The Coffee Spoon Addendum

One. A Lost Friend (Friday night).

He's not a long lost friend. Rather an old friend, a good friend, a friend whose life had intersected with mine with a hundred different links and triggers, a friend whose story will, when he remembers his twenties from the vantage-point of old age, intractably also be mine. And yet, for the most part, we don't speak.

I think it is always with the good friends that we lose contact. In these circumstances, 'friends' is just another form of relationship, one with its closeness and dependance, and its pride and hurt. I hear he refers to me as a kind of ex-girlfriend. A moment of awkwardness, a display of animosity, can destroy what took years to build. Just like in a relationship, one harsh word, one heated argument or (in this case) a spitefully-phrased e-mail can set a tone from which we can never recover.

And yet I was tapped on the shoulder on Friday night, and heard a familiar call: 'So we meet again, at another Sonic Youth show.' Two years ago, we travelled to Melbourne to see Sonic Youth. Now we were just two faces in the crowd. And we shared that night again - a night, given the age of the 'Youth and the fact that they were playing 1989's Daydream Nation in full, that was all about celebrating the past - but once the crowd began to leave the arena, we once again parted, made our apologies the following day, and went back to letting a history of awkward grievances make us anonymous again.

Two. Exclusive Information (Saturday).

I meet many people while drunk. One night, at a favoured local haunt in the early hours of morning, I met a man who began asking for advice about breaking up with his girlfriend. Having been in this position before, I offered advice which was stern, but kind. On Saturday, I spotted him in the crowd, said a cheery hello. He promptly introduced me to his girlfriend. I was polite, affable, but just a little reserved. After all, I know something she does not.

Laneway crowd scene with bonus Okkervil River - photo courtesy of Carly.

Three. Mr E's Beautiful Gay Strippers (Saturday night).

10pm. We're inside the small Laneway Festival venue now, escaping Gotye's brazen display of electronic genius in order to catch the stoner spectacular of Devastations. Suddenly, a tall ginger man with an American accent demands to know how he knows me. He's surprised to find I don't share his Atlantic drawl. He tells me he thought he'd met me in Detroit. In a gay nightclub. Offerring dollar bills to male strippers.

Between tears of laughter, my friend Carly and I assure him that I have never even visited Detroit, let alone participated in its thriving gay stripper scene. Then he pauses, reflects, and gasps in a visceral eureka! moment. 'That's it!', he cries. 'You totally look like E from The Eels!'

Incidentally, although he's now the third person to tell me this, I don't think I look a thing like E from The Eels.

Also incidentally, Sonic Youth's Daydream... set was incredible, phenomenal, breathtaking, and far better than the Rather Ripped tour in 2006. The Laneway Festival offerred a slow-burning, brilliant set by the always-amazing Okkervil River, and a spectacular show by the talented, beautiful, guitar-shredding alto-warbling Feist. The Fringe opening night - which I saw before Sonic Youth, and to which I returned after, was well-orchestrated but ruined by competing with lost crowds of Clipsal 500 petrolheads. Whoever scheduled two such diametrically-opposed events not one kilometre away from each other on the same night should be terminated immediately.

And despite my intentions of heavy Saturday night drinking, everyone had gone home by 1am. Really, what is it with you people?

Fringe Opening Night, Rundle Street.

In the non-French-speaking world, anyone who wishes to see first-hand the experience of human frailty in a position of political power can look to George W. Bush, whose well-documented failings and verbal idiocy have been a source of hilarity for his entire term as US President. For French speakers, however, we have the joy of current French President, Nicolas Sarkozy.

First, there was the controversy over his wife's refusal to campaign alongside him. Second, there were no surprises when said wife filed for divorce within months of his election victory. Third, there was his paparazzi-favoured whirlwind romance with Italian actress/singer/model Carla Bruni, who has previously been linked to an endless slew of desirable wealthy bachelors (Mick Jagger, for example). Fourth, there was the surprise marriage of Bruni and Sarkozy after only three months of courtship. Now, there's the beginning of the Sarkozy dynasty, with remarkably handsome 21-year-old Jean Sarkozy running a Bush-family-esque candidacy for the local Neuilly council.

What is most remarkable is that all of this has occurred since the 2007 election, only 11 months ago.

The French don't much like such personal controversies in their leaders, and Sarkozy's approval ratings have been falling steadily since his victory over the equally troubled Ségolène Royal. So now is the time when Sarkozy starts pulling out the big guns, and coming up with novel, imaginative policies which show his big heart and concern for humanity in the midst of personal crisis.

Like deciding that all 10-year-old primary school children should be entrusted with the memoirs a Jewish child their age who perished in the Holocaust 60 years ago.

In a move to combat what Sarkozy sees as growing anti-Semitism in France, he believes that all schoolchildren should be instructed to read memoirs of a child who was sent to a concentration camp in the early 1940s. Naturally, this has outraged Nationalist groups, including the still-popular Front National whose long-time leader, Jean Marie Le Pen, believes the gas chambers were little more than a footnote to World War II. But it has also outraged Holocaust survivors such as Simone Veil, who had previously greeted Sarkozy warmly when he became the first President in a decade to address the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France. Veil, not unreasonably, believes "we cannot do this to a 10-year-old... it would be unbearable."

The question is, why does a country so proud of its laïcité - the word given to the exclusion of religion from political matters - become so touchy when it comes to questions of Judaism and the Holocaust? How can France ban public schoolchildren from wearing religious symbols, including veils and yarmulkes, but demand such intense religion-centric education? Why is Sarkozy not also addressing the problems of social exclusion of Muslims, particularly those from post-colonial North Africa, in French primary schools? (This would be a more fitting policy, given his previous record of verbal harrassment against such ethnic groups.)

And why does multicultural education have to be inextricably linked to persecution? Can we not have a policy which positively reinforces equal citizenship and respect for people of all backgrounds, rather than singling out particular groups for which the rest must feel sorry? Will not such a policy have the counter-reaction of having French children continue to see people of Jewish heritage, such as myself, as somehow 'different' and 'excluded'?

Is this part of a personal struggle Sarkozy is enduring with his own Jewish heritage (he is part Hungarian Catholic, part Greek Jew)? Or does perhaps the France of Sarkozy still bear the guilt of the Vichy régime?

For an English-language article on the subject from Israeli newspaper Haaretz, click here.

Dear The Bank,

Today I received my new bank card in the mail.

Firstly, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your concern. I do appreciate the biennial card replacement service. After two years, my card has been well-worn through the regrettably constant, promiscuous stream of ATM and EFTPOS contact. I fear that after any more than two years, my card would be reduced to a piece of crumbling plastic, frayed and torn beyond recognition, perhaps even capable of unusual plastic biodegradation. In the lead-up to its February replacement, my card struggles to make a lasting, meaningful connection to even the kindest of EFTPOS receivers. Your care in replacing these cards is truly heartwarming.

However, I do have one pertinent question to ask you. Why, I mean why, have you made this year's uni cards so goddamned fucking ugly?

I mean, why? What confident, self-respecting ATM would want to accept the affections of a card so brutally unattractive? Even if in a drunken stupor, what kind of EFTPOS machine would so much as sleaze awkwardly onto a card so irredeemably grotesque? Really, what were you thinking?

Any assistance you could provide in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Yours sincerely,
Ben.

Before I start, let me first acknowledge the bout of Contentiousness this blog has suffered for the last few days. Yes, no sooner was I (with great wit and maturity) comparing the technical drawing of an XLR cable to a penis, than suddenly the grand debates on Australian Indigenous policy were fixing their crosshairs right here. We're not sure how our healthy young blog caught such a vile illness, but the doctor has now contacted us and is satisfied with our progress, and so we can continue.

For today, I merely wish to show you three entirely uncontentious sales pitches. The first comes courtesy of the 2007 New Zealand local body elections, where Mike Padfield, one of 33 candidates for a place on the Counties Manukau District Health Board, offered voters the following heartwarming slogan:

A vote for Mike Padfield will ensure that Mike Padfield will always be the voice of the community.*

Who could want anything more from democracy?

I also feel it is appropriate to share with you the festival sales pitch of the Lead Item, or the one item at a festival which will also serve as its major form of advertising. Here, from the Stockholm Furniture Fair, is Holy Shit. The cross-shaped toilet roll dispenser.

And finally, just one exhibit of the journalistic sales pitch known as a Headline. Here are exerpts from an article in the English-language Swedish news service The Local headlined Police Get A Grip On Serial Masturbator:

"But the man continued with his manual labour from the cruiser's back seat."

"The man continued to feel his way around..."

"The man was known... for holding his own in different churches and public places."

Someone gets paid to translate these stories from Swedish to English, and frankly, that person may be a little bored at work.

*Sourced from Geoff Cumming, 'Big Money, Big Issues, Few Voters', in The New Zealand Herald, 6 October 2007. And Mr Padfield, if you're reading, please feel free to leave us a comment. It seems it might become fashionable.

Is it just me, or does the completely unnecessary technical drawing accompanying my new XLR cables look like a phallic surgical drawing?

Let's look at this again, in extreme close-up:

PVC Strain Relief?

All I want to know is that I can put one end into a microphone, one end into a mixer, and sound will travel through the cable.

I don't want to see any more than that.

As I left the Central Market, I spotted a girl wearing a Dietrich Bonhoeffer t-shirt. Yes, a Dietrich Bonhoeffer t-shirt. It was bright red. It featured his name, underneath a stencil outline of his bust. It looked like the kind of poster art made for Mao or Che Guavara. Except, it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On a t-shirt.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Not on a t-shirt.

And as I burst into immediate, uncontrollable laughter, I realised that there were only maybe five people in the world who would find this funny.

In order to find this funny, you have to have seen the article Kevin Rudd wrote in the Monthly where he proclaimed himself a 'Christian Socialist'. Here he wrote at length about the Catholic theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Only, nobody reading had any idea who Dietrich Bonhoeffer was.

And so Kevin Rudd, in true Kevin Rudd form, had tried to inspire the masses with his personal hero: some freakish, obscure German academic. George W. Bush once had me in fits of hysterics by claiming that his favourite song of all time was Creedence Clearwater Revival's Fortunate Son. Rudd, in turn, would probably pick something from Slowdive's Souvlaki.*

Of course, even if you do understand the history, you also have to be the kind of person who chortles irrepressibly at the sight of an obscure German academic on somebody's t-shirt.

As I regained my composure, I began to think that I was haughty and precious, and was quite alone in my amusement. But then I realised that I was not at all alone. Some girl was actually wearing the t-shirt.

* Or any other hopelessly obscure, out-of-print, yet critically acclaimed album. If you want to read some non-critical acclaim, go here, and read red_atm's review. It's priceless.

--

And here, quite late, is a photographic wrap-up of Wednesday's apology, replete with State Party Leaders in all their glory. There will be more written about this momentus occasion at the Auditorium.

Mike Rann, keeping close to a camera at all times.

A heartening celebration.

I sat next to them the whole time. As the crowd cheered at each mention of the word 'sorry', Martin Hamilton-Smith and Duncan McFetridge offered polite golf-claps.

The crowd.

Compensation has already begun. In plastic.

As a show of support for National Apology Day, word had been spreading encouraging people to change their Facebook status to 'is sorry'. Upon waking this morning, I checked my friends' status updates, to see just how far this had caught on. The popularity of the movement was heartening, but I was surprised to see this.

I'm sure all of you playing at home can tell which of these is a recent ex-girlfriend.

I briefly considered attacking her wall with 'which one?', but thought better of it. I jumped on my bike and rode to the ceremony. And in any case, it seems that by the time I had arrived, she had entered into the spirit of the occasion.

And I will follow her lead.

To Australia's Indigenous peoples, I am truly, deeply sorry.

When you are, as the saying goes, a Christian, people sometimes seem to think you have signed up for an excessively harsh life. They worry about all the talk of sinning, and all the strictures you have to live by. But the truth is, being devout is a lot like dancing or performing complex brain surgery: at first it seems like there are all these rules you have to follow, you make a few embarrassing missteps, and someone ends up dying of intense internal haemorrhaging. But eventually you get into the groove and make it part of your life, and spiritual well-being and a lack of malpractice suits will follow.

Oh yes, it seems like there’s a lot of church to get through, with only the assurance of a strange man in a dress that it’ll all work out, but it’s not so bad. Christmas is a doddle, you get presents for your confirmation, and the deep-seated sexual repression eventually sublimates itself out in a variety of interesting ways. But there’s one season of the liturgical (that means “churchy”) calendar that strikes fear into the hearts of every Christian, the one that has even the most faithful reaching for their hip flask for a fortifying belt of holy water. It’s called Lent.

Lent is where the guys who go to church just to watch girls kneeling down slink away and leave the cast-iron believers to it. It’s what separates the men from the boys (which in the modern church is probably a good idea right from the start). For those of you who have never stared down the cold barrel of Lent, it is the 40-day period of fasting and self-denial in preparation for Easter, starting on Ash Wednesday (where, each year, we traditionally start the most devastating bushfires South Australia’s ever had) and ending with Holy Week, which is like Lent on bad crack. When Easter Day finally comes, we either celebrate with a lamb roast dinner, or just huddle in the corner waiting for the sweet release of death, depending on how we’ve taken the time in between.

So why do we do this each year? It’s all in remembrance of our Lord and (on one occasion, anyway) Saviour, Jesus “The Redeeminator” Christ, organised religion’s original hard man. This guy was one tough Messiah. He’d turn water into bleach and drink it, arm-wrestle demons right out of people’s bodies and give himself leprosy just so he could heal himself. And to prove exactly how tough he was, he went out into the desert for forty days and forty nights of the harshest, most brutal, hard-arse prayer and purification imaginable. He had to struggle, not only with the cruelty of the elements, but also the temptations of the Devil, who came to torment him. But Jesus did resist. Sure, things did get a bit Stockholm syndrome-y for a while, and the two of them did end up releasing an album together called Cryin’ in the Wilderness, but after their second studio release was called pale and derivative by the press and the Devil tried to get Jesus to worship him, Jesus renounced him with the famous line, “Get thee hence, Satan. You used to be cool.”

(This is all in the Bible, by the way, if you know where to look. It’s in Paul’s third Angry Letter to the Corinthians, right after the bit where Paul complains that the government is stealing his dreams and right before the bit where he tells the Corinthians, at length, about how they can go fuck themselves.)

Eventually, of course, Jesus pissed off the wrong people, namely the Israelites and the Romans, who are even today the wrong people to piss off. They tried him and executed him, but even as he was being crucified, Jesus maintained his hard-arse attitude, notably saying, “You call this nailing me to a cross? Man, I was nailing your mama harder last night.” And then, just to show them, he came back to life, killed the Demon Bunny of Antioch and ate its eggs so that no more of its demon-spawn would grow – a practice we commemorate to this day – and invited everyone to a big party at his place after the Rapture. So Lent is our way of honouring this Chuck Norris of the church. On Shrove Tuesday (known to you soft heathens as Pancake Day) we shovel in as much rich food as we can to make the experience that much harder before getting into Lent properly by giving up something we love, repenting our sins, fasting completely through parts of Holy Week, and finally ritually crucifying ourselves (although the Church finally banned that in the Pope’s famous 1972 “Let’s not go nuts here” proclamation). And then, when Easter comes and passes, we can spend the remainder of the year fulfilling the other main part of being a Christian: counting down the days with dread before the next Lent.