Adelaide
I finished work at 1am on Thursday night. It was about 1:30 by the time I got home, and maybe 3 before I wound down and went to sleep. I had to be up at 5:30 to get to the airport, so my first day in Adelaide was spent in something of a stupor. Got a good sleep last night, though (after dozing through important sections of “One Hour Photo”, meaning that I was even more confused than could be expected given the plot).
What’s to report. Well, Adelaide has acquired a Borders and The Big Issue, but other than that remains much the same. The public transport system still sucks. I got on the airport bus, and the driver asked where I wanted to go.
“To the city.”
“Whereabouts?”
Wow, I thought, door-to-door service. Well, no. The bus stops at about eight different places (the last of which, it turned out, was where I wanted to get off). Thing is, nowhere does it tell you what these eight places are. There’s no map or timetable or anything at the airport that prepares you for this bloke asking where you want to get off and getting frustrated when you’re confused. It was a small problem for me, but a much bigger problem for the tourist who didn’t speak much English and was obviously just in Adelaide for a short stopover. All he wanted to do was have a look around a town. He was completely unfamiliar with the city. He was made to feel like an absolute idiot by the driver. “Where. Do. You. Want. To. Go?” etc. The best the tourist could come with was “Famous prace”, but of course the driver, apart from being an all-round dickhead, was the sort of all-round dickhead who refuses to understand anyone speaking in a strong accent. (Of course, Adelaide doesn’t exactly brim with “famous praces”, but that’s beside the point). The SA Tourism Commission promotes Adelaide as a well kept secret. This driver was clearly guarding the secret closely.
I got to King William Street, and waited 40 minutes for a bus that’s supposed to come every 10. I’d forgotten why public transport always used to be the last of last resorts when I lived here.
It’s been raining pretty constantly since I’ve been here. While Melbourne edges closer to more water restrictions, Adelaide residents are being flooded out of their houses. The lawns all look like they do in Ireland. (Ever since I dug up our back lawn and replanted it, I’ve become a bit of a lawn-phile. Jason’s place, where I’m staying, has Santa Anna Couch, much hardier than the Highland Bent that I’ve planted at our place, but less soft and visually appealing. It’s benefited from the rain, but suffers from bogginess where the water overflows from the canvas canopy that covers his entertaining area. And yes, I am uncomfortable with how much all of this sounds like the script of a lifestyle show.)
Speaking of lifestyle shows, the inflight magazine on Virgin (”Voyeur”, thanks Richard Branson you sex machine) is execrable. Packing cliches into a smiley monologue on a TV show for aspirant voters is one thing, but seeing them in print is somehow even more stomach turning. I’ll have to note some examples on the flight home. I couldn’t bring myself to save my complimentary copy.
Watching the clock in an internet cafe makes me nostalgic for my cruise ship days. It also takes its toll on my editing and proofreading, so consider my excuses made. There are half a dozen ten-year olds playing Quake against each other to my left, so I’d better go before I get fragged.
Sub-Standard
Dear Subway,
In Australia, a marinara sauce has seafood in it. If you’re going to play American ads on Australian TV, couldn’t you at least spring for an Australian voiceover, one that doesn’t create the impression that your meatballs are going to be garnished with mussels? You have Australian franchisees, couldn’t you have least checked with them? Or do you just not care. Do you expect that you can bully our language into acquiescence along with our small businesses?
Dichotomy-ectomy
I’ve spent a bit of time recently reading blogs that I disagree with. I’d recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind feeling their blood boil now and then, and having a few beliefs challenged (although perhaps not the ones you’d expect).
A few interesting thoughts occurred to me as I ploughed through a series of Anyone who declares an affiliation to one side of politics immediately concedes credibilitydodgy rants on various topics (many of which could be described as “right-wing screeching”, although I’m reluctant to classify them that way for reasons that I’ll get to later).
The first was to be surprised that I hadn’t stumbled across any of this stuff before. I’ve been surfing the net for quite a while now and I’ve read my share of output from loonies. But my blog reading has rarely taken me into vehement political territory (the same cannot be said of my blog writing), and when it has, it has tended to be somewhat left-leaning (a term I use with the same hesitation for the same reasons).
I surmised that my blog experience was almost self-fulfilling. I stumbled across one or two blogs early on, and the reason I kept reading them was that I liked what they had to say. If I’d happened across a site that had a banner across the top saying “The UN Wants Your Gun”, I probably would have hid my disquiet beneath a snort of contempt, and moved on. As it happened, the other blogs I ended up reading were mostly linked from the blogs I already read. Thus, politically speaking (and it should be noted that many of the blogs had little political of which to speak), all those on my roll tended to be of a similar ilk.
That relates to my second thought. A lot of these sites that I have recently visited have expressed views that many of us would characterise as extreme. That being the case, I expected that the comments on these blogs would be swollen with vindictiveness, from people like me whose stomachs had been turned. Interestingly, though, I was wrong. Most of the comments were of the “Well said” variety, with only the occasional dissenter (like me).
Based on my first point, that should come as no surprise. People like to read blogs they agree with, in the same way as they incline towards newspapers and books that they agree with, a trend which is exacerbated by the common linkage between blogs of similar persuasion. Not everyone wants to get all stirred up over their morning coffee – they’d much rather have their viewpoints affirmed.
In terms of my own beliefs, not much of what I read posed much of a challenge. Most of it was notable for its shallowness, its reactionary stance, its predictable adherence to a political agenda that seems to have been defined from the start, and its tendency to dichotomise discussions into a conflict between “left” and “right”. There wasn’t much there to make me reconsider any of the principles on which I build my political position. Rather, it made be seek to clarify exactly what that position is. Here is where it got interesting.
When I read material that is so objectionable that it makes my eyeballs throb, my instinctive reaction is to pull the argument to pieces using every resource at my disposal. (If the original poster either a) goes silent or b) calls me a Communist, I can take myself to have succeeded). I’ve had a fair bit of practice. I’ve already applied this sort of scrutiny to my own ideas, with the consequence that they’ve changed quite a lot over the last fifteen years or so. Trouble is, my recent experience with extremist loonies on one side of politics has alerted me to something of a double standard with regard to the tests that I apply to theories of extremist loonies from the other side. It’s not that I agree with them. It’s just that I don’t go to too much effort to attack them, perhaps because I feel that even if their ideas are wrong, their hearts are in the right place. It’s easy (and fun) to attack a greedy compassionless neoliberal. It takes more stomach to deliver a similar crushing to the similarly dodgy ideas of a tree-hugging hippie.
In fact, of course, there’s not much point in attacking either, except maybe for personal satisfaction. Rather than wasting time on their respective viewpoints (the idiocy of which, in many cases, speaks for itself), it’s much more interesting to look at the thing the two sides share in common. Namely, an adherence to orthodoxy which blinds them to reason.
The “right” attacks the “left” for being blind to the consequences of its philosophies. The “left” does the same for the “right”. Many of the attacks are wholly justified, because neither side seems to apply serious scrutiny to its own ideas. Rather, both fall in behind the set of ideological rules which define them as a group. The tendency would be more forgivable if that orthodoxy remained constant. What is laughable is the extent to which one ideology is set aside and another substituted whenever it is seen as being necessary for the sake of preserving power. Witness the silence of the trade union movement during the large-scale privatisation that took place under Hawke-Keating, or the support of the (historically non-interventionist) Right for an invasion of Iraq, simply because it happened under Howard. It almost goes without saying that the Left would have screamed blue murder if the Commonwealth Bank had been sold under a Liberal government, and that the Right would now be sticking the boot into Kim Beazley if it had been his government selling dodgy intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. The issues themselves are irrelevant: all that counts is the political colour of the players involved. Thus, lively minds which might otherwise have turned themselves to the complex questions surrounding the nation’s best interests are otherwise engaged, attacking the other side for the sake of attacking it. Or, more correctly, for the sake of seeing it’s man get his hands on the reins of power.
(It should be noted, interestingly, that the Right seems to identify its opponent much more pragmatically, using “Leftist” as a generic pejorative, whereas the Left chooses more issue-specific insults like “warmonger”, “fat cat”, “enviro-vandal” etc. The Left scores half a point for at least identifying the issue along with the enemy).
A possible conclusion of all this is that anyone who declares an affiliation to one side of politics immediately concedes credibility. If you want to argue about rights and wrongs, ethics and morals, freedom, tolerance, economics and the ways in which the nation should be run, that’s great. But the moment you start framing that discussion in terms of Left v Right, what you’re talking about is none of the above. What you’re in fact talking about is power, and who’s going to wield it. All the pretences of ideology evaporate when the business of winning power comes to the fore (cf Kim Beazley, election 2001). If you want to discuss the issues themselves, as distinct from the political game, you have to be prepared to abandon your chosen political party to their fate, and assess the arguments on their merits. To do otherwise (without acknowledging that your argument is deeply informed by considerations of power) is intellectually dishonest.
I’ve tried to found my own political beliefs on solid ground. Some of that ground has been traditionally occupied by the Left; some of it by the Right. Much of it has now been abandoned by both. From now on, my political discussions will seek to make my beliefs and their justifications clear, lest I should be mentally pigeonholed by a reader into either category, and have all sorts of other beliefs inferred upon me by association. The Cold War is over: now we need a much more complex model than the Left-Right divide if we are to understand the ways in which power is going to continue to be wielded over our lives. It would be good if political bloggers, who are uniquely empowered to register a conscience vote on each and every issue, took the opportunity to shed their allegiances. When I read one that hasn’t, I’ll be led to one of two conclusions. Either the blogger must be a residual true believer (which would be hard to imagine, given the lifetime’s commitment to wilful blindness that this would require), or he/she is an aspirant to a career with a major political party, seeking to make sure that nothing embarrassingly off-message is left behind for political opponents to retrieve from the Google cache and table in Parliament.
Cafe Sobriety
It seems pretty common for middle-aged people to get jack of working for a bureaucracy and decide they want to take a retirement package and start a little cafe somewhere. I get to see it quite a bit, because many of them adopt live music as a part of their fantasy. I certainly appreciate the work when it comes along, and in a way it’s nice to be a part of someone’s dream. Unfortunately, though, I’ve seen many of those people’s dreams crash and burn after a very short period of time.
I’m sure that most of these budding entrepreneurs go into business with their eyes open. You couldn’t, I would think, look at the rapid attrition rate of cafes generally and imagine that your new baby wouldn’t be subject to the same pressures. I get the impression, though, that many of them just decide to take a chance, open the doors and hope that people come in. It’s as if they say “Well, the business is fickle, it might or might not work, but I’d rather go broke giving it a go than sit behind this desk for the rest of my life.” Although that’s an admirable sentiment in a way, it would be dumb if they didn’t then do everything possible to make sure that their business wasn’t one of the ones to fall by the wayside. Having stood there watching quite a few businesses go under (to the mocking accompaniment of my peppy walking bass lines), I feel as if I’m in a position to offer a few pointers. If you’re planning to take the plunge, here’s what I’d advise.
1. Hospitality is brutal. You’ve probably clicked latte glasses in dozens of cafes as you gazed around and theorised how you could do it better, but in fact you have no idea what makes the place live or die. Hire someone who does. Pay a manager with lots of experience. Someone who tally of foccaccias served exceeds your tally of paper-jams cleared. Listen to what they tell you. Don’t imagine that because you’ve fronted the cash for the venture, you know best how to run it.
2. Don’t think that your liberation from the world of suits and ties means that you have to hang around your new cafe all day wearing ill-fitting jeans and a worried expression. If you really have to be there, either keep yourself out of sight of the punters, or blend in with them. Grab a table, be served good coffee by the experienced staff you’ve hired, relax and enjoy yourself, add to the ambience of the place. Don’t put staff and customers alike on edge by fussing about like the adult chaperone at a 21st party. Atmosphere is what attracts people to one cafe while they ignore the one next door. Everyone who is associated with the place is a part of the atmosphere, and that includes you.
3. If you want to have live music, that’s terrific, but only do it if you’re prepared to make it work. Go and hear as many bands as you can, and think carefully about what sort of feeling they’re going to create if you stand them in the corner of your cafe. How is that going to fit in with your customers? Who are your customers? Are they inner-city hipsters who are going to get off on funky grooves even at the expense of conversation? Are they octogenarians who’d give their last squeeze of denture paste for some tin pan alley songs? Are they self-important wankers who want nothing less than a source of competition in their loud quest for other people’s attention? It’s important to choose a band that suits (bearing in mind that shopping around by price is generally not the best way to accomplish this objective).
Also, remember that the value of live music to your business cannot be measured from week to week by inspecting the bottom line on the particular night the band’s on. Yes, the band may come with a ready-made following (although the number of extra bums that can be expected on your seats on any one night will be small, unless you’re planning to hire big names), but that’s the least of the ways in which the band can help you. Put simply, live music helps to distinguish your place in the minds of customers who have probably eaten out at half a dozen other places that week. Most of the competition can offer waitresses that smile and a decent marinara, so you’ve got to present them with something unique if they’re going to remember the name of your place and mention it to their friends (and this is where your extra business will actually come from). If you stick with it, music can put your venue on the map, and make it somewhere that people have heard of, as distinct from the thousand anonymous eateries that are a coffee machine and a wine of the day and a generic menu. A great night out with great live music is something that everyone remembers, and if your name can be associated with that sort of experience, then you’ll build up a great business. If, however, you’re imagining that queues will start forming outside the door the moment the drummer sets up his cymbals for the first gig, then it would really be better if you gave it a miss and saved everyone concerned a great deal of heartache.
Some places thrive in the simplest ways. Look at Ray, on Victoria Street in Brunswick. It’s a tiny place, and the menu is pretty much limited to toasted sandwiches. But they’re great toasted sandwiches, which go with great coffee, and it’s set up in such a way as to make it a terrifically relaxing spot to sit and read the paper on a rainy day. That’s if you can get a seat.
Others (like, for example, The Big House, just over Sydney Road and down a bit), become empty caverns despite a huge investment in live music, signage, fancy outdoor furniture and probably a hundred other attempts at promotion that have gone unnoticed. Drinking coffee in there, you can almost hear the clocks ticking, and you can feel the owner’s red-rimmed eyes focused on you, wondering desperately why you’re the only one there. It’s about as relaxing as visiting a nursing home. Unfortunately, that particular place suffers most from its size. Nothing puts people at ease like the presence of plenty of other people (which is why smart restaurateurs always seat their first customers in the window to make the place look full to anyone on the outside). The Big House could host an Italian wedding and still feel empty. That’s how Big it is.
Y
eah, it’s a business that anyone would do best to steer clear of if they’re not into stress and heartbreak. I’m grateful that some people take it on, so that I have places to play, and places to sit and write blog entries over breakfast (like I’m doing now in a great place down by the bay, the Parkdale Beach Cafe). I don’t have all the answers as to why some places work and others don’t, as evidenced by the fact that plenty of cafes fail without making any of the mistakes that I’ve pointed out. Still, even if fate has the knives out for your establishment, you might as well protect your jugular as best you can.
Solving Sorities
The Sorities Paradox grapples with the problem of how to rule boundaries around broad concepts. If you take a grain of rice, then add another grain to it, all you have is two grains of rice. But as you keep adding grains, you eventually have a pile of rice, and if you keep going, a heap. You couldn’t say, though, at exactly what point your collection of rice grains becomes a pile, or when it stops being a pile and becomes a heap. You wouldn’t even say that one grain of rice could ever make the difference between one and the other. How is this so? (Check out this interactive example - trying to pick the point when red become purple, and then the point when purple becomes red, and finding, surprise surprise, that it’s a different point).
Yesterday, I found myself facing a Sorities Paradox of my own. When does a tolerable situation become an intolerable one? At what point does an additional irritation, however minor, tip the balance in such a way that an activity that was viable becomes unviable?
I often do gigs that are unjustifably underpaid. I often have to wait a long time for the money to come through. I often do gigs in spite of ethical conflict. I often find myself, on a gig, being treated with less than the respect I deserve.
All in all, I’m in the habit of taking every scrap of work that I can possibly fit in, on the basis that it’s the only way to insulate myself against the inherent fickleness of the music industry. The money I got for tonight’s gig might be crummy, but its value will seem to multiply the next time I look in my diary and see empty weeks ahead. So yes, I put up with all of these things, sometimes in combination. The particular gig I was doing yesterday, and which I’ve been doing monthly for a while, was one which had always come with quite a collection of irritations. In fact, all of those I’ve just mentioned. But I did it, happily enough, for quite a long time.
It’s always been the case on this gig that there’s a problem with the background music. They like to leave it on while the band is playing (it’s a wandering trad jazz trio). I’d always assumed it was because there was some policy that there should be background music playing (maybe based on some research that people feed more into poker machines when themselves fed on a diet of insipid muzak), and our sound, since it would not carry to the outlying corners of the establishment and would thus leave some pensioners being robbed in relative silence, was not sufficient. Yesterday, I discovered that there’s another reason: the meal announcements (as in, “Number 29, your schnitzel is ready”) were going through the same system, and the volume for both muzak and distorto-number-calling was controlled (get this) by the same knob. So the minimum-wage drones, presumably not payed enough to crank the knob up for the announcements and down in between, refused outright to turn the music down. I don’t know whether it was the sheer technological stupidity of it all offending my gadgeteer’s sensibilities; whether it was the look of withering neutrality (thanks, David Foster Wallace, for the only phrase that comes close to describing it) on Mr Morethanmy Jobsworth’s face as he shrugged off our polite request; or whether it was the fact that the muzak was just that ten decibels louder than its normal, inconsiderate level. Whatever the cause, a line was crossed. The gig which had hitherto been a modest pile of modest irritations, became, on that day, a full-blown heap of shit.
And so, I’m going to go back on the habit of a lifetime: next time it comes along, I’m going to say “no”. I’ll lose the money (or at least, the three-month chose in action that I normally get in lieu of actual payment as such), but I’ll gain the satisfaction of knowing that, as tolerant as I am of many things that I probably shouldn’t be, I do have my limits, and what’s more, I know when I’ve reached them.
Pixellated
Well, spent the evening counting pixels and marvelling at how one version of a browser can render the same HTML completely differently from the subsequent version. I have nothing but respect for people who wrestle with web designs for a living. Knowing what you’re doing with the code is challenge enough, but it seems as if that’s only the beginning. You’ve then got to work your way around the inexplicable idiosyncracies of half a dozen different browsers, none of which (I would have thought) have any excuse for not doing well what is (it seems to me) a pretty simple task, in the annals of software achievement. It’s annoying enough for me as I try in vain to punch above my weight in geekiness terms. Surely one would be ropable if one did it professionally, and was forced to have the work in which one took pride compromised by a lack of similar pride on the part of under-paid contract coders in Redmond.
Quirks
Sorry if anyone’s browser is freaking out as a result of my design changes. I think I might give up trying to make this thing work with relative positioning. Every time I think I’ve made it work, I have a look in a different browser at a different resolution and it buggers the whole thing up inexplicably. I’m hoping that if I do it pixel by pixel there will be fewer opportunities for confusion.
Post Mortem
Well, if there’s one thing more boring than studying for exams, it’s talking about how they went. Walking out of an exam hall and asking “How did you go?” is a little like walking out of a cinema and asking “What did you think?”: questions and answers so predictable that they’re not worth indulging in.
Having said all that, the exam today was a bit ordinary. Not that I did badly (hopefully). It’s just that, out of maybe fifteen offences that were covered in the course, I’d studied in detail and prepared prepared cheat sheets (meticulously designed and CorelDrawn in glorious 7-point Tahoma with boxes and arrows) for about twelve. Eleven of those cheat sheets had made it into a spiral-bound booklet that I bore proudly into the exam, rejoicing in my mature-age-student swottiness until one of the questions started me hunting for the twelfth (which had hidden itself, by virtue of the bizarre behaviour of Adobe Acrobat, in an obscure folder, and thus missed the final stage of publishing). Of the three remaining areas, two (reckless endangerment and indecent assault) were pretty obscure and unlikely to be covered, and the third (complicity) was so hazy and undefined that had defied my half-hearted attempts to reduce it to an orderly flowchart. So it was with some chagrin that I saw complicity featuring prominently in two of the three questions, alongside reckless endangerment and indecent assault. It’s not that I had too much trouble improvising answers. It’s just that the paper could scarcely have been structured better to probe my weakest areas. Maybe this will be one of those papers which I feel ambivalent about and end up getting great results for. Or maybe it’s time that I lowered my expectations a little.
I left the exam and drove home in time to get changed and head into the VCA, where I was playing for Erica’s honours recital. My life seems to be full of bizarre non-sequiturs these days.
Tonight Erica and George and I went out to dinner in Fitzroy, and then out to a bar afterwards to have a listen to a band. I felt pretty proud of myself, reclining on daggy couches, rubbing shoulders with all the boys and girls dressed like grandmas and grandpas, regarding the sea of woolen beanies through a haze of herbal cigarette smoke, grooving to the band and generally tolerating the scene almost as readily as I would have in my early 20’s. Staying up late. Or so I thought, until I got back to the car and decided to check on which of the wee hours I’d made it through to. 11:30. Consider fountain of youth drained.
Driving home, though, I was comforted by the thought that I was happy. In my early 20’s, I might have been driving home at four in the morning, but would have had company in the form of a sort of wistful melancholy. There was this uneasy equilibrium which I was in the habit of trying to strike between my urgent desire to foster a sex life and my compulsive need to maintain dignity. The melancholy arose out of the realisation that, in trying to balance sex with self-respect, I was cheating myself out of both. This, I should point out, represents the most charitable analysis possible of a time which, for all its pretensions of bohemian hipness, sucked.
Now, with sexuality and self esteem both kicking goals, it’s perhaps not such a bad thing that my night-life is settling for rushed behinds. As long as I still tread the sticky carpet now and then when the fancy takes me, I think my live-music-venue chops will stay pretty much in order. Maybe I can start a savings jar for all the money that I’m not spending on Febreze to get the smoke out of my clothes. Might get me a nice lawnmower, or a barbecue, or something.
Sorry
Head full of crap re exams. Can’t form sentences. Thoughts compulsively summarised. Capacity for prose may resurface post crim law Tues.
Overdone
So I’ve got this idea which suggests that one of the important things for me to do while I’m studying for exams is to make sure that I exercise properly so that I sleep properly so that my brain will be well primed for the few bits of information that I get around to dribbling into it. So today I went cycling for three hours, and consequently I’ve spent the whole evening passed out on the couch instead of ploughing through case law. Life in balance: elusive as ever.