A Month in Australia 1

A Lorikeet demands food on my Sister's balcony.

A Flickr slidehow is found here.

1/19/2013  My Sister Jan’s family apartment in Artarmon overlooks North Sydney and a wonderful assortment of trees, palms and other tropical growth. Because of the recent heat, I expect a brown, desiccated landscape, but it rains the first day, the temp is low 20’s (it was 46C the day before, I luckily arrive with a “cold” front) and the vegetation is green, the recent fires apparently being caused by the growth of grass and underbrush after two years of abundant rainfall (and often started by young pyromaniacs). The trees are rich with avian life including hysterically laughing Kookaburras, Rainbow Lorikeets, Willie Wagtails, Noisy Miners, Pied Currawongs, Friarbirds and let’s not forget Galahs. A pair of beautiful Lorikeets land frequently on the balcony or window sills noisily demanding handouts.

1/20  The second day My Sister takes me to downtown Sydney, an area Jan lived in for several years.

The city is huge, modern, affluent and sophisticated…and spectacular. Several long bays crenellated with coves brings sailboats 20 km inland before meeting a fresh water river. The past is well preserved in old colonial buildings and parks and it all reminds me more of London or Paris than New York or Toronto.

We visit the Rocks, a downtown area of old sandstone 19^th (and one 18th!) century buildings, and some cobblestone streets, now full of businessmen, shoppers and tourists. Sydney is well preserved, and they claim to know the exact spot where Captain Cook planted the English flag in 1770. There are many beautiful parks full of palm, fig, banyan and eucalyptus trees, numerous huge old colonial buildings and vistas of the water, Opera House and Harbour Bridge.

I don’t know why, but I never realized how huge the iconic Opera House is, or realized that the roof is distinctly patterned with tiles. Funny how these ubiquitous travel mega-symbols like the Eiffel tower, Statue of Liberty, Acropolis, Big Ben, Forum, Taj Mahal, Giza Pyramids or Mount Fuji seem somehow hyper-real when you first see them.

1/21  Today Jan took me to Ku Ring Gai national park.  A boardwalk led us over some mangrove swamp and then the trail headed up into the bush along the heights on both sides of the tidal river. I fell in love with the open forest with Gum and Eucalyptus trees. Lots of rock and vegetation, but always open to the sky. The trees often in convoluted shapes and sometimes appearing to ooze out of rocks. We see a beautiful black and green Goanna lizard, about four feet long, and find the huge pile of leaves that are a Mallee Bird nest. The bush is loud with cicada and shrieking Cockatoo and the continual lovely spicy scent of eucalyptus in the air. A sign points out an area of flat rock, where 23 axe-grinding grooves have been made by Aboriginals, with two bowl shaped depressions they used for water to wet the axes.

There is still some traces of an English orientation here. The row of little shops across from our local rail station have an English feel, although they have substantial marquees for shade. Like the British, the traffic system often uses roundabouts and drives on the wrong side of the road. Local names on the map are old country, Epping, Chipping Norton, Liverpool, Penrith, Paddington, Habersham. Of course other local names are Turramurra, Wooloomooloo, Wahroonga, Woy Woy, Kirribilli or Toongabbie. The suburbs we drive through remind me vaguely of Orange County or Millbrae in California, or maybe Etobicoke with palm trees.

1/22  I spend the day downtown taking photos in St Andrews Cathedral and the Queen Victoria Building, which looks suspiciously like the inspiration for the Eaton Center.

1/23 I walked through Hyde Park again and down into the Royal Botanical Gardens, a huge park near the harbour where I found a vast assortment of tropical trees of amazing shapes. What a city!! Then I walked back taking the main drag, George Street, through all the office buildings and skyscrapers. The streets are crowded, a mixture of business dress, surfer casual, or European chic in the case of many women. There are many Asians, but I only see about seven aboriginal faces all day. As befitting the major city in the country boasting the worlds 12^th largest economy, Sydney is impressive, but still has charm and great style. I’m impressed, it trumps Toronto in many ways for sure.

A flickr slideshow is found here.

The Hunter

The star attraction of course in this movie is Willem Dafoe. If you've seen "The Last Temptation of Christ" you know what incredible presence this man can project. In this movie he starts out as the villain, (the good guy is already dead), and his redemption at the end is not really believable, although we'd like to try to believe. Why is it cold-hearted killers can convey such a fascinating zen-like presence? Is it their single-mindedness, their frequent obsessive-compulsive insistence on order, or just that they have a clarity, being free of the need for morality or social acceptance which clutters up the lives of us civilized folks?. A great little movie, well crafted, and you'll never forget what a Thylacine is. The Bluray edition is prefaced with a tourist ad for Tasmania, rather unnecessary given the amazing landscapes in the movie. 

Samurai at the Roxy

In 1971, a festival called Films of Japan opened at the Roxy Theatre in Toronto. For some reason I don't remember, I attended the first film, got hooked, and then attended all of the subsequent showings until the series was cancelled, halfway through the thirty-odd films.

One of the first films I saw was Samurai Rebellion. A black and white film made in 1967 by the director Masaki Kobayashi, it concerns a Samurai family slowly drawn into a confrontation with their lord. I was fascinated by the medieval dress, the interior simplicity of the dwellings of rich or poor, the elaborate protocol and intricate social systems, the highly ordered and stylized culture. The slowly mounting tension of the story finally explodes with incredibly fury. In the climax two Samurai friends who find themselves on opposite sides calmly duel to the death under dark clouds near a field of long grass undulating in a fierce wind. It was certainly one of the most powerful scenes I had ever seen in cinema at that point.

In 1971 Japan, although still notorious for it's aggression in World War Two, was just another little Asian country, known for cheap plastic toys. The first few cars from Japan had just started to trickle in with awkward names like Datsun, Toyoto and Mazda. The sole perception of quality was in Canon and Nikon cameras. There were only two or three Japanese restaurants in Toronto. But if Japan seemed quaint and irrelevant to those around me, it was no longer so for me.

Thus the beginnings of my Japanophilia. I was soon investigating the nation of islands any way I could. I encountered the woodcuts of Hokusai and Hiroshige and bought reproductions for my walls. I listened to Koto music. I experimented with a Japanese lunch item made by rolling up cold rice and various other ingredients in a sheet of dried seaweed and slicing the resulting log into sections. I visited the Japanese Canadian Cultural Center and naively bought a “Learn Japanese” manual. I read novels, poetry, biographies and travelogues. I got the first hints that all is not cherry blossoms and immaculate gardens in the Japanese psyche, that underneath lie some incredibly twisted and bizarre impulses and practices. I saw more films. My first car was made in Hiroshima. I planned to visit Japan.

These days, in my part of town, its easier to get sushi than a hamburger. The bin at the video store for the films of the modern director Takashi Miike is larger than those for Bergman and Fellini combined. Japan is no longer seen as quaint and irrelevant. But my interest persists. So yesterday I was pleased to find that I still possessed the poster for that film festival at the Roxy many years ago.

And notwithstanding my respect for Japan's most famous director, Akira Kurosawa, my three favourite films are still Samurai Rebellion, Harikiri and Kwaidan, all by Masaki Kobayashi.

Mirage

A photo I took today over about 30 miles of water of Hamilton steelworks down the lake from Toronto. Notice how the image of the buildings is mirrored and the whole thing seems to be floating above the water. The texture of the waves is very odd too. I used a 300mm telephoto lens and then cropped down the image by about 20X.

Burn, Burn, Burn

This is the story of four friends. It is not usually told this way.

Three young men met in New York in 1944. Two years later they were joined by the fourth.

Each with different characteristics, they formed an interesting synergy......

......A handsome athlete, a shy drifter, born into a French Canadian Catholic family in small town New England.

......An intense bisexual Jewish teenager from New Jersey

......A perverse, paranoid drug addict, the oldest at 30, supported by his rich St. Louis family.

......And a western hustler from Denver, a chronic car thief, a “holy goof” whose manic energy inspired his friends.

These four created a mad lifestyle of immediacy and high spirits fueled by drink, jazz, high speed driving, drugs, taboo sex, hitch hiking, rootless wandering and minimal employment. Postwar America was a place of conformity and rising materialism, and their lifestyle contradicted that, but I doubt if this mattered much to them, they just loved living that way.

Friends through the late Forties and Fifties, these men kept up a voluminous correspondence, on occasion sharing wives or being lovers themselves, and rushing madly in various permutations between New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Mexico City, Tangiers and Paris, together with an ever widening number of new friends and associates.

They all had a love of writing. One amongst them wrote novels that chronicled their lives, and so to large extent were autobiography. That he was able to capture the spirit of their life in words, without any discourse or editorial (aside from an occasional Buddhist note), is his achievement.

Jack Kerouac's famous novel, On the Road, written in 1951, was published in 1956, but the events depicted, the arrival of Neil Cassidy into the group including William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, had actually occurred ten years earlier.

The book was reviewed in 1957 in the New York Times, and called a major novel, and although that opinion was far from unanimous at the time, there is no doubt that the book has had a lasting presence. Protest in the Fifties was almost non-existent, although one must mention people like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. But the novels of Kerouac and Burroughs, and the poetry of Ginsberg, went a long way to igniting the counter culture that arose first with folk music, then the Sixties dissension and exploration.

The circle of friends romp through most of Kerouac's books. Neil Cassidy becomes Dean Moriarty or Cody Pomeray. Kerouac becomes Sal Paradiso or Jack Duluoz, or Leo Percepiad. Ginsberg is Carlo Marx or Irwin Garden or Adam Moorad. William Burroughs is Old Bull Lee or Bull Hubbard. And similar names are created for their other friends, a Who's Who of bohemian America including Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and other writers like Alan Watts, William Carlos Williams, Randal Jarrell, Kenneth Rexroth.

The close friendship came to dissolve in the early Sixties as fame and and other pressures rendered the mad lifestyle impossible, and Kerouac and Cassidy died before the decade ended. But the Beat writers, as the four friends came to be known, changed things with the spirit they lived by, as much as anything they wrote.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles." (from On the Road)

trailer for the upcoming movie of On the Road

trailer for the movie "Howl"

trailer for the movie "The Source"

oh, and read the books too.......

The Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band You Never Heard Of

We tend to think that talent and accomplishment mean fame and success. One Toronto band, the Monitors, who in my estimation created awesome music, got very little recognition, didn't last long, and no doubt was completely paid for out of the band members pockets.

I first heard them around 2006 in a tiny little place on Queen Street called the Smiling Buddha bar. When they got up to play I had no idea who they were but immediately realized how great they were.

Keith on his Melody Maker

Their last show was several years later at Clinton's. Some band got up before them, did a tasteful set, showed how good they were on their instruments and behaved like they thought a rock band should. Ho Hum. Then the Monitors got up and tore the place apart like they had no choice. And that was that.

Diego Shea

Special mention goes to Diego Shea, who did main vocals and songwriting. He's currently playing in the Castros. The Monitors Myspace page is still available, with four great songs you can hear, of which Easy Rider is my favourite. Go to Myspace and search for "themonitorsmusic". I'm happy owner of a copy of all demos extant (thanks Keith). Sometimes world-class bands play just down the street for free.

Why Meditate ?

I have been meditating for about 12 years, on and off. I'm not sure about the benefits. I think I may have received benefits, but its not something I can point to with words. Things can be subtle but still very powerful. Maybe I'm more relaxed, maybe I'm more patient, more grounded, more content, more able to take time to smell the roses. It's hard to say. 

It's important to see what our condition is. I believe that all us modern folks are actually weird and dysfunctional versions of humanity. Most spiritual paths have a way of talking about this and the usual idea is that we each have two selves, one that is essential and exists in the moment, and one that is conditioned and focused on past/future and grasp/avoid.

Meditation is a chance for your essential self to get its time in the light, so to speak. But when we are in the present we don't care about benefits. And being concerned about benefits keeps us from being in the present moment. 

So rather than benefits, think of meditation as a chance to practice being, or to just be. 

If meditation has one obvious benefit, its that it helps us see how our mind works, and what we're really thinking about. And where our attention usually is (which ain't the present moment). As my (then) teenage son said to me after his first meditation class "Dad, I can't stop thinking!". So one of the benefits is seeing what going on inside yourself, learning about yourself. You'd be surprised at the misconceptions we have about what goes on in our own minds.

Some people meditate to have blissful experiences, or become more peaceful, or to calm down. That's fine, but when you have a idea like that, your setting a goal, having expectations, judging and rejecting anything that doesn't seem to be giving you the experience you want. But being in the moment requires that you accept the moment for what it is, not what you want it to be. Its hard because its so simple.

Even sitting cross legged on a cushion can be a trap, as I think of myself as "meditating" and being "spiritual". Better to meditate by just sitting in a chair alone in a room for half an hour and doing nothing. 

I think the only thing to try to do, when your thinking mind will let you remember, is to place your attention on some sensation, be it a sound, a visual detail, or the feeling of space around you in the room. This is "doing" yes, but it then allows you to have a few moments perhaps of "being", and surely it is a good thing to just "be" fully in our life once and a while.