Rock Opera One of the great failings of rock ‘n’ roll, especially in its days of aspiration to being “classical”, i.e., the 1970’s, was the Rock Opera. This was, I think a fundamental misunderstanding that all music is folk music, and that rock was, essentially, no different from anything ever written by Mozart or Beethoven or Monk or Parker or whomever you’d like to distinguish the forms as superior/inferior over the ages or just last year. If rock did anything different from classical it was to keep it short, and if it did anything different from the blues or jazz it was, well, to make it more broadly popular for a moment than the form that it was ripping off. One thing that appears to be true, however, is that the overarching category of “rock”, but which encompasses pop music generally, has not actually changed in form in any significant fashion for the last hundred years, effectively since jazz became popular. Nevertheless, it’s no less effective, no less evocative than it ever has been, and is now more artistically representative than ever before. Today, going to a musical stage production, watching a television show, listening to the soundtrack of a movie, you’re very likely going to hear material that is or is more akin to rock ‘n’ roll than ten or twenty years ago, because pop music is at this time more universal than at any time previously. That’s not a bad thing. At least not for most of us living today. Whereas once the ability to play an instrument or sing accompaniment was an important factor in social behaviour, that isn’t true, and hasn’t been for at least fifty years or more. More significantly, we have, since the 1980’s, at least, imbued our lives with our own personal soundtracks, to the point where we can hardly stand, it seems, to be without the appropriate music the appropriate time. Which brings me to B-Girl, a one-act musical production, just finishing up at the Sydney Opera House. It’s the story of a housewife who retreats into fantasies of glam-rock stardom, and it’s a production that deserves a much broader audience than just the basement playhouse of the SOH. I’ve seen a lot of mainstream and off-beat theatrical productions over the years, and I truly believe this one could very easily be the next “Hedwig” or more. I think there are some tweaks yet – as I understand it, some of the more “theatrical” effects had to be abandoned, due to technical issues (and let’s all be grateful for lessons learned from Broadway’s attempt at “Spiderman”, eh?), and their reintroduction could help. Mainly, I’m concerned with getting the spine of the narrative more firmly established before the rest is fleshed out, but it still works, as-is, and that’s important. This is a production that can go far, and with a little push, further still. I’d love to see it at BAM, and it’s almost “Next Wave”, but might need just a little more to get there. Meanwhile, I’m sure it will do well on its global tour, when that comes, including NYC, but Berlin, London, Paris, the world. I am very enthusiastic about this show.

Insane Mad Max: Fury Road is MADNESS! It's beyond good. ZOMG! Tom Hardy channels all the best of Mel Gibson, Charlize Theron is the best two-armed actress playing a one-armed hero you could ever hope for (and more), and George Miller has finally made the Mad Max movie he's always wanted. Unmissable. Yes, it's one big car chase with really loud music and practically no dialog, but it all works, all hangs together. While it feels at first as if it's started in the middle, it has: in the middle of the ongoing heroic epic of Max Rockatansky in the wastelands of the petrochemical-based capitalist extremities when it's finally all gone to hell. And redemption is only possible by sacrifice, which Max enacts to the purest merging of Joseph Campbell and the New Testament, a Moses/John the Baptist merger to Imperator Furiosa's Virgin Mary/Jesus combo. Yeah, a Jesus motif, as so often happens in the movies, but in full action hero mode to boot, driving out the money changers, or the crazy dictatorial war lords controlling the water, anyway. I may not have left this one as jazzed as from a Bourne movie, and more deaf, but it was still an absolute thrill ride.

Weekending So this weekend was, effectively, the end of the Vivid Festival, in Sydney, and although we didn't get out to see the lights, per se, I took advantage to follow up on a birthday present of two years ago, to engage in a little photographic instruction, from Photo Workshop Australia, in shooting at night. Vivid was a great opportunity to pick up a few techniques, although the course wasn't so much in the hows and whys as it was just about getting good shots. Some of which, I think, did indeed turn out o.k. Unfortunately, I didn't think to enroll B. in the course, which I'm sure she'd have enjoyed, but we headed up to the Blue Mountains on Saturday to have a weekend away in the start of the cold. We ended up in Mount Victoria, a bit further on than we usually go, due to booking late for the holiday weekend, but also to have a go at some of the bushwalks we hadn't previously attempted, down the other side of the ridge. We hardly saw anyone else, something very unusual up there, and that was an added attraction. The walks weren't hard, but they weren't all that easy, either, if maybe a little shorter than we sometimes attempt. Very nice scenery, too, including a "bush ranger's cave", a cleft of some considerable depth and notable dryness, from back in the day. Later, Mount Wilson offered a bit of cascades.

Stateless The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, is putting forward, at the behest of the most extreme right-wing of his party, a proposal to remove Australian citizenship from dual citizens found to have engaged in terrorist acts, most particularly of going to the Middle East to join ISIS, but without a judicial hearing. The Immigration Minister would be able to judge whatever evidence or allegation and strip such persons of citizenship, effectively removing them from access to the legal system and any hope of redress. Worse, the fascists are proposing that birthright citizens should also be subject to the removal of citizenship, rendering them stateless. I don’t use the term “fascists” lightly. This is exactly how they have positioned themselves politically, making citizens servants of the state, rather than the other way around. This is a bad plan, all up. There is no value in removing people from the rule of law. It makes much more sense to expand the rule of law, if such was necessary (and it isn’t; the law we need are already in place), to embrace them, and hold them accountable properly. It is cowardice, pure and simple. Hysterical fear-mongering cloaked in the flag, and pandering to racists. Andrew Nikolic must be the stupidest man in Parliament.

Billy Two-Toes' Rainbow Opalised dinosaur bones recognised as new species. Found only three years after the Hugh Atkinson novel, it makes you wonder how much else of opals out there are made of monsters from the past.

The Thrill is Gone B. B. King, dead at 89. Good run. A lot of his contemporaries didn't make it so far. "Live at San Quentin" will have to go on rotation.

Sequels It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the sequel to a successful movie is never as good as the first instalment, or it’s even better. Avengers: Age of Ultron falls somewhere in the middle. It’s very entertaining, certainly, if a bit long, but also full of what has become, effectively, stock-standard sequences. There are attempts to develop the characters, a little, but they don’t add all that much depth. Yes, they are comic book characters, so depth is only ever going to go so far. That scene as the team are walking up to a farmhouse highlights the silliness of it all: you are immediately reminded that they are all wearing rather ridiculous costumes out in the world. Looks like Halloween for some seriously embarrassed grown-ups. Ultron himself was something of a disappointment. Sure, James Spader was perfectly cast as the voice of the mechanical monster, but the physical representation probably should not have had lips or expressive eyes, and probably shouldn’t have been making quite so many jokes or using contractions. The purity of Ultron was always what made him most monstrous, after all. Vision was also rather too human; it was inevitable that Scarlet Witch would have her powers reimagined (“probability hexes” was always a bit of a struggle, so telekinesis and telepathy work a bit better); and where did Falcon fly in from? Never mind, it’s all a set up for a spin-off franchise, West Coast Avengers here we come. Joss Whedon will be remembered better for Buffy than for anything he’s accomplished so far on the big screen, but we can hope.. With the trailers for “Ant Man” and the reboot of “Fantastic Four”, and having sat through this film, I think I’m about over the super hero movies.

Misleadership The Liberal Party of Australia hates Medicare. They hate it purely on the basis that it was introduced by the Australian Labor Party and has been a great, transformative success; and that it is a benefit to the poor. Opposition to Labor is ingrained in this mob. They preference the big end of town on the basis that it from this source that they derive their legitimacy. Therefore any success by Labor must be rolled back. That Medicare has been so successful and so popular presents a challenge to them, however, so they must be duplicitous in how they reverse the program. Deep-seated resentment of the poor in a philosophical matter: like puritanical conservatives of the American Republican party, they believe the poor deserve their condition, that it is a moral failing. This extends to the elderly and sick. Wealth and good health are the rewards of providence for virtue and the evidence of it. So when the current Minister for Health, Sussan Ley, announces a review of Medicare, this would be a welcome development, from any other set of politicians. The review will include all procedures, tests and treatments, on the basis that there is a need to reduce “inappropriate tests and procedures”, because, primarily, many are no longer used. Of course, a test, treatment, or procedure that is no longer used isn’t costing anything, but that’s not the point. The point is to simply to stop spending money on health care. The review will also examine new ways of paying GPs, which is fine, potentially working towards a better system of managed care, to reduce the need for more complex procedures and interventions such as now inevitably arise from the lack of management of conditions such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc. Early intervention and management over the longer term means fewer people needing emergency and more costly interventions later. This, of course, costs money now, but reduces spending overall. Don’t expect this to be an outcome of the review. Instead, expect GP care to become part of private medical insurance coverage, shifting the cost from Medicare to the consumer and killing off bulk-billing as effectively as the previously mooted co-pay and rebate reductions. New rules are expected to be implemented to address the issue of Medicare cheats. But it’s actually doctors rorting the system more so than it is patients, and you would be foolish to believe that’s going to be the focus of the review. Instead, the “Medicare cheating” to be addressed will be rules to make it more difficult for the poor and middle class to access Medicare on the basis they are accustomed to, requiring more out-of-pocket expenditures and a reduction in services. The Australian Medical Association and Consumers Health Forum may welcome the review, but they should be cautious in their embrace of it, like the farmer and the viper. We know who these Liberals are, and their nature.

The System Reading the latest New Yorker (the latest I’ve received to date, delivery being somewhat more delayed than it would be if I were still a local), I encountered an article by Adam Kirsch, ”The System”, reviewing two new books on the Nazi concentration camps, both of which sounding quite excellent and quite terrifying. I was struck by the final paragraph, in a more contemporary context: Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. ”The impulse to separate some groups of people from the category of the human is, however, a universal one. The enemies we kill in war, the convicted prisoners we lock up for life, even the distant workers who manufacture our clothes and toys – how could any society function if the full humanity of all these were taken into account? In a decent society, there are laws to resist such dehumanisation , and institutional and moral forces to protest it. When guards at Rikers Isalnd beat a prisoner to death, or when workers in China making iPhones begin to commit suicide out of despair, we regard these as intolerable evils that must be cured. It is when a society decides that some people deserve to be treated this way – that it is not just inevitable but right to deprive whole categories of people of their humanity that a crime on the scale of the [concentration camp] ecomes a possibility. It is a crime that has been repeated too many times, in too many places, for us to dismiss it with the simple promise of never again. Australia, it seems, has decided, and we deserve every condemnation for it.

Happy Easter (Please Stop Raining) It had stopped, of course, or a drive into the Blue Mountains for a bit of bush-walking wouldn't have been part of the plan. These aren't Wentworth Falls, just the Empress Cascade, but very pretty, and a nice section of the walk, albeit all uphill and this point. A very nice way to spend Easter.

Last Time (this time) Last business trip to Auckland. Now I have to arrange a holiday in NZ so I can visit properly.

RIP Astrid Spielman was one of my first Australian friends, and I met her long before I moved to Sydney. Of all the Australians I met in that now brief period of 2000-2002, I think she was the one who really “got” the transition, for myself, and my ex, but could accept it in a way that not a few in the US could, and that was because of her vision and status as an artist. Astrid had been a rocker with Particles, a Sydney punk/post-punk band of the early ‘80’s., and the Yokos - great band name – before moving on to become an artist in the area of photography and video. But she was primarily, to me, a friend, and a challenging one, not content to let intellectual slackness slip by. Astrid had a burst aneurysm recently. The treatment was working, to the extent that it could, but a follow-on stroke took her just days ago. I have had, during this period, occasions to think of Astrid and to hope for the best .and now, in some small, clichéd regard, that’s where we are. I know I haven’t made the effort myself to maintain that friendship, which is a common failing for me, but I held it close in my heart nevertheless, and I will miss Astrid, with love always.

Gritty A Walk Among the Tombstones is a not half-bad adaptation of the Lawrence Block novel, but half of it is the rest of the Matthew Scudder series, and that's at least part of how the movie fails, ultimately. Liam Neeson falls in and out of his hard NY accent, and his team-up with the street kid, TJ, is, as every critic bothering to deal with it has mentioned, inexplicable and ultimately pointless, but my issues are somewhat different. The book left Scudder slightly off the hook for the vengence required by the end, but also left him open in the series to something darker than it had otherwise painted him to be. The movie tries to do the same, to a point, but ties the revenge to his past in a way that makes him out to be incapable of the redemption his sobriety would otherwise. So we're left wondering who Scudder is, without any questioning by Scudder, as is more characteristic, at least to this point in the series, of the literary PI. I'm surprised, a little, that it's taken this long to make even one of these novels into a movie. Neeson is perfect (barring the accent), and the movie captures much of NYC as a lived place. They could have started earlier and had a franchise, but I don't think we're going to get that, but if nothing else, I think I'll go back to the books before long.

Rules of the Road The first rule of cycling in the city: they don't see you. Melbourne is a cycling-intensive city, more so than Sydney, but both cities haven't got the infrastructure or the culture to keep their cyclists safe. What that means is that it's up to the cyclists, so today's rally is important. I commend Sydney's mayor, Clover Moore, for her efforts to establish bicycle lanes, and condemn both Labor and Liberal state governments for their efforts to rid themselves of both her and cycleways. Cities are not for cars, they're for people. That has to be balanced. And bicycles are better for the environment than cars. It isn't just about how many cars can be funneled into the CBD, but that seems to be the motivation of most of our politicians, and, unfortunately, the short-sighted, narrow-minded perspective of many citizens. This, too, is part of how someone can be killed riding a bike, and it needs to change.

Landmark Preservation Still no sign of Miranda.

Real and Unreal Very different recent movie viewings over the last week or so. First, Birdman, with Michael Keaton, a magical-realist story of a washed-up action hero trying to do a serious Broadway play, and maybe losing his mind in the process. Even though the setting is limited in scope, swirling around on itself as the characters move through the theatre and sometimes the bar next door, it's well-paced and keeps you moving right with it. The music, just drums, is sometimes intrusive, but not too often. And the titles are a throw-back to the sixties, when titles design was an integral part of movie-making much more so than is common now. Probably not for everyone, although it seems everyone is going to see it, as I keep overhearing people talking about it. That is most likely a function of just how good it is. Then Selma, which we saw at the St. George Bank Open Air Cinema. Rain poured in the hour the gates opened, but most of us didn't show up until well after. These are always top movies, first-runs, and a pleasant enough evening. The first time we went, high winds kept the screen from rising, but the second year was a treat. Selma can't be described that way. This is a tough movie to watch, and I kept flashing to Eric Garner and Ferguson Missouri. So much progress and so little changed. The performances are all of the highest quality, as is every other aspect of the film. I can find nothing to fault in it, except maybe that the actor playing George Wallace doesn't quite fit my rememberance of the man, whom I picture more like Edward G. Robinson. Funny what memory will do to pictures like this one. This is, however, one of those films that everyone will praise and many fewer will see, but it should be watched like the Best Picture it in many ways deserves to be.

Health Care & Aged Care Our illustrious Treasurer, Joe Hockey, is trying to sell the nation on the idea that we have to have a co-pay for visiting a doctor, or that the payments to doctors for short appointments needs to be reduced, because somewhere in the world today a child may be born who will live to 150 years of age. Of course, if he can't afford health care because, after he's paid his Medicare levy etc. he can't afford the co-pay, or doctors no longer bulk-bill so they can make up the shortfall imposed by government, he won't live so long and certainly not well. Hockey also relates the story of only having to pay $40 for the treatment of his son's broken foot. He says that was "inherently wrong", because he could afford to have paid more. No, Joe, that doesn't make it wrong. You - and the rest of us - pay the Medicare levy so that we can access health care. That's what it's for. We may need to raise the levy. The levy may only be raising half the annual cost. But there are other initiatives that can be taken and that would make sense to improve health care delivery and maintain access for everyone. You only need to read a newspaper to find out about them, or talk to actual health care professionals. It might mean more money spent now and less - significantly less - later, but it puts the program on a progressive track, taking advantage of new technologies, new techniques, new and better practices. But that's not what this government wants to do. At best their ideological commitment to "small government", something they never fail to fail to achieve, demonstrates a complete misapprehension that government is the one organisation that can apply the leverage needed to make things better. At worst it's simply that they hate Medicare. They hate the very idea of someone else getting something they think they're not getting - even when they are. Good Catholic boys who heard "the poor you will have with you always" and learned the wrong lesson from the story, they've somehow adopted the mindset that being poor or ill is a moral failing. Joe Hockey, Tony Abbott, our current and former health ministers, they are lying. Medicare is not "unsustainable", and we do not need to inflict "price signals" on health care.

American Novel I've heard it's been said that all of jazz is either a 12-bar blues or "I Got Rhythm", so maybe all of great American novels are either The Great Gatsby or ? Well, Donna Tartt's novel, The Goldfinch, I think, is Gatsby. It's a very entertaining novel, certainly, although the object referenced in the title is little more than a MacGuffin, one of the secondary characters is a highly improbable Russian, while the rest are nearly little more than backdrops, but all that's never mind. The story roughly parallels the vague backstory of Jay Gatsby, with the great love lost, the rise to a position in which to reclaim it, but then takes a different turn, with a redemption Gatsby never finds, but not the final resolution. The protagonist is agonizing at times and the prose let's him linger on his agonizing nearly beyond endurance, but you finish with a sense of how realistic that is and how the past drives his present. I haven't read any of Tartt's other novels, and I don't know that I'll go so far as to seek them out, but I'll be very interested in her next, I think, and can recommend this one.

Boxing Day There are two Australian traditional events the day after Christmas: cricket and the start of the Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race. This year I went out to Watsons Bay, by South Head and the Gap, to watch the start. The line forms just past Shark Island by Rose Bay, and crowds line the harbour and the view points out to sea, at every vantage point along the way. Boats of all sizes and types also pour into the harbour to view the start and to accompany the racers, past the heads if they're suitable to the open ocean, but generally staying out of the way. Lots of helicopters, too, and one blimp, the latter a somewhat unusual sight. The Americans have a boat in the race, too, a super-maxi called Commanche, and it's apparently had a credible start. Next year perhaps I'll see about going to see some cricket, if there's any in town. I think the Boxing Day test is in Melbourne.

Moral Compass: Lacking Here we have the true measure of the current Attorney General of Australia and the Liberal Party's commitment to the rule of law: Because David Hicks has been labelled a terrorist, torture is o.k. Without the courage to face his questioner, George Brandis dismisses the torture of David Hicks by the CIA, with the apparent knowledge and complicity of a government of which he was a member, and scuttles away from actually answering to the charge. As much as it pains me whenever Dick Cheney rears his hideous mien to pontificate on terrorism and justify his crimes, it is worse to bring such men as this back into power and pretend that it's a good thing. Brandis, you toad, answer the question.