Transmission

This story has proved harder to write than I imagined. As if there were an emerging and fading voice in my head I couldn't quite tune into, and am still searching for amid the static: an appropriate enough problem for a piece I first conceived of with the somewhat saccharine phrase, 'the magic of radio'.

It's taken me a while to realize what I am really trying to tune into is my youth. That what I am connecting with is not technology, but longing - and with it a feeling of timelessness that is both premonition and memory at once, as if the boy beheld the man and the man is keeping the boy in sight through some long and mutual telescope of sound.

If I'm honest I'd go even further and tell you radio is our most spiritual 'medium'. That there's something about radio's emanating nature, its radio-active aura, which unites it with our sense of another world, and certainly another time. Something caught up in its delivery to us, floating from place to place.

I guess it's hard, though, to tune into my feelings for radio as a line into the divine when all you are hearing is a loud-mouthed DJ laughing like a drain, followed by an old Billy Joel song and an advertisement about premature orgasms during the morning traffic report (that's an ad that takes place during those reports, by the way, not an issue of over-excitement with traffic flow - though as Billy Joel once put it, you just may be the lunatic we're looking for).

Maybe in the end I'm confusing nostalgia with spirituality, a common enough affliction today when the only church most people have is their past. Maybe I'm just another twentieth century cave man who can't put his thumbs to a Black Berry, still enraptured by radio's formerly central place as a hearth in the home - and, more importantly, in the car.

Maybe all I am talking about in the end is the way radio connects so immediately with an unconscious moment when the right song or conversation comes along. Not magic, but chance: or 'synchronicity'.

Whatever those wavelengths, radio is most certainly about voices. And while there are many radio-inspired inspired films from Oliver Stone's shock jock tale, Talk Radio (1988), to Woody Allen's recreation of the days of the 1940s serials in Radio Days (1987), and Christopher Petit's post-punk, existential English road story, Radio On (1979), I'd argue the most evocative and true depiction (if that's not a contradiction in terms) is Jean Cocteau's Orpheé (1950), a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.

In Cocteau's version, Orpheus is a French poet with writer's block. He witnesses the death of a young poet in a road accident and becomes enmeshed in a surreal set of circumstances. They culminate in a dark-haired aristocrat revealing herself to be Death, before she pulls the dead poet through a mirror into the afterlife. Orpheus faints, then awakes in the middle of nowhere, unsure of what he has experienced and what he has dreamt. Returning home he ignores his pregnant wife and becomes obsessed with messages crackling from a radio inside a car parked in his garage. The messages - elusive and sometimes nonsensical - seem to be coming from the dead poet. Re-inspired, Orpheus jots them down, publishing them as his own. After all, he argues, "Who can say what poetry is and what isn't?"

You see something of this same energy in bio-pics like Walk the Line where the young Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) has his ear to what was then called the wireless, being seduced by similarly far-off sounds. As if the aural poetry of country music and gospel is leading him away from the flood-plagued cotton farm of his Arkansas childhood and on into a crucial place at Sun Studios and the birth of rock 'n' roll, and even further into his own mythical realm as 'The Man in Black'.

Martin Scorcese's documentary No Direction Home begins with a similar reflection on the young Bob Dylan, detailing the way "50,000 watt stations coming out through the atmosphere" would deliver the sounds of Hank Snow, Johnny Ray and Muddy Waters to a boy in the icy boondocks of Hibbing, Minnesota. Dylan also talks about finding an old 78 slab of vinyl on a record player at the house his family moved into, a discovery that had "mystical overtones" for him as a child. This moment and the influence of radio are conflated in Dylan's memories as a siren-call: "I had ambitions to set out to find like an odyssey," he says, "[to] set out to find this home that I'd left a while back and couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there and encountering what I encountered along the way... the sound of the record made me feel like I was somebody else, like I wasn't even born to the right parents maybe."

With those feelings in mind, its hardly surprising so many iconic figures have begun migrating back to the radio to work as DJs, putting together their own programs and playing the music they love: notably Bob Dylan with the 'Theme Time Radio Hour' on XM Satellite Radio and Lou Reed with his 'New York Shuffle' on Sirius Satellite Network. Figures as varied as Alice Cooper, Steve Earle, Joan Jett, Tom Petty, Steven Van Zandt and a host of others have joined them, reveling in the satellite radio broadcast revolution in the USA.

Hearing about these artists playing at being DJ seems to re-affirm radio as the ultimate machine for poetic experience and transformation to this very day. As if radio's gifts of song alongside any-time, any-place can still catch us unawares and transport us.

Which is how I came to write this story, I guess. The radio on in my car, Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks' on the airwaves, the decades peeling away in my mind till I find myself at age 21 again, behind the wheel of my very first car, swinging through the curves of the old Pacific Highway near Swansea, this very same song streaming ecstatically along with the promise of the road as the singer calls to me through my radio: "To be born again, in another world... in another time, in another place, and another face."

- Mark Mordue

* This essay first appeared at ABC Unleashed.com on 18th December, 2008, 12.30pm.

Where Fools Rush In

In an age of sound byte opinions and digitally rapid-fire news we are wildly quick to make our judgement calls on almost any subject from Britney Spears' mental health to the Gaza Strip invasion. The culture of blogging and a look-at-me glibness that seems to reward the loudest and quickest mouths on the block only adds to this feeling of disposable and trivial involvement delivered with maximum and immediate impact.

The idea we have the time, let alone a desire to think deeply about anything seems to be an anachronism we are dispensing with. Yet the popular success of the recent film Doubt throws this into question - and seems to me to have the same ethical significance now as Arthur Miller's The Crucible (which used the Salem witch-hunts of 1692 as its metaphor) did in the aftermath of McCarthyism in early 1950s America.

It certainly must have taken quite some convincing of the powers-that-be in Hollywood to go with a drama about a priest and a nun in conflict with each other over the direction of the Catholic faith and the well-being of a young school boy in their care during a gusty and grey autumn in the Bronx of 1964. No guns blaring, no significant special affects, no comic skits or lightweight patter, not even a clear and easily digestible conclusion to send people home feeling good.

And yet Doubt has gathered such critical momentum it played a significant role at this year's Academy Awards - with nominations for Best Actress for Meryl Streep and Best Supporting Actor for Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as well as seeing Viola Davis (as a worried mother) and Amy Adams (a young nun) competing for the Best Supporting Actress honour.

Hoffman's priest is a lover of life: enjoying a glass of red wine and a cigarette, a side of raw and bloody beef, an extravagant and almost provocative three sugars in his tea. Along with these earthly pleasures he has a philosophical association with the groundswell of the Vatican II movement under Pope Paul VI in the early '60s, which sought to make the Catholic Church a more user-friendly and humane institution.

Streep's nun is a stoic recalcitrant who thinks 'Frosty the Snowman' is a pagan anthem. She detests biros as a sign of declining penmanship and runs her high school with ferocious discipline. Outwardly she represents a gloomy authoritarian hangover from the 1950s, but there's a tartly humorous side to her take on the world that slowly becomes available to us. "Everyone's afraid of you," a young sister tells her. You can almost taste Meryl Streep's smile when she replies, "Of course."

What is at heart a personal and institutional power struggle masked in the ideological currents of Catholic theology and educational practice (and with it some proto-feminist intimations as well) becomes something darker and deeper as the nun suspects the priest of inappropriate relations with the young black boy at her school. And yet despite the almost clichéd motor of a paedophile plot it's not clear if the priest is guilty - and even more ambiguously if such a 'guilty' relationship is utterly shameful, or part of a much more complex scenario involving issues of sexuality, bullying, race, class and other hidden forms of abuse.

The film's title resonates throughout every moment, turning our beliefs into presumptions. It ultimately asks us to consider the part that doubt can, or should play in how one speaks and acts. As Hoffman asks from the pulpit when Doubt opens, "What do you do when you're not sure?"

John Patrick Shanley wrote, directed and adapted the film from his stage play of the same name. These antecedents are obvious and Hoffman and Street eat up the screen in some overtly stagey if nonetheless superb bursts of plot-shaking dialogue. Shanley has meanwhile been open about the real inspiration behind the substance of the film: post 9/11 New York and the USA of this era more generally, when anyone who doubted or questioned the direction the country was headed in risked being ostracized and isolated.

And yet if events since 9/11 have taught us anything it is to be suspicious of fundamentalism, extremism and absolutism in all its forms, as well as any cheers (or hisses) that come too easily from abroad or at home. There's an old saying that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. It would pay to have it inscribed as a motto on the level of our civic debate these days.

It's this sophisticated broadening of thought - and emotions - that makes Doubt so richly involving as an experience, whether you have an interest in Catholicism or indeed an aversion to anything religious at all. The real drama it contains is its focus on our morality and how we come to determine its active nature in ourselves. How dreadful to think that our convictions can grow in the shallowest of soils and be nothing more than weeds.

Of course there comes a point where endless nuances and vacillations can immobilize us. One of the ironies of Doubt as it develops is the way in which the best possible actions are in fact committed on the basis of what is known, if for somewhat mixed and uncertain results. We do our best. What Doubt asks of us is to think about the tension between what we claim to know and how shaded the world can be in practice, and find some greater faith in its complexities - rather than annihilate ambiguity in order to reward our certainties.

- Mark Mordue

* This article was first published online at ABC Unleashed.com, 23rd February 2009, 09.30am.

May Your Hope Give Us Hope

Barack Obama stands in the torrential rains of Chester, Pennsylvania, addressing an 8000 strong crowd that has stood ankle deep in mud for hours waiting for him to appear. It is one of the great moments in the American election campaign, and a confirming symbol of the Democratic candidate's seemingly assured place in history when those elections are decided today.

If John McCain had appeared during that same storm he would have looked a sodden loser, an old man down on his luck as the election slides from his grip. The Republican candidate wisely decided to move his appearance indoors once the pelting rain settled in around Quakertown, while Obama electrified a similar scene just a city away in Chester.

That all the same circumstances were in play, yet one man could seize the day while another was overwhelmed is a case study in the way symbols work.

What those symbols say is that Senator Barack Obama is ready to lead the USA through the stormy weather that has befallen it, and that people are willing to follow him. The stormy weather is, of course, the current economic crisis and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars that have so scarred the nation's spirit, its reputation and its confidence worldwide.

It is now clear the war machinery of George Bush's administration harnessed post-September 11 sympathy as a stalking horse for imperial ambitions which have proved fatal for the regime. Broad analysis would have it this hawkishness has also been fatal for America itself; that the nation is on its last legs as an empire, rotting from within and assaulted from without.

One could refer to all manner of indices and stats to affirm the bleak prognosis, but none have struck me more powerfully than recent information that approximately 1000 suicide attempts a month are being made in the USA by returned serviceman from Iraq. This lemming-like urge towards self-annihilation among veterans goes beyond a phenomenal case study in post-traumatic stress syndrome, and on into a mass trauma at the heart of the nation.

In truth, America has been behaving in a traumatized way ever since September 11 struck. Osama bin Laden, a man with a well developed taste for symbols, made sure the event date on the American calendar matched the numbers for phoning 'emergency' when you're in trouble - '911'. It's rare a culture gets to see such a grand blow delivered right between the eyes, an event whose script assured America it was, like all the empires before it, terribly mortal. Go ahead and call for help, you ain't gonna make it.

Yet for all the devastating power of those planes sliding into the Twin Towers and the buildings tumbling down over New York, other symbols sustained themselves by association: the couple who leapt to their deaths holding hands; the police and fireman who went up the stairwells into the smoke and fire against all the odds before them.

This is the human thrown up against the monumental, and the human is not forgotten or diminished. Indeed it's the human that grows in nobility all the more, a sentiment greatly celebrated in Bruce Springsteen's Into the Fire, which conjures up an image so religious the song becomes a prayer and the men involved ascend a staircase to heaven rather than hell on our behalf:

"May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love give us love..."

It would seem to me we similarly perceive the human and heroic scale upon which Barack Obama must act today. And that this is why we admire him so much, and why we pin so much hope upon him. Satirists with a taste for the caustic agree it's exactly the right time for America to elect a black man president. And yet there remains a deeper, truer feeling that a change in government and more especially a change in leader can transform things for the USA, even in its eleventh hour.

Is it right then to say the big game is over for the United States of America? Despite pundits by the pound leaping upon phrases like "the end of the American century" I see no desire for us to witness an end to our love of rock 'n' roll or jazz or blues, or great American films, or TV shows like Entourage or The Wire, or even the apocalyptic 'frontier' novels of Cormac McCarthy. Whether it's McCarthy's book The Road or Paul Thomas Anderson's punishing film There Will be Blood, there's a thrill to American culture even as it examines its own damaged and insanely titanic spirit.

The feelings of hope that Barack Obama kindles worldwide indicates we are no great hurry for the so-called 'American century' and its influence to come to pass. Indeed Obama's looks and youthful dynamism - along with the fact he is the product of a white mother and a Kenyan father - exude a JFK meets Martin Luther King charisma that make us feel history might yet be in the making rather than the breaking.

In these symbolic convergences he personifies not just new hopes in this time of confusion and pessimism, but lost hopes from another era as well, right down to the foiled assassination plots around him. Yes, it is true: Barack Obama is the epitome of a second chance, of something reincarnated in America's vision of itself. He is a kind of living fairytale, and for all our doubts and fears about its veracity we want to believe in that story still.

- Mark Mordue

* First published at 'Unleashed', ABC.net.au, 4th November 20008
Photo by Jae Hong / Associated Press

Food for Thought

Of the almost four million people living in Sydney, it’s estimated some 1.3 million are now celebrity chefs. They can be seen everywhere from the front of the Sydney Morning Herald and its various supplements through to the covers of this year’s White Pages (Residential and Business & Government), not to mention a plethora of high-rating television shows, signed air flight menus with a choice of Thai chicken or lamb curry, best-selling $150 cook books that make the Bible seem shabbily produced, and of course the social pages, where they are usually snapped embracing each other and laughing like drains.

I have been observing this phenomenon for some time – though a word like ‘observing’ does undue credit to the obviousness of being stampeded to death by a herd of men and women in white hats and clogs shouting ‘f-you!’ and ‘lovely jubbly’ as they pass over you in clouds of money, sweat and flour.

Of course I assume it is flour. I come from a prehistoric era when chefs were lesser known and most likely to be red-faced old hands with a 3-bottle-a-night wine habit and a dubious approach to hygiene, or young turks prone to snorting a blizzard of cocaine at 2am once their kitchens had closed before going off to party into the daylight hours. The chef back then was not so much a high profile social figure as the very acme of dysfunctional humanity and workaholic chaos, their private lives a shambles held together by little more than a knack for frying up chops with a dash of rosemary.

Those were the days. And, if you will indulge me in a little bragging, I did party among these aspiring caterers du jour before their stars ascended. But no more guest appearances on morning television with Bert Newton and his ilk looming over them cracking jokes (as if to suggest they were not interesting in their own right!). No more struggling in the shadow of Margaret Fulton. No, the chefs were slowly clawing their way centre stage via an assortment of reality television shows, preparing to take over the media arena, and now of course, the city as well.

This has put enormous pressure on the rest of us common folk, especially when hosting intimate events in the home. Just the other evening I had a few friends over for a lazy Sunday night viewing of Australian Idol. Everyone seemed to be ironically enjoying themselves at this casual soiree when I brought out my piece de resistance – spaghetti with tuna sauce. I quake at even telling you this, the memory is so vivid and painful to me, but among my friends was a celebrity chef who stood and threw their bowl against the wall, roundly abusing me in language that would make a rugby league player blush, before sending me back to the kitchen to cook the meal again – and again – and yet again – oh God, have mercy on me please – “Until you get it right!”

He was doing this for my own good, I know, and as I offered him my last effort at near midnight and he smiled, it was as if Jesus himself had blessed me. Accepted! Embraced! A part of Sydney society at last! My spirits rose like pastry!

I am sure other non-chefs among you have noted this seismic shift in Sydney culture. My book case, formerly dominated by Patrick White and Fyodor Dostoyevsky is now occupied by the complete works of Neil Perry and Greg Doyle. I try to fit in, you see! I say all the right things at parties like “mmm” and “delish”; I avoid subjects like literature and art in favour of my latest pilates class or an interesting tempura prawn canapés I have tried recently. And yet somehow the takeaway pizza, salt n vinegar chipped, Coca Cola swigging side of me is visible to all – and people turn away.

As a consequence I am becoming more of a loner in this city, my face pressed to the fogged window pane of exclusive restaurants and cafes where whippet thin people with fake sun tans and a sprinkling of grotesquely fat bon-vivants gaze down at huge white [sometimes square] plates upon which main courses the size of a minor doodle reside.

Kandinsky, Pollock, Miro? Bah! The chef is the real artist, the Zen calligrapher upon the palette of our contemporary souls.

Me? I shuffle off to a Lebanese take-a-way for a schwarma, or linger at children’s birthday parties stealing party pies and dipping them in a plastic bowl filled with tomato sauce. A barbarian in this city of celebrity chefs, not even worthy enough to be a ‘foodie’, let alone a restaurant critic. The shame and sadness of it all, caste out a world so refined and ‘f’in’ lovely jubbly.

- Mark Mordue

* A Melbourne accented version of this story appeared today (Sept 25th 2008) in The Age under the title 'Starved: the lament of a failed foodie'. The Sydney Morning Herald did not opt to use the piece, but I hoped Sydney friends might equally appreciate it. Link to The Age story runs below -
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/starved-the-lament-of-a-failed-foodie-20080924-4nbq.html