Category Archives: Cricics, Critics, Everyone's a Critic

The Pig’s Arms Salon de Crit

8 Gigabytes of Hardcore P0rn0graphy

07 Wednesday May 2014

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Pic Borrowed from Griffin, with Thanks.

Pic Borrowed from Griffin, with Thanks.

Review by Tearthese Trouserzoff

So, last weekend, FM, a couple of pals (Terry and Brenda) and I went to see another in the flesh gem from Griffin Theatre Company at the Stables (the old old Nimrod).

The play is called 8 Gigabytes of Hardcore P~ (just to get past your nasty network filters).  While there was no actual P in the play, it was a very contemporary cutting and funny reflection of the midlife loneliness-driven world of online dating / SMS “romance” – or more accurately the lack thereof.  Look closely at the picture above.  Can you make out the repeated word “happiness” ?  It’s elusive.  It sure is elusive.

“I’m fat.  I’m stupid.  I’m ugly”.  “Maybe if I wasn’t so fat, I wouldn’t be so ugly – it’s because I’m stupid”  But I DO have some good qualities ….. pause …. I’m kind.

LOL ?? ! ?  The spoken SMS punctuation was hilarious.

Written by Declan Greene, Eight Gigabytes stars Andrea Gibbs and Steve Rodgers and was/is directed by  Griffin Artistic Director Lee Lewis (whose mythological adventure The Bull, The Moon and The Coronet of Stars blew us away last year).

The protagonists exist in a sad and lonely mid-life wasteland – she is an underpaid/overworked nurse – a single mother of one facing a slow grinding financial oblivion and he’s trapped in a very unloving marriage where he sits desperately waiting for his TV-  watching his wife to go to bed so he can pullout the laptop, unzip the fly and … you can guess the rest.

The two (one hesitates to use the word ‘lovers’ ) meet online, negotiate a stop-start phone affair and eventually meet in person.  They get to share an uncomfortable drink or two too many in a bar as well as sharing a plethora of half-truths and outright lies – much like the lies he tells his boss when he gets asked whether he’s downloaded 8 gigs onto the company laptop on one of his many sick days.

steve and andrea

It’s a sad, sad, funny dialogue – at once poignant and heart wrenching –  according to Terry who’s gone through much the same scenario after his kids grew up and left the nest, and for whom the drama was just a little too uncomfortably close to home.  Not that he was keen to share that with Brenda – his partner of just one year.

Afterwards, we discussed the play for hours over a meal and a few glasses of somewhat too inexpensive red – which is a fair indication that we really appreciated the play, the light-as -a-feather direction, the warts and all acting and the all too human story of the built-in compromises involved in beating loneliness deep in the third quarter of life.

Griffin supports new talent and the price of a seat is really at the bottom end of live entertainment – but the quality of their productions is fresh and always outrageously good.

Go and see 8 Gigs if you can – It’s a blast !  http://www.griffintheatre.com.au

 

Calling Leigh Sales a Cow – Moosic to my Ears

29 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Cricics, Critics, Everyone's a Critic, Emmjay, Politics in the Pig's Arms

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I’d rather be a cow than a dinosaur. Sexism versus ageism.

The recent post at the Drum (Finishing the Job on Misogyny, August 29) about the Grahame Morris spat is all politically correct stuff.  Who could seriously argue that calling a much exalted TV reporter “a cow” is acceptable ?

But neither is a so-called senior TV reporter entitled to talk over the top of her hosts’ answers and ask disgraceful questions that show a complete lack of respect for the positions of PM and other senior ministers.  We can see that scoundrels are lying through their teeth, Ms Sales.  You don’t need to prove it !

I think that Ms Sales and Mr Uhlmann are both a disgrace to their profession.  In my book they do not enjoy the same social status as the leaders of our country and they should show some respect.

Neither have they contributed anything positive to the nation.  This is not informing Australians.  It’s a pathetic attempt at racing the commercial stations to the bottom, most of the time.

Ms Sales and Mr Uhlmann are both just sh1t-stirrers at a time the nation is oversupplied with the same.

It seems that Wayne Swan, Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten have been coached and have finally been able to deal with Ms Sales and Mr Uhlmann’s goading.  Not only do they seem to not lose their cool under cross-examination, they seem to also be able to sell the message they came on screen to deliver – and frustrate the shit out of dickhead reporters at the same time.  I love the standard line “Well, I don’t accept the premise of your question, Leigh / Chris”.

Not a chance in hell that Tony Abbot or Joe or anyone on the Opposition front bench has the brains to pull the same thing off.  If they keep up being policy free and Labor keeps on handing out the goodies, it’s a monster turnaround – but no thanks to shock-jock tactics in the ABC.

In that regard, isn’t it a pleasant change to see the reporting end as buffoon rather than as a try hard would be inquisitor ?

Steve Jobs Story – a Bad Job

26 Sunday Aug 2012

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Posture – it’s everything, isn’t it ? The Apple Lisa and a curious onlooker

Story by First Mate

The IT industry of the past was not only managed by different companies like IBM, ICL, Prime, DEC etc., but within those companies lived tribes and families.  I was a tribal member within several tribes and more than a few companies.  It was good.  For over twenty years I enjoyed the protection and development provided by my tribal elders.

There was no such thing as job insecurity.  Everyone recognized the special talents of other team members and leaders and we put up with their foibles and sometimes straight out fuckwittery.  At the end of the day loyalty to the tribe was paramount.  Many great things were created and impossible deadlines were routinely met or bettered.  We were simply too busy to bear grudges or feel hard done by because we had encountered turds like Steve Jobs.  Life was a fascinating roller coaster ride and sometimes our tribes got wiped out by unfortunate turns of events, but there was always a galaxy of other tribes looking for talent and keen to bring us on board.

The seventies, eighties and nineties were rocketing along for anyone who could speak IT and like so many of our colleagues lucky enough to get our mittens on some cool electronica, and like so many people who actually touched Steve Job’s life in some way, the Australian computer cognoscenti too have boundless stories of derring do, outrageous behaviour and just plain madness.

There are stories of incredible sales feats (like conning the Federal government into thinking that flooding schools with PCs was a good idea and insisting that teachers somehow “incorporate them into the curriculum”) led to sales bonuses up to and including space travel.

And now – in times where the usual modus operandi is to watch your back and simultaneously duck shove your “colleague’s” career into oblivion to climb the greasy corporate ladder, the mind-numbing boredom of making no obvious mistakes has led to a dearth of interesting new folk-law.  Not tedious minutiae.  Real, death before dishonour, live-forever stories that even outsiders can appreciate.

But the authorised Steve Jobs biography is not one of those. Walter Isaacson has meticulously hunted down every snippet of Job’s not uneventful life, excused him for his tactlessness and poor personal hygiene and recorded every heartbeat, every morsel of junk food, every abuse of positional power and a mountain of toadying and skunkworks and implied that Jobs has been some new messiah.

Reading into the fine print, however, the truth appears to be a simpler notion – that Jobs was good at hunting down really clever but gullible engineers and appropriating their amazing ideas, incorporating them into a greater vision, flogging other poor bastards to make the great ideas a reality and then stepping back, taking the adoration and repeating the process.

Some of us who are old enough do appreciate the brilliant products that Apple brought to the world.  When the early iPods were released and had enough storage to hold an average western person’s record collection several times over and still fit comfortably in a geek or music aficionado’s top pocket (after the vinyl had been turned into MP3 digital files), the writing was on the wall for the record industry.  When video became portable and bandwidth became cheap, the same writing hit the wall for the print media industry.

Jobs was not alone in leading the revolution, but Apple’s recent products and service offerings have turned the digital life on its head and created many new good and equally bad paradigms.  Did you know that the numbers of pedestrians being mown down while crossing the street while they have been focussed totally on their portable communication engines has doubled in the US in the last two years ?  Same for the number of people convicted of traffic accidents that curiously involved them when they mistook texting for one of the important driving tasks.  Or do you routinely see cyclists as well as drivers too dumb to realise that plugging in an iPod takes away an important part of their survival arsenal – namely hearing a car approaching in their blind spots ?

Anyone who has travelled by train in the last year or so cannot but be surprised by the number of their fellow passengers with white in-ear headphones connected to their iPods, iPads and iPhones – or the pale Android imitations thereof.  This is a new host of individuals, acting like a flock of sheep.  Possessed by the world flooding in through their Interweb tubes, oblivious to the life going on just outside their personal spaces, indifferent and incapable of telling the difference between reality as it is personally experienced and some selective synthesis of a new reality conceived by someone else.

But enough of Job’s legacy.  On to the book itself.

Boring, tedious name-dropping crap.  Rich in its cast of characters, but with no more character development than the telephone book.  The hardcover book hit the stands at $50 a copy – an outrageous rip-off.

The Newton left pencil and paper shivering in their socks. Not.

So I read what I had hoped were familiar parts of the downloaded e-book -costing about half the hard back, looking for some of Job’s less successful contributions – namely the Lisa (named for his one-time shunned daughter) that was incredibly expensive for its time and lacked one important ingredient – actual software that did useful things, and the progenitor of the iPad – the Newton hand-held personal assistant – with the single failing that it didn’t actually work very often, or, looked at another way – it made simple paper-based tasks even more tedious.

This is referred to in marketing circles as “not a very compelling offer”.  These two Apple products died the horrible death they richly deserved.

There are a few pages about the Lisa.  I don’t know whether the Newton gets a mention.  It probably does, but the narrative on the Lisa was so boring, it made me glad that I had only wasted $25 and not the full whack for the hard copy.

In a nutshell, enjoy your Apple products, but don’t waste your time or money on the book.  It’s a major stinker – whether you are part of the IT industry or not.

What Value is ABC News ? Any Value at All ?

15 Wednesday Aug 2012

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ABC News Reporting Team

Early this morning, the ABC Web site reported that Julian Assange was given asylum by Ecuador.  I was ready to fire off a letter of gratitude to the Ambassador for Ecuador (if in fact Australia has one).

But wait.

No, they reported that the British Newspaper “The Guardian” reported that Assange was to be given asylum by Ecuador.

Later this morning, ABC News ran report of a denial of sorts on Twitter with the President of Ecuador himself denying that Assange had in fact been granted asylum.  In essence the process was said to be still ongoing.

What bozo at the ABC thinks that News reporting amounts to reading stuff other people write and repackaging it as “fact” ?

Where is the value add, ABC ?

Was it too hard to check – like Email the source at the Guardian and ask for a shred of evidence – a scintilla of proof ?

Does the ABC have any credibility at all these days ?

Just a tip ABC News – when I write the piece about the NASA Mars robot discovering little green men, ring up NASA and check before quoting me verbatim.  You never know when somebody might be pulling your leg.

I think I just heard the sound of geese ….. HONK… HONK… HONK…

Picasso, Schmicasso

21 Monday Nov 2011

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The Pig’s Arms’ resident art critic, Phil O’Stein was an early visitor to the NSW Gallery Members’ free squiz at the new blockbuster Picasso exhibition.  Here’s his take.

Ah, yeah, hi.  Well the missus and I (and I use the term loosely, if you catch my drift, Tarquin) were amongst the three or four hundred thousand NSW Art Gallery members to line up for an hour and a half in the stinking heat of a Sydney November Sunday afternoon to run our beady peepers across the latest imported nonsense from the National Picasso Museum of Paris.

The NSW Gallery lucked out and scored third pick of the Museum’s collection – in fact Picasso’s own collection at the time of his death (read …. unsold stuff he had in the back shed).  First and Second picks went to Seattle and somewhere in Asia.

This is not to suggest that the 150 or so works on display were to an individual tripe of the first order, but I could see from the look on the missus’ dial that she was not going to contemplate a major redecoration of the rumpus room on the strength of the works the NSW Gallery flung up on the walls of most of its ground floor display spaces.

It was in fact a trans-historical pastiche of the various periods identified in Mr P’s long and illustrationist life.  There were bronzes as well as flat-pack art, and my personal favourite sculpture of a bull’s head – made from the careful juxtaposition of a bicycle seat with handlebars was slung way up on one wall – obviously reflecting the unsafeness of such an object amongst the seat-sniffers represented in impressive numbers amongst the members.

Now call me Phil O’Stein, if you like, but I have seen quite a lot of this art and a superset in the actual Museum villa in Paris, and I have to say that something seems to have been lost in the translation.

I’m betting that the loss is something to do with below-par curation of the overall exhibition.  There was virtually no explanatory material.  The curator(s) had boldly gone for letting the works speak for themselves – which led to some intriguing dialogues amongst the arterartie having a butchers at the works.  “Look, there’s the woman’s head over there”.  “That’s not the head”.  “Is that really a guitar”?  “I’m buggered if I can see the saxophone”.  Clearly the troops were not always up to re-assembling Mr P’s disassemblages.

Let me draw a contrast.

The missus and I (nudge, nudge) went to the Dali exhibition at the NGV sur Yarra a while back.  Like the NSW G Picasso exhibition, this was intended to be a blockbuster – and it certainly was.  Over half a million people flocked to Paris sur Yarra to have a squiz.  And magnificent it was too.  There were all kinds of interesting objects, movies from the period, light, colour and excitement.

That was what was missing from the Picasso Exhibition.  The excitement.

It could be that in sending off the great man Ed Capon – after his magnificent 30 years steerage of the NSW G – they had expected that the mass of Picasso works would be exciting enough on their own, and that the target to hit was the logistics – namely getting the masses through the exhibition quickly and tidily – hence the booked timeslots for ticket-holders only.

Maybe it really is that the NSW G – is showing us that it is a tired old flog of a building and that it is incapable of really doing the blockbuster exhibition with the same flair and panache as either the National Gallery in Canberra or the NGV in Paris sur Yarra.

What concerns me is not just that the Picasso exhibition left the missus and I a bit flat.  I’m worried that this is the second in a trend of “should be great but look a bit ordinary” exhibitions – following the “Mad Square” show.

If the arterartie members were having a struggle extracting delight from the Picasso show (as seemed to be the case for people dotted through the inner circle throng – more interested in dinner to come or what they were doing about their own personal global financial meltdowns…. readily apparent in their attire), what might one of the hoi polloi – expected to show up in their thousands make of Picasso ?

Geeze, he can draw, but why does he make the hands and feet so big ?

For THE artist of the 20th Century, the curators could well have worked up a tiny tiny bit of sweat and led the punters through with a modicum of context.  It’s the least they could have done.

So, the missus and I are scouting around to see whether there will be at any stage the odd guided tour where a well-informed artertainer can supply the context and inject the excitement that Patrons de la Salle de Porc have come to expect – ever since the Mondrian Brothers (Abstract Plumbers to the Drinking Classes) retiled the loos at the Pig’s Arms.

Appalling Reporting at the Quaker’s Hill Nursing Home Fire

19 Saturday Nov 2011

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This morning I opened the door to the SMH’s screaming headline “Owners have record of failure” – by renown journos Linton Besser and Saffron Howden.

It was all downhill from there.

The front-page story was about the terrible nursing home fire in Sydney’s West – now said to have more than a dozen old people in serious condition in hospital and five deaths.  The story is at once awfully sad and also a tale of heroism and bravery that ensured that the casualty list was not longer.

However the tone of Besser and Howden’s piece is unrelentingly accusative –pointing the finger at the Quaker’s Hill nursing home – and its parent organisation Domain Principal Group – owned by, AMP Capital Investors.

Amazing, it was that within 20 hours of the blaze being reported, the police arrested a male staff member and charged him with four, then five counts of murder.  They had some fairly solid clues – that the fire broke out in two places – suggesting that this was no accident.  And second that it happened just before five am – calling into question who would be up around in a secure facility at that time.

My criticism of Besser and Howden’s article is that they seek to hang the nursing home and it’s parent organisation for many trivial reasons as well as because of a previous problem three years ago when ten old people died from gastroenteritis in another Domain Principal nursing home.

I need to put my credentials on the table here.  My 87 year old mum has been in care in a nursing home for nearly six years – first with dementia, then latterly also with frailty – she can no longer walk, stand or sit up un aided and she has to be fed, bathed, cared for medically, dressed, toileted, undressed and helped into bed every day.  FM’s dad is 85, is in another nursing home and has much the same care needs.  We visit every fortnight. So I have some experience in the field.

When old people can no longer feed themselves, perhaps cannot chew or swallow reliably and are incontinent – as well as having unreliable immune systems, they are always at high risk of gastroenteritis, no matter how strict the nursing home’s hygiene protocols.  More often than not, infections are brought into nursing homes by visiting relatives who do not use the handwash provided, do bring in food treats and certainly do not wear sterile gloves as the staff do.  In our folks’ time as residents, we have seen three outbreaks of gastro in the two locations – providing care for about 250 people.  There were thankfully no deaths as a result of these outbreaks, probably due to strict quarantine – no visits unless these were absolutely necessary – and mandatory disinfection of visitors’ hands.

This is impressive care – particularly when you realise that demented people with incontinence can act in ways that are highly counterproductive to safe hygiene.

But returning to the SMH article.  Besser and Howden cast aspersions on the Quaker’s Hill nursing home and the parent organisation for various failures in government inspections including not having background checks on prospective staff that were valid – and revalidated every three years including proof that staff had no convictions for murder or any form of assault.

There are two things that need to be said about this.  First, it is incredibly challenging for nursing homes to recruit carers – first, nurse-qualified carers (who can earn a lot more money working through agencies temping in hospitals) are always in very short supply and less qualified people who are amongst the lowest paid individuals in the workforce – who have to work shifts and do personal hygiene tasks for old people that would turn most relative’s stomachs are not exactly beating the doors down demanding jobs.  The people who work there are in my estimation and experience, mostly saints.

Second, a police check that an individual has a “clean” record can take an eternity – especially when you realise that many of the carers come from overseas and take these jobs because they do not have a huge amount of choice.  If I was a nursing home manager, with a desperate need for staff now – because I have patients who need care now – and not in six months, I’d take new people on, train them and manage them carefully and let the police do what the police do – in their own time.  They have no choice.

Moreover, a police check that says a person has a clean record – so far – does not predict that a person will never go bananas tomorrow or the next day – which could well be the case with the alleged killer in custody for the Quaker’s Hill fire.  Arsonists are usually not the outgoing socially aggressive violent types.

These kinds of regulatory inspections are risk minimisation exercises – and nothing more.  They are not in any way iron-clad guarantees that will always prevent bad things from happening.

The last bit of ridiculous trash reporting was, in my opinion, the assertion that in the previous case of deaths from this unrelated, three year old gastroenteritis outbreak, the cause was unproven, but there was a suggestion that there might have been a strong association with eating pureed food (what like a huge proportion of old people with dementia who can no longer chew ?) …. and – and get this, that the residents who died from gastroenteritis “were already deteriorating from their underlying health conditions” – like the ones that landed them in the nursing home in the first place ?  Give me strength !

Besser and Howden finished by saying that the management of the nursing home and the parent organisation had cancelled the planned meeting with the SMH and were refusing to comment. Surprising ?  Not when the police and coroner are involved – or when the reporters churn out such unhelpful rubbish.

I’m not suggesting that the nursing home is definitely blameless.  I just don’t know.  Neither would I seek to be unsympathetic to those who lost their lives, their loved ones or those who suffered terrible injuries.  I do think that tremendous praise should go to the fire-fighters, police, staff and neighbours who saved so many lives.  These folk did a magnificent job.  The same cannot be said about the SMH reporters.

White Rabbit, Mad Square and “The Guard”

11 Sunday Sep 2011

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White Rabbit Gallery’s new exhibition – Beyond the Frame.

Lu Zhengyuan's Mental Patients

As always, White Rabbit have produced a thought-provoking and very powerful exhibition, but this time it’s also a dark exhibition.  Sometimes the art displayed at White Rabbit is bleak – reflecting artists’ disenchantment with different aspects of Chinese contemporary life.

Lui Di (born 1985) produced a series of graphic images in 2008 (Animal Regulation), depicting gigantic animals posed in urban settings – amongst the drab and dreary blocks of Beijing apartments.

Ai Wei Wei, recently released from custody has a work in this exhibition too  – with an assemblage of a series of large porcelain blobs – called, unsurprisingly, “Oil Spill”.  The work is amazingly convincing.

But in my view, the most powerful, and profoundly sad work is the collection of photographs of inmates in Burmese prison camps by Lu Nan.  A close second is Lu Zhengyuan’s life-size grey sculpture – mental patients.

The Mad Square

Grosz's "Suicide

But if you really need to be cheered-up after this White Rabbit exhibition, it’s going to be a mistake to go to the much-hyped exhibition now at the Art Gallery of NSW – “The Mad Square” – German art from 1910 to 1937.  I found it grim and disturbing – notwithstanding that it does include some important material from the Bauhaus school and (for me) a couple of small colourful paintings by Klee.  Clearly the lead-up to WWI, the war itself, the aftermath and the inexorable march into WWII were profoundly chaotic hyper-violent periods – strongly depicted in the art in this exhibition.

FM and I found it grim going – from the massively deformed faces in ink drawing graphics of WWI severely wounded soldiers, to blood red paintings of murdered prostitutes, it was unrelentingly grim.  Grim indeed.

Some time ago I complained about the Sydney Theatre Company’s War of the Roses (apart from the poor production), the tone of murder and mayhem accurately reflected the chaos of more recent times with the global financial meltdown and ongoing wars in the Middle East.  That show was an A-grade downer.  I found the Mad Square a downer too – but not for its quality, moreover because the content was very confronting.

The context in which this exhibition is experienced is a relevant factor – for FM and for me – yet again, a less-than welcome disturbing and even distressing experience in a world that seems up close and at a distance to be accelerating and falling apart at the seams – unutterably violent, mad and pointless.

The Guard

Which leads me to a very welcome balance – provided by the marvellous black comedy – “The Guard”.  Yes, there is more death and mayhem, drug smuggling on a massive scale, police corruption, more prostitution, a mother dying of cancer and a country policeman wading through a complex existential crisis.

It is truly hilarious – with the laconic wit and mirth of the  Oirish at its best.

The boofy psycho baddy is a wonderful counterpoint to the genuinely threatening and ice cold members of the drug-smuggling trio– driving along discussing arcane points of philosophy.  My favourite line amongst many great lines was when one of the baddies asked why he always had to do the murders and the reply was “Because you’re the psychopath !”; to which he protested and insisted that he was not, “I’m  a ‘sociopath”’.  The second crook says “What’s the difference” and the reply was “They told me inside the asylum, but it’s kind of tricky !”

The interplay between the ‘smarter than he looks’ Irish cop and the slick fish out water FBI man is a treat.  “Have you ever been shot ?”…. Yes…three times…. “Does it hurt ?”

It’s a wonderful movie written and directed by a chap called John Michael Mcdonagh and it stars Brendon Gleeson as the Irish policeman and Don Cheadle as the visiting FBI operative.  It’s a magnificently dry comedy and it’s a must-see.

Unaustralian Australians at the Museum of Sydney

15 Friday Jul 2011

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FM, FM’s Mum and I went to the Museum of Sydney today to check out Louise Hawson’s photo exhibition –  52 suburbs of Sydney.   It’s highly recommended.  You should go if you can.

I was amazed to learn that there are currently 638 suburbs in Sydney.  Louise visited a fairly wide-ranging selection – one each week for a year.  She said that she took photographs for three days, spent another two working on them and then grouping them into related pairs.   Six days a week for a whole year.  And of course, she’s just scraped the surface.  She asks the rhetorical question “Just where is the suburb called ‘Canoelands’ and what might the good people of that suburb do ?”  Damned good question.

It brought home to me how amazingly culturally diverse our city  of many tribes has become – from the Anglo white bread village of my youth to quietly (with the exception of the occasional Cronulla race riot) morph into something unrecognisable as a suburb of  the middle of last century .  Dramatic change – in a good way.

Thinking that a city of four and a half million people that grows (apparently) at the rate of 1,000 people per week might in any way be comprehensible at a glance is clearly a big mistake on my part.  Louise’s exhibition is a wonderful study of colour, contrast, character and texture and her use of diptychs comparing and contrasting time and place and cultural reference is brilliant.

So – it’s a fascinating study, which BTW leads into two other really important small exhibitions.  First was a history of WWI German internment camps in NSW – Berrima Gaol, Holdsworthy and Trial Bay camps.

Holdsworth Internment Camp about 1915 (Government documents of the time refer to it as a "concentration" camp)

This is an extraordinary story about how about 7,000 people of German origin – even Australian citizens were locked up – some for six months after the WWI armistice.  Many were deported back to a devastated Germany.  These clearly dangerous and criminal krauts included none other than Herr Resche (whose Australian born sons were running his breweries while he was interred, and Australia’s only specialist orthopaedic surgeon of the day.  There was a class system where the wealthier German Australians got a better gig in a northern beach-side encampment.  And in addition the camps were run on a law of the jungle system where the “Black HandGang” at Holdsworthy terrorised other inmates and extorted and victimised them for gain – until remaining members of the crew of the Emden were interred with them, formed the “White Hand Gang”, and beat the crap out of the “Black Hand Gang”.  These beatings included throwing victims (deserving and otherwise, apparently) amongst the barbed wire while the guards turned a blind eye.

It makes it easier to understand the obscene way that Australians of many different ethnic backgrounds are so easily able to turn a blind eye to the plight of refugees – we’ve had form.

Then we went into an adjacent exhibition on housing in Australia.  There he was – the beaming visage of famous Viennese refugee architect, Harry Seidler –surrounded by images of his wonderful creations – Rose Seidler House (1950).

BTW Rose Seidler House is the venue for  the annual 1950’s fair at Wahroonga on August 16.  Don’t miss it hep cats and cool kitties.

 

Seidler’s  MLC Centre remains one of the CBD’s iconic buildings.

Construction started in 1960 (completely obliterating the delightfully bohemian Rowe Street) and was completed in 1967.  MLC Centre was for a very long time the tallest building in Australia at sixty something stories.  It was my workplace for five years in the middle 1980s.  The view from level 41 was spectacular.  The lifts were something less than spectacular and offered a service reminiscent of Sydney’s public transport systems.

And they also had pictures of the arsehole of Sydney Harbour landscape – Seidler’s Blues Point Tower.  We used to live across the harbour in Birchgrove and had to look at this eyesore every day.  I used to fantasise about starting a fund to buy all the units in there and pull the bastard building down – it is so ugly.  I gather that the alternative strategy is to save up, buy one of the tightly-held / rarely-sold units and look outwards.

But then the exhibition’s images looped back to another form of Australian ugliness – and perhaps the definition in my view of a total lack of charity and uncaring mongrel behaviour.

This image – reproduced without all the palaver that the State Library insists is necessary to have permission to republish, is a picture of William Roberts and his family – evicted from their home in Redfern in 1934.  William Roberts was an original Anzac.  And this is how he was treated.

My Mom used to tell me stories about the depression.  Her Intermediate certificate is dated 1939.  She got an A in History.  She said that neighbours used to help evicted families by waiting until the bailiffs had left and then break into the house again to let the evicted people back in.  If a landlord was such a bastard as to want to try it again, he would risk having the place burnt down – with a not-surprising lack of witnesses.  Not helpful for William, but not a bad way to discourage a lack of landlordly compassion.  My Dad used to tell me about how a kid with a pair of shoes to wear to school was the mark of a wealthy family.  And he also told me how the poorer kids used to beg apple cores from the richer kids because they were so hungry.

So while it is fashionable to wax on lyrical and wallow in the “Tradition of ANZAC”, it should not be forgotten about how Australia has a well-developed cultural capacity to act like total bastards towards those less fortunate in our midst.  Can’t accuse us of playing favourites, though.  We mistreated both ANZACS and Australian citizens of German descent.  We seem to have at least a hundred years’ practice at being bastards.  Probably twice that, really.

This visit to the Museum of Sydney (that likes to call itself the MOS for short) is a very worthwhile experience – this time, especially so.  It shows us at our best, culturally diverse, colourful, tolerant and inclusive, and also reminds us of how bad we can truly be if we try really hard.

Absolucion

12 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by in Cricics, Critics, Everyone's a Critic, Emmjay

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Arrebato Ensemble - Damien de Boos-Smith, Andrew Poniris, Greg Alfonzetti, Stuart Henderson and Dave Ellis

The fabulous Arrebato Ensemble and friends played to a packed house in the Studio (cabaret space) in the Sydney Opera House last night.  It was the official launch of their new CD “Absolucion”.

The band was joined by Leonid Beshei on piano accordion and the talented,  fiery and lovely flamenco dancer – Anna Anterio (apologies for the spelling !).

The performance was a stunning and joyful celebration of Arrebato’s unique fusion of flamenco and jazz – at once intimate, passionate and even wistful at times.  The band tells wonderful stories with changing nuanced passages from Greg Alfonzetti’s hard attacking syncopated staccato phrases to the haunting wail of Andrew Poniris’ soprano and alto sax and Damien de Boos-Smith’s liquid cello – backed by Dave Ellis’ velvet brick wall bass and Stuart Henderson’s meticulously-timed percussion.  Damien de Boos-Smith played some wonderful guitar pieces too – but he really shone with his oud playing last night.  I was hearing a miraculous Madrid delta blues piece – which he played with a magically invisible slide.

Impossible to pick an individual piece as a favourite on the night, but for me “Verdades” – (Truths) was particularly fine – between the first truth you hear and the last – comes ….. everything else….

The band played a couple of encores – my favourite ; a mi padre (to my father) speaks of the bond between a man and his Dad.  The piece highlights Greg’s mastery not only of the instrument, but also his strength in composition and a brilliant collaboration with Damien.

You can listen to a couple of tracks at Arrebato’s Web site  – but whatever you do, try to score a copy of Absolucion – to fail to do so – would be unforgivable.

Hardware Gallery Does it Again !

11 Wednesday May 2011

Posted by in Cricics, Critics, Everyone's a Critic, Emmjay

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Across the road and down a bit from the Pig’s Arms, we are blessed by having a wonderful gallery – owned and managed for the last ten years by a local landmark  – Lew Palaitis.

Lew holds 20 or so exhibitions every year and is a strong supporter of new as well as established artists, art students and quite a lot of the local wildlife.

FM and I go there regularly.  For those of us who can get there, please go !  And for those of us in distant climes, enjoy Hardware Gallery’s web site ….

http://hardwaregallery.com.au/index.html