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This Song...

  “D.C.” by Died Pretty has been appearing in my social media a lot these last few days. It’s a beautifully crafted rock elegy that croons and soars, and anyone who has ever farewelled a friend can connect with it immediately. Now, it’s a sadly fitting memorial to the man who wrote and sang it.   Although we were contemporaries with overlapping circles in ‘80s inner-city Sydney, I didn’t know Ron Peno personally. I do have a blurred memory of walking into a pub near Sydney Town Hall with a musician friend and encountering an exuberant Ron, but time and drink have erased the details. Died Pretty may have rehearsed in the basement of one of the Darlinghurst share-houses I lived in, but I could be wrong on that. More certain is the fact that Died Pretty keyboard player John “The General” Hoey directed a music video that I was in. Apart from seeing them live in places that no longer exist, that was the extent of my personal connection. There are some gaping holes in my music c...
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Scott Morrison and the Death of Dignity

  I was born in an age of pomp and circumstance, when Empire was still a living memory. The image of Our Gracious Queen gazed serenely on her subjects from every official wall, and her viceregal representatives added a sense of occasion to all the stone-layings, tree-plantings, openings and addresses that she couldn’t appear at herself. Foremost and most adoring of her subjects was the Prime Minister. The first PM to impose himself on my infant consciousness was Robert Gordon Menzies, who loomed above it all with magisterial eyebrows bristling. For all his drumming up fear of Communist bogey-men, his arrogance and pomposity, Menzies was a picture of something that has disappeared from contemporary politics: dignity. Dignity, arguably an essential quality for any aspiring statesman, existed to wildly varying degrees in Menzies’ successors. Harold Holt was an urbane bed-hopper who grovelled to President Lyndon Johnson, but he mustered it when he needed to. So could the man who ...
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Nemesis

The past has a horrible habit of catching up with you…. and fair enough if you’ve got crimes or deplorable behaviour to answer for. Sometimes, if you’re wired that way, gangs of less heinous former embarrassments and awkwardnesses sneak into the mind. Like small, snivelling distant relatives of the Classical Furies, they often ply their trade in the small hours of the morning. Sadly, the Furies don’t do much in the way of relentless pursuit these days. Hellhounds don’t dog many heels. We’ve got the toxic banality of 70’s pop/rock instead. Any day touched by its rank tendrils is not a good day. As far as I can tell, I’ve violated no tombs, offended no gods, desecrated no shrines. I can’t identify a single action that would merit what happened. There was no warning, no trigger, no fragment of a tune from a passing vehicle. Nothing. For no reason at all, I found myself thinking of a song by The Captain and Tennille. Hearing it would have been bad enough. Having it come to mind unbid...
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Reaching for the Razor

I’ve been thinking about razors a lot lately. Not the hair management sort, but rather the metaphorical variety; the principles that cut away the unnecessary in trying to reach understanding. Occam’s razor states "the simplest solution is most likely the right one" and Hanlon’s razor says "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". I think they need to be stropped up and applied now more than ever before. I have seen people I know succumb to a frightening malaise, and it isn’t covid 19. It’s the bizarre ideas that arise from the baroque intertwining of strands of conspiracy theory. I know otherwise rational, intelligent people who appear to believe that the virus has something to do with 5G, and/or that it’s part of a plan by Bill Gates to implant mind-control chips via vaccines. They point to the “heroes” who dare to speak the truth about the “fake” virus, linking to endless YouTube clips, all of which are about as scientifica...
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