It's Up To You, New York, New-ew Yooorrrrk!

You’ve probably seen the footage on the news. The CCTV from the Kings County Hospital in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York City, which shows a 49-year old black American woman dying on the floor of the waiting room. It’s here. The TV News in Australia described her as a psychiatric patient who had already waited 24 hours for unspecified treatment and that the other patients in the waiting room, who ignored her for the whole hour she was dying unattended, were also psychiatric patents.

You would also have seen how she was observed and successively ignored by: a security guard; a doctor; another security guard – that’s right, the one who rolled his chair back to have a look and then rolled it back out of frame. And of the nurses who finally did come to her aid, one gave her a bit of a kick before bending to check on her.

The news you saw probably also had a New York public official saying something like:

“You might expect something like this to happen in a Third World country. You do not expect this sort of thing to happen in New York City.”

I disagreed with her. I’m not totally surprised that something like that happened. And I’m also not surprised that it happened in New York. I thought that the American cities I visited in the mid-80s all looked a lot more like Third World countries than I was comfortable with, including New York. I think there might also be quite a few Americans who are similarly unsettled by the nature of American cities.

And if there are any of you out there who’ve also been to New York City, you might just have picked up the same vibe from many of its inhabitants that I did.

That people seemed to be predisposed towards being deliberately unhelpful. And further, would even appear to take some deadpan pleasure in you being disadvantaged by this unhelpfulness. Always politely, of course.

Some of it was epitomized in the TV show Seinfeld: In scenes where the main or other characters would delight in or be dismissively uninterested in someone else’s misfortune. And then when the plot resolved and some disaster had overtaken the indifferent, their despair and pathetic pleading for assistance. I picked that recurring motif as very much a New York thing. In Australia, it appeared to be perceived as a combination yuppie Gen-X thing. The final two-hour episode was probably the quintessential example of what I’m talking about here.

Now, I’m happy to cop a roasting on this, particularly from any Americans who don’t see it as an indictment on New York or America anymore than backpacker murderer Ivan Milat reflects Australia. But that’s just it. He does reflect Australia. If you’re able to, check out some of the statements attributed to him by people who encountered him and tell me they’re not (admittedly) extreme examples of attitudes to women and crime that are not entirely rare in Australian males.

The indifference and deliberate inaction of those officials in the CCTV footage towards the dying woman is an (again admittedly) extreme example of attitudes you would not find altogether uncommon among New Yorkers.

We should be shocked, but not surprised.

New Job

My Long Service Leave ended just last Thursday. Counting the Christmas school holidays, I haven’t worked since December last year. On Friday, I commenced Leave Without Pay. And as this juncture approached, I didn’t really know what I was going to do. Job-wise I mean.

This is not a wolf-at-the-door situation. I can do Casual Replacement Teaching if nothing falls into my lap. And if that’s unbearable, I can always go crawling back to my teaching job. So I’m not in the same situation as some poor bastard who’s been retrenched. I’ve jumped, but with a parachute securely strapped on.

I’ve been half-heartedly checking employment opportunities since about April. Something in training, perhaps. I have a B Ed and a Post Grad Diploma in Educational Computing. Neither of which makes me an appealing prospect for training firms. Certificate 4 is the preferred qualification there.

But just last Friday afternoon, I found out I have a new job, starting on 14th July. I’m pretty relieved, as you can imagine. I’d been feeling a bit guilty about making my family hostages to fortune.

The interview was on Friday morning in the city. With a State govt statutory authority. Being a qualified teacher was one of the selection criteria for the job. So I wouldn’t have to bluff my way through, too-hopefully claiming that skills I’d picked up during 25 years as a primary school teacher were transferable to whatever job I was going for. This was a job for a teacher that fulfilled all my requirements: it didn’t involve actual teaching!

There’s a bit of a pay cut involved. Leaving the profession right after a salary increase to take up a lower-paid job might not appear the smartest move and has generated quite a few interestingly arranged wtf facial expressions. Including from my new boss.

I’ll be working in the city. First time since 1978. Catching public transport. The kitting up will be expensive. For a teacher, the general rule of thumb in the absence of a dress-code is sort of just below smart casual. Or in my case, very casual and not always smart. From now on, I’ll be in shirt and tie territory.

And loving it.

Something Happened To Me Yesterday

Actually, it wasn’t yesterday but I’ve been dying to use that song title from the Rolling Stones 1967 album Between The Buttons to head up a post. This is about interesting experiences on a few occasions where I’ve been out recently. At night. And why I always feel I’m at the mercy of the naked city whenever I do.

Episode One:
I’ve arranged to go out for a drink on a Friday night with a former colleague, Paul. We both need a night out. At Newmarket’s The Quiet Man. It’s one of those fake Irish pubs, with a warm, friendly atmosphere, and named after a sentimental John Ford film set in a Hollywood faux-Ireland, so there’s a layer or two of irony attached to it.

Populated without being crowded, an acoustic duo plays unobtrusively in the corner. We have a look and a listen and I go to the bar. On the way back, I see this big beefy bloke, maybe early to mid-20s, and with facial features as if designed by the NRL Footy Show, sitting in a booth with a couple of friends and they’re trying to get him to stop punching the wall. Or at least stop punching it so hard.

Clearly someone to give a wide berth to. I tell Paul to keep his eyes peeled for the plaster pugilist. A couple more rounds and I’m waiting at the bar again when someone comes up beside me. It’s the big beefy bloke, still looking a little affected by his earlier anger-management issues. Fuck. I can be a bit of a magnet for these types.

“G’day mate I’m Steve how’s it goin’?”
“Hi Steve. Pleased to meet you, I’m Lad.” Wary without trying to appear wary.
“Geez I fuckin’ love this pub y’know. Good to get out on a Friday night and get pissed in.”
“Yeah, it’s alright isn’t it? Couple of drinks, bit of music, a few people.”
“Few wankers though. I kicked the shit out of a fuckin’ homeless cunt just down from here last week. Reckoned the two buck coin I chucked at him was a bit stingy. Fuckin’ ungrateful cunt. He fuckin’ deserved it.”

Often with these sorts of pricks there’s an inherent challenge to disagree with their scumbag attitudes. You find yourself with a tenuous grip on the tiger’s tail. But he seems to accept my non-committal single-nod Mmm as some kind of endorsement and I let him. Then he insists on buying me a drink, because he reckons I look a bit like a sometime in the future fucking homeless cunt myself. I know this is a fishing expedition, but I take it as a half-matey you-old-bastard-type insult and manage to grin and disentangle myself from him and return to where Paul and I are sitting.

“You looked to have handled that pretty well,” Paul says.
“Yeah. Managed to avoid putting him on an action footing, but he wasn’t pushing hard.”
“What would you have done if he was?”
“Well, and this is only a theory mind you, but with fucking arseholes like him, and there’re plenty around worse than him too, there’s a point where you realize they just want to hit you, and there’s no way to placate them. Anything you say they use to wind themselves up further. So when you feel you’re almost at the point of no return, get in first, I reckon. Start with a quick uppercut into the very soft bit just under the sternum. They’ll be winded by that and it might be all you need to do, but if you’re not confident about hitting the right spot, a couple of straight jabs right into their Adam’s apple should make them lose interest.”
“Shit, have a listen to Mr Fucking Natural-Born Killer here. Hahaha! Can’t understand why you’re not in Special Forces.”
“Now, you know perfectly well that we covert op types can neither confirm nor deny.”

Thankfully, Steve found other people at the pub to earbash (I hope that’s all he ended up doing) and we were left to chat and drink too-many Black Russians unmolested.


Episode Two:
This time it was a regular monthly get-together of old schoolmates. Usually referred to as “the boyos”, for no good reason other than it gives us a chance to put on a piss-weak Welsh accent. I don’t get to go along all that often anymore, but this time I’m keen as mustard to make an effort. It’s in Preston, in a Chinese restaurant near the market.

After picking up a nearby mate, I’m waiting to turn right into Cramer St from Gilbert Rd. The lights change to green but I’m not in a hurry, so there’s a beat before I ease my foot off the brake. And just as well. Because as I do that, some kind of hoon-mobile comes streaking through the intersection to my right, doing what my companion and I estimate to be between 80-100kmph. We also estimate that if I’d taken off a little more quickly we might just have made the 7:30 news update as a diverting tsk-tsk item about two middle-aged blokes being killed in a horror smash. So far so good.

At the restaurant, one of the boyos is a regular and keen to order on our behalf so we let him concoct a set menu that is pretty good. Some of the guys are a bit dubious but I trust his judgment and we are vindicated. The meal is excellent if a little pricey, and we have a fun night catching up with good friends.

We get out of the restaurant at about 11:30 and walk over to where I’m parked in the market. We get in. Over to my right, a police car cruises up to a nightclub entrance about 50m away when I see a car being driven at speed from in front and to the left heading straight for us. This bloke is howling across the car park, swerving between cars parked in marked bays. Just as I start bracing myself for a significant impact he manages to yank the wheel over and flies past us leaving just a few inches to spare. We both say “Let’s get the fuck out of here” together.

Of course, we remember to link our little fingers for luck. We figure we’re going to need it if we’re to have an incident-free trip home.

Episode Three:
Collingwood have easily beaten Essendon in the annual ANZAC Day match at the MCG, but back at a mate’s cozy place in Richmond afterwards, a few drinks and a few more joints take the edge off a terrible result for the Bombers.

I start heading home around midnight. Richmond West station is down the end of the street and I just need to hop on a train to Flinders St Station and then change there for another that will take me home to Flemington. But I’m disoriented, and catch an outbound train by mistake. I realize this when the next station is Collingwood.

No worries, I’ll get out at the next station, walk around to the city-bound platform and everything will be just tickety-boo. At Victoria Park, there are teenage kids saying goodbye to some mates and they’re good-naturedly rubbishing each other across the platforms.

A couple enters the platform opposite me. She’s tall and thin with long lank hair and he’s short and agitated, wearing a tracksuit and baseball cap. He walks quickly up and down the platform tapping on the walls, seats and signs with something and then jumps down on the tracks opposite the kids. They go quiet.

“Give me a fuckin’ cigarette. No, two,” he tells them. He’s wound up. The kids hand over the cigarettes. Hmmm, I think. A nasty piece of work. He turns to go back over to the platform opposite but then stops and looks directly at me, where I’m leaning against the station wall. It’s about this time I notice that he’s carrying a knife.

Fuck. I push off from the wall and walk out to the edge of the platform, so I can have a go at kicking his head off if he tries to climb up. He’s still looking at me, but it’s just a pause and he returns to the other side and he and his girlfriend leave the station. I go back to the wall, and turn so I can see anyone coming up the entrance ramp, just in case he’s decided to pay me a follow-up visit, but my train arrives and I’m on it and away.

Every night, there are four million stories in the naked city. I'm just paranoid enough to see it that way too.

Great Gigs II: Joe Walsh at the Prospect Hill, 1985

You can’t go past a guitar player who tries to do something a bit special with almost every note. You know the type. They’re said to play like it’s an attack on both the notes and the instrument. Think Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix. But I’m not so sure the metaphor fits. I think it’s more about an individual player’s feel. Intangible, I know, but what did you expect me to say? Je ne sais qua?

I’d first heard of Joe Walsh in early 1973 when his hit Rocky Mountain Way got airplay on 3XY. The talk-box was a strange new effect and his slide guitar playing was outstanding, with a delightfully dirty sound and plenty of sustain, artfully combining country and blues influences.

His album titles were witty (eg So What?; But Seriously, Folks; There Goes The Neighbourhood) and tracks from the live You Can’t Argue With A Sick Mind were regularly shown on rock clip TV shows like Flashez and WROK in the mid-70s. It was here that I was able to see Walsh in full flight.I mentioned that he’s the kind of player who puts everything into just about every note (by that I mean slight bends and the odd harmonic scream) but between notes he slid along the fretboard, going waow and whoo to punctuate his solos that really made my hair stand up on end. Here was a player who knew how to use the more “noisy” elements of rock guitar technique beautifully.

When I heard early in 1976 that he was to replace Bernie Leadon in the Eagles, I immediately thought their share price was raised considerably. No disrespect to Leadon, who was a fine singer-songwriter-guitarist, but up until Hotel California the Eagles had struck me as a group manipulating the easily-impressed (and easily depressed!) sensitive teenager market with contrived country-rock she-done-me-wrong songs. They still retained this element of their persona after Walsh joined, but it was just, I don’t know, better? And he and Don Felder really knew how to blend their similar styles. More fraternal guitar twins than identical. Kinda like Keith Richard and Ron Wood, but more accomplished.

At Kew’s Prospect Hill Hotel in 1985, legendary journeyman guitarist Waddy Wachtel supplied the counterpoint that Felder had provided on the Eagles recordings. Wachtel could play too. This was a Joe Walsh solo gig, but this American band (he had toured with the Party Boys* earlier that year. I saw them at Billboard) were just a hot outfit. Don’t you just love an eminent artist who doesn’t feel the need to be the big shot on stage?

They did all of his classic songs, from the early James Gang days, his solo career, and the Eagles. One particular highlight was a pumped-up Life In The Fast Lane, not an easy song to do live and believe me I would have understood if they’d left that one off the set list.

But for this admitted worshipper, Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl was the sour cream on the burrito. The original is the kick-ass opening song on Young’s 1968 Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere album, but Walsh and his hired guns took it to a new level while still remaining faithful to the original.

It was a pretty blokey crowd of unashamed Joe Walsh fans that night as I recall and we were all just transfixed.

Isn’t it great when you see an admired artist perform and expectations are both matched and exceeded?

*The Party Boys were a band that served as a perpetual fun side-project for prominent Australian rock musicians and the occasional overseas guest artist. Their membership was fluid and if memory serves, at different times included: John Swann; Marc Hunter; Kevin Borich; David Briggs; Shirley Strachan; and many others.

Classic TV I: Flight of the Conchords

Last Sunday, I read a fairly tepid review of Flight of the Conchords in the Sunday Age. Thinking it might be okay but not really expecting a cack-fest of any great magnitude, I tuned in about ten minutes into the first episode and laughed helplessly for the remainder.

Flight of the Conchords stars New Zealand musical-comedy duo Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement as a New Zealand folk duo trying to hit the big time in the Big Apple. They have an unbelievably incompetent manager, desperately sell possessions to a pawnbroker who doesn’t like them but who is still their best friend in New York, and a lone female fan who they find repulsive.Inner monologues and dialogue between characters are often rendered in songs, frequently in the form of full-on music videos, a little bit like the Monkees TV show. There’re also many funny references to the Aussie-Kiwi dichotomy, which probably parallels the US-Canada relationship in some ways, I’d imagine. Read an interview with Bret McKenzie here.

Anyway, I’m about to watch episode two of this terrific 12 episode HBO series in just a few minutes. It screens on Channel 10 at 10:10pm. In Melbourne, anyway. Check local guides for details.

You can visit the official HBO website here; check out the BBC take on it here; and read a few slabs of dialogue here.

I found it piss-your-pants funny and littered with brilliant musical and visual gags.

So much of commercial TV is a complete fucking wasteland. And no, I’m not going to add the almost-obligatory “these days” to that assessment. Because let's face it, it’s ever been thus. But Flight of the Conchords is great TV, not just a cut above most of everything else that’s on at the moment.