In his seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord argued that capitalism and mass consumption had created a world in which human relations were now mediated by images. Commodification had intruded so radically into all spheres of life that individuals, who were formerly in a natural state of being, passed into another state of having and finally into one of appearing. It is not hard to see how Debord's thesis might be applied today, even though his work is 50 years old. He did not live to see the internet age nor the era of the smartphone, but it seems likely he would not have been surprised. I can imagine him writing an essay on the selfie, much as he also might be interested in the artificial online self. And much else besides.

Debord was a Marxist and critical theorist. He was also a French intellectual so (without trying to sound too essentialist) he tended to hyperbolize - theories were seen through to their most radical conclusions, but his central ideas remain pertinent and influential. I don't have his brainpower for deep analysis but reading his work, though it is sometimes obscure and difficult to grasp, reflects how I have long felt about the modern Western world. In saying this I am not harking back to some ideal time (there may have been some great historical periods to have been alive but they didn't have modern medicine or dentistry) and what's done is done. But it behooves us, perhaps, to meditate upon why so many people seem anxious or unhappy or prone to using drugs or alcohol, when we live in an age of unparalleled plenty. What is ungrounding us?

Christmas crowds, Sydney, I

hunting a seat
to pen three simple lines-
like dancing on the sun

Photos of old Sydney pop up on my FB feed from time to time. The metropolis of Sydney is not all that old, being founded in 1788, so age is less dramatic a condition than it is in say Rome or London. But these pictures are set in time, often before I was born or in a very junior state, so they evoke a sense of what was. All too often they also critique what has become. Comparisons like this can sometimes be misleading, for though a demolished structure may have had a charming exterior, it might have been a little box of horrors within. Poor lighting and ventilation, cramped offices and so forth are potentially hidden by a pretty facade, though my acquaintance with older buildings is often the opposite.

Wandering through the city yesterday, with time on my hands before meeting Ann, I reflected upon the changed streetscape of so much of the CBD. I don't want to launch into a criticism of modernist and post-modernist architecture. But it's clear that even the briefest acquaintance with the photos I mentioned earlier demonstrates that a stroll along George or Pitt Street in the 1950's would have been a visually more pleasant experience than it is now. Buildings were only a few stories in height and had facades that blended with each other and which invited a human presence.

Passing Martin Place yesterday, and despite the continuance of many fine buildings, it was clear that a number of ill-conceived skyscrapers ruined the effect, no matter what direction one might look. The crescent moon hung like a necklace between these ugly structures.

broken bauble
pasted on a concrete sky,
oh slip of moon!

Later on, I took a photo near the spot of another shot taken way back in 1954 of the concourse leading from Central Station adjacent Belmore Park. It is an area that I walk past regularly on my city jaunts. I didn't get the exact location, but near enough to show how 50 years has altered one precinct.

Tom plays basketball on Wednesdays with a bunch of his school friends. They call themselves The Ballers. He is new to the game but is starting to improve, though building confidence is a slow process. So too building skills, which occurs slowly, unless you happen to be one of those kids who seems to be a natural at sport. They are rare enough though and most of us have to work at it. But underlying becoming good at something is having confidence in yourself sufficient to take risks. Just to hold on to a ball and not feel compelled to get rid of it requires some faith in yourself.

The Ballers are a stylish lot and the tendency to all have the same haircut with a long fringe attracts considerable mirth from parents during a game. There is as much flicking of the hair as passing of the ball, so one parent came up with this solution yesterday.

Ange Postecoglou has stepped down as the National Coach of the Socceroos today. Even though Postecoglou had hinted at this possibility in recent weeks, it seemed impossible that a man on the verge of taking a team to the World Cup, the premium event in world football, would not grasp that opportunity with both hands. But something else was stirring inside the man, some other cause or grievance or hurt, and now the job is vacant. He has done a great job.

Who will fill these shoes at such a time? I hope, for heavens sakes that we don't get some foreign hack or blowhard, intent on cashing in. I pray for an Australian coach, or someone familiar with the game and mindset of the players in this country.

Well done Ange Postecoglou and good luck with your next venture.

I don't remember anything of the Sydney I was born into in 1958. It was, undoubtedly, a different town to the one I visit regularly today. Recollections from early childhood rarely begin much before three years of age and I am afraid that the 3 or 4-year-old me would have little of interest to recall. The Russians may or may not have had a device aimed at my hometown, the Beatles may yet to have been formed and trams still plied their trade through Sydney streets, but I remained in short-panted ignorance of anything but my immediate needs.

Today I found in another post the following photo of Central Station, dated 1958. It is one of those curiosities that stops one, a scene at once familiar (the vast arch of the station) and unfamiliar (the long-gone shops spilling onto the concourse), for I walk through this space at least once a week. I wonder if the all-night service really ran all night, and what refreshments it served? How much stamina, do you think, did the trousers need to have to deal with an Australian summer and winter? What of the man in the dust coat (recalling Ronny Barker, surely) and the gentlemen reading at the far end of the newsagency? What magazine, exactly? And the ubiquitous milk bar, now a rarity.

Philip Larkin completed his magnificent The Whitsun Weddings in October 1958, a poem based upon another railway journey in another country. The first verse reads-

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river’s level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

Larkin gradually becomes aware that traditional Whitsun Weddings were underway at every small stop and station along the line and reflects on this "frail travelling coincidence." I suspect that many such paths crossed at Sydney's Central Station. Though the pace is faster, indicative of the impatience of our time, it is still happening now.

Last Thursday Ann graduated from her college, Bridge Business College. The Diploma of Business Accounting is a far lesser qualification than her Bachelor degree from Thailand, but it is nevertheless remarkable in that she studied in a foreign language, English. I can't begin to imagine the trouble I would have reading a simple street map in Thai, so I take my hat off to her and all her cohort for their achievement.

Ann is typically humble about her graduation and didn't want anything posted anywhere. I disobeyed and sent a photo to FB. I am proud of her and would like the world to know.

The votes are in and counted. The results are out. Better than 61% of Australians voted for Marriage Equality, with a majority in every state and territory. Now all that matters is for the National Parliament in Canberra to craft and pass the relevant legislation. The hour is now. The need, pressing.

I am convinced that the Yes vote would have been higher had it not been for a dismal and mendacious campaign by elements of the No side. As alluded to before, a logical argument, perhaps appealing to tradition or religious belief did not materialize. A very poor attempt at scaring and confusing people did, sufficient to dissuade some in the community, no doubt.

I suspect the sun will rise in the morning. The sky will not fall. People can get on with loving each other and the rest of us can mind our own business.

I was with Ann in Auburn the other day. From the window of the office we were waiting in, rows of trees in full bloom were swaying in an adjacent park. There were children playing happily in their shade, a scene so common as to be instantly forgotten. Looking at my watch, it occurred to me that the Melbourne Cup was underway, though all was blissfully silent around us. I wrote this entry in my notes.


jacarandas lilt,
and kids frisk blithely beneath,
somewhere, hooves quicken

I like smart people and smart ideas. Conversely, well, you know what I am going to say! I like art though I am only a rank amateur in terms of my knowledge or understanding of it. I like wandering through galleries and sometimes, though much less these days, curated exhibitions of art. While it is very convenient to have all that good stuff in one place at one time, sometimes it feels like I am just consuming a product. And then there is all that faux studied-attention and more latterly, selfies.

Today I found this clever this cartoon representation of the history of art in the avant-garde era, an era which I suppose began in the latter part of the 19th Century. It's funny and true enough to be helpful, should you ever wander into one of those huge galleries like the Tate or the Louvre and become befuddled by the post-realist phase of Western Art.

As for the beginning of things, the Universe began forming a long time before the Earth came into being. This order will be reversed for the end of things, when the Earth goes out in a fiery blaze long, long before the Universe becomes a sea of dark atoms. If you are religious then you might quibble with this view, for all things might have been made at the same time, or in short order thereafter. An apocalyptic view of the end might see all things being extinguished at once, something physically impossible, though theology apparently can enable it. Even a change in the vacuum state of the Universe can only happen at the speed of light, so some phenomena get upended later in the day, so to speak.

Which brings me to the world. The watching world. Rarely a week goes by without some media head telling us that the whole world is watching some event. I have often wondered at this, especially when I was a child. It seemed to me that at least half the world or more did not have a TV set or a radio, nor much loose change for a newspaper. I thought it unlikely that they could watch even if they wanted to, yet still I was told that the whole world was watching. It was puzzling indeed.

I suppose that someone should have told me that this was merely idiomatic. It also may have reflected the Western worldview, one in which a group of countries in what was then the First World dominated the narrative. Today there are more voices from outside this formerly ascendant group. No doubt somewhere in Beijing, a news editor is writing up a headline about how the whole world is holding its breath, and some child is scratching her head, wondering why it is so.

There is hardly a moment's peace in the omnipresent and strangely overstimulated world of media. Short of turning every device off and ignoring the newspapers (now far fewer than of yore), it is impossible to get away from its constant jabbering. It fills every space and then forgets the contents of the space it has filled, as if the last event has somehow disappeared or never existed in the first place. This odd amnesiac tendency sweeps away whole lives and narratives as if by magic, though we know the real reason is more a hyperactive hunger to fill the next gap in the cycle.

I think the ultimate effect of all this noise, for noise it is, is to create anxiety. I am not saying that the intention is to make populations anxious, but that the management of news ends up with people feeling dislocated, worried and uncertain about the world around them. There is very little balance between so-called bad news (war, accidents, murder etc) and good news, those stories that tell of positive human endeavour. I am told that the latter does not sell, but I am skeptical. We have been trained to expect the worst by our news services.



On a quite different note, a friend asked me what the haiku in my previous post was about. I was surprised that anyone read this blog, let alone a friend. She guessed that it had something to do with the funeral of King Rama IX (correct!) but did not understand the last line. When I wrote the poem, I was struggling for a way of more symbolically portraying the passing of the King's funeral carriage. I decided to use one of the Thai Royal Houses's own symbols, the discus (Chakri). The Chakri, being circular, is wheel-like. This reminded me of the Wheel of Dharma, a Buddhist concept you can investigate for yourself. So the Wheel fits nicely(in my head, anyway) the relationship between the Royal House and the Buddhist faith that it upholds.