Saturday 16 March 2024

Mahler

 


Jaime Martin conducts the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

 and choirs through Mahler's Third Symphony this week.

The night is young and the concert hall is hung in tuning sounds, dress circles and a hundred points of light. Mobiles switched off, the audience adopt immobile postures in readiness. The largest orchestra, assembled in array like a cityscape, somewhere like curlicued Vienna, begins to speak that city’s multifarious languages of old, all in good time. Though what are these towering forest sounds, shifting in unison or harmony or disruption, to do with this capital cityscape in sight of the ancient frontiers? Disquiet might be querulous, absence might be abyss, thunder might be transitory, the dress circle is in two minds. We could step onto that steam train in our minds, surging through alps, descrying passing waterfalls outside its blue windows, racing with absolute glee towards the modern world. We could be on a high for days, and then what? Nature very rightly surges from the earth and the flocks that wheel around its topmost expressions make song as faint as twenty violins. A clang or toot directs thoughts into day just past, inconsistencies of computer behaviour, hopeless headlines, something someone said lingering, liltingly. Or recent months, mind of insistent realities, bushfire sunsets, homeless walking the streets in need of home. Everyone is turning to tune in, shifting from one immobile style to another more comfortable, while an orchestra is a picture of concentration, concatenations his, consternations his. Discordance might be declamation, crescendo be craziness, rupture might be premonition, the stalls are all ears. But where are the archdukes of yesteryear? A forest of cellos send calling cards, steam trains of percussion talk up the procession process, a skyline of horns resound the present moment. Subscribers rest into their good fortune as the inscribed movement “comfortable without haste” merges into the movement “very slowly, mysteriously”, human voices singing now of the day that could only be summer in its intensity glory. And yet, as before now, the closing sixth opens the way through. Disjunction flows into connection, presence is indescribable presence, whispers wander into wonder, everyone is listening, everyone is close in, everyone is hearing the resolutions, everyone is in the space. The conductor signals closure and bends to silence. Ovations join in the unstrained uplift, sounds of thanks mingling with relief and tradition. And so, stalls and dress circle escalator up, walk out into the star hung night of city windows and flowing river crowd. Talk of Mahler’s intended seventh movement on heaven, never included after the glorious sixth. It would have been an anticlimax, we agree, and oh heaven is not to be an anticlimax. There is lychee ice cream and a cooling breeze as we cross the bridge on a high that will continue for days.

Sunday 10 March 2024

Bookshop

 


Image: The crowd gathered outside the Hill of Content bookshop for Thursday’s auction. Photo: Eddie Jim. Words: Nicole Lindsay, in The Melbourne Age.

My first bookshop account was with Margareta Webber’s circa 1973, when she was still upstairs in Little Collins Street. Trying to remember, I must have opened my account at the Hill of Content Bookshop in the early eighties when I developed spending power. Knowing most of the staff was an added incentive. Reading this weekend’s headline puts one in an Ecclesiastes frame of mind: “Hill of discontent as famous Melbourne bookshop fails to find a buyer.” Journalist Nicole Lindsay’s report prompts practical and wistful thoughts. “Melbourne’s first CBD auction of the year got off to a rocky start on Thursday,” Nicole writes, “when the well-known bookshop was passed in on a vendor bid of $5.7 million.” Not the shop, of course, the land and property. The bookshop could go elsewhere, maybe, but where? I think of the sizable part of my own library purchased from Janet Campbell, Pauline Osborne, Andrew Robertson at the counter, plopped into HoC bags and hauled home, wherever home was at the time. “The bookshop, a city institution, is on a month-to-month lease in the building.” One thinks of Thomas’ Records up the street, closed in 2018, or Gaslight Records directly across the street, left wondering if that end of town has changed character in ways that are not sustainable, or if rents, or online have reduced literary possibilities to zero. “Three bidders made a play for the three-storey freehold shop, which had been owned by the family behind the Collins Booksellers business for 73 years.” Well, Collins collapsed, while HoC was rescued, but for how long? “About 200 people crowded the footpath next door to Grossi Florentino restaurant for the auction, which took about 40 minutes and drew just eight bids, two of them vendor bids made by auctioneer Paul Tzamalis.” A good poem, in a book one could only buy at this shop, may take 40 minutes just to size up. “The slow bidding meant Tzamalis went inside to negotiate with the vendors four times. The first party to put up his hand outside the shop was a local investor bidding for his family. His main competitor was a student from Adelaide, in a swank new Louis Vuitton suit, from a Chinese family which owns a restaurant chain.” Et cetera, as if restaurants will be the only future for the area. Indeed, Nicole observes, “High-end restaurants, including Florentino, Bottega and the Lucas Group’s Batard dominate the top end of Bourke Street. There was a strong likelihood of any new owner ending the Hill of Content’s lease…” a sentence ending with the flickering, or rather guttering, last sign of light: “… but the shop has survived to sell more books.” Sure. What are we not being told? For everything there is a season. Yet Wisdom keeps you safe, this is the advantage of knowledge. What has happened before will happen again. Generations come and go, but the world stays just the same. Ecclesiastes keeps going round in my mind, and is that useless? Is it all, as Eugene Peterson translates ‘vanity’, smoke?

Saturday 9 March 2024

Celebrity

 


It is a pleasure to amble through a shopping centre, knowing that at no time will a celebrity show up to ruin the ambience. Sometimes shoppers have a sad or distracted appearance. This is due to the music in their earplugs which is being performed, alas, by a celebrity, or even worse by two celebrities in a duet. In the city I sometimes see a large circle of admirers surrounding a busker. This is a pleasant sight so I join them, happy in the knowledge I don’t need to make a quick exit, having mistakenly gatecrashed a celebrity autograph event or celebrity selfie opportunity. Busking, on a Chinese erhu violin or treated Fender Stratocaster, cheers up my already cheerful day. Celebrities spend much of their time walking along red carpet in the latest gold-spangled overalls. Overalls as you know are the fashion this year but only celebrities wear gold-spangled overalls. They wear resilient sunglasses, which are not like other people’s sunglasses, only don’t ask me why. They do strange things like filling their lips with air so they look puffy and choosing a facelift that leaves me thinking they are auditioning for parts in a horror movie. Celebrities, a very great many of them, are usually seen on film sets, which means happily they are not at the swimming pool, the library, the native gardens, or other favourite places. The exponential increase in movies seems to be related to the exponential increase in celebrities. I have it on good authority that a celebrity is someone more successful than me, that I must look up to as a god. Obviously our world has become so full of little idols that we are spoilt for choice. If that’s a choice I wish to make. I notice that celebrities are always on something called an A-List. It is not of the slightest interest which list they are on, as far as I’m concerned, given their main purpose in life seems to be having their name on some list. Wandering around town, travelling on a tram, it is pleasant to see anonymous people of every persuasion going about their lives with the slightly anxious, slightly wondering look that people have in large urban spaces. Anonymity is, I sometimes find, my A-List. This is quite an extensive list yet, paradoxically, a blank list for the simple reason that everyone is anonymously nameless. This pleasant scene is not, however, to be taken for granted. At any moment a perfectly presentable person will appear in the urban area wearing a celebrity tee-shirt, or else is yabbering on about some celebrity being the most supreme being hovering above a lotus flower. Still, anonymity, that is where everything returns, unbeknownst it seems to celebrity. It is a relief to see celebrity in relief, the song of the celebrity about the burden of celebrity, their trademark payoff, their byting opinion, their ego badinage, their instagram statistics. Seeing one coming, I cross the street, even though they seem to be doing their darndest to appear anonymous, behind their resilient shades.