I should have blogged all night

I defy any mother of two teenagers who’s hosting Christmas, has dogs to walk and a full-time job to blog regularly during this season. About 3 weeks ago I did in fact write a whole post on the suave Richard E. Grant as Henry Higgins and the delightful Taryn Fiebig as Liza Doolittle then promptly ‘lost’ it. Now that I realise my blog creation software doesn’t have an ‘undo’ function when you inadvertently highlight and delete 3 paragraphs I am writing this in Word first!

The urge to blog, and the ideas for postings, remain as strong as ever, it is getting the time to sit at the keyboard. As usual I am writing this piece at the office where I can persuade myself that writing for an e-medium is good practice for our imminent electronic learning system!

I bought a little note book intending to jot down ideas but so far it only contains 3 days’ worth of expenditure records - the entire fruit of my partner's and my decision that we need to itemise what we spend and analyse it to be able to budget properly. Those 3 days alone included $150 on theatre tickets and $30 on wine. When I started the Christmas shopping the amount coming out of the ATMs and going into the cash registers of shops became so large I was embarrassed to record it. I convinced myself that December is atypical so I should start AFTER Christmas! I think I see a trend emerging...

It is a truism that Christmas is a stressful time and I find more than usual to feel panicked and guilty about at this time of year. I should have an immaculate house with a scintillatingly decorated tree already in situ. We should have coloured lights up like our neighbours do. I should have bought someone in the developing world a goat. I should have written and posted all my Christmas cards by now. I should be saying ‘Holidays’ more often and ‘Christmas’ less often etc! All these feelings of underachievement and inadequacy are no doubt fuel for the New Year Resolutions to come!

Any way I believe I could/should have posted more to my blog than I have done recently. All the above only took me 15 minutes and I am thinking it wouldn’t be the hugest leap to turn it into an article on procrastinating about learning and development for the blog here at work!

Bird of Limbo

I've just worked out how to add images. Check out this and Joan Didon and the dusty Mirrorball below! I wonder how I managed to add Alice herself? Curiouser & curiouser!

Any way this is the Bird of Paradise or Strelitzia flower. They're amongst my favourites. I planted a strelitzia (or what I thought was one) in my garden about 11 years ago and while it has grown to a towering height, it didn't flower at all until quite recently when some greyish spikes started to push their way through the 7 foot tall foliage! The variety I bought seems to be an albino giant! Not a skerrick of the conventional gorgeous colours and 4 times taller than any strelitzia I've ever seen anywhere else!

I'll post a picture and see if I've bred a freak of nature or if it is just some seldom cultivated variety. It certainly wouldn't be grown for its looks!
'
STOP PRESS; It's a stelitzia nicola and it may reach 25 feet!

The Book Group

My sister and I and our dog walking friends have started a book group. We had our first meeting last Sunday and all agree it was a raging success. This is despite choosing a book that 3 out of the 6 of us hated and only 2 really felt pleased they'd read. It was Joan Didion's (left) The Year of Magical Thinking which is not the jolliest text you will ever encounter, dwelling as it does on the aftermath of her husband's sudden death from a massive heart attack right on Christmas and when their adopted daughter lay critically ill in hospital. You can't fault the authenticity of the way Didion renders her experience. You FEEL each tremor of pain, doubt and delusion. So powerful a writer is she that she replicates grief and its accompanying disorientation. It does your head in. It was a brave first choice especially as our group includes women who have suffered sudden and catastrophic bereavement. Turned out to be a book we could admire though maybe not like. It does succeed as a great monument to John Gregory Dunne (her partner of 40 years) as her portrait of him and her quotes from his work have inspired me to seek out his books! Our next choice is safer, fiction by David Malouf, the novella Child's Play I am already romping through it and enjoying every phrase and image. If the others feel like I do it should be a joyous December meeting.

Mirrorball Epiphany

Dust is, according to Marjory Dawes, a good low cal snack! It is also an apparently endlessly renewable resource! It certainly replenishes itself very promptly chez moi. Scudding over surfaces with a piece of fluffy acrylic stuff on a stick and flourishing my poor battered vacuum cleaner once a week diminishes it only fleetingly. I should have heeded Quentin Crisp, who said it doesn't get any worse after the first 12 years, and never started the sisyphean labour at all. Any way, thankfully actually noticing it's there is only sporadic - like when you're obliged to sit in a dentist's waiting room or outside the principal's office and you fixate on details like a bit the painters missed or a crooked picture frame!

So it is that I only recently noticed dusty surfaces at work. The area behind my computer, the parts of the floor at the furthest reaches under the desk etc. Most significantly though, there is dust on the mirrorball! No, I don't work in a disco. I'm in HR and the lime green faceted bauble hangs over the Recruitment section. At first I thought it was a Christmas decoration but I've been here 3 years and it's been hanging there all that time and presumably longer!

It is - appropriately, considering this is a public service department - attached to the ceiling with red tape! I noticed neither the mirrorball nor its ironic tether until some weeks after I started here, when, as I said, the season led me to think it was a festive adornment.

Those were my salad days (well I certainly ate more salad and fewer cakes than I do now) and all was rosy, or in this case shiny and chartreuse! Now familiarity has led to dust-noticing and I am tempted to create hugely mixed metaphors to express how my early enthusiasm for my job and the organisation has given way to my current disaffection and fatigue.

A mirror ball is meant to spin. It needs vibration and light and dark to distribute its glitter. It borders on cruel to keep it static and dust accruing. It can not be true to it's dance floor enhancing function. I think there's a message there!

Generation Ex

Did you know that Jerry Lewis is still ALIVE and about to tour Australia? Well I'm assuming he's alive, the ad didn't say. If there's one thing more confronting than realising that some old bastards never die it's watching the seminal figures of your youth drop off the twig one by one. It makes you feel sooo old (and mortal). Of course the biggie of this past fortnight was Paul Newman universally regarded as a decent bloke and with the bluest eyes in the business (I guess Robson Green may inherit that title now). On the local front there was the demise of Rob Guest (I must admit I thought 'Rob who?' when I heard but apparently he had a bit of a following). And I am still trying to get through my Saturday afternoons without the distinctive voice of John Cargher introducing and gossiping about those performers on scratchy 78s!

Perhaps attaining a certain age makes you take more notice of death. Isn't there a story about some eccentric aged Englishman/woman who used to read the Death Notices in the paper each morning to check they weren't in them? It seems clear that the subjects of "Who Do You Think You Are?", the celebrity genealogy program on SBS on Sunday nights, find the tug of discovering their roots irresistible. There's a reassurance in seeing yourself as part of an evolving and continuous chain of family. And discerning traits shared with great aunt Mabel (however spurious) adds some meaning, makes a sort of pattern out of our essential alone-ness and finite-ness.

So Vale Paul, Rob, Aunty Mabel and the countless departed who have touched our lives. I think it is not, as the absurd title of a spiritualist book I saw in Dymocks this week suggests, that 'We Are Their Heaven' more that the memories and associations they've left with us act to enrich our own existence.

Brideshead Revisited Revisited

A sacred entity has been interfered with. Someone has re-made "Brideshead Revisited"! The ultimate televisual indulgence of my youth has had it's epic-ness cut to feature film length and someone has decided they can match or better its impeccable casting! The film has not been released in Australia so I have not yet had to make the decision of whether to go and see it and risk piercing my gloriously intact sense of nostalgia for Evelyn Waugh's own monument to nostalgia. (I recently had to make a judgement call about the latest iteration of "Sleuth" - another delight of my young adult cinema going life - and let the reviewers persuade me to preserve a fond memory).

What the news DID prompt me to do however was to pick up a very well thumbed second hand paperback copy of Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel with luverly pix from the telly series on back and front covers and start to read it. I realised I hadn't before despite being quite a Waugh fan. 'Loving' doesn't do justice to John Mortimer's TV adaptation. Next to nothing of the book's wistful narrative, pithy conversations and exquisite description is omitted! It will be interesting to see what is done to the work for consumption by a post MTV audience.

A clever friend has pointed out to me that John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier who appeared in the Granada series were virtually contemporaries of Waugh's and would probably have known or certainly have known of the originals of some of the book's characters. Gielgud's performance as Charles Ryder's eccentric and sinisterly mocking father is so apt - it is one of the most delightful experiences ever provided on the small screen. I wonder who plays that role in the film. I also find it hard to imagine a more perfect Anthony Blanche than Nikolas Grace.

It may still be a couple of weeks before crunch time comes and in the mean time I am relishing Waugh's prose and reliving the Granada series all over again in my head!

I'm Back!

It's been awful. I locked myself out of my blog. Forgot my password and then the security email enabling me to re-set it came to my work email address while I was on a week's leave! I have been suffering withdrawal symptoms!

Where to start? World Youth Day (the longest 'day' on record)? Saint Kevin PM's disappointing grasp of art vs. pedophilia? Recent filmic and televisual treats? A hymn to Annie Proulx who has made me read texts about cowboys BY CHOICE!!! She does the BEST imagery: a radio announcer who 'pronounced his own name as though he had just discovered a diamond in his nostril', 'a few final rain drops (that) fell, hard as dice', 'clean arcs divided the windscreen into a diptych, and their faces flared through the glass' - all on consecutive pages of a short story in 'Close Range'. And her vocabulary - I always mean to hold a dictionary in my other hand when I read her!

Well this will be a brief posting because lunch - and to a lesser extent - work calls! I've written my password down this time so watch this space!

Tubercular News

Does the pedant in a person (this person for example) come to the fore as the years progress?

I hate the 'makeover' they gave the ABC News about 12 months ago. The phony ad breaks when they flash the logo and play a few bars of the theme, the constant use of 'and coming up' or 'and just a reminder of our lead story' (or words to that effect) all of which imply that a 30 minute news broadcast defies our ability to concentrate & retain information and that, given that the lead story is usually dramatic and often tragic, we are sufficiently de-sensitised for it to have made no impact. The the other thing is the confiding, slightly moralistic tone the news reader adopts, quite at odds with the journalistic dignity ABC newsreaders used to exude. Who wants to gain the impression that Juanita is thinking 'oh, how cute' or 'serves him right' about the subject of a news item?

The copy Juanita and her colleagues read seems to be the work of hacks with clumsy expressions and ambiguities often cropping up and puns abounding in true tabloid style. These can be unintentionally funny as on the bulletin a couple of nights ago dealing with the blight of TB in Africa. Assuming we hermetically sealed citizens of the 21C west know nothing of how disease is communicated Juanita said, in her best 'tut, tut' voice, or I thought she said, "sneezing spreads the bugger 'round"!

Shows how primed I am to the dumbed down lingo that I was only mildly surprised!

The power of good telly

I recently read The Two of Us, Sheila Hancock’s memoir of her passionate and sometimes rocky marriage to John Thaw. Thaw was propelled to fame along with Denis Waterman in the 70s in the landmark British cop show, The Sweeney, and later starred (less interestingly and convincingly to my mind) as Inspector Morse. I was not a Thaw fan and was surprised to read that his passing (he died of throat cancer in 2002) almost stopped the nation and attracted the condolences of Prince Charles and Cherie Blair among others. Such is the power of telly I suppose. Thaw himself was a great apologist for it as a respectable alternative to legit theatre and Hollywood stardom, self aware enough to acknowledge that being a big fish in the relatively small pond of UK telly suited his ego very well.

What tickled me more than any of the insights into Thaw’s vodka sodden years and latter epiphany were Sheila’s lovely asides about the telly luminaries of my childhood: Frankie Howerd, Derek Nimmo and Kenneth Williams. Just as Sheila observes that fans felt they had a personal relationship with Regan and Morse (the heroes of the two Thaw series) I felt and feel an affection for those eccentric performers from Up Pompeii, All Gas & Gaiters and numerous Carry Ons because they were inhabitants of my childhood world and laughing at their antics was a shared and galvanising family experience.

The writers of Life on Mars realise how deep this goes. They made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when they rendered “Give Me Sunshine” (one of Morecombe and Wise’s themes) in a sinister and unnerving version in the first episode of series two. It messes with your head, tampers with a deep sense of the familiar and comforting. Dennis Potter knew it too when he staged rape, murder and execution to the lilting feel-good songs of the 30s and 40s in Pennies From Heaven.

A Potter production I tried hard to appreciate but which just didn’t work for me like Pennies From Heaven was Black Eyes. How nice to see Gina Bellman, who played its eponymous heroine, teamed with James Nesbitt in Jekyll over the past few Sundays and what a tour de force piece of telly that was!

Doc Martin, At The Movies and docos on Walt Disney and Lee Harvey Oswald have kept me engaged this Easter break when a virus put paid to planned trips and outings. At the risk of committing blasphemy as Compass has just usefully reminded me many thought Martin Scorsese and Monty Python did in the 70s, thank God for good telly!

Blog Envy

Now I know the object of writing a blog is communication and the last thing I should do is grumble if my ramblings have inspired others. BUT, I am suffering blog envy. Someone very close to me has proved to be a more fluent and prolific blogger than I am. BTW (techno shorthand for 'by the way') I thoroughly endorse and recommend this person's blog which you will find at:

http://murphydoneablog.blogspot.com/

It has made me LOL (look that one up yourself) on more than one occasion, but I am just a tad envious.

Maybe I am not the e-democrat that a dweller in the 'global village' (is that still the concept or is there something more 21C I should be saying?) is expected to be but while I was as chuffed as anything that my blog got a few comments I wasn't really expecting one of my circle to burst forth with a blog of their own that is vastly more entertaining.

This is where I find out that I am perhaps inherently competitive because I want to be LOL funny too! Or that blogging perhaps isn't my forte as I don't put stubby fingers to the keyboard half as often as I think I ought to. I haven't been REALLY inspired to write anything for a couple of weeks, that's despite seeing the Tim Burton Sweeney Todd and series 2 of Life on Mars starting up on television. I guess it is all about finding my e-voice.

I've finished the volume of Proust I started in January so I can take that pretentious bit out of my profile. Now I'm reading the pro sloth, hedonistic musings of Tom Hodgkinson - a writer and broadcaster to whom you could probably append the (again very 1990s) label of 'new lad' (he has a home pub). A friend gave me his book 'How To Be Free' for Xmas. It meanders along making some nice observations about self sufficiency such as growing your own vegies and false idols like having career ambitions and I would probably be enjoying it if it didn't (a) make me feel so old (Tom Hodgkinson was born in 1968 the year I came to Australia) and 2. make me feel so much a part of the reviled bureaucracy. He considers most things done under the banner of 'occupational health and safety' or 'equal employment opportunity' to be mean spirited erosions of individuality and freedom and talks about 'meritocracy' with complete disdain... Unfortunately these are the very areas I always gravitate to when I get public service employment so, if I accept any of his thesis, my career, I mean job, would seem to be kind of perverse S&M game. I am only 75 pages into his 339 page tract so I guess there is plenty of time for real guilt or rebellion to take hold!

Er, Hello, Ms Chipps

The music teacher from my daughter's school was recently featured on a television program about 'inspiring' teachers. Just as any discussion about what motivates adults to achieve or to behave in a certain way must acknowledge that one person's carrot may well be another's broccoli, I think we need to admit that while some kids may find bluff paternalism reassuring others might consider it bullying!

My daughter, for example, did not find the remark 'Of course you want to join the choir, here, I'll carry your bag for you' uttered whilst simultaneously comandeering her backpack and taking it to a place of choral practice so much inspiring as like being press-ganged! She felt her protest that she did NOT in fact want to join the school choir were somehow not being taken seriously.

In relating this incident to me my daughter told me she submitted to the practice session and was still making up her mind whether to attend more. If she does she will make it clear to Ms Chipps that she was recruited under duress! That they can possess her lungs and vocal chords for an hour a week but they cannot have her spirit!

As a proud parent (and one who has heard the school choir perform on various occasions), I can not help but believe that Ms Chipps was desperate to recruit a trained (and rather lovely) voice to their ranks. If my daughter's imitation of the breathy, mumbling technique employed by her peers was accurate there is no doubt that her inclusion will be an asset!

But how much better if Ms Chipps had enquired into my daughter's reason for not wanting to join - an 8 am start the day after her evening practice with her other, extra curricular, serious choir! (And, dare I hope it? perhaps a burgeonng sense that homework needs to be squeezed in somewhere). And how much better if she'd leveled with my girl and said 'Actually we need voices like yours!'

I think she'll stay. They're moving school choir practice to a lunch time and I think she's chuffed that her voice is clearly improving their overall sound. Ms Chipps could have put her recruitment on a rather more inspirational footing if she'd framed it as talent spotting rather than coercing.

Talking Pigeon

Agreeing on a film that a middle aged couple and their kids all want to see is a challenge every school holidays. Our 13 year old daughter expressed no interest in ‘I am Legend’ and ‘American Gangster’ – both high on our 17 year old son’s ‘must see’ list. No-one but me showed any interest in ‘Atonement’ despite the romantic theme (which I hoped would entice my daughter) and the chance to see Keira Knightly as wet camisole competition entrant (which I thought might be leverage for spouse and son). We settled on ‘Enchanted’ the Disney studios’ homage to and gentle mockery of what I have read described elsewhere as ‘its own back catalogue’!

It is actually bit broader than that with many of the industry’s conventions - especially the set pieces of lavish musicals like ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’ - coming in for recreation in a teasing yet celebratory way. By far my favourite was the translation of Snow White’s famous transformation of the dwarves’ grotty cottage with the help of her forest friends! The film establishes in the opening animated scenes that the heroine, Giselle, has a retinue of saccharine woodland chums ready to whip up a proxy prince charming for her out of objets trouvé and garland her with flowers.

When she is later transported to 21st century New York City and is dismayed at the disarray in the apartment of the people who have given her shelter overnight she employs the traditional Andalasian (Disney) solution of calling melodiously to nearby fauna to come and wield brooms and dusters to make everything shiny new! This being New York though, raccoons, chipmunks and blue birds are in short supply and her respondents are CGI rats, pigeons and cockroaches. There follows a joyous sequence in which the vermin cooperate with Giselle to make the apartment spick and span. My favourite vignette is three rats heartily scrubbing the toilet bowl with the family’s toothbrushes!

Having transformed the flat in best Snow White/Mary Poppins fashion, the animals roost on the furniture looking pleased with themselves and revelling in their jolly cross species cooperation. Just as you are thinking ‘Aah’ - one of the pigeons leans over and consumes one of the ‘roaches in a single gulp! Reality check (of sorts)!

But life, as we know, imitates art and I was reminded of a time soon after I started work at my current location opposite Sydney’s Belmore Park and saw a homeless man distributing stale bread to huge flocks of pigeons. ‘Aah’ I thought (despite my rational mind being only too aware that environmentally it was NOT a good thing). Then some of the pigeons started tussling over some crusts and without hesitation the old bloke gave the one he considered the greediest a boot up the arse!

The cinematic genre bending goes on... I walked through the park the other morning and the pigeons were engaged in a Hitchcock ‘homage’, cooing and glowering from the branches in their hundreds! Watch out cantankerous old bloke I thought!

Revisiting the Sexual Revolution

This weekend provided some perfect companion viewing in Kinsey (screened on commercial TV last Friday night I think although we recorded it and watched it on Saturday night) and The Chatterley Trial - last night on the ABC. The major question raised by both was what sexual behaviour we deem 'normal' and what 'debased'. Proof that Lawrence and Kinsey have had their impact on social mores and public thinking generally was the calm and commonsensical response our 17 year old has to these issues. Not Gen X (or is it Y, or Y-not? whatever!) enough to be blasé and wonder what all the fuss was about, he is too bright & has too much appreciation of history for that, he is completely mindful of how organised religion and the Hoover-led FBI had a vested interest in using concepts of sexual deviance and abnormality to control the citizenry. We were right proud of him! He chose not to view The Chatterley Trial but casually mentioned the flowers woven in the pubic hair episode in the book while he was helping me put the washing out. Oh, to have had his awareness and sophistication in my early teens when most of my sexual education came from sneakily reading a Colin Wilson novel I found in my parents' bedroom (and from empirical research of course!)

A Love of Swann's

Filmed as 'Swann in Love' and seen by me some years ago (mainly because it starred Jeremy Irons for whom I had a weakness in my distant youth), I am finally reading the portion of Proust's massive opus A la recherche du temps perdu (translated in the latest Penguin edition as In search of lost time) called 'A Love of Swann's'. What stikes me is the incredible modern-ness of the text (complete as it is with bitchy asides about philistinism and superficiality). Part 1: 'Combray' dripped with sensuous descriptions of the natural & built world of the author's childhood and the most profound insights into how mind, memory and desire operate (don't think I am saying anything new re. Proust here!) but this second part is much more brittle and pacy yet still makes these startling observations about how we experience pleasure, tedium, practise self delusion etc. Even though the book's vocabulary and allusions are 'classical' or at least historically specific for me the world conjured up is far more immediate and modern that those of Joyce or Woolf! More later when the train ride home allows me to visit Marcel again!