First day of spring and it has rained all day.
It’s wet, cold and very, very welcome.
First day of spring and it has rained all day.
It’s wet, cold and very, very welcome.
I’ll be playing with Tess McKenna on Saturday, September 4 from 5 to 7 at the Union Hotel
109 UNION STREET
BRUNSWICK VIC 3056
The Union is a lovely pub with a great atmosphere. The last time I was there was in the Great Hailstorm of ‘10 (as we’ll all call it when we’re clacking our false teeth in the old folks’ home) and I can tell you it’s a nice place to be when the weather is cold and blustery outside. Or not.
If Abbott wins I’ll be the one sobbing into my beer.
Everlasting is the second solo CD from Rebecca Barnard, formerly of Rebecca’s Empire and Yarraville local treasure.
My first impression: quiet and restrained, occupying a very adult space between pop and cool jazz. The dove-grey cover art maybe sets up that expectation. Yes, it’ll seem soft and unassuming at first listen, but it’s a mighty album.
Everlasting is like a gemstone which might look soft and grey on the ground, but on closer inspection it’s covered all over with tiny multicoloured facets, and once you see one you discover more and more of these facets and refracted colours, all different.
Barnard, who is a foodie and radio/TV cooking personality in her other life, has another description for it.
“It’s a bit like one of those Chinese stocks that’s been simmering away for years and years,” she says of her new-found musical potency.
“The longer you let it go, the stronger it gets until it’s got all these elements that you’ve been striving for.”
I’ve been tasting this stock for a week and I keep finding more unexpected flavours. The pop sensibility of Rebecca’s Empire is still there in more uptempo songs like Give Way and Fall and Walk. The signature buzzy lead guitar still pops out on occasion (she plays all guitars on this disc) joined by clarinet, cello and other textures.
Everlasting was recorded in a few weeks in New York. Barnard deliberately took herself out of her everyday world to travel to a distant place, but to record with Barney McAll, who she had known since childhood. Other musicians are Dan Reiser (drums), Jonaton Maron (bass), Rufus Cappadocia (cello), Matt Darriau (Clarinet).
Take some time, got to move from there
All that’s left is what you bear
(Give Way)
This isn’t a CD for rushing around with a child clinging to your leg, or on the car stereo in noisy traffic. It’s a melodic meditation, with Rebecca’s sweet and husky voice telling you stories in between bursts of her signature sweet harmonies. The ingredients in the stock are the shifts and shocks of adult life, and the flavours are subtle sweet-sour-salty tastes and spices blended by a masterchef. I first listened to the title track, Everlasting, in the kitchen with distractions all around me, and it sounded unexciting, almost filler. Then I listened to it properly and now it makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Barnard invites the listener into something deeply precious and personal, hugely generous, a gift.
The boy and I are at home with colds and I’m enjoying the quiet. Outside our northern windows, on the other side of the board fence, is a strip of spotted gum, buloke, melaleuca and ironbark. Beyond that is a stretch of grass dotted with eucalypts which slopes down to a creek, which is hidden from here, and the far slope which is also half covered with eucalypts.
You may be confused if you’ve had the impression that I live in the inner city. Have I moved? Do I live on a property somewhere in the country? There are no sheep, cows or horses on the grassy paddock; a man comes every month with a ride on mower to keep the grass down. Am I some millionaire landowner?
No – I’m about 8 ks from the city centre, as the crow flies. I’m lucky enough to live in the last house on the end of a street which abuts on one of Melbourne’s linear parks, resurrected and revegetated from an old bluestone quarry in the 1970s and 80s. If I’m standing at the kitchen sink, I can just barely make out a house or two and the corner of a car park on the opposite side. If I’m sitting down, I might as well be somewhere in Gippsland.
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By sheer coincidence, just before Catherine Deveny was sacked from her AGE gig for tasteless twitters about iconic Orstralians, I clicked onto a masterpiece by Lawrence Money in a spirit of WTF-is-he-saying now. Deveny’s twitters were, to put it mildly, a bit ordinary, but look at what Fairfax publishes on its “blog” section: Could Pauline Hanson be right?. (Previously: “Three Cheers for Pauline Hanson!“)
Money has been around forever on the “social” pages, drip, drip, dripping a kind of slow poison against anyone he sees as being leftyscum, but evidently in Modern Times his previously thinly concealed xenophobia, sexism and homophobia has kicked up a notch. Here’s another one: Enoch Speaks from the Grave!. That is, Enoch “Rivers of Blood” Powell. But obviously Money’s on first name terms.
I’m starting to see that little guy’s moustache in quite a different way.
I don’t know that if I were in Fairfax management’s shoes – a strange place to be, I agree – I would necessarily find Deveny the worst trollumnist on the payroll. A writer who, in her own time, although in a public forum (her “passing notes in class” defence was unbelievably silly), made a couple of rather horrible bad taste jokes about a two very successful people; versus someone who, in the Fairfax online space, contributes to the ongoing drip, drip, drip of polemic against asylum seekers and people of other races and religions?
If I were Rove or Bindi, I’d be hurt by the Deveny tweets. They would be like a little savage kick to the gut, those jokes. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. (And of course they are not me, and possibly they weren’t offended at all…)
But more importantly, Rove and Tasma and Bindi aren’t threatened. “Offended” doesn’t cover how an immigrant or asylum seeker might feel, perhaps traumatised already by war and suffering and then subjected to “opinion” articles like this. Many of them, of course, won’t see the article, but they’ll certainly be aware of the zeitgeist which it feeds. “Offended” doesn’t cover physical personal injury at the hands of people who are given courage and targets identified by this stuff. People have died and they are still dying, some just around the corner from me, so perhaps this is a little close to home… literally.
And Money keeps drip-drip-dripping out his poison in the pages, social and online, of the AGE. I don’t know that I’d bone either of them. But I know which one “offends” me more.
You know when a government come up with something that just really stinks of “cooked up by a PR company”? To give him credit, our State Premier John Brumby took on board that the recent attacks on Indian students and workers in Melbourne really did have a racist component and didn’t try to take the “Racist? Who? Us? How dare you!” route. But. Come on. Wasn’t there anyone in the State PR machine to say “hang on a minute guys, I think this might cause widespread uncontrollable laughter, eyerolling and blowing of mighty raspberries from the people we are trying to impress with our Sincerity™?
A FORMER AFL footballer is the nation’s first “respect” minister after being appointed by the Victorian government to tackle the growing racism and alcohol fuelled violence problems in the state.
Premier John Brumby announced Justin Madden would be the minister for the “respect agenda” as part of his election year cabinet reshuffle following the shock resignation of embattled Transport Minister Lynne Kosky this week.
I mean… Madden! Not only does he come from the background of Australian Rules football – a milieu which is trying with limited success to shake off its reputation for a lack of respect when it comes to women and people of other races and cultures. He’s also the minister least likely to be associated with the word “respect” by the long suffering inhabitants of Victoria. He has a long history of showing respect to developers and money, and none to architecturally significant buildings, grasslands, coastal communities or the planning rules set up to make our city livable. This leaked email about setting up a false public consultation process for a development has shown just how much respect Madden and the Vic Government have for the people of his State and the iconic buildings and places which they love.
Really, I’m not under any illusion that the Victorian government has our best interests at heart – let alone those of international students – but you’d think with all the money from developers pouring into the party coffers, they’d be able to come up with a more sophisticated PR response to the problem.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T – Find out what it means, before you create a ministry of it.
Crossposted at Larvatus Prodeo, with bonus Bernice
Wow, a famous blogger and scientist coming to my town! When I found out last year that Pharyngula blogger P Z Myers would be coming to Melbourne this march for the Global Atheist Convention, I thought it’d be fun to book a few seats and see who might be interested in coming. I thought I might bring my Dad, a determined atheist, as well, although he wouldn’t be physically up to it unless the disabled access was well up to scratch.
Looks like I won’t be going at all, though. The convention’s already sold out, and it’s sold out as an indirect consequence of the Australian government favouring religious events over secular ones (with some notable exceptions, see below.)
Last year, the Parliament of the Worlds Religions received $2 million in funding from the Federal government, plus half a mil from the City Council, while the Atheist convention received nothing from any level of government. Some people (see the Pharyngula thread I linked to in the first paragraph) would say that it’s not the Government’s place to fund any particular event. I could go along with that, except that it seems to be their place to fund religious conferences.
Oh, but, you’ll say, the Victorian State government gives plenty of money to secular events. Yeah, the ones which are elevated to quasi-religions: AFL football celebrations and the Grand Prix, Festival of the Great God Car, which is costing us around $40 – $50 million this year.
I’m glad that the convention sold out, but disappointed to miss out on P.Z. And I’m disappointed that religious events can attract Government sponsorship (while many religions are awash with followers’ money) and a secular event is given the thumbs down. I would expect that in the US, but not here.
As of Monday after next, SO no longer has a job.
He hasn’t been a casualty of the financial crisis. He no longer has a job because things are going so well. Mr Bucket sales are through the roof and he can’t keep up.
You’ll remember that Mr Bucket started Going Off back in March. I forgot to blog about the Rose Street Market fashion-show-with-models for L’Oreal Fashion Week. Which was a whole lot of fun – see the ultra-professional Bucket segment here. Ahem.
He’s started running the stall on St Kilda Esplanade on Sundays and has been included in this book.
Wolf at the Door, a new place in Hepburn Springs, bought a fuckton of T shirts and were sold out by the weekend after that. He also had a writeup in Men’s Style mag – no link for that.
Week after next Mr Bucket moves into his new studio in an old factory in Brooklyn, next to an artisan associated with the Wolf at the Door, who runs a bronze casting foundry.
Oh, and he has bought this thing, which is really cute, but the exciting part for me is that our family mitsu-bashi isn’t the Bucket car any more and I get to do things on weekends like a normal person!
So, life is set to change. It seems all go for the Buckets and unusual and exciting things are happening all the time. SO has his books all in order and is doing his own super and insurance and everything properly. I’ll be looking at the Dow and the Futsi and the All Ordinaries with more than usual anxiety in the next twelve months and hoping we don’t have this W-shaped recession that some party poopers are talking about.
Excuse me while I just go and hyperventilate into this brown paper bag.
[Part One]
So, I’m sitting around the table with the people I volunteer with at Scarysuburb High, and the conversation turns to the people who are pushing for a new high school closer to where I live. I said that I hadn’t joined the group except as an email listee, because I’ve chosen to put my limited effort into Daughter’s school and there are only so many hours in the day, but I admired them for their support of the bigger picture and of public education.
Well, said one of the other mums, have a look at this then. And when I saw the article in the local newspaper she had brought with her, I realised what she meant. The group supports public education – just not the public education that the rest of us are using. Because the real public education is too scary!
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Someone mentioned that it had been a while since I posted on schools. I’ve written letters to the paper, and thought deep thinky-thoughts about it. There’s a Movement going on in our neighbourhood, and it shows a burgeoning support for public education. But, contrary pinkofemmoblogger that I am, I can’t find it my heart to support them all the way. Why, you say? It’ll take a while to explain.
In my area, we’re spoiled for choice when it comes to Primary schools. When we moved here, we had three nearly equidistant public schools to choose from, all bright, well resourced and with high morale. We ended up choosing the one just across a park from our house, which the kids could walk to once they were old enough. I even discovered that I had some distant relatives in the area and one, about my age, had taught at that school under the existing principal. How nice is that?
In the matter of high schools, we are not so spoiled. We did have a local high school, which fell victim to the Kennett government school-closing orgy. We do have a local school which is only five kilometres away, and is easily accessible by a bus service which goes right by the school doors.
It happens that this is the school which the daughter attends and at which she’s relentlessly pursuing a highly academic programme, with plenty of input from some impressive and motivated teachers. This school excels in a broad range of areas, with special emphasis on music and the arts, including film and TV, and they excel in maths, science and technology as well.
Here’s the thing: It bears the Scarysuburb name. And it appears that since my area became gentrified, and the Audis and SUVs and two-storey extensions covered the land, the incoming population have the opportunity to send their children there. But the parents who “support public education” don’t want to send their children to Scarysuburb High, because they see it as dangerous, or beyond help, or whatever, because it is part of the existing system. And as everyone knows, the existing public system is scary and failing. They fail to see that it’s the flight of the middle classes to the private and Catholic systems that is leaving the public system underfunded and in danger of becoming a “safety net”.
They want something better, somehow, built for them, so that their kids won’t have to mix with the presumed dangerous paint-sniffers and ice dealers at Scarysuburb High and they will not have to go on a terrifying, twenty-minute bus ride to (gasp) an adjoining suburb.
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Nick Possum
Uncensor