Education

A friend of mine wrote that life can be divided into seven stages:

1) What is that?

2) I know that!

3) I thought I knew that.

4) Who am I kidding?

5) How did I manage to miss that?

6) Was this my journey?

7) I don't get it.

Getting your degree is the beginning of the end for stage two.

My mother graduated with a Masters in English from Otago in 1960. I got my Masters from Vic in 1998. It was while I was doing my Masters that I began to learn things. I learned that if you go far enough in academic study you tend to end up in a very small (intellectually speaking) room that you fiercely defend against people in different rooms. There might be someone in a different room, for example, that says the wallpaper colour is double Spanish white, while you maintain that it is only Spanish white. Particularly annoying people in rooms down the hallway might even argue that the room doesn't exist at all, that it is merely a cultural construction.

I also began to suspect that most of what you need to know is learned the hard way which is, generally speaking, not to be found in a lecture hall on a power point slide.

Number One: Judas

Christmas.

I read a book about Jesus and realised not for the first time that the original message was appealing: we should help the vulnerable; everyone deserves a chance.

Organised religion is a bore. There is nothing in ceremony, there is nothing in a church. The only thing that teaches us is words and experience.

In my thinking book, as a result of reading My Name Was Judas, I wrote:

"Human rights don't exist. They just don't. Human beings have different kinds of rights depending on the values of the society they live in and how that society apportions them. Sometimes human beings have no rights. For example, slaves in 19th century America, or Jews in Nazi Germany. Because human rights are specific to society there is no such thing as universal human rights."

This maybe a cliche to some, but it was an original thought for me. I always thought (without really thinking about it) that the Declaration of Independence, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were rather grand. And yet injustice in the world is continuous. Yet champions of human rights are assassinated. It might be, I realised after reading My Name Was Judas, that these declarations are just letters to Santa Claus.

Numbers Three & Two: Katherine

I re-read Miss Brill.

I remember walking past a group of new students at university when I was doing post-graduate study. I was wearing a ridiculous white suit jacket with shoulder pads. As I walked past them they fell silent. As I walked further on and we were able to pretend that I was out of earshot, they laughed at me and my jacket and my shoulder pads. It was not a nice feeling.

More than anything I think that this story might be about the thoughtlessness of youth.

I'm not young anymore. I'm middle-aged.

Numbers Five & Four: Christmas

Christmas was nice. I come from a very small family. I have no brothers or sisters, but I first had Christmas with my wife and daughter and as my daughter ripped open her presents with unwitting delight I had a feeling that I was a father and that being a father was in itself a gift. Then we went to my mother's place and opened presents there. The candle burning on the dining table was for my father to show he was there in our minds at least. Finally we went to my brother-in-law's new house. It was a good day. His wife looked after us generously. For me, the most devout of atheists, at the time of Christmas I think of Jesus, which is pretty odd really - for an athiest. But then it's at Christmaas that you tend to notice the difference between a bum wandering around Israel with only the clothes on his back telling people to love one another, and the rampant consumerism of the modern Christmas. This is a cliched thought that occurs to me every year. It is comforting to have recourse to cliche.

Number Six: Robert Kennedy

For along time I thought that JFK was the one I should admire. I discovered recently that it was his brother Robert. He is the one I should admire more because he was allowed four more years than his brother and his wisdom was hard won.

His speeches are not as initially moving as his brother's speeches, but they have more truth in them because he had done more suffering, and thought more about it.

Like my other great personal hero, Martin Luther King Jnr., he came to be, after decades of thought and bruising experience, anti-war, anti-capitalist, believing in the basis of good society which is love.

I strongly, strongly recommend that you visit the website called "American Rhetoric" and listen to the speeches of Robert Kennedy who was the last (?) hope of America and was gunned down in the same year as Martin Luther King Jnr. was gunned down. Listen to his brother Ted read out his eulogy, listen to his voice break. If you no longer allow yourself to weep, weep.

Number Seven: Dreams

Here's what has been bothering me over the last few days, Richard:

1. I read a book called My Name Was Judas


2. I told my mother about this blog
3. I reread Miss Brill


4. Christmas came and went


5. I started a thinking book*


6. I listened to the speeches of Robert Kennedy


7. I read a book called Mister Pip
   

*A thinking book is a book where you write down what you've been thinking (duh)

Let's start with number seven first.

Something a character wrote in Mister Pip made me write this in my thinking book:

"A dream may be broken in two. Sometime later you realise that this is the opportunity for two dreams. You pick them up for awhile until they also fall and break. Soon you have so many broken bits that some must be discarded because there are too many to hold on to. Once your dreams have come down to the specificity of small, worn-smooth pebbles you find that you can actually make them come true. Sometimes you might pine for the original grand dream of your youth but this was silly and naive and untested against anything. These dreams that you have now are hard won. The dream of your youth was something like: "I will love like no other, I will be free, I will be like a comet in the night sky." The dream of your middle-age is: "I will give myself to my child so that she will know love, and I will learn through this how much I owe my own parents who gave me love."

Time further out

Dave says:

"To explain the relationship of the Miro painting to the music is not a simple task. I can point out the obvious link between the numbers in the upper right hand corner of the painting and the time signatures of each of the pieces on the album. There is a more tenuous link in the Miro abstract forms, suggesting human figures moving in a visual rhythym which could be interpreted as a jazz quartet."

I learned how to play the guitar at Strings 'n' Things in Paraparaumu. Strings 'n' Things was run by a German who had had a hit with his band in Germany which I think might have been called Lollipop (the hit not the band). He had a big bush of grey curly hair and a long, lean body. He taught me guitar with a couple of other boys. Basically we sat in a circle, he played the chords for simple songs and we copied him. That's how I learned how to play the guitar. This method had a major advantage and a major drawback for my musical development.

Advantage:

I learned that chords are the thing you need to know, and if you know them you can make your own songs. I have made my own songs ever since and regardless of their negligible quality I have gotten a lot of satisfaction out of this

Drawback:

I know next to nothing about music from a technical standpoint. For example it wasn't until quite recently that I really realised what different time signatures were and that a lot of my favourite bits in pop songs were when they shifted to 3/3 or 5/4 or whatever.

Which leads us back to Time Further Out by Mr Brubeck. Cool idea (each track in a different signature), and cool execution. I've listened to Unsquare Dance for years and never understood that one of the reasons it's good is the unusual time signature and off beats.

I know you can argue that music is all about feel and you don't need to worry about all that technical stuff, but sometimes I feel like I am playing in a cage, or trying to explain something very complicated in another language.

Then again, the only other time I've paid for lessons it was with a guy who wouldn't even let me touch the guitar until I had mastered written music. I would look mournfully at my guitar across the room trying to remember if it was Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit or Fruity Ardvaarks Can Eat Gooseberries. We lasted two lessons together.

Interlude IV

Up again. Down again.
Morning is a square of light
instead of darkness on the curtain.
The lawn needs mowing
The face needs shaving
This unremarkable dawn is
done by 9:15.
If he turned on the radio
he would hear the unbearable beauty
of faith transformed into song,
if he went out there might
be the chance of a smile snatched
off a child, or laughter,
or anything.
Any damn thing.

Interlude III

I loved my leather jacket

I gave it to a now vanished friend

Bought when I believed I was a Lizard
King, able to do anything
And given up when I got fat
Old and bald
When I found that I was not at all
The hoodlum I had wanted to become
But liked quiet nights in

Reading

Life's Companion

"Be my life's companion and you'll never grow old

You'll never grow old, no, you'll never grow old

Love and youth and happiness are yours to have and hold

Be my life's companion and you'll never grow old

I know a man who's lonely and he's old at thirty-three

No one wants to be old at thirty-three

Your disposition sours like a lemon on a tree

Don't let it happen to you and don't let it happen to me."

Be my life's companion (from Funny Girl)

I heard someone say that Louis Armstrong could sing anything and make you feel that everything would be ok. I'm a bit older than thirty-three now and I have a disposition like a lemon on a tree but side two of Hello Dolly really cheers me up.

Sometime this year I was beginning to find out about my father, and my mother was over for dinner. I said: "So, was my father like one of those 70's dads that never changed a nappy and wanted children to be seen and not heard?" and my mother, without missing a beat, said "oh no, he LOVED being a dad."

I had to go and hide in the bathroom and have a little cry after that. How I wished I had known him. How honoured I am to know my daughter.

A fake interest in jazz

My mother said that she had a fake interest in jazz. It never did what it was supposed to for her. I sympathise. For awhile I had a fake interest in Nick Cave. He's very moody, very trendy (in a slightly obscure way). I have listened to a lot of his albums, even a best of. I pretended it was cool, but now I have given up.

It's a funny old thing peer pressure, and you never get entirely free of it. Of course it's much worse when you're young. It's always the kids who are cool who are the biggest pains in the arse at school. If I thought a student would listen to me when I handed out unasked for advice I would say:

Don't ever try to be cool. Find out who are you are and be true to yourself.

Sounds straight forward, but it's worth remembering;

Very few people will give up trying to be cool before they're thirty, and

1. Finding out who you are is pretty much impossible.

Aside from those two problems, it's a real pearl of advice.

The Armstrong record was my Dad's. It is a pearl. I once saw quite a famous movie (maybe High Society) in which I think it was Bing Crosby who explained to Louis Armstrong what jazz was while Louis aped goofy grins. It's all very well to say things like "to thine own self be true" but there are a lot of things against it. Society for one.

Grandad Sings Italian Opera - Volume Two

I think that The Great Caruso must have been a very influential movie. It certainly made the reputation of Lanza.

I think that Lanza, like Caruso, might have been a bit of a ham. But what the technicians forget when they criticise tenors and sopranos who are hams is that opera is also about drama. It is not sufficient simply to hit all the notes, you have to sell the song as well. Caruso could sell a song. Even though it is totally over the top to do a big sobbing intake of breath in an opera aria as Caruso does in Pagliacci I still love it because he is swept away by the drama of it all.

I have never liked art that is realistic. Art for me has always been about escape. Realistic art is false. If you want realism just open your eyes: it's a toddler reaching for food at the table; it's a mother with rollers in her hair; it's breakfast tables and net curtains. Do you think Grandad sang Italian arias in Mosgiel in the 1950s because he wanted realism?

Give me the sobbing, give me the hams.

Grandad Sings Italian Opera - Volume One

When I was a kid my mother gave away a pile of 78s. She gave them to a kid that had a wind up gramophone and collected 78s to play on it. I didn't know what 78s were at the time, or why she had them or what they meant.

They were her father's. Her father liked opera and bought 78s of people like Jussi Bjoerling, Caruso or even crooners such as Lanza. He was a decent tenor himself and liked to sing at church or embarass my Gran by serenading her while she scrubbed potatoes at the kitchen sink or shelled peas.

My grandfather was a man of dark clouds and bursts of light. I think in the days of light he must have been a man of great charm.

He died when I was five. Same year as my Dad.

My fondest memory of my Grandfather is a bike ride on the Tairei Plain. He sat me on the handlebars of his heavy, black bicycle, between his arms, and pedalled out into the long, deserted back roads behind Mosgiel. Here are the fields, and ditches overrun by weeds, the high holly hedges and hills off in the distance lying like a woman on her side.

Who knows what parts of him are parts of me, but I suppose at least I can say that he's the reason I love opera. He passed on his enthusiasm to my mother and she passed that on to me.

Even a stopped clock

Time.


I steal all my worst ideas from Richard.

Here is my class room at the end of the year. I don't wish to say anything fatuous about the year. There were times I wanted to hang myself from the rafters. There were times my students would have tied the noose and held the ladder.

Left is my wall of 2007. Right at the tippy top is a hat worn by the fine people who work at Krispy Kreme donuts in Australia. A girl in my form class brought me that back from her trip to Oz. There is an origami swan, pieces of art and a few touching portraits of myself drawn by students.

You don't get into teaching because you're vain.

When I was at Teachers' College there were two people in my study group that (or who, depending on your command of English) work at the school. I wanted to say something to one of them today:

Are you ok? I hope you're ok. You told me a story once about a ghost sort of coming and telling you everything would work out. I don't know if it will, but we survived another year. Have a good, long, stressless holiday.

Planetary Dances

While my mother was at Lorna Brown's dance classes she worked up an original dance piece set to Mars, Bringer of War from Holst's The Planets. Aside from Mars, Bringer of War and the bit that someone set to Blake and turned into Jerusalem most of this album reminds me of the theme for Star Trek. The last piece even has a female choir. If only von Holst had thought to have someone say "Stardate blah-blah-blah" over the top of it.

It was written in 1914. That means that you have to think about World War One. The liner notes say (about Mars), "It has been called a prophecy of the mechanised warfare that was to come." No. Just because there's a snare drum in there doesn't mean it has anything to do with World War One. I would say most people listening to it now would think of Darth Vader.

Holst composed 200 pieces of music. He's remembered for this. Ravel is remembered for Bolero. Rodrigo for Concierto Andaluz.

If your life was boiled down to one thing what would it be?

Interlude II

Richard has distracted me. He inadvertantly hit on the idea of remote control toilets little knowing that they already exist. While I was in Japan I often went to the toliet (sometimes up to twice a month), and I was confronted by things like this on the wall where the toilet paper should have been (see above).

It's somehow especially annoying to be humiliated in a toilet cubicle. There is a great sense that pushing the wrong button could lead to things going terribly, terribly wrong. There are two things that are intimidating. One: how can there be so many buttons when all you want to do is flush the toilet? Two: Why is there an LED display?

Here is something from Wikipedia that really captures the snappy brilliance of the Japanese mind:

"Other features may include a heated seat; an automatic lid equipped with a proximity sensor, which opens and closes based on the location of the user. Some even play music to relax the user's sphincter (some Inax toilets, for example, play the first few tunes of Op. 62 Nr. 6 Frühlingslied by Felix Mendelssohn). Other features are automatic flushing, automatic air deodorizing, and a germ-resistant surface. A soft close feature slows the toilet lid down while closing so the lid does not slam onto the seat, or in some models, the toilet lid will close automatically a certain time after flushing. The most recent introduction is the ozone deodorant system that can quickly eliminate the smells. Also, the latest models store the times when the toilet is used and have a power saving mode that warms the toilet seat only during times when the toilet is likely to be used based on historic usage patterns. Some toilets also glow in the dark or may even have air conditioning below the rim for hot summer days. Another recent innovation is intelligent sensors that detect someone standing in front of the toilet and initiate an automatic raising of the lid (if the person is facing away from the toilet) or the lid and seat together (if someone is facing the toilet).

Recently, researchers have added medical sensors into these toilets, which can measure the blood sugar based on the urine, and also measure the pulse, blood pressure, and the body fat content of the user. Talking toilets that greet the user have also started to be made. Other measurements are currently being researched. This data may automatically be sent to a doctor through a built-in internet-capable cellular telephone. However, these devices are still very rare in Japan, and their future commercial success is difficult to predict. A voice-operated toilet that understands verbal commands is under development.

It is possible to use the water jet on a high-pressure setting for an enema, and some users take advantage of this to help them with their constipation. It is also reported that women may be sexually stimulated through the water jet."

Wikipedia: Toilets in Japan

Which makes you realise how hitting the wrong button could really affect your toilet experience. Thinking that you were simply flushing you could end up having your bowel cleansed or being inadvertantly sexually stimulated.

A further question: How did the Japanese toilet designers find out what kind of music is sphincter relaxing? The mind really boggles. What kind of person would sign up to an experiment that involved laxatives and classical music? How would Mendelssohn feel about his music being chosen as the most sphincter relaxing?

I knew a girl who went to the toilet at her Japanese friend's house and pushed the wrong button. She looked on in horror as her pee fountained back over her shoulder in a long jet and saturated the calendar on the toilet door behind her.

Interlude

The way to make money is to invent something that becomes ubiquitous. Nobody would think of buying a TV that didn't come with a remote.

When I used to stay at my grandmother's place in Mosgiel she had an old TV. It had a quite nasty green synthetic dust cover. When you pulled it off you were confronted with the large wooden box that was the TV. You turned it on and then you went off to make a cup of Milo because it had to warm up. Then you came back and sipped your Milo and watched Coronation Street while your grandmother knitted. If you really had to change to the other channel you got up, walked over to the TV and pushed a button.

On the weekend I found a drawer of abandoned remote controls. They were all for old stereos. Because I have a small, easily distracted mind I thought: "Why is a TV remote indispensible, but a stereo remote unnecessary?" The answer is something like this: with a stereo you choose what you want, and you listen to it right the way through; with a TV someone else chooses what they think you might want to see (they're always wrong), and they chuck in heaps of ads. To get around not knowing what people want to see networks create hundreds of channels. To check that there is nothing on quickly you need a remote.

Conclusion: a remote is essential for a TV because TV is shit.

Flamenco Magic

"On the evening of the Pilgramage, the Gypsies gather together in their camp. On the second side of the record you will hear Manitas and his family. His brother plays the guitar with him. His sons, his cousin and his nephew sing, and during this Provencal night they are all present for you, singing, dancing, playing for your pleasure which, today, thanks to this record, is also yours."

This album. This is the jewel in the crown of the collection for me. Manitas' playing is so rough, raw and percussive. Side Two, the live side, is fantastic. Somehow I have never been bothered by not understanding what people are saying when they sing (sorry to the guys who wrote Carmen Jones), it has always been about conveying emotion for me. The wonderful thing about listening to these guys sing is that they are like the brass section in a jazz band, doing their long bluesy runs, and filling in each others gaps, while underneath are the clapping off-beat hands, and pulsing heavy guitar rhthyms. Strong stuff when I was a kid.

About as far away from this as you can get is the "New Flamenco" of Ottmar Liebert. I have two of this man's CDs and have been to one of his concerts. All because my friends knew that I loved flamenco and were being kind. I think enough time has passed for me to say (1) thank you for your generousity, and (2) German flamenco! Oh dear. It sounds like it is being performed by robots. The back of Liebert's CD says (please read it with a fake German accent): "we are dedicated to a process of continuous refinement both artistically and commercially. As in music, so in life." Dreadful. Reminds me of another slogan: "Work Makes One Free." Yeah, right.

Ottmar Liebert appeals to one thing in man, and Manitas de Plata appeals to another. I have always been on the side of Manitas.

Lorna Brown teaches creative dance

Early in my mother's marriage she started going to classes in creative dance held in a room in Otago University in the Physical Education Department. They were taken by someone called Lorna Brown. There were about a dozen people in the class, and they danced to a variety of records including Spanish stuff requiring castanets, shawls and a shuffling mastery of footwork.

When I was a kid one of my toys was a pair of black plastic castanets held together with a piece of red string. Of course I didn't know what they were or how to operate them. They seemed a very cryptic children's toy. Funny how your parents' lives before you were born don't exist when you are a child or a teenager. When you are a teenager you are utterly impervious to the idea that your parents were once young, and felt the things you felt and hated the things you hated.

Then you get older of course. Age does bring perspective. Strangely this reminds me of a piece I read in a book at the beginning of the year. The person writing is a very old Jesuit priest, and he says:

"I am sometimes very conscious that I am following a leader who died when He was less than half as old as I am now. I see and feel things He never saw or felt. I know things He seems never to have known. Evedrybody wants a Christ for himself and those who think like him. Very well, am I at fault for wanting a Christ who will show me how to be an old man? All Christ's teaching is put forward with the dogmatism, the certainty, and the strength of youth: I need something that takes account of the accretion of experience, the sense of paradox and ambiguity that comes with years."

Although my father lived to a reasonable age he died when I was five. It struck me this year that I really knew nothing about him. Am I taller than him? What did his voice sound like? All those photos of my mother and me... he was there, in the room, holding the camera and pushing the button. I really think he must have loved the woman he married. He supported her in the barbarian culture of 1960s Otago to take fashion courses, to do a Masters, to dance.

This interest in dance, and the weekly dance classes, leads to what is for me the iconic album in the collection.

Dorothy Dandridge? She was some kind of coloured singer.

My mother bought this after going to see the movie starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte. My mother said that seeing this movie in the late 1950s blew her mind. She thought Dandridge was a fantastic Carmen, and the music and dancing were wonderful.

On the back of the LP Hammerstein says when he was a kid he went to the opera, liked the music but thought it was silly they were all singing in Italian. Listening to his version I think it's silly they're all singing in English. Frankly the toreador's song is not quite the same when it's about boxing and he says things like "punch him smack on the nose."

Nevertheless, my mother passed on the Carmen gene to me. I was brought up on Carlos Sauras' version of Carmen. The Carmen Jones version starred Dandridge and Belafonte but they were both dubbed. So the record has neither of them on it. Dandridge's career didn't pan out very well.