I’m over here now home with my very own domain name.
Thanks to Sam Da Silva of Spinach 7, who hosted the Balcony and Barista on the Spinach server from May 2004 to now – that’s seven years – for nix, nothing and nada, and to David of Barista who organised it. I am so grateful to both of them.
The Cast Iron Balcony will be moving soon, somewhere away from the hackers who have made your user experience a bit substandard lately. I’ll post the new URL when I know what it is.
Meanwhile, here are some adorable dog pictures.
I hired a DVD a couple of days ago, The Tunnel. It’s a new Australian horror movie in the style popularised by Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity, although better, we thought, than either; a faux-doco complete with jumpy camera and white-on-black text. It’s interesting in several ways. Visually, it manages the jumpy-grainy-camera style much more gracefully by the simple and inspired move of making the characters a professional TV news team. It’s also interesting in the way the film is made and funded, through the new concept 135K project. But what really grabbed and held me about this film was the location – a network of subterranean tunnels underneath Sydney, which are real, and of which I was completely ignorant.
Journalist Steve Dow has visited the tunnels and other secret places in Sydney.
In the inky darkness, we sweep torch lights side to side and slosh through sludgy earth in Sydney’s great unfinished eastern suburbs subway – which would never actually see a train, but instead become an air raid shelter.
Thin tree roots drape from the ceiling and glisten in the spotlights like spiders’ webs; thicker roots that long ago sprang through wall drainage holes twist across our path. Could these gnarly tendrils really belong to the old Moreton Bay figs guarding Hyde Park above?…
…(A)fter planners and politicians disagreed on the route, work on the eastern suburbs tunnels was abruptly halted close to the ANZAC Memorial. During World War II, the tunnels were converted into a public air raid shelter, which Sydneysiders thankfully never had to press into service. Brick dividing walls were added to create smaller bomb shelter chambers. Australian Imperial Forces officers stationed down here scrawled their messages that can still be seen, including their regiment number and the date, many in 1942.
We step into a rectangular chamber flooded in ankle-deep water, in which stands a rustic steel bell with a pointy top almost as tall as a person. One of our group whacks the bell with a plank of wood: the gong sound is deafening. Sydney sound-sculpture artist Nigel Helyer created and installed the work, known as An UnRequited Space, as part of ArtSpace Sydney’s Working in Public project in 1992, employing a wooden mallet “to sound out the midnight chime on ABC National for 21 consecutive days”, Helyer says. Memo to the ABC: your microphone cable missing for 16 years is still connected between the bell and wall down here.
The bell features in the movie and you can see it in the trailer. I had wondered if it was real. The room it’s in is dry in the film, probably because of the extended drought.
As we trek north, the air becomes more humid. We climb up a rickety metal ladder through a hole only half excavated and slip down a muddy embankment, meeting the edge of “Lake St James”: the drainage system of the city outer tunnel next door, the water stretches left and out of sight for a kilometre, 10 metres wide and about five metres deep.
The NSW Government says it aims to collect rainwater in tanks from the roofs of Parliament House, the State Library and Sydney Hospital, store the water in Lake St James, and recycle it back through the non-drinking system. Well, you certainly wouldn’t ingest this stuff, its fine film of brake dust floating on top.
The lake is home to an eel named Eric: “I’ve seen him, but no-one believes me,” one CityRail employee says. He spreads his palms a metre wide. “He’s about so big. An albino!”
The abandonment of the NSW government plan to use Lake St James as a water storage reservoir for Sydney is the real-life event on which The Tunnel hinges. In the film we see some of the old wartime air raid shelter rooms and hear the story of General Macarthur possibly having an emergency bunker down there. Unfortunately, my googling failed to find any regular organised tours of the tunnels.
This film is a must-see for anyone who likes to think of the strange, secret and eerie places which exist under our feet.
The Grand Ridge Road only took two days, so there was still plenty of Easter/Anzac long weekend to check out the tourist attractions of East Gippy. Near Thorpdale, you can see this sign:
In the Easter break I did something I’d wanted to do for quite a while – go for a road trip along this road, which follows the top of the Strzlecki ranges in East Gippsland. Just myself, while the family fended for themselves at home (Mr Bucket works on weekends, of course, and the kids are allergic to country air.)
Looking north from the Grand Ridge Road, somewhere between Tarra Bulga NP and Gunyah
I have such loving memories of the scruffy, worn-down Womens Hospital in Carlton, which has moved to a new building. I had two babies, and lost two pregnancies there. Despite the ageing and creaky building, the staff were wondrous, especially the midwives. Driving past, I’d squint up the boxy building to try to guess which windows I’d been behind.
A week ago, something terrible happened to a member of our family, and so I had occasion to visit the new, you-beaut Womens Hospital in Parkville. I walked up the wide, easily accessible ramp (tick!) to the beautiful, spacious lobby (tick!) where an information section was easy to find (tick!) and found the person I was looking for in minutes.
It’s really a stunning building, and although, to me, the Women’s will always be about the staff, they now have the comfortable and beautiful working environment which they deserve. The patients and the friends and relatives who wait anxiously there benefit, too.
It’s just a shame about all the artwork. Not hanging pictures, which I was too preoccupied to notice, but the stuff that’s right up in your face: Environmental graphics, I think, is the correct term for what I’m talking about.
The new RWH features giant frosted-glass murals on the large exterior windows as you walk towards the entrance. This mural shows a younger blonde woman and a slightly older blonde woman. This is hardly a serious effort to fulfil the contractors’ brief, to portray a “broad demographic of age and culture”.
There were smaller murals on the wall facing the lifts, which were impossible to ignore for anybody entering or leaving any part of the building. These murals featured new mums and dads holding babies. Happy, happy, happy.
Although these murals are lovely and fulfil the diversity brief a little better than the one at the entrance, they completely fail the requirement to be “sensitive to the individual needs of patients and their supporters.”
Not everybody leaves the RWH with a live birth. Our family member would have had to walk past those murals as she left the hospital for the car park.
Women come to the hospital to have babies. They also come there to lose their passionately wanted babies, to have abortions, with cancer, with gynaecological troubles, with infertility.
Abstract, rather than figurative, environmental graphics would seem to be the way to go for an environment like this. The new RWH is beautiful and comfortable, but as triggery as all hell.
A lone sock waits eagerly near the campground for the Festival shuttle bus to arrive.
Not having been to the Port Fairy Festival before, I was expecting old guys with fisherman sweaters and mandolins. Not that there’s anything wrong with old guys or mandolins. There were plenty of oldies but they were as likely to be playing blues and roots music or zydeco. It’s really a blues and roots and folk and world and indie festival.
I went to see Joe Pug in more intimate mode in the smaller tent, and a second time in the full-on big venue, because he came highly recommended by the Flop Eared Mule, and hell yeah she’s not wrong.
Pug (Joe Pugliese) did both gigs completely solo, just steel string guitar and harmonica. The smaller tent suited his style better (I was able to wriggle up to the front for that, as well.) The first thing about this man is that he’s exceedingly engaging and friendly, without carefully-cultivated angst. So relaxed on stage, he could be in his kitchen. There was a veritable plague of crickets in Port Fairy that weekend, and he was heard to say “Hey, that was cool. I had to get really quiet in that mid-section there and I could actually hear crickets chirping.”
When it comes to the songs themselves, comparisons with the young Bob Dylan are inevitable. The influence is clear, along with Leonard Cohen and Woody and Arlo Guthrie. “Nation of Heat”, his indie hit from his first EP, reads like a homage to The Times They are a Changin’, echoed in the rhythm. And the similarity doesn’t end there. Some of Joe Pug’s younger fans, like Dylan’s, have been… Shocked! Horrified!!! because -gasp – he uses electric guitars and pedal steel and drums on his latest album, Messenger! It’s 1965 all over again, bless their conservative little hearts.
His songs are studded with wry one-liners – I grew up in a circus, I ran away to a home / If I didn’t own boots I wouldn’t need feet / I call today a disaster, she calls it December the 3rd. He asked the audience to ask him questions and someone asked “do you play any happy songs?” He replied (from memory) that inevitably, loss and sadness happens to all of us, but when he puts it in a song he’s holding it in the hollow of his hand rather than it holding him. I normally find the one-man-with-guitar format hard going, partly because the damn audience is usually talking over the performer, but he held me in the hollow of his hand with beautifully crafted songs and a melodic intelligence to die for. And the audience shut up and let him be heard.
We bought a signed copy of Messenger after the show and Mr Bucket offered him a free shirt. He dropped in the next day for it, but sadly I was away doing something else. Missed by that much.
If Joe Pug was an exemplar of pared-back balladeering, Shakura S’aida and her band were a mighty soul-cleansing blast of sound and movement, bringing the funk, soul, blues and a bit of gospel. Shakura S’aida was born in the US, lived in Switzerland and now in Canada. Her guitarist, Donna Grantis, is a virtuoso who can knock off blistering solos of the kind that get you interviewed in Guitar Player Magazine. I’m not a particular fan of extended guitar solos, but she is certainly made of awesomeness and with so many kids of all ages at the festival, an important sight to see for young gels and boys alike.
S’aida showed her more intimate side in a Blues and Gospel session where she performed solo. Hairs stood up on the backs of our necks. She told a story about her childhood, auditioning for a church choir and being knocked back by the choir leader, who said “I don’t think you’re ever going to be able to sing.” I imagine that woman feels a bit silly these days. You can hear her (S’aida) in intimate mode on this podcast, in another theme concert, A Woman’s Voice.
Representing Australia in my selection of favourites is Fiona Boyes, a Blues shouter and guitarist/songwriter who has bazillions of awards but doesn’t seem to be appreciated enough here.
If there was one thing that these performers had in common it was a sense of complete enjoyment of their time on stage and a disposition to chat with the audience. I’m over angsty performers who see the audience as a bunch of philistines who have to be endured. All of them looked as though they were having a blast at Port Fairy and their enjoyment was contagious.
Honourable mention – Justin Townes Earle. The bad-boy schtick was pretty unrelenting, and some of the remarks he tossed off about his family were kind of snarky and TMI, but dedicating a song to Christchurch (and changing the lyrics accordingly), that was sweet, and he’s a good listen. Just don’t take him home to meet your Mum.
Things I liked about the Port Fairy festival: The weather – mostly warm and gently sunny in the way of Victorian autumn. The tent city at the Showgrounds, which was flat and not in the least muddy (see Weather). The people of the Showgrounds Committee who ran a breakfast mess hall – $5 bacon and eggs brought to you by adorable children, supervised by slightly older adorable children. Buying a cut-down beach chair on impulse in Colac, and finding when I got there that this item is absolutely necessary. Win! Spending time with the old friends who came to help out with the Bucket stall. Having a wrist band with ADULT printed on it. At last!! The diversity of the audience, including all ages from babies to seniors in their eighties…The members of the Folk club, aged 60s and 70s, playing their songs in the main street – I was sad they weren’t in the main enclosure, because after all it’s still called a Folk festival, and they’re locals, and oldies playing the songs they know is what folk is supposed to be all about, but sadly I myself would rather listen to Pug et all, so whaddyagonnado. The children who busked outside the enclosure. The twelve or thirteen year old boy who casually blew Take 5 on his tenor sax. The VCE-age kids who played in the village square.
A new concept for me - the backwards drum pedal technique
Outside the compound: Busker at Port Fairy
Hey! The New Everything has a four-star review in the AGE / EG. I don’t know how many stars one can potentially earn but none of the other offerings this week have more.
It’s not published on line, so what the hell, that touch typing I learned at school has got to be good for something. Right?
With a vocal comfort zone that in past performances has seemed to swing with ease from melodic balladry to twangy country, what’s new about everything on Tess McKenna’s stylish and thoroughly satisfying fourth LP is that it’s all fallen into place. Recorded in Melbourne with Barry Stockley joining her at the controls, she’s got the mix just right between acoustic singer-songwriter and plugged-in band material. Gentle strummers such as the title track, Pancho Style [should be Poncho style] and Down By the Sea serve to perfectly set up the electric guitar crescendos of numbers such as Fill me Up. Love is Gone, a sinewy blues number, could have come from a hot’n'sweaty Mississippi juke joint, smouldering for nearly eight minutes without ever quite igniting. Better still is energetic rocker Hummingbird, with strategically placed harmonica lines. Rumbling bass and driving drums give Tidy Town a heavier, ominous feel, then it’s back to the blues on nine-minute closer Still our House, which is also the closest she comes to Tamworth on this set of songs. McKenna launches The New Everything at the Northcote Social Club on Sunday at 2 PM.
Jeff Glorfeld
The AGE, EG 18.2.2011
Tess will officially launch her latest CD, The New Everything, at the Northcote Social Club on Sundee week (Sunday 20th Feb). It’s been out in the wild for a few weeks, and you can buy it here.
Tess McKenna’s fourth album, The New Everything, was recorded over a year in the low-fi setting of Fatsound Studio, with Barry Stockley & an ensemble of long time playing pals including Ash Davies on drums. The New Everything eases in between barefaced folk and dirty bang bang blues to sonic rock overdrive. This is singer-songwriter McKenna at her best – authentic, soulful & intimate.
Tess has toured her music extensively, supporting artists such as Nick Cave & Lucinda Williams; has played her music from as far as the Woodford Folk Festival to the East Coast Roots & Blues Festival in Byron Bay, from the Melbourne Concert Hall to Austin’s SXSW Music Festival in Texas, USA. Tess McKenna & her longtime band The Shapiros will be joined by special guests for an afternoon of pitch-perfect harmonies and shimmering guitars to launch The New Everything at the Northcote Social Club 20th February 2011. [Doors open at 2 PM - $12.]The New Everything is out now on HEAD RECORDS & is distributed through MGM.
Ashley Davies, who plays drums on the CD, is off touring with The Dingoes. So I’m occupying the drum seat for the launch, and thereafter. Which is a huge honour, and an exciting day to look forward to.
Come and celebrate with us.
I’m taking some weeks off work courtesy of the wonderful 48/52 , and having an at-home holiday with a rare respite from early mornings and reasonable bedtimes. So it was that on Saturday night I found myself watching a late-night 1950s black and white movie – something I haven’t done much of since the demise of Bill Collins and Ivan Hutchinson’s shows. Oh, how I used to love those old black and white movies (cue massive eyeroll from the kids). Some of the interest lies in a mixture of plot points which appear to have been written while dropping acid combined with gender and class expectations which are all too real.
This one was No Sad Songs For Me, starring Margaret Sullavan, who was quite a hoyden in her youth, with Natalie Wood as her abnormally well-adjusted daughter. According to Answers.com,
…Sentimental melodrama about a ridiculously self-sacrificing wife based on the book by Ruth Southard and starring a 12-year-old Natalie Wood. Mary Scott (Margaret Sullavan) is pregnant when she finds out that she has terminal cancer with only a few months left to live. She keeps this information a secret from her husband, Brad Scott (Wendell Corey), who is carrying on an affair with his assistant, Chris Radna (Viveca Lindfors). Mary encourages her husband to pursue Chris as a replacement wife and mother after she dies.
Heavy stuff, eh, especially as I was in Natalie Wood’s shoes in 1968, except that I was a year younger and not nearly as adorable, co-operative or conscientious with my piano practice. So the movie should have had me wallowing in memories and grief, except for that other marvellous feature of the 1950s B&W: the LOLWUT!? factor.
Consider the events which the writer of this weepie considered believable in 1950.
The movie opens with the happy family at breakfast discussing a new pregnancy. Mary says she’s off to the doctor that day to confirm. When she does, the doctor tells her sternly that she’s not pregnant and is never likely to be again. We’re given to understand that the doctor’s an old family friend, but this is all he tells her. Oh, and the hilarity – Doctor lights up a cig while giving her the bad news! In the surgery. Oh, the ’50s, those were the days.
Dr. Bedside Manner obviously has no intention of telling her anything at this point. He only tells her about her terminal cancer when she leaves the surgery, walks out to the car, is overcome by an unseemly attack of patient curiosity and walks back into his office to ask him for more details. We are asked to believe that the doctor has diagnosed the cancer some weeks ago yet hasn’t seen fit to tell the patient, who, remember, is also an old family friend. RIGHT.
Mary then says “I remember you’ve been taking dozens of X rays for the last few weeks!”
Wouldn’t you think a woman who thought she was pregnant, instead of harbouring a fatal illness, would question having “dozens of X rays” taken in the (presumed) early stages of the pregnancy? But these were the days of smoking in the doctor’s surgery. They didn’t have those namby-pamby, politically correct safety procedures.
In 1950, it appears, cancer was universally a death sentence. Mary asks Mr People Skills if operations or radiotherapy will do anything, and he replies that the treatment’s still in the experimental stage. Well, perhaps IF HE HAD TOLD HER EARLIER she might have had a chance to get a second opinion, or something.
Instead of going straight to a solicitor to file a medical malpractice suit – seeing as he’s a family friend, I guess – Mary swears the doctor to secrecy so that she can conceal her condition from her family. The doctor readily agrees with this, since obviously he’s given to withholding information anyway. Incredibly, although he can’t do anything at all about Mary’s cancer, he is able to give the most detailed prognosis: Nine months to live, six months of which will be “on her feet”. Modern oncologists would be amazed at the ability of cigarette-smokin’ 50s doctors to pinpoint the exact course of the illness.
The rest of the movie pretty much consists of Mary becoming more and more saintly. Her terminal cancer appears to involve no painkillers, curtailment of social activities or even symptoms, apart from the occasional frown and clutch of the hand to the abdomen, or a brief lie down on the couch. We are not told where this cancer is. One imagines that the ending will be Mary lying on lacy pillows becoming ever more beautiful and radiant as death approaches. However, it’s even more hokey than that.
After participating in a batty, and saintly, ruse to make sure her husband’s affair partner/girlfriend, Chris, is around to replace her(!) (LOLWUT!), Mary spills the beans. Husband, suitably devastated, breaks his philandering and working routine to take her on a second honeymoon to Mexico, where they dance together to a mariarchi band, after which Mary obligingly drops dead, thus eliminating the need for the sad bedridden final phase, and making the handover to Chris more seamless.
Although Chris is an exasperating entitled little shit, one can have some sympathy for her as she enters the movie in the guise of a professional draughtsperson working on a dam project with the husband, Brad / Wendell Cory. Thus we have the classic 1950s/1960s scene where the new worker turns out to be a WOMAN! Oh the HILARITY! The world turned upside down! The exchange between Brad, the hirer, and Chris, the prospective employee, illustrates perfectly the complete disdain for female employees and her need to plead and supplicate to convince him to give her the job despite her manifest inferiority. He demurs because the job’ll require her to go outside and it might rain! A woman might… melt, or something.
The plot then requires them to fall in lurve, but this is just predictable, because she’s a member of the sex class. That’s why we can’t have them on the job! They’ll distract the men!
In the final scene, the LOLWUT!? factor goes off the charts. Chris, the replacement mother, and the child Polly are sitting together at the piano playing a tragic musical piece. At this point, as far as Polly knows, Chris is the family friend/babysitter and Mum and Dad are just away on a nice holiday. The phone rings and Chris answers. It is terrible news from Mexico! Well, terrible for Mary, anyway. Chris makes some cryptic remark and they keep playing. Are they ever going to tell this kid anything? She never knew her mum was even sick. When are they going to actually let her know she’s DIED? The Wikipedia article on Margaret Sullavan says that her family life was fairly tortured and marked by suicide and institutionalisation. If this was the way 1950s families were supposed to handle family crises, I’m really not surprised. “Here’s your school lunch, dear. By the way, your mum’s not coming back from Mexico. She’s dead. I’m your new mum now. I’m sure Dad will explain everything when he gets back, but he’ll be a while because of organising the cold storage for the coffin ‘n all…”
Ah, those old black and white movies. If you’re ever tempted to join the conservatives in yearning for the Good old Days before the counterculture and modern medicine changed the world, when a man could still light up a satisfying fag in his doctor’s surgery and women knew their place, watch one of these and marvel. On the other hand, there’s no room for complacency yet; Judd Apatow and Charlie Sheen still churn out stuff which future generations will watch and…LOLWUT?!
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town
Helen also writes for the Australian Group blogs Larvatus Prodeo, Hoyden About Town and cooking blog Progressive Dinner Party.
Nick Possum
Uncensor