A woman serving the interests of the Old Boys Club... where have we seen that before?

This blog says it better than I do, as do about five or six op-ed pieces in The New York Times. I have argued about it with people who should know better and to be honest I'm clean out of puff.

The fact that windbags like R*sh Limba*gh are tripping over themselves to call her a 'babe' should give everyone a clue about whose interests she serves - and it ain't those of American women - let alone men, polar bears, elk, wolves, trees or Arctic shelves, or indeed any human beings on the planet who fear the incongruous thought processes involved in a pro-war, pro-guns, pro-death penalty, pro-drilling, anti-gay, anti-green, anti-intellectual, anti-library books, anti-sex education and anti-anyone-who-gets-in-the-way platform alongside being "pro-life". Even the people who will vote for her just as easily as they'll vote for their favourite singer on American Idol don't deserve her.

I don't care if she has a 99/I Dream of Jeannie/Bewitched/That Girl/Mary Tyler Moore retro charm about her (though this is by far the best thing about her). All those women did it better than her anyway, not to mention more liberally, even though it was the 1960s... And anyway, Jeannie never used her power for ill. SP is like the evil sister.

I don't care if she believes in Frith (so long as she doesn't want to hammer it into school children) - it's the vindictive tyrant streak that worries me, and the Goebbels-inspired GOP press machine.

I don't care what her daughter gets up to either - the personal stuff is only held against her because she runs on a hypocritical, preachy, I-will-enforce-my-family-values-upon-you ticket. If Hillary had a string of lovers and a couple of adult love children, it would make no difference to her suitability. Just as it made no difference to Bill's.

I'm sorry if I sound like a member of the much maligned liberal left elite, but since when has being terminally ignorant and vicious been a job requirement for consideration in the US presidential elections? Wait. Please don't answer that.

Barack - don't mess it up. The rest of the world needs you. As do the sane 'Blue State' voters in your country, with whom we stand united.

Music is the only way to say it without bursting (another) blood vessel. Over to Cody Chesnutt...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdyNAIcGN48

(If anyone knows how I can post the actual thingy up here, I'd be most obliged. Yes, liberal, left, perhaps a little elite with pretensions to intellectualism - but a complete net luddite.)

(Crap visuals, but there's a 'catchy alert' attached. The song will be with you until November.)

Bill Henson. My take.

I am hopeless at getting my opinion out there while issues are still topical, partly because I want to make sure I can stand behind what I've written, and partly because I'm a waffling old bore.

So my take on this issue has to be presented in point form, though even my 'points' can be rather long:

Many of the commentators condemning Bill Henson's work are using the 'art is subjective' line to defend their lack of understanding of it. I agree that art is subjective, but the laws governing artist freedoms should not be. It's quite a leap to go from saying you dislike Henson's art to calling for it to be banned. In my opinion saying that you find his work 'revolting' or even plain dull is acceptable. Calling for censorship based on that subjective opinion is absolutely not.

Again on the matter of subjectivity - whose subjectivity? If we are to follow that to its logical conclusion we start to see every image through the hellish prism of paedophilia rather than our own eyes. I look at Bill Henson's photos and I see nothing sexual, therefore nothing obscene. As one lawyer noted, there is no consent issue. After all, what is the girl consenting to? There has been no violation, no sexual act. It is a simple representation of the human body, the inspiration for art throughout the ages. What does it say about our society that we see sex in everything and beauty in nothing? Have we devolved over the centuries to become less complex and perceptive than Caravaggio, who lived over 500 years ago?

I'm dismayed by the uncritical thought and scent of hypocrisy around this debate. I am so tired of seeing everything in our culture reduced to the lowest common denominator knee-jerk Herald Sun reaction. Unsurprisingly, 70% of Hun readers think the photos constitute pornography, and it's this public reaction (skewed sample of the public though it is) that seems to be driving the foam-mouthed, torches-and-bayonets pursuit of Henson, spearheaded by our very own moral thermometer - the PM.

Really, who cares what these folk think when they're being spoonfed their reflected outrage by the Hun itself? Are we becoming a nation governed by straw polls and market research over reasoned discussion and analysis? I suspect most Hun readers also believe in meting out the death penalty to those who express views contrary to their own. But that's why they're not in government. Or are they?

And do these people calling for Henson to be charged with obscenity feel irked about our highly sexualised culture as a whole - the presence of Sexyland on every high street, midriff tops and g-strings for little girls sold in Target, or the inescapable billboard exhortations to 'have better sex' on every freeway? No. As usual, artists and thinkers are being targeted while the real exploiters and manipulators - of children and of the minds of the public - advertise within the very pages onto which this public opprobrium is spilled.

I don't think you need to know about art to know that further censorship of art in a society which already spurns and sidelines art for more pressing and lucrative concerns such as sport and celebrity trivia is wrong. As wrong as you can get.

Five things about me...

Finally, I'm doing as the blakkat prescribed. Here are the five 'random facts' about me.

1. I was a badass - in primary school.
In Grade 4, when I was nine, I was routinely chucked out of the class for disrupting it. I was called turbo tongue and motor mouth and an attention-seeker and all those other labels schools need because they don't actually know how to stimulate smart kids. I was never a nasty fuck-up - I was just exuberant, and they wanted to suppress that. It got to the point where I would sit down at 8.30am, open my trap and be shown the door mid-sentence. Our classroom was one of those portable units and 'outside' meant just that. I was often there in the rain. In Grade 5 our teacher divided our class into Row 1 - for the brainiacs, Row 2 - for the average people, Row 3 - for the dummies and Row 4 - for the naughty kids. Row 4 only had five people in it, and only one of us was a girl. Yep! I later saw a few of the Row 1 goody goodies in high school and bless me if they weren't on their way to becoming nail technicians. Real brainiacs they were.

On camp in Grade 5 there was a boys cabin, a girls cabin and a special scary hut called 'siberia', the camp equivalent of solitary or the brig (or perhaps Guantanamo Bay). I was sent there for the night for doing something - can't remember what - though I was allowed to dress up as a punk and do some pretty snazzy breakdancing during a dance routine to Matthew Wilder's Break My Stride at the special 'music night' before I was carted away*, so that was ok.

The next year I was separated from my entire friendship group, because they thought that isolating me might shut me up. It just made me talk to new people. The Principal of the school was a rabid patriot who made us sing the turgid 'Advance Australia Fair' every Monday morning. He hated me. He always just assumed I would amount to nothing and wrote the same crap in my report every year - "attention seeker who disrupts the class and shows off all the time" - when he didn't even know me as a student. Petty as it is, about a hundred years later when I graduated with my Arts/Law degree the first thing I thought of was to go to that pissy little place and ram my degree up his arse. Not bitter. Anyway, I am now a big nerd.

2. I love the Baltic States - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
I guess it's all those cheekbones, high-percentage proof white spirits and the former Eastern Block associations and the romance of the Baltic Sea. I think it started with Latvia's Maria Naumova winning Eurovision in 2002...





and continued when I discovered that Lithuania's capital Vilnius features a sculpture of Frank Zappa.


Not the most impressive statue, but nevertheless...

For decades prior to my liking for the Baltics, I was a card carrying anglophile, like most Australian teenagers of my generation. The early part of this blog still bears testament to this, though I was well into adulthood when I started it. I grew up with British comedy (The Goodies, The Young Ones, Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton, Alan Partridge, The Fast Show, Ab Fab and later, The Office and The Mighty Boosh), TV drama (Cracker, The Bill, This Life etc) and even sport, and of course, I loved their music. You can keep most of their musical output at the minute, but I do still have a penchant for UK pop culture. Thankfully I'm over wanting to live in London forever (God!) or marry some fop like Rupert Penry-Jones now.


Rupert

3. I am a multiple lapsed vegetarian.
When I was ten I made my first attempt at vegetarianism after seeing a documentary about seals being bludgeoned to death for their fur in Canada. I wept into my spaghetti bolognese, and vowed never to eat it again... after this one last plate. I then followed a three day regime of carrots, apples and celery until my mum intervened. Subsequently, at 18, 22, 27, 30 I had six month to two year stints at it, where I would check for rennet and gelatine (I still do - why would you put cow spine in yoghurt or cream - no thanks!) and I was no vegequarian - I was strict, but then I would lapse spectacularly and decide to go the whole hog, as it were.

I have to say, friends and family never made it easy, baiting me with dumplings and curries, relating tales of recent sightings of my meat-devouring ways - cheering when I gave in to succulent roasts. I acknowledge my part in my own meat-eating, but I was aided and abetted at every turn. My old-school dad, encouraged by my mum (who likes nothing better than a clean plate) said I was not a N****n (surname) if I didn't eat meat. I don't eat much meat these days, but I don't have a big guilt attack when I do. I think I've learned that phasing something out is better than anniversary dates and absolutism, which can only lead to failure. And I've discovered the delights of Chinese vegetarian restaurants, with their TVP and tofu and mushroom protein masquarading as meat - and tasting far better than the real thing. These restaurants have many haters (most of whom have never eaten at them) - people who say 'why don't you just eat meat?', or 'a true vegetarian wouldn't want to eat things that tasted of meat'. Well, duh, I like meat, and if I can have it without an animal dying for the privilege all the better for everybody concerned.

4. I am shit scared of heights, and also, embarrassingly, the dark. I am not in the least bit scared of spiders, snakes or rodents.

5. I love Rob Morrow, especially in Northern Exposure. Just the sight of his face makes me feel really happy and serene. Here:



6. A bonus fact about me: I was in a band for about five seconds of my life. I was the singer. My cohorts came to my birthday and sleazed onto most of my friends - that was our first and last public appearance as a group, and it was downhill from there. I still have aspirations, so look out.

* Just to clarify, I wasn't carted away for my breakdancing, though I probably should have been.

A round-up and a recipe... stick around for the recipe!

OK, so Londoners are idiots who deserve what they get, just like Australians did for 11 years. Have fun suckers! Just why you think an old Etonian with no civic governance experience, a distaste for your eclectic population and a shady agenda is 'the right guy' is beyond me. Maybe your brains have just been fried by too much reality TV. Listen up - the smiling man with the fluffy blond hair and the bicycle is not a contestant on Big Brother, he is your mayor. You used to have Ken Livingstone, whose tenure will be looked back on as a golden age. You now have a clueless conservative clown. Suck. it. up.

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In brighter news, I have perfected a cannelloni dish that will fry your brain in an entirely pleasant way. I'm so proud of it that I'm going to post it here.

Sue's ricotta-less cannelloni goes something like this:

Cut open a capsicum, lay it flat and chargrill it.

Fry a little garlic in a saucepan with a generous glug of olive oil. Blend in about a tablespoon of flour (the idea is to make a bechamel sauce, but I’m going to explain the whole process to you so as not to alienate non-cooks – cos if you can’t make a bechamel sauce, that is what you are) and slowly add about a cup of milk, stirring as you go.

I then crumbled some blue cheese into the sauce (don’t be scared of it, it adds piquancy – if you are scared, however, substitute some good cheddar or maybe parmesan. If you’re not scared, all three is best). I am a heathen and I don’t like the traditional ricotta – it’s too bland. Then I threw in a bag of baby spinach leaves.

Stuff the cannelloni shells (about 8-10 of them in all, it’s pretty tedious work) with the spinach sauce mixture. Arrange the soldiers in a baking dish, scattering pinenuts over them and studding them with bocconcini. Take the roasted capsicum, slough off the charcoaled skin and layer it over the top of the cannelloni. Then drown it all in some napolitana sauce (I will not make the call about how you source the sauce, as it were, but leave it up to you. If you cannot be arsed skinning tomatoes from your garden and ripping up fresh basil and oregano in a flurry of rustic endeavour after the hard labour of stuffing the cannelloni, I will pass no judgement – and the dish will only be a degree less lovely than it would otherwise have been if you just crack that jar of shop sauce and chuck its contents carelessly over the top. Sugar and preservatives don’t taste that bad.)

Now pop a couple more bocconcinis on the top and some parmesan and bake the bejesus out of it (45 minutes on medium heat? I dunno. I’m not one for measurements of any kind - just ensure the cheese is molten and the pasta can be stabbed without too much resistance) and serve with garden salad.

For some of you this is cooking 101. But there’s no harm in me sharing it.

SAVE RED KEN!

With all the fuss about impending foreign elections many of us have overlooked one very important tussle in progress as we speak, in a city very dear to my heart - and the hearts of many other bloggers I know.

To all you people who are able to do so, please, please, please save London from Boris Johnson. Ken Livingstone has done more for London than his foppish idiot rival could ever do, because he actually cares about the place. But it goes further - Johnson is not just a silly chinless twat, he is a dangerous conservative. He'll not only let Ken's good work lapse - he'll most probably actively destroy it.

As both Nick Hornby and my good friend MSKP know well, a list will solve anything - be it an argument, writers' block or the blues. So without further fanfare...

Five songs I love:

Hearts and Bones - Paul Simon
This song has the same effect on me as a warm cup of tea in my favourite mug. I fucken love Paul Simon. Sad, plaintive, melodramatically romantic. I want this played at my wedding.*
Favourite line: 'one and one half wandering Jews, free to travel wherever they choose'.

Boulder - Ned Collette
Ned is part weird 70s prog (think War of the Worlds or the Monkey theme tune), part Steve Kilbey, part Go Betweens. He's not scared of a complicated melody line and he knows his way around a jaw harp (or at least a sample of one). We went to a Ned gig a couple of weeks back and heckled and mugged at him all night. But it's like the old law of the playground where the little boys tease the girls they like the most, isn't it? Favourite line: the moog solo.

I Wanna Know What Love Is - Foreigner
OK - I'm allowed to return periodically to the big-haired ballads of my childhood, because I didn't discover them yesterday.** This only gets a mention because we were in South Preston Safeway when it came on, and we entertained the checkout chick with the bit where the emotion cracks through just before the big chorus... which makes my favourite line *squints meaningfully and draws clenched fist in tight to the chest*: 'in my life, there's been heartache and pain, I don't know if I can face it again, can't stop now, I've travelled so far, to change this lonely la-ha-hafe....'

Upwards Over the Mountain - Iron and Wine
Another topical rather than all-time favourite, I&W being a gig I reviewed recently. Intimate and other-worldly and completely without pretension, the stories within the songs are so personal and evocative. I've recorded my own version of this on Garage Band. Be thankful that I have neither the technology nor the know how to inflict it upon you here.
Favourite line: That would be 'Mother, remember the night that the dog had her pups in the pantry.'

Scenic World - Beirut (sorry to be painful, but the version on the Lon Gisland EP)
I love this song so much. That hypnotic riff, the trumpet line that sounds like some old highland refrain, his gorgeous voice. This one's for the funeral. It fills my eyes with tears every time.
Favourite line: 'I lie down like a tired dog, licking his wounds in the shade.'

*I know, I know, it's about a marriage break-up. But I still want it played at my wedding.
**Upon re-reading, this is a violently snobbish and hateful thing to say, but I'm leaving it in. If someone wrote that about T-Rex, whom I didn't discover "at the time" (because I would've been about two), I'd hate them. Chris often rails against this nasty, ignorant ageism. But I'm yet to find a person who hasn't engaged in it.

Redux

Thank you to those who seemed concerned about me (and this ever more indulgent blog) after my last post. I guess I lied - I'm back. I have far too much time on my hands at the moment (I'm having a bit of time off work), and we all know how things start to look a bit skewed when that happens. Let us say no more about my last couple of histrionic posts, now redacted. They remind me why I should stick to politics and music and not delve into the mire that is personal relationships on this here blog. I love my friends as they were, and as they are, but I am nostalgic and immature and a little soft in the head, and I expect people to grow and atrophy in the same ways I have, and not in their myriad different ways. Which isn't really fair.

Ray Davies says it best (if a little pithily in that last verse) in Do you remember Walter:

Walter, remember when the world was young
And all the girls knew Walter's name?
Walter, isn't it a shame the way our little world has changed?
Do you remember, Walter, playing cricket in the thunder and the rain?
Do you remember, Walter, smoking cigarettes behind your garden gate?
Yes, Walter was my mate,
But Walter, my old friend, where are you now?
Walter's name.
Walter, isn't it a shame the way our little world has changed?
Do you remember, Walter, how we said we'd fight the world so we'd be free.
We'd save up all our money and we'd buy a boat and sail away to sea.
But it was not to be.
I knew you then but do I know you now?
Walter, you are just an echo of a world I knew so long ago
If you saw me now you wouldn't even know my name.
I bet you're fat and married and you're always home in bed by half-past eight.
And if I talked about the old times you'd get bored and you'll have nothing more to say.
Yes people often change, but memories of people can remain.

Speaking of Ray, as we now are, he is one of my all time musical heroes. My adoration of The Kinks has been more constant than a hell of a lot of other things in my life – taste in clothes, housing circumstances, country of residence and occupation. My relationship with his music has even transcended friendships, and, I have to admit, it’s more tangible than that shared with most of my relatives. I even chose to write about The Village Green Preservation Society as part of my Arts degree, knowing that it was one of the few subjects I could be bothered researching*. Around that time two good friends and I were chatting about our favourite bands. Theirs were the more contemporary Primal Scream and The Smiths respectively (still more contemporary than the Kinks – a band whose best-known work was completed before any of us were born). When I was pressed to give my response I had to settle on The Kinks, because it was the truth, though it felt woefully daggy to admit it. But there it is, The Kinks still shit on not only their peers (The Stones, The Who, and yes, even the Beatles), but also on most of the melodic guitar-based music that has come out of the UK since, and especially on their horrid snivelling little Britpop imitators. Indeed, in recent times that once fertile pop territory has become a wasteland, with all the most innovative music coming out of the States (as a former anglophile I never thought I’d say it) and elsewhere (here, Sweden, Cambodia). But I digress.

One night while living in London in the mid-nineties (unfortunately this was at the height of Blur’s rather irritating appropriation of Ray’s postcard-from-Blackpool Englishness – see ‘snivelling little Britpop imitators’ above), I even took the bus up to Muswell Hill to have a look at the house the Davies brothers grew up in. This sort of obsessive behaviour is rare for me. I love music, but I rarely lurk around stage doors or any of that stuff. It’s not my bag – I don’t need mementos or validation (a la Pamela Des Barres) from those I admire. At least, I haven’t for a long time…I suppose that’s part of growing up. But in the lead up to seeing Ray at the Palais on Friday night I had been having dreams about meeting the benevolent, dimpled, twinkly-eyed genius.

So we arrived at the Palais, quaking with excitement amidst young Dave Davies lookalike coolsies and their Penelope Tree girlfriends and (the majority) paunchy silver-haired collector types. And of course Ray was brilliant – as if you didn’t know I was going to say that. Wiry and energetic, and pulling off the obligatory final-chord-scissor-kick (à la Pete Townshend) at the end of every song, he certainly doesn’t look his 63 years from a distance. His voice was pitch perfect, and the winks, gestures and wry asides suggested he is still very much on the ball. He was, as expected, utterly charming. When he launched solo into the first gentle bars of 'Days', I felt the tears well up.

My only complaint was that the set list was a little disappointing – he asked us to indulge him for a bit while he played his (very good) recent material, which we were more than happy to do, but when the old stuff came it was the safe, chart-topping, boomer-pleasing stuff like ‘All Day and All of the Night’ and, of course ‘Lola’. To be fair, all the hits had to be played, and everyone (including me) was expecting them. He left the stage after the encore without having played 'Waterloo Sunset', but then strolled back on and did it brilliantly, saying ‘Oh, I can’t believe I forgot to play this’. It might have been part of the schtick, but it was pretty convincing, and we were alarmed that he might have forgotten to play the song that 'changed his life'. Of course, we were hoarse from shouting it by the end of the night. But if only he could have thrown in ‘No Return’ from Something Else by the Kinks, ‘Big Sky’ from Village Green (or anything from that album actually), or ‘Shangri La’ from Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, it would have been perfect. Ray bears the mark of a true artist (as opposed to simply a multi-million-selling megastar) - one whose genius can be discerned in the space between the hits, in the many memorable, diverse, off-beat album tracks. He sold that remarkable ability short by playing to the cheesy Gold 104 crowd.

Anyway, there was an interval – Ray announced he’d join us again in 15 minutes. During this interval I went and bought a bottle of water from the kiosk and absentmindedly shoved it back in my bag – without its lid. Everything in my bag was soaked and had to be laid out on the dark, dusty Palais floor to dry while Ray did his second set. After the show we were about halfway back to the car when Chris realised I’d left my ipod earphones on the floor near our seats. Big deal, I thought, but we walked back to the venue, carefully retracing our steps. We were let back inside to scout around for them with the help of an usher and a torch, but we couldn’t find them. Chris seemed to care more about it than I did. Anyway, as we left the venue for a second time, we spotted a little crowd waiting by the Palais side exit – its composition 70% pure spock, 30% haircutted coolsie. The coolsies had a ukelele and were (rather cringingly) singing Dedicated Follower of Fashion. We decided to lurk for a while, ending up talking to a Glenn Robbins-looking collector bloke and his tubby, bearded friend who was sporting a Kinks Official Fan Club t-shirt in XXL, replete with soup stains, tucked into his (rather too) low slung jeans – bless. A Japanese fan (who, we eavesdropped, had been at the soundcheck) and a guy with a thick Euro accent who’d seen the Kinks in 1972 (and, it sounded like, every time they’d toured since then) rounded out the group. They were absolutely lovely guys. I don’t get the Nick Hornby stereotype of the record geek who doesn’t know how to include women in conversation. I think he’s a bit of a straw man. In my experience, these guys are so blinded by the music that they’re happy to chat to anyone, no matter what their age or gender or ethnicity, who shares their passion. I’ve always found that sort of guy fascinating – they’re kindred spirits.

Anyway, we thought about splitting a couple of times, but just as we were about to, Ray emerged. I reached through the pack and took his hand and said something inane (“Ray, take care” or something silly) and he clasped my hand and said “Thanks sweetheart.” Ray Davies called me sweetheart. Ridiculously, that means more to me than so many other things, and will probably keep me warm through lots of life’s other disappointments.

Chris got an autograph (oh, the cheesiness of it all - but I don't care) and we set off for the car again. Chris was just saying what a strange night it had been when he looked down and found my earphones lying on a St Kilda footpath. Bizarre! I couldn’t have given a stuff about them – but if we hadn’t doubled back for them, I would never have squeezed Ray’s hand. And as Chris said, if we hadn’t gone back to the venue and met Ray, we would probably never have found the earphones either. So in the end, all unfolded as it should.

Thank you for the days,
Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me.
I'm thinking of the days,
I won't forget a single day, believe me.

I bless the light,
I bless the light that lights on you believe me.
And though you're gone,
You're with me every single day, believe me.

Days I'll remember all my life,
Days when you can't see wrong from right.
You took my life,
But then I knew that very soon you'd leave me,
But it's all right,
Now I'm not frightened of this world, believe me.

I wish today could be tomorrow,
The night is dark,
It just brings sorrow anyway.

Thank you for the days,
Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me.
I'm thinking of the days,
I won't forget a single day, believe me.

Days I'll remember all my life,
Days when you can't see wrong from right.
You took my life,
But then I knew that very soon you'd leave me,
But it's all right,
Now I'm not frightened of this world, believe me.
Days.

Thank you for the days,
Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me.
I'm thinking of the days,
I won't forget a single day, believe me.

I bless the light,
I bless the light that shines on you believe me.
And though you're gone,
You're with me every single day, believe me.
Days.

*I'm considering posting my essay here, with all its gauche 19 year old wordiness. But I will spare you. You've had enough of mental behaviour caused by too much thinking and too many late nights.

**Is anyone else in love with Ned Collette, or is it only me?