Accentuate the positive – or good things about that BIG birthday number

I turned 50 last week, and that was a bit hard to type, but having typed it and lived it I can now think about listing the good things… so, randomly, here are some of them.

As my friend Will so accurately put it, I am the oldest teenager around.. so that’s good, and his gift was another good thing about my birthday.

I didn’t have a party, but I had a lovely dinner with my family and my mum and dad. 50 years of knowing 2 wonderful people and watching their incredibly loving and supporting relationship – what a wonderful gift.

I did go to my schoolfriend’s party, we’ve celebrated our birthdays together in far flung places and here in Sydney over a 35 year friendship. I knew most of the people there, we’ve seen eachother’s children grow up, we’ve shared eachother’s lives to a greater or lesser extent.

Spending a glorious night under the stars with people you feel totally and absolutely comfortable with? Effortless, joyful and worth the wait… a far cry from those stressful parties when you are young and insecure.

Watching a couple who’ve been together 25 years dance with eachother like two flirtatious teenagers? Almost made me cry with happiness.

Looking at our beautiful teenagers and young adult children and congratulating ourselves and eachother on the great job we’ve done as parents… well earnt satisfaction and shared relief that they are finally moving on or about to move on with the next phase of their lives..

Sharing plans for post-teenager travel, work, adventures and life? As exciting as the days we spent planning our schoolies trip or our first trip without parents at 16.

Sharing our fears for our ageing parents and grief at losses to death or dementia? Moving and reassuring.

Sobbing with laughter as my first boyfriend (year 7) headed a motley bunch of ‘musicians’ belting out 80s cover songs and dancing like a complete idiot? Liberating and totally uncool.

The wonder of seeing a friend strong and healthy after beating cancer, or another living an independent happy life after a disastrous marriage? Awe inspiring.

The morning after hugs, goodbyes, chats and coffees as we filtered back to the house from our hotel? Almost better than the party.

My post birthday facebook ‘unfriending’ session? Liberating and so so positive, from now on I promise to love and nurture the good friendships in my life and simply leave the others behind. Just because you’ve known someone for 40 years – it doesn’t mean you have to like them.

Life is about friends.. or friends are about life.. and while we may tread parallel or even divergent paths at different times, as we grow older the diverse paths seem to merge into one big road, and that’s a great road to be on right now.

With love to all my friends – old and new,  you know who you are (well you do now!)

How do you grieve?

How do you grieve for a life that was, in reality, lost to you many years ago? Is it even right to grieve and what is it we are crying for? This is a question I guess I’ll have to deal with more and more now and, to be honest, I’m at a loss to know what is right and how to feel.

As we get older we slowly but inexorably lose touch with people who once meant the world to us. Connections fade and become frayed, people move on .. and yet, when you meet at some funeral, wedding or memorial service it’s as if the years fall away and there you are again. Laughing at the same jokes, sharing a spliff or a glass of wine, falling again into the shorthand that once made communication so easy. You keep in touch through facebook, you hear bits and pieces of news, but you still rely on friends to keep you in the loop about illness, death and tragedy.When that loop fails, and someone dies that you haven’t expected, you’re unprepared and unsettled and what’s worse you can’t process and deal with it in the normal way. A sudden sense of isolation and disconnection intensifies your feelings. Grief for the loss of a life becomes intermingled with sadness for the loss of friends and the loosening of ties and connections.

My first serious boyfriend died in the early hours of Friday morning at his home in Brazil with his beautiful wife and son by his side. The last time we saw each other was at a gathering to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of his best friend. We, along with a tight group of 4 or 5 others spent a year in a golden haze of youth, surf and that special intensity that comes with being a teenager and ‘in love’. I was 16 or 17, he was 17 or 18, I had yet to do my HSC he had just started Uni, we had the same friends, we went to the same parties, our lives as yet untouched by anything of any great importance. We smoked pot, we hung out, we talked and laughed and partied and drove up and down the coast, we lay on the beach, we spent New Years Eve at Blueys Beach growing up amongst the sand dunes. And that was that, we broke up with no great dramas and gradually over the years everyone moved onto other lives and other countries.

So now he has left and my world is, in reality, no different. Yet I’m grieving and it’s just a bit overwhelming.. Why and for what do I mourn? Selfishly for my own lost youth? For the indescribable loss of a father and husband – certainly. For the loss of a mate, brother, son. If anyone (and you’ll know who you are) reads this, know that I am thinking of you and that I care deeply for your loss.

Perhaps my sadness has also to do with the fact that I didn’t know he was bravely battling cancer and that I lost the opportunity to contact him and send support to his family and to him before he died. Sad that I didn’t contact them, sad that no-one told me and sad that someone may have thought I didn’t care.

I also feel I should apologise to his wife and son for even writing this – this is not my day to mourn, it’s yours and yours alone, and my heart goes out to you now and for the future as you rebuild your lives without the one who meant the most to you.

So I guess I’ll just say ‘goodbye’. I’m glad that when I look at fading photos those golden days seem so perfect and remain unsullied by the years in between. I’ll go to Palm Beach one day soon and when I do, I’ll sit for a time as I have before and think of you and the others we have lost.

India.. the endless destination.

Photographs: Paharganj early morning Delhi, Women of Ghanerao, all copyright Jean-Pierre Henfrey 2008. www.mwpics.com.au

Time wasting, should be working, no-one on facebook, twittering twats boring… Double click on my guilty pleasure, looking again and again at the 700 odd photos from our trip to India.

Time wasting becomes ‘time-pass’, work fades into the distance .. I find myself leaning towards the screen breathing in deeply through my nose, as if the smell that permeates and characterises India was somehow captured by the digital chip along with the acid colours, brown faces, mangy dogs, cows, teeming streets, glorious buildings: temples, mosques, shanties and beautiful countryside. I can recall it if I concentrate, how is it that those ads describe perfume? Bottom notes of curry leaves, cumin, cardamom and cooking with a burning acrid dash of chilli.. a smoky sweet overlay of sandalwood incense from the nearby temple or puja.. earthy drifts of cow dung, sweat, urine.. and yes.. shit mingle with car fumes and smoke from wood fires.

The smell was the first thing I noticed even before I left the airport at Mumbai, and it was overwhelming as we drove to Colaba the first night. Huddled in the back seat of a taxi, my son, my partner and I.. crawling slowly through late night streets alive with children, people, animals, small fires.. faces pressed against the windows.. fireworks exploding.. horns blasting.. music shrieking.. past shanties and tarpaulin homes and straggly apartment blocks… Like a journey into some kind of surrealist horror movie. The three of us wondering through a haze of tiredness what we were doing there, what were we thinking, what type of mother brings their child to such a place?

After the smell – its the sounds of India that creep into your consciousness, becoming so much a part of your life that the absence of sound back home, rather than being peaceful, is more like a sterile aural vacuum waiting for some life to fill it. The birds that fill the Indian skies, making our skies seem so empty in comparison, the endless traffic & car horns, the chatter of voices – laughing children, hawkers, gossip, chai wallahs, vendors, temple bells, Muslim calls to prayer – a dawn wakeup call I came to love. In some places the chatter of monkeys dominates. In others the quiet lowing of cattle, the rhythmic sounds of workers picking weeds from crops or drawing water from a well and the snoring of men dozing in the sun on charpoys outside the chai stall are all you hear. Until of course the omnipresent cassette player or transistor radio bursts forth with another round of the latest Bollywood hit songs, prompting a few dance moves and a singalong and the appearance from god knows where of a group of noisy children.

Indians abhor a vacuum of any kind it seems, life without noise, smells, colour and decoration is simply not to be tolerated. For westerners, this can be an onslaught your battered senses get no rest even in the ‘privacy’ of your hotel room – for privacy is a concept that if grasped at all, is treated with amusement and bemusement as a luxury that we in uncrowded western countries demand. Why? Who knows.  But (and this was to become our mantra) don’t fight it – go with it and the onslaught becomes a presence that brings every fibre of your being and every sense to life.

Just go with it, don’t fight it – the smell, the noise, the lack of privacy. Answer a thousand personal & intimate questions in the street from a stranger and make a new friend or twenty, go with them to the chai stall, follow them to the best bangle shop & let then haggle for you. Laugh through your agony along with the delighted crowd of spectators as you try your first delicious oily street snack and the green chilli brings tears to your eyes and snot pouring out of your nose ‘take out the chilli before you eat’ the children shriek – doubled over with laughter, as the stallholder – with a flourish of his filthy cloth over a plate – presses another free pakora on you, anxious that you should enjoy his cooking.

As you spend days in each new place, the rhythm of daily life, with different spikes of activity for each village town or city yet reassuringly the same everywhere, becomes soothing. The same woman performing her puja at the temple outside your door each day, the same dog sleeping in the same spot on the street, the cow who visits for a bowl of milk each morning, the same children pouring out of or into the school in their pressed and starched uniforms, tight pigtails and thick glasses. After a day or two, the boy at the chai stand is making your morning cuppa as he sees you pass the women washing at the lakeside -slap slap slap amongst the laughter and talk. You take your place on the stools at the stall amongst your new best friends.

What’s the daily gossip? They’ll tell you where you were the day before, what you ate – news travels fast – everyone knows everything. Its as if you’ve lived there for years – but in a day or so, you move on, and you know they don’t remember you. the Indian grasp of going with the flow of life and fate is too strong, connections made are as easily broken, what each day brings is accepted and then let go of with equanimity… go with it.. it begins to make sense, to bring calm.

Along with the demands of religious observation.. routine comes in the most part, especially in rural areas, from the tasks that an un-mechanised, un-modernised life demands; shopping, preparing and cooking meals, manual labour, hand making objects, working in the fields. Life is hard, no doubt, lets not romanticise it – a trap that westerners too often fall into, and one that I am guilty of. I couldn’t live that life, I wouldn’t live that life, but briefly being alongside, observing & meeting those who live this way changed us.

You adapt or run home, hide or end up like my son – dressed in a kurta and cotton pants, living on street food, chai and homemade treats forced upon him by plump sari-clad women, playing street cricket and with an impressive grasp of Hindi phrases to flirt with giggling girls and bargain with shopkeepers & a tough demeanour to ward off touts & rickshaw drivers.

And what of the shock of death, disease, poverty. What are the right words? Did we cease to care? Did we become hardened? How could we travel for 5 weeks and not be torn apart by what we saw, how does anyone?

Even now 18 months later I find it hard to analyse and properly express my feelings about the inescapable side of India. People ask when you return – ‘how did you handle it?’, ‘I wouldn’t be able to deal with the poverty’ they say. I have no answer, other than to say – ‘you don’t have to deal with it, you’re not the one living on the median strip, it isn’t really about you and those people’s lives won’t be made any better by your hand-wringing and western guilt’.

Its not that you don’t care, or that an individual child or woman can’t reach into your soul and make your heart bleed, or that you don’t shed tears of anger and frustration at the indifference of the Government and the wealthy, at the injustice, the garbage, the dead and dying. Its more that as the life force of India flows around you and sweeps you along you (rightly or wrongly) begin to let go of things. Its just how it is, move on, go with it, focus on the immediate, the routine, the daily tasks. What will happen will happen, don’t fight it.

The beauty and colour becomes distancing and distracting like the flashing eyes and beautiful smile of the little dancing girl twirling and clapping in her pink pink sari and flashing sequins and bangles, her tiny bare feet a blur in the dust.How easy it is to forget she doesn’t go to school – to not notice how thin she is, or how her father grimly supervises her dance, is that a bruise on her arm? She is the breadwinner after all, she must work hard late into the night dancing for us. I put money in the box and I try to give her a childish toy, a little koala, a cheap nothing.. her father sends her back to return the toy and ask for more money. Another awkward tourist moment among many.

That little girl, and the thousands of people we met, the Taj Mahal, Humayan’s tomb, the Golden Temple or the Jama Masjid, the incredible food, the music, laughter and beautiful gardens, the long hours of conversation with elderly intellectuals about politics and philosophy, or with studious teenagers about physics and English grammar and always the cricket, the bloody bloody cricket. All these things, but especially the people, are the glorious, beautiful, incomparable, beating heart of India. Sights and experiences that make your soul sing, that make you glad to be alive in that moment, glad to be fortunate enough to experience such incredible things. The things that make you begin planning to return almost as soon as you land back in Sydney. The things that make you overlook the corruption and injustice while vowing to do something to help end it.

Don’t try and understand it, don’t bother trying to explain it, just go with it – or don’t, India probably won’t care either way

Some lovely images taken by JP in India can be found on flickr – here

Are we getting the internet filter we deserve?

It was interesting to note at the recent IQ2 debate about government censorship of the internet that everyone on the panel, even those arguing in favour of some form of government censorship or regulation, stated that the proposed Conroy/Rudd internet filter is a complete dud. There are umpteen reasons for this, ranging from the technical to the philosophical, the most compelling being simply that everyone seems to agree that it just won’t work. It is difficult to believe that the Rudd Government is so stupid that they dismiss the opinion of the overwhelming majority of experts; so we are left wondering, what was really the point of proposing the filter in the first place or of persisting with it now?

Western democracies have been attempting to balance the see-saw of  personal liberty versus the mitigation of risk since the industrial revolution, swinging wildly between over-regulation and demanding that we self regulate and look after ourselves; somewhere in between lies the body of laws and statutes that are necessary for a civilised and functioning society. Increasingly though, particularly in the West, governments are faced with an impossible task as we clamour peevishly, loudly and incessantly  for someone (else) to ‘do something’ about everything (real or imaginary) that upsets us or makes our lives or those of our children less than perfect. Faced with escalating and relentless demands to create and maintain a risk-free society and the certainty of being voted out should they come clean, its small wonder our leaders often resort to constructing something flashy that is complicated enough to shut people up until the next panic comes around,

There are several different issues that are raised when the filter is discussed. The fear of opening a floodgate of government intrusiveness and censorship is often cited by those who are anti-filter. These fears, while founded in historical truth, seem to be to be fairly rhetorical and frankly a bit like shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. Howard’s anti terrorist legislation has already paved the way for future intrusions and restrictions and stripped away many of our previously cherished rights (innocent until proven guilty, right to silence, right to legal representation) under certain circumstances. Recent changes to bail laws in NSW have removed yet another layer of assumed legal ‘rights’ and there are countless other examples across Australia and in other countries – all in the name of safety and protection.

The pro-filter people on the other hand seem to be focussed almost solely on the sexual exploitation of children, to the extent of implying that if you’re anti ‘clean feed’ then you must also spend your evenings in front of your screen consuming ‘child pornography’ if not actually molesting children. In this respect, the proposed internet filter is nothing but an expensive illusion, a sleight of hand that will fool the simple folk in the ‘think of the children’ brigade into feeling safe, until the next moral panic comes along. Meanwhile, the rights of the rest of us to live our online lives in relative freedom will be unnecessarily constrained, until of course we quickly develop ways of circumventing the filter.

While all this is going on however, the real work is being carried out in unglamorous offices around the world where police officers and investigators spend their working lives immersed in horrific images and videos that most people – including most of those who clamour for a filter –  couldn’t bring themselves to glance at and which they will never see, no matter how long they spend on the internet. In almost unprecedented cross-border and cross cultural cooperative operations and by dint of incredibly thorough and painstaking collection of evidence and investigations, these men and women actually and actively save lives, rescue children, and arrest perpetrators. Others trawl through the filth of racist and extremist hate sites and chatrooms while yet others attempt to educate assembly halls full of teenagers and parents about the dangers of cyberbullying, sexting and posting photos of your boobs on facebook and the need for parents and schools to supervise children’s online activities in the home and elsewhere.

The fact is that all the bad things on the internet – indeed in our everyday lives – are already illegal and most always have been. While the internet has enabled the easier distribution of exploitative material, hate and violence, it has also facilitated the detection, apprehension and conviction of those who create and consume such things. Child pornography wasn’t invented with the internet, or even last century and it hasn’t suddenly become  morally wrong or illegal. The brown paper envelope, VHS tape, clandestine meeting and anonymous post office box of the past is now an innocuous PC in the corner of a sitting room, but the content is, sadly, much the same. Imagine what more could be done if the money set aside for the internet filter was instead directed to increase the numbers of these specialist investigators, better facilitate international operations and to deliver training, highly skilled support staff and state of the art equipment? Imagine if the Federal Police could afford to employ the best and most expensive computer hackers and experts?

We, the voters, the people, the ones with the ‘I vote and I.. ‘ stickers on our cars, need to stop whining, blaming and waiting for ’someone to do something’. Instead of listening to fear mongers and panic merchants with a vested interest in keeping their readers/listeners perpetually fearful and outraged, we might get a grip on reality and learn to accept that 100% safety and 0% risk are unachievable. Once we do that, we might support our governments to make well informed decisions which might actually help to prevent and detect crimes such as the exploitation of children. Until we grow up however, we will continue to get what we demand and deserve – cynical and empty ‘initiatives’ such as the internet filter which are nothing more than a shiny and diverting toy designed to make us shut up.

New York: Bits and pieces – parks, places, shops and more

I could write and talk about New York for ever, but I fear this is getting a little like an interminable slide night at your Auntie’s house, so I’ll finish with a few bits and pieces

Some random bits of NY style

This little cutie was so proud of the Obama hat he got for his birthday, he told me that his family and friends were still partying after the election, made me feel good after all the recent criticism!

Seasons

It was so lovely being in a city with real seasons. When we arrived, the trees were bare and the air frosty, this is our neighbourhood – Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, a block from our apartment.

Within a few days there were blossoms and flowers springing out everywhere and the sun was shining gloriously – window boxes appeared and little courtyards and stoops sported pots of tulips and blossoms.

Parks and places

Manhattan is full of wonderful community gardens – lovingly tended and each one with its own character, its something I remember from my first visit – amongst the burnt out tenements of Alphabet City, were little unofficial community plots of flowers and herbs. Now they seem to be official and organised .. lovely.

Spring of course is the ideal time to experience the beautiful parks and green spaces in NY, Central Park is without a doubt one of the most beautiful and expansive parks anywhere

The new Highline Park - developed from an old eyesore overhead road in Chelsea/Meatpackers District, has great views, art and lovely little patches of grass, a really beautiful place to walk and a great transformation.

Also new, in fact unfinished, is the Brooklyn Bridge Park – a beautiful stretch of green winding along the East River from Dumbo which will eventually stretch all the way to Cobble Hill. Its a beautiful walking park, with playgrounds and even little beaches on the river – and of course that view of Manhattan on the other side of the river.

Dumbo – under the Manhattan Bridgeon the Brooklyn side, is an old waterfront industrial/warehouse area which has been turned into a funky area full of art galleries, smart cafes and waterfront apartments that people bought for a pittance and are now worth millions. Its a great place for a walk and retains a few reminders of its industrial past which make it more interesting.

Red Hook – right up the end of the river, looking across to Jersey and the Statue of Liberty, is a more arty, hippyish area which is also developing from an industrial waterfront, its really lovely and peaceful and less aggressively groovy than Dumbo. It has a great supermarket which I raved about in the food post and a new Ikea, which is a source of much excitement to New Yorkers & their tiny apartments and even has its own ferry service to Manhattan.

Gentrification

Is proceeding at a galloping rate in New York, especially in Brooklyn possibly because Manhattan is pretty much done! Cobble Hill, where we stayed, is full of beautifully renovated brownstones, tree lined cobbled streets, nannies and small children. Its lovely, but there are precious few remnants of what was not so long ago a hard, working class, waterfront workers suburb. We went as far out as Flatbush, which although still pretty grim and drab, is showing signs of renovation, with cafes and bars springing up here and there. Like most people I’m ambivalent about gentrification, I deplore the fact that rising prices force the low income residents out and hate the corresponding lack of diversity – but at the same time, I’m happy to sit around the cafes & love the lifestyle. The NY tradition of rent control or rent stabilisation on a certain quota of buildings in each area is a great idea, and has protected Manhattan to some extent, although from many accounts the pace of property development and the greed for profits means that many of these residents are being forced out.

Shopping

We did very little shopping of the kind people normally associate with NY, mostly just browsing in vintage clothing shop, record shops and little boutiques. Bleecker Bob’s in the Village was a favourite haunt for slavering over thousands of record albums of all genres. I miss vinyl for its warm sound and especially for the wonderful cover art, liner notes and the way the packaging used to be so carefully designed and created to complement the music and the artist, looking through vintage records is like seeing frozen moments in time – the design, fonts, writing and photos all representative of their era. Oscar bought some great original jazz albums and I bought this

not in great shape, but original and worth it just for the cover art.

There were some great shops in the East Village& Brooklyn for one-off t-shirts, new and vintage shoes for the teenage shoe freak and many other such goodies, it was as much fun browsing as buying  – well almost.

Williamsburg

Home of the hipster, was chock a block with vintage clothing shops and vintage everything else (by vintage in this case I mean 1980s). Being vintage myself, and from the 1980s, I have to say the revival of 80s fashion and music leaves me pretty unimpressed. It was mostly crap then and its crap now, and no amount of irony or beardy bicycle riding will make it good. Williamsburg has great bars, cafes and restaurants and some fantastic shops, its buzzy and crowded and very very hip – but it does get a bit tired and tiring after a couple of days, its all just a bit try-hard. I imagine living there would be exhausting, what with the constant pressure to be wearing, riding and listening to the latest thing of the moment.

Lovely cafe in Williamsburg, on Bedford, sadly the expresso machine was broken and we had the worst excuse for Chai I’ve ever tasted! Like milky water with a few spices waved at it.

Vintage shopping in Williamsburg – Beacons Closet – nearly made Oscar buy this rather wonderful suede number!

In Williamsburg, even the trucks are hip and vintage.

There’s a great post which pretty much sums it up, at the excellent ‘Less This More That’ blog. Having said all that though, its a  pretty great place  -all that Surry Hills wants to be but somehow so much more!

So that’s it, my thoughts on wonderful wonderful New York, it certainly won’t be another 20 years until I return.

New York: Music, bars, poets and comics – so much to do, so little time!

Along with the gentrification and creeping hipness comes that wonderful NY thing which we so sadly lack in Sydney, little neighbourhood bars. We didn’t get to enough of them, and I say we, because the majority allow children accompanied by adults.

Barbes, in Park Slope, Brooklyn was one bar we went to a couple of times. Run by French expats and very cosy and welcoming,  its a tiny room with a lovely old marble and wood bar. Out the back is the performance space, which you’d be lucky to fit 60 people in, and it was here we saw the French guitarist Stephane Wrembel – who did the title track to ‘Vicky, Christina Barcelona’ accompanied by the innovative Nick Anderson on drums & Dave whose last name I can’t remember but who has a brilliant red afro and pale white skin  (in case you see him around) on bass.

Stephane Wrembel at Barbes

We saw Dave again in Greenwich Village, towing his bass down the subway steps, and then again busking in Washington Square, where the busking is as competitive as the rest of the jazz scene in NY. Everywhere we went, we saw people with double basses – in the subway, in restaurants and cafes, walking down the street.

Washington Square busking – that’s Dave on the left & the drummer is a super talented young guy we saw get up for a jam session at Smalls one night, so much talent in that city! There’s some youtube footage of it here and I will get the names and add them as soon as I can!

Speaking of buskers – there’s some footage here of an incredible acapella group we ran into twice, once in Washington Square and again that evening in Greenwich Village, they must have been making a fortune – they had their money in a milk crate – and they deserved every cent, people were dancing on the footpath, sorry sidewalk.

Later we went back to Barbes to see the famous Slavic Soul Party bring the house down with a pumping few hours of Serbian gypsy music in their regular Tuesday residency. Barbes website states that it cannot have amplified music – and its true, SSP use no amplifiers. The night we saw them however there were 2 trumpets, sax, tuba, 2 trombones, bass drum, snare and cymbal and piano accordion, we were deaf for days.

Nick Anderson told us about a fabulous bar called Solo Kitchen Bar, way out in Flatbush, owned by a Japanese guitarist, Aki Ishiguro. Every night there’s jazz, a jam session or some kind of event – there’s a real neighbourhood vibe, including pet dogs sitting at their owners’ feet and the transformed shop space is spacious with  big old tables, wooden floors and a nice old bar along the side. We went on a jam night, and like every other jazz venue we went to in NY, the musicians were all excellent and innovative players.

It must be an incredible experience for a musician to live and play in NY for any length of time, its a pressure cooker and extremely competitive, with jams every night all over the city and quite famous musicians performing in tiny places for very little money. Most of the smaller places we went to payed the musicians by passing around a jar for donations, yet the music was consistently impressive, even in the streets!

Oscar got up and had a jam on drums at Solo Kitchen, which was pretty brave for a 15yo, after 2 weeks being immersed in jazz he was itching for a play and he did pretty well. Dan Loomis on the bass was lovely, making lots of eye contact and really encouraging him. He must have been OK because the sax and trumpet players sat down when they saw a kid get up, and then got back up again once he started playing (yes, the jam sesssions are that ruthless – if you’re no good they just stop playing). There’s some youtube footage here of Oscar jamming, that’s Dan Loomis on bass and I will have to find out the other players names

Smalls is a wonderful place, one of the homes of jazz in Greenwich Village in a tiny cellar, dusty and a bit rickety. Although it was $20 to enter, we saw musicians that we’d have to pay upwards of $50 or $6o to see here at somewhere like The Basement – which of course doesn’t allow people under 18 in any case. Smalls – and other Greenwich Village venues like Fatcats -  didn’t seem to mind Oscar and other teenagers staying in there until 2 or 3 in the morning. One of the highlights of our trip was seeing 3 sets by the brilliant brilliant Israeli bass player Omer Avital accompanied by Avishai Cohen on trumpet, Joel Frahm on Sax & the sensational Jonathon Blake on drums, mesmerising and wonderful!

We also went to the Highline Ballroom to see some New Orleans music. The Rebirth Brass Band, which features in the new series Treme, was an exhilarating, joyous experience and Dumpstaphunk, led by junior members of the Neville family, were pure funk – the place was packed and going completely insane, people were jumping on stage, and it was impossible not to dance.

Things get crazy with the Rebirth Brass Band

Dumpstaphunk lay down the grooves as if they were born to it.. hang on a minute

There are always some Australians making their presence felt around the NY scene, Nick Hempton - who was a wonderful source of information and who has possibly the coolest job working the late night door shift at Smalls, Sean Wayland, and Adrian Cunningham to name a few. I guess my son will be joining their ranks in a few years, he’s already started a campaign for me to enter the greencard lottery and is scouring websites for scholarships to study jazz.

Along with jazz, NY is famous for its comedians and comedy venues. Many of the more well known places were prohibitively expensive, and music was a priority, but we did go to a fantastic comedy club – the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre twice. Each visit we went to all 3 shows, leaving and queuing up again to pay our $5 !!!!!!!! entry fee. The comedy was mainly improv, but mostly hilarious.Amongst others we saw the Colbert report writers do a set, a ‘cage match’ between 2 comedy teams, two women who invite guests to talk about their sex lives – funnier than it sounds, and Scott Adsit from 30 Rock and a partner do a brilliant & sometimes sad improvised play. My twitter friend Dave Hill’s monologue was great – and a little disturbing, and I wish I could remember the names of the other young comedians who performed.

On our very first night out in NY, we were taken to a free poetry reading at the New School – a very NY thing to do. This was no ordinary poetry reading however, but the launch of a book about Pearl London, a poetry teacher at the University. We sat with about 100 others in awe while no fewer than 5 great American poets read their own work and talked. They were Edward Hirsch, Maxine Kumin – Poet Laureate who read a beautiful piece written for her wayward teenage son; Pulitzer prize winner – Irishman Paul Muldoon who conjured wonderful images of cows and other creatures; Poet Laureate & Pulitzer prize winner Robert Pinsky, who’s reading was musical, funny and moving; and Stanley Plumly. A once in a lifetime experience and one that rekindled a love of poetry that had been dormant for many years.

In 2 weeks, we managed to see and hear a lot of music, some comedy and of course that wonderful poetry and also to meet a lot of people. Oscar is now  practising his brushwork madly in preparation for going back when he leaves school. The experience not only helped his drumming, but really opened his eyes and his world to what is out there musically and to what is possible, people were wonderfully friendly and helpful, even though they give no quarter when actually playing – we have a list of emails and have vowed to keep in contact.

New York: Egg cremes, sandwiches, eating the POTUS, Latin noms, burgers & the best doughnuts in the world

While in NYC I tweeted and facebooked a lot about food, we ate almost incessantly however not necessarily in style. Being on a strict budget meant we were unable to sample the finer establishments NY has to offer, however we managed to chow down on some pretty delicious treats nonetheless.

Our first day out in NY saw us head over to Manhattan with our host Louis, also 15 and an Aussie who has lived in NYC for 10 years now. Our eagerly anticipated first meal out had to be something intrinsically NY and if possible somewhere iconic, so where better then Eisenbergs Sandwich Shop on 5th Avenue, near Union Square? Of course we sat at the counter, of course I had a chicken salad on rye and of course my son had a pastrami on rye and of course they came with pickles!!! The place is amazing, a real slice of old NY, friendly counter staff, unchanged ‘decor’, photos of celebrities lining the walls.. and great value at about $8  a meal. The boys had Lime Rickeys to drink, which as far as I could make out was lime cordial.

The NY concept of a sandwich is very different to ours!

Later that evening we met Louis’ mum, Jen, and headed to the West Village for delicious cheeseburgers, a glass of wine for me and a huge beer for Jen at the White Horse Tavern, Dylan Thomas’s favourite watering hole. Despite reviews to the contrary the service was extremely friendly, the food was delicious and again – about $8/ meal!

After dinner we wandered over to Magnolia Bakery, of Sex & the City fame, which had a queue out the door at 9.30 on a Wednesday night!

The day Osc headed off with Louis to experience high school NY style, I wandered up through our neighbourhood of Cobble Hill in Brooklyn in search of breakfast – which I found at the delightful One Girl Cookies just off Smith St. Sitting in the sunshine, reading the NY Times and eating house made granola with homemade yoghurt, drinking one of the very few decent coffees I had in the whole 2 weeks, I felt very NY – well very Cobble Hill anyway.

House made and artisan goodies were a recurring joy throughout our stay, from beer to bread cakes, cookies and everything in between, New York cafes, restaurants and shops really go all out to stand out from the crowd. Jen and I visited the incredible Parkway supermarket in Red Hook, down the road from our house, to find a staggering array of organic or ethically produced produce and foodstuffs. Incredibly priced compared to Sydney, fresh and delicious. An enormous cheese counter featuring American and imported cheeses and house made mozarella being made behind the counter and plumped still warm onto the shelf; granolas and mueslies of every description – all house made, yoghurts, curds, juices and icecream; ready to eat meals, freshly baked bread and bagels.. I could go on all day!

Brooklyn is, apparently, the hippest place on the planet at the moment and if the sheer number of groovy cafes, restaurants, bars, bottle shops and providors in the neighbourhoods around ours is any indication its also the hungriest. Every second place is organic, free trade, homemade or artisan, and most are packed, several with a constant line out the door waiting for tables. Despite all this, it goes without saying that none of them could make a decent cup of coffee!

This is Blue Marble Icecream in the very pretty Boerum Hill area – there was a constant line of people waiting to be served. It was nice, not the nicest I’ve ever had – but nice.

Back in Manhattan and again, in search of the iconic, hit East Houston St & the famous Katz’s deli – of When Harry Met Sally and ‘Send a Salami to your boy in the army’  fame, unchanged and unmodernised for probably 30 years – why bother? The food was delicious, relatively expensive and came in HUGE servings, the place was packed and extremely noisy. Despite being a bit of a tourist haunt, the noise definitely had a NY twang, and a bit of a walk around confirmed that the majority of diners were American, if not New Yorkers. After queueing to get in and then negotiating a very complicated ticket/find a table/queue at the counter procedure, Oscar chomped through a pastrami sandwich and most of a reuben sandwich, a plate of fries and several pickles, I ate half a pastrami sandwich and a piece of cheesecake.

After a long walk and shop around the East Village, we headed back to East Houston a few doors up from Katz’s, past the BEST disposal store in the world where we bought a fantastic backpack and hat for next to nothing, to Russ & Daughters – another NY institution and home to the biggest range of fishy products you’ve ever seen. On the subway back to Brooklyn we devoured the most amazing bagels with indescribably delicious smoked salmon and the creamiest cream cheese ever, a sprinkling of raw onion setting off the taste sensation perfectly.

We made several visits back to Russ & Daughters, eating our bagels in the sunshine on the bench outside the shop.

Fortunately the famous knish shop next door was closed for the Jewish holidays, or I fear Oscar may have eaten himself into a stupor.

The Lower East Side, below Houston, is probably not the neighbourhood it once was. Chinatown seems to extend for ages, and there is a largish Dominican area and of course lots of hipster cafes and bars springing up all over.

We found the Pickle Guys down on Essex St, where Oscar grazed happily on all the different pickles, the friendly staff were happy to let him try anything as long as he didn’t eat over a different barrel!

Around the corner was a Deli/pizza/diner packed to the gills with Orthodox Jewish families eating Friday lunch, kids everywhere!

Next to that was a bagel shop, where I had a very New York conversation with an elderly gentleman who introduced himself as the’President of the Shul’ and asked where we’d been in NY so far. When I mentioned Russ & Daughters I was treated to a ten minute dissertation on why they shouldn’t call themselves a kosher deli. It seems sturgeon is not a kosher fish – who knew?

Not being Jewish, the news was of little concern to me – although clearly of great importance to the Shul president!

Along from the Bagel shop we discovered another treat, the Doughnut Plant – the best donuts I have ever eaten in my life – and I’ve had a few. Regretting the very average bagel I’d eaten only moments before, I dithered and dithered and finally bought 3, intending to eat them as I went along, slowly.

Needless to say I stuffed them down and felt sick – meaning I missed out an hour or so later on what Oscar said was one of the best meals he has ever eaten at a little corner Dominican place called Cibao – in Clinton St. While he ate chicken soup and rice, ordered by asking another customer to translate into Spanish for him, I rather embarrassingly fell asleep with my head on the table in a hipster cafe a few doors along.

Speaking of things Spanish speaking – another of our great discoveries which received more than one visit was a fantastic little old-style Peurto Rican diner called La Taza De Oro, on 8th and 14th. We went there on the twitter recommendation of the fabulous and velvet voiced comedian Dave Hill @mrdavehill and it was fantastic. A real neighbourhood place filled with mums, kids and locals; cheap as chips, huge plate of food – and GOOD! Roast chicken, rice, beans – all the trimmings, Oscar had baked pork chops with rice, beans etc – all with a spicy latin tang and served by super friendly staff.

Another disappearing NY institution is the classic chrome diner, we were fortunate to eat at the Empire Diner in Chelsea – which apparently is also about to close. The food was good to average and a little pricey, but the place is amazing.

We did however journey to Park Heights in Brooklyn to eat at the famous 70 year old  Tom’s Diner. The place is crazy – filled with plastic flowers and sparkly lights, full of people, serving classic NY diner fare – and a few other things like the delicious lemon ricotta pancakes, which I ate with the selection of fruit flavoured butters that was served with them. The place has an incredible history – the Brooklyn Dodgers used to eat there and the stadium was round the corner, people took shelter there during the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assasination and the same Italian family has owned it since it began.

The food was great, and plentiful and cheap (a recurring theme emerging here?), we were completely stuffed, which was fortunate as we attempted to catch the bus rather than the subway home and managed to get lost.

The manager at Tom’s got a bit carried away by Oscar’s enthusiasm and ceremoniously presented him with a chocolate egg creme. Egg cremes are apparently a famous NY beverage, and one we’d managed to avoid until then. Basically, its chocolate syrup, soda water and milk (no egg) – topped up with whipped cream from a can – when you see one made, you feel quite ill. Neither of us could force ourselves to drink more than a couple of sips, which meant we had to confess that we didn’t like it – he didn’t seem too surprised and replaced it with a delicious malty chocolate milkshake, much better!

The revolting egg creme – fizzy chocolate milk? Yuk!

Late in our trip, hanging around our favourite neighbourhood – the East Village, we discovered the fabulous and famous Ukrainian restaurant Veselka. Which food blogger @reemski made her own on her visit to NY. Oscar ate a huge plate of stuffed cabbage at 11 one night, while all I could manage were pierogis, we went back for an enormous breakfast and again for more starchy treats a 3rd time.

Stuffed Cabbage

Blintzes with fresh raspberry sauce – best breakfast of the whole trip.

2 other great East Village places are Artichoke Pizza – which serves huge and delicious pizza slices & beers to an endless queue of hipsters, and its sister Led Zeppole – which sells enormous great big pastries filled with custard. I’d never heard of a zeppole before, but they’re pretty delicious and disgustingly rich and creamy. These 2 are basically eat on the street places, but they’re great and extremely groovy – both recommended by @danthejew, a guitarist with hardcore band Set Your Goals and author of the blog for boys who love to eat – roadnoms.

One freezing cold night we dragged Jen away from work to eat at Black Iron Burgers – also in the East Village – and another very groovy new place. Delicious burgers, a lovely glass of wine, friendly service, and a cosy and  inviting atmosphere made this a winner – despite the fact that the burger is ubiquitous in NY.

This time around I resolved to spend a day in Harlem – and we did a great walking tour which focussed on the architecture and history, foodwise it had to be soul food, and we managed to fit 2 meals into the day.

Lunch was at Miss Maude’s Spoonbread on Malcolm X Boulevarde, fried chicken – delicious, seafood gumbo for Oscar, collard greens – a bit underwhelming really and scrumptious, sweet, crumbly cornbread. Sensational! I topped mine off with the best lemon meringue pie I’ve ever had.

A couple of hours walking and we were ready for, er, lunch? This time Amy Ruths where the waitress had the sexiest, roundest, highest booty – and boy did she work that thing! All the dishes are named after famous African Americans, and Oscar ordered the .. President Barack Obama .. how could you not!? He did resist having the POTUS smothered however. It came with corn bread and scrumptious corn on the cob, I settled for corn bread and a pick at the Barack Obama. We were too occupied watching the boys watch the waitress to take photos – but it looked pretty much like Miss Maude’s, except with waffles.

There were other places, other restaurants, cafes and snacks – but I’ve tried to highlight the meals that were the most “New York” or which offered us something new and different. The upmarket cafes around Brooklyn – in Red Hook, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and Dumbo – and in Manhattan were pretty much like the ones here in Paddington or Surry Hills -serving much the same food. Uptown Manhattan – like Double Bay or the City, downtown – more like Paddington or Surry Hills. Over in Williamsburg, the hipsters flock to cafes, bars and funky little restaurants, again very like Surry Hills but with a Newtown or Enmore edge. Further out in Prospect Heights and Flatbush – its more Marrickville, funky new places dotted amongst the industrial landscape and long term working class residents. We didn’t really have a bad meal and we didn’t really have a good cup of coffee – everywhere was nice, friendly and served varyingly good food, but we found a lot of the hip and groovy places recommended in magazines and online to be nothing that special. Coming from Sydney, I guess we’re used to nicely presented modern cafe or pub food and it was pretty interchangeable with here.

New York City: life is a movie

If you’re lucky enough to strike a native Bronx or Brooklyn resident as we did a couple of times, or an older Lower East Side resident for instance, you’ll  have the joy of hearing those voices you are so familiar with from the screen in real, loud, glorious life – complete with witty asides, sayings and speech patterns you thought were only spoken in movies or on television. Of course the African American dialect is practically ubiquitous on our screens – but it is still a shock to hear the N word used with such abandon and to hear large-bottomed black women squeal and flap their hands and exclaim in that way the guests on Oprah do.

We sometimes wondered whether people were for real, or actors or comedians practising a character or honing their standup routine.

Possibly the low point of my trip was being accosted on the street in Harlem by a street stall vendor as follows

‘Hello big mumma’, looking down, ‘lordy, that’s a faaahn pair you got there’. Ahem!

Subway conversation one day – please insert broad Brooklyn/Italian accent and imagine large, red faced gentleman aged about 50, excuse my attempt at phonetic writing!

“Where yas from”

Australia

“Awstraalyaa … my brudder lives in England, in Yawk, ya know it?’

“I do, but we’re from Australia”

“He moved there twenny years ago, married an English girl, sez he’s happy.. who’m I to question? Its cold there, snows a lot, he drinks a lotta beer, got kids”

“Where are you from?” (giving up on the finer points of geography)

“Brooklyn, born here, parents came from Italy”

“You have any children?”

“Nah, my wife, she’s too selfish .. shoulda married an English girl like my brudda, all she does is nuttin – spends money has her hair done, and her nails always havin her nails done, take me out to dinner she sez, take me here take me there. Shoulda divorced her and gotta wife from Italy, a proper Italian, knows how to cook and clean, wantsa have kids, my mother – she says – ‘why that woman no give you kids, shesa no good’…….

(well you kind of get the drift – it went on for a few subway stops like that, a kind of stream of consciousness anti-wife rant, I could feel Oscar beside me shaking with laughter)

“Well, nice meeting you, have a great day”

“Yeah, enjoy Noo Yawk, its the best city in the world, especially Brooklyn. When ya goin back?”"

“2 weeks”

“I’m gonna visit my brudder soon, might run into yas”

In fact, the tourist in NY, especially one of a certain age such as myself, will often find themselves feeling as if they are an extra or bit player in a movie or TV show.  Apart from the familiar buildings with their fire escapes, the Brooklyn or Harlem brownstones with the stoops,the skylines and streetscapes – several times a day situations and people, voices and sounds will bring a weird sense of deja vu, or a moment of disbelief that such things exist FOR REAL!

The famous ‘Cage’ or West 4th Street basketball courts are instantly recognisable from ads and movies, I found the players and regulars super-friendly and spent some time there taking photos and shooting the breeze. The banter, shit talking and arguing is easily as entertaining as the basketball action and much funnier.

The building on the left is actually the lower half of the East Village building from the front of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Physical Graffiti’ album. Sorry I didn’t photograph it properly, not sure why! Patti Smith’s shop was a few doors down.

“When Harry Met Sally” orgasm location – and remaining  part of old Lower East Side NY (more to come later on this)

Please excuse the terrible image quality! On our last night, we ate at John’s Pizza on Bleeker St in The Village – an institution since 1929. You’d expect, well we did anyway, that an ‘institution’ would be just for tourists and out of towners. But it provided us with our last ‘I’m in a movie’ moment when the large round table beside us was occupied by a smartly dressed group of elderly (and one young) regulars. The buzz of conversation from the table was SO New York, they were talking baseball, sharing pizza, teasing eachother and just generally all talking loudly  and eating while waving their arms around a lot.

Of course I couldn’t resist it and had to have a chat, it turns out they meet there every month and all live, or have lived locally – within a few streets, they ranged in age from 88 to 45.

As they posed for their photo – I said, ‘I feel like I’m in a Woody Allen movie’, to which one replied, in ‘that’ classic De Niro/Pacino accent ‘No sweetheart, you’re in a Scorsese movie – we’re Italian!’, his tablemates fell about laughing and one said ‘he should know, we call him the Don’, just joking, I think.

Speaking of Pacino – a photo on the wall of John’s Pizza reminded me of how incredibly handsome he was as a young man, he still is of course, but sadly my wish for a NY Pacino or De Niro sighting remained unfulfilled.

On parenting, drugs, alcohol and moral panics.. please discuss!

Call me an old hippy, and no, I’m not old enough to have been at Woodstock, but watching the movie ‘Taking Woodstock’ triggered musings and reminiscences about drugs and life in general. Yesterday in the Sydney Morning Herald, Duncan Fine wrote an excellent piece on talking to younger kids about drugs (Duncan Fine SMH 19.12.09), which prompted me to finish this blog post which I started some time ago.

I’ve also been thinking about the ‘binge drinking epidemic’ which is (apparently) gripping our nation and wondering if things were really so different when we were young. My observations, hardly scientific, lead me to speculate that if anything has changed, it’s the group determination of some (and only some) to keep drinking until comatose and the lack of genuine fun and enjoyment that seems to accompany this kind of drinking. Although of course there were always individuals who drank in this way, it certainly appears to be more widespread.

Interestingly, the (reported) rise in this joyless binge drinking has been paralleled by the ‘war on drugs’, the push towards sexual abstinence and the rising power of conservative churches in the US, and a general (if not as pronounced) shift towards social conservatism throughout the last decade and a half here in Australia. I am also convinced there is a direct link between the rise in binge drinking, the demise of live music in pubs and venues and the proliferation of soulless pubs and dance music. However I’ll save that train of thought to pursue another day.

So what (if this is true) does this say about our current situation vis-a-vis, drugs, alcohol and other ‘risky’ behaviours? Does it speak to the interests and lives of young adults? Or does it draw attention to policy or social deficits? Should more be ‘done’ or, are we doing too much?

The rising tide of uninformed judgemental statement masquerading as opinion, Government policy or, heaven help us, journalism is driving us ever closer to a dangerous situation in which we view our world and each other, through a simplistic black and white lens: right/wrong, good/evil, legal/illegal, moral/immoral. The glorious individual, with all our infinite variations, is being submerged along with the nuances and vagaries of life. Civil liberties, the rights and responsibilities of the individual and the community and the interplay between media, politics and law and order are topics which have become increasingly less nuanced and more ‘dumbed down’. Issues around the use and abuse of drugs and alcohol are a prime example of this, with the ‘debate’ reduced to statements & slogans, competing interests fighting for limited funding and unimaginative policy changes, all in the context of a broader national attitude towards alcohol that has long singled us out in the eyes of the world.

The very fact that ‘alcohol’ is somehow always separated from ‘drugs’ in general use and in debate speaks volumes. Alcohol is, by any definition, a drug and its legal status by no means infers that it is safer or should be more widely consumed or viewed with more or less approval than ‘other drugs’.

My personal stance on drugs of all kinds involves no consideration of ‘morality’ or socially or legally constructed ‘harm’ or ‘risk’. Like many other things to which the term is applied with abandon, I refuse to accept the inherently lazy assumption that a substance (or person or activity for that matter) is ‘evil’ or ‘immoral’ and to be legislated against for our own protection. This broad-brush painting by media and policy makers is, in my opinion, counter-productive as it removes the responsibility for each adult to be fully informed about what they consume and to consider their own physical, genetic and psychological makeup and current state of mind before consuming anything – be it food, drugs, religion, the internet or fashion.

So let’s get a few facts straight from the beginning; drugs are (sometimes but not always) fun, can make you feel good, can ease pain, reduce shyness, counter tiredness and induce flights of creativity. As Aldous Huxley pointed out, drugs can open the ‘doors of perception’. Like almost anything else, drug abuse also carries risk and is potentially dangerous and some individuals are inherently more vulnerable to these dangers than others. Some drugs and some people don’t mix and some people should never use any drugs, the important thing is to know yourself and know your friends as individuals as well as being fully informed about the various drugs available. Acknowledging, allowing and valuing the individual rather than applying ‘rules’ is what will ultimately save lives and minds.

On the ABC program Q&A some time ago, politician Sophie Mirabella displayed a breathtaking lack of perspective and knowledge when she stated that sending a 15 year old girl to sail solo round the world was ‘better’ than her ‘going to raves and taking e’s’.. hmmm.. I’m no actuary Sophie – but I wouldn’t put money on those odds. Her silly statement is however symptomatic of a society which glorifies sporting heroes and conformity above all else. We are apparently free to climb mountains, give all our money to a church, walk the Kokoda track until our hearts burst, gamble our life savings away, drive cars, play contact sports, take up big wave surfing or snowboarding and indulge in all manner of risky behaviours. As with drug use, a minority of people who do all these things and more, including simply getting out of bed in the morning, will come to grief as a result, so what’s the difference? Anyone? Sophie?

Personally, I am not a big drinker – never have been. I don’t dislike it, I enjoy a glass of good wine or an expensive shot of vodka or tequila, but being drunk is not a sensation that I feel comfortable with, similarly, I have never been a great lover of ‘party drugs’ or pills. Pot is my drug of choice, frankly – I love it and I’ve loved it since the day I first tried it. I don’t indulge much these days as I like to have a clear head for work and when I do I hunt down organically grown bush leaf as I dislike the ‘new’ hydroponically grown pot. I went through a brief and glorious psychedelic phase in my 20s, and fortunately came through it unscathed and with some incredible memories and experiences. Once freed from parenting and work commitments I definitely plan some further exploration of those wilder regions of my mind! Working in the music industry in the 80s brought me into unavoidable contact with as much free coke and speed as I wanted – neither of which I particularly enjoyed, but which sometimes came in handy for the long sleepless hours of standing up at gigs and going to work the next day.

I am, I must admit, blessed with a complete inability to become addicted to anything past a short term obsession – and perhaps this colours my thinking on the issue too much? I am aware that some, for whatever reason, do not have freedom of choice when it comes to a range of possibly addictive pursuits – drug taking being only one among many. Banning risky and addictive activities will not prevent death or accident, once we start on that road where do we stop? I would hazard a guess that for practically every activity known to man someone somewhere is addicted to it, and that most – no matter how seemingly innocuous – have resulted in the death of at least one person or the destruction of a life.

Some of the best times I have ever had have been under the influence of drugs, my memories of my wild years (20s, early 30s) involve alcohol, and a lot of other drugs besides, but (and here I could be wearing rosy coloured reverse spectacles). I can’t remember that we indulged to excess because we were bored, or had nothing to do or nothing to say to each other, or even because everyone else was doing it. My memories of my twenties and early thirties are that alcohol and drugs simply allowed us to take ourselves to the edge and experience highs and sometimes low far more intensely than we would have done otherwise. There were some, of course, who lived like that without chemical assistance and others who, sadly, took the path to ultimate self destruction.

As a parent now, I terrify myself to some extent when I think back – and I’m sure many will find it appalling for me to ‘glorify’ drugs and alcohol. But I can’t deny that some of my best memories (and this is crucial, being unable to remember what you did means you’ve gone too far) come from those times when we drew a line between straight, sober and sensible and completely written off and managed to sustain that delicate balance over a night or even days. These memories involve different people, different countries and different events, but each made me more aware of myself and the world around me.

The Lost Weekend is, of course, a brilliant Billy Wilder film that chronicles 4 days in the life of a chronic alcoholic. Alcohol and drugs, like marathon running and plastic surgery are not for everyone and for some, for whatever reason, pose the threat of addiction and self destruction. Salutory though the movie is, and horrible as alcoholism is (and as one who has been closely associated with it I speak from experience) the lost weekends of my memories are a different thing altogether; there are times in one’s life when events, circumstances, places and people come together and your life takes flight in unexpected and exhilarating ways. Often, these times were enabled or intensified by drugs, and although we sometimes took risks and placed ourselves in danger, I would not have missed a moment.

So as the parent of a teenager where the hell does that leave me when it comes to dealing with and discussing his inevitable and apparently constant exposure to drugs? As I said, I refuse to simply state that they are ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ or ‘dangerous’ and I am not enough of a hypocrite to pretend I have no experience of such matters. On the other hand, I am not a fan of parents who regale their kids with all the details of their past exploits, give them alcohol, share a joint with them, or condone teenage drinking and drug taking. The fact that we may have done things as teenagers does not make us hypocritical when we tell our own children not to do the same things, and allowing them to say that is a cop out. We didn’t know smoking was bad, we didn’t wear seatbelts as kids and our mothers drank while they were pregnant. Time and science advance, thank heavens!

Surprising though it may seem, I firmly believe that the weight of scientific evidence and research over the last 30 years clearly indicates that for many reasons young people should not use any drugs, at all, until they are at least 18. So the first thing I try to discuss and to get him to read and research is the science, his brain and body are precious and growing – and he only has one of each.

Most importantly though, I try to draw a distinction between pushing boundaries as a young adult or adult, and pushing them as a teenager. Self knowledge, confidence, mental stability and an innate sense of self preservation are all essential if one is to walk on the wild side and of course teenagers are in the process of developing these attributes. If those essential qualities aren’t developed and nurtured, if the arts of friendship, conversation, argument, debate, seduction, flirting and partying are never mastered straight and sober – then how can a young person grow to be a complete adult?

These are the conversations I try to sustain with my son and his friends, and at the end of the day you have to have confidence in your parenting and in your kid. You can’t restrict their every movement, I know some of his mates drink and smoke pot and I know he’s tried it. I’ve never seen him drunk – and he, and some of his friends tell me they are fed up with some mates and particularly some girls ‘having to’ get drunk every weekend (at 15!!!!). Being 15 is tough, girls are scary, boys don’t talk, parents are foreign and you are under enormous pressure at school and in life. If you can resist the urge to use drugs to get you through those years, surely your defences and inner strength will be so much greater as an adult?

What worries me is that there are 20 something year olds out there now (and I have met some) who appear unable to function socially unless they are drunk, who are unable or afraid to talk to the opposite sex, hold an intelligent conversation or have a good night out without drugs of some kind. When you’ve been getting drunk or out of it every weekend throughout your crucial teenage years it’s not surprising that you don’t progress past the social ineptness of the average 15 year old. Sadly, some of my son’s friends already have their feet on this path and fortunately some are already resisting.

The 20 somethings I see at the races, or clubbing in Kings Cross seem lost and somehow lonely, although they are always in large loud groups. They go to places where conversation is virtually impossible, they work ridiculous hours and apparently earn huge amounts of money, yet seem somehow empty and unhappy. Despite dressing like junior hookers, casual sex seems to many young women to be a drunken affair to be regretted rather than the exciting and sensual exploration of boundaries it has the potential to be between grownups. An innate political and social conservatism (they are the product of the last 20 years after all!) means that marriage, mortgages, sport and making money take priority – and perhaps this pressure is at the core of the empty kind of drugging and drinking to oblivion I referred to earlier?

As I’ve said in other posts, I meet many many young adults who are not like this at all – far from it, but I doubt these are the people around whom the moral panic about alcohol abuse is revolving. Answers? I don’t know. Despite doing all the research I possibly can, I don’t even know if I’m correct in my observations or in my parenting strategies (another opinion to add to the mix). I could yet be proved horribly wrong, but I do know that as parents we need to have these discussions between ourselves and have them often, as clearly the government and policy makers have even less of a clue than us.

Why don’t you all just f*** off: On immigration, ignorance and fear

Bend over White Australia: we’re a nation of trembling, gutless, fearful pushovers. Passive, inert and devoid of an original thought, we deserve every thrust of every f***ing over our politicians dish out.

Fear is not an emotion that is readily associated with the Australian ‘brand’. Aren’t we all rugged individualists? Isn’t White Australia a nation forged from the blood and guts of another country’s human detritus? How about our celebrated mateship? Our self-expressed cynicism and refusal to kowtow to those who consider themselves our betters?

Well, I have one thing to say to that: you’re dreaming mate, if that Australia ever really existed, it exists no longer except in mythical form; a myth that we treasure and nurture certainly, but which bears little resemblance to reality. The reality, my fellow Australians – and I make no apology for this – is that we are ruled by fear, divided by fear and driven by fear.

Sometimes, often in fact, a situation presents itself that is complex, with many shades of grey and no possible wholly right or wrong outcome. Crime, immigration, race, social welfare are all examples of such issues; and I’ll agree, it is time consuming and without the reward of immediate gratification to take time from our busy lives to devote the requisite time and thought to these thorny problems. Instead, we consume pre-packaged opinion and analysis from our media, our politicians and our opinion makers. Some of us consume in a questioning and demanding fashion, prepared to take issue, to challenge and to seek out and demand rigorous research and intellectual analysis. Others are happy to take our opinions pre-packaged and unchallenged, particularly if they conform to ideas, preconceptions or notions that we already hold.

Criminologist and sociologist Murray Lee has written of the Fear of Crime Feedback Loop, which exists as a perpetual and finely tuned force in Australia and which can be applied to more than just crime. This loop is the process of the manufacture of a fear, threat or risk, the official response to that fear, the discussion of the fear and response in the media and wider community and the actions and (importantly) reactions arising from and contributing to this process.

Essentially, and this in no way does justice to the enormous body of work and the subtleties of the various approaches and writers (for example Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck), there is a school of thought which holds that our world today is uncertain and rapidly changing, certainties that once existed no longer exist and as a result we feel threatened and insecure. Living on such shifting sands, we tend to herd towards what we see as (or are told are) small patches of solid ground, whereupon we defend that ground, attempting to build seawalls of laws, regulations and actuarial calculation of perceived or actual risk. This fear and uncertainty creates a compliant population which is easily controlled by those who practise the now finely tuned art of ‘dog whistle politics’ and who, it seems, know us far better than we know ourselves.

Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish born sociologist who resides in the UK, writes on the subjects of modernity and postmodernity (which he calls solid and liquid modernity), rationality, and the stranger among us. His observations, insights and predictions regarding our current state of existence in the Western world are beautifully written, enlightening and potentially life changing. Among many other theorists, philosophers and sociologists, Bauman identifies fear of ‘the Other’ or ‘the Stranger’ as one of many tools used by governments and those in power to exercise control over the populace.

As Barbara Hudson notes, the identification of the different and dangerous is an ‘abandonment of liberalism’s philosophical egalitarianism and a move towards neo-liberalism. .”. Bertrand Russell wrote, way back in 1943, at a time when such things were uppermost in people’s minds “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”

Wedge politics is a method of governmentality that is deliberate on the part of the governer and responsive on the part of the governed. We respond to the dog whistle because of our desire to move towards what we see as normalcy, we automatically attempt to avoid being the ‘deviant’. The clearly defined and frequently reinforced barriers between ‘normalcy’ and ‘deviance’ (Australian and UnAustralian) laid out by the Howard government, and the added ‘condition of possibility’ of a population, which compared to some other democracies is relatively passive, made us extra responsive to these particular instruments of governmentality during the events and election of 2001, and the massive restrictions to our civil liberties that were set in place as a result of 9/11 and the Bali bombings.

As the current immigration debate takes shape, it seems that not much has changed. Both parties have (mostly) deleted the vitriol and the most vindictive of their policies, and are making an effort to present themselves as more humane. However, the shameful use of asylum seekers as tools and fodder for political manouvering and manipulation of the populace continues unabated, albeit in a more sophisticated form; and the peddling of hate, lies and misinformation by the erstwhile media lapdogs of the Howard government continues unabated.

But surely fear is nothing new? Fear of ‘the Other’ has existed since the beginning of the human race, with its evolutionary roots no doubt in self-protective instinct and superstitions. The demonisation of those outside the ‘mainstream’ to achieve political gain  – witch hunts, religious persecution and the Inquisition being the obvious examples from pre-industrial times – is nothing new. The creation of a perception of risk underpinned by a people’s values and beliefs; and the use of beliefs to blame, divide and persecute groups and place them ‘outside’ the dominant culture has been utilised for centuries.

As recently as the persecution of indigenous peoples by European colonists in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, and possibly the hysteria surrounding the fear of the ‘negro’ in early 20^th century America, a case could be made that demonisation was made possible by the ignorance and widespread illiteracy and naiivety of a population who knew little, if anything, of the world outside their immediate experience. But the fact that an educated population, exposed to the world through media and travel, continue to respond in much the same way today is surely extraordinary in the face of our massive advances as a society in all other areas.  ‘The feared subject’ (criminal, immigrant, indigenous person, teenager) is always among us, despite our modern rationalisation of almost everything else in our lives.

Bauman quotes Albrecht:

“Demonisation has been replaced by the concept and the strategy of ‘dangerisation’. Political governance, therefore, has become partially dependent on the deviant other and the mobilisation of feelings of safety. Political power, and its establishment, as well as its preservation, are today dependent on carefully selected campaign issues, among which safety (and feelings of unsafety) is paramount” and then adds “Immigrants, let us note, fit better into such a purpose than any other category of genuine or putative villains …”

Bauman eloquently sums up the direct link between our medieval ancestors’ fear of demons and witches and our fear of the victims of war and religious persecution in leaky boats thus

“When all places and positions feel shaky and are deemed no longer reliable, the sight of immigrants rubs salt into the wound. Immigrants, and particularly the fresh arrivals among them, exude the faint odour of the waste disposal tip which in its many disguises haunts the nights of the prospective casualties of rising vulnerability. For their detractors and haters, immigrants embody – visibly, tangibly, in the flesh – the inarticulate, yet hurtful and painful presentiment of their own disposability..”

The fact is that we are citizens not only of Australia, but of the ever-shrinking and ever more interdependent world. The conflicts and misfortune visited on other countries and peoples are as much our responsibility as anyone else’s in the world.

We are all, at times, guilty of lazy thinking and snap judgements, of letting others take the running or tell us what to think, but that is no way to run a country, or indeed the world.

I speak directly to those who follow the hateful racism of ‘journalists’ such as Andrew Bolt or the ‘leadership’ of the likes of Wilson Tuckey, Alex Hawke or Jim Saleam  – you know who you are, and so do the rest of us – when I say:

You are lazy, you are pathetic and you are ruled by fear. Your tough talk and your hate do not make you important, instead they underline your puniness in the face of manipulative people who seek to use you for their own ends and then cast you aside. You have no backbone, you have no pride in your country, you have no world view outside the tiny piece of ground you think is yours. Your bullying of those less fortunate than yourselves reveals your small mindedness and your misguided sense of your own importance.

You are so stupid, weak and blinkered that you fail to realise that you have been used as pawns by men in suits and that your thoughts and words are not yours, but merely what you have been conditioned to unquestioningly think. Your wilful ignorance of the facts of a situation, for example the fact that asylum seekers are not illegal, and your continued use of terminology and language that perpetuates falsehoods such as ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘illegal immigrants’, betrays the fact that you have squandered the excellent and free education that you have received in Australia – if you want to talk about people who are ungrateful, you top the list.

How dare you claim to speak for the rest of us. How dare you claim the right to air your opinion. I say that as a true Australian you should forfeit that right when you do not speak responsibly or from a position of self awareness, consideration, fairness and a careful weighing up of the facts and evidence. We are not an illiterate population, we do not believe in witchcraft or demons, we are not ruled by superstition. We are a modern, wealthy western secular democracy who have had everything handed to us on a plate. It is our responsibility as citizens of such a country to behave in a just and carefully considered fashion.

It takes far more guts to leave everything you own and attempt to start a new life than it does to sit on your spoilt arse and trumpet your ignorance to the readership of the Daily Telegraph. What have you ever done, or had to do, that even remotely parallels that? In terms of what our country needs for the future: that bravery and perseverance and those leadership qualities will surely prove themselves more valuable than whatever you and your ignorance can offer, as far as I’m concerned you can bugger off and make room for them.

Some references/further reading if you’re interested

Murray Lee (2007). Inventing Fear of Crime: Criminology and the Politics of Anxiety. Willan Publishing.

Anthony Giddens, A. (1993) ‘The Nature of Modernity’ in P. Cassell (ed) The Giddens Reader, Stanford University Press, California

Hudson, Barbara. 2003. Justice in the Risk Society: Challenging and Re-Affirming Justice in Late Modernity. London: Sage Publications

Rose, N. (1991) ‘Governing by numbers: figuring out democracy’ Accounting organisations and Society, vol 1

P.Miller, G Burchell and C.Gordon (eds) The Foucault effect: Studies in Governmentality

Pratt, J. (1997) Governing the Dangerous, Federation Press, Annandale

Bauman, Z (2004) Wasted lives: Modernity and its Outcasts

Ulrich Beck: ‘Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity’

Mary Douglas: ‘Essays in Cultural Theory’

Pat O’Malley, Michel Foucault etc.

Songs to make you … advice for young (aspiring) lovers

Music and sex, sex and music, it seems to be a preoccupation at the moment, but hey, spring is in the air. I’ve had a few conversations with lovely young men lately about young women, and how to approach them with a view to enjoying a night or so of good times, without necessarily wanting to settle down into a relationship. So here, with a grain of salt, are my entirely unscientific tips for young straight blokes on how to use music to, shall we say, loosen things up a little.

Its pretty personal stuff I know, and everyone is of course different. I’m sure there are girls out there who swoon at the first notes of a Snoop Dogg or Lady Ga Ga ditty or daydream of making sweet love to the sounds of Pete Murray. This little blog is not for them or the boys who want them, it’s about a woman worth pursuing, a man who’s man enough for her, and a night to remember.


Men are apparently afraid to express themselves with women, confused about what women want and the signals they give out, and unsure how to be an evolved young man who is respectful of women while still getting laid (to put it bluntly). Despite a rather lamentable trend towards the straight and narrow in young women these days, not all of them want a boyfriend, and not all women view a night of great sex with a nice bloke on a level playing field (or a bed) as a promise of marriage (sorry Beyonce, I find you old fashioned and rather pathetic in your assumption that women want a ‘ring on it’, especially when you take enormous pains to present yourself and your glorious body in voyeuristic videos that border on soft porn). The bottom line should always be a mutual respect and openness about just what to expect. Tricking a romantic girl into the sack with promises of eternal love is just as wrong as expecting an offer of marriage in return for ‘giving yourself to a man’.


So if you’re a tongue tied music loving young bloke, speak through the music. If you’re into someone in a big way and have some time for planning, the mixed tape (or CD these days) is your missive d’amore. Burn that girl something that will make her burn, give her a slow buildup of tracks, tease her a little with something witty, flirt a bit, show her a little about yourself, make her laugh, make her dance around the room, make her pick the phone up at the end of the CD or better still knock on your door. If you’re in a spur of the moment situation with someone you’ve just met, talk about your favourite music and play it if you can, hijack the party music, put a CD on or play a track on the jukebox (yes, I know, it conjures images of Garth and the ‘Foxy Lady’ in Wayne’s World for me too, but you can move past that if you concentrate), give her your ipod headphones to listen to that certain track (and keep hold of the ipod so you have to stand close and lean in just a little – if she leans away, move on).


What to leave out of the tape or off the stereo? Ballads: too namby pamby, too ‘I want a long term relationship’, too manipulative – save them for your wedding. A 13 year old dreaming of a big white wedding dress goes tingly all over for a pretty boy crooning sweetly, but let’s hope for more reasons than one that the girl you’re after has grown out of that phase. Misogynistic rubbish of the kind peddled by some ‘rap’ or ‘hip hop’ artists; a woman who is turned on by those attitudes is a woman with problems – and you don’t want to be involving yourself with that; ditto for racist or homophobic music or songs about guns, war or violence.


Rule number one, play her music that you genuinely love. Passion about anything is a turn on, an indicator that more passion bubbles beneath, and if she likes the music you like there’s a good chance you’ll like each other. Meaningful music is great, as long as it is genuinely meaningful to you and not soppy and manipulative. Sharing a song that reminds you of a lost friend or great times reveals something of yourself – and that is sexy. Sharing a song that reminds you of your mother or your ex girlfriend, or which expresses stalkerish sentiments similar to Elvis Costello’s ‘I want you’ is not so sexy. Perhaps leave the political anthems out of the mix, unless the girl that gets you hot is manning a barricade beside you, in which case crank up the Internationale and impress her by knowing the lyrics in French and English.


As a general rule the rhythm section is your friend. Yes boys, it’s as obvious as that. Rhythm, bass, drums, pounding – get the message? Take it from that scrawny little sex machine Prince, it’s all about the rhythm and those low, dirty notes. Bearing that in mind, some funk would be a good inclusion. Perhaps George Clinton is a little out there unless you’re sure she ‘gets’ it, in which case she’s probably up for a wild old time; maybe some vintage Prince, Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield, some Chilli Peppers or RATM.


Don’t be afraid to go right to the heart of the matter, some songs about sex are as sexy as hell, and men who can talk about sex in the right way generally have a pretty good idea of how to go about it. An entire playlist of songs about sex crosses the creepy line, but after you’ve laid down a good intro that tells her you’re a smart, funny interesting guy, bring it on. 

Most women, if they already like the guy, will respond to an upfront confident proposal for sex rather than a sideways sneaking up approach. For me, the sexiest song, the one that really gets me, is NIN’s Closer. It’s explicit and far from romantic, but the juxtaposition of the lines ‘I want to fuck you like an animal’ and ‘you bring me closer to God’ is all but irresistible; the song is all about the woman and her power but it doesn’t set her up as a goddess (another slightly creepy turnoff). James Brown’s Sex Machine, on the other hand, I find a little too ‘I’m a great lover and I’ll show you a great time’, a line which only appeals to certain types of simple girls and which can only lead to trouble.


In general, if you’re headbangers, stay away from technical geeky music, Norwegian death metal and overblown hair metal and steer towards something more melodic, uncontrolled and elemental with a vocalist who puts it all out there or instrumentals that move along and have a strong melodic thread. As a final caveat and word of warning, it’s a truth universally assumed that men who can dance well can also fuck well, so if you can move then do so by all means. But if you can’t, then under no circumstances put yourself in a situation where the opportunity to dance may arise or your quest will be doomed before it begins.

Meeting Billy Bragg

My favourite Billy Bragg story – and one that underlines my constant refrain of music as a lifetime companion – involves a CD signing in a small record shop in Bondi Junction after the release of Mermaid Avenue. I was there with about 40 other fans – all about my age, which is about the same age as Billy himself, and one woman produced a photo of her young son. Billy promptly whipped out a photo of his own son, as did almost everyone and a lengthy chat ensued about parenting, the lifestyle changes and challenges it presents and life in general for the ageing lefties we had all become. All that was missing was the teapot and kitchen table. The point being that we had all started out together solving the world’s problems, protesting, raging and full of anger.. and we had all grown up and weathered a few things together. Billy himself had maintained the anger and the activism, as had many others among us to varying degrees, but the feeling of companionship, shared experience and friendship among the group was much broader than just a shared politics.

Singer Songwriters and Frank Turner.

Update 25.2.11: At last Frank Turner will be touring Australia in his own show in April, I was lucky enough to see him as part of the fantastic ‘Hot Water Music’ group tour and the few songs he performed there were pretty damn good! Information here. I’ve now also listened, a lot, to all his albums – and they’re all great.

As is evident in my earlier post about the politics of the personal and music I am a firm believer in the power of the personal story to move, amuse, effect change or provoke thought, set the story to music and that power is maximised.

Whether fronting a band or sitting on a stool strumming, the singer/songwriter or solo performer creates a far more intimate one to one connection with the listener or audience. I prefer the sound of Ryan Adams when he plays with The Cardinals and Steve Earle when he plays with The Dukes, both amazing bands – but the focus remains front and centre. Its their words and their voice I want to hear, and the relationship I have as a listener/admirer is with the man not the band. This can, in the case of bratty geniuses like Ryan Adams, grumps like Neil Young and Bob Dylan or dead people like Jeff Buckley, Gram Parsons, Joe Strummer and Johnny Cash be somewhat fraught with tension or sadness.

The singer songwriter with whom you bond can be a wonderful and inspiring companion, but I am at a loss to really quantify what separates the few I love from the many I just find blah. If you want to start an argument in a pub amongst a group of music lovers, begin a discussion on who are the ‘best’ singer songwriters. For example, despite the fanaticism displayed by several friends, and despite being a contemporary, I never really got or got into Nick Cave – apart from the couple of extraordinary songs, like Mercy Seat or Into Your Arms which, OK, I agree, explain his place in the scheme of things. Live, I find him to be a self indulgent wanker with an awesomely good and very tolerant band. Bob Dylan similarly divides people (I love him) and I once fell out with a dear friend for almost a year because he persisted in disliking Billy Bragg, who of course, in my opinion can’t be faulted and is not to be criticised despite a dodgy voice and a habit of bashing you around the head with his ideals and opinions.

Is Jimi Hendrix a singer/songwriter? I’d say yes, and unlike others (with maybe the exception of some of Neil Young’s tracks) his music and guitar is what grips my soul first and then with time the lyrics follow – well the ones that are comprehensible, the others just set your soul free.

Honesty is a must, according to Australian Idol you have to believe in what you sing about to sell records. I’d go one further and say I prefer people to sing about what they have lived and experienced and really care about – Johnny Cash or Hank Williams being the classic examples that spring to mind. People singing other people’s songs confuse the issue for me though, I love Ryan Adams’ version of Wonderwall.. but does that mean I’m an Oasis fan because the words speak to me – or is it just Adams who brings them to life? Someone new can change the whole meaning of a song, like Johnny Cash again, his rendering of Hurt, especially with that video clip brings me to tears every time and whatever meaning the song had for Trent Reznor has been wiped from my mind.

Someone like KD Lang has it all, the heavenly voice, the beautiful turn of musical and lyrical phrase and the conviction that transports the listener to another world, she can make anyone’s words her own. On the other hand, Billy Bragg and Joe Strummer, two of my heroes, are definitely at their best singing their own material. Voices not so great, music pretty simple, with or without a band, it doesn’t really matter – there is something that reaches directly into my mind as if the words had been written for me.. and indeed, being almost a direct contemporary, they might well have been. Their musical and lyrical journeys reflect my own, from anger and idealism to introspection, to grappling with life, politics and relationships as one moves into middle age.

Which brings me to British singer/songwriter Frank Turner, who has captured my attention to the point where I have just finished playing his album Love, Ire and Song for the 6th time in a row. In his late 20’s, he is politically from the left and has more in common biographically with Strummer than Billy Bragg – coming from an upper middle class background and then sliding from a hardcore band in his case to being a solo performer.

He writes more about life than politics, but politics are implicit and present in his songs. I have only, so far, heard the one album – and I see there is a more recent and earlier releases, but the impression I have is that he has reached that point of life when the realisation that passion and anger are not enough to change the world hits home, when friends either die or move on to suburbia, suits and sameness; when loneliness may no longer be assuaged by wild nights but a one night stand is still exciting enough to make settling down look boring. In short, its that time we all went through (or will go through) where you begin to question everything: your past, your future, your world, your friends and what the hell the point of you exactly is.

Playing Strummer’s last album – The Mescalero’s Streetcore, straight after Turner’s Love Ire and Song or any of Bragg’s albums, underlines the similarities in voice and sentiment. It’s the little things these guys notice, personal reactions to things are often wittily relayed, and the examination of oneself, one’s peers and the times is honest but never sickly or self indulgent.

Thoughts and observations are encapsulated in cleverly chosen words that paint a picture rather than spell out the whole bloody story. Strummer, looking back on events of his life (Coma Girl) and Turner looking forward to maturity and fighting against being forced to ‘grow up’ (Photosynthesis). Billy Bragg released ‘Talking with the taxman about poetry’ at about the same age Turner is now, and ‘Greetings to the New Brunette’ and ‘Wishing the Days away’ seem come from the same place in a young man’s life.

As with many of his peers, and unlike a young Bragg or Strummer, Turner is not especially angry, but he does have the bouncy phrasing and way with words of Billy Bragg and a better voice than either of them. As with the bard from Barking, I like Turner’s wordplay, the conciseness of his lyrics, and the way the music is just enough.. catchy and tuneful and thankfully not over indulgent or overwrought. Its singalong or quietly melancholy stuff rather than the soaring heights of Lang or Buckley, and there is little of the self indulgence but some of the self examination of Adams.

There are moments on the album that made me wish I was 28 again, and moments that make me glad I’m not, lyrics that make me feel guilty for not achieving my potential and sometimes settling for mediocrity, and songs that bring back bittersweet memories of dead friends and long nights in pubs solving the problems of the world.

So there you have it, my version of an album review, with rather too many comparisons to do justice to the uniqueness of Turner, apologies for that. Have a listen, maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t, I’d love to know what you think.

I’m hoping he will tour here soon so I can see the live Frank Turner. My guess is he will be more the avuncular, have a beer with the punters type than the grumpy loner or tortured artist, but who knows, maybe he’ll play with the lights out and flounce off stage like Ryan Adams.

About my music

As I’ve written a couple of pieces now about music, perhaps I should put my musical tastes out there for all to see. As a background – I worked in the music industry many years ago in management, booking, tour management and PR before going on to many other lives and careers. Music has always been central to my life but sadly, like so many other armchair critics I neither play nor sing.

I will pretty much listen to anything, but currently on high rotation in my house and not counting what comes up on the shuffle:

Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan – the three staples! Muse, Porcupine Tree, Clutch, Devin Townsend Project – try it, its beautiful, Alice in Chains – eagerly awaiting the new album, Wilco – new album is stunning, Ryan Adams, Steve Hunter and the Translators – brilliant Australian jazz from the master electric bass player, Elana Stone band, Tower of Power and Parliament because everyone needs some funk in their lives!

So, for what my opinion is worth which isn’t much, I’ll post some short pieces now and then about my favourite music beginning with my favourite Australian bands Sydonia and Mammal.

As boy genius Nine Inch Nails drummer Ilan Rubin puts it.. “I can’t stand when people say “support local music”. Support it because it’s good, not because it’s local and probably sucks”. I think both these bands have the potential to ‘make it’ in the sense of building a long term solid international fan base and being able to make a respectable living from their art while maintaining their ‘integrity’ (for want of a better term).

Sydonia.. the future of Australian metal?

This 4 piece from Melbourne have somewhat misleadingly distinguished themselves by becoming Randy Blythe of Lamb of God’s favourite band, and in my opinion they stand head and shoulders above most if not all the other local bands lumped into the prog/metal category (I have to confess I don’t have a fantastic grip on the labels and sublabels!). They have toured Australia supporting Lamb of God, Stonesour and Slipknot and the US on a wild tour supporting Stonesour and Dirty Little Rabbits – bits of which are chronicled in their recently released and very funny DVD ‘through a lens is all we are’ – which might well be subtitled ‘National Lampoon’s musical vacation’.

After a year or so of semi-downtime, they are now launching themselves back into touring and preparing for a new album, which judging by the new material in recent live shows should be sensational. They have one offering released so far – 2006’s Given to Destroyers – an album that should be played right through and which gives and grows with each listen, to the point where I spent a good few days almost addicted. It is still, months after buying it, on the listening pile of CDs and not yet relegated to the ‘tired of it now’ back of the cupboard.

Sydonia deliver an enormous sound and a confident and charismatic stage presence. Having seen footage of their US shows and seen them at the Acer Arena, they are one band I really feel come into their own on a full stage with big big speakers and a big big crowd. You could throw the whole box and dice at this band production wise – lights, sets, explosions, mini stonehenges the works – and they’d soak it up and rise to the occasion. They have talent and material to burn but at the moment are a like restless caged animals – sleek, taut, toned and ready to pounce the moment the door is opened. I’ve also seen them a few times at the Annandale and each time have been blown away by just how great they are up close, their rapport with their fans is relaxed and they pull off a blistering set with ease and obvious enjoyment time after time.

The band has an interesting yin and yang thing happening musically and visually. An extremely masculine (and I don’t mean testosterone fuelled bogan) presence in the rhythm section of Sean Bailey – a tight, fast, hard hitting powerhouse of a drummer – and Adam Murray whose deep dirty bass lines and growling vocals drive the music’s dark undercurrent. In contrast, singer/guitarist Dana Roskvist has a slinky, androgynous sexiness and beautiful upper vocal range while Sam Haycroft’s slightness & sunny personality belie his formidable and often lacerating guitar playing. There’s metal aplenty for the headbangers but it comes laced with a shamelessly emotional lyrical and musical outpouring. The resulting musical onslaught can at times be almost too intense to bear, especially at close quarters.

By rights, Sydonia should be massive.. and I’m not the only one to wonder why this hasn’t happened yet when other competent bands with far less originality and breadth seem to be forging ahead. They certainly produce radio-friendly material amongst the darker more challenging songs, ‘No Woman’s Land’ and ‘Sorry’ being two examples. Perhaps its partly because they are so difficult to categorise in these days when it seems every band has to fall under a heading or be claimed by a ‘subculture’. Listing bands that they ‘sound like’ is simply pointless & confusing .. they’re a bit too metal for the emos, a bit too emo for the metalheads, a bit too funny for the goths (they do a great line in silly merchandise – witness the ‘I fucked the chick from Sydonia T-Shirt’ and even sillier email messages and blogs) and way too scary and dark for the metros – although they appear to have loyal followers from all these groups (well maybe not the metros).

What they actually sound like is Sydonia, and they sound like the future of Australian music to me.

www.myspace.com/sydonia www.sydonia.com.au

Teenage kicks and Factor X

Always my constant companion, music of all kinds has sustained me when people and life in general have fallen short. Live music, at its best, can be transforming and life affirming but with a young child, work, study and other people’s problems to juggle I went without late nights and loud music for way too long apart from the occasional concert. Returning at last to the sticky floors and beer fuelled punters of the music pubs of Sydney was like going home and yet, frustrating, as I found that straight and sober and with no crowd of mates along for the night, my older self is more demanding and a lot less easily entertained. Fidgety and easily bored, I now look for something that lifts the night and the band above the average.

Sure, I want my rock harder and funkier, my punk more thrashy, my metal more brutal and melodic, my accoustic more beautiful, my jazz more complex and challenging and my blues dirtier than ever. I want to see people sweating up there, giving me my money’s worth, making it worth leaving home and series 4 of The Wire….Ability, talent, originality and a dose of stagecraft and charisma are the minimum requirements (not for success sadly, but that’s another story!)

But there’s more, an elusive X factor somewhere in the equation – something that only some have to offer. It doesn’t always bring stardom and is to a large extent, I think, a subjective reaction; but when I see it, hear it and feel it I’m as happy as when I was 25 and throwing myself around at the front of the Trade Union Club with several drinks and maybe something more illicit in my veins. Back when life was simple, labradors were someone’s pet and sleep was a waste of time.

I’d been thinking about factor X when I heard someone speak about rock music as a a ‘primary colour’ – to put it simply.. its sex.

And that’s it, the way the bass and drums kick in right in your guts, the delicious tingle that a guitar riff can create on your skin, the way a charismatic singer or beautiful song can draw you in so the two of you are alone in a sea of souls, the resonance of a chord or a melody that makes your heart lift. Its the tribal glee of being as one with 500 strangers singing and shouting together while at the same time you’re alone amongst the noise, conversation impossible, TVs and poker machines blocked out, nothing matters but the moment and the music and the people on the stage. Finally you fall out into the street, sweat soaked and sated, maybe a little bruised.

Great live music is like great sex. Its the type of sex you used to have with a new lover at a time of your life when new lovers were easy to come by and easy to discard. Intense, electric, abandoned and joyous, different every time, every nerve in your body alive and tingling… sex that makes your brain expand.

So, as life is inevitably more predictable, new lovers improbable and chemical thrills unsustainable; as work and kids and bills and sleep create a routine that is unbreakable and the thrill of travel is often out of reach.. can live music be the answer to my mid life crisis?

It means often being the oldest person in the room, starting late in the evening and staying awake and sometimes going out alone. I don’t go every night, or even every week – but when I do, and when its good and the X factor is pumping – I feel energised, renewed and happy for days, weeks even. I’ve made some new friends and rediscovered a couple of old friends, I haven’t had to buy a red sports car, get divorced, find a young lover, shoot up botox or spend a lot of money..

I remember now why I’ve always liked being around musicians, they’re creative, funny, frequently extremely rude and most importantly, passionate about what they do. I’ve also affirmed that twenty somethings today are not all alcopop sizzled, Sam Sparro listening birdbrains. Many are thoughtful, smart, politically and socially engaged and happy to converse about important and unimportant things with someone almost twice their age. And finally, I’ve discovered that nearly all the venues in Sydney have gone, most of the good new music these days comes from Melbourne and the Annandale and the Hopetoun have, thankfully, never changed.

Music and the politics of the personal

In a recent session at the Sydney Writer’s festival, Don Walker – lyricist extraordinaire and now author of the excellent, stream of consciousness collection of memories ‘Shots’ spoke of rock as something that should be ‘undiluted by politics’. He explained this no further and I imagine he meant that politics robs music of its primal, visceral power to move and excite.

I disagree, I’d defy anyone to sit still through, say, Rage Against the Machine belting out ‘Killing in the Name Of’ with an audience of thousands chanting ‘fuck you I won’t do what you tell me’. Closer to home, up and coming Australian band Mammal drives capacity crowds of sweaty punters into a frenzy with a potent mix of sex drenched driving funk, blistering guitar-shredding metal and a strident, at times blunt force, political message. No doubt in my mind, politics and rock can and do mix to powerful effect…

No-one could call Cold Chisel a political rock band – and in that sense I guess Don was within his rights to disavow politics as part of music. But there is another politics at play that underlies the party political and which is used to manipulate, wedge and dog-whistle us. The politics of the personal – an individual’s place in the world and the relationship each of us has with the power structures in which we live. How we reel in shock when personal politics – in particular those of the alienated, brutalised and marginalised – spill or coalesce into tragic action such as murder, suicide, or more widely terrorism, revolution or revolt… how quick we are to blame… yet how seldom we walk in the shoes of another.

Here, in my opinion, Don is being somewhat obtuse with respect to his own work – for his lyrics express the Australian working class view of the world. Set these lyrics to music that is anthemic in its simplicity and you have the reason why Chisel are still revered (and sung along to) in every pub in every suburb and country town in Australia. Like all good lyricists, he puts the listener in the place of his protagonist.. gives us a fleeting moment of shared experience.. ‘Four walls, washbasin, prison bed’, ‘Standing on the outside, looking in’, the escapee from the stultifying small town in ‘Flame Trees’, the truck driver in ‘Shipping Steel’, the powerless suburban blokes in ‘Star Hotel’ here lies a local culture, Most nights were good, some were bad. Between school and a shifting future. It was most of all we had.

Billy Bragg, for all the wonderful call to arms songs he has written is, I feel, at his best addressing politics obliquely from the point of view of the (again) working class, suburban individual… you can picture his characters, where they live, what they wear.. In ‘Greetings to the New Brunette’, his bloke … celebrating my love for you with a pint of beer and a new tattoo, wallows, confused by his pregnant lover’s sexual politics.. out of his depth & out of her social class, eventually leaving her alone with the new baby. The lonely woman in her mobile home listening to the 4 Tops in ‘Levi Stubbs Tears’… who ran away from home in her mother’s best coat and married before she even entitled to vote and a victim of domestic violence,he put a hole in her body where no hole should be .. For anyone with a shred of empathy its songs like these that drive home just where we should be focussing ourselves politically and what the real goal of politics should be: empowering the individual, building communities & networks, ensuring education and equality of opportunity, offering safe havens to people at risk.

Go back to 1992, 30 years after Nixon started the unwinnable War on Drugs & 10 years before the Uniting Church finally opened its safe injecting room in Kings Cross over continuing howls of protest. Listen again to Alice in Chains’ prophetic ‘Dirt’, the self loathing & anger of the addict battling not only his own demons but those around him who seek to drag him down and a society which spurns him as a criminal yet uses him as a pawn in the power games & funding wars between federal and local politicians, the justice system and those who grow fat on the profits of drug trafficking or from warehousing prisoners in jails full of drug users and dealers.

Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon’s angry, alienated poor white boy in 1977 looking for a white riot, a riot of my own… wanting a reason to smash windows like the black rioters at Notting Hill, feeling solidarity with another group on the fringes united against a racist police force and unfeeling Government & yet unable to express his anger in any way other than violence.. a view to Brixton in 1981 and the Poll Tax riots of 1990.; Steve Earle’s portrayal of the American Taliban John Walker Lindh raised on MTV & his disastrous search for some meaning & light in his life; Kurt Cobain’s ‘Lithium’; NWA spitting out the anger of the black teenager in ‘Fuck tha Police’.. to deaf ears.. pre-empting the LA Riots 3 years later; John Schumann’s heartbreaking country boy proudly marching off to Vietnam as his family watches, returning home haunted and broken to become perhaps the bitter drifter of Walker’s iconic ‘Khe Sanh’..and of course Archie Roach telling his own and Australia’s devastating story in ‘Took the Children Away’.

I could, of course, go on and on.. My point? Like great literature, journalism and documentary.. but shorter and with music you can sing along to, great songwriting can open doors to understanding and bring our focus back to the real reasons we should continue to vote, care, fight and stand up and be counted… the only politics that count in the end, the politics of the personal.