Tuesday 27 January 2009
Two songs by Lou Barlow
'Easy'
The Folk Implosion
Said I wouldn't do it, leave it alone
Tried to ditch it, followed me right back home
After a while I don't resist
I'm alive with a purpose
My way down looking for it
That's what I'm afraid of
When I finally hold it, arrive on the scene
The doors are open I can hardly breathe
And like every guilty feeling
I've forgotten before
Three hours later, I'm hungry for more
That's what I'm afraid of
I don't have the will to change
Not when it's so easy, to be easy
Resistance is low when I'm feeling bored
What I thought was fun isn't fun anymore
Gravity pulls neither wrong or right
The moon is full and we're out of our heads
Let's do it again and feel allright
The fight is over for now
The fight is over
Sebadoh
Is something missing in my touch, a tension tugging at my smile?
If there's a right thing to say, I'm sure I missed it by a mile
Swallowed in some detail, heavy in my blood
I wanna hold you close, but I can't lift my arms up
Is there a reason for this distance?
More than the drug that floats my days
A nervous bug in my system, it keeps me edgy and ashamed
I've got a saint, never ever will forgive
That never understood me but still tells me how to live
It fits when I stretch and I stretch because I can
I stretch until I'm sore and then I open up for more
I do it out of habit, not addiction
And if I give it up, clean out my blood
Will I still feel bored and disconnected?
If I do it all for love, will I ever give enough?
'cause you can never be too pure or too connected
You can never be too pure or too connected
You can never be too pure
Monday 26 January 2009
Review: Leonard Cohen 'A Day On The Green' Coldstream 24/01/09
(Photo by Simone Maynard.)'The Sunday Age'
Leonard Cohen
Day On The Green
Rochford Winery, Coldstream
LEONARD Cohen is like a horse whisperer, only for women. Even at 74, the dapper rogue could provoke sighs from women in the audience at Rochford Winery last night with his courtly songs of sex and regret. When he growled his sleazy 1988 classic I'm Your Man, women leapt from their picnic blankets to yell: "Yes, you are!"
At his first Australian concert in 24 years, Cohen seduced 7000 people — women and men — with an act polished by a year's touring and a lifetime perfecting his pitch: he charmed us, he moved us, and then he broke it to us gently. "I tried to leave you," he sang at his third and final encore.
Cohen is a funny man. The jokes may be bleak but he tells them with a rueful smile. "It's been a long time, about 15 years since I was on stage," he told the crowd. "When I was 60, a young kid with a crazy dream."
He may look frail, but Cohen put paid to his morose reputation with a vibrant set that lasted almost three hours. He certainly didn't perform like a man forced out of retirement to sing for his pension fund. Dressed like a preacher in three-piece suit, string tie and fedora, he literally skipped on and off stage between sets, swung tight-fisted like Sinatra during musical interludes, and performed a "white man dance" to whooping applause.
Cohen's baritone is, as he cheerfully admits, a rough diamond. His martini-dry vocals are complemented by a nine-piece band of accomplished musicians and singers, led by his long-time musical director, bassist Roscoe Beck. Folk classics Suzanne and Chelsea Hotel #2 were presented simply, but many highlights came from more recent songs, such as the witty Everybody Knows, soaring Anthem and wry calling card Tower of Song (featuring Cohen's one-handed synthesiser solo!)
Hallelujah came halfway through the second set. Cohen fell to his knees to wrest his best-known song back from all the artists who have covered it — Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, UK Idol's Alexandra Burke — and rediscovered its wild, black heart. Later, Cohen ceded control of lovely hymn If It Be Your Will to the angelic voices of the Webb sisters. Then he roared back into focus with the song of the night, a rocking and timely rendition of his 1992 number Democracy Is Coming to the USA.
A Thousand Kisses Deep
('A Day On The Green' - Coldstream 24th January 2009)
Bonus:
From the last time Leonard Cohen played in Melbourne nearly 25 years ago, I give you a 'new' song 'Hallelujah' as well as 'Democracy' live in Glasgow on the night Obama was elected.
Day of Shame, Day of Triumph (The Age 26/01/05)
For some years now, Australia Day has seen commentators berating us for not making a greater celebration of the day that marked the beginning of our nation. Other commentators berate us for celebrating the day that also marked the beginning of a tragedy for Aboriginal peoples. Both sides are right about the historical significance of January 26, 1788. It does mark the beginning both of Australia's shame and its triumph. This partly explains the muted way in which we tend to celebrate the day, for there is much to be ambivalent about.
Phillip had been sent by the British government to take possession of the eastern half of Australia. The bold move was designed to give Britain a strategic presence in the Pacific, allowing it to challenge the tottering power of the Spanish and secure the sea route to China. Little thought was given to the incidental consequences for the Aborigines.
With the peremptory act of raising a flag at Sydney Cove and reading a proclamation, Phillip blithely made one of the greatest land grabs in history without even a token attempt to negotiate or compensate the traditional owners. Had they been invited to Phillip's ceremony, and realised its significance, the Aborigines might have made a more determined attempt to resist. In that first year, they certainly had the numbers to bring the half-starved colony to a premature end. But there was little sustained resistance, and even less after an outbreak of smallpox wiped out much of Sydney's Aboriginal population.
We continue to watch passively as Aborigines die from preventable diseases and as their societies are ravaged.
Laid waste by disease and alcohol and the disruption of their traditional living patterns over the succeeding decades, or killed outright by punitive expeditions, the Aboriginal population seemed set by 1900 to be headed for extinction. A population of a million or more had been reduced to about 60,000. In the minds of the colonists, there was a sense of sad inevitability about it all, along with a quiet sense of satisfaction that the eventual Aboriginal demise would remove any lingering feelings of uneasiness about the legitimacy of the British occupation. But the nature of our national origins clearly concerns us still.
Indeed, the shadow cast by Phillip and his officers, as they stood beneath the flag toasting the imposition of British authority, continues to darken our national life. Still unconfident in our relatively short-lived occupation of the continent, we shrink from undertaking those symbolic acts that would acknowledge the historic wrongs visited upon Aboriginal people and adequately recognise their status as first peoples. Just as in the past we took many of their children in an unsuccessful attempt to make Aborigines disappear from view, so we continue to press for them to blend into white Australia and become one people with us, thereby ceasing to pose a moral challenge to our occupation of their continent.
We continue to watch passively as Aborigines die from preventable diseases and as their societies are ravaged by the physical and psychological consequences of their historic dispossession, while comforting our consciences with the mistaken belief that they are the authors of their own misfortune. Rather than mobilising our resources to provide adequate medical, educational and housing facilities, we now compel outback Aborigines to wash their faces in return for the provision of a petrol bowser, thereby implicitly reinforcing the 18th-century view of the Aborigines as child-like savages who have to be civilised.
Of course, there is nothing to be gained by simply reproaching ourselves about the shameful acts in our past. Instead, we need to understand and acknowledge our history in all its complexity, from the grandeur to the genocide. We need also to situate our history within a wider context and understand that we are far from alone in dispossessing indigenous people of their land. Societies across the world, from Japan to Peru and Israel to Indonesia, live on land taken from indigenous inhabitants. The process of claiming and occupying those lands has helped to shape the nature of those societies, as it has shaped ours over the past two centuries. However, just because many other societies share our situation does not absolve us of our shameful neglect.
On this Australia Day, then, it is fitting that we acknowledge the historical importance of Arthur Phillip's foundational enterprise. Despite being dogged by ignorance and ill-luck, the first colonists overcame considerable obstacles to establish the beginnings of one of the great cities of the modern world and one of the most diverse and tolerant societies. But it is equally important to acknowledge the tragic outcome for Aborigines of the British invasion.
That tragedy continues, and it will persist as long as we push ahead with Phillip's original project of dispossession and refuse to recognise that we have reached an important point in the prolonged process, initiated by Cook and Phillip, of making this continent our own. After more than 200 years, and with a population of 20 million, the fear of ourselves being dispossessed has been largely allayed.
We should be confident enough now to recognise Aborigines as the first peoples of this land and to accord them the rights implicit in such status. It has proved to be a bounteous land. Its riches deserve to be shared more generously with those from whom it was taken. It is inevitable that Australians will be held to account if that responsibility continues to be shirked.
David Day is the author of Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia.
Sunday 25 January 2009
SS Maton up for auction
The guitar boat built by Maton for Josh Pyke's video 'Make You Happy' is up for sale.Full story here.
