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!