Painting Fakes

This week the Australian public has had to swallow the news that a violent protest at the Manus Island detention centre resulted in the death of one detainee and serious injury to a number of others.  Depending on who you believe, the death and injuries were the fault of the asylum seekers themselves (who were rioting in frustration over their conditions), of heavy handed response by security guards at the centre, or of local police or residents breaking into the camp and assaulting the protesting detainees.  The various accounts of the event are irreconcilable.  At this point, given that neither staff of the centre nor detainees are allowed to talk to the media and we can't trust anything the government says on the subject, we have no way of knowing what happened. One thing is agreed by all those telling the story.  The detainees were protesting, with some violence, about conditions in the camp.  They had, in fact, been protesting for weeks before their pr...

After reading lots of stuff about Pink Floyd over the holidays, I've spent the last couple of weeks reading about their founder and muse Syd Barrett.  His death in 2006 released a new wave of writing and re-evaluation of his life and legacy.  I've just read two quite detailed and thoroughly researched examples - Julian Palacios' Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe and Rob Chapman's A Very Irregular Head: The Life of Syd Barrett.   Pink Floyd had a rapid rise to fame.  In early 1966 they were playing R&B covers at university socials.  By the end of 1967 they had a top 10 hit and successful first album, were playing concerts in USA and Europe and were at the forefront of the new wave of psychedelic music that was sweeping the Western world.  Most of this success was down to Barrett.  He played lead guitar, operated as the main singer and wrote most of the songs.  The creative vision that made them so successful was almost totally his...

I often ride my bike past the Seventh Day Adventist church on O'Keefe St in Buranda.  This week the sign in front of the church read "Love People. Use Things."  I'd like Scott Morrison and co (including their Labor colleagues who are just as bad) to read this sign. I haven't posted on refugee issues for a while.  I've been too depressed about it to write anything.  Our current government has ratcheted up the deterrent to a point where it has become absurd - a military style intervention whose sole purpose is to repel boatloads of asylum seekers and return them to Indonesia from where they have generally departed or, failing that, send them offshore to detention facilities on Manus Island or Nauru where they can expect to stay indefinitely no matter what their refugee status.  The result has been a growing number of horror stories and embarrassments - pregnant women and newborn children interred in terrible camp conditions or returned there ...

Graham Nash has just released a memoir, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life.   I'm quite a fan of Crosby, Stills and Nash (and sometimes Young).  Their heyday was a bit before my time but Neil Young was the first musician to make me think that perhaps I could do that, as opposed to just think it sounded great.  (As it turned out I couldn't, but I'm still trying.) Of course once I cottoned onto Young it was only a matter of time until I followed the trail that led to his most famous collaborators. I've seen CSN live twice in recent years - a good but not great show at Brisbane's River Stage in late 2007, and an electrifying set at the Byron Bay Bluesfest in 2012.  Sadly, one of the reasons the Brisbane show was a bit flatter was that they attempted to play some newer material.  Fair to say the audience didn't enjoy it much.  The Bluesfest set didn't include anything recorded after 1978.  Still, it's pretty impressive that they can still hit thos...

Last night Tony Abbott treated the world to the unedifying spectacle of his use of a global forum (the World Economic Forum in Davos) to criticise his Labor opponents .  There's a lot else to dislike about his speech.  It was a classic of simplistic dry economics - low taxes, deregulation.  He also made the breathtaking claim that "stronger economic growth is the key to addressing almost every global problem", conveniently ignoring the fact that decades of growth have done no such thing.  If you keep doing the same thing, you will get the same results. However, I was most interested in the way he used the speech to criticise the Labor Government's economic stimulus program, suggesting that this program was unnecessary and caused the economic problems we are facing now by pushing the government into debt.  Doubly interesting when in the same speech he urged the US to exercise caution in winding back its much more ambitious stimulus program.  You cou...

So everyone, here's the gist of tomorrow's sermon. Readings are 1 Corinthians 1:1-9 and Romans 12:1-13. But first, a story about Mohandas Gandhi.  In the 1930s and 1940s if you wanted to do anything in the Indian independence movement it was important to have Gandhi's blessing. So when Shriman Narayan returned to India from England in the early 1930s with a PhD in Economics and a head full of schemes for economic reform, he went to visit Gandhi in his ashram.  He explained his ideas and plans and asked Gandhi for his blessing.  Gandhi, however, said that first he wanted Narayan to clean the ashram toilets. This was not a pleasant job. The toilets were not water closets they were latrines, and cleaning them involved a shovel and bucket. Narayan had probably never done it before. Traditional Hindu society has a strict caste system. Higher caste people, like Gandhi and Narayan, do important things like running the government and trading. Lower cast...

More Pink Floyd ruminations for you... You could divide Pink Floyd's work into four periods. The first, spanning 1967 to 1969 and including their first album Piper at the Gates of Dawn and some of the second, A Saucerful of Secrets , was dominated by guitarist, singer and chief songwriter Syd Barrett and involved experimental, off-the-wall songs and musical pieces with strange sounds and bizarre lyrics. The second began when Barrett's mental illness made his ongoing participation impossible. It involved the remaining members - bass player Roger Waters, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Rick Wright along with replacement guitarist Dave Gilmour - trying to work out what they should do next. The result is a number of interesting musical experiments - quirky extended songs and musical pieces which tested the limits of late 1960s and early 1970s recording studios but which these days are more curious than compelling. In the third period they finally found the answer. B...