Art Movements

Don't get me started on Economics.  Over the years it has been one of the topics I have invented my own integrated, multi-dimensional systems to describe and explain.  I am a solitary, introverted person who spends most of my time in my head thinking.  I have very little to do with the rest of the world, these outings to the Theatre are quite a recent development, and actually writing my ideas is too time-consuming, tedious and pointless.

[Written to 45 Downstairs]

Frankly, I think you should make it free.  The problem is evening out attendance on the night, so people would need to book, which implies booking costs.  Public Transport should be free.  Museums found out years ago that if they were free they would have more people, and everyone spends more in the gift shop and food hall than they saved in entry-fee.  It is the same as the amount drunk at a function is less if it is free than if there are bar prices.
 
There have been many 'Art Movements' that were based on the concept of Art not being a commercial commodity, including fabricating 'Art Objects' that have a Capital Value as an Investment Asset, not that there is anything wrong with that because it does increase the market for 'Art', but it is not the meaning of what 'Art' is.  Giving people an opportunity to add a donation to their ticket is something that some Arts Organisations already do.  I am convinced that if the ticket was free with no booking fee, but there were options to add a booking fee and a donation, the end result would be more revenue, not less. 

Here is a prediction.  We are Astrologically nearly through the Cusp from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, when we will live in a genuinely 'Free Society'; there are already signs of it.  

Am I alone in my musical appreciation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RENk9PK06AQ
It is billed as the world's ugliest music. 

A long lecture by a mathematician explains the principles of Harmony and then argues that it is because of what he calls 'repetition'  that gives all Art, including Music its 'beauty' presumably the only interesting aspect of Art.  Then he explains how something that is not just random, but even more 'dissonant' in that it avoids all repetition must be 'ugly'.  The resulting succession of notes is played on a piano.  No pair of notes have the same interval.

Among all the negative comments attempting to ridicule the music, presumably comparing it to Pop, I wrote:

Dare I admit that I enjoyed it very much. It was the unexpectedness of the progression that delighted me. It must be possible to generate 'harmonies' by this method so the 'music' or 'soundscape' has genuine dissonance. 

Unexpected!

Unexpected!
I wanted a picture of David Unaipon on the $50 dollar note, so I tacked it to the bottom of the stand that held up my drawing board.  Turning it slightly looks like this.  Could this be 'meaningful' for some people?  It was totally accidental, but if anyone likes it I shall claim that I created it as an installation, or something.  Anyway, it is still there, stuck in the grate of the fireplace.  

the Melbourne Grand Prix

Opposition to the Melbourne Grand Prix is a bourgeois plot to denigrate a Working Class sport.  The emphasis on the overuse of a public park for an event with limited class appeal appears to support the rights of ordinary people – class unspecified, and also has an environmental aspect that immediately co-joins this issue with the social groups and ideas that are called ‘the left’.  

It might be argued against this idea by pointing out the elitist domination of the Grand Prix by ‘big, international money’ and the exclusive use of some of its facilities by that small group, and then noting that these people are reviled by opponents of the Grand Prix.  The very small, very wealthy, global elite, the five percent of the population that owns ninety five percent of everything, a ratio that has remained similar throughout human history since Classical times and probably before, are the contemporary version of an Aristocricy, while the Middle Class and Working Class might be approximately be assumed to be forty percent each with a five percent ‘under class’. 

Before the French Revolution there were moves to align the peasantry with the aristocracy against the middle class who were the leaders of the revolution.  Still today, most of our Greens, Socialists and so forth on the ‘left’ are the well-educated children of the old middle class.  Working Class suburbs are always more conservative, for example supporting the Monarchy.  Socialist Governments are mostly run by a middle class sub-class of the highly educated, supposedly on behalf of the Working Class who are assumed to be unable to govern themselves without being led by theorists and activists.  

After the Russian Revolution’s blatant social failures emerged after the first world war, the German left agreed to work with the old upper class for the sake of social stability.  It led to later problems but this is not the place for detailed history of the different class groupings though history.  These two classes share other aspects because they are the two original classes before the rise of the middle class.  They are both ‘earthy’ in the sense of swearing and carnal relationships compared to the middle class’s puritan approach to both.  They are also both public compared to the highly prized privacy of the middle class, because the working class live in crowded, public conditions and the upper class live overt, public lives as exhibitionists, though now days only in private.  It is little wonder that Motor Racing should appeal to the extremes of the Social Ladder: Gasoline Alley and the many motor racing princes.  While the Working Class are powerless to end the negativity towards their sport, the other end of the social spectrum are probably amused that the trendy, bourgeois activists oppose them and laugh at ignorant denigration.

Instead of opposition, the aim should be to take maximum advantage of the Grand Prix.  For example, the much derided pit buildings and temporary facilities for the international, high-paying visitors could be year-round facilities for park users.  Indeed, the effort to preserve the park for public use really only helps a small number of park users, compared to similar areas in other places, and a further criticism could be that if the park is to be saved for anything it is to revive ‘Country’.  

A further suggestion will be ridiculed by those who now oppose the Grand Prix, and that is to make it the Royal Melbourne Grand Prix.  There is a valid criticism that internationally few people know it is the Melbourne Grand Prix and not the Australian Grand Prix, so the City does not earn all the global publicity for which it pays dearly.  Making it the Royal Melbourne Grand Prix would ensure the name was clear and unambiguous, as well as unique.  The way to make the event truly Royal would be to start it with a carriage race.  After all, motor vehicles derive from the horse-drawn vehicles. 

HRH the Duke of Edinburgh helped develop carriage racing as a competitive sport and raced himself until recently.  An approach to be patron of such a new vehicle racing sport in conjunction with motor racing might appeal to His Royal Highness.  How horses galloping down the circuit would affect the road surface might be a consideration of the sort that bursts bubbles.

It would be interesting to make this a truly Working Class festival, unabashedly so.  With interests and advertising that appeal to Working Class people that derive from their own interests and activities, not alcohol and so forth sold to working class people by big middle class companies.  For example, the Churches could be sponsors, because there is nothing ‘sinful’ about cars and working on them is good, honest ‘work’. The end of greyhound racing in NSW is similar, with issues over the well-being of the dogs the excuse to terminate a largely working class sport.  There is an ironic inconsistency in people who eat meat without thinking about the conditions of the lives or deaths of their food but stress over the deaths of dogs, and it is even more inconsistent with a world where millions of people are suffering more than the dogs, including some in Australia: the dogs can only be an excuse.

If we are to have the Grand Prix, it should pay for itself.  Being able to include it in our list of International Sporting Fixtures, to support our claim to be World Sporting Capital, comes at a great cost.  Melbourne remains a car city; while over eighty percent of private journeys in London are on Public Transport, it is less than twenty percent in Melbourne (ref mislaid).  We can’t extend the trams and trains significantly, but we could replace half the cars on the road with buses.  Non-polluting buses that use fuel cells as in many other countries could be built here to replace our now defunct car manufacturing industries, but for some reason we spend more on roads for cars.  We sure do love our cars!

Music is very ancient and powerful

Music is very ancient and powerful.

Perhaps our hands developed their dexterity after we learnt to play music.  There are some Palaeolithic flutes made from pierced long bones.  Anyone who could play music must have attracted multiple sexual partners very easily and hence any genetic advantage in music playing

So, I imagine myself standing in a darkened place, on a small, circular platform that gradually rises, and above me is a circular opening that is brightly lit.  As I rise up into the space above, I start to hear the shouting.  I am now on a tiny, round stage in the centre of an enormous auditorium, surrounded by a quarter of a million people, on many level all the way round, and they are all shouting. 

Then rising up from around me, where a ring of dark space divided me from the cheering throngs, was a hundred and twenty piece orchestra that gradually rotated around me, but all I could hear was the cheering.  The lights were intense an kaleidoscopic but the brightest spots were on me.

The world was mine for the taking, and then I pissed my pants and woke up.

I have to reply at once

Hi Heather,

I have to reply at once, with first reaction before I lose it.  Firstly, thanks for the review of the Circa.  Just a few days ago I accidentally hit the button on Billy's remote that took me to what I thought was ballet, that cleverly used skipping ropes.  As it became more gymnastic and less balletic, I realised it was a Circus dancing rather than rather more agile than usual dancers, and then at the end they said it was Circa.  It is all about cross-over, mixing different art forms.  I didn't know abo8ut the Monteverdi-slash-circus.  It is very hard to conceptualise the union of chalk and cheese, but if nothing else they would both need to be the best quality.  A lot of these productions are in the "points for trying" category.  Good on them for making the attempt.  Perhaps it could never work, even with excellent singing; I am not sure how Operatic emotions would translate to gymnastics.  A trapeze artist filled with self-doubt or a jealous rage would be dangerously doomed, even if it wasn't in the libretto. Some unlikely pairings do work and lead to bigger things, but they are only found by accident when lots of unlikely pairings are tested.  Musical Comedy stars who can both sing and dance as well as act are greatly admired, but taking those combined skills to the level of High Art would be super-human.  I love Brett's image of Jesse Norman in a tutu.  That is sort of what Walt Disney did in Fantasia with the ballet dancing elephants and hippos, or perhaps Absurd Theatre, like Ionesco, but they were making the point that the combination was absurd, not passing it off as serious "culture". 

I long ago admired Pina Bausch and remember the dumpster tragedy.  It is always sad when a young person dies pre-maturely, but when they display the potential for exceptional creativity, it is a loss to all humanity, not just to that person.  I have been somewhat obsessed with my own mortality recently.  [Cancer diagnosis does that sort of thig.]  Had I died young, as I fully expected to do as a sick child, the world would be very little different as my contribution has been close to minimal.  That is the result of being a  very introverted person, and as you would probably tell me, is irrelevant.  Even people who do great things are often just the person who did something that was part of the cultural development and would have been done by someone else if not them.  It is the equivalent of the "great man" theory of history.  If Einstein hadn't worked out Relativity and so on, they would not have remained unknown, but we would have attached other names to that knowledge.  Similarly the silliness of people going crazy over sports-people that they do not personally know, as someone had to win the race, so their adulation is meaningless.  But I don't think any of that matters, because there are only so many of us in the boat and we all have to row together, and if anyone does not pull their weight, but just gets carried along, then it does make a difference.

Yes, please do jot down ideas.  Keep a notebook/diary.  It could be the raw material for something later, even edited by someone else.  Also, writing things archives them and makes room for new ideas.  I write quite differently with a pen.  I write letters on paper to Marie in Queensland.  I would write to you too, but I have no address.  It takes five days for our letters to pass between Vic and Qld, but Germany might be quicker.  That makes me think: the City of Berlin is the equivalent of a State in Germany, isn't it?  In feudal times cities had their own sovereignty equivalent to Bishoprics and Dukedoms.

Cheers,
Na'um