selling point has been the direction and characteristic projected animated visuals by superstar artist William Kentridge. (Actually there is a whole design team involved but their names can’t really squeeze into the headline.)
I went three times.
I
First night. I sat upstairs on the left. I could see the surtitles and all but the back left and left top corner of the stage.
I was distracted throughout by the noise from the projector mounted not so far from me on the front of the circle which was the source of most of the projections. From where I sat it was almost as loud as quieter orchestral details which were consequently lost to me.
I struggled to take in action, words, the orchestral commentary in the music and Kentridge’s constantly changing visual commentary.
Kentridge’s visuals are based on an apocalyptic vision of the Western Front in WWI, with dirigibles, aircraft, maps of Bullecourt and frequent invocations of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s up-pointed moustache.
Various reviewers who ought to know better nod seriously and draw a link to Alban Berg’s experience of war horrors in the trenches.
As far as I can tell, Berg’s only military service was training in Hungary in 1915 before he was invalided out. He was then consigned to a desk job in Vienna. It was the humiliations of military life in the ranks rather than the horrors of war that he complained about and found a resonance of in Wozzeck.
And what’s all this about the Western Front and the Kaiser? That’s a bit like reaching for the Hitler toothbrush or the swastika for WWII. What about Franz Joseph?
II
On the second night I sat upstairs at the right front corner. This gave relief from the projector fan and a good sound from the pit at the price of missing out on the surtitles and an overall view of the stage.
Leaving the second performance I overheard a North-American –accented woman saying:
“The one thing I remember about the production I saw which was realistic is the boy at the end.”
In this production, there is no actual child on stage. Instead, a gas-masked puppet. Kentridge has justified this with something not unlike the usual complaints about appearing on stage with animals and children. But surely Berg put the kiddie in for a reason? Kentridge doesn’t trust this and wants to run his own concept. OK, that’s his prerogative but something has been thrown away with the bathwater.
III
I wanted to give the whole thing another chance where I could be exposed roughly equally to all the elements of the production. A seat in the middle of the front row for the third night was marked down from B to C reserve. D has gone to China which meant I could snap it up by exchanging his ticket for Werther.
I couldn’t see the surtitles but I knew the libretto reasonably well, falling back on the gist for some of the more wordy parts such as the Doctor’s lists of medical symptoms or the drunken speechifying/sermons in the tavern scene. After listening to a recording numerous times and following bits of it in the score, I can’t say I had unravelled all of the mysteries of the various musical forms employed or worked out all the things the commentators find exquisite, but I’d assimilated enough of the musical language and material to be able to respond to more of the threads than when I started.
Ironically, sitting up the front meant that I could focus much more on the singers. The relative impact of the projections was much less and no longer overweening. For me they worked much better that way.
The whole thing was utterly compelling.
My favourite scene is the Tavern/Inn/Wirtshaus scene. Berg writes for the main orchestra, a chamber orchestra (within the main orchestra) and an onstage band (banda) of clarinet, fiddles, accordion, guitar and bombardon –which is basically a marching-band version of the tuba. Berg says a tuba may be used provided it can be muted. Part-way through the scene the player is directed to insert the mute.
We had a tuba. I loved the moment when, instead of an ordinary mute, a pillow was tossed into the bell of the tuba by a fellow inngoer from his would-be-sleeping spot just above. Turn that music down!
Internet resources:
There is a great little selfie-video of the tuba part here. (If a mute went in it must be out of shot.)
At the Berlin 1925 premiere, the part of Marie’s son was performed by Ruth-Iris Witting. Her father, Gerhard Witting, was Andres, Wozzeck’s fellow soldier. You can hear Ruth-Iris, I’d guess about 8-10 years older and in quite different repertoire, here .
