Holding a Miro up to life

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

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

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,

See also:

• Constitutional monarchy
• Prime Minister
• unwritten constitution
• HP Sauce
• Black Rod
• Intelligence and Security Committee

HP Sauce? Who is this, the Chief Whip? Kids around here are also routinely told that England can fit into Victoria EIGHT TIMES. Victoria needs to watch her step if she doesn’t want to pick up a reputation and a touch of something itchy and unpleasant besides.

Kevin Rudd must be on the suicide pills as he’s currently drawing the worst from the PR manuals of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The winning combination of an overpowering aura of shiftiness accompanied by a perpetually raised eyebrow and the doggedly unfinished sentence in response to every media enquiry has well and truly soured the romance now. Just to be on the safe side, he’s unleashed a barrage of the most cringe-inducing ockerisms known to soundbite history. It was a strewthfest guaranteed to visit one in nightmares for years to come. I must dig out that Lonely Planet Guide to Mexico.

By refreshing contrast, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has proved herself a queen of the quip, commenting on the prat spat between Tracey Grimshaw and Gordon Ramsey in The Australian,

‘I understand from the publicity that Gordon Ramsay is a good chef,’ Ms Gillard said.

’I think perhaps what he should do is confine himself to the kitchen and make nice things for people to eat rather than make public comments about others.’

Sauce for the gander…

* No need, Mexico has now come to Victoria.

Boyle Over

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

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

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

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.