13 Monday Aug 2007
Posted in politics and current affairs, Western Australia
Rising cost of living hits low paid – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
In WA, average wages have gone up 5%; rental by 17% and food by 11%. This is why the mining boom is bad! It’s created two classes of people in Western Australia – those that win and those that lose. I hope all the minerals run out soon.
(Yes, I realise that would be disastrous for the economy.)
06 Monday Aug 2007
Posted in music
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Me and Nicole went to see the Cure on Saturday night.
It was at Challenge Stadium, a basketball stadium, and the setting for part of my novel The Fur. It was strange to be back in that place again; the last time was nine years ago when I was playing volleyball at countryweek. Robert Smith was standing on that same ground where I’d been playing sport.
They played for over three hours, a loud and generous set that seemed to cover every single album except Bloodflowers. (I wonder if he regrets Bloodflowers? I have always liked it and I always will.) Some of the songs I remember him playing are:
– Us or them
– A hundred years (a real treat)
– Wrong number
– Lovesong (at this point Kath and Kim next to me got up and did a chicken dance.)
– Plainsong
– Pictures of you (another highlight for me; but if only he’d played Last dance.)
– Fascination street (actually this was early in the set)
– Deep green sea
– Friday I’m in love (was this in the encore? I think so)
– The kiss (the only song I remember repeated from the last Perth concert in 2000 – when he played every single Bloodflowers song.)
– Why can’t I be you?
– Just like heaven
– Jumping someone else’s train
– Killing an arab
– The forest
– The walk
– Never enough
– Three imaginary boys
– Fire in Cairo
The bass player, Simon Gallup, was annoying, he kept on bending his knees and crouching and swaying; he didn’t have any of the dignity of the others. He looked like a little boy playing with his older brothers. Even if he’s been with the band since the start.
I wish Robert had said more, revealed something of himself, or about the songs. I guess he wanted them to speak for themselves. At one point he said he wasn’t saying much because he kept forgetting he spoke the same language as us.
With two guitars, a bass and drums in a heavy rock stadium setup, the interpretation of the songs was really aggressive. I guess that’s my main criticism. I would have liked to have seen a softer, more varied performance. And keyboards. Give us that 80s sound! Instead, we had a clear message that ‘we’re not too old for this’.
UPDATE: Here’s a complete setlist-
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ChainofFlowers/aug0407.html
31 Tuesday Jul 2007
Posted in film review, Western Australia
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An Australian survival film, with a gentle sense of humour. A group of refugees are people-smuggled to a remote beach on the Western Australian coast. (It looks like Western Australia, but the film was actually shot in South Australia!) The Iraquis go one way; the Vietnamese another. But in the end, an Iraqui engineer and a Vietnamese youth with an Australian father are forced to journey together with one of the people smugglers, while some larrikin Army reservists chase them.
It’s an excellent film, resisting easy classification, and Australian in a way thankfully different to most ‘Australian’ films. There are no white leads. The main characters are Middle Eastern, Asian, Aboriginal. It’s refreshing to see the Australian landscape through their eyes.
With so many different languages being spoken, the subtitles are crucial, and they’re well handled. Instead of being added on the bottom, they appear above the head of the character speaking. I guess this is only possible because of the big strips of barren landscape or sky that the text can go over the top of.
For me, the highlight of the film comes when the Iraqui engineer gets an ancient wreck of a ute going on three wheels and driving in reverse, sitting on top of the cabin like a ship.
The film is set in 1990; I can’t see any good reason why, except perhaps that the film starts in Vietnam 1972, with the youth’s father leaving his pregnant girlfriend. Perhaps left behind during the Vietnam War?
31 Tuesday Jul 2007
Posted in Uncategorized
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I read the Last Battle – C.S. Lewis’s final Narnia book – twice, but I never noticed the strong suggestion that the humans who have come to Narnia have been killed in a train crash. I found out this was the case after reading it as a casual aside in a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
It seems that all the Narnia ‘children’ – barring Susan, who’s rejected Aslan’s ways – are on the same train, having met up. Conveniently, this means that they all die at the same time and appear in Narnia simultaneously, where they are in high demand for the last battle.
If Narnia is the afterlife, then the idea is this: we die because we’re needed in the afterlife. This is a very comforting idea. My Granny died soon after Ron Pop because he was lonely in the afterlife and wanted her there as well. Perhaps some heavenly band needed Ian Pop to play drums, and that’s why he died of lung cancer in his early seventies. But I don’t know what God wanted with Mark Sandman, lead singer of Morphine, so young nor my favourite theologian, John Howard Yoder, who should have been given another twenty years to amaze the world. And then why such high demand for people in the afterlife during wars and epidemics?
Well, I might respond, these people were dying anyway, and it just so happens that God manages to make good the tragedy of their death by creating a reason for it – invisibly to us who are left behind.
Okay, I could almost live with that, but I’ve got a more serious and sustained objection. I don’t believe afterlife is lived in an invisible realm running parallel to this one like Narnia. I believe that the afterlife is resurrection, that it takes place on an Earth made right. Whatever existence we might have immediately after death, it is but a shadow, a waiting for the time of our resurrection with incorruptible bodies on a new Earth.
C.S. Lewis, I’m sure, never meant me to read his eschatology too literally. But I do think that a lot of Christians see ‘heaven’ as a Narnia-like realm in its basic disconnection from Earth.
24 Tuesday Jul 2007
Posted in music
This album was released on my wife’s 26th birthday. We were in Geraldton, four hundred kilometres from Perth, and yet there it was sitting in Sanity for $20 on Thursday morning. Nicole is so kind; it was her birthday and yet she bought it as a present for me!
I was waiting in a department store, so I read over the lyrics to Zeitgeist before I listened to the album. I was not impressed. I found them almost unreadable. (Most lyrics sound a bit wrong read without the music, I think; I wasn’t expecting W.H. Auden – but these were particularly bad.)
Billy should stick to personal angst; I’m afraid his detours into politics and religion are unconvincing. I think he is a stupid genius – he’s got this intuition for writing brilliant songs, but he’s not a thinker.
I haven’t listened to it enough time to form a good judgement yet. It seems to sound more like Billy’s solo album than any Pumpkins album. There are a couple of songs which I like already. And let me say this: I’m so glad this album has been released! I had given up on ever hearing new Pumpkins songs seven years ago.
10 Tuesday Jul 2007
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The first list I paid any attention to was this one from Modern Library, released in 1998. In 2002, I was intimidated by how many my friend Tim had read and how many I hadn’t. Now a couple of times a year I read books from the list. It has been widely criticised because of its lack of women writers and its American focus. Fair criticisms – it is really a list of the 100 greatest American male novels written before 1960, with a couple of extras.
I only recently discovered how the list was chosen, and it made me like it less – nine writers were asked which, of a list of 400 books (published in the Modern Library) they would recommend. The books were ranked by numbers of recommendations.
That is a very limiting way to make a list! And yet I’ve made some amazing discoveries from the lists – books which have become favourites of mine, including John Updike’s Rabbit series; John Cheever’s Wapshot Chronicles and Graham Greene’s The heart of the matter.
I think the Board’s choice of James Joyce’s Ulysses as number one is a good one. It is one of my favourite novels, and an incredible literary accomplishment. I think it shows what it is to be alive better than anything else written in the twentieth century.
I have now at least begun reading 42 of the books, up from 25 back in 2002.
Being aware of the list’s limits, I would recommend it. (But you should totally ignore the Readers’ List. It is a victim of vandalism by fans of Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard etc – internet freaks who think distorting the list will make more people read their crazy books. They’re probably right.)
10 Tuesday Jul 2007
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I spend a lot of time looking over lists of the greatest books ever written. I take notice of award winners. I listen to critics.
Unpopular things. My friends regard me as either stupid or obsessive.
But critical opinion does matter. Critics are generally good readers who have read a lot and have informed opinions. I tend to enjoy highly recommended books. There are times I don’t; there are a number of critical darlings I just can’t abide – but I certainly have a good success rate.
They are subjective – but that doesn’t make them just a matter of taste. The amazing things about humans is our ability to share language and taste through the medium of culture. The books on many of the ‘greatest’ lists compiled have managed to appeal to many people for many years. So they might appeal to you too.
I’m going to start a series of posts on different lists available and how I’ve found them.
10 Tuesday Jul 2007
Posted in book review
Spoiler alert.
So much poorer than the film. Jimmy, Sean and Dave are playing in their street when Dave is abducted. He escapes four days later. Fast forward twenty-four years later, and Jimmy’s daughter is murdered. Sean is investigating the case; Dave becomes a prime suspect because he came home bloodied that night. Just before the end we realise that co-incidentally, he murdered a paedophile that night outside the same bar Jimmy’s daughter was last seen. Dave won’t tell his wife the truth; she is Jimmy’s wife’s cousin and she tells Jimmy she suspects Dave did it. Jimmy kills Dave then finds out from Sean the real killer was Katie’s boyfriend’s mute brother and his friend, jealous of the attention she got.The plot is good; it’s the uneven execution I don’t like. It starts out with an eerie, melancholic air. But then it degenerates into a type of writing that feels like a poor Hollywood script – cliches, and lines planted in people’s heads that only belong in bad movies. (See my previous post.)
07 Saturday Jul 2007
Posted in writing
I started reading Dennis LeHane’s Mystic River today and was hooked. I should read more crime fiction, more popular fiction, I thought. And then I came across a sentence that showed me the difference between popular fiction and literary fiction.
On its own this sentence I am going to share is sort of funny. Slightly amusing one liner. But in the context of a scene trying to build suspense? In the context of a serious work of fiction? It’s cringeworthy!
Are you ready…
( I hope I haven’t built this up too much, because it’s not that bad.)
Jimmy hadn’t seen anything resembling this kind of chaos since the last time he’d attended an Irish wedding with an open bar… (70)
There you have it. My conceited judgement.
07 Saturday Jul 2007
Posted in Uncategorized
I found a good site for free blog headers:
http://www.freewebpageheaders.com/gallery/
You need to register, but so far I haven’t been spammed. Seems legit to me.
One of the problems with WordPress is the difficulty in customising it. I guess it’s made for professionals, rather than amateurs like me. But even an amateur can use a WordPress template with a customisable header and then use a header from the freesite above.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 