That's so pants

Shocking Revelation

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:22:00 +0000

Last at Lamington by Pants

The things I'm best at are the ones I know nothing about. This is not a very pleasant realisation to arrive at in middle age. Of course there are a great many things I know nothing about so choosing one in which to specialise is no easy task. Fortunately my old friend Mr T has been visiting here all week and he was able to confuse me even more, which is probably the thing he is best at. Having looked at all the things I'm doing, he advised embarking on a whole set of different things. Nora Barnacle said after reading Ulysses, 'Jimmy should have stuck to singing'. Mr T's contemplation of the Pants artwork yielded a similar response.

Mr T is not at all good at predicting the outcome of horse races. I turn out to be quite good at doing that since I was able to successfully intuit the Melbourne Cup winner, Shocking. What's more, I managed to pinpoint the betting hub at the Larrikin's End Lamington Racecourse and place $5 on Shocking to win after seeking advice from my fellow students on how to conduct the transaction. Bonanza! I received $50 for a few second's worth of clairvoyance. With horse racing, the trick seems to be to do as little research as possible and simply follow your instincts which were given to you precisely for that purpose.

I was not so successful in betting on the Lamington Classic (above). I would have been if I had stuck to my original intuition, a horse called Shagstar. Unfortunately, Mr T also conjured Shagstar from his crystal ball and since he is so bad at picking winners, I changed my mind. So did he. My revised horse came last and his came second. He hadn't gone for win or place. Neither had I. I'm not an each way person. A career as a gambler, despite obvious talents in that direction is not on the scope. There is far too much waiting around in lines and I am very much over that.

Most of the punters at Lamington looked like they had just come from auditions for Bugsy Malone. The majority were fifteen and under. The young people of Larrikin's End are more pranksta than gangsta. The boys were in black shirts, white shoes and white ties and the girls were in pink satin bin-liners with pipe cleaner fascinators. Next year I think I'll be the one wearing blinkers. I don't think a career as a bookie is on the cards either. It would be nice to be given money by very drunk people and only have to give a small amount of it back. There were twenty-four runners in this year's Melbourne Cup. That represents a lot of surrendered cash. It would be just too demoralising to take money that by rights ought to be spent on decent clothing.

So what am I to do? Now that it seems apparent the biennale people won't be calling any time soon, I guess I ought to sit down and make a list of other things I know nothing about. Well, there's particle physics, taxidermy, boilermaking, cake decoration...

Stop your wining

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:19:00 +0000

Wine Glass by Pants

An interesting email popped through the pantychute this morning. Sender Jenny Hardy works for a British PR firm tracking the impact of the recent UK Home Office hectoring against youthful high jinx. Her firm Rubber Republic is apparently ‘part of the award-winning Team Rubber creative boutique’?? Their awards aren’t detailed. Perhaps they got the plaudit for locating Martin Lukes’s missing Blackberry™.

Here is the mail with all its adorable linguistic idiosyncrasies,

I am looking for some opinionated bloggers to spare some time if they are interested on the subject of Binge Drinking in the UK to watch the online video and comment on the campaign. The campaign draws to a close on Friday and it would be great for me to feedback to the Home Office some intelligent comments, instead of LOL.

As you are in/from Australia, have you seen the australian and binge drinking adds? I was quite shocked, very different approach.

If you are able to help out, please take a look at the campaign, you may have already seen it? and let me know what you think, I have no expectations for you to blog about the video, you are welcome to of course. I just would like to know what you think, or your readers think.

Please let me know if you require any further information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hba3clJ9XWw

‘Opinionated’? They certainly know how to butter one up these charming PR people. Surely you mean erudite, Jenny. And carpet-bombing the internet with requests for feedback the day before responses are required? Is that strictly professional? Pants does not like to be bottom-trawled like some unfortunate shrimp. Last resort is not a description that goes down well here at Seat of Pants.

Well, you know me, generous to a fault. Where Gordon ‘Scrooge McDuck’ Brown is concerned, my goodwill recognises no boundaries. What do I think about binge drinking? I’m in favour of it, obviously. Oh, sorry, I think I’ve finally worked out what is wanted here. Pardon me while I go and look at the video…

Okay. I’m back. Amusing trope involving a clinically sober young man doing things in broad daylight that very drunk people often do after pub closing, like roll around in their own vomit and throw rubbish bins through shop windows. Punchline – you wouldn’t do this in your right mind so why do it when you’re legless? Boom, boom.

It’s a spectacular own goal in two obvious ways:-

1. The young people seen observing this extraordinary behaviour don’t appear to think it’s at all disturbing. Bang goes the shock value then, not to mention the peer reinforcement. Perhaps they thought it was a play by Sarah Kane or a new reality TV show. No one is going to ‘react’ to something as obviously staged as this. The British public is inured to high street stunts. Anyone who gets shot in the street for real these days is likely to be left to bleed to death as people will assume it’s an episode of The Bill being filmed.

2. A fundamental lapse in logic has occurred here. People get drunk in town centres precisely to enable the sort of outrageousness that would simply be pointless at home. You can drink indoors for about a tenth of the cost of drinking at a club but what could be sadder than sitting on your sofa and singing Olé, olé olé olé! to a blank wall? Vomiting on your own floor or throwing a bin through your own window would clearly be madness and probably not covered by insurance.

Mercifully I missed the Australian campaign as the television here is too appalling even to be enjoyed vicariously. I can make a guess as to its hysteria level as moral panic has been something of a national project for as long as I can remember. I also need no forecast model to predict that these campaigns will have zero effect because people don’t like to be told what to do with their dwindling freedoms by idiots who can’t even manage to teach children to read and write.

Everyone knows that alcohol consumption has dropped progressively over the last two or three generations. In the fairly recent past manual workers would bolt from their heavy machinery to the pub for their fifteen-minute morning smoko to find six beers lined up in front of their stools. Everyone also knows that the time to drink to excess is when you’re young and your brain cells are still regenerating and you don’t have tedious responsibilities like child-rearing and pension-planning to dampen your spirits, so to speak.

Jenny, you can put me down as a LOL...

Saving Private Interests

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 03:38:00 +0000

The shark tower strikes back by Pants

The current big conversation in Australia concerns 'sustainability', you know that wonderful all-purpose word that impeccably credentials one's environmental integrity simply by its utterance? I can barely manage to sustain an interest in waking up in the mornings these days, much less trouble myself with the conflict of balancing the need to contribute to economic liquidity by purchasing white goods with the imminent climactic disaster occasioned by their use. But participation is no longer avoidable.

As luck would have it, even our very own professors have come to regard the learnin' of this highfalutin 'sustainability' fella above brushin', chisellin' and executin' triple knots. In short, colour theory is out, 'sustainability' is in. At this point I must declare an interest. Back when I first arrived in Larrikin's End to find that there were only three employers (Larrikin's End Municipal Council, McDonalds and my own beloved education provider), I applied for a job as 'Sustainability Manager' at Larrikin's End TAFE, the mother organisation of Larrikin's End School of Fine Art and Advanced Macrame where I am now a mature (as if) student.

I felt at the time that I could offer a seasoned perspective. Working in the field of neighbourhood renewal in Britain for around fifteen years brings one into frequent contact with the brow-scrunching notion that is 'sustainability'. Many a conference have I passed in its contemplation. There were six or seven wild years when the whole thing spun out completely under the tutelage of New Labour remittance man and Deputy Prime Minister John 'Prezzies' Prescott when 'sustainability' came to mean 'two of everything', (two Jags, two main squeezes, two country piles, etc). Eventually professional consensus settled upon the following definition,

'Just try not to make things any worse than they already are.'

It was with this informed view that I found myself in an interview situation discussing at length aspects of 'the customer experience' that wouldn't have been out of place at Coca-Cola. I wondered what this had to do with environmental ethics and economic viability. I have since learned that 'education' in Australia is not a service, but a business dedicated to fleecing Asians. It has the very useful added benefit of providing our youth with slight and easily recognisable targets on which to expel their pent-up enthusiasm for blood sports when there's no football on. By Australian measures, a highly sustainable industry. I didn't get the job. They wanted someone who could 'hit the ground running'.

Apparently the successful candidate did exactly that as he/she has not been seen since. After Mistress of the Brush sunk dismally in the attempt to wrap some hard science around her innate fluffy grasp of our new core subject, I suggested she ask the 'Sustainability Manager' to come down and put everyone out of their misery. An organic cyanide pill would have been more welcome at this juncture but suggesting a re-enactment of Jonestown would have sent the wrong civic message and I didn't have any fruit cup to hand.

The shy encumbent proved a persistent no show but eventually cobbled together an online 'course' for our edification. Subjects for study are no longer accompanied by what we might once have called 'a syllabus'. Apparently kids like it better if you just make stuff up - that way you don't risk intimidating them. Provided you knew the names of all five rivers that feed Lake Larrikin and didn't live in a big house by yourself or have a four wheel drive car (oops), you passed this online 'course'. You got extra credit for an energy-saving clothes dryer but not for having no clothes dryer at all. I figured they weren't going to come round my house to check so I lied about that, and the car. I got screwed by the clothes dryer question though.

I may not know enough about stewarding the world's resources to get a job sourcing eco-friendly bog roll but I do know that rounding on your neighbours for watering their azaleas when it hasn't rained for a few days and turning apoplectic at the sight of Peruvian asparagus or Californian lemons in the supermarket is really not the main event.

All over this country people are collecting up little trays of detergent-contaminated shower water and dumping it on their drought-evolved native plants. Why don't they let it go down the drain where it will be collected, recycled and sold on for use in farming and industry? Don't people read their water company newsletters? They're missing out on a source of great amusement. Where do they suppose the expression 'laughing like a drain' comes from?

As for the the 'debate' about the evils of 'food miles', this is sillier than Christmas cards appearing in July. Ever since the Sumerians sat down with the Mesopotamians over a pint to nut out how much salt they could get for their silver, there's been trade between nations. It isn't new and it is a vital pillar of global co-operation. If someone has something you want to buy, it makes more sense to go have a chat with them than lob a scud at their power station. Not all of it is good obviously - sending live sheep and cows three-quarters of the way around the world is cruel and pointless and should be stopped immediately.

I would no more buy Peruvian asparagus or Californian lemons than I would diamond-studded escargot forks. Why would I? Lemons and asparagus grow in abundance locally. Every second house in Larrikin's End has a lemon tree. Asparagus grows wild on the river banks. I'm happy to wait for summer for my strawberries and blueberries and even happier that every handful of seeds I toss in the general direction of my lovely black soil soon rewards me with edible leaves.

I'm all for locally-grown produce but some agricultural practices in this country make no sense in any imaginable context. Rice growing has been a major contributor to the destruction of one of our most important river systems and is entirely mechanised. Even the seed is sown by chucking it from planes. Why would we do this when several of our near neighbours grow rice efficiently using traditional methods in ideal climates and a large proportion of their populations depend on its export for their subsistence? No one talks about the environmental efficacy or civic responsibility of keeping our rice, tea and cotton industries afloat.

Smugly saving cupfuls of soapy water and totting up 'food miles' on recycled note paper will not save the planet any more than knowing the names of rivers will deliver them from irreversible salination. But somehow doing these things makes people feel righteous. Go figure. We've got teachers who can't even spell 'sustainability' telling students its all about taking a hessian bag to the supermarket and turning their lights off for an hour once a year. Whose interests are being served by trivialising the genuine threat that we might not be able to feed ourselves in the forseeable future?

Meanwhile, for the last twenty-four hours Larrikin's End has been beset by violent wind, hail and rain and Seat of Pants has nearly been shaken off its considerable foundations. It's mighty scary stuff. And that's climate change for you. No sooner will we get over this storm episode than we'll be into the dry season again. After last year's fires, the panic is already starting to grip. It might be cause for comfort if the feverish reviewing that consumed the winter had culminated in actual disaster-mitigation plans. But of course it didn't. All we got out of it was a new classification for the kind of conditions that create fires that move faster than the speed of sound - Catastrophic. So much for staying calm then. Well, for better or worse, I'm in Oz now. If this wind keeps up, I may well be in Kansas by morning...

Snobbery in Progress

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:10:00 +0000

Duplicity by Pants

Everyone tells me Australia is 'the smart country'. Perhaps, but it's still full of stupid people. Britain, of course is a stupid country full of smart people. America is a stupid country full of stupid people as all the smart ones went to live in Britain. At least if it's just the people who are stupid, you can simply keep your distance and hope that it's not contagious. A stupid country is much more difficult to ignore.

I, rather dumbly in retrospect, succumbed to an inadvisable whim to take up a course in visual arts at the Larrikin's End School of Fine Art and Advanced Macrame as those of you who've not yet entered a nursing home in the time it's taken me to compose a new post may recall. Incidentally, I read yesterday that regular intakes of wine help to stave off Alzheimer's. The usual 'moderation' caveat applies but I think we can agree a bottle a day covers it. Any more probably produces the reverse effect. Please do enjoy the fact that, if like me you relish a sauvignon blanc with your evening meal, you can look forward to being acutely aware of the stupidity all around you for the term of your natural life.

Where was I? Oh yes, art school. The rather grand sounding 'digital media' aspect of our course has so far managed only to equip us with the singularly pointless skill of cutting out an object from a picture and inserting it into another picture onscreen using a mouse. This is a task that takes approximately one hundred and thirty-two times as long as it would if one were to go to a shop, browse for two hours through the magazines, choose one with a suitable picture, dawdle to the stationery counter and finally select a pair of scissors after insisting on testing every pair eleven times, go on a two-week holiday to Phuket and, upon returning, forget for three monthss that you once had a notion to cut a picture from a magazine and stick it onto another picture.

Yesterday, the digital media teacher called me 'retarded'. This was just after she had gone away to get a calculator to aid her in the complex problem of dividing 210 by 3. I don't think she appreciated my suggestion that we call Wheeler Labs to see if they have a computer powerful enough to get an answer back on the same day. It's all my own fault. I could have chosen to stay on the dole and continue writing books that no one wants to read in my hermetically-sealed, stupid-free house rather than retrain for an occupation I am even worse at and spend my days with people whose livelihood depends on my achieving sustainable learning outcomes. I guess it's true what Kant said, 'A sane child put with mad children will go mad.'

Australia has recently discovered 'political correctness', although clearly it has not yet filtered down to Larrikin's End. It can be a very helpful strategy for getting out of doing hard things, especially when the old 'health and safety issues' excuse is too much of a stretch, even for the chronically daft. For example not teaching kids to read for fear that they'll be felled by lethal paper cuts mostly won't wash but shunning literacy in recognition of the damaging Anglo-centricity it imposes on our multicultural pretensions is genius. There must be some sophisticated non-elitest code of grunts we can employ instead of that crusty old English language to let each other know it's time for The Footy Show. Barney's just yelled out to me from under his rancid duvet that there is. It's called parliamentary discourse. 'Cheers Barney.' It can be highly beneficial sharing your house with an an aspirational owly-cat. Barney meets all the best people. 'Give my regards to Vlad old chap.' Did I mention the Barnster's opening a new vodka bar in Melbourne? It's to be called 'Goblet of Fire'. Barney's partial to strong drink. He fits Australia like a well-Vaselined condom.

Speaking as someone who still doesn't get why 'people of colour' is a more acceptable construct than 'coloured people', I am absolutely baffled by the semantic twist Australia has taken in reference to Aboriginal people. When I first came back here, I kept hearing talk of 'didgous' people. (Australians are not given to the mandatory pronunciation of vowels.) I eventually worked out that 'Indigenous' is the new culturally-appropriate moniker for Aboriginal people, the capitalisation creating a convenient new proper noun. Whereas 'Aboriginal' easily became an unambiguous national identity for the original owners of this colonised country by virtue of its not being in use for anything else, 'indigenous' is not quite so neatly commandeered. In countries such as England and France with big migrant populations, 'indigenous' refers to the dominant, white majority. You see how that could be confusing? It also creates a nonsense of a converse. 'Non-indigenous' is now in common use as a description for anyone who does not have Aboriginal heritage. But I, for example, must by default be an 'indigenous' Australian simply because I am not indigenous to anywhere else, even though I don't have Aboriginal ancestry. It's proved an effective and invidious diversion from real problems as the conditions in which most Aboriginal people live continue to deteriorate disastrously while academics helpfully ponder the finer points of linguistic propriety on their behalf.

This morning I listened to a radio discussion about children's sport. Whenever Australia loses at any kind of game it inflicts such a blow to the national psyche that it triggers a year-long 'conversation' about how we must do everything 'differently'. Apparently it is standard practice now to withhold the scores in children's sport to alleviate the distress of losing. That must be quite hard in tennis. How would they know when to stop playing? It's a shame if it's true as keeping score in sport must be one of the few opportunities children have left to experience active arithmetic.

Do I regret coming back to Australia? Only about five times a day and whenever I hear those anguished pleas to the collective disinterest beyond the waves for 'global recognition'. That they are still squabbling over abortion, gay marriage and whether or not to provide free and decent health and dental care is tedious beyond imagining but it must be so much worse to be an American where these things are still the dangerous hallmarks of radical socialism. I'm beyond the need for abortion and have already come to terms with the fact that I have to book my dentist three months in advance. I'm just going to have to get better at predicting toothache. Fortunately my teeth are in reasonably good nick for a woman of my advanced years. There is some health care in Australia but the system for accessing it is so complex that I think it would just be easier to avoid illness altogether. It does seem that if you are planning on having any kind of medical emergency, a motoring accident is your best bet. They hate people dying in motoring accidents here and will do their best to save you.

I have before me now several days of blissful aloneness and some warm weather forecast. If I could just remember why I thought it would be a good idea to move to the beach, I'd be in business...

Moon Muckraker (reprise)

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 08:36:00 +0000

My shadow questioning by Pants

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing, as you cannot fail to know unless you have actually moved there. The occasion draws to mind a time when I used to turn out a blog post a day. (Surprise! This blog really is all about me). I didn’t have any readers then and that made it much easier to blather on ad infinitum. Back in 2006 I wrote a piece about the revelation that no one had retained a copy of the high quality footage of this historic moment. I refer to the moon landing, obviously. Who would ever have thought you’d need something like that again eh? Well, to date, no dinted but undaunted film casing has been pulled from a dumpster and no fun-loving astro-nerd has surfaced sheepishly admitting that he was never a great practical joker or couldn't quite get the hang of eBay.

I might make a habit of republishing the best of my vast archive as some of it isn’t half bad. Today, I give you the old moon landing post. Its resonance transcends both time and, er, space in my admittedly biased view. Before that exquisite joy I offer a piece of rather harsh criticism I received from one Alla L via email a little after the fact. Alla L was not best pleased with my sloppy reporting it seems. I relay below every delectable skerrick of Alla's stinging critique,

1. "Sometime in the early afternoon Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin... " -------- when you talk about such important event, the reference has to be 100% accurate: exact time, exact day (of july 1969).

2. "Last month The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the original, high quality tapes of the moon walk have been lost by NASA" ------- Because the article was written on September 2006, we can assume that "Sydney Morning Herald" was for August, but again what day of August?

3. If you do not know how to write serious text, do not write it all: your material do not look relaible and childish.’

Well, that’s me told then. I was wondering why the Pulitzer people hadn't called.

Make your own judgement for here it is, Moon Muckraker, originally published 4th September 2006.

On a chilly July morning in 1969 I sat shivering with the six hundred other pupils of my Sydney girls’ school on the floor of the gymnasium in front of an especially imported television. I believe the maths teacher, a stick of a man who later married a girl in my class, was delegated to adjust the indoor aerial. Please don’t anyone worry about this as it was perfectly normal in the sixties (having to constantly adjust the TV aerial I mean). Sometime in the early afternoon, sound encased in a crackle of static, the first live television pictures of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon sprang from the box.

What we all thought was a space programme that would see us holidaying on Mars when we had exhausted the new experiences of our own world had begun. Sadly, this was not to be. The only legacy of those few years and handful of ‘space missions’ where Americans bounced around in their Michelin Man suits and collected rocks was about ten years of moon-landing inspired ‘if this why not thats’. An example might be ‘if they can land a man on the moon, why can’t they make the 7.56 from Upminster to Fenchurch Street run on time at least once a week?’, or ‘if they can land a man on the moon why can’t I get a decent cup of tea in Benidorm?’

I put up my hands as someone who is susceptible to conspiracy theories. It’s a natural by-product of having trust issues with the world, or universe as the case may be. It’s true that those pictures of Armstrong and Aldrin did seem oddly transparent, like they had been double-exposed in some way. Then there was the ‘was it or wasn’t it flapping’ with the flag thing. There is no atmosphere on the moon which is why I guess it never became the new Ibiza, but the American flag could clearly be seen flapping. I came to accept the NASA official explanation which is that the thrusters from the departing space craft caused the wind that made the flag flap. There is no escaping that those space vehicles looked impossibly flimsy then and even more so now.

Even so, I was disinclined to believe that the moon landing was a hoax for a multitude of reasons. Although it wasn’t until I saw the film The Dish five years ago, that I realised the pictures we saw were coming from the radio telescope in our very own city of Parkes in New South Wales, I did feel a great sense of retrospective pride. Also, it’s one of only three days I can remember at all about that school (the others being the day I arrived and the day I left).

The last month has brought disquieting news for moon walk believers. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the original, high quality tapes of the moon walk have been lost by NASA. Presumably these show pictures of the astronauts bouncing around that don’t just look like very poor special effects. Panic buttons were triggered when an Australian scientist called John Sarkissian who had worked at Parkes for ten years, suddenly thought it might be nice to see if NASA could burn a DVD for him and phoned the Goddard Space Centre in Maryland. Someone had a bit of a poke around but couldn’t lay their hands on the tapes. Either NASA’s cataloguing system could do with a review, or something more than a little pants is going on here.

Today, thirty-seven years after the historic ‘moon landing’ scientists are celebrating because they have managed to successfully crash a space vehicle into the surface of the moon. This was not an emergency procedure after robots couldn’t get the landing gear down or a freak accident on a very delicate and highly risky mission. No, this was their actual goal.

‘We don’t think there’s much that can go wrong now. It’s going to crash and that’s what we want’, said Manuel Grande, a planet scientist (previous credits include stunt co-ordinator on Thelma and Louise). At the risk of overstating, is it that difficult to get a crash wrong? But why crash at all? Why not set the thing down in a little puff of moon dust like they used to do in the old days? Neil Armstrong is, after all still alive. Surely he would have been glad to assist. He could have done the whole landing by remote, couldn’t he?

We may all have to come to terms with the possibility that the 1969 ‘moon walk’ was as fake as Michael Jackson’s.*

* Please bear in mind he was still very much (almost) alive in 2006.

Holding a Miro up to life

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:14:00 +0000

Miro cushions from Victoria & Albert Museum

At last the interminable second term is over. Larrikin’s End School of Fine Art and Advanced Macramé has washed its brushes of its bothersome students for a couple of weeks and I’m left to piece together the shards of my shattered sanity as best I can. I have learned just one thing in the last six months – when you ask a teacher a question, a politician answers.

The final week was hell on skates as each of us struggled to articulate a response to the probing question, ‘why did you make this piece?’ Apparently, ‘because you told me to Miss,’ is not an appropriate response. I did try to anticipate the pain of the assessment process by pointing out well in advance that, as we had not been given even the vaguest semblance of a working vocabulary for doing so, it was not likely that any of us was going to be able to ‘talk to’ our work with any degree of sense, never mind sensibility. I was assured that after Modernism there really is no big conversation, so to speak, in the visual arts. Teachers have consequently absolved themselves of any responsibility for intelligent input into the learning environment. Picture if you will fifteen students with multiple artworks and no discussion guidelines and try to imagine the torment. Not even close. It eclipsed root canal surgery by a factor of ten.

I, of course, refused to believe there was no known lexicon beyond pointing and grunting for first year art students to consider work with peers and teachers within the context of six months worth of development. Surely there was some way of assessing whether or not an idea had been realised with due budding giftedness or at least absorption of some of the scantily-clad knowledge we’d managed to prise from the unwilling grasp of teachers. I say ‘unwilling’ because I’m next to sure they know a thing or two. I suspect their reticence has everything to do with the absurd ‘sustainability’ and business-fixated curriculum that recoils from considering any aspect of quality other than to stipulate that there should be lots of it. Presumably there is also some intolerable penalty for betraying a fixed position on any topic at any time.

As Jack Kerouac once said, ‘Walking on water wasn’t built in a day.’ I vowed to devote my winter break to sourcing a decent template upon which I could at least base my own evaluation of my work. The term ‘evaluation’ suggests an appraisal of some ‘values’. The first step would appear to be to work out what these are. If there are no common ‘values’ then judging fairly and accurately was going to be difficult. The first step was to scan some of the endless lists of adjectives and occasional adverbs that we are routinely dispensed in a laughable stab at exegesis. In landscape painting for example, one must ponder such concepts as ‘symbolic’, ‘cultivated’, ‘literary’, ‘psychological’, ‘idealistic’, ‘theatrical’, ‘formally’, ‘micro’. Micro? Kerouac was on the money.

These lists weren’t going to be any help. Neither was the barrow-load of books on art history from the library. Master of the slide projector it seems was correct. Post-modernism is a critical void in everywoman terms. I wasn’t asking for the flickering neon installation equivalent of particle physics here, just an iddy-biddy little primer on basic principles, preferably in whole sentences. And then, it looked like I was going to get a big break. Sunday Arts, a television show on one’s just about occasionally watchable ABC, promises an interview with one Eleanor Heartney, art expert and author of a definitive new book on contemporary art with the general reader in mind. Hoopla!

I throw a log on the fire and curl up on the Miro-cushioned sofa-bed (pictured) with a G&T and prepare for enlightenment. Believe me, I’m the first one to accept that when you’re nervous, the sum total of what you know about anything and everything important and relevant deserts you and all you can think about is whether you turned the iron off. You should see me in job interviews. And this is why we rehearse what we are going to say before we go to a job interview or indeed a TV show to talk up our expensive coffee table book on contemporary art. If you would like a good laugh, the ABC has thoughtfully published an agonising transcript of Ms Heartney’s non-exposé complete with the entire cache of sort of kind of you knows, which to be honest was most of the content. It was like watching a one-legged man trying to start a Norton Commando in quicksand. Here’s a sample,

I wrote the book in part, hoping that it would be a useful textbook, or that the general reader might be able to go to it and begin to understand, you know, why are all these crazy artists doing all these crazy things? So, I see it as a kind of a map, I guess, more then anything else. And some of the most interesting artists are doing work that almost doesn't seem like art anymore. It's gone so far into some other kind of area or discipline that it's really new territory. And I think that's what's very exciting.

Illuminating stuff. The realisation dawned. As usual, I would have to work it all out for myself. A couple of weeks ago Brian Eno said in an interview on the very same Sunday Arts that discourse on contemporary visual art amounted to ‘no thoughts, inarticulately expressed.’ That would appear to be the sturm und drang of it. The blisteringly obvious question would be if it’s so difficult to subtext pictures, why does anyone bother? Photography books don’t contain musings on the meaning of a sunset now do they?

I can understand an artist’s reluctance to add words to what is adequately self-explained. Few nail this particular colour to a mast as comprehensively as sculptor David Smith who told students in a 1959 speech,

'There were no words in my mind during its creation, and I’m certain words are not needed in its seeing; and why should you expect understanding when I do not? That is the marvel—to question but not to understand. Seeing is the true language of perception. Understanding is for words. As far as I am concerned, after I’ve made the work, I’ve said everything I can say.'

Antony Gormley, another sculptor says, 'I want to start where language ends’. You get the message. It makes perfect sense for artists to jettison words once they’ve found their subject, marshalled their tools and are making work and succeeding commercially but there must have been the odd phrase floating about when they were learning how to mould and weld and mix and glaze and so on. Their apprenticeships can’t have been all one big joyous Marcel Marceaury of higher plane drifting, surely.

If the purpose of contemporary art is to deconstruct the artifice of convention and demerit the element of skill, then why do we still have art schools? There is very obviously many layers of understanding present between vox-pop Turner Prize outrage and doctorial enquiry and I was rather hoping, as a first year art student, to land somewhere to the left of centre and move on from there. Too much to ask? Apparently. Even Turner Prize judge and art blogger Jonathan Jones, who should be able to shed some light on this dilemma says,

'A critic is basically an arrogant bastard who says "this is good, this is bad" without necessarily being able to explain why. At least, not instantly. The truth is, we feel this stuff in our bones. And we're innately convinced we're right.'

Triffic. I’ve attended almost every Turner Prize exhibition since its inception in 1984 and am probably favourably conditioned towards conceptual art, the black sheep of the contemporary art family, because of a long and steady exposure to it. Whether this proximity has heightened my intuition in any way is not clear to me but I can and do judge these pieces and I usually can say why. For example I don’t rate Steve McQueen’s 1999 Turner Prize winning Deadpan, a reworking of the Buster Keaton toppling house gag because the original idea was simply reprised and not advanced and I could find no emotional connection between the old and the new.

I compare it with Tacita Dean’s video piece, Stillness (currently showing in Melbourne), where dancer Merce Cunningham performs his own choreography to late partner John Cage’s famous 4’33”, (usually known as Silence). Cunningham sits on a chair for the duration of the four and a half minute piece in three movements where not a single note is played, moving slightly to denote the change of movement as per the original score. It is everything the McQueen piece is not. Here is a dancer in old age paying homage to his dead partner with a companion work spiritually and intellectually in tune with Cage’s original concept.

I can see the piece might annoy some people just as Cage’s 1952 composition did but I found it both emotional and clever because I clocked the personal and creative references. I can't say how I would have responded if I'd just happened upon a video of an old man sitting still without knowing that he was Merce Cunningham dancing to John Cage under the direction of Tacita Dean. It could be that a work of contemporary art moves us if it hits a mark in our continuous narrative, makes us feel smart for making the connections it sets up for us and allows us to feel a sense of cultural belonging. Well, that’s one identifiable ‘quality’ at least.

I’m sure there’s more to it than this. The last thing I need right now is to be spending all my time on a pursuit for which I can find no purpose. I think it’s time I read John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts again. I’ll get back to you when I’ve joined a few more dots...

Beyond Bad

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 06:06:00 +0000

Michael Jackson by Pants

On a parky winter’s day in 1982 I ran into NME photographer Bleddyn Butcher in Oxford Street. He had just emerged from the Virgin Megastore clutching a freshly-pressed copy of Michael Jackson’s Thriller about which he was gleefully enthusing. This struck me as unusual for a number of reasons. It was unimaginable that anyone who worked at the NME would ever buy a pint much less a long-playing vinyl platter and wasn’t Michael Jackson, you know, one of those glittering disco type people? I never heard Bleddyn enthuse about anything at all after that day so at least something reverted to normal.

I never got into Michael Jackson. By the time The Jackson 5 started having hits I’d exhausted my taste for novelties on Cab Calloway and Mel Tormé and chose instead Hendrix, Joplin and The Doors as the soundtrack for my early angst. I did go to The Monkees concert in 1968 but they at least were not children. Then came the watershed year of 1976 and the choice between the mirror ball and the safety pin. I went for the pin. Try mending your knicker elastic with a mirror ball. Black was always a better look for me than gold lame and punks made their own, very much superior fun.

By 1982 Jackson was all grown up and there was no avoiding Thriller for the next eighteen months. I dutifully attempted to learn the moonwalk at a Christmas party in 1983. The Royal Ballet dancer who tried to teach it to us, looked quite stunning gliding across the varnished timber floors in his crepe soles but I collapsed in a heap in my stockinged feet. With the whole world seemingly under the Thriller spell, I wasn’t convinced. The niggling question for me was why would you want to listen to Michael Jackson when you could have Marvin Gaye? His Midnight Love album came out around the same time. Marvin had been ladling out his uncompromising blend of sex and politics in exquisite sound chunks for a decade. This jittering, squeaking, gyrating poppet just wasn’t in his league. It’s worth noting that it was Midnight Love that the NME named its 'album of the year' in 1982 and not Thriller.

It was twenty-five years ago last April 1 that Marvin Gaye died in genuinely tragic circumstances. He was shot and killed by his father just as his troubled life and career seemed to be on the upturn. That’s not to say that Michael Jackson’s death isn’t tragic in its own sad way but as Paul Morley concludes in this measured piece in one’s beloved Guardian, inevitable. The pathetic figure who needed an autocue to string three words together to announce a series of fifty demanding all singing, all dancing entertainment spectaculars, was not very likely to be still standing after more than one or two lacklustre performances. His sudden death may have been a kindness to all involved.

Like everyone else in Britain, I was parked in front of our rented television when the John Landis directed Thriller video was premiered in the wee hours. Revolutionary? I didn’t think so. More like The Rocky Horror Show meets Grease. But perhaps it was prescient in retrospect. When he tells Ola Ray he’s not like other boys and then acquires the face of a ghoul, well you can’t help but conclude it was a foretaste of things to come.

Most people are saying nice things about Michael Jackson at the moment but there will be dirt soon because it’s most assuredly there. Anyone who doubts that just needs to look very closely at Martin Bashir’s 2003 interview again. The county coroner may have finished with Michael Jackson but the real autopsy has only just begun.

My own curiosity is most piqued by his unchallenged attitudes towards women. He was clearly a misogynist of the first order but was never accused of it. Why? Because he appeared so infantile and vulnerable and one normally associates misogyny with brutes? What kind of father purges children’s mothers from their lives, names them all Michael, even the girl and then forces them into purdah for no good reason? It’ll be interesting to see how well-adjusted those kids turn out to be after an early childhood with Daddy Dearest. And what’s this about a surrogate mother? Last time I checked the dictionary, a surrogate mother was a woman who carried a child on behalf of another woman. If it’s her own embryo and there is no infertile Mommy, then she's it. The mother of Michael Jackson’s third child knows who she is and will emerge from the woodwork roughly about the same time as the value of his estate is announced I should think.

Michael Jackson’s misogyny was enabled by a mafia of clichéd grotesques with car bomb private lives (yes Liz & Liza, that would be you). These unsightly distortions of femininity so often associated with extreme gay iconography represent a version of self-inflicted victim-hood and chronic narcissism which appears comforting to men who, for whatever reason fear and/or dislike strong women. I often wonder why gay men don’t idolise Jeanette Winterson, k.d lang, Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. I’m not suggesting by the way that all gay men hate women and/or love Liz and Liza or that Michael Jackson was indeed gay – although that might explain some things. I do know a few gay men though and none of them read Jeanette Winterson.

The protection provided by these doughy dowagers may also have masked, even sanctioned some sinister behaviour. Going back to the Martin Bashir interview where Jackson candidly revealed that he regularly shared his bed with visiting children, it’s apparent he did not think he was doing anything wrong. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t, it probably means he felt no obligation to bother checking on his legal and moral obligations as the responsible adult. It’s a unique belief in personal entitlement that only someone who has never known anything but celebrity could hold.

I don’t own any Michael Jackson records and I won’t be buying any now. I don’t think my restraint is going to alter the estate's fortunes. Once the Amazonian frenzy for available material subsides, expect a slurry of previously unreleased tracks to hit the market. There’s at least one shopkeeper in New Jersey sitting on sixty demo tapes he won in a legal action along with other Jackson memorabilia.

For the last couple of days I’ve been listening to Prince. Everything Michael Jackson could ever have hoped to have said is contained in one Prince song, When Doves Cry.

P.S. By chance I received an email today from one Luke Jackson asking me to aid in the promotion of his new release. Normally I would greet such brazen cheek with a bad-tempered stab at the 'report spam' button but in the circumstances I can't pass up the opportunity to urge you to listen to an entirely different Jackson. Besides, it's called Goodbye London and it contains clever and amusing animation. Ootoob your way to happiness with my compliments.

Bad finger rising

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 06:12:00 +0000

Bad finger by Pants

I fear I may be dying. They say the forefinger is the first part of you to go. They don’t? Well they should. I fear the slow but sure decline of my erstwhile faithful right index digit following some mystery wildlife encounter of which I wasn’t even aware until alerted by an explosion of puss that would have been rejected from ER on the grounds of excessive gruesomeness, portends the worst. Anyway, I don’t want to live any more if my chief instrument of accusation is faulty.

Speaking of pointing the finger, British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has produced her first official poem, published yesterday in one’s beloved (and much missed) Guardian. Here it is,

Politics

How it makes of your face a stone

that aches to weep, of your heart a fist

clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue

an iron latch with no door. How it makes of your right hand

a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of your laugh

a dry leaf blowing in the wind, of your desert island discs

hiss hiss hiss, makes of the words on your lips dice

that can throw no six. How it takes the breath

away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin,

makes of your promises latin, gibberish, feedback, static,

of your hair a wig, of your gait a plankwalk. How it says this –

politics – to your education education education; shouts this –

Politics! – to your health and wealth; how it roars, to your

Conscience moral compass truth, POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS

* * *

Mmmm. I sense dissent. My views on the suitability of Gordon ‘Scrooge McDuck’ Brown to run anything other than a lukewarm bath have been exhaustively proffered here over the last couple of years. What I simply don’t get is how anyone could have been daft enough to invest in him any kind of hope in the first place. So you can imagine how far I am from being able to grasp the latest pale imitation of a putsch in British Labour. Did they rent their long knives from Ryanair then?

Loyalty is normally a quality to be admired but in this instance I fear it may have been seriously misplaced. Simon Hoggart (Guardian – where else?) points out that the Tories hold no reservations if they think a leader is likely to lose them an election. It’s off with his/her head. The left prefer to wallow in self-inflicted inertia and pray to St Jude rather than scout amongst the other 350 or so eligible candidates for someone with a little common sense and a modicum of humility when their leader does an Ahab. I’m glad I don’t live in the UK now. I’d have to vote Tory and then never mind waiting for the withering finger to get me, it would be the first plane to Mexico*.

While attempting to discover the exact number of Labour MPs in parliament so that I could approximate it accurately, I stumbled upon this Australian educational webtool.

Closer inspection of the scintillating content revealed these links to related material,

Boyle Over

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 10:12:00 +0000

Image from www.mirror.co.uk

SuBo’s flipped. Now there’s a surprise. In the game of chance we call ‘life’ here on planet idiot-box, her card was always marked, ‘Go directly to The Priory. Do not pass Go. Do not collect £100,000.' The transition from village curiosity to global basket-case has taken what – all of two months? And she’s skipped the whole tedious business of rushing out a hit novelty album followed by a couple of risible duds, a string of bad marriages to a creepy fake Eastern European aristocrat, a scrap metal dealer with dodgy connections on the Costa del Sol and David Gest, not to mention addictions to prescription drugs, cosmetic surgery and internet sex? I wish.

Was it personal hubris or vicious puppeteering or perhaps a toxic mix of both that resulted in the shock loss that sent the unlikely diva spiralling into meltdown? Everyone’s got a theory about how a street dance troupe from Dagenham whose name sounds like it was arrived at by canvassing a cross-section of local authority community engagement officers, managed to snatch victory from the Youtubed-to-death sure thing. Tanya Gold in The Guardian reckons Boyle wandered perilously off script to uncurry favour,

'In Britain's Got Talent it is never simply the talent that wins. It is the journey that wins – the story that the British public deems most worthy of reward. Who from the fetid gutter shall we raise up to be a glittering star? Who will be the most appreciative candidate? At first we thought it must be Susan Boyle, who the tabloids nicknamed "the hairy angel". It is a despicable phrase, but it says everything about what we expected Susan Boyle to be. It means "ugly saint".

But last week Susan Boyle began to step out of her journey. It was reported that she was cracking up under the pressure. The "hairy angel" was becoming aggressive. She wasn't, in fact, an angel, but she was human, and troubled. She apparently swore at a passerby who was bothering her, and even complained to a policeman about it. But, Susan, aren't you ecstatic to be bothered? You have never been bothered before.'

Hang on a minute Tans, I think it was the folks from across the pond who were mostly keeping the Boyle boat afloat. I'm a long, long way away now but I picked up that the SuBo magic started to sour along with those first few notes of Memory in the semi-final round. Personally, I blame Amanda Holden. When she proclaimed Boyle the emblematic heart and soul of Britain, it wasn’t much of a stretch to visualise jaws dropping all over Essex,

‘You wha? That daft old bint represents us? No fucking way.’

The rallying of Facebook networks from Barking to Basingstoke, Upney to Upminster, Romford to Rainham may well have turned the tide. Perhaps the bookies figured it was cheaper to max out the minutes on premium price voting than pay out the estimated £5m on a Boyle win. Or maybe ITV rigged the poll to satisfy some twisted agenda well beyond the imaginations of decent licence fee-paying folk. It wouldn’t be the first time a TV phone-in fell under the spell of a mysterious ‘irregularity'. Or possibly the voting public realised SuBo wasn't really much of a singer but they'd inadvertantly gotten rid of all the decent contenders and a saxophonist was never going to cut it. It'll take at least three generations to eradicate Baker Street from the national psyche.

According to media reports, Boyle was assessed under the Mental Health Act and conveyed to The Priory with a police escort requested by doctors after staff at her hotel observed her ‘acting strangely’ on Sunday. I would venture that a celebrity in a five star London hotel would have to be doing something slightly more threatening than merely ‘acting strangely’ to be carted off by police to a Gucci-padded cell. I know someone who once walked into The Dorchester clad in flannelette pyjamas and tartan slippers, ambled about for half an hour in a state of studied disorientation and wafted out again past the liveried doormen without a single challenge or even a sideways glance. Discretion is the blind eye that keeps the kids in Kappa for the staff of top London hotels.

Still, the expectation is that this poor muppet will have a stellar career and earn between £5-10m. As Tony Parsons observed in The Mirror, ‘she is not the best singer in the country. She is not even the best singer on Britain’s Got Talent.’ Arguably, being not even the best drummer in The Beatles didn’t do Ringo Starr any harm. Perhaps SuBo will get lucky and the world will be waiting ‘with bated breath and whispring humblenesse’ upon a golden album of dated show tunes. Hey, SuBo, Liza Minnelli called, she wants her life back and she's suing...

Embracing the dress rehearsal

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Sun, 24 May 2009 10:59:00 +0000

Under surveillance by Pants

Ever feel like whatever you do, however grand and heroic your effort to scramble to a place of relative comfort and safety, some insidious and uncombatable force masquerading as benign, or possibly even benevolent has you at the top of its ‘to screw’ list?

An ex-friend once misquoted John Lennon to me in a flurry of frustration as I racked up yet another failure to comply with her version of experiencing existence in its full and glorious magnificence. ‘Life’, she shrieked, ‘is what happens to you while you’re busy making plans.’ That salvo ended in a hail of expletives involving liberal use of the c-word on both sides, the cumulative result of which was we never uttered a civil word to each other again.

Some people it seems are unnervingly passionate about the quality of the lives of others, even if their take on the nature of that quality is entirely alien to the recipient. Where on earth do they get the time? What is going on in their own lives while they’re busy critiquing l’engagement de vivre of others?

At the risk of going all Dr Phil, I just don’t get it. I tend not to make firm plans as something invariably gets in the way of them. When plans are unavoidable, I develop a hierarchy of two or three carefully devised strategies and contingencies and even then, I prepare myself for the probability that there are enough spanners in my sphere to bollocks the lot. I’m flexible to the point of obsession about the amount of excrement any given fan pointed in my direction is capable of expelling.

Some people interpret my pragmatism as indecisive or even negative. I have seen rigid individuals rail against the inevitable to the point of apoplexy, regarding themselves positively assertive. No amount of aggression will undelete a cancelled flight, of this I’m certain. The only effective defence against the vagaries of the likes of airline accounting is a large and interesting book. I speak from experience.

Right now I have friends visiting. Domestic standards serve as their compendium of righteousness. I do not complain as I am acquiring all manner of ‘correct’ implements and ingredients, at least some of which will make certain operations infinitely more efficient. For example, I had a dim awareness that the clothes pegs I bought at The Reject Shop were fundamentally flawed in that they were not capable of attaching wet clothes to my external line for long enough to render them dry and therefore wearable. Beyond a general feeling that this was not a good thing, I had no other thoughts on the matter.

Having spent most of my adult life in a flat, I had only ever used pegs to stop sheet music from blowing away at alfresco gigs. It never occurred to me that there might be a type of plastic peg that didn’t spring apart at the slightest gust of wind, depositing your clean jeans in your newly constituted compost heap. I'm very pleased to have acquired a fully functional peg collection but less thrilled that the entire population of Larrikin’s End is now intimately acquainted with my shortcomings in the house and garden department. Mrs Visitor likes to share. Mr Visitor has brought me cases of vintage red, nicely redressing the balance. All’s well.

Getting back to John Lennon, the ex-friend and the misquote. What Lennon actually said was, ‘life is what happens when you’re planning other things.’ Now to me that doesn’t mean, as my ex-friend suggested that one should blast one’s way through life unplanned and unplugged, mowing down any and every shred of resistance until one’s will is fully satiated. I intuit a more nuanced meaning. My interpretation is something more akin to these lines from Robert Burns’s poem To A Mouse,

'The best laid schemes o' mice an' men

Gang aft agley'

In other words, expect the unexpected to leap up and punch you right on the nose at the very moment you think you can finally relax.

When Rose Tremain coined the phrase ‘life is not a dress rehearsal’ twenty years ago, I wonder if she imagined how ferociously it would be appropriated by our selfish gene to justify overriding others’ needs and desires in order to satisfy our own self-interest. Could she have been aware of how much this catchy and seemingly innocuous mantra would contribute to the odious ‘personal growth’ industry? Does she now realise just how much damage she's caused? Life may not be a dress rehearsal but the unavoidable inference that it should therefore be a polished performance is surely even further removed from actuality.

At best, life is improvisation and it would appear the more confident you are, the better an improviser you’re likely to appear to be. Now that seems like a bad peg to me. Just because I’m not loudly and constantly articulating desires, doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally have them. If I prefer to go quietly, minimising the risk of conflict, it doesn’t mean I willingly concede to others’ aspirations for me. Never having been a parent, ambition on behalf of others is not a concept I can readily understand. And I very, very much don’t understand people who have views on the shape of your salad bowl or the size of your coffee mugs.

Neither Ms Ex-friend nor Mrs Visitor has ever given a thought to the possibility that I just might have different priorities. Both have interpreted my habitual compliance as fecklessness.

I only refuse interference if there are clear and present disadvantages to the proposed alterations or additions. I just don’t care enough to resist and that alone guarantees I’ll lose any ensuing argument. Better to save your strength for battles that matter. If they were really that keen to see me right, they might have made it their business to become literary agents or publishers. Now that kind of intervention I could have happily gotten used to. Robert Burns has a neat little couplet just made for those too busy making other people’s plans,

'O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us'.

Having strong views about unimportant things would seem to me the very antithesis of ‘life’. Surely it’s better to have no views at all than to clog your head up with facts and figures about DVD players and hosepipe fittings. There is something hideously narcissistic and competitive about comparing your dishwasher to someone else’s dishwasher. Both Ms Ex-friend and Mrs Visitor have a worrying fascination with white goods which I’m confident I will never acquire. A fridge is a fridge is a fridge and then only so when it breaks down and needs replacing.

What does it matter if sometimes 'life' as others would have it passes you by while you’ve got your head firmly planted in a book?

Oh my, look at the time. I must go now, I have rehearsals to be getting on with.

The gospel according to Seasick Steve

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Thu, 14 May 2009 04:20:00 +0000

St Larrikin's aims for zeitgeist, hits passerby instead by Pants

My water bill came. It’s $176.00.

The cost breakdown is as follows:-

$6.00 – water usage

$170.00 – standing charges

I phoned the water company (note : water company as opposed to water authority. Could someone please remind me of a single reason why anyone ever thought that privatising essential services was anything other than criminally insane),

Me : Surely this charge can’t be right.

WC: Oh yes (with rather more relish than is strictly tasteful). You’re in a remote area and it costs more to deliver the water there than it does in the city.

Me : But I live next door to a lake. Doesn’t the city get its water from us?

Like most things nowadays, it falls apart when subjected to a rudimentary sense test but satisfies the broad customer service definition of ‘explanation’ from the corporate point of view. I believe the first principle is tell them anything that will convince them to go away. It did nothing for my mood to discover the five brochures on water-saving measures accompanying this joke bill. Rest assured I’ll be taking very long showers from now on. Logic dictates that if I’m spending all this money getting water delivered to my house, then I ought to make it worth my while by using some of it. That’s just good economics, innit?

Our local godpod, St Larrikin’s, recently raised the inspirational sign above. You wouldn’t have had to venture far out of your shell to recognise it as a paraphrase of Boxcar Willie clone Seasick Steve’s recession ditty, ‘I started out with nothing (and I still got most of it left)’. In its zeal to squeeze its frumpy old frame into the zeitgeist, St Larrikin’s has mangled both the spirit and the syntax of this song. Let us pray that the good burghers of Larrikin’s End don’t ever discover Leonard Cohen once wrote a song called ‘Hallelujah’.

Seriously, the economic theory encapsulated in Seasick Steve’s simple shanty could form the basis of post-recession thinking. As the value of cash assumes the shelf-life of a muffin, surely the less money you have, the better off you are. If you have any money at all in the present economic environment, you have to be concerned that it will be worth so little that you might end up having to pay someone to take it off your hands. I’m not quite sure how that would work. Perhaps you’d have to pay in turnips. I hope it’s turnips.

The Australian Government delivered its budget yesterday. There’s an immediate deficit of $57 billion and an estimated red hole of $200 and something billion over the projected course of this negative fiscal cycle. Why this seems so terrible to everyone is a mystery to me. Government debt is not the same as personal debt. It’s not like a bailiff is going to show up at Government House and remove all the Queen Anne occasional tables. In a recession, what tends to happen is someone finally notices schools and hospitals are about to disintegrate and decides now might be a good time to do something about it. I never got why a government gloats about its ability to accumulate a surplus. We give it our money to spend on our needs. So, why the inference that it’s all much more complicated?

The previous Coalition administration was very proud of its surplus and is now infuriated at the perceived squandering of it. A national treasury is no more than a cash account and is subject to the same vagaries of the free market economy as yours or the Pants savings is. Now all the surplus money that wasn’t spent on schools and hospitals when it could and should have been has been wiped off the slate. It’s best to spend it while you have it – a stitch in time and all that.

National debt in a country like Australia is a bit like a mortgage. You pay it off over thirty years and it’s just another thing you spend your money on. You don’t really notice it until it’s paid off and you’ve got money for holidays. It’s a shame you’re too old to enjoy holidays now that you can afford one. The opposition is moaning that everyone’s children and grandchildren will be saddled with a debt burden from the current borrowings as if some scruffy debt collector with a dirty suit and an iron bar will be waiting at the school gates to relieve them of their iPods in lieu of payment. Britain was still servicing its World War II debt until three years ago. It made absolutely no difference to the quality of citizens’ lives. Most of us didn’t even know about it until the media marked the occasion with a news item.

The less money you have when a recession hits, the less you have to lose. These days I’m trying to keep it as simple as possible. No loans and no contracts, in fact no commitments of any kind. Not even a credit card. I wouldn’t mind a bit ofwork but I can get by on my student allowance if I don’t eat or go to the movies and only buy ex-library books at 25c each. At least I feel confident to splash out on water now. If I could find a way to turn it into wine, I'd be laughing. Seasick Steve seems to know how to do that, perhaps I should ask him.

On the subject of work – has anyone noticed the number of feasibility studies that exist for so called ‘tele-working’ opportunities? Uh-huh? And have any of you ever come across an actual tele-working job in your travels? Didn’t think so. If you should happen upon such vocational gold dust, please email me. I’m very diligent when it comes to lying in bed with my laptop.

My brilliant careen

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Tue, 05 May 2009 08:46:00 +0000

Tiger in an urban jungle (surprised) by Pants

My first canvas is complete. If you think you recognise bits of it, you're right. It's an established convention called 'appropriation' that allows the artist to swipe other people's ideas, chop them around a bit and call them her own. Ask Chris Martin of Coldplay. He knows all about it. I had the good sense to use a work that is well and truly in the public domain as the centrepiece of this painting. The background comprises imitations of a combination of masterpieces by a living artist who has much better things to do than chase me down and are so naively rendered as to make them unrecognisable anyway. I'm accepting bids over US$400,000. Krug doesn't come cheap.

One of the top universities in Victoria today announced it's ditching all foreign language courses except for Vietnamese (don't know why - that lecturer is the only one with tenure?), to focus on the study of English. It may already be too late to reintroduce literacy into our tertiary institutions but I applaud the gesture.

Although the tutors at Larrikin's End School of Fine Art and Advanced Macramé are all exceptionally fine artists and indeed deliriously advanced macramists, not to mention reassuringly attired in eccentrically clashing patterns, not one of them has been tempted in the direction of a dictionary of late. I have given up trying to convince Mistress of the Brush that 'complementary colours' are those sitting opposite each other on the colour spectrum, whereas 'complimentary colours', should they exist, would be more interested in telling you how much they like your red and green swirly leg-ins... ohh, now I get it.

I believe it was Kant who said, 'an intelligent child who is brought up with a mad child can go mad', and I beg your leave to invoke him. I have a feeling that I once used to be smarter than I am now. Perhaps there's only so much you can blame on negative subliminal messaging but it often feels like I'm spending all of my limited head time on trying not to lose what I already know rather than on channelling a blossoming conscientia.

I've been following with a melancholy mix of anger and outrage the plunging fortunes of the British Labour Party and failed lamentably to scratch out the poignant, witty and insightful responsive piece I imagined I had in me. I realised, going over some of my old posts about the Labour Government and Gordon 'Scrooge McDuck' Brown in particular, that I normally need a comic spike to inspire me. The laughs are all lead balloons now. I reproduce in full below a post from January 2007, before Scrooge became PM, and we could all still see the funny side. Enjoy.

A Scrooge Loose

Watching as Gordon ‘Scrooge McDuck’ Brown fluffs himself up and waddles self-consciously into the international spotlight is almost always a painful experience. With equal parts of David Brent, X-Factor contestant and third choice best man giving a wedding speech, he invariably looks as if he will break down at some point during the delivery of his routine quackery and start blubbering that all he ever wanted to be was a retail marketing manager for a small to medium sized enterprise in Dundee. Pity us world for he is our next leader.

This week he’s in India fielding questions about our perpetual inability to get along with people from other countries following accusations of racist bullying by three of our finest belching and farting chavs on Celebrity Big Brother -

'Yes I know we invaded your country and enslaved your people while we systematically stripped your natural wealth, following which we invited your compatriots to live and work in our country and subjected them to appalling bigotry but we still want to be seen as a nation of fairness and tolerance.’ It’s worth a try.

Unfortunately, Scrooge’s trusty moral compass was confiscated at Heathrow Airport
due to heightened security threats, (‘I’m sorry sir, they interfere with the aircraft’s ethical guidance system’). This meant he had to hoof it when listing his heroes and went a little off course, citing Winston Churchill as a source of inspiration. Hang on Scroogy old chap, Winnie batted for the other side. Surely you mean Clement Atlee or Harold Wilson – those were your guys. Scrooge told our BBC this morning,

‘I think it was Churchill who said that you cannot meet the challenges of the future by simply building the present in the image of the past. And therefore I'm also seized that we face new challenges, first of all a security challenge, secondly an environmental challenge, and thirdly, of course, the challenge that British people want most of all is the prosperity challenge. And that will need new policies.’

Probably better not to quote Winnie in his ‘vintage’ period, and by that I mean the things he said after his fourth bottle of Pol Roger. Still, it’s nice to see that Scrooge is acquiring his soon-to-be predecessor’s finesse with the non sequitur.

Remembering where he was, Scrooge explained that Mahatma Ghandi had also been one of his great heroes. (When in South Africa,it’s Nelson Mandela. When in Jamaica, it’s Marcus Garvey. When in Germany, it’s Gerh… Yes, well). Scrooge explained to our BBC about Ghandi,

he showed a strength of belief and a strength of willpower, a determination to move for a more just and fair order. And people of courage always inspired me.’

I know I’m nitpicking here, but the thing I remember about Ghandi is that he didn’t move. That’s right isn’t it? Forgive me, but didn’t he sit and meditate? Wasn’t that the whole point and what made it so powerful?

What Scrooge says next indicates that, in conjuring Ghandi, he might have been invoking a particular historic era and perhaps needs to get out more,

‘I think if you look at the shape of the international institutions, you will see they were built for the age of 1945. We are in a new age. Reshaping these institutions can give us an environmental improvement, they can give us a security improvement, and they can give us also greater prosperity.’

If this is true, what’s happening in all those new Norman Foster buildings that we’re paying for? The fashion for neo Bauhaus architecture aside, what is slightly more worrying is Scrooge’s recent repetition of the phrase ‘there is a new world order’ whenever a microphone appears. It’s not a topic that has surfaced in the ‘community conversations’ in which we are encouraged to participate. Perhaps there’s a hint in this,

‘We need to strengthen the alliances we have, a strong alliance with America, a strong alliance in Europe, a strong role in the Commonwealth. But we also need, and I think this is now very clear to people, to reshape the international institutions so that they can meet these challenges of the future.’

I’m not entirely sure what ‘people’ he had in mind to be the recipients of this particular clarity but as a citizen of Britain born in a Commonwealth country, I can tell you I have no idea what these ‘international institutions’ might be, or indeed, what shape they might assume. Could there not be a reality TV show to assist me? How about Colour Your Commonwealth, hosted by Rolf Harris?

It all seems horrifying until you remember that politicians are scary and if all they’re about is trying to work out what will keep them in the positions they don’t even think they’re smart enough to have, then they are probably not that dangerous. Prove me wrong McDuck or you’re paté.

Sources – www.timesonline.co.uk and my warped imagination.

PS - It's Pants from the present. If you're still with me, come for breakfast tomorrow at Seat of Pants. Specialty of the house - duck paté on toast.

The cost of everything and the value of nothing

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 11:02:00 +0000

Blue Boy by Pants

This week I join the chorus of concerned citizens who believe that something vital is being lost from humanity. Unlike the battalions of pundits who can’t decide whether we’re at the beginning, middle or end of the greatest financial crisis in history or even whether this moveable feast will bring out the best or worst in all of us, I think I am at least able to put my finger on the malaise that is compromising my own well-being.

For me, the loss is all those wonderful grey shades of normalcy that used to sit between the opposite poles of a grand day and a shitty one. Those were the solid ground on which we all used to stake our sanity. A good day for me is one in which nothing out of the ordinary happens. These are the bread and butter of existence and the more of them we chalk up, the happier we are. But now it seems that verifiable human experience can only be measured in quotients of either brilliance or horribleness and all the lovely non-reportable things that happen to us ordinary folk which make us smile but don’t warrant a segment on the evening news or even a twitter post, don’t register.

To extend this thought to almost untenable elasticity, I don’t believe the levels of our collective morality can be accurately measured by our response to Susan Boyle. I realise this runs contrary to global public opinion but I actually think that the hysterical championing of this poor woman is the equally dangerous flipside to chucking half-devoured Big Macs at her in the street. Somewhere in this orgy of self-congratulation, critical process has been suspended. Susan Boyle has had false attributes and monstrous expectations assigned to her simply because of her appearance. This is grossly unfair as she quite categorically only asked for a chance at fulfilling the modest and reasonable dream of becoming a professional singer. And why for fuck’s sake are we so desperately seeking authenticity in Susan’s eyebrows?

Like Barack Obama before her Susan Boyle has gone from being an impossibility to a messiah just by opening her mouth. I know I’ve said this before but it’s worth reiterating in this context. The cheesy deification of Barack Obama is not only a shameless and obvious masking of prejudice but a form of racism. Wouldn’t it be grand if a black man saved the world? That would pretty much make up for slavery and the continuing oppression of black people now wouldn’t it? Self-evidently there are no shortcuts through this mountain of debt but somehow this man is expected to unearth one just by 'being'.

Obama's political opponents and disgruntled colleagues alike have found themselves gleefully clutching a win-win. They won’t challenge him too rigorously for fear of being accused of racism and no one will expect them to for the same reason, but if he falls on his face for lack of honest and timely critique, they can say ‘look, we gave him all this great support and he still flopped.’ When humanity joins forces to set some poor putz up to fail instead of applying itself to solving the real and complex problems of the world, then yeah, I do think something has been lost.

Back in the little world of me, I find the lack of nuance in all areas of fact and opinion afflicts daily business so badly I now conscientiously restrict contact with my fellow travellers to only such transactions as I deem unavoidable. At some point in a day spent in one room with fifteen others, I will inevitably have to communicate with someone. ‘Would you please pass the impasto medium,’ is occasionally necessary to successfully complete an assessable task. I stay well clear of open-ended questions such as ‘how was your weekend?’ which are likely to lead to real-time enactments of Jerry Springer episodes.

Many of you might find this difficult to believe but I can be a bit of a target for need-to-shares. If I had a quid for every time some stranger plonked him/herself right down on the bus seat next to me and uttered the words, ‘I was abused as a child you know,’ before even disturbing the velour, I too would have a Caribbean island all to myself. The windows on the top deck of a bus don’t open more than a few inches (presumably so that kids can’t throw their half-eaten Big Macs at Susan Boyle), so instant escape is impossible. Many’s the time I've had to alight prematurely and nip into the Slug and Lettuce for a reviving G&T before I regained the will to live.

This week in The Australian (25-26 April), resident psychobabbler Ruth Ostrow identifies an increased national tendency towards indiscreet public confession which she calls Recession Honesty (her caps),

All of a sudden, if you ask someone how they are, you get information on anything ranging from their financial affairs or their parents’ superannuation predicament, to what medication they are taking for economic-downturn stress and/or depression.

What could possibly cause people to think the quality of your life would be infinitely enhanced by their sharing of hopelessly undisciplined emotions with you? Sure as dependency follows Prozac, if you indulge someone’s excruciating outpourings even once, they’ll ferociously stalk you for the rest of your life. I’d like to be able to extend a sympathetic ear to fellow suffering every now and again without becoming a perpetual human diary, but such a gesture seems unthinkable. If it’s a case of all or nothing, I have no choice but to opt for nothing. Better to come across as a bit standoffish than find yourself obsessively following Dr Phil in order to contribute to a conversation. In the immortal words of Alain de Botton - let them read Proust or even Mills and Boon.

The nuance drought has also completely devastated educational standards as far as I can see. How difficult can it be to adopt an exacting and scholarly approach to advanced macramé? More often than not, I absent myself from class discourse as I find it entirely lacking in a critical framework. There are only so many tea cosies you can decide whether you like or dislike before you imagine you’re psychoanalysing yourself with less than pleasant results. The danger of expressing a view is that you will inevitably be called upon to qualify your subjective view by applying the question ‘why?’ to it. Aristotle, it ain’t. No matter what the object, I find after twenty minutes in this environment, my only answer to any question is endocrine emblazoned pavlova pyjamas.

The key to reversing the fortunes of the human condition is no easier to pinpoint. However, I do think it would be a whole lot more possible if the sub-concept of ‘degree’ was reintroduced into the broad concept of ‘value’. There’s a vast spectrum of legitimate states of being between rich and poor, sick and well, good and evil. Why is it now so difficult to hang a prolonged conversation on the state of being middling? In order to engage anyone’s attention these days you have to either have won the lottery or been beaten ragged by your mad biker boyfriend.

I’ve spent most of the last three days staying warm in bed, reading, writing, watching DVDs and looking at the ever-changing shape of the sea, mostly feeling fine and very occasionally feeling either exhilarated or a bit melancholy. Life doesn’t get any better than this in my view but how does it compete with the woman who ran over her poodle or the one whose ex-husband attacked her current boyfriend with an axe? (Yes both of these things happened to people in my class last week). When someone asks me what I did on the weekend, the easiest response is ‘nothing much’, and it serves all concerned very well.

Australia is indeed a place of great contrasts, and one in which the perils of a value system based on isolated absolutes with no connecting qualifiers couldn’t be more apparent.This is a country where a ten-year-old girl can be snapped naked by a famous photographer provided her parents give their consent but is not legally entitled to cross a street without holding on tightly to an adult’s hand. Bill Henson as a lollipop man – now there’s an interesting thought…

Boyling Point

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:24:00 +0000

Susan Boyle's BGT audition from examiner.com

This is going to end badly for Susan Boyle, I just know it. With over a million hits on YouTube already for the jaw-flooring Britain’s Got Talent audition that turned initially derisory guffaws into whooping great roars of approval, Susan is well on the way to certain notoriety. Lasting fame and her longed-for career in music could be something else entirely.

Both judges and audience were visibly confronted and humbled by their open prejudice towards her distinctly non-televisual appearance and bold determination. Many who watch the repeat will self-reprimand for judging the book by its cover. Just because a woman doesn’t resemble Gwen Stefani, they might reason, doesn’t mean she can’t carry a tune. I'm not convinced the studio judges and audience entirely succeeded in facing down their inner gargoyles. What they seemed to be saying is it's still okay to taunt the ungorgeous until they redeem themselves with a dazzling display of mitigating talent. Susan may have conquered the moment by virtue of surprise but does she have the personal resilience and professional repetoire to win, or even survive this contest?

TV people aren’t daft. They know they need to keep upping the psychological ante on these talent shows to continually engage a mass audience. The obvious banana-skin moment would have been that this lumbering oddity brimming with self-confidence mounted the stage and sang like an orang-utan with a hangover. Cue yawn for talent show cliché. Most of the time the air-punching blancmanges in tutus who vow to make entertainment history in their big moment turn out to be the kind of flotsam that should rightfully have gone down with the Good Ship Lollipop. But 2007 winner Paul Potts proved that this expectation could be turned on its head with the opening of a larynx. In this currency, Susan Boyle is talent-time gold.

But here’s the worrying thing. No question she’s Princess Fiona on steroids but where is the matching Shrek for happy-ever-aftering my dear? The world now knows two things about Susan Boyle from her BGT appearance – she’s never been kissed and she's more than a little keen to remedy that situation. In the service of that ambition, she’s developed quite an attachment to the late Jade Goody’s best girl-pal, general tease and nuisance-at-large Piers Morgan. Just because she really can sing, doesn’t mean Susan is not delusional in other star-struck ways.

Leaving aside the wanting of taste, I strongly suspect that this sexual naïf may not have fully explored the detailed contents of the dream she dreams. Scottish paper The Herald reports that Susan is already purring the praises of Piers when she’s not otherwise engaged crooning about castles on clouds.

‘It's Piers this, Piers that. She absolutely loves him,’ one of Susan’s neighbours gleefully informed The Herald.

My crystal ball tells me there’s no Morganite marriage in this pulp princess’s future. The question is how is brother Piers planning to manage the potential conflict of interest here? What if Susan isn’t just having a bit of a laugh and has genuinely fixated on the unlikely dreamboat? Having been guaranteed a huge audience for the season, producers are going to have to spend no small amount of time handling and grooming their new star. How far are they prepared to go? Piers by candlelight – now there’s a hideous thought.

A third piece of important information about Susan Boyle hasn’t been as widely reported. She has unspecified ‘learning difficulties’. Susan says it’s for this and her odd looks that she was ridiculed and bullied as a child and is still vilified. The youngest of nine siblings, she was encouraged to stay at home as a carer for her aged mother, who died recently. Perhaps she’s not as vulnerable as this might suggest. She did spend some time in theatre school before being called home. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, her many siblings will demonstrate their caring allegiance, as some of her local supporters have.

Susan Boyle sings I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables creditably and with a great deal of passion. But it isn’t a technically difficult song to sing, i.e. it ain’t no Nessun Dorma. Paul Potts, who memorably ‘nailed’, (in talent show speak), the famous aria from Turandot on BGT is about to kick off a tour of Australia. The superficially odd-looking tenor has done admirably in the two years since he won the inaugural show but he was quite a few centimetres further from the eight ball than Susan Boyle to begin with. His much publicised mangled front tooth was easily fixed. It’s a mystery to me why he hadn’t sorted that sooner. I had a Bond Street dentist in London whose patients included a Prime Minister and even he charged less than a week’s pay for a cap. Paul Potts had also had plenty of amateur operatic experience and no one expects opera singers to look like Hugh Jackman.

There’s ample career scope for tenors in tuxes dispensing opera-lite to busy culture vultures, but the on-audience for the Susan Boyle experience is much tougher to imagine. And here’s where the people manipulating her trajectory need to take stock now. Not even Susan’s heroine Elaine Paige sells albums like Paul Potts does. There’s no future for Susan in musicals unless there’s another revival of Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Her best hope is in panto – and I mean that in a kind and helpful way. I hope someone’s got the sense to guide her in that direction. What I fear is that the abashment everyone felt for initially maligning Susan on the basis of her appearance will morph into a misguided collective championing of a patently impossible dream. For Susan’s sake I hope I’m wrong.

Madness is the Message

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 03:50:00 +0000

The Light Pours Out Of Me by Pants

Hardly a day goes by at present when I don’t have to talk myself down from the trees before I can actually do anything constructive. I am not depressed, at least I don’t think I am. Definitions of depression are now so amorphous that you can think you’re suffering from depression if the latest series of Spooks isn't as good as the previous one. If that’s the case, I’ve been in the grip of melancholia for five years.

The quality of light entertainment can influence my mood. I'm overjoyed to have finally cracked the code to the BBC’s elusive online content. Most of it is unavailable outside the UK. I’m miffed about this since I’ve given that organisation several thousand of my best English pounds over the years in TV licence fees and I can’t even access The Parliament Channel. I have, however, found a small cache of segments from my favourite show Newsnight Review and have wasted most of the morning in delightful displacement activity.

As I’ve said before, I am not enamoured of the Australian media in the slightest. The TV doesn’t cost anything but there’s only about two decent things per month to watch. I listen to the radio a lot but it’s excruciating to witness the self-conscious wrestling with vowels that goes on, particularly if there’s an English or American guest involved. Standard pronunciation in Australia is still very much a work in progress. I hear so much about the Tarl-ee-barn in Park-ee-starn and Arf-gharn-ee-starn, I think my ears might be parm-ee-narntly darmarged.

Next week, however, Mad Men starts here on Free-to-air TV. I’ve just watched the Newsnight Review panel discussion on the pilot which has only recently been shown in Britain. It makes a nice change not to be two years behind. Kirsty’s guests were very excited about it. I found myself falling in love with Paul Morley all over again. Something to do with the ability to wear a sweatshirt with elan and whole sentences spoken in rich Mancunian I suspect. We know from the Life on Mars experience that blokes like to make shows about the sixties and seventies so that they can be unreservedly and bestially sexist. I think back to something Germaine Greer said before she went barmy, something along the lines of ‘women don’t realise how much men hate them.’ At least we now know for sure it’s genuine hate and not just ignorance.They don't ask Germaine to be on Newsnight Review any more.

Last night the multi-ethnic broadcaster SBS showed a bio-pic of David Ogilvy, often cited as the original Mad Man. It’s of no comfort at all to realise that the whole grotesque American marketing revolution was actually a British invention. Ogilvy famously said, ‘the consumer isn’t a moron, she’s your wife.’ He also left his own wife of seventeen years by simply taking her to a dinner party and departing with someone else. Not so much a moron as a doormat. I don’t like ads. All they do is put me off something I might actually want to buy because I become immediately suspicious of the claims made on its behalf, even when they’re attributes I might require.

The New York Review of Books (Jan-Feb 09) contains an interesting article on the influence of advertising on medical diagnoses, particularly for psychological functions. Reviewer Marcia Angell concludes that marketing has so successfully colonised medicine, it’s induced a role-reversal – new diseases are being invented to maximise the productivity of existing drugs. Reviewing three books dealing with the subject, she remarks,

It seems that the strategy of the drug marketers – and it has been remarkably successful – is to convince Americans that there are only two kinds of people: those with medical conditions that require drug treatment and those who don’t know it yet.

Of the three books Angell considers, one sounds particularly interesting. Of Christopher Lane’s Shyness: How normal behaviour became a sickness, she says,

Lane uses shyness as his case study of disease-mongering in psychiatry. Shyness as a psychiatric illness made its debut as ‘social phobia’ in *DSM-III in 1980, but was said to be rare. By 1994, when DSM-IV was published, it had become ‘social anxiety disorder,’ now said to be extremely common. According to Lane, GlaxoSmithKline, hoping to boost sales for its antidepressant, Paxil, decided to promote social anxiety disorder as a ‘severe medical condition.’ In 1999, the company received FDA approval to market the drug for social anxiety disorder. It launched an extensive media campaign to do it, including posters in bus shelters across the country showing forlorn individuals and the words ‘Imagine being allergic to people…,’ and sales soared. (*DSM – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

As I’ve always suspected, this sickening trend towards compulsory bonding is conjured by insidious multinational snake oil vendors. I'm not so much shy as misanthropic. I can talk to people, I just don't want to. I find it increasingly easy to ignore the rest of the world because of this kind of thinking but it’s precisely this attitude that makes it more difficult for the rest of the world to ignore me. It really is okay not to want to be with other people. It gives me enormous pleasure and I’m fairly certain social cohesion is not dependent on my willingness to absorb the autobiographically ramblings of ten people a day. I think of what Jack Kerouac said,

….I realised either I was crazy or the world was crazy: and I picked the world. And of course I was right. (Vanity of Duluoz)

Australians love Alain de Botton – another reason to suspect the national psyche is in need of maintenance. He was described as a ‘French philosopher’ on ABC radio the other day. He’s neither a Frenchman nor a philosopher in the French tradition as far as I can see, (although he’s rather prone to overuse of the word bourgeois), and he invariably ends up steaming his train of thought down the wrong track. In an article in The Australian last weekend, the ubiquitous Englishman graced us with his musings on the relationship between work, love and happiness, the research for which extended no further than a few weeks of eavesdropping on the sobbing clients of a London psychotherapist. His enquiries left him,

…newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so.

De Botton asserts that personal fulfilment is some kind of bourgeois invention. Wrong. The inclination to organise and produce is present in all societies as is the ambition of some to take charge of this activity. That humans enjoy what they have achieved is evidenced by the universal habit of celebrating success in feasting, dancing and other pleasurable rituals. Our natural industriousness is being short-circuited by a psychotherapeutic revolution that deludes us into believing that no matter what we achieve it is not enough. This end is easily secured by pushing the big button most of us wear openly labelled self-doubt. Extra confusion is added by the debasing of our traditional rewards. One can’t even enjoy self-congratulatory feasting without residual guilt any more. The result is a shrink’s bonanza.

It’s not the quality of ‘work’ that is to blame for career disappointment any more than the quality of ‘people’ is to blame for the failure of relationships. Most would agree that it’s human nature to want to do something with your life. It’s awfully long and could be quite tedious without activity of some sort. Even I want to do something (as long as it involves total silence and lots of reclining). The real letdown is not the work so much as the workplace. This is where quality falls on its arse. Why doesn’t someone set themselves against the problem of discovering why toilets pong, staplers walk and your boss’s brain has been injected with formaldehyde?

Well, that feels a lot better. Now for some industry of my own. The Larrikin’s End School of Fine Art and Advanced Macramé is an exacting taskmaster. I expect to finish a painting today, be jolly pleased with it and reward myself with as fine a feast as my limited income will allow. Cheers...

Goodbye to Jade

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:02:00 +0000

Woman with blues by Pants

‘A Primark Princess’, that’s what Russell Brand dubbed Jade Goody. I wonder if he realises how insightful an observation he’s made. Perhaps he’s also sat on the top deck of the No 55 bus as it crawled through East London on a Saturday afternoon and tried to focus his attention on The Guardian but registered only half a dozen prattling girls arguing over who has the flyest ever boyfriend/nailart/ringtone. Perhaps it was also obvious to him that they were on their way to Primark, Oxford Street’s grand cathedral of clobber, in the perennial search for the flyest frayed skirt ever sweat-shopped. When I was on that bus I was often going there too, but for a slightly less fly stock-up of cotton knits. Primark is the antithesis of style and originality while being the embodiment of ready-to-shag fashion. It’s the most overt commercial example of the paradigm shift in post-millennium British turnoutery which saw the concept of exclusivity sent to Coventry in a Burberry mac. Even I once had no choice but to buy my long-sleeved vests at Marks & Spencer, or as we Australians used to call it marked ‘expensive’.

Jade Goody was a dominant figure in the superficial egalitarianism that came to epitomise the new millennium Britain. The dotcom geek dag look that transformed ‘jumble’ into ‘vintage’ legitimised every stressed garment lurking in a wardrobe and made potential models of us all. Whether we liked it or not, we were fixated with noticing and commenting on each other’s outfits. It’s hard to credit now but there was a time in the not so distant past when that didn’t happen because clothes were too expensive to stalk with intent to purchase every Saturday. Consequently, you saw the same people in the same attire for months if not years on the trot. Primark clothes are cheaper than chips and even more popular. That Jade Goody should be considered a figurehead of the pound-stretching flagship is, well, fitting. She was to Primark what Princess Diana was to Versace even though by the time Primark conquered Oxford Street, Jade was wealthy enough to be shopping at Harrods.

There were over 22 million hits on Google for Jade Goody last time I looked. Of those, several thousand were news items. It’s fair to say Jade had well and truly arrived before she unexpectedly left. She’s been called the ‘ultimate’ reality star. That kind of presupposes there were others. I can’t think of any apart from James Hewitt who came with inbuilt infamy and has been louching his way across our unfortunate collective consciousness for interminable decades. No one could deny that Jade did sculpt a very credible silk purse from a most lamentable sow’s ear, but she did rather more than that. She was given just one big opportunity and she not only ran with it, she came first. My own path is littered with squandered opportunities so I can appreciate, however grudgingly, the insight, focus and acumen required to turn an active vocabulary of thirty-seven words (half of them made up) into a multi-million pound fortune.

Predictably the comparisons with the death of Diana, the former diva of attention magnetism, have proliferated to mark Jade’s departure. Just as Diana’s life and early death were compared to that of Marilyn Monroe a generation before, Jade’s demise seems now to complete an unlikely trinity of martys to femme fatalism. What’s it all about? Many have tried to explain. None of it looks either logical or pretty. Let me try to make sense of it – I don’t imagine I’ll do worse than any of the thousands who’ve already been there.

Marilyn Monroe was a screen siren and very beautiful. Diana was a pure princess and very beautiful. So far, so archetypically sustainable as explanations go. But then along came Jade and she was, like one of her implausibly successful product lines, Just Jade. Enter the paradox. How does the ordinary become the exceptional by doing nothing more than remaining resolutely ordinary? Some qualities Jade shared with those other thick, peroxided birds with kamikaze sex genes we can’t seem to stop missing.

She had that whole absurdly vulnerable and needy yet hard as nails when it comes to protecting your self-interest thing going on. But Paula Yates had that in spades. She was bleached, blithering in the love department, died shockingly and left young children but there were no teddy bears and helium-filled, heart-shaped balloons left outside her house. Is it because she wasn’t thick or because she didn’t have the compulsion to share the minutiae of her daily existence? (That was a lucky break. Too much information about Bob Geldof and/or Michael Hutchence may have rendered the concept of tomorrow untenable).

Jade was compulsively confessional. Like Diana and Marilyn before her, she wanted everyone to hear about her trials and triumphs. To know the intimate details of a person’s life renders them a kind of proxy intimate. Many commentators have drawn the comparison with soap opera – a scenario of long-term tribulation trailing. That’s not so interesting. Historically it’s women principally who emote over the early demise of the famous. In 1926, the entire American supply of smelling salts was exhausted by the ‘grief’ of the nation’s women at the premature loss of the laughably camp, even for the whoring twenties, silent movie actor Rudolph Valentino. Plenty have argued that this sentimentalising belongs in a time when women were given nothing more meaningful to do. So how come it’s still happening? What perversion of the feminine mystique is this?

Stand up Britain (with apologies to Bridget Jones), the weird and wonderful place in which I spent nearly half my life. The buttoned-up, no-nonsense, sensibly shod society whose truck with the saccharine sentimentalism of Hollywood was permanently parked on L’Avenue d’Isdain, hurrumphed rather than sobbed at Ali McGraw’s character dying in Love Story and Debra Winger’s in Terms of Endearment but felt moved to buy flowers and personally convey them to deepest Essex on Mothering Sunday. Sure Jade Goody was a real person, but not one most of the mourners personally knew. It would be very comforting to think that Britain had finally rid itself of its class-consciousness to the extent where it was able to celebrate the most ordinary as if it were the most extraordinary. For one brief shining moment, pigs sort of did fly, albeit business class.

That’s not what the whole Jade hate/love/grief triangle is all about however. Her life and death tells you everything you need to know about Britain’s relationship, ancient and modern, with women. Like all disempowered groups in society, women’s lives are represented in the media as a minority experience with separate and confined interests. Women are expected to be upset if a breakfast television host dies of breast cancer just as black people are expected to protest if there’s a coup in Kenya. You’ll even find the white male population wanting to accommodate you with space and understanding if such a thing should happen and you’ll then often be in the embarrassing position of asking ‘Melanie who?’ whilst refusing a condolence Polo mint.

I often wonder if British men understand that women are a separate gender rather than inferior men in drag. Britain has a very uneasy relationship with women in positions of power, yet over the last 450 years, 190 of those years have had a woman occupying the throne. A hundred of the last 170 years have seen a queen as monarch. I can’t help speculating about the origins of gay men calling each other ‘she’ and ‘queen’ and straight men wanting to group women and gay men together as a combined sexual ‘other’. And gay men being not entirely unhappy with that provided they were top bitch. Jade Goody fell into that area of fascination for gay men which is also very useful for attracting straight men. Graham Norton was never able to get enough of her and he was instrumental in launching her post Big Brother career.

As a woman, I always feel as if my bippy’s being yanked when I’m asked to produce sympathy where it’s clearly not required and I wonder what the men are doing while I’m searching for a clean hankie. There’s an inexplicable zeitgeist embodied in the late Jade Goody, the fascination for which I hope doesn’t last very long. I especially hope the phenomenon that was Jade, laudable as her considerable personal achievements might have been, doesn’t morph into a hideously crass role model for aspiring girls from deprived backgrounds that absolves the government of the day from providing them with an equal and decent education. And I pray, oh yes I pray, that Elton John is not penning V3 of CitW as I type. If there is a god, let her smite him now before such an evil thought should enter his mind …

Piggies on the fiddle

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 09:49:00 +0000

Clouds suddenly appear in the bank by Pants

Barings trader Nick Leeson got six years in Changi Prison for gambling with and losing his bank’s solvency and ‘retired’ Royal Bank of Scotland CEO ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin got £16m for doing the same to his. What’s the difference? The British Government didn’t bail out Barings.

The interminable retro-outrage about obscene levels of executive pay and perks in the private sector is turning my head into horseradish. We’ve known about it and have moaned about it for the last decade or more and suddenly there's a screeching demand for stout stocks and rotting cabbages? So wage inequality is now somehow a whole different derby simply because the wheels have fallen off the money-go-round is it? I'm guffawing into my gruel at the thought of governments across the western block overtly bristling at the hackles after years of sanctioning tax scams that ensured precisely zero of those colossal bonuses made its way into national exchequers. Somehow they deluded themselves into believing that fat controllers' contributions to ‘economic growth’ made up for their erstwhile tax revenue holidaying permanently in the Caymans instead of building schools and hospitals.

It’s all going to end up being a pointless, vitriolic aside anyway because £16m, although a handy wad for an individual, will amount to about forty-five minutes worth of interest when it comes to servicing the debt resulting from this mercantile belly-flop. Sure I think ‘Sir’ Fred and all his reprobate cronies should be tossed off their own motor yachts into shark-infested waters but I thought that before they did a KLF on our savings. It’s a bit late to be securing the vault doors now, innit?

Sadly no one knows quite where else to go with this, ideologically speaking. For a few years in the late nineties, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair made occasional tentative forays into exploring an alternative world order which he liked to call ‘The Third Way’. Like most Blairomes, it was a fag packet assemblage of vaguely cobbled together notions that sounded sort of holistic and a bit sexy and kind of caring without inferring that anything would have to change very much for it to be achieved. It contained nothing new – another cornerstone of Blairomes. Roosevelt had a crack and even old Harold Macmillan made a stab at articulating a centrist position way back. The inclination of Blair to lose interest in a thought before he managed to finish a sentence probably had something to do with this project’s failure to develop into anything other than a set of annoying imperatives for people to be nicer to each other and rather a lot of CCTV cameras to enforce the new niceness. Pity because the embedding of some equitable principles prior to the mega-boom years might have been quite handy as it goes.

A very obvious flaw in seeking a third way between the two now completely discredited systems is that the chances of ending up with something incorporating the worst excesses of both are quite high - hence the enthusiasm for world leaders to busy themselves with reconfiguring deckchairs rather than tending the iceberg wound. But isn’t excess itself the main event? The dominant component of capitalism is greed (for money) and the dominant component of communism is greed (for power). Shouldn’t we stop stressing about which system we use to barter food, shelter and i-pod downloads and just concentrate on curbing our cuntishness? Did communism have to end in Kim Jong-il and capitalism in GW Bush?

Somewhere in this warped mix of human desires is a telling propensity. Dictators, whether they be corporate or political feel a compulsion to pass their gross accumulations of money and power to a relative – usually a son – at the onset of incontrovertible dotage or the termination of a fixed term in office. At the very apex of the power pyramid exists the basest of caveman instincts. It seems to me that at some point on the long march to ideological sophistication, progress flips into reverse. Maybe top dog gazes into the mirror and, in the throes of delirious self-lust, forgets that everything is spelt backwards when you do that. Perhaps an economist or, even better, a four-year-old could harness one of the copious forecast models available to predict at what point in the cycle alpha man’s knuckles start to scrape the floor.

Now we know that the people running all things financial were not only breathtakingly avaricious but also gobsmackingly incompetent. (I feel slightly less bad about not having made terribly much of myself, I don’t mind telling you.) It’s curious but I suppose just about comprehensible in the context of the huge structural void, that governments still perceive these scheming lowlifes who are rubbish at their jobs to be pivotal in the economic recovery strategy. I guess a house with no roof is marginally better than no house at all. It won’t stop the rain from getting in but it might just be useful if a herd of stampeding rhino is in the area. Even Nick Leeson got a job advising merchant banks on how to avoid rogues like him.

In a treasury of risible riches the glistening gem is that governments, even when they own an overwhelming majority share in a failed corporation (as the British Government does in RBS), remain in awe of disgraced executives and visibly afraid to withhold or claw back their insanely undeserved exit bonuses. In a sector where food-chain inferiors are given a cardboard box and twenty minutes to clear their desks for no greater crime than being superfluous to requirements, what exactly is the procedural protocol in action here? What’s there to fear? These are the bad guys, yeah? What are they going to do – whistle-blow on themselves? ‘They may take legal action,’ terrified officials quiver. So? Haven’t these brainboxes heard the one about civil cases and the deepest pockets?

The most incredulous thing is their willingness to take seriously the ludicrous huff-puff threat from the private sector that the removal of bonus payments will result in tougher negotiations over base pay. The following combination of words seems highly appropriate to that scenario – bring it on. It seems reasonable to expect the scarcity of proven performance successes accompanying future batches of executive CVs might turn out to be beneficial even in the most bungling of banking boardrooms where any audacious remuneration demands should surely be met with the retort, ‘eat my shorts’. And piggy banks might fly. I suspect the formula for a 'better world' is still quite a long way from transforming itself into a lightbulb moment in any current politician's imagination...

Postscript - I've just heard that Jade Goody has died. I'll write something about Jade next week.

Walk On Up - Review

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 04:37:00 +0000

'Round Midnight by Pants *

I plan on devoting a substantial proportion of this post to reviewing Walk On Up, the new album by the Andy Young Quartet. If you don’t like jazz, now would be a good time to check out some of my earlier posts – as you’ve been promising yourself you would do for the last year, right? As I said about Andy’s debut album Downside Up, it’s wicked and you must immediately go online and buy it from Amazon. I declare an interest - Andy is the boofhead-in-law, i.e. the partner of Sis Pants.

I was thrilled when my copy of Walk On Up arrived in the post on Thursday and I’ve been playing it ever since. A friend who is highly musically literate, although not in jazz, asked me once when Downside Up was playing, ‘What’s this?’ I told her and she said, ‘Oh right. I thought it was some classic I should have known the name of.’ It sounded like lots of jazz classics but none you’d immediately recognise. You'll get the same again with this new album. If I had any sense I’d stop right here but, hey Pants by name - the boof-in-law deserves, as opposed to desires closer scrutiny.

Walk On Up, named for a chord progression found in some blues and gospel music, is subtitled ‘progressive jazz’ by record company Hardrush. Don’t let that put you off. When I think of progressive jazz, Stan Kenton or the Jazz Warriors spring to mind - neither comparison would accurately define the signature sound of this album. It contains neither the brittleness of the Kenton sound nor the brashness of the Jazz Warriors. Later on in the notes you’ll be informed that the AYQ sound incorporates the ‘swing, blues, ballad, bebop and bossa’ styles and this is much more helpful. It’s not fusion though. There are tunes in each of these styles but the styles are not meshed. They do however sit well together, mainly because of the very strong melodies which weave a cogent thematic thread. In the UK, this album would be categorised as smooth or cool jazz. The wonderful London-based radio station Smooth-FM would call it ‘dinner jazz’. Bear in mind, Kind of Blue would fall into that category. If you’re the type of person who occasionally finds yourself humming ‘Round Midnight in wistful moments, you’ll want this CD, and Downside Up too if you don’t already have it - and you’ll probably want to have a chic dinner party to show them off.

It’s unusual to find a jazz album where the playing isn’t superb - it's the nature of the beast - and here you'll be treated to some fine ensemble playing. Andy wears his influences proudly with a stylistic range that runs from Wes Montgomery right through to George Benson via Barney Kessel. For mine, Kelly Ottaway on piano and vibes is the tallest amongst some very lofty poppies. It’s almost like you’re listening to Bill Evans when he’s on piano and Milt Jackson when he’s playing vibes. I know I won’t be popular for saying this but the addition of Andrew Legge on piano and Fender Rhodes is a layer too far for me. Kelly has the lighter touch on piano and this makes a difference to the unison melody renditions. Even by Rhodes standards the sound is pretty naff and starts to grate after a while. It’s only a slight irritant though and it certainly doesn’t inhibit my enjoyment of the music.

Andy’s trump card in the world of jazz is that he is a composer of no small ability and versatility – a quality I’m guessing will make him extremely popular once more people get to hear his tunes. I’m sure there’s been a ton of theses written on the dearth of decent tunesmiths in jazz but I’m going to speculate totally off the top of my head and venture that the separation between players and tunes coincided with the demise of the American musical after the Rogers and Hammerstein era. Prior to that Broadway had supplied many of the staples of what we now know as the Great American Songbook. In my view the last great jazz translation of a show tune was John Coltrane’s sublime reading of My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music.

The sung-through musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Stephen Sondheim tended towards a more homogenous score and were less likely to contain tunes with enough elevation to interest jazzers. Around the same time many of the great player-composers who’d made up the other half of the book, died (Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Clifford Brown), or put their feet up (Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington) or gallivanted off in entirely new musical directions (Wayne Shorter, Charles Mingus). Then in the sixties, the shift to Latin rhythms exemplified by the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim, more or less closed the book on the jazz standard. Why would anyone want to invest in new tunes when they could play Ornithology, Joy Spring or Nica’s Dream? This legacy carried within it the seeds of its own destruction because no art form can suffer the finite indefinitely. At some point someone was going to have to start over, and many have fallen trying.

Now, forty or so years down the track, Andy Young appears with a big fat batch of meaty compositions that seem to me at least to slot right back into the grand tradition of the jazz tune. The format on this new CD mirrors the successful configuration on Downside Up. You’ve got ten substantial numbers nudging the content just over the hour mark with a mixed bag of up and down tempos and an impressive spectrum of moods. There is a much bolder emotional palette on display on this second album. The ballads are the best indicator of that maturing in confidence. Serenade on Downside Up, although slightly melancholic is carefree and somewhat restrained. My Joy on Walk On Up, on the other hand, exposes a genuine saudade of the type that truly haunts. I hope Andy records more ballads next time around.

So, music-loving readers, I urge you to purchase this collection – the quality of my Christmas present may depend on it…

* This is not the album cover - I tried to scan it but it's a bit fuzzy so you have instead some of my extremely bad art work.

Chance is a fine thing

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:53:00 +0000

Metropolis by Rosalie Gascoigne, Art Gallery of NSW

It may have been the kind of week that changes one’s life. I don’t know, ask me in five years time. I do know I’m not half bad at predictions, having accurately pinpointed the global financial meltdown – an assertion easily confirmed by posts around September 2007 when I was scrabbling to liquefy my meagre assets and consolidate a debt-free future before the excrement collided with the cooling device. I just knew it was going to clobber Britain and I was right. It’s a great time to have neither a job nor a mortgage, (unless of course both are insignificant), not to mention your life’s savings in the Royal Bank of Scotland. As many of you know, my artful dodge only meant I’d skimmed that first hurdle but there was still a long and painful race of indeterminate furlongs stretching out as far is the blinkered eye could see. The Gumpish question in my head resounded like a twenty-four hour alarm clock - ‘what’s my destiny, Mom?’

This time last week, as I was meditating my headspace into a suitable state of nirvana in which to begin my studies at the Larrikin’s End School of Fine Art and Advanced Macramé, (and foraging in the miscellaneous toiletries box for patchouli oil as a back-up strategy), I flicked on the newly instated television to watch Sunday Arts on the ABC. For reasons best known to its producers, Sunday Arts usually devotes itself to the championing of neo-polka but it is equally usually tolerable for its visual arts content and the neo-polka segments are useful intervals in which to mix a G&T, toss some rice snacks into a bowl and remove a slab of (pre-homemade) pizza from the freezer.

Rosalie Gascoigne was one of the featured artists last week. Beginning her art career in her fifties, she quickly became one of Australia’s most significant artists and the first woman to represent the country at the Venice Biennale (1982), a mere four years after her first solo exhibition. A sculptor and bricoleur, she created immensely rhythmic and lyrical works out of weathered materials rescued from the land, bestowing upon them an enhanced but still faithful new context. Even on the small flat screen, these pieces communicated to me a truth about the world that seems absent more often than I find entirely comfortable.

My first week as a ‘mature’ (as if) student was a revelation in many ways. Firstly, unlike real life, there were no crazies to contend with. We all sat around the reassuringly paint-spattered furniture determinedly chopping at/daubing with or organising colours, lines and shades as if it were as natural as, well, toasting bread and calling it breakfast. On Wednesday, over our free (hurrah!) but cold and demonstrably Nescafé (merde doble!) morning beverage, I happened to ask if anyone had seen the segment on Rosalie Gascoigne. One of my mature (and she actually does seem to fit the spirit of the name) colleagues, not only had seen it but had a book on the artist in her bag. Under only slight coercion, she was persuaded to lend it to me. Not only did she perform this exceptional act of generosity, she also informed me that there was a retrospective of my new-found heroine showing at the National Gallery of Victoria. I needed little persuasion to head for the train station and book a concession day return to Melbourne using my freshly minted student card.

At 4.30 am on Friday morning, it seemed a less good idea but I got up, packed a rucksack with fresh-brewed coffee, an essay on post-modernism and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife and headed for the connecting bus. By 9.30 I’d arrived in Melbourne and was perusing the works of Rosalie Gascoigne and I saw something one always looks for but rarely finds in art, humanity nestling with majesty as if they were soulmates. This was the truth that had reached out from the little flat screen and grabbed me by the throat. It was the experience I most wanted to have at the moment I most needed to have it. Here was a set of instructions for setting the world to rights. Rosalie Gascoigne, although dead for ten years, seemed to have come back to earth to explain how exactly to reorder the world so it can function honestly again.

Retrospectives are a joy because you get a speed tour of the artist’s head in an hour or so. It’s enormously stimulating, like receiving an intravenous download of a lifetime of blood, sweat and tears. Having had the opportunity to read a little about Gascoigne before the exhibition, my view was illuminated by knowing some of her story. As the educated and erudite young wife of an astronomer emigrating from New Zealand to Australia in 1943, she found herself isolated for years on a barren mountain-top with three small children to bring up. She spoke of the extreme loneliness and the need to establish purpose, which sounds perfectly plausible now, but in fifties Australia was the last thing a woman was given leave to contemplate. Women were expected to devote themselves to décor and the only fine art they were permitted to master was that of sniping each other into a highly constricting social order.

Rosalie Gascoigne found her purpose in what lay around her and became a monumental artist in part because she wasn’t prepared to compromise her vision by succumbing to the carousel of trivia paraded as a woman's lot. I could go on about her work for a month but it’s all been said already. What interested me is the single-mindedness of her journey, which was undertaken with the most astounding navigational skill and insight. Completely ignoring social convention, (as opposed to wasting her energies railing against it), she scoured the countryside for the detritus of post-industrial life, farm machinery, corrugated iron, wooden soft drinks boxes and decommissioned road warning signs, often having to negotiate courageously with suspicious males who incongruously assumed custody when they discovered a woman was interested in their erstwhile trash. From these scraps a new object was synthesised. Individually, these items were just waste but collectively they made something metaphorically powerful and always aesthetically beautiful. She had learned from the Japanese discipline of Ikebana that placement is everything in art, as it is in life. One is nothing without one’s surroundings.

What Gascoigne could or would not do in domesticity, she resolved in art. She talks about being a hopeless housekeeper, not because she didn’t try but very often because the elements diminished all reasonable effort. Dust storms, lack of suitable equipment and the severe cold all conspired to place a ‘housewife’ firmly in the red. Housework is a zero-sum game at best, an equation that’s well understood now. Gascoigne collected domestic materials (enamel-ware, linoleum, food containers and labels) and tamed them into an order that is serene and permanent. All external conflict was resolved using the same ameliorative but determined method. Of course one can never know how these dynamics really play out in families. I’m not sure I’d have liked to come home to a house full of sheep bones and saw marks on the dining room table. As Gascoigne’s career was peeking, her astronomer husband Ben was retiring after an illustrious career. He seems genuinely to have settled into a supportive role as her cataloguer, archivist and general factotum. Don’t you wish all relationships could be like that?

She said,

‘Chance is a fine thing and it serves me well.’

And I agree. Thanks to the timely intervention of my introduction to the work of Rosalie Gascoigne, the road ahead now seems far less daunting, this week at least…

Light entertainment

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:58:00 +0000

The Scream by Pants

I was minding my own, one of my core talents, when there was a knock at the front door. I love saying that – front door I mean. I’m used to only having one entrance. Seat of Pants is so grand, it has three doors – front back and top. A rap on the door of my Hackney flat signified a neighbour. Non-residents were obliged to make their representations for entry via an annoying intercom contraption and, unless I had actually invited someone around or ordered books from Amazon, I ignored its hideous trill. The caller was only going to be some sad fuck whose job it was to convince me to do something I’d never have thought of and had no interest in. Neither did I then nor do I now have even the remotest desire to be reminded that there are people in the world of such breathtakingly limited intelligence they don’t realise it is far more noble to kill yourself than to participate willingly in the demise of civility by bothering someone carrying out the concerted task of being.

There is evidence that Seat of Pants once had Hollywood-style delusions of fortress as the heavy front gates carried a small sign that read,

If gates are locked, please buzz.

I took it down as I don’t ever shut the gates and I didn’t like the idea of people standing outside them making like the bees. It might have done terrible things to the psyches of the actual bees. So someone had walked in through the trustingly open gates and up on to the little landing and knocked at my door. The only person who was ever likely to visit me was already here and I hadn’t ordered books from Amazon. I leaned over my bedroom balcony with all the confidence and authority of a senior Capulet, to find not Romeo waiting beneath but the bastard son of Nathan Detroit.

‘Luke’, as he claimed to be, was dressed so casually he would have been refused entry to the beach. The most formal element of his attire was a plastic disk on a string bearing the words Simply Energy slung untidily around his neck. He began his spiel,

‘I’m here to save you money,’ he bleated.

‘I don’t want to change my energy supplier,’ I retorted and turned to walk away.

‘No, no,’ he asserted, opening a folder, ‘I don’t represent an energy supplier. I’m a private contractor. Don’t you want to save money?’

I immediately recalled the two times I’d returned to London after several month’s absence to discover my electricity supply had been annexed by an insidious transformer monster called Powergen. You only find out such a liberty has been taken when the mountain of accumulated post reveals a sad little letter from London Electricity expressing hurt resignation that you’ve elected to desert them after years of mutual adoration. You phone them to say you would do no such thing as that’s not the way you’ve been brought up and you honestly believe re-establishing direct debits to be more painful than giving birth to triplets. They tell you, very slowly, you must have agreeably signed a contract to do so with some snivelling little Luke who interrupted your rapt absorption in Spring Watch. As if. I felt my eyes turn to lasers.

Luke steals himself for the hard sell,

‘Look,’ I train the lasers on to his opened folder. It is full of forms filled out in spindly writing. Old people. He’s preying on old people. I recall with murderous clarity the time one such huckster bullied Ma Pants. I could hear her at the door, trying to get him to go away, sternly but politely. In the end, I went and stood behind her just so he’d know she wasn’t alone. He left, eventually. ‘Your electricity supplier is SP-something or other…’ Luke didn’t know and he was trying to get me to tell him. Who’d fall for that? I maintained my silence and fine-tuned the lasers. I spoke slowly,

‘I do not want to change my supplier. We’re done here.’

‘Why don’t you like me?’

He was genuinely shocked that I felt no obligation to succumb to his odious advances, even though I’d made it obvious I knew he was trying to bake porkies in my oven. Why was he wasting his time like this? Why is there such limited understanding of the nature of co-operation – i.e. that there has to be some discernible benefit for people to participate? Isn’t it the very essence of this ‘choice’ culture we’ve all embraced so keenly at the expense of quality? Why would someone go door-to-door and then go head-to-head with a hostile householder? Picture it, ‘oh well, since you’re being so coercive and condescending, a combination which I find curiously charming, give it here you cheeky chappy.’ I think not.

And then there’s the choice that’s more like a kidnap. The sheer chutzpah of the Powergen episodes was confounding, even on the back of twenty-four hours of in flight existentialism. Place yourself in the Powergen boardroom during the conversation that must have precipitated this ingenious growth strategy,

‘The people aren’t buying our transfer argument Howard.’

‘That’s not good, Brendan. I know, let’s just change them over without asking. They probably just don’t want to be bothered with the details. After all, we’re a great company. Why would they not want us to supply all their energy needs going forward?’

Both times I complained vehemently to Energy Watch, the industry guard dog. It transpired that forging people’s signatures is common practice in the cutthroat energy supply business. It seems once people have been co-opted, they quite often can’t be bothered to go to all the effort of changing back.

Life’s administrative tasks hold no thrall for me. My time is worth infinitely more than the money I’d save by swapping a shark for a snake. I chose my energy supplier because i) it uses renewable energy, ii) I had a personal recommendation from someone who is not criminally insane, iii) it isn’t Singapore-owned, (although China might have snapped it up this morning).

The gracious life transformation is very nearly complete. After more research than went into The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I have rationalised my communication needs and have gone totally wireless, thus deftly avoiding the certainty of half a dozen calls a day from people trying to flog me everything from tea towels to tap water. I now have a little broadband stick from a company that is unfortunately Singapore-owned but also the lesser of three evils. The other choices were a notoriously incompetent Australian company hated here more than Pol Pot and a British company owned by the person I despise most in the world, ‘Sir’ Rich Bastard Brandname. There has also been another secular adjustment – I’ve become a student. Yes friends, I have enrolled in the Larrikin’s End School of Fine Art and Advanced Macramé. I’ve threatened to do it for years and now I’m a fully passported citizen of Bohemia. This is bad news for you folks as you’ll now be getting a regular dose of my extremely bad art with every post. In this instance I’m afraid there is no choice…

Tinsel Clown

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 03:49:00 +0000

Masked Woman by Pants

When Hugh Jackman erupted into song, lap-dancing his merry way across Hollywood’s most mega A list, the Oscars seemed destined to sink indecorously lower than the elimination rounds of X-Factor. I know, I’m not even supposed to have a television. Blame Ann O’Dyne. I was perfectly content to believe that my stuffy English TV, gainfully employed playing DVDs, would never deign to transmit anything but the BBC. Ms O’Dyne does love a technical problem and within hours of her arrival at Seat of Pants, the LCD was persuaded to accept the local fare. So I settled down yesterday with a fresh brewed coffee and a plate of scones to have my well-honed preconceptions about Hollywood well and truly confirmed.

I don’t suppose you can expect the Oscars to be anything but self-congratulatory but the tone this year was even more Team America than usual in its zeal to bestow harmony upon a troubled world. Sean Penn, accepting the Best Actor award for his portrayal of murdered gay politician Harvey Milk, shared with us his disappointment at the recent electoral rejection of gay marriage but noted his pride in living in a country with the courage to vote in an ‘elegant man’ as president. Is ‘elegant’ the new black? Or perhaps black is the new God. Dustin Lance Black tearfully interpreted his Best Original Screenplay award for Milk as a vindication of his whole life which had been an intolerable hetero nightmare until he discovered the purity and authenticity of show biz. Perhaps he’d not had the chance to read On The Origin of Species when he informed us that not only did God create and love gay people but he would be arranging for ‘equal rights across this great nation of ours very soon’ – the minute he gets back from his KKK meeting presumably.

For a lavish celebration of all that is American, there were embarrassingly few American wins this year. Predictably, Slumdog Millionaire cleaned up the big awards for being ever so fashionably Asian. Heath Ledger was always going to get his Best Supporting Actor gonk for being ever so fashionably dead and Kate Winslet triumphed, well, for being ever so fashionably Kate Winslet. Momentarily overcome by a bad attack of the Halle Berrys, she blurted out her childhood fantasy of practising her acceptance speech with a shampoo bottle, something that should never have materialised into actual words, never mind for public consumption. Hyperventilating like an extra on ER, she was so anxious to share the great moment with her DNA donors, she screeched for her father to whistle and reveal their location. He did – forever scotching the reputation of the English as reserved.

Penelope Cruz (best supporting actress) also hovering in that peculiarly thespian intellectual netherworld where statements need bear no regard to actuality proclaimed, ‘this ceremony is a moment of unity for the world.’ Why do we need Hillary Clinton? Let’s just send Wall-E to the Middle East. But then again Cruz was wearing a wedding dress so it was hard to take her seriously even in this context. When Sarah Jessica Parker also fronted up dressed for the chapel, you wondered if a re-enactment of Bride Wars was in the offing. Not to be upstaged by the bride of Jack Skellington, her co-presenter Daniel Craig appeared absorbed in a dyslexic trance or perhaps he’d rashly chosen to debut a new pair of contact lenses.

There was something strange going on with presenters generally as if they had all been told they were auditioning for Waiting for Godot rather than giving someone a prize. Ben Stiller’s routine with Natalie Portman as foil was joyless and weird, although she came within a miraculous whisker of rescuing it. That woman has untapped comic potential. Steve Martin was ruthlessly funny in a way that suggested he hadn’t slept since he heard Hugh Jackman had clinched the hosting gig. It would have been even better had he trusted Tina Fey with an active line or two. Sophia Loren has looked 62 for thirty years. Michael Douglas has looked 52 for thirty years and Mickey Rourke looks like his wilderness decades were spent as a crash test dummy.

Bafflingly, every winner claimed to have been born as far away from Hollywood as it’s possible to get which I guess means they all hail from Mauritius. It can be quite painful to watch people who so obviously see a pair of the cat’s pyjamas when they look in the mirror trying to convey humility. The women always succumb to hysteria – aren’t they supposed to be trained not to do that? It’s difficult to get a statistically reliable sample as there are only ever two women accepting Oscars but they do seem to scream rather a lot. You don’t get much more diversity from the men even though at least four of them appear for every technical award. After they’ve methodically run through their name checks of everyone who could possibly be of use to them in the future, they hector their children to believe in themselves and their dreams and go to bed this instant. Perhaps it’s the only time they ever communicate with their offspring.

It’s said Hugh Jackman was chosen as host because of his song and dance credentials. I didn’t see The Boy from Oz or the London revival of Oklahoma!so I don’t know how well he sings in a decent setting. All I know is the opening song was an abomination and it plummeted from there. Jackman introduced the absurd production number that pointlessly dissected the event with the info-bite that Mamma Mia! had out-grossed Titanic and then lunged into a cannibalised medley of show and pop tunes with the improbable Beyoncé Knowles. How can I put this delicately? It was infinitely more cheddery than an American Idol ensemble piece and almost as curdling as Randy Jackson perennially howling ‘whaddup dawg’ at every male contestant like a dad demonstrating the Boogaloo to potential in-laws after one too many Captain Morgans.

‘The musical is back,’ thundered a delirious Jackman to tepid applause. I guess everyone else had made the obvious connection that there was not a single musical in contention for any award and neither had there been for a generation. Further, of the three tunes up for best song, two were forgettable dance numbers from Slumdog Millionaire and the other was an excruciating novelty from Wall-E. It was easily the paltriest collection of songs in the history of the Oscars. In any case Mamma Mia! is no more a musical than Titanic was but such trifling details were clearly superfluous. As a final flourish, Jackman pointed to a sheepish Baz Luhrmann and revealed that it was he who’d conceived this atrocity. At this stage, Baz had already lost in the two minor categories for which Australia had been nominated. Safe to say, it hadn’t been Luhrmann’s finest afternoon.

You had to feel for Baz though. I’ve seen both the universally trashed Australia and the universally acclaimed Slumdog Millionaire and if I was Baz Luhrmann I’d be feeling a bit hard done by right about now. Slumdog is brimming with both Hollywood and Bollywood clichés. Like Australia, it engages the magical through the vehicle of a child and you know that means someone’s going to wind up getting hitched under the stars. And the plot of Slumdog is far more preposterous than Australia’s. To enjoy the film, you have to accept the absolute howler of a device that enables its momentum. I loved both films because I am always willing to jump in that particular car and be taken for a ride. They both telegraph their intent from minute one and remain true to it throughout and that’s fine by me. The rejection of Baz’s vision and the embracing of Danny Boyle’s is irrational in critical terms and says a great deal about the whimsicality of movie world. Perhaps Baz’s musical smorgasbord was revenge rather than consolation. I like to think so. Looking forward to your remake of The Great Gatsby Baz. Please make it a musical, a proper one and please, please, please can you make all those lovely shirts dance?

To tree or not to tree

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 02:56:00 +0000

We are a society that won’t readily accept defeat, even when the fight ends like an Ali/Liston bout. We grew up on David and Goliath and The Guns of Navarone. The plucky little chap with the slingshot is supposed to knock down the big bad guy. And we aren’t able to easily comprehend violence, even when it’s the kind that nature flings at us in its caprice. A tsunami, an avalanche, or a bushfire are the kind of furies that no one with any sense would expect to demur to our rules and reason; yet we do expect precisely that. We demand Queensbury conformity from nature – like it should put up its dukes and pronounce en guard clearly and precisely before pouncing.

In Australia we are unused to killer events. Our mountains don’t explode and our earth doesn’t crack open. Individual lives are highly priced and our risk-averse population is conditioned to believe that accidental and disastrous death is not only preventable but unforgivable. In our arrogance, we assert that we can and must control all the elements in our living sphere. We don’t believe the horrific fire events that destroyed great swathes of Victoria last week and snatched around two hundred of our precious citizens should have been allowed to happen. Someone should have prevented, or at the very least stopped it before lives were lost. By this logic, someone must be to blame. Our belief system broke down and the recriminations have already begun even before all of the dead have been identified. The hunt is on for the person or persons on which to pin the ‘why?’

There were a lot of very brave but scared fire fighters out there on the ground last weekend risking their lives to save others and there were also some brave but scared commanders in control rooms flying as blind as tyros in a snowstorm. None of the systems they’d been trained to rely on were adequate for the scale of the challenge facing them. Communications towers melted severing vital links between command centres and operative crews. It was too dangerous to send reconnaissance planes up and satellite images showed only vast clouds of smoke so no accurate overview was possible. I affixed myself to ABC Gippsland all last weekend and heard the frustration coming from people who couldn’t get crucial information and those who’d tried and failed to get authorities’ attention about imminent threats. With the plethora of personal communications tools available to us, it ought to be within our capacity to develop a more effective and cohesive warning system and that should be a priority. Having said that, the most sophisticated communications systems imaginable would not have saved the towns of Maryville, Kinglake or Strathewen that were set upon and engulfed in minutes.

While blame is levelled at civil authorities by the media for a perceived lack of preparedness and mishandling on the day, anger is building against green leaning policy makers and city escapees who like to live our in the countryside surrounded by untamed flora. There’s a history of friction between the hands-off environmentalists and professional foresters on the question of how Australians can live safely and responsibly in a country so obviously hostile to being customised to House and Garden templates. Environmentalists take a kind of free market view of bushland – that it ought to be left alone to self-correct by spontaneously burning off at whim. But they reckon without the deep human intervention that has already irreversibly altered the land’s characteristics in compound ways.

Foresters are fundamentally managers and like all managers, they’d ideally like all elements within their sphere to conform and not cause them any bother. Tree-hugging folk think of them as vandals and the vassals of evil timber barons who would turn every tree into a fitted kitchen if they had their way, a reputation not entirely unwarranted as they often appear to be siding with corporate interests. The division is mirrored in the general population with traditional country people taking the forester view that land must be strictly managed and the newer, tree change and city fringe expansion settlers advocating for total non-intervention. Both have good and unselfish reasons. The price of a bushfire for farmers might be their entire livelihood. They could lose hundreds of animals who would die horribly. Widespread losses of pastoral land threaten food supplies. Tree changers are not only concerned with their own lifestyles and vistas. They want to see the habitats of native species protected. At an individual level, we've got one householder gloating because he was hit with a $100,000 fine for ripping out trees but his house survived and others blaming local authorities' refusual to let them clear land for the loss of their property. Both sides are right and wrong in the same ways.

The governing fault is in the rigidity of these opposing points of view and the short-tempered and impatient way in which they are argued. The two sides have to make peace, cease calling each other names and surrender the contested moral high ground in favour of a common sense approach to a concrete problem. Human development’s contribution of synthetic systems and products has irretrievably altered the forest’s pristine state. Human intervention is a done deal. Some fires are deliberately lit and others ignite because of the presence of introduced flammable materials. And then you have to factor in climate change. Whatever the sceptics say, temperatures in the mid to high forties centigrade are a recent phenomenon in Victoria and the hotter the day the higher the risk. Even if global warming isn’t yet a verifiable factor, we know it soon will be because there’s no great rush to do anything to halt it.

Policy-makers must deal in actuality. People live where they live, regardless of whether some opinion holds they shouldn’t. And we’re not just talking about a few remote settlements here. Hundreds of thousands of Australians live in rural towns and cities and on the leafy metropolitan rims. There is talk of forced evacuations. In Victoria the police don’t have powers to force people from their homes so that would require a legislative change. Besides, you can’t evacuate a whole state which is the scenario disaster planners would have been presented with on that blistering Saturday. If they had evacuated any one of the risk areas, chances are they might have sent a crawling convoy of families into a direction-shifting fire front. Almost every even vaguely rural area was vulnerable to fire outbreak on that day. Fire authorities rely on residents extinguishing the flying embers that spread fires. Of course there are sad tales of people who wouldn’t budge even when the home defence battle was lost but most people did not die from stubbornness but because they had no time to react to the threat. We can all learn more about managing fire risk and no doubt we will have to but we can’t stop the sort of catastrophe that visited us last week any more than we could prevent a volcano from erupting.

Although it makes no sense, retribution is demanded. One arsonist has already been caught and he currently has the life expectancy of a housefly. The hunt for official rolling heads has already thrown up a seemingly willing victim. You have to feel for the obviously traumatised Russell Rees, chief officer of Victoria’s Country Fire Authority, whose despair translated into a pitiful combination of anger and self-reproachment following his weekend in the disaster command centre. Here he’s quoted in The Australian (14/2),

‘Fundamentally, our community is choosing to live in a way I can’t, and our people can’t, guarantee their survival. Why do we choose a system of civilisation that puts itself at so much risk?’

Almost everything about that statement is misguided but it provides a useful insight into the boardroom assumptions authorities make about their duty to the public and the reciprocal expectations of which the public remain largely unaware until there is a disaster. Yet practically, when it comes to doing their human best, the people they’ve trained and deployed to save lives and property in an emergency, perform superlatively. No one expects their survival to be guaranteed as if it were an electrical item. Quite the opposite occurs in a real life-threatening situation. People expect to die and view their survival as a miraculous event and their rescuers as angels. Even sadder is this,

‘If we choose to live in this way, then who do we blame? My fear is that people will say the fire service failed (last Saturday) and I will go to my grave saying we fought our guts out.’

I just want to say to him ‘relax Russ, you’re not the head of Enron. No one thinks you did wrong. In fact the opposite is true. We rightly worship the fire fighters. So please get over yourself quickly so we can move on to helping the people who need it. Then we can talk about what’s doable in terms of managing future risk while discharging our duty to nature.’

Readers who’d like to donate some money can do so through www.redcross.org.au. This money goes directly to victims. Over 7,000 homes were destroyed so there are a lot of people out there who need cash urgently.

Fire Alarm

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 02:36:00 +0000

Fire Demon by Pants

Seat of Pants is safe, thanks for your concern. Gippsland is a very big place. In fact it’s probably bigger than Britain. That said, much of it either is or has been on fire at some point this past weekend. Larrikin’s End has been spared everything but a couple of hours of mild smoke in this dazzling demonstration of nature’s fury. A great swathe of the Australian state of Victoria has burned down in the worst homeland disaster in the country’s history. So far over a hundred people have died, many of them in the little town of Kinglake, just north-east of Melbourne where more than five hundred houses have been destroyed and the town has been obliterated. And the news is only going to get worse because some of these fires are still burning out of control. Whole communities have been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of animals have perished. People have been burned in their cars while trying to escape. The Prime Minister told us last night, ‘the nation needs to prepare itself as the full facts become known.’ That's a sobering thought.

We knew it was going to be tough. Saturday was predicted to be the hottest day on record in most of Victoria, winds would be high and it hasn’t rained since before Christmas. These are perfect conditions for a bush fire. And then on Friday night nature hedged its bets by tossing in a phantom storm – lots of scary thunder and lightning but no rain. Lightning strikes ignited some of the fires, some had been smouldering away since last weekend and, almost inconceivably, it seems some were deliberately started by a mutant version of our own species. On Saturday morning I went for a swim. The beach was gorgeous. There was not yet much sting in the day. I was in buoyant mood as my first visitor was coming, no less than the redoubtable Ms O’Dyne. When I got back home I put the radio on. The first thing I heard was that some train services had been cancelled. Ms O’Dyne made it onto a train but was turned back an hour into her journey. I retired downstairs with some cold carrot and celery soup, set the air-con to a comfortable 26 degrees and played every DVD I could find with snow in it – Ice Ages 1 and 2, Polar Express, March of the Penguins.

In between films I checked in with the radio. By late afternoon the pungent aroma of burning timber arrived in a searing sirocco. I assume it was coming from a fire over a hundred kilometres away. By the evening it was clear that the scale of the catastrophe was much bigger than either authorities’ or individuals’ disaster plans could possibly cover. I stayed glued to ABC Gippsland, a regional radio service that had been converted to a 24 hour emergency facility, from early evening through the entire weekend. I followed the progress of the fires on a big map, never worried as I knew I was not in a danger zone. And I listened as people phoned in with their experiences. Some had only minutes to get away once they saw the fires coming towards them. They told of grabbing the kids and the dogs and powering through flames even as their car tyres melted beneath them. News started to come through of those whose flight had failed. One woman was found dead in her car with a box of crockery on the passenger seat. To imagine her bewilderment was utterly chilling. A charity shop announced it was opening its doors for displaced victims to come and get free clothing and they were putting on a barbeque supper as well. It seemed wildly inappropriate but somehow guilelessly Australian.

The radio has been the only source of information for many people in threatened areas. Almost all of the television networks have been affected with relay stations being knocked out and many people are without phone coverage. A woman phoned in from Paris having heard from a friend in Holland who was streaming ABC Gippsland that there was concern about a couple who were the next door neighbours of the Paris woman’s parents. She phoned her parents and found the neighbouring couples safe together. It soon became clear that authorities had been caught on the hop. In many instances their advice was hours out of date and in others woefully inadequate. The most accurate and pertinent information was coming from escaped fire victims and the radio was doing a sterling job of co-ordinating it all. To be fair, these were no ordinary fires. They were the gruesome product of an evil collaboration between parched land and spiteful wind and moving much faster than anyone had seen fires move before. Mistakes were made. Beleaguered announcers often didn’t know if they were coming or going as they struggled to connect talkback lines and deal with the volume of information coming at them. And there were howlers as errant microphones picked up crass asides and cluelessness. Half of the state must have listened along with me in horror as Victorian Premier John Brumby rehearsed his ‘distress’ levels, asked his advisers for feedback and then delivered his ‘emotional’ speech with the emotion tastefully notched down. I guess he's only human. In the face of such a monstrous disaster, a politician has to strike the right tone or risk a grand slagging but it sounded disrespectfully cold and detached in the circumstances.

By Sunday morning I was snuggled up safely under the duvet and by midday I had on a fleece. The temperature in Larrikin’s End had halved, a cool southerly was blowing and I could no longer smell smoke. It seemed Armageddon was on a fixed contract. I spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about what I would do in an emergency. I have a huge wooden house but I don’t even have a hose. Regular readers might recall that I was put off acquiring a hose by the sheer enormity of the task of absorbing the daunting plethora of accompanying regulations and decided a watering can might suffice given my only watering requirement is a small herb garden. I’m thinking now that it would be quite difficult to damp down a thirty foot high house with a watering can. I’d need either a crane or a hose for that. A hose would certainly be more cost effective and coming to grips with the regulatory information marginally simpler than obtaining a crane licence. I would not stay and defend the house, fond of it as I am. I’d only use the hose to deal with burning debris. My plan would be to head for the river. If push came to shove, I think I’d rather drown.

Well, I did choose to live here, fully aware of the untamed nature of this country. If I’d stayed in London I’d be snowbound and kicking myself for not acting on my instinct that the British economy was about to collapse. So, in for a penny. I’m off into town now to donate some money to the disaster relief fund and find out if there is anything else I can do. My phone is now not working. Happily I called the family yesterday but now I don’t know if Ms O’Dyne is on the train. I guess I’ll meet the shuttle bus just in case. Good night and good luck…

Flue Epidemic

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:00:00 +0000

Casualty of woe

It was always going to happen. Previously I’ve mentioned that small winged things have a habit of toppling into my fireplace. The origin of the term bird-brained is no longer a mystery to me. Usually they make such a racket pecking away at the glass door that I hear them and affect a rescue. However, I have to be home for the system to work. The beach is just too enticing at the moment for that to occur, being as the temperature has maintained itself at approximately that required to temper steel for the entire week. Consequently, I have just now buried my first kamikaze. I don’t know what made me look in the stove. I just had a hideous feeling. Nothing had gone wrong in several days and I found myself thinking, ‘oh there must be some appalling life experience of the fresh hell variety awaiting me somewhere in this great big old house of biological horrors.’ Et voilá! There was this poor little chap, lying flat on his little downy back in a bed of ash with his little curled up legs pointing heavenward, as dead as George W Bush’s dinner circuit prospects.

The burial service was short but dignified. I’d no sooner re-shelved my Auden than fuck me if there wasn’t another near tragedy. Hearing the all too familiar frantic pecking resound through the house, I opened the front door and then carefully released the stove door. Instead of flying out, the latest captive darted upstairs and immediately trapped itself in a skylight. I thought, ‘who am I dealing with here, Sylvia Plath?’ So I opened the deck door, got out the broom and a tea towel and improvised a coaxing ritual that was probably more matador than Attenborough. Eventually it worked but not before a dozen flies had taken advantage of the lapse in security. So I spent the next half hour chasing around the house with a rolled up newspaper. Not that there’s much to attract a fly in my kitchen. All I’m interested in at the moment is gin, sauvignon blanc and ice cream. Flies don’t seem to have the capacity for strategic reconnaissance, more’s the pity.

It’s Australia, innit? There is not one creature on this whole continent that is not either suicidal, homicidal or boorishly keen to join you for lunch. How is it that fauna can be so benign on one continent and so aggressive on another? Flies are a case in point. In Britain you can happily leave all your windows open throughout the summer. Flies will come in but, instead of raiding your smorgasbord or testing your ears to see if they contain undiscovered culinary treats, they simply circle the centre of the room is if they were gleefully Morris dancing the afternoon away, leaving you to concentrate on the delights of Wimbledon interactive. It’s a master class in symbiosis. I don’t know what British flies eat but it certainly isn’t barbeque. These are the same animal but their national characteristics are pure Jekyll and Hyde. I suppose some humourless science buff will email me to inform me curtly that the British fly’s DNA is closer to that of the sperm whale than to its Australian namesake. Come to think of it, you don’t usually have to shoo sperm whales away from your coronation chicken so it may well be the case.

I had a flatmate in London who was so scared of spiders that you could casually remark, ‘Oh Chris, I thought I saw a spider go into your room this morning,’ and he’d leave town for a fortnight. It was pretty handy if you wanted the place to yourself for a while. I have a spider in my kitchen that is the size of a Messerschmitt, just as mean looking and possibly even faster. Unhappily for both of us, it thinks my toaster is Manumission. There are creepy centipedes commuting through my garden and I’ve no doubt snakes lurking in any number of dark and mysterious culs-de-sac just waiting for the moment to re-enact Anaconda for my entertainment.

There is not one single dangerous spider or snake in the whole of Britain. Again science nerds, I know about the adder but when was the last time you heard of someone being bitten by one? It would be more sensible to live in fear of being bum-fucked by a unicorn than to worry about meeting an adder in Theydon Bois. My kitchen spider is a huntsman therefore, although huge, hairy and capable of travelling at the speed of light, is not actually a threat except in the gothic sense. But the other day, I had to escort a rather more unnerving looking arachnid from my shower stall. In Australia, it’s the little harmless looking spiders you have to worry about, even I know that.

One tries to live in harmony with nature but it’s enormously difficult when nature is so relentlessly combative. Apart from ants for which I have no sentiment, mosquitoes (clearly self defence), and flies of course, I don’t like to be responsible for animal fatalities. I think I ran over a lizard on a bush track last week. I didn’t get out of the car to look just in case it wasn’t (a) a lizard (b) dead. The other day I was mortified when I accidentally dispatched a bee. Thinking it was a fly that snuck in during an unavoidable door opening event, I flattened it with a copy of the Larrikin’s End Examiner. Flies shouldn’t be allowed to buzz, it’s far too confusing. They aren’t in Britain. Perhaps the Australian fly is a cross between a bee and a child brought up on McDonalds. It’s upsetting enough to erroneously eliminate a honey bee but being the mistress of a perpetual death trap flue is unacceptably unnerving. I expect I’ll have to do something about it although what that might be I can’t imagine. Perhaps I could put up some warning signs. Barney’s just suggested ‘mind the gap’. I can see the logic in that. They’d think they were at Bank Station and obviously immediately turn around and go back. No one goes to Bank Station unless they absolutely have no choice. It’s worth a try…

Flag Blag

thatssopants@gmail.com (That's So Pants) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:53:00 +0000

Natural Disaster at Seat of Pants

Australia Day. I ambled onto my rear deck this morning and what did I see? Arrrgggghhhh. The patriots below have inappropriately unfurled all over my view. Don’t that thing stand out? It’s not only my egocentricity that’s affronted. I was already feeling a certain yeeeuuucccchhh about the whole Australia Day blaahhhttt. Sorry about the onomatopoeia obsession but my homeland tends to bring out the beeeuuulcccchhhh in me I’m afraid. You can blame Barry McKenzie for that one. Forgive me while I

uuuurrrrgggarraaammmaaakkk.

Okay, I feel a little better now that I’ve had an Alka-Seltzer and a stiff gin. Here’s where I stand on overt displays of nationalism. A homemade replica of your country’s flag scrappily tacked up in your front window during a major sporting contest, if and crucially only if, your country incredulously ends up in the final when it wasn’t expected even to qualify, is acceptable. Iceland, Cameroon and Jamaica – your flags are welcome on any occasion. France and Holland – only if cheese is involved. I know I should be staying calm but these maniacs have put up a flagpole. Where have I landed? Nazstralia? Who puts up a fucking flagpole unless they plan to open a military academy?

Australia Day, celebrated on 26^th January every year, commemorates the day in 1788 that Captain Arthur Phillip fetched up on a great southern continent which had been successfully owned and operated by a continuous collective of indigenous peoples for around 40,000 years, and claimed it on behalf of a dysfunctional monarchy that had been around for a few hundred. Mad King George III was tottering on and off the throne at the time and quite frankly, in addition to his many personality defects, had a bit of a plunder problem. Some Aboriginal people naturally regard this day as a token of mourning and refer to it as Invasion Day. I wonder how the Aboriginal family next door feel about our neighbours over the back flying the flag of their tormentors on this of all days. Aboriginal Australia has a flag too, one that signifies the history and geography of this country. Why not display that flag if they must put one up?

I lived in Britain when the Union flag was appropriated by the National Front to taunt black residents. It was a horrible time but eventually those racists were soundly despatched by ordinary, decent folk who just wouldn’t have it. These days in Britain the jack has no function in public display apart from letting everyone know that there are royals about and they should scarper unless they want to end up on the front page of Majesty Magazine. Instead it has assumed an appropriate afterlife as a popular pattern for undergarments, which naturally Pants approves wholeheartedly. The Australian flag incorporates the jack which is the source of most of my discomfort. If its country of origin has already conceded its oppressive power and tempered its invocation, surely ordinary, decent Australians must realise that they might be offending people by running it up a flagpole in their backyard on a contentious day.

Today, Aboriginal activist Mick Dodson was named Australian of the Year. It’s a supposedly prestigious honour bestowed upon a person of great importance and influence, at least that’s what the Prime Minister inferred when he handed it over. Then Mick Dodson used his position of importance and influence to make the modest suggestion that Australia might consider celebrating its national harmony on a different day from the one that Aboriginal people feel is the most inappropriate out of the 365 on offer. And all he asked for was a conversation about it. The Prime Minister snapped back,

Let me say a simple, respectful, but straightforward no.

It was the back-flip that shattered a carefully orchestrated illusion. Here was the same Prime Minister who less than a year ago made that historic and cathartic Sorry speech, huffing in a tone that suggested what he really thinks is, ‘oh for crying out loud, haven’t we humoured you people enough already?’

Amongst today’s events was a march through the streets of Brisbane to protest the continuing scandal of the stolen wages. For decades Aboriginal children were herded into dormitories where they were taught domestic skills and 'manners' and then farmed out to white employers, often on remote cattle stations where they were treated with contempt and very often actual cruelty. They had no choice about these placements and, if they decided to ‘resign’ i.e. exercise their only chance to reclaim their lives by running off in the middle of the night, they were hunted down, beaten and returned or sent somewhere even more awful.

In return for hard work and long hours they received ‘pocket money’, a tiny portion of their wages. The rest was supposedly held 'in trust' by the state and most of it was never paid out. Now it transpires that this money has disappeared. In any other situation this would be fraud but it’s just those pesky Aboriginal people rehashing unfortunate incidents from the past to be annoying. In an act of extraordinary gall, the authorities have offered a one-off payment of $4,000 as compensation. That’s the monthly wage of a low ranking public servant and to Aboriginal people whose savings were fleeced over twenty or thirty years, must be a worse insult than being offered nothing at all. It’s an admission of culpability but at the same time a glaring statement of just how little Aboriginal people are valued. For some families, those stolen wages meant the difference between owning their own home and paying a lifetime of rent to someone else. In real terms the money owed to them is more like half a million.

Even today in some parts of Australia Aboriginal people have their incomes quarantined, regardless of their circumstances or their capacity to manage their own finances. How can this kind of discrimination be tolerated? So yes, Mick Dodson, you have my vote. Let’s change the date. I honestly think it’s the very least we should do if we are sincere about equal rights for Indigenous Australians. I suggest April 1 and then I can have a jolly good old giggle when my neighbours over the back put up their flag.