Travelogue, part 4 Rome, the Eternal City. Absolute chaos. More tourists than I've seen outside of the Louvre, in Paris. Our hotel wasn't great, but it was less than 2 kilometers from the Colosseum, another 2 to the Vatican, so we had no trouble getting around and seeing as much as we could in two days, which was a lot. Romulus' & Remus' mom doesn't look too impressed, but she's everywhere. The Swiss Guard really do dress like 1970's McDonald's employees, but with spears and metal hairnets. You cannot escape the crowds at any time of day.

Travelogue, part 2 Christo. I've missed all the installations he's done since I first learned of him, including the Central Park "Gates", so I didn't, even after reviewing the web site, have much sense of what the "Big Air Package" was going to be like. We trained out from Berlin to Oberhausen, where a disused "gasometer" stands, and where Christo has previously had an installation. It was built in 1929 and was the largest in Europe. It is indeed enormous, a tourist destination in its own right, apparently. Christo's installation on this occasion was an "air package", which is the format he started out with, back in the sixties, and has come back to now and then since. This is the biggest. There is no clear way to describe the experience other than "awesome".

Travelogue, part 3 So, after Berlin, we flew to Pisa, where we didn't stop, but caught a train up to La Spezia and then on to Riomaggiore, the southernmost town in the Cinque Terre region. This was a true highlight of the trip. The landscape was incredible, mountains straight up out of the sea, terraced for olives and grapes, but much of it still wild, too, with each of the five towns along the coast being perched and clustered right on the edges. Italians seem to like their cats, too.

Travelogue, part 1 So, first up, Berlin: Special notice in Berlin: Holocaust Memorial, designed by the same guy who did the WTC in NYC. Very evocative. Also, the Jewish Museum was very extensive and effective. And then there's the Walk/Don't Walk signs. West Berlin has the usual format. East Berlin, however, had it's own, which has been preserved. It helps orient you to where you are in the city, too, I think. It's all very different from when I was there in 1988, not to mention October being a bit cooler than August, and having locals to guide us through. Checkpoint Charlie has an enormous McDonald's on what was the eastern side, and many of the old East Berlin sites now host staged photo ops, like guys dressed as soldiers or in bear suits or Mickey Mouse, even. Segways everywhere, for the tourists, and otherwise the city is bicycle-mad. They keep a sense of their history well, without overindulging guilt. The role of Germany in the modern world is acknowledged with appropriate humility, as well as the divisions of the Cold War. I'm glad they're keeping what's left of the Wall. Some of that deserves to be pointed up, too, including the East Berlin Gallery section, which had a section of the Wall painted with pictures of other, current walls around the world. We still do these things to each other, and are insufficiently shamed by it.

Inscriptions Did I actually buy an inscribed (2nd edition) copy of "Sincerely, Willis Wayde"? Or is that someone else's signature? US$8.14 seems a little low for such a thing. Thanks, Strand Books!

Home Again Something longer later, maybe a series, certainly some pictures, but for now: that was an epic trip. Berlin was amazing, 25 years on from my last trip there, just ahead of when the Wall came down. Now, Checkpoint Charlie, where I stood and watched the East German and US armies monitoring the crossing, there's a big ol' McDonalds. On what was the eastern side. Cinque Terre was the best part, and Rome was anarchy. NYC was a nostalgic trip, including a visit to the Frick (no "Girl with Pearl Earring" this time, as we were just a couple of days ahead of a new show), but with enough new stuff all over town to keep it as interesting for me as it was for first-time visitors. Enough local knowledge remains to get around, but not much more, so advance research would have been a good idea, as data roaming was insufficient and WiFi only sporadic to know what we needed when we needed it. The trip to Mom & Dad's in NC was brief, but we got enough of the South, or that part of it, to satisfy some parts of interests for all involved, cat-head biscuits being a good starting point, if authentic pulled pork didn't get done in the time allotted. Well, there's enough barbeque around Sydney we can say we know what we'd missed. Nobody does biscuits, though, like Big Nell. I'm not looking forward to reviewing 3000 photos and picking through them for posting here, but I'll get it done eventually.

The Mob I enjoy science fiction. Sure, a lot of it is polemical, or, worse, just fantasy, but some of it really has some science in it, and that can be really fun, especially going back and seeing the stuff that's already come true. Like John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider." Interestingly, this is a response to Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock." What it does with that, however, is remarkable, especially, perhaps, in retrospect. The book predicts the internet, and very well, including smartphones, to an extent. The computer viruses and so forth are believable and a good prediction of what such interconnectivity would bring. ave The society in Brunner's novel may not be quite what 1975 thought 2013 would be, but it's not all that far off, in the bigger picture, if not the particulars. But one thing has always stood out to me since I first read it. Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferable terrified of what tomorrow may bring, and constantly being reminded that the man in the street must step into the gutter when his superiors deign to pass him by. What's being described here is the resemblance of government to organized crime. Government is the mafia, more so than the mafia has been for a very long time. There are those who will say, in Australia, that's Labor, because of its union origins. False. Or false in any modern sense. The unions have been long ago relegated to irrelevance by the Liberals, who operate more in line with what we know of as the Mafia. The Liberals legitimize their . . . business, just like the Mafia families were just "olive oil importers" or whatever. We can't see the true power brokers, and that's the point. Is it any different in the US? The GOP is run by business interests. How unlike the mafia are the Koch brothers, for example, buying politicians to deny climate change and preference petrochemical businesses over its alternatives? We need to wake up to the lies. The data is at our fingertips. And the power of our votes and our dollars can have an effect. But more importantly, we must all speak out at every opportunity. Object to the lies. Tear off our own blinders and let anyone who hasn't done the same know that it only hurts for a little while, and then feels a whole lot better.

Bridge Run The Sydney Running Festival includes a marathon, half-marathon, 3.5k Family Fun Run (walk across the bridge with a pram), and the 9k Bridge Run, which has been my elected option the last three years. This year saw nearly a four-minute improvement over 2012, and just a little slower than 2011. I credit work for particpating in the Global Corporate Challenge, a fitness-promoting program that encourages you to walk "10,000 steps" or more per day, which ran over the last four months. I included training runs in that program, but breaking training was compensated for, it seems. It's tremendous fun running across the Harbour Bridge, somewhat less so through the Domain, when the streets narrow and the course loops back on itself, so your pace, for those of us not destined to actually compete, can be forced to a shuffle as you look for a gap through the walkers and (even) slower participants. The reasonable starting hour makes it a good choice, although by 9 a.m. at this time of year it's getting warm: 20 degrees by the time I got to the finish. I'd go for another half if it didn't start at 6:15. There's still the Sydney Morning Herald Half, in May, or maybe the new one out at Olympic Park at the end of October (not this year, though, which I'll miss even the 10k event, due to only just having completed a long overseas trip).

The Poor You Will Have with You Always Tony Abbott's Liberals have won the 2013 federal election. What a shame for the country. Abbott ran on Labor's budget deficit and the large number of illegal entries by asylum-seekers by boat. The "budget emergency" was a furphy: the LNP's proposed budget needs only $0.6 billion to return the country to surplus in the same period of time Labor would have re-attempted. But Labor made too many promises over too many of each of the last three years that we'd be back in the black "next year". And large numbers of fools believed that deficits are inherently and always bad, even when we can see how Britain and other European countries are struggling with austerity economies, how the US struggles to keep on track (blaming Obama all the way, despite the Bush tax cuts and two endless wars he started). And fear of Muslims, a nice dog-whistle issue since the days of John Howard, make all refugees arriving by boat a deadly threat to the nation. We'll all be wearing burkas next! Labor's lurch to the right on that issue also had large numbers swinging against them. Without being a viable third party in their own right, Greens preferences helped staunch the damage, but xenophobic mainstay Pauline Hanson got into the Senate. We can only hope that she will challenge Tony Abbott's agenda just on principle, if she actually has any, for his attempt to have her imprisoned back when she was first standing for a federal seat. But too much of her agenda coincides with his to be truly hopeful on that point. Bye-bye carbon tax/emissions-trading scheme and hello warmer planet. I may have a coastal property sooner than I'd like, as in at all, under the circumstances, but I can't say I won't be paying for it, as Tony's plans for the country mean people like me will carry the weight for the wealthy. The acceptance speech Abbott gave started out ungraciously and ended up with a promise that Australia is "open for business". That is not a promise I am anxious to see how it plays out. I can't believe the country voted for this guy.

City2Surf The biggest foot race in the world went off this morning with 85,000 entrants, including me. Better result than last year by a fair bit: 84:49 by my clock. We'll see what the official results are, but that should be pretty close. I finished behind my bib number, but that watch is pretty accurate: 84:46.

Where's Whaley? Thar. The container ship was on the horizon line, so probably too far to see all the activity, except on sonar, but we got quite a show. The last twenty minutes or so had lots of breaches, tail slaps, and even some waving, although I doubt it was any of it for our benefit. The northern migration is nearly over, so it's lucky we got booked in when we did or we'd be waiting for them to head south again, which won't actually be all that long from now. Might have to do another cruise, if we can get as good a deal as we did with Sydney Adventure Cruises. A Groupon deal, and not much of a discount, really, but worth it.

B-Grade B’s been travelling, so I’ve been occupying myself in the evenings by going to see movies she’s not interested in. First up, World War Z. I don’t know if Brad Pitt means to have a career in movies about devastating global plagues, but he does a good job of being sane in this one, and resourceful. The movie’s not scary, not a horror movie at all, really; it’s a medical drama. No, really, although none of the doctor characters seem to be notable at diagnosis or developing a treatment. What the movie’s really good at is getting across what it feels like to be in the middle of a mass panic. I can well imagine what it would be like to be under attack without knowing where the next blow will come from or if it will come at me while watching this movie. It’s also good at conveying just how baffling disease can be, how impossible to stop, much like Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, even if it is at the same time and throughout less medically realistic. It’s a better movie than zombies would lead you to believe. Last night was monsters, big ones: Pacific Rim. I can see now, without having to ever bother about seeing them, why the Transformers movies would be fun. But I went to see this because it’s Guillermo Del Toro’s tribute to the rubber suited Japanese giants that occupied Saturday afternoon monster movies so ubiquitously in the sixties and seventies. Del Toro does monsters so very well, and he gets to do big ones here. The movie hits every stereotype, every stock speech (except “some things mankind was not meant to know”) and reprises dozens of alien invasion tropes, but it’s still big entertainment. If you want a quiet movie, this isn’t it. There’s enough tension to be satisfying, even though you know the outcome already. It really left me wishing Del Toro had been successful in getting Lovecraft’s “In the Mountains of Madness” green-lit.

Sealed So the Pope’s updating the rules around sexual abuse crimes, but he’s also beefing up the laws on leaks. The two are in conflict. This is what the Church hierarchy doesn’t get: secrets are at the heart of the problem. Were there child abusers? Yes, there were, just as there were and are all the hell over the place, not just among priests. Nearly every institution having caretaker responsibility for children has had some problem with abuse. The Roman Catholic Church, however, has institutionalised hiding from and avoiding responsibility for the crimes of clergy. Happy as they are to put some idiot butler in jail for leaking financial documents, they have shuffled pedophile priests and cooked their finances to avoid responsibility, as if that would solve the problem. There’s a doctrinal problem they need to contend with. If the seal of the confessional is inviolable, then some things need to be sins beyond the reach of the “sacrament of reconciliation.” The Church cannot be a law entirely unto itself if it will not operate as openly as law, in fundamental principle, should. Not all the Ten Commandments rise to same level of harm. Murder and sexual abuse are not equivalent to talking back to your parents or petty theft. (If a priest steals your car, however, I think the civil authorities should be notified.) The Church operates in the world and needs to acknowledge this, not try to bury its secrets deeper.

Slower & Slower, But Faster than Last Year City Mile Dash may not be the Fifth Avenue Mile (although if James Packer was really smart he'd sponsor it and keep it going after he builds his giant casino), but it's a mile race and a good cause, plus a nice break in the middle of a working day. Weather was great, and I think the course, which made some sharp turns, felt faster than last year. Maybe that's because I was a whopping seven seconds faster myself. Hey, at that rate, I could shave a whole minute of City2Surf this year!

Ol' Baz Sure Can Throw a Party Baz Luhrmann's Great Gatsby isn't F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, not in the story and not in the character, or at least not entirely. It's a hell of a party for significant sections of its overall running time, but it shies away from the characters too much, and that also means that the performances are often more style than substance. It's hard for actors as good as these not to perform well, and so they often do, but not to the best effect, which, I think, is down to the writing and the directing. Luhrmann captures what would have been the spectacle of Gatsby's ambition, and the undercurrents that he kept hidden, and, in the end, the undertow that was his undoing, but it's plasticised, too much of a film of a film by a great fan and student of the films of the forties. You can't make a musical of Gatsby, and I think that's where this movie ends up. Plus, we should have gone for the 3D option. Even in 2D you're very aware of the 3D effects, in the long pull-back shots that bring the foreground forward and push the background back. I don't know what that's called, but in those and many other shots, the effect would have been stronger with the glasses.

Pubrock Good news from the real estate front: The Annandale Hotel has been bought, purportedly by someone who will keep it as a pub, and hopefully keep the live music going. The Annandale is a storied Sydney music venue, from back in the day, although fallen on hard times and afoul of newly nearby residents who don’t appreciate the noise. (Why move next door to a rock ‘n’ roll venue if you’re just going to complain?) But nobody’s contacted me about my piece of it: I bought a brick so shouldn’t I, as a part-owner, get a cut? Maybe it’s because my name doesn’t appear on the “honour roll” – maybe I didn’t buy enough bricks. But since I’ve got the shirt, I should show up at the closing, right?

Impending Fun Last year I managed to get together a team from the office to run the City Dash, but alas, this year I am a team of one for the Cancer Council NSW's annual mile run fundraiser. It's not Fifth Avenue (and there's no Donald Trump, thank all the powers), but it's still a heritage thing for me, and I don't mind the fund-raising aspect. In fact, if any Australians ever still see this, feel free to chip in. I promise to run as fast as I can. That's as much as I can promise, and it ain't much, but oh, well.

Fun, Fun, Fun Every year I go to Vivid. There is always something worth going to. Last year, maybe I made the wrong choices, but not this year. Kraftwerk reprising their 8 iconic albums was not to be missed. The Sydney Opera House, however, should be ashamed. Look at the view from our seats: For this I had to go into a lottery, because the Opera House knew demand would be huge - and it was. Sold out on the floor immediately, and a secondary lottery set up for the balconies, including those so far off to the side that the tickets came marked: "No view; listening only." It was a little better than that, but only just. Lucky for us the people in the pair of seats in the very front row didn't show up. We moved up and got this much better: Still shameless, but we could use the 3D glasses for the animation on the screen behind them, and leaning forward could see them at work. Hilarious, really. I mean these are serious musicians, but aside from sometimes adding a bit of a live chant and twiddling dials and so forth they could have beamed it in over the internet. But I wouldn't have missed this for the world. They invented this stuff, and it's technically and artistically important, even for pop music. I think they had fun, too, but it was a little hard to tell. But on Sunday, the view we got from our walk across from Palm Beach was from the best seats in the house, even if it was a 60 degree slog to get there for the first kilometer or so. Nice weekend, all up.

Not Enough Honestly, if I was in charge of the IRS, I'd focus on TEA Party groups, too. These are [semi-]organized groups of people dedicated to tax avoidance. They don't want to pay taxes. Why wouldn't they cheat? Go ahead, audit every last one of these anti-social creeps.

Heart of Glass I understand why that review I read of Iron Man 3 was so . . . angry. I don't remember if it was the NY Times or the New Yorker, I think the Times, but they were really upset with the whole terrorism thing. I get it: it was very effective, at least for me. It was triggering. I've been angry, too, all this time. I was, of course, able to enjoy the usual moments of humor in the movie, the lessons to be drawn from the little kid, and the political polemics about war and the environment and the overreach of government and so on, blah, blah, blah. No different, really, from any of the other comic book movies. It was exciting, fast-paced, a thrill ride. And also hit me in a way that no other movie I've seen since 2001 has done in regard to the events of September 11. And it didn't even take place in New York or, except peripherally, Washington DC, let alone some lonely field in Pennsylvania. Although there was that bit in the rural midwest. That was pretty spooky. But the Avengers trashed NYC and I didn't experience it the way I did this film. Space aliens aren't the monsters that scare anyone much anymore, maybe. Mostly it was the performance and presentation of Ben Kingsley, which is, I suppose a tribute to the actor and to the screenwriters who crafted the part and the plot around him. It was a very effective presentation of what we've come to know of as terrorism, specifically of the al Qaeda variety. Even if it was, in the end, more a caricature of Osama bin Laden, it still worked. What it was was exploitative. That's what terrorism does: it exploits fear. That's what art does, including mere comic book movies, it exploits our emotions. But this was an exploitation that hit home where other instances have not. I suppose I have changed in ways that I have tried to channel more than to fathom since 2001, so I was a little caught by surprise to find myself so affected. It was just a movie. As good as any of the others of its genre. But I'm still angry. Anyway, Guy Pearce was very good, the pace was managed well enough, Robert Downey, Jr., may be looking for something else to do after the second or third Avengers movie is in the can, probably he is already, and Ben Kingsley, well, even his big reveal didn't change how I felt walking out at the end. Glad it was over, that I didn't have to see any more of that - was it a Mcguffin? no, I don't think it was, quite. Maybe I'm done with the super heroes, the "real cool cats with a heart of steel." Well, until the Wolverine movie comes out, anyway. Meanwhile, I can be angry at Obama, for not closing Guantanamo, and I can be angry at the Republicans for not letting him, and I can be angry at the crazy extremists who still think blowing things up is a path to a solution for their problems. I can be angry at Big Oil for working every angle to avoid responsibility for killing the environment, at the NRA for exploiting whatever convoluted rationalisation then can to prevent simple gun control measures to keep people safe, and at every otherwise decent person who makes up stupid excuses for the bad decisions of the GOP, the NRA, the terrorists, Obama, or anyone else. But I'm not mad at the movies, or at art. They do their jobs, usually, even though they are sometimes exploitative, like Iron Man. At least in that case the conflict is built into the story from the start.