10204650
Jamming in Thornbury
Last night I caught up with some other Adelaide refugees for a night of playing and recording. Rod (drums) and Dave (trombone) had written a song a couple of days before, so they got Judd (guitar) and I (bass) to come around and record it, and a couple of other things, in Rod’s home studio. Here is something that we did (it’s 1.5Mb, but you know it’s worth it). It was a bit dangerous for me hanging around Rod’s place. He has enough studio-type toys to make me really jealous, but not enough that it seems totally out of my reach, so I’m very much in danger of coveting.
A dog-sitting headfuck today. I’m going to have to trek from Brunswick to Caulfield (about a 45-minute trip), feed the dogs, come back again to Preston (about the same), then go back to Caulfield to sleep. I’ve been trying to come up with other, more practical, options, but I can’t see any that don’t involve guilt-inducing suffering on the part of the dogs, so I guess I’m just going to have to resign myself to spending the better part of the day doing battle with Melbourne traffic. I might catch public transport for the first round trip, that way at least I’ll get some variety in my frustrations.
I’m still waiting to find out my final timetable for uni, which starts on Monday. It’s all very online and clever these days, not like my last degree where there would be a bunch of sign up sheets for tutorials put up outside the faculty office and names would be scribbled on or scrawled out at will. Now they use Allocate+, a web-enabled software package that allows you to do much the same thing from the comfort of your own home. The trouble with doing all this stuff on the web, though, is that you can keep calling back to the website to see that nothing has changed, and there’s this sense of disquiet that goes through you, not really knowing whether you’re looking in the right place or whether you’ve fucked the whole process up, or what. At least with the sign up sheets you could see for yourself that everyone else had been contributing to the same sense of mayhem. It looks like something is happening now, though, so I should have some sort of schedule worked out by the time I actually start.
It’s been orientation week this week, and I keep getting the feeling that I should probably be somewhere doing something, but I’ve looked through all the literature, and there’s nothing that seems particularly important. I’m sure that I can find my way around the library without a tour. I’m not really keen on going to the orientation beach party, where I might just feel like a lurking paedophile as the lone 29-year-old hanging around amongst the bikini-clad fresher sprogs. I can’t seem to find anything about any introductory lectures or anything I should be going to, and the idea of the opening ceremony gives me a big soft-on, so here I am making myself scarce. I might find that I get there next week having missed something vital, but hopefully not.
10174419
East Bentleigh Swimming Centre 3:21 Wed
I’m dog-sitting in Caulfield while my sister and brother-in-law are away on holiday, which is why I’ve had to abandon my beloved Brunswick City Baths for the rather-less-glamorous EBSC, which is rather more reminiscent of the George Bolton Memorial Swimming Centre in Adelaide, where my skin was comprehensively irradiated on many a 40-plus day during the pre-Sid the Seagull years of my youth. Swimming here has had its pleasures, though, one of them being the fact that I shared an Olympic-sized pool with a total of four other people, including the yellow-shirted and wraparound Bolle’d lifeguard wandering languorously around the perimeter.
The clock counting down to my financial apocalypse advanced another few minutes last night when I paid a power bill online, and noticed that the zero point was easily less than two months away. Then it seemed to slip back a bit this morning when I had a call for a gig from a trumpet player, a guy who has been recommended to me as an apparently endless supply of work, and who I called about a week ago to be met with a less-than-enthusiastic response. Having a gig coming up with him and Peter, my friend the banjo virtuoso, is encouraging, because I know that the band will sound great, and from all accounts this guy, Ian, the trumpet player, is someone who can tell the difference (which couldn’t be said for everyone that I’ve worked with since I’ve been here). If his supply of gigs is as abundant as everyone seems to reckon, then there’s a good chance that between him and Jeff, the tuba player who seems to be giving me most of his double bookings, I might have a fairly steady supply of these little traddy things, maybe enough to avert financial Armageddon after all. Of course, that’s a fairly big assumption to make on the basis of only one gig, but it’s good to be positive, and it’s good to have a plausible reason for being so.
I took this gig, on a Thursday lunchtime, before I stopped to think that uni would have already started by then, and of course it overlaps a Philosophy tutorial. I might even just change that tute for the sake of it, enrol in one that starts later and that I could still get to after the gig. It seems a bit dumb to change a semester-long commitment on the basis of one gig, but I don’t really have much of a preference either way anyway, and it might be easier than trying to sort out a change just for that one week. It’s also certainly preferable to just missing the tutorial altogether, seeing as how I’m supposed to be commitment man this year, and everything. I can imagine, too, that Philosophy might be the sort of subject where you’d only have to miss out on one or two important bits of jargon to be left behind for the rest of the course, because you’d be too embarrassed to put up your hand and ask what the hell they were talking about.
I should write briefly about Monday night, as a part of my continuing series on last weekend, which was too busy for me to write anything at the time. I went along to my second instalment of the Showbiz Social Club. The first meeting that I’d gone to was last month - it was a barbecue at Pippa Wilson’s (a singer’s, and a good one’s) house, followed by a bit of a jam session, and it was a good opportunity for a bit of a meet-and-greet with that particular section of the music business (what you might call the “older mainstream” crowd, basically trad-jazz oriented people over fifty who see themselves as being progressive because they prefer a piano to a banjo and like major seventh chords). I took along Edwina for moral support in case it turned out to be a disaster, and it turned out to be a pleasant enough night. I played quite a bit and was very enthusiastically received, and it all seemed fine and dandy. I went along again this month, as much as a gesture of thanks to Pippa than because I particularly wanted to. As it turned out, it was this month’s gathering that was the horrendous one.
The playing was supposed to have started at 7:45, but I was running a bit late, and I strolled into the Monash Uni Club at 8:30, to be met by applause from the twenty-or-so people who were gathered there, basically waiting for some musicians to turn up. Unfortunately, though, there was nothing I could do to rescue the crowd from what was to come.
Jam sessions can be pretty horrible at the best of times. When there are a lot of musicians there, though, they can be okay, because there will be at least a proportion of good players, and as long as there’s someone in charge (like there is for the sessions at Dizzy’s) to make sure that everyone doesn’t get up at once and try and blow each other’s heads off, there can be the occasional redeeming musical moment. The poorer musicians can generally be slotted in amongst the good ones in such a way as to be inoffensive. On Monday night, though, there was no such luxury. Pippa, a drummer, a trumpet player and myself were the only professional standard musicians there, and the rest of them were horrible, which left us to put up with a horrible guitarist who played loud and out of tune and wouldn’t get off the stage, a horrible pianist/singer who played more wrong notes than right ones and sung with almost comical ineptitude, and who wouldn’t get off the stage, another piano player in the same vein with whom she had to fight for embarrassment time. In the end I got jack of it all, and was able to manoeuvre things in such a way as to be playing piano myself, accompanying Pippa in what I hoped would be a few quiet intimate jazz numbers to ease the pain of those in the audience who had been (literally) blocking their ears during the guitarist’s stint on stage, only to find this sax player blowing loud, wrong, untuneful notes in my ear as he struggled to read the music over my shoulder. From then it was a struggle to come up with songs that Pippa might know but which the guitarist wouldn’t, specifically so that he could be prevented from jumping up and joining in.
Pippa and I found a quiet moment after it was all over to share a few words of commiseration with each other, just before she shared with me the news that the social club committee had met and unanimously voted me a member, and all I had to do now was come up with my membership subscriptions. I nodded with carefully disguised ruefulness, but I didn’t reach for my wallet straight away.
10126026
Caulfield 11:51 Tue
Of course, it’s self-fulfilling that the more things are going on in one’s life, the less time one has to sit and write indulgent descriptions of them on self-serving websites.
I’ll start with one of the more bizarre things that’s happened. On Saturday night, I went along to a place called the Planet Cafe, in Brunswick Street, where there was a sort of jam session happening (it was actually a birthday party for one of the guys who is a regular at the Dizzy’s jam sessions on Friday and Saturday evenings, so I suppose it’s natural that he would have wanted to celebrate with another showcase of questionable musical judgement). The idea (of my being there) was that this piano player, Jo, and her friend, Margaret, a singer, and I, were to play some stuff there together, and the proprietor of a venue across the road, who was a friend of Margaret’s, would come across and listen to us with a view to hiring us. When I got there, it turned out that Margaret had already left, but Jo was there. I knew Jo from the jam sessions at Dizzy’s where I’d always assumed her to be another of the barely-20 jazz students who seem indigenous to the place. In the absence of the singer, though, I took the opportunity of sitting with her for a while and chatting, and it turned out that she was actually one of the more senior contributors, a barely-30 who just happens to look frighteningly adolescent. Naturally, this piqued my interest a bit, knowing that she and I shared a worldliness in common that the jazz sprogs around us lacked, and that she was one of “us” (those who’ve stopped growing and have left home) rather than one of “them” (those with cracking voices and still-developing social graces).
Okay, so it turned out that this rather attractive piano player was about ten years older than I had given her credit for, and that fact was fascinating enough, but here’s where things get bizarre. In the whole conversation about ages (and yes, it did include the immortal line “How old do you think I am?”, although, with the youthfulness of her appearance being so unusually freakish, and with her being accustomed to being treated like a school leaver, she wasn’t actually that flattered to know that I’d underestimated her age by over 30%), we inevitably came around to the subject of birthdays, and it turned out that she was turning 31 soon, and I was turning 30 soon, and so forth, yes, I’m in March, too, oh, really, what date? And of course, we both share the same birthday. Now, that’s pretty unlikely, certainly, but here’s what takes the cake: The singer that I told you about, who was to make up the last third of the trio? Same birthday.
Now, call me a dork, but coincidences like this make me want to do a few calculations. So here we are:
The chances that, of three randomly selected people joining a trio together, any two of them (but not the third) will share the same birthday, I calculate as being 1 in 121.86. So if you were an unusually transient musician and joined a new trio every couple of months, you’d expect that to happen once in twenty years. As for me, with the number of groups that I join, it’s not something that I could have expected to happen during my working life.
That’s fair enough, but if you look at the chances of all three trio members having the same birthday, you’d only expect it to happen in one of every 133,407 trios formed. Our wandering musician joining six new trios a year could only expect it to happen about once every 22,000 years (and being as fickle as he is, he’d probably run out of people to play with well before that).
Now, I’m not a believer in numerology or astrology or anything like that, but there is this family history of sharing birthdays with significant others, which is worth detailing at this point. When I was about eighteen, I had a girlfriend who shared a birthday with my mother. Which wouldn’t have been so amazing, except that, at the time, my sister had a boyfriend who shared a birthday with my father. That’s pretty amazing, but then my parents got divorced, and my Dad ended up marrying someone who shared the same birthday as him. I’m not up to calculating the odds that that would happen with any three members of a five-member family, but it is strange. I’m also not reading anything from that into my prospects of romance with Jo the piano player (or, for that matter, Margaret the singer), particularly considering that all three birthday-coincidental relationships have long since been consigned to romantic history.
There’s more to write, but I think that’s enough to digest for now.
9993002
Brunswick 11:05 Thu
I just had a call from a bass player that I’ve never met, asking me to dep for him on a gig this Sunday. Of course, the gig coincided with the one other gig that I’ve got booked in the next month (yes, this is frustrating, but experience has taught me to be philosophical about this sort of thing, basically because it happens so often that one could be driven nuts otherwise). It was a shame that I couldn’t do the gig, but the fact that he called was very positive, because it means that my networking is starting to work, somehow or other. I have no idea who he got my number from, but there’s a good chance that he got it from one of the twenty-odd people who I’ve distributed cards to in the last few weeks at gigs and jazz festivals and jam sessions and so forth.
I’m luxuriating in breakfast at a cafe, because today is the day when the windows in my flat are finally being fixed. Nick the maintenance man was around at eight o’clock this morning, and the contractors were coming at about nine. Nick was deinstalling the exhaust fan in the kitchen (which, coated in thick layers of grease and crap, vibrated alarmingly whenever it was turned on, and which will be replaced with one that I can actually use to ventilate the kitchen and thus the rest of the flat, and perhaps even dry some of the damp that’s coming through the wall of the bathroom), so I opted against breakfast there. It’s going to be a day of staying out of the house, which is a pain, of course, but also an excuse to bum around in cafes and do all this stuff that I normally wouldn’t.
It’s interesting that when John Howard appointed an ex-Archbishop as Governor General, there were all these concerns about the separation of church and state, which I didn’t really share despite my committed atheism. At that point, I don’t think that anyone would have foreseen that the real dramas wouldn’t relate to having a Christian head of a secular state, but to little girls being sexually assaulted. It seems that, in retrospect, it was a bad idea to get someone from the church involved as a constitutional guardian, but not for the reasons we might have thought (although, if we’d thought carefully enough, perhaps we would have realised that institutional religion is as rife with scandal as any sector of society, and it would be a rare archbishop who didn’t have at least some history of priestly indiscretion waiting to be dug up. Of course, the same could be said of the judges and sportspeople and political figures might have been appointed instead). The most astounding thing, though, was to see the ABC interview, where the GG talked about the sexual abuse of a fourteen-year-old girl by a priest, and in which he more or less said that she was gagging for it. Hmm. I know that ages of consent are set somewhat arbitrarily, and I’m not inclined to make too many moral judgements based solely on the letter of the law, but one might have thought that the priest in that situation would have, at the very least, realised that it was a bad idea to get involved. I’m sure that a hell of a lot of people who are involved with adolescents on a daily basis will, at some point in time, be put in a position where they could be compromised, but most are professional enough and sensible enough and responsible enough to make sure that nothing happens. I might not be sure about the black-and-white mercilessness with which the issue tends to be prosecuted in the media and in public discourse, but I am sure that it’s a bad idea to circulate the idea that accepting the advances of a fourteen-year-old girl (assuming that’s what happened, which it might not have been) is stepping well out of line, and anyone who does so should be expecting some pretty harsh consequences. Sexual morals are not as simple and clearly defined as we might sometimes like to believe they are, but it doesn’t take a professor of ethics to work out that when the relationship between a fourteen-year-old girl and an adult priest begins to become sexually charged, whoever might be the initiator, it’s in serious need of defusing, and it’s up to the adult to make sure that that happens.
The kids overboard drama seems to keep getting worse and worse for the Howard government, if you follow the tone of the newspapers. There’s something that bothers me about it, though. Of course, it’s abominable for the Prime Minister and/or the Defence Minister to have deliberately lied to the public, in what amounts to racial vilification, but are the people who voted for John Howard, knowing his policies, knowing his tendencies, now saying, “Oh, you bastard, you tricked me into endorsing your xenophobic agenda”? Howard callously distributed nasty disinformation, but the policies were in place before there was any suggestion of kids being thrown overboard, and a hell of a lot of people supported those policies. When Peter Reith gets up and says “Are these the kind of people that we really want in Australia?”, it doesn’t really matter what events prompted the comment or whether or not they actually happened. The comment itself, in any circumstances, is disgraceful and shameful for a political leader. At the time, I was shocked and appalled that crass racist generalisations had become a part of the language of election campaigns. The fact that the comment was based on a bare-faced lie can hardly make it any worse than it already was.
9902828
Brunswick Baths 11:11 Wed
God, the Herald Sun is a horrible read for those of us who couldn’t give a shit about Australian Survivor (or even any of the originals). The front page is covered with the story of an injury to a Western Bulldogs footballer. The “Children Overboard Affair” gets about two-thirds of page 8. I don’t think that it’s quite as bad as The Advertiser, but that’s not saying much.
A conversation yesterday made me think. My sister was telling me how you’re only supposed to exercise for 30 minutes, three times a week. I do about 25 minutes seven times a week, so does this mean that I’m damaging myself? That I’m getting too fit? That I’m running the risk of injury? What?
Then I thought, well, who the hell says that you’re supposed to exercise for x minutes y times a week? Is this something built into our genetic makeup? A process of evolution that determined that those who exercised more or less often than that were less likely to pass on their DNA? I can’t imagine that there were any prehistoric humans sitting there saying “No, darling, I can’t go out hunting any bison today, you know that my exercise days are Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. Now let’s fuck.”
Of course, these sorts of guidelines are totally arbitrary. It’s fair to say that you shouldn’t overdo things, and it’s fair to say that you shouldn’t underdo things, and it’s fair to say that a guideline like that could help people who were looking to get into exercise and who were wondering what might be reasonable. But this little discussion was a clear illustration of the process by which a set of figures like those can make the transition from being a rough set of pointers to being something supposedly magical. The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is a magical number. The amount of exercise you should do is not.
Still, everyone’s got to make some sort of a decision. How much am I doing, how much should I be doing, how much do I want to be doing, how much do I have time to be doing? A set of numbers like the one my sister mentioned can be helpful in that it illustrates how little is necessary in order to make a positive difference, but I don’t think that it should be assumed from that that you necessarily won’t benefit from doing more. Of course, there’s an upper limit, too, and it’s quite possible to do too much, but in my mind the danger there is not so much that you’ll damage yourself (unless you get ridiculous), but more that you’ll find that rate unsustainable. If there’s one thing that is really important, it’s establishing a routine and keeping it going for months at a time. If you’re finding that you’re too tired after one session to look forward to the next, then the chances are that you’re overdoing it. The same is true of a lot of other things, too, of course: practice, chocolate, sex … there’s a limit to how much of each can be really constructive, and there’s always a line that can be crossed whereby you’re reluctant to come back. (Although in the case of sex, and possibly chocolate, you can only be put off for so long.)
Gee, it’s blowing like buggery out there. The accumulated crap of Brunswick seems to have blown over the wall and into the pool, and the lifeguard is having to enlist the services of the lap swimmers to pluck out fugitive Safeway bags and Big Mac wrappers, just to avert an environmental catastrophe. One might think that a cool change was blowing in, but there don’t seem to be any actual clouds or any actual change in temperature … maybe it’s just going to be one of those days when one’s eyes fill with dust as soon as one steps outside the door, and when the washing dries in five minutes, but not quite quickly enough to avoid it becoming coated in a layer of flying topsoil.
Alisa Camplin. What a sweetie. The gold medal winners are certainly getting a good deal this time around, aren’t they: they (the medals) look like something that has been raised from the holds of a sunken Spanish galleon. I’d be impressed.
9873702
A quiet word, and the deed is done
It happened last night after the concert. I took the applicable committee member aside and had a word in his ear, saying that I would be interested in conducting the band after the competitions, for a trial period to begin with. Which doesn’t mean that it’s a fait accompli, but it’s required a fair bit of soul searching to have gone this far. If it happened that someone else came along who was qualified for the job and who the band was keen to take on, then I’d be more than happy to keep going along and playing my bits. If they decide they want me out the front, I’ll do my best for four or six weeks or however long the trial period is, and I’ll see how it goes from there. It’s not a path that I expected to be following, but it’s something that could be very rewarding if it works like I hope it will. If it doesn’t work, and it’s going to a disaster, hopefully that’s something that I’ll be able to spot during the trial period, and I can bow out gracefully, no harm done.
Frustrating situtation on the sexual front. I’m hanging out for something, anything, to happen, but all I seem to be getting is the occasional suggestion that something might. Which in a way is worse than nothing at all, because at least then I can put the whole issue aside and concentrate on something else. But when one’s sexuality is continually being piqued but not sated, one is subject to all the distractions but few of the pleasures. Still, the drought is bound to break sooner or later. I’d like to think that when it does the results will be all the more earth-shattering for every day I’ve spent wandering the sexual wilderness.
9828468
Brunswick Baths 10:34 Mon
The phone’s been running hot this morning. First there was another gig - in Mornington next Sunday. I figured out that that will make five gigs in five weeks, so I guess that means that I have pretty much met one target - to be doing a gig a week by the time I start uni - even though it doesn’t always feel that way. Of course, to be “doing a gig a week” is something that’s kind of undefined. What does it mean? Having done an average of a gig a week over the last n number of weeks? Having done at least a gig in each of the last n number of weeks? Having an average of a gig a week booked in the diary for the next n weeks … the list goes on. All I can really say at the moment is that if things keep going as they are, I’ll probably wind up with about a gig a week in the long term, which is not quite enough to live on, but it’s hopefully enough to push that zero point far enough into the future for the extra work to catch up. If that makes sense.
The other call was to go to another jazz festival the weekend after, in Inverloch. I said that I’d go, because there was nothing in the diary, so now I suppose it’s just a matter of seeing whether or not it ends up being worthwhile. The guy that I’m playing with is the same guy who I was playing with in Halls Gap, and the music made in that trio is certainly nothing exceptional, but again, it’s another chance to see and be seen and hopefully be noticed and talked about. One impression that I’m getting is that the younger jazz crowd, like the students at Dizzy’s, have far fewer loyalties to preserve than the older jazz crowd, like many of those that you’d find at Halls Gap or Inverloch. The attitude of the younger players seems to be “Oh, great, there’s a new bass player in town for us to use,” as opposed to the older guys, who are more like “Oh, right, there’s a new bass player, well, I always use so-and-so and so-and-so, but you never know, maybe I can slot him in somewhere.” Which doesn’t mean that the older jazz scene is impossible to break into, it’s just going to be a bit different, and maybe a bit longer term. That’s bearing in mind that out of the eight or so gigs that I’ve been booked for since I’ve been back, about six of them have been from the old guys. Probably once you do break in, one they do start to trust you and realise that you can do a good job, they’re more inclined to stick by you. I noticed that in Adelaide, actually, after I left etype, and I was basically relying on old contacts to keep a bit of work coming in until I went away on cruise ships, it was the old trad jazz crowd who really came through for me. I guess the younger crowd would always have thought of me as “good to play with”, but not if it meant going particularly out of their way. The older guys, the ones who had decided that I was the best thing since sliced bread, were so thrilled that I was available again, they were on the phone all the time. It’s all pretty interesting.
So anyway, I think that between the Dizzy’s thing and the jazz festival thing, I can get a reasonable exposure to both groups, although they will tend to be the lesser players in each. The better players will tend to have better things to do on a Friday or Saturday night than go to a free jam session, and likewise, the better players will tend to be doing their paying gigs rather than trekking down to a free jazz festival, but you do get the odd crossover, and word can trickle through any of those boundaries anyway.
Lunch with Edwina today. Should be nice. Concert tonight with David Childs, the euphonium player. Could go either way.
9812544
Preston 4:23 Sun
The master class was good, although it was mainly a regurgitation of all the same stuff that I’ve heard at a hundred other master classes. I guess the fact that this guy is so young (20) means that I’m inclined to take everything with a grain of salt, knowing that the chances are he’s only re-telling all the stuff that his teachers have told him. It’s probably all pretty much true, but there was a lack of really original thought, a feeling that he was sharing something unique to himself. His ideas were orthodox ideas, and it’s an orthodoxy that we’ve all been pretty much trained in. His playing was good, too, but again it was just like listening to another good player. Once a musician gets to a certain quality, they can just play one note and instantly the audience is enraptured. I don’t think this guy fell into that category. The sound was quite a human one - it didn’t seem to transcend itself, become something more than a guy playing a euphonium and open that direct line to something much more fundamental, more visceral. That’s a hell of a tough ask, but I’ve heard it done before. Perhaps it will be different when he’s actually playing solos instead of just demonstrating to a class.
I must admit though, all of this does awaken something in me, this little bit of enthusiasm for being a brass player, for achieving amazing things, striving for that sound that’s more than just a sound. It could be that my passion for being a musician is a little more alive than I thought it was (after all, there’s nothing like spending two years playing in a cruise ship orchestra to defuse any passions that you once might have had). I still think that I’m doing the right think, going back to uni this year and studying something else and trying to diversify my career, but I think that music might just remain more important to me than I had previously given it credit for. It’s a bit of a problem, because both sides of my life (the musical and the academic) are going to require a lot of time, but then, I’m always saying that I have too much time on my hands, anyway. I think that if I stay healthy and stay motivated, I’m probably up to the task of dealing with both.
One potential problem with that could be the sharp distinction that exists in the minds of fellow musicians, between full-time players and part-time players. If you’re someone who hasn’t devoted himself completely to music, then you’re vulnerable to the perception that you’re not really serious about what you’re doing. Once you start struggling to find rehearsal times, or having to pull out of gigs for other commitments, or whatever, full-time players can start to just drift away a bit.
I think I’d rather try and deal with that, though, than devote myself again to the full-time music path, and have to revisit all the various pitfalls that that entails. Of course, whenever one tries to sort out one’s life, it’s always balance that ends up being the key, and this problem is certainly no exception. It’s going to be a big challenge, finding that balance and maintaining it, but I think it’s better to start wobbling around and figuring things out than to imagine that I can forge an equilibrium straight away.
9800280
Bizarre
I always used to tell my friends on the ship that so few cruise ships came to Adelaide that it was in all the newspapers when one did. What’s even more amazing is that this story made it into a Melbourne newspaper (or at least the online version thereof). They reckon that the two ships will generate $2m in tourism revenue. Let’s do a few sums. I’m estimating numbers, but I’m being generous here: Let’s say the QE2 carries 1400 passengers, and the Aurora 1600 (this really is being generous), making a total of 3000 passengers between them, which would mean that they’d each have to spend an average of $666 on a visit to Adelaide to make up that $2m mark. Of course, the crew would spend a bit, and there might be a bit from port charges and resupply and so forth, but really, I doubt that it would be worth $1m, especially considering that Adelaide doesn’t have the infrastructure to milk the ignorant American tourists of every last ignorant cent, like the more established cruise ports do. It’s not as if Outer Harbour has a row of little shops selling fluffy koalas at inflated prices. That’s what the punters are looking for.
9799552
Brunswick Baths 10:50 Sun
So I open my swimming bag in the change rooms and go to get my goggles out, and what do you know, they’re not there. I don’t know yet whether I left them in the change rooms yesterday (in which case they’re probably gone for good), or whether they fell out somewhere at home, but either way I was left with a choice: to swim or not to swim. It had probably been close to twenty years since I had swum in a chlorinated pool without goggles, and I seemed to remember ending up with red eyes, but I thought to myself “Hey, how bad could it be?”, and besides, I could have developed an immunity in the intervening time, couldn’t I?
Um, no. My eyes started to sting a bit at around the 400m mark, and I thought about stopping at 500m to limit the damage, but I ended up pushing on, reasoning that if my eyes were going to hurt, I might as well have a decent swim to show for it. So when I climbed out of the pool after twenty laps, I found that I was surrounded by this sort of cloud, as if there was a fine mist rising off the pool (despite the warm sunshine). Back in the change rooms, a glance in the mirror quickly confirmed the reason for the fog: I was peering at the world through a complex network of engorged blood vessels, as a whole host of white blood cells rushed to expel the nasty chemical invaders. If you think of the worst hangover eyes you’ve ever had, and multiply the effect by about a hundred, that’s what my eyes looked like (and probably still do, although judging by the fact that the fog has begun to lift a bit, I think they’re probably on their way back to normal). I suppose that at least I won’t have to die wondering whether I still have an allergy to chlorine (although whether or not that question would be at the forefront of my deathbed consciousness, I don’t know.)
I went back to the second instalment of this jam session last night. It happens every Friday and Saturday, so I thought in the interest of maintaining a constant and unignorable presence on the jazz scene, I should probably put in another appearance. The standard was marginally higher than the night before, mostly because there were fewer people there, and whilst the jam session diehards are mostly pretty inexperienced players generally, they’re at least experienced by the standards of the jam session, if only by virtue of the fact that they’re always there. (I’m assuming, of course, that they’re always there - I’ve only been twice. Somehow it’s easy to imagine, though, that most of the people who were there last night and the night before are permanent Friday and Saturday night fixtures.) One thing about going to these sessions is that it’s easy to feel like a bit of a hero. Of course, I’ve got fifteen years’ professional experience on just about everyone there, so it’s not like I should be getting too big a head over the fact that I’m at a higher standard, but when I come off stage and get swamped with admiration, it’s sometimes a little hard not to buy into my own propaganda. “Actually, yes, I am a bit of a jazz god. Now, you were saying you might like to come around to my place sometime for some lessons in improvisation?” (Swimming around the small pond were a number of cute girls, one of whom was particularly so, and I struggled for a little while to figure out why. Then I realised: it was her lower eyelids. There’s something about pronounced, expressive lower eyelids that really does it for me. They are exemplified in Reece Witherspoon and Marisa Tomei, amongst others. It was a bit of a watershed moment, to realise what a turn-on they were.)
I’m going to a master class this afternoon with a visiting British euphonium player. I’m sure that he’s going to be very good, although I’m hoping that it doesn’t turn into a bowing and scraping session for all the brass band tragics who dream of a northern English promised land, who know the names, conductors and players lists of every colliery band in Yorkshire, and whose breathless admiration of a northern English prodigy is likely to be embarrassing in its obsequiousness. “I’m not the Messiah, I’m just a sour Englishman who can play every page of the Arban’s tutor.” Still, I’m looking forward to it - some of the master classes that I’ve been to in the past have been really helpful, not so much in the advice that they offer, but just for the fact that they can inspire me to get off my arse and do some work. Being able to have an intimate picture of how someone else has achieved their success can enlighten the path that one has to follow if one is to achieve one’s own. If I was financially minded, perhaps I’d get this kick out of investment seminars, but as it is, all I’ve got is brass master classes.