whitebait

sometimes the end of the week is the best part of the week

It is a great Friday because despite the absolutely crapulous Melbourne weather ...

• you come into your office and discover that it has been vaccuumed for the first time in months (without you having to write a memo to make it happen)

• you go for a haircut at lunchtime and they say don't worry, it's on us this time

• one of the best is playing his 250th game tonight

• you know that this time next week you'll be strolling the streets of this place

timeless poetry for an election year, or same as it ever was

[...]

     astonished
trade union delegates
watch a man behead a chicken
in Martin Place — isn’t there
a poem about this
and the shimmering ideal
of just walking down the street?

              not being religious
we bet on how many circles
the headless chook will complete
and won’t this do for a formal
model of Australia, not
      too far-fetched, not too cute?

from John Forbes, 'On the Beach: A Bicentennial Poem' from The Stunned Mullet (1988) via Meaghan Morris' Ecstasy and Economics (1992)

your ticket to the universe

Just re-reading parts of the one of the early books that started W's academic focus on urban cultures. The preface still gets me right there in the gut.

Shortly after I finished this book, my dear son Marc, five years old, was taken from me. I dedicate All That is Solid Melts into Air to him. His life and death bring so many of its ideas and themes close to home: the idea that those who are most happily at home in the modern world, as he was, may be most vulnerable to the demons that haunt it; the idea that the daily routine of playgrounds and bicycles, of ordinary hugs and kisses, may be not only infinitely joyous and beautiful but also infinitely precarious and fragile; that it may take desperate and heroic struggles to sustain this life, and sometimes we lose. Ivan Karamazov says that, more than anything else, the death of children makes him want to give back his ticket to the universe. But he does not give it back. He keeps on fighting and loving; he keeps on keeping on.

-Marshall Berman, 'Preface' to All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982)

the untouchable

So Nick and I walked up Whitehall in the hard-edged spring sunlight, past the statue of Charles I encased in its protective galvanised privy. On all sides were giant mounds of rubble over which ambulance men and Home Guard recruits were scrambling like ragpickers. In the Strand a cascading water main was incongruously suggestive of Versailles. Yet the destruction, however extensive, was curiously disappointing; the street seemed not ruined, but rearranged, as if a vast rebuilding scheme were under way. I had, I realised, put too much hope in the air war; what the newspapers nowadays like to call the fabric of society is depressingly strong.

Whitebait is about three quarters through John Banville's brilliantly written The Untouchable. This quote comes from a section of the book where the narrator, double agent Victor Maskell (strongly based on Anthony Blunt of the Cambridge Five),  has just had his first homosexual experience the night before during one of the most intensive London blitz bombings which, as he has also discovered, has just killed his father-in-law. Maskell is one of those brilliantly contradictory characters in the sense of being utterly repellant in terms of his generally callous disregard for the lives of others, but compelling in his witty descriptions and sleazy charm.

cycling in the city

Couldn't agree more - David Byrne on the pleasures of bicycle riding in the city. (Love the Pee Wee Herman reference).

globalising melbourne

Forgot to post a mention of the recent news concerning the ongoing transformation of major Australian media company, PBL, into a global gaming business. PBL has divested its separate gaming assets (the centrepiece of which is Melbourne's Crown Entertainment Complex, aka 'the casino'). Now, as part of a joint venture, they're opened a Crown in Macau and are also on their way to building a Crown Casino on the Las Vegas strip (not an entertainment complex this time - why deny it in Las Vegas after all). For Whitebait it is a nice reminder of the fact that globalisation is not simply some force out there that affects a peripheral city like Melbourne; rather, globalisation is itself a condition produced (however unevenly) in/as part of/from the local.

(If for some reason you don't have a TV player or a life or anything better to do you can download an article I wrote in the late 1990s about Crown in Melbourne).

*  *  *  *

Was reminded to post on this after seeing this quote:

Las Vegas enables you not only to gaze upon spectacle but also to sleep in its bed and have sex with it.

-William L Fox, In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle (2005)

forensic pleasures

The downtown I remember - drab, Calvinistic, with white men in dark overcoats marching in lockstep on the sidewalks, interspersed with the occasional woman, in regulation high heels, gloves and hat, clutch purse under the arm, eyes front - is simply gone, but then it's been gone for some time. Toronto is no longer a Protestant city, it's a mediaveal one: the crowds clogging the street are many-hued, the clothing vivd. Hot-dog stands with yellow umbrellas, pretzel-sellers, hawkers of ear-rings and woven bags and leather belts, beggars hung with crayoned Out of Work signs: among them they've staked out the territory. I passed a flute player, a trio with electric guitars, a man with a kilt and bagpipes. At any moment  I expected jugglers or fire-eaters, lepers in procession with hoods and iron bells. There was a blare of noise; an iridescent film clung to my glasses like oil.

This passage comes from Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (2000), which Whitebait feels like he has been reading for eons. Not, mind you, because it is a dull book - quite the opposite he thinks; but he simply hasn't been that successful at sitting down lately and reading fiction in a sustained way. So it goes. Whitebait has read most of Atwood's fiction and a also a bit of her poetry. What this novel reminds him is that among her other skills Atwood has a wonderfully forensic writing temperament; for example, characters/narrators are often stopping to question why we use a particular, well-worn phrase when if you stopped and though about it for a moment it would be revealed for the peculiar convention it is. Or she just notices banal things that resonate with Whitebait - he can't find the quote but at one point a character points out to his lover that anyone can tell that of all the fruits, bananas are clearly the ones most likely to have been introduced to Earth by extra-terrestials.

Whitebait's other forensic fix has been season 1 of the HBO series The Wire, which his work library has had the good sense to purchase. Set in the secondary city of Baltimore, which the show has some nice incidental gags about, its terrific because it is a police procedural with some space (ie, 13 episodes) to breathe in terms of plot and character development. And it seems one of the more 'accurate' shows he has seen in capturing the, erm, 'range' of personalities and intelligences that end up in institutional organisations like the police force. Watch it and you'll see what he means.

And an extract from the wikipedia entry for those who don't know the show:

The plot of the first season centers on the ongoing struggles between police units and drug-dealing gangs on the west side of the city, and is told from both points of view. Subsequent seasons have focused on other facets of the city. The large cast consists mainly of character actors who are little known for their other roles. Simon [writer/producer and former police reporter] has said that despite its presentation as a crime drama, the show is "really about the American city, and about how we live together. It's about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how... whether you're a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you've committed to."

Another year, another ranking of cities

It's time once again for the annual Economist Intelligence Unit 'most liveable city' ranking:

The EIU ranked 127 cities in terms of personal risk, infrastructure and the availability of goods and services.

All the cities that fell into the top "liveability" bracket were based in Canada, Australia and Western Europe.

No real surprises in the top tens here (compared to past results):

Top 10 cities

• Vancouver
• Melbourne
• Vienna
• Geneva
• Perth
• Adelaide
• Sydney
• Zurich
• TorontoCalgary

Bottom 10 cities                                                                                                   

• Tehran
• Douala
• Harare
• Abidjan
• Phnom Penh
• Lagos
• Karachi
• Dhaka
• AlgiersPort Moresby

It is interesting that while Australian cities dominate the top ten, that there is also a strong national link with the worst ranked city in the world, which is both on its doorstep and was part of its colonial domain for much of the 20th century (until 1975).

But as someone born in New Zealand, now living in Australia, Whitebait is keenly aware how geographical proximity often bears little resemblance to broader media and political imaginations. Australian newspapers, for example, only infrequently include New Zealand and Papua New Guinea stories.

Getting back to the list though, W. wonders how long Melbourne can maintain its ranking given the water problems here? Liveability is dependent on sustainability which doesn't appear to be part of the equation for this ranking.

matsuri

Sometimes Whitebait just sits at his desk bristling with warm delight at the incredibly talented and generous people who come and go in my life. Special among these individuals are two of my main Tokyo guides, Dr E (also known as 'Kuka') and Ms. L.

Dr E. has previously made a few appearances in the lines of this blog and, in particular, in a guest, photographic blog post of Tokyo train commuters. He's an academic at Waseda University in Tokyo at the moment but has managed to grab a few breathing moments thanks to his institution (and a number of others) being shut down due to a measles outbreak.

These fabulous photos are from the Sanja festival in the Asakusa area. Festivals (matsuri) like this are one of things that make me go weak at the knees when Whitebait considers the things he really loves about Japan (see this old post about one of the matsuri attended by W. in his previous sojourn in Tokyo - it is worth it just for the Chris Marker quote).

 

the shogun's favourite dish

I received this delightful quote from a Tokyo friend yesterday (was that you C?). Thanks friend - it tickled Whitebait pink.

It was, so the story goes, the shogun's appreciation of a good dish of whitebait--those tiny fish whose name explains their color and the use to which they are normally put--that led to the establishment of Tsukudajima ('Island of the Cultivated Rice Fields', which still exist in today's Tokyo). About 1615 Ieyasu or his son Hidetda ordered a community of skilled whitebait fishermen to pack up their belonging and move from their native village of Tsukuda in Settsu province (now within the confines of Osaka) to the country's new military capital to fish in the bounteous waters at the mouth of the Sumida river. That was the official story. The real reason was rather less ingenuous: these fishermen were spies, seasoned navigators of the waters of the Inland Sea. Their brief was to keep the shogun's censors informed of any suspicious movement of boats in the bay.

                                    --from Tokyo: City of Stories by Paul Waley. p.110