Underworld - Peter Loveday

The other day old Pantypal Peter Loveday sent me a link to a music video he'd recently made. It's called Underworld and it's marvellous. But don't take my usual dodgy word for it, go see and hear for yourself. Why review when you can preview! Well, I say that but do check below when you're done seeing and hearing because there is a bit of a story there...





In my wild enthusiasm, I offered to write a blog post and spread the glee. I emailed Peter to send me the mp3 file because our crap internet service wasn't exactly creating ideal listening conditions. Mount Larrikin is apparently in the way of something vital that would enable a 4-minute song to actually play out in four minutes rather than stop every ten or so seconds to catch its breath. And then something really embarrassing happened. Peter reminded me in his diplomatic reply that this song is on an album he sent me a couple of years back. Oops.

Naturally, I popped straight over to Food for the Brain and took their 15-minute test for dementia. No joy there. Perhaps it's actually dimentia I have.

Only partially daunted, I hunted out the CD in question, Moving Along from 2006. This is a fine collection of songs, which I'd not listened to for a while but had remembered fondly. You know how it is. We've all seen Toy Story. I put the CD on and concentrated intently for the first couple of songs and then I started drawing pictures and, while still enjoying, my focus had shifted to my own activity. This is not unusual. I always listen to music when I'm drawing but my consciousness of it quickly becomes subliminal.

Before I knew it, the CD had finished. Mmm, I thought. So, I cut straight to Underworld, which is placed at number ten in a collection of twelve tunes. I played it. It sounded good. I didn't quite get the same buzz as I'd got watching the video though.

This morning, I made myself wake up at 6am. In our little corner of the world, this is far and away the best time to view a YouTube video. I watched Underworld. Buzz. I watched it again. Zing. Mmm, I thought, etching a mental note not to make a habit of thinking hard before breakfast too often.

I thought about it for several hours. Quite a bit of that time was spent desperately trying to figure out a way to appear less stupid to my long-time friend. And then it struck me. Zeitgeist. Boy, that zeitgeist packs a punch when it sneaks up on you. But, even I know you just can't pull zeitgeist out of a hat and call it a white rabbit.

So, I busied myself on research of a very non-scientific nature, i.e. the type that supports whatever hypothesis you are positing. Because, dear friends, I was positing for all I was worth. I had come up with a theory. My theory is three-fold. Firstly, I think Underworld might be a song whose moment in time has come. This strand of my theory is easily evidenced. I submit, courtesy of Songfacts, this list of tunes who belligerently slept through their first release and then shone when given a second life. Quite a few classics in there - and who could believe the likes of Gangsta's Paradise would need a redux to get noticed?

One that isn't mentioned is River Deep Mountain High. That's right. The Ike and Tina Turner perennial failed to bud in its first spring. Interestingly, to me at least, Underworld invokes that very song with the inverted couplet,

It's all magnificent when I sleep,
mountain high, river deep.

Maybe it's an omen.

The second part of my theory has to do with the positioning of the song on Moving Along. I don't think there's anything wrong with the arrangement of these songs. There are twelve, distinctly individual songs, and some of them will end up nearer the end than the beginning. Thinking about it, the CD format advantages concept albums far more than it does collections. Your old vinyl LP required you to get up and spin the disc over, giving the songs on side two second-act status. Tracks at the rear end of a long CD have a hard row to hoe.

Some songs don't like siblings, especially if they're show-offy ones. I submit in evidence, courtesy of Yahoo! this list of quiet achievers who hurled themselves to stardom from the ignominy of B-side relegation. Suffice to say that Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock was a B-side.

Underworld seems to me a song not entirely happy to be a pea in a very long pod. It doesn't stand out in this collection as anything exceptional and I'm sure its writer didn't intend it to. Admittedly, this is the shakiest strand of my theory. Forgive me for going a bit Toy Story II on you. Prepare yourselves for a strong finish...

For the last thirty years the pop song has had a unique opportunity. It can make itself seen as well as heard. Some tunes are natural companions for visuals. And now, this combination is a desirable product in itself and an artform in its own right. Underworld has a strong, driving pulse and a generous tonal palette - qualities perfect for a short film.

Underworld has cut itself a lucky break. Its composer, Peter Loveday, is also an artist of exceptional vision and skill. I've known him for about thirty-five years now and he's always had that in spades. Declaration of interest - I'd rather hoped Peter would become famous for his art as Gallery Pants has quite a few original Lovedays in its collection.

The third strand in my theory is that the animation of it has propelled this solid song into a higher league altogether and given it a whole new life. Very Toy Story III. It's a tune made for YouTube times. Now, all that remains is for it to get noticed. Over to you...

Bottle blonde

Shearing Shed Saturday Night by Pants


Since Barney arranged for me to work as his assistant at Larrikin Shire Council, I've trousered more readies than a mining magnate with a top tax lawyer - quite legitimately, I hasten to add. Barney's dealings are, of course, anything but. You know Barney. He certainly had a feather-bed landing when we moved here.

You may recall that I have tried without success to modestly squander this little nest egg on some bits of art. I'm not fussed about the investment potential - although, given that I have exceptional taste, anything I buy will hold its value.

Recently, a small assemblage by Rosalie Gascoigne came up for sale. I enquired about it, thinking it would be about five or six thousand dollars. The answer came back - $46,000. Perhaps not. The art fund remains intact.

Back in 1985, shortly after the National Gallery in Canberra opened, I made a return trip to Australia from my London base. I was in a band. We had just made an album. One of my band mates and I made a visit to the gallery and saw, for the first time, Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings. On returning to London, we contacted Nolan, who was living there too, and asked him if he would kindly design the cover for our album. As you do. Inexplicably, he declined, so we made our own Ned Kelly cover. And very lovely it was too.

Miffed by the annoying 4 in front of the amount of money I could comfortably pay for a genuine Rosalie Gascoigne, I made my way up to Larrikin's End Trading Post, a grand cavern of junk, with a view to reprising the Nolan solution. Gascoigne sourced from the tip. Sadly, one can no longer get free stuff from the tip and all you find there these days in any case is grimy Tupperware and broken, even grimier fridges. The back room at Larrikin's End Trading Post contains, amongst other things, bits of old wood and bottles. I got the makings of the work above for a grand total of $6. Now, some people might think that's an outrageous price to pay for a tatty old drawer and a chipped bottle. But, I say it's a bit of a bargain for an artwork. Not exactly in Gascoigne's league but I'm pleased as punch with it.

I'm a fan of the great maker of art in boxes, Joseph Cornell, as was Gascoigne. Cornell's take on assemblages is that they are sight poems. Making art from found objects is the converse of painting, in a way. Paintings take little time to plan and a long time to execute but boxes are a long time in gestation and then, whammo, they're flung together in an instant once the arrangement comes right. I like to have both on the go.

I once became incensed, and still haven't quite gotten over it, when someone who really should have known better, referred to Gascoigne as a 'florist'. She was never a florist, but rather a dedicated and highly talented student of Sogetsu Ikebana. To call her a florist is a bit like calling Elsa Shiaparelli a seamstress. Ikebana is a high art, a discipline. I'm not saying that florists don't conjure beautiful arrangements but art needs more than just a trained eye, it needs an injection of intelligence. A work of art is the map of a thought. The viewer must be able to read that thought, which means that you have to insert knowledge, something that Gascoigne and Cornell did with both insight and charm. An item made from found objects must be intriguing. That's its only source of intrinsic value. I hope I've achieved that with the piece above.

The first box I ever made came about because Ma Pants suddenly decided to relinquish to me the small collection of items that accompanied my entry into the world. There's a little faded card with my date of birth, gender and weight neatly recorded in fountain pen, a tiny rubber bracelet, a calico strip attached to a huge safety pin and an envelope marked 'Special Privilege'. I have no idea what that means. I also have no idea why Ma Pants would want to part with these precious items, since it's almost impossible to pry anything from her possession. To call her a hoarder would be an insult of understatement. I've often wondered whether I should have been hurt by that.

Anyway, I thought for a very long time about what to do with these bits, proving the theory outlined above. And then I decided to put them in a display box. Craft shops had just started to appear and I found a very convenient and inexpensive little pine box with a glass front in one. Everything fitted perfectly. The pine has faded gracefully and I must tell you that this work is much admired, not something I ever would have expected. Sometimes art is the solution to a most perplexing problem. I can highly recommend it for awkward possessions you can find no good reason to keep but can't bear to consign to landfill.

The making of assemblages is a bit of a metaphor for life as it requires you to create an order from things that have no importance but nonetheless cry out to be made meaningful. It makes you wonder why you spend so much of your day on tasks necessary for keeping your life going, like paying the electric or sourcing replacements for products that barely limped past their one-year guarantee or fixing all the bits that got knocked about in the bad storms that seem to have been a feature of our so-called summer. Makes you wonder about the kind of life a travelling shearer might have had...

Don't follow me, I'm lost

Alchemy by Pants


The other day, I followed the wise counsel of the smart and justifiably paranoid seers of this world and deleted my Google history before it was set in, er, vapour? I also hit the button that invited me to 'pause history', for whatever that's worth. Presumably, like Kubrick's HAL, Googledroids can very easily override their don't-be-evil chip and appropriate my data anyway. I'm sure they could find some greater good/god to cite as justification, and its name would probably begin with a P.

They say that if you're not paying for the product then you are the product. If that's the case, then I'm a bottom-dollar toilet brush. There's no algorithm yet invented that could create a credible profile of my life from electronic records. And that's actually really worrying because that algorithm will try, like HAL, to 'understand'. And, when it doesn't understand, it will simply make shit up.

Algorithms are not unlike people in that they are designed to answer questions. The more accurate the information they are given, they more likely they are to be able to use their considerable reasoning capacity effectively. But I don't want to give these hypothetical algorithms information that might enable them to identikit me, no matter how accurate a picture they might form. Remember Tom Cruise legging it through a mall in Minority Report only to be the target of personalised marketing? Who needs that when you're trying to put the world to rights?

Unlike humans, algorithms can't discern when you're being serious and when you're joking. If, in the future, we're to be defined by our online profiles, then what happens to those of us who only feel like updating our Facebook when we've had a skinful or fictionalise our online diaries because it would be too awful to write the truth?* What worries me is that if algorithms are unable to create a complete picture of me at random, then do I become an outcast by default? Dickens would have loved that scenario.

I give very little of my true self to 'the cloud' - a real entity that sounds more like a Dr Who villain every day. I only shop online if there is no other choice. I certainly don't bank online and I get cash out for all my perishables. I don't want some doctor down the line refusing me treatment because I ate too many lentils.

Being human is defined by the possession of an inner life. To relinquish the rights to that inner life would be to voluntarily emigrate to a kind of mental North Korea. It would be a desolate place distinguished by a perpetual famine of imagination, leading to intellectual starvation. But, by choosing to reveal a false or incomplete picture of myself, do I invite condemnation? Am I a liar? In the future, will everyone who writes gratuitous fiction be a liar? Will the occasional deployment of a metaphor single one out as mad? Lonely as a cloud? - whoever heard of such a thing! To Bedlam with that Wordsworth of a miscreant.

I am a bit sensitive about this sort of thing because I have recently been the victim of a disfigured personal profile. An unflattering judgement has been made about me in an official record which is based on completely false information. The 'information' which supposedly led to this judgement did not come from any declaration on my part but from snippets that were first misheard and then fed through a Chinese Whisperizer to come up with something that sounds, frankly, mad. And then it was re-framed to appear that these mad utterances had come from me. Fortunately, this misinformation is easily discredited. But, it has been stated. And damage has been done. It is a very Joseph K moment and I'm afraid we're all going to be experiencing more of them.

It used to be that we valued our freedom and the privacy on which it depends above all else. If you don't think it's such a big deal, then go ask someone who grew up in the GDR. It's one thing to choose to reveal yourself in all your gory glory, but quite another to have someone else make that decision for you, and, to fill in the gaps with liberal deployment of their own prejudices. And how far are we from a point at which a prospective employer who fails to find an online presence for a candidate assumes that he/she has something to hide? Surely such a situation is beyond any thinking person's pale. I hope I never see the day when people become slaves to rogue algorithms serving some equation bent on world domination.

Word to the wise - get off the bus, ain't no one driving.

*Does not apply here at Seat of Pants where we don't do Facebook and life is permanent idyll - Barney, more vodkamisu. Quick as you like. There's a good fellow...

Pearls at Dawn

THEORY OF GENERAL RELATIVITY

JG by Pants and I'm afraid I couldn't find the original source for MT - sorry but you know who you are.

Normally on Oscars day/night, you would find the Question why and yours not-so-truly curled up on our respective velour recliners in the home theatre on a Chardonnay drip with a vodkamisu tantalisingly in the offing. But, disaster. The Question why was suddenly called into the Australian Labor Party Caucus room to cast his vote on the future of our country and our butler-cum-vodkamisu chef - known to you as Barney - was nowhere to be found. (He later sent a cowardly text informing me that he was with the Hugo entourage. Apparently, Scorsese has an owly-cat from Barney's batch and is, well, you know, kinda sentimental about that sorta thing).

Worse still, Pants has found herself in gainful employment that simply refuses to go away. So, whilst dramas both real and imagined played out on the national and world stages, I was engaged on the erstwhile shattering issues that engulf Larrikin Shire Council, like whether or not we should allow vehicles built after 1973 to park in Maim Street.

Clearly, a new getting-one's-head-around device is required for the eerie prospect of processing the multiple challenges implicit in understanding why it should be as incongruous for a woman (pearls optional - hopefully), to be leading a government in 2012 as it was in 1979.

A week or so ago, I saw Iron Lady. I lived through most of Margaret Thatcher's Prime Ministership. It was dire for a lot of people in Britain. It was morally corrupt and sabotaged a potentially resilient social housing model to a point from which it may never recover. It very nearly managed to destroy the even more important post-war legacy of the National Health Service. It hobbles like a pantomime horse with two rear ends to this day.

When you're young, fit, well-educated, play in a band and have managed to get a hard-to-let council flat, you protest but also thank your lucky stars. Protesting is the right thing to do and you do it willingly and enthusiastically because wrong is wrong, whether or not you are personally experiencing pain from that wrong. You get to play at a Miners' benefit. That is a real thrill. From a purely selfish perspective, you know living like this is a great experience. You try your best to contribute to the sum of making things right. And sometimes it doesn't work, or it works a bit because you're one of millions who at least try.

But your experience is still your experience and I have to admit, I did go a bit 'awww, the poll tax riots' soft with nostalgia when I watched Iron Lady. It is a great film, about a monumental character and, as much as her singular screwing of a country I called home for a quarter-century rankles still, I found myself totally absorbed in the fictional portrayal of her real-life descent into gagaeity. This is the kind of extreme narrative at which Madama Streep excels. She got the Oscar, of course she did. Excuse me while I grab a frozen vodkamisu for one from the freezer and watch the replay.

And now, inevitably, we come to our very own pearl-wearing iron matron. Today, whilst La Streep basked in her third Oscar win, our Prime Minister Julia Gillard was coming up for air following a leadership challenge from the mad narcissist to whom she gave a consolation prize of a job we'd all be more than glad to have. There it was in all its irksome, laughing-stock glory. It couldn't have been more hilarious if the Coen Brothers had half-baked it and left it out in the rain for some neo-Dadaists to re-imagine. Streep was a sure thing. Julia, less so. But she won.

When the Question why returns from Canberra and Barney from Hollywood, we'll go and see The Artist. We loved Hugo, but it will be nice to see a movie for once that doesn't feel like it has to wrestle you to the floor and invite the Burundi Drummers to take up residence in your ears.

Stand down the pearls for another year. All is quiet now...

The Art of Dottiness

Reconstruction by Pants


Every so often, the electricity supply here in Larrikin's End blips for about 30 seconds. Not enough time to ruin a soufflé, but certainly enough to throw every electronic device at Seat of Pants into a tailspin. The worst of it is having to go around and reset all the clocks. Every appliance these days feels the need to know the time and, even creepier, to go into epileptic meltdown if it momentarily loses that ability, resulting in fits of uncontrollable blinking.

This is an accurate metaphor for how I'm feeling at the moment. Suffice to say, the reconciliation with the birth-mother country has hit something of a major snag. Our biorhythms are most definitely not in synch at the present moment. What this means is that I'm almost always seeking escape, and this usually involves bumming a ride on someone else's psychic Segway. Happily, in recent months, there have been plenty on which to hitch.

I was in Brisbane a few weeks ago to see the Matisse exhibition at GOMA, (of which more later), and I also popped in to the Yayoi Kusama show Look Now, See Forever. It seems to me that Kusama has this life lark figured out about right. When she's not travelling the world spreading her infectious brand of wonderfulness, she lives in a nuthouse. It could be argued that she is a lot saner than those of us who persist in butting heads with idiots for a far smaller allocation of crust when we could be decorating the world with bright colours instead.

The polka dots, her most recognisable image, are an interpretation of the hallucinations that Kusama began experiencing from an early age. As I've mentioned many times before, I'm automatically a fan of any art that can bring glee to the face of a small child. Obliteration Room is an interactive piece that is installed using locally sourced elements. It comprises a suite of rooms containing everyday household objects like televisions, sofas, shelves tables and chairs, all painted in matt white. Visitors are each given a sheet of dots and instructed to place their dots where they please.

It's undoubtedly the best interactive artwork I've ever experienced. It operates on a number of levels. The children love it, of course, and it's not half fun if you're a curmudgeonly matron either. It's completely inclusive. Any person of any age or ability can place a sticky dot. It's utterly egalitarian. There is no wrong place to put your dots and no wrong way to deal with your dots. As you can see, I saved half of mine to create my own artwork, above. Barney ate all of his dots, thinking they were tabs of acid. Judging by his behaviour immediately following, I assume they were.

My favourite thing about the Obliteration Room is that, at some point, it either has reached or will reach an aesthetic peak but no one will be there to make that call and perhaps no one will even notice. The first couple of visitors who deposited dots might have had some pleasure in the blank canvas that was before them but they would not have had much of a glimpse of what was going to be possible. We came about halfway into the experiment and, I must say, it did look pretty amazing. But it will obviously reach the point where it looks like 101 Dalmatians' breakfasts.

Leonardo da Vinci supposedly said, 'art is never finished, only abandoned.' The artist's dilemma is choosing the right moment to walk away. Nothing is ever perfect. That's a given. But over-whipping the cream leaves you with curds, whey and a naked sponge. To most artists, the fear of not knowing when to put down the brush/chisel/spray can puts global warming, international terrorism and being caught with an outdated electronic device in the shade.*

I'll bet that not even Leonardo could have predicted that a half-millennium after he'd painted the famed Mona Lisa, it would still be making news. Last week The Prado Museum in Madrid announced that it had an almost fully restored painting of her thought to be by a da Vinci student, done during the same sitting. If you haven't already done it, it's fun to play with this comparator for a few minutes.

I have seen Leonardo's Lisa several times and a great many other Leonardo bits and bobs to boot. There is no doubt in my mind whatever, that being in the vicinity of any object he made, even down to the roughest, tossed-off sketch is a special privilege. I don't believe it's an entirely conditioned response. Great artists find a sensory level on which to communicate, which is the thing that makes them great artists and the reason not even experts can accurately pinpoint the nature of their allure.

Kusama has made some intriguing signature pieces over her long career. In addition to the dot motif, she does a fine line in flowers and pumpkins. These are happier relics of childhood, recalling the family business - a plant nursery. The legacy of her time as a performance artist in the New York City of the sixties is evident in the psychedelic fantasies she creates in works like Dots Obsession. It's a rabbit hole into which one willingly tumbles. Very much a happening in the best sense.

You'd think it would be easy to do this stuff, but very few artists do it well. Not someone who normally shies from fun, I've been resolutely po-faced at many an ill-conceived attempt to get me to participate in an art event. But when an artist of such insight and skill as Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread or Anthony Gormley tosses a structure in my path and requests my response, I'm er, like, can I be your slave?

Obliteration Room does not carry the gravitas of Cloudgate, House or Event Horizon, but I do admire Kusama's take on public participation. Although clearly obsessively perfectionist in many ways - circles are a giveaway indicator - she is happy to author a work over which she has no control. Its compositional ideal will come and go without her being able to say 'stop sticking now'. She's not the first artist to play around in that territory, but the interesting thing about it is how easily and cleverly it blends with her other impeccably constructed pieces.

It doesn't come across as an attempt to bring art to the masses. It does, very simply, ask for a small but significant personal contribution to a mass artwork. Kusama exploits many aspects of our vanity successfully, using her own best-known symbol. We are all very confident that we can not only stick dots on a wall or object with the kind of aplomb that would make Lady Gaga blush, but we are also convinced that we can improve on what was already there. I'm not entirely sure that toddlers experience this degree of self-congratulation after exhausting their allocation of coloured dots but, judging by the level of satisfaction I witnessed, there was some pay-off, maybe the promise of a baby gelato, which would have been entirely appropriate.

I'm writing this piece now as a major Kusama retrospective is just about to open at one's beloved Tate Modern. And it will have an Obliteration Room. It's not often these days that I get to be ahead of any game.

*someone is bound to email me with the news that you can now get any number of smarty-pants appliances capable of resetting their pointless little clocks every time there is a thirty-second power outage, I just know it.

It came for me

'It's Guy Fawkes, Jim, but not as we know it, er, him' by Pants


I was just sitting there thinking ... I would rather go blind, than to see another Larrikin's End fireworks display. And then Barney shoved one of his fine vodkamisus in my free hand and, frankly, I don't remember much after that.

There was a boat involved. I think it was called the Poseidon? Maybe it was the Pontus. I remember it was one of the Greek nautical gods. I survived the experience, so maybe it was the latter. Barney vanished in a vodka vapour with a view to simultaneously appearing in all 2,011 of his Goblet of Fire venues at the stroke of midnight - I've given up wondering how he does that.

I remember what happened now. The commotion of Barney's departure alerted my lovely neighbour Ren. After we'd put out the fire, she invited me to a barbecue on her brother's boat. She didn't want me to be alone, for obvious reasons. The saying, 'fight fire with fire' must have originated in Australia because they've no sooner put out one than they're itching to start another.

I took some homemade lentil burgers I happened to have in the freezer to a barbecue on a boat in Australia, on New Year's Eve. It is a measure of the fine breeding of my hosts that I wasn't bludgeoned to death and thrown on the barbie myself, or fed to the sharks. My hosts, of course, served the finest shark'n'neeps to be found in Larrikin's End. The smell was extraordinary, but I just can't bear the thought of how cruelly neeps are killed these days, and I couldn't eat them.

Ren, after several glasses of Barney's special 2o11 vintage Russo-Barnique, became rather more animated than usual. That does tend to happen with Barney's top-of-the-range poisons. Anyway, she told me the story of the boat we were on. It had been a fishing trawler catching whiting and morwong. When her father and brother ran it, they'd used nets that trawled several feet above the sea floor, which they knew to be ecologically responsible. She told me that her late father was vehemently opposed to the destructive practice of bottom trawling. The old timers knew a thing or two about so-called sustainable fishing.

These days, Ren's brother runs the vessel as a leisure boat. It was an insanely pleasurable evening as we puttered about Lake Larrikin while the barbecue moaned about the indignity of having to grill my lentil burgers. The other guests, who incongruously comprised only middle-aged, divorced dads and their teenage daughters, occupied their time negotiating facebook access and trying to convince each other to either drink less or eat more.

I couldn't work out at first how this strange cohort could have come together. Then my canny friend Ann O'Dyne filled me in. She'd deduced that the mothers had already booked themselves into New Year's Eve parties, knowing that they'd be able to celebrate free from prying junior eyes. Having nabbed the offspring for the premium family event of Christmas Day, when the major and most memorable pay-off comes to the kids, they leave the dads with the lame-duck event of New Year's Eve. What's in it for kids? No presents - only the responsibility of having to sweat over a parent who is likely to want to get seriously pissed, because it may be the only time in the year when it's possible to do that with other like-minded souls. Now that is sad.

By the time it got to midnight, Barney's largesse had gotten the better of even Pants, who ought to know better after all these years of dealing with the devious little voligarch. You'll have guessed by now that the vodkamisu had more than a little something to do with it. Barney had prepared a special batch, which he assured me was child friendly. It was child friendly in the Timothy Leary sense of the expression. None of us can accurately recall what happened after we'd consumed Barney's special dessert. I think we can safely say, however, that the abandoning mothers might find themselves trumped in future years by the notoriously unreliable vodkamisu flashback, which tends to represent events in a much more rosy light than a standard memory might recall them.

We all agreed that the Larrikin's End fireworks display was the best ever. We differed significantly on how long it had lasted. A couple of participants insist it's still going on, even as I write. I wish the dear man whose wife left him for a Thai cosmetic surgeon and his very lovely teenage daughter, would abandon the gum tree outside my house. He has taken on the persona of John Donne and persistently intones,

'and to 'scape stormy days, I choose an everlasting night'

while the daughter's pitched herself in the Longfellow camp, crying constantly,

'O father! I see a gleaming light, O say, what may it be?'

Oh, sorry innocent country people. Flashbacks - probably not something you've ever had to deal with before. Try to look on the, er, bright side. Plenty of people have made money out of documenting their psychosis.

I know Barney is a menace. But who can stop him now?

Do you believe in magic?

Susan Langford MBE, photo by Stephen Davies


All year I've been planning to post about my friend Susan Langford but one's beloved Guardian beat me to it! The bleedin' front of them. Adds new meaning to the term chutzpah. But, since it is the season of goodwill to all - even newspaper people - and the reason for this cheeky usurping of my right to unparalleled tardiness is both honourable and valid, I will retire in gracious magnanimity. It's a very good piece and I urge you to read it.

The Guardian has named Magic Me, the charity Susan founded in London over twenty years ago, as one of eight charities benefiting from the annual Guardian and Observer charity appeal. This is far more than even the recently employed Pants could have brought to the table and, although it pains to admit, the Guardian's readership is marginally more than can be boasted here at That's So Pants.

I met Susan about ten years ago when I was working in Tower Hamlets. Magic Me was very effectively conjuring community harmony by bringing together (mostly) white elderly people and (mostly) Asian young people to discuss and document their shared history. Inter-generational mixing goes remarkably well if you don't angst too much about it and if you can bring the type of skill and wisdom Susan has in abundance to it. She got a well-deserved MBE last year for her Ginger-Rogerslike ability to waltz backwards in dancing pumps across the seemingly fatally rent fabric of civil society and make it all look too easy.

One of my favourite things that Magic Me does is to host cocktail parties in care homes. Susan discovered that elderly residents were being sent to bed straight after tea for no better reason than to relieve the staff of the responsibility of attending to them. So, she got together a group of adult volunteers who now go into care homes in the evening armed with a variety of drinks to suit diverse tastes, medical and cultural restrictions and with a remit to engage in lively conversation. If I knew that my charitable dollars were being directed towards providing Sex on the Beach to old people, I'd give more. Note to self - start similar charity here in Larrikin's End or move back to London before senility sets in.

Susan talks about the diminishing opportunities for the young and old to mix as people increasingly retreat to within narrowing cultural boundaries. That feels very true, especially in Anglophone cultures. You're much more likely to see large, extended families dining together in restaurants in Continental Europe than you are in Britain or here in Australia. But, I wonder if the great gulf of understanding that supposedly exists between the youngest and oldest of us might be a construct created by the in-betweens who haven't the patience to deal with either. The so-called 'generation gap' seems to me to be a very middle-aged, middle-class concept and it actually doesn't make much sense when you take into account the eagerness of the young to soak up knowledge and the capacity of the old to dispense it. This would seem a transaction opportunity made in heaven, except perhaps to those with a will to contain information exchanges within their own spheres of influence.

Ma Pants (82) and I recently went to a party next door to hers. The lady is Jewish but her husband is not. It was the first day of Hanukkah and we were fed blinis with smoked salmon and capers and also sausage rolls filled with pork mince. Their grandson, aged eleven, served us drinks and then sat down and engaged Ma Pants in a long and intense conversation about the walkie-talkie set he hoped to get for Christmas and the relative merits of the final four contestants in So You Think You Can Dance, an American TV programme to which Ma Pants has been inexplicably drawn. I could only watch it up to the point where the judges started shrieking, a spectacle which I am neither young nor old enough to tolerate.

One programme I did manage to watch for at least a bit is the BBC's When Teenage Meets Old Age, recently played here on our ABC. It's a classic social experiment scenario pitting opposing prejudicial views against each other, presumably with a view to creating a train-wreck no-score draw. Something a little less alarming but a whole lot more interesting happened. Society's economic-outcast bookends bonded in unexpected ways. There was mercifully little hysteria involved and a few ah-ha moments where it became apparent that both ends sensed that they'd been played off against each other by the mysterious middle. Who knew that a little peace, love and understanding could be so easy? That certainly isn't the mainstream view.

Is what Susan does magic or just well-executed common sense? My guess is exactly the right quantities of both. It is magical to have the ability to create the kind of project idea that will appeal to a diverse range of ages and ethnicities and also prove genuinely engaging and uplifting. The Moving Lives Project brought young and old women together to examine the life of Emily Wilding Davies, the suffragette who died in 1913 when she fell under the King's horse at the Derby. History? Politics? Feminism? Dissent? Aren't these all aspects of British society that the mysterious middle would have us believe are of no interest whatever to the young? Nice one Susan.

My last post was about Pecan Summer, the opera written by Aboriginal soprano Deborah Cheetham, who then went on to recruit and train a cast of Aboriginal people to perform in it. I've frittered away many an hour trying to imagine the conversations amongst various funding mullahs when the grant applications for that one arrived. I can't work out which is more remarkable, that the opera materialised or that its very being seems so audacious. When we all now supposedly have the freedom to pursue any avenue that piques our interest, how is it that we're so easily herded into age/gender/ethnic stereotypes when it comes to choosing which path to take?

I, for one, have been freshly inspired. 2012 will be the year of living defiantly. Thanks Susan.