Category Archives: George Theodorides

Shack

17 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by in George Theodorides, Joe Carli

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

 

68_1

Simulated fishing shack

The Pig’s Arms welcomes our newest contributor – Mr Joe Carli.

This may sound like a bit of sentimental tosh..but hey..

Got the old shack up for sale…years ago, back in around 1980..we (the family / brother, sister and the old folks) chipped in a few hundred quid each and bought this block of land on the peninsula and I built a holiday shack there..sure and it was built on the dirt cheap , out of bits of sticky-tape and bent wire sort of, but it was great for the kids to get away from the city and we’d go fishing, crabbing, that sort of thing…

You’d get there and the first thing is you’d run to claim a bed and throw your clobber in one of the two big rooms with four beds in each, grab a crab-rake or fishing rod from the corner and make for the beach..the shack..and it really was a shack..was just to flop in for the night..cook the tucker in and watch the fire burn and crackle before you hit the sack….it was effing great when the kids were growing up.Some times there’d be half a dozen or so family or friends kids and the parents over for the school hols’ and it would be a whale of a time.sometimes on one of the days, we’d all go to Pt. Vincent to fish off the wharf there and I’d go check out the books and such in the op-shop over the road in St Neot’s church (best find : a first edition USA. of  T.E.Lawrence ; “Seven Pillars Of Wisdom” !..heyyyy!) annex and we’d all end the day before going back to the shack with a big butcher’s wrapped paper pack of fish and chips…and how many chips went to the gulls!..the fish being caught local from one of the fishing boats that worked the gulf in the area…geez!..it was good.

But now, the old shack is up for sale, I am getting too old to maintain it..and after the recent hernia operation ( I’ll tell you about it someday!)..it’s all getting a bit too much for me..The kids have grown up into gen Y adults..and are no longer interested in “crab island” or “cockle cove” or “starfish rock”….the shallow flats are “smelly” now..and just who wants to gut and clean their own fish anymore?..indeed…who wants to even go fishing anymore..and the old place has that “old smell” and look..it never was pretty..the old shack..not like the brand-spanking new McMansions popping up all around the little enclave..and NO-WAY will anyone be using the “out-the-back” dunny..even if it is a flush toilet..the spiders?.the dark!? And the rainwater in the old tank..is it safe to drink?…doesn’t everyone nowadays have an ensuite?

And those retirees who came here to getaway from the city…and brought the city expectations with them, expect there to be ; services, no fire risk..and that grey-water run-off from the kitchen and the shower that goes under the trees to keep them watered in the long hot summers..is that a health risk, is it legal?..and if there is a bush fire, those trees around your shack could “catch on fire and send it onto my house..I’m going to ring the council”…But the birds, the animals, you protest..the delicate native lilies and such?..Poison the lot…not a blade of grass..not a hint of verdant cover shall tarnish the scoria and gravel expanse..

It’s the school holidays..and there are no kids fishing..not even an adult walking the beach..nor at the wharf at Pt. Vincent..no kids, no people even to watch the crayfish boat sidle up to the wharf and unload it’s catch..not a curious soul..what has happened..is this a kind of Brave New World of hideaway people..is there no wonder in nature anymore?..no cry of children in a discovery of delight..Do not the parents delight in showing and explaining even with a touch of bullshit those strange shells and twists of sea-worm casings..to tell lurid tales of the goings on there just around the next cliff of “smugglers cove”..of dark nights and pirates and booty and good lord knows what else to see the wide-eyed wonder in their eyes as they fall to sleep snuggled in your lap by the fire in the old shack…

The shack is up for sale now..and I was there to cut the grass and tidy the place up a tad so it’ll look good…But really, it is only being sold for land-value..to be honest..no-one wants a shack anymore..you see..everyone now has an ensuite..the kids their ipads or smart-phones..But you know, as we were walking on the cliff-top road down to the jetty there..for just a moment..be it the wind-blown smell of the mallee trees in flower, or the cry of a gull surfing the air…for just that one short inhale of breath, I was back in that time with the kids and our arms full of fishing gear and buckets and a crab-net and we were all laughing and heading to the jetty and my little boy was saying that he bet he will catch a big, big squid…for just that one short moment..

Time has stolen the years from me , and I could bloody well weep.

Joe’s Bio

Jesus, Emmjay..100 words!?…I’m better talking about other people than myself…: A retired carpenter who’s knocked about this country and some times in Italy….from Italian/Australian parents..My father came here before the 2ndWW..and met my mother up at Blanchetown on the River Murray where she worked as a servant girl on the stations there…Self educated save for a couple years as a mature entry student in Classics at Adelaide Uni’ just as Howard buggered it all up so only did two years a long time ago..I write stories / cameos / poetry of the places and people I have known in my working life..a few also of Italy…I now live in splendid isolation with my partner and her two horses in the mallee…Joe.

 

 

Some Old Some New Some Covers

13 Saturday May 2017

Posted by in Algernon, Entertainment Upstairs, George Theodorides

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

some old some new some covers

 

Playlist by Algernon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdnQkQYT63E

The Kiss – Judee Sill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDljUTAxyMo

Supermoon – cas/lang/veirs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc9jM9DVQcA

Over my head – Alabama shakes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54lYf0X07jk

This empty space – Cilla Black

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvWiiUgT8Nk

Goin’ Back –Dusty Springfield

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz4Z5QfPW4s

Just for a thrill – Aretha Franklin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9URM_5R-vWk

Calling Occupants of interplanetary craft – Klaatu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK6Jt3Gxeao

Smoke signals – Olympia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqM0ABVM45w

Cellophane – Sarah Belkner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y8ZXJiH3X0

The Whistle Song – Frankie Knuckles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x4AZHDT-4A

You’ll lose a good thing – Barbara Lynn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd4DzpxmFjE

Don’t hesitate – The Meltdown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUaxVQPohlU

What the world needs now – Jackie DeShannon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt8GDAL7Av8

In the Ghetto – Candi Staton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lozX3EAvFPI

Fever – Helen Shapiro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6x3mRbZo3k

The first time ever I saw your face – Peter Paul and Mary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SakUZHsGUVo

Ode to Billy Joe – The 5th Dimension

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5jI9I03q8E

Aint’ got No / I got life – Nina Simone

 

Medea comes to Brisbane.

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in George Theodorides

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, ,

XIR182676 Jason and Medea, 1759 (oil on canvas); by Loo, Carle van (1705-65); 63x79 cm; Musee des Beaux-Arts, Pau, France; Giraudon; French, out of copyright

XIR182676 Jason and Medea, 1759 (oil on canvas); by Loo, Carle van (1705-65); 63×79 cm; Musee des Beaux-Arts, Pau, France; Giraudon; French, out of copyright

Story by Atomou

A new adaptation of Euripides’ Medea is being staged at the Le Boite in Brisbane, by Suzie Miller.

Suzie Miller speaks with Sarah Kanowski of ABC RN

http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programitem/pgQkGAXqL7?play=true

It is an interesting interview and Miller is not only a great thespian but also a very competent scholar. She gives her reasons why she had made the changes she did to Euripides’ work and whilst her views have a genuine validity, I tend to disagree with her on a number of fronts. However, disagreements in these works are a glowing sign that the works cover huge canvasses of human nature and affect the careful mind and heart quite profoundly.

Euripides, like his two near-contemporaries, Aeschylus and Sophocles, was a chef in the kitchen of thought, of expression, of human behaviour and emotions.

I quibble a bit with Miller because she takes the easy road of condemning albeit cautiously, Medea as being “crazy” or motivated by “revenge” and ambitious for “political(?) power” and that she was a “strategist.”

One could write a book, of course and many have been written about her character, as depicted by Euripides and about her motives for killing her two sons. I do not believe that any of these three views is correct at the very least because they are far too simplistic and because they “flatten” Medea’s most complex character.

Above all else, Medea was a foreigner, the word in Euripides’ day was “barbarian” and while Greeks were enormous xenophiles, they did not accept citizenship for foreigners too lightly. Their cities (countries) were small and any newcomer could upturn the decisions of the city by voting in favour of their original homeland. It wasn’t so much about eugenics as about civil clarity. So they frowned upon barbarians who overstayed their welcome. Medea was the wife of a Prince and so the Corinthians put up with her and her sons and all was going splendidly until Jason decided to marry again, this time the king’s daughter. This pushed not only Medea into the background but made the two sons foreigners, stateless, which is what this government of our is trying to do with those who hold dual citizenship and who went to off to fight in the ranks of the enemy, whoever that might me according to the Minister at the time.

Forgive my navigation into other shores!

The consequences of that, of the civil alienation from Corinth would be devastating for Medea and more so for the two young boys. They would be, according to Medea -and she would know- torn limb from limb!

Jason’s suggestions that they would be well looked after didn’t ring true in anyone else’s ears.

Luckily for Medea, King Theseus from Athens arrives and promises her asylum in his country. (This, incidentally, is a common ploy by Euripides to show that his country, Athens is always ready to help people who are treated unjustly.)

But she can’t take the kids with her and so she kills them herself, rather than leaving them to the sharp and vicious claws of the Corinthians. She just couldn’t take them with her, since even the benevolent Athenians wouldn’t want a woman to run off with a man’s sons. Daughters perhaps but sons -who could defend the father by brawn, if not by brain- no way!

I won’t go on, so as to give you the time to listen to Suzie Miller’s excellent summation of the play.

My translation is here: https://bacchicstage.wordpress.com/euripides/medea/

Patrons of the pub might remember my little article on Medea back in the olden days, called, I think, “Would you marry Medea?”

Let me know what thou thinkest!

The Greek Crisis put very, very simply.

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by in George Theodorides, Politics in the Pig's Arms

≈ 8 Comments

Greek protesters, one waving a national flag, gather in Athens, Wednesday, June 15, 2011. Hundreds of protesters clashed with riot police in central Athens Wednesday as a major anti-austerity rally degenerated into violence outside Parliament, where the struggling government was to seek support for new cutbacks to avoid a disastrous default. (AP Photo/Kostas Tsironis)

Greek protesters, one waving a national flag, gather in Athens, Wednesday, June 15, 2011. Hundreds of protesters clashed with riot police in central Athens Wednesday as a major anti-austerity rally degenerated into violence outside Parliament, where the struggling government was to seek support for new cutbacks to avoid a disastrous default. (AP Photo/Kostas Tsironis)

Story by Atomou

The Greek Crisis put very, very simply.

Because, in fact and in effect, it is very simple!

Imagine this scenario: Great grand parents were told by a banker that they should avail themselves of the bank’s offer of very, very cheap and very, very simple loans. Your grand parents agreed and they borrowed some money. One might, if one is cynical enough, add also that the banker has advised them to borrow more, rather than less. I remember reading the words of the wise capitalist Onassis who in his wisdom about capitalist ways, said, “borrow much, rather than less so you can complete the project you borrowed the money for,” or words very similar to these.

So your grandparents borrowed the money in what looked like benign conditions and manageable interest rates. However, something happened -and a lot can between borrower and lender- and the bankers change the conditions and, more direly, the interest rate, which they raise to such a level that the borrower simply cannot pay the instalments.

(People of my age will remember the bankers’ brutal glee during Keating’s reign of “the recession that Australia had to have” as they raised interest rates to levels that no one had ever before imagined. Bankers love doing such things.)

So the thief, sorry, I meant to say the banker, says to your grandparents, “not to worry, we’ll just keep lending you money to make those payments. We will increase slightly the interest rate but that’s only fair and, in any case, the new loan will help you survive until things turn good for you and you can make the payments.”

The can was thus kicked along the path of time until you came along and things simply didn’t turn good. In fact, they have turned aggressively bad. The interest rate has increased even more, the economy has left you unemployed and with barely enough income to put bread on the table. You have no hope of ever making the next payment. The instalment is greater than your income (GDP, if we’re talking national).

But the bank insists that, once again, you must borrow more money to help you make the next payment. In fact they have lodged themselves into your house and began examining your every move, telling you to sell everything you possess at give-away prices. They have their eye on your precious possession and they want them for themselves and for their mates. They want everything you own and they want you to work for them, the bankers and their criminal associates and STILL keep making those payments!

As an individual little pawn in a capitalist market you have no way out of this. They take everything, including your second pair of undies and you are left to wander the streets, hungry, barefoot and with severely soiled undies. Yes, you can work for these crims but at slave conditions and for wages set by the Gina Rineharts and the Christine Lagardes of this world.

However, as a sovereign State, and one that has been locked up into contracts and agreements that were nothing short of criminal, such as trade agreements that locked you out the market place and further out still of negotiating prices for the traded goods, and thus, out of earning any income at all, or like having to work with a currency over which you have no control at all and which is controlled by the bankers in the club, you can do a number of things.

You can negotiate, relying on a fairly strong logical argument.; an argument which will say, “make the trade agreements fairer, make the interest rates fairer, lend us no more -you have loaded us up with too great a debt already- buy some of this debt yourselves, since that’s what you did with the American banks (bought their foul and worthless derivatives, i.e., bad debts) – or we’ll get out of your sinister little clique of thieving bankers and we’ll go our own sovereign way as an economy and, more importantly, as a society, wearing its own clothes and carrying its own dignity, our own pride and integrity. We will sell you nothing more from our treasures! We will buy and sell our products free from your crooked constraints and prohibitions. We will no longer allow your troika bureaucrats to sleep in our beds and tell us which side of the pillow we should sleep on. And we will certainly not let you touch our undies!”

And Greece is at this very point of the negotiations now.

The bankers are screaming “not fair” and the mongrels of the opposition, who feel, as do all fascist Tories, including our own in Australia, that they were born and chosen by god to rule and have never in the History of Greece been in a real opposition, (since they were always a duopoly), are screaming even louder, two- and three word slogans, no more sophisticated than those spat out of our own leader’s mouth. “Pay the debt, pay the debt,” they shout and bark like barnyard dogs.

I have staged a most unabashedly simple scenario.

Others who wish, may add the complexities and the more nuanced complexions of this moral dilemma as they see them. In the end however, it is a scenario about criminals, going back a long way… to the days when Germany herself borrowed an enormous amount of money from Greece and, at the same time, devastated the country. She has neither paid that loan back nor made any reparations for that destruction.

How Does Your Garden Grow ?

06 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by in George Theodorides

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Front 4.4.15

Story and Photographs by Atomou

Mrs T makes lots of friends because she’s very garrulous and very gorgeous. She either accosts people or they accost her; either way they all end up taking a small promenade around our vegie patch, holding a cup of coffee or tea in their hand and chatting like sisters, brothers, daughters, blissful in each other’s company. I’m more of an indoors grump, slaving over ancient Greek and preposterously interesting emails from all sorts of people, from staff and students of unis and other educational institutions or thespians of every description.

But late last year we decided to put my idea into practice and now we are both constantly chatting with people from many miles away who have heard of this idea (MINE, thank you very much), which was to allocate the front meter and a half of the front yard to herbs and to make sure people gather them as they need them.

The response was quick and abundant. Young and old couples stopped, knocked on the front door and asked us if it was true they were allowed to pick whatever herb they liked and could they take a photo of the patch.

Most of my neighbours are Asians of one sort or another, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Singaporean, so the photos of our front yard are now known almost as well and as widely across the globe as my translations page!

Herbs8.3.15.b

The plants are:

  • Sage (four varieties, including Bog Sage)
  • Basil (4 varieties including Thai basil)
  • Mint (three varieties, including Vietnamese mint)
  • Parsley
  • Coriander
  • Olive plant
  • Curry plant
  • Dill
  • Rosemary
  • Thyme
  • As well as some spinach, lettuce, endives, rocket, hot chilies, arthritis plant (Gotu Kola)

I think that’s all.

I love watching parents and grandparents of very young children stopping, picking up a few leaves and bringing them up to the kid’s nose. The expression on those little faces send joy tremors up my spine and chuckles in my heart.