Zzz
An interesting idea came up in a bioethics tutorial yesterday (completely off-topic, like a lot of interesting tutorial discussions).
The discussion had to do with sleep. The theory was that people like uni students and deskbound professionals tend to suffer a lack of proper sleep, because they spend their days with their minds spinning (notionally), but getting no exercise. When it comes time to go to bed, there’s no trigger for the body to sleep, because it’s neither physically exhausted nor mentally relaxed.
It sounds like another bit of pop physiology, but it does provide and explanation for a couple of things I’ve sometimes wondered about. For instance, why is it that when I start exercising properly, all of a sudden all sorts of things in life start to go better? Yes, there’s the general sense of wellbeing that comes with getting the circulation going, but there’s something more than that. My personal life, academic study, music, everything seems to get better, quite suddenly. It’s more than just better circulation, I think. I wonder whether it might have something do with sleep.
Also, something odd happened when I went to Jo’s parents’ farm in country NSW last Christmas. We were there for a couple of weeks, and I think it’s the first time in many years that I’ve had a holiday as such where I haven’t been running around and doing things and catching up with people, or playing music or something. In short, it was probably the closest I’ve come in recent times to a state of non-stimulation (in the adrenal sense - that’s no reflection on the quality of conversation). So what happened? I went to sleep for about five days. Not literally, of course, but I was sleeping for about ten hours a night, then getting up and reading for a while, then going back to sleep again for another four or five hours in the afternoon. Normally these days I get about seven or eight hours, so it was a big change. I wonder whether it’s just activity that’s keeping me awake?
The implication of all that would be, of course, that the more brain-work you’re doing, the more exercise you have to do as well if you’re going to stay healthy. Which probably accords with all those ideas of balance that have been around since Leonardo was a kid. Still, it was an interesting way of thinking about it, I thought.
Done
A politics essay out of the way. I enjoyed this one, really, once I got started. Didn’t enjoy having it on my mind, but didn’t not enjoy having it on my mind enough to do it before tonight, when it was due on Friday but the tutor gave everyone an extension until tomorrow because so many people don’t go to uni on Fridays.
What I’ve come to appreciate is how good this little room is.
It’s a separate room at the back of our house, and it smells a little, and the birds nest in the roof, but when there’s work to be done and I can get myself out there with the heater on and the laptop fired up, hours go by with a minimum of fuss. Maybe time distorts according to the number of distractions that one’s subject to, or something. The word count on this essay seemed to climb upwards of its own accord, as opposed to some others where it inches along with the speed of centuries.
Anyway, really just wanted to post in case my ten visitors a day thought I’d given up (and those who’ve been with this weblog all along know my form). I’d hate for my circulation to drift back into single figures.
Wilful Blindness
It’s a shame that I didn’t have this blog running during Gulf War II. If I had, I might have written down my thoughts about the Saving Private Lynch Affair. It’s a bit too easy now, after the BBC story showing that it was all a sham, for me to say that I always thought that it was. But it’s true.
Coincidentally, as part of the Politics and Media subject that I’m studying at the moment, I’d watched Wag the Dog I don’t think it’s good that large swathes of the population should see news broadcasts as just another arm of entertainmentonly a week or two before. When this story started to break, I thought to myself that it read just as Dustin Hoffman might have scripted it. The war was becoming bogged down, public opinion had begun drifting. And all of a sudden, bang, an episode of heart-rending patriotic intensity, a cute (but not-too-) blonde soldier-next-door rescued in a daring night-time operation under fire. Perhaps John Williams was already scoring a pair of trumpets in fourths accompanied by sparse snare drums, in readiness for the tearful homecoming. At any second, one expected the background to fade to the stars and stripes fluttering in slow motion.
It was clearly bullshit, well before the BBC took up the cause of exposing it. A lot of people believed it, though, or seemed to believe it. Am I saying that they were just gullible, just stupid uncritical consumers happily feasting on a diet of processed tripe? That would be one explanation, but the wrong one, I think. Wrong because it relies on the assumption that a critical eye is the preserve of the intelligent few of whom I’m one, and that “people” (meaning people other than me) are in fact stupid.
I think it’s probable that few people swallowed the reports of that incident whole. Lots of people seemed to accept the story, but I think that the majority probably fell short of believing it in the same sense that I and others disbelieved it. I’m inclined to put it down to a voluntary illusion. Lots of people believe stories like this in the same sense that they believe in God, or in a football team. They believe it because it’s easier and more convenient than acknowledging what, if they were pressed, they know is the reality.
In other words, it’s a defence mechansim for people who have other (better?) things to do with their lives than sit around pondering (or blogging about) the State of the World. It’s not about gullibility, it’s about quality of life. I choose to focus on these things because that’s what I’m interested in, but when I do so I probably neglect other things that other people find important (fashion?), and about which I might seem ignorant to them.
Okay, so not everyone needs to be as Saving-the-World oriented as I am, and it’s probably good that many of them are not. Still, I think there are minimum standards of awareness that should be a part of participation in a democratic system. I don’t think it’s good that large swathes of the population should see news broadcasts as just another arm of entertainment, where any resemblance to real events is coincidental. There’s not too much harm done when people believe unquestioningly in Kevin Sheedy, but the same doesn’t apply to Ari Fleischer. Religion (according to me and others) is an illusion which allows us to live our lives without constantly coming face to face with the unpalatable truth of our own mortality. That’s okay. But what we’re talking about here is an illusion which blinds us to the bloody and unglamorous reality of people being killed and maimed. Another harmless diversion?
We’ve seen a spate of murders committed by people who believe that they are living in The Matrix. Maybe the war in Iraq could be considered a spate of murders committed by people who believe that they’re Saving Private Ryan. The first class of murderers suffered from an inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. The second class exhibited a stubborn, lazy and squeamish unwillingness to do the same.
Not Swimming, Procrastinating
Swimming represents guilt-free proscratination. As the semester nears its end and anything (even twenty laps in the rain) seems preferable to another night dredging for truth in the morass of self-serving obscurity (i.e., trying to make sense of the law).
I say self-serving because I can’t escape the conclusion that much of this stuff is deliberately made more difficult than it has to be. Legislation is written with politically motivated circumlocution and paradox. Judgments are written in a kind of professional pidgin that only lawyers (and often not even them) can understand. In three months studying this stuff I’ve had to wade through reams of this bullshit. A first-year Arts essay using this sort of expression would come back covered in red pen and with a referral to the Language Learning Centre attached.
The idea is that legal writing speaks to lawyers of concepts that the lay person can’t be expected to understand, so it might as well throw out all standard English rules of style and usage and communicate as if in code. I would argue that the concepts aren’t that hard: only the writing is. Of all the (many) legal misunderstandings that I’ve suffered so far, none of them couldn’t have been resolved in a second by a single clearly-written sentence. The lecturers wax lyrical about how obscure these concepts are supposed to be. I’ve yet to come across one that is any harder than those that I’ve understood in metaphysics or logic or ethics or international relations or music. It’s no more difficult to understand the subjective element of provocation than it is to understand the paradoxes of time travel or the rules of polyphony. It just seems harder because the concept needs to be inferred from the writings of generations of legal professionals who make a living out of not saying what they mean.
Law Bore
Five or six pages in to the Fundraising Appeals Act 1998, I suddenly remembered why it took me so long to finally decide I wanted to study law. I was concerned that it would be bloody fucking boring.
“So, you see, law’s never boring”, my tutor says as she marvels over another titillating legislative ambiguity. “Compared to what?”, I wonder, silently.
Still, I was bored witless by music history in 1990, too, and I managed to pass that.
Fraternal Journal
Well, it turns out that, unbeknownst to me, my brother Angus has been blogging in his own right for some months. Not only that, but he’s discovered this blog.
I think that’s great (and yes, there is a little of the identical-twins-separated-at-birth synchronicity about our having started blogs independently at more-or-less the same time, notwithstanding that we’re not identical nor twins nor were we separated at birth …), but there’s also a sense of crunch-time about it. No more blogging in relative anonymity (i.e., anonymity from relatives).
Admittedly, if I’d wanted to keep this writing to myself, I could easily have done so. I could even have kept it from Jo if I’d wanted (although waiting until she goes out before I wrote here would have felt deceptive. Almost like waiting until she goes out before dragging out the porn collection, or something). When I decided to host a blog on my plain-vanilla homepage without any obscure URL-age to protect it, I must have realised that it would be open to all and sundry, including people to whom I’ve handed out business cards in the last 18 months, along with family members (who already knew the address from when I used to post hand-coded cruise ship travelogues), to be privy to my touch-typist’s detritus. It’s odd to think that a whole bunch of jazz musos should be stumbling across my sloppily-argued polemics (some of which will inevitably refer, sometimes quite specifically, to them). It’s almost odder to think that my family might do the same.
Why the disquiet? Well, here’s something: I’ve been playing music professionally for sixteen years or so, but the most nerve-wracking performances I have ever done were at family Christmases. It’s not that I had stage parents (I didn’t), and it’s not that my family weren’t generally supportive and encouraging (they were). It’s just that seeing myself through the eyes of my family opened me up to all sorts of insecurities that I never knew existed.
It would take a few weeks of head-scratching and a few thousand words for me to try to unravel what I mean by that. Suffice it to say my family’s expectations (however they can be defined - probably a nexus of things like hope and pride and support and well-meant concern) had (have?) emotional purchase.
As you can probably tell from the content, I don’t care if any random person reading this blog thinks that I’m a bit of a dickhead. If the random person happens to be a family member, though, that’s different. When I saw the kind things that Angus had written, I was chuffed with the compliment, but I was also prompted to mentally recheck my grammar.
I’m a little shy about people I know reading what I write here. I haven’t kept it a secret, but I haven’t emailed the URL to all my friends, either. Still, if it keeps getting stumbled upon, I suppose I’ll get used to it.
Dock of the Bay
Melbourne is not a cycling-friendly city, but I’ve started to discover a few secrets.
Last weekend I decided to explore a bikeway that appears and disappears mysteriously from the Melways as it crosses the CityLink freeway. It runs only a kilometre or so from my place, and heads towards the city, so I wanted to find out what it was like and how far it went.
What it was was the Moonee Ponds Creek bike path. Moonee Ponds Creek, I should point out, is something of a euphemism. It might once have been a creek - now, you couldn’t call it anything but a storm drain. The bike path runs alongside the drain for most of the journey, but at times you can ride along the drain itself. It has a broad section which I presume only fills with water during floods, running alongside the deeper channel which stays filled with stagnant filth. I had visions of a flash flood streaming down the culvert bearing a tangle of bikes and cyclists, limbs and pedals protruding chaotically from its boiling whitewater. But in truth, it was idyllic enough. The drain, unlike the path alongside it, is flat and smooth, so (putrefecation notwithstanding) it is an attractive option.
As you get towards the city, the path begins to wind around and under the CityLink, a massive tollway elevated on enormous concrete pylons. It was a bit eerie, actually. As a driver, you come to conceive of the city in terms of the restrictions imposed by its thoroughfares. The CityLink is like an insulated tube - you have to plan carefully where to get on it and off it (not to mention making sure that your e-tag is charged and ready), and while you’re actually on it you’re separated by speed and by big concrete walls from the cityscape surrounding it. You would never think, to drive along it, that twenty metres below your accelerator pedal there was a whole substratum of commuters coursing happily along their own road network, heralded only by the massed whir of a hundred derailleurs.
I realised that not that many people get to view this part of the city from that angle. I stopped and tooked some photographs of the Northern Gateway, which I found a lot more attractive at 20 km/h than I usually do at 100 (and a lot easier to photograph).
Up the track a little further, something odd happened. I passed a bike helmet lying in the middle of the path (odd enough in itself). Around the next bend, I found this old bloke on his with his grand-daughter in a little bike seat on the back. He was stopped, trying to figure out how to prop the bike up so that the little girl wouldn’t fall out while he went back to get her helmet. Thing is, the reason her helmet had fallen off in the first place was that she’d gone to sleep on the back of the bike, and her head had fallen over (well more than 90 degrees) and come to rest with a thud on the arm of the bike seat. When I first saw her, I thought she might be dead, her head was on that much of an angle. I could imagine her having been struck by some falling branch or something that had broken her neck and knocked her helmet off. But no, it turned out that she was just fast asleep, even still as I went back to help and held the bike while grandad retrieved her helmet. She barely stirred as he came back and stuck the helmet back on her head. I know that little kids can basically sleep anywhere, but the sight of her sitting there on the back of the bike, fast asleep, was astounding. I kicked myself, as I rode away, for not taking a picture.
The bike track, I’d have to say, was a big success. It joins up with the Capital City Trail and heads right into the Docklands. I was hopeful for a while that it might end up joining another bike track that heads from the city down to Beacon Cove, which would mean that 
I could ride from my place to Port Phillip Bay almost completely without using public roads, but things ground to a halt when I got to the Yarra and found that a flashy new foot/bike bridge hadn’t been finished yet. Still, it’s an exciting prospect to think that soon I’ll be able to cycle around the bay without the attendant death struggle that is the CBD.
I amused myself by riding around the docks and down to Port Melbourne, where there were blokes in cars with stereos turned up, fishing and drinking beer in the shadow of the Bolte Bridge’s twin towers.
I had a sense, drifting about, that I was seeing the last of the docklands as they used to be. I wondered whether this guys would still be there fishing in ten or fifteen years’ time. Although from what I hear, they’re having trouble getting rid of all the apartments that they’re building, so maybe the development boom down there will grind to a halt and leave a few relics behind. I’m all in favour of people living in the city (especially if they work there). 
It keeps them off the roads. I’m also in favour of housing gluts that help to keep the rent down for all of us who are not property speculators. Still, I think it’s nice to have some areas of the city that are not just another pondage on the commercial swamp. Even areas that fall into dereliction, it seems to me, provide some relief from the bombardment of consumer imagery, a reminder that there’s more to the human condition than the corporate world would have us believe. I won’t be disppointed if there’s a bit of spirited ugliness left around Hobson’s Bay.
Obtaining By Deception
About once a month, I take my tuba on the train into Flinders Street Station. There’s a shitty little pokie venue right next to the ticket barriers on St Kilda Road, where we play old songs for a lovely bunch of old biddies. They go to the Morning Melodies concert at the Concert Hall, then walk over the bridge to the Tatts club for schnitzels and chips and the jazz band. We get a full report (usually highly critical) on the quality of the concert they’ve just seen, and they usually request that we play all the songs that were on the programme, perhaps so that they can make a comparison.
The trumpet player seems to be a bit of a sex symbol amongst this set, maybe because he’s only twenty-odd years their junior. the pokies exist to relieve old people and low income earners of their savingsOne of the old dears is the sort of audacious, arse-pinching, innuendo-making flirt who would put the worse office sleaze to shame. The trumpet player would have a great case for sexual harrassment proceedings, but I doubt that anyone in the court room would be able to keep a straight face as the defendant struggled with her dentures.
Gigs in pokie rooms tend to be depressing, but this one I don’t mind. The people are obviously enjoying themselves, and enjoying the music, and pokie-playing doesn’t seem to factor into the equation too highly.
I was speaking to another jazz musician the other day who was saying that he enjoyed a particular gig that he did in a pokie pub, because the pokies provided an adequate bribe for his wife to come along and act as designated driver.
You’ll often hear pokies justified as a means by which old people can get out of the house and enjoy themselves. I don’t doubt that it’s true. Seeing it that way, though, disguises a much more sinister undercurrent that runs through the whole business.
It seems to me that the pokies exist to relieve old people and low income earners of their savings. That might sound like a generalisation, but how many pokie venues are there in Toorak? How many wealthy professionals do you know who visit the pokies regularly? It’s no coincidence that, with the possible exception of the casino, pokie venues orient themselves towards particularly vulnerable people.
The layout and the decor is part of it. I was recently speaking to some friends (she’s 66, he’s 70) who come and see me play sometimes. They’re very active, very enthusiastic music followers. We were going through some music venues that they might like to visit, and it was interesting to me how some venues were immediately ruled out: “Oh, we’re too old to go there”. Venues like Dizzy’s in Richmond, somewhat classier than the daggy pokie pubs and sports clubs that they were used to going to, but not trendy venues for young people by any account. In terms of the age of the clientele, they would have fitted in quite readily. The thing is, I don’t think it was actually the age thing that made them uncomfortable. I think it had more to do with the look and feel of the place. It seemed a bit out of their league.
I can relate to it, in a way. Whenever I walk into a place that is in any way classy-looking, I’m instinctively on guard, waiting to be told that my shoes are too casual or that my beer is going to cost nine dollars. I resent paying for snob value, and I think my friends felt a bit the same way. They identified their concerns in terms of ageism, but I think what it comes down to is that there is a certain kind of venue in which they feel comfortable, and that’s the sort of venue that doesn’t pretend to be classy. In a venue like that, they can relax and not worry about getting ripped off, or getting laughed at for being old and daggy. It’s understandable that pensioners should be money-conscious, and it’s also understandable that they should be image-conscious.
I think that pokie venues cash in on both. Old people can go to a place that’s suitably daggy, where they can relax around other people of a similar age, in similar dress, eat meals that are (ostensibly) cheap, drink free (instant) coffee, and avoid the stresses of the cafe society (three dollar flat whites; nine dollar foccaccias and by the way what’s a foccaccia; polished wood and aluminium that reflects sound and plays havoc with hearing aids; becleaved dolly birds squawking loudly into mobile phones).
Of course, what they should be stressed about is all the money that they’re pouring into poker machines. The pokie industry does a pretty good job of disguising that cost with blinking lights and false hopes.
It’s clearly good for old people to have somewhere to go where they an socialise and feel comfortable. It’s understandable that they should look for venues that offer different qualities from those that 18-40’s might prefer. There’s no good reason, though, why poker machines should have to be a part of it. Everyone goes on about the problem of sustaining an aging population. Well, here’s an idea for starters: How about we stop cheating them out of their money?
Here’s what I think every poker machine should have on the front of it, in big clear letters as prominent as a cigarette warning: “For every dollar you put in this machine, you’ll probably get [insert relevant amount here, usually about 85c] back.” The pokies shouldn’t be allowed to disguise the truth about the odds they offer behind promises of big wins that speak most loudly to those least able to afford the losses.
On Mahler
Just been to see the VCA orchestra with MUCS doing Mahler 2.
It was an interesting journey back into a past life. I’d forgotten all the ritual that goes with classical concerts. The coming on, the going off, the ties and tails, the standing and sitting and applauding and acknowledging. I took it for granted back when I used to be immersed in it. It’s been so long since I’ve been to a concert like that, though, that I felt a bit disoriented. It was like going to a church service and realising that people are still doing the same odd things as they did every week when one used to go to church, but not having seen them for so long, they seem stranger.
The music, though, was terrific. The orchestra sounded great. It was certainly a cast of thousands … I counted twelve french horns, which is a pretty good field for your average music school. Of course, it diminishes the chance that there is going to be any one chord free of split notes, but it’s true that music like this demands a substantial battery.
I hadn’t heard the symphony before. It had lots of nice moments, although I must admit that the climax at the end didn’t quite do it for me to the extent that I would have liked considering the 80 minutes of teasing that led up to it. Maybe by that time Mahler was getting a bit tired, or something, just wanted to get the fucking thing finished (we can all relate to that). Or maybe he realised that he’d built up more expectation than he could possibly deal with, so he chickened out of making a full-hearted attempt.
I’m not complaining, mind you. Even though I had a long day at uni followed by a long ride in the gathering darkness followed by a flat tyre just before I got home (requiring a gallant rescue from Jo), and I would have been pretty happy to spend the evening lounging on the couch and seeing what The Panel had to say about John Howard’s trip to America, it was an evening well spent.
Summer of the Dominant Seventh
In the morning, we went surfing. We got back to the beach shack and shifted the daggy brown lounge suite to one side. With sand still crunching between our toes, we made a recording of some of the tunes we used to play when we were in high school. Yes, even in the 80’s, we were playing the songs of the 30’s …
Recorded in Middleton, SA, January 2003