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...and the rest of you (and apologies to you Gen Y-ers for whom that is an arcane and mysterious reference). Just to let you know that within the next few days I look likely to transfer this blog over to Wordpress. There will likely be a few days running in parallel to ease the transition, and once I'm up and properly running again this blog should always be accessible via the url www.hieronymous.net.
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I caught up with the end of The Kennedy's last night, the double-whammy episode in which both Jack and Bobby are assassinated. I have to say I felt a bit emotional. I know it's only a TV program, but these are historical figures who still loom large in the consciousness of many people. Because they both died we are left with a legend of who they were and what might have been. Perhaps a lot of it is hyperbole, and perhaps they have been sanctified beyond all reasonable limits. I suspect that's true - but, the fact is they remain important figures in the western culture.
Leading up to the assassination of JFK in the episode last night I felt a kind of dread knowing what was coming up. For all his foibles I was genuinely fond of the figure portrayed on screen. I thought he was a genuinely good man, and in some ways a great man; and that Bobby, less charismatic, more doggedly idealistic, might even have been better.
I recall stories told of the moment when people heard that JFK had been murdered. It's one of the seminal moments of our society in the last 50 years, and watching last night I understood way. Jack and Bobby represented something good. They were real people who just so happened to be driven to do the right thing. They were easy to like, easy to admire, easy to believe in. In many ways and for many around the world they represented the hope for a better society.
With the death of one after another, bang, bang, much of that hope died with them. I'm not sure if it has ever returned. In place of it we have been left with a succession of leaders who could be called pragmatic at best. No wonder the Kennedy era is termed as Camelot, because it seems from afar to be wreathed in a fairy tale mist, a time of hope and idealism and the possibility of universal good, tragically dashed.
Afterwards a few questions through my head. I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I'm unconvinced that Oswald killed JFK, and it's nothing to do with the grassy knoll. It's quite a shot to head-shoot a man travelling in the back of a moving car below where you're standing and at a distance, and over open sights. I used to be a hunter. I was a reasonable shot, but then I had a scope. I hit a kangaroo on the bounce one day, but I knew my limitations. Far as I know Oswald was no marksman. And the fact that he was murdered so soon after by Jack Ruby lends credence to the mystery as far as I'm concerned.
I wondered too at the terrible history of the Kennedy family. So many have died prematurely, much more than the odds would suggest. It's awful that one family should have been made to bear so much heartbreak.
Finally I wondered why so many politicians today choose to be mediocre, at best.
It was not long into the return trip home today I felt like stopping to admire the view. I was travelling along of a hill on a dirt track. To my left the ground fell away. The sky was blue and the sun shone down upon a network of ravines between the hills mysteriously shrouded by the mist that seems such a feature of this place. It feels a remote place even though it is not that distant from the city. It is rugged and beautiful and looking out upon it I thought, not for the first time, what a wonderful place we live in.
There are many people around the world who could doubtless say something similar about their home, the difference being that this is mine. There's a sense of pride with this. I'm a strong Australian, I find much to grateful for and glad of in general. Still, there is a different sense to this. I've travelled through many different terrains in Oz, from desert to rainforest, through red dirt country where the bones of dead beasts litter the sides of dry waterholes to alpine areas where the air has a bit to it, and the trees grow close and tall.
Perhaps it's the same everywhere, but I always feel in the midst of all this great mystery. There seems in some ways a knowing indifference, as if there is a consciousness that nature will outlast us. How many times have I felt a sense of wondrous awe? Many times, and it's great to remember. It may be indifferent, but this is ours, distinct I think, and certainly unique from most of the world. It may be indifferent, but if anyone belongs it is us, and us particularly who have have to love and respect the might of the land. The tall gums, the curling ferns, the harsh sun, the wildlife like no other place, this is ours.
We had gone for a walk late the previous afternoon down the road I had just driven, and come to an area that seemed like many others I had seen around Victoria. Here the ground had been cut away by a creek we could distantly hear, but barely see. The vegetation was thick and moist: here there was a different ecosystem from up the hill, here it was degrees cooler and in the air a sense of damp. Gun-barrel straight stringy barks grew up from the ravine reaching for the sky, the trunks of some metres and metres in diameter, majestic and quintessentially Australian. On many the bark had curled into mad and untidy scrolls that somehow clung still to the tree. Others were stripped bare, the bark providing food for the vegetation below and in the pale light looked ghostly. At the foot of the trees giant tree ferns grew amid a profusion of smaller ferns and bushes.In the still and silence a bird might be heard occasionally. By the side of the road a wombat stiff with rigor mortis lay in the channel cut by rain. We stood without saying a word, taking it in, this 'nature' this place, this other world that goes on regardless of what we do or strive for in the city, timeless, eternal, forever.
That was in my mind as I made my journey home. I had decided to take a different route back, but already I had been forced to make a detour because of a road closure. I had the GPS and so ploughed on in the expectation that it would lead me out of trouble. The roads were quiet though. Mostly they were hard-packed mud with a bit of gravel on them. They wound between the hills between light and shade and had I not the GPS I would have become easily lost.
As it was I wondered at times if I was not. The GPS led me down tracks that I soon turned from, unsure if my car could continue on the slippery mud earth and seemingly headed towards more remote places yet and shrouded in mist. I found myself selectively ignoring the GPS , choosing to remain on the nearest thing to a main road - a single lane road of gravel and mud. Once committed there was no point turning back.
Still it was pretty. The hills seem to go on forever. At times we would dip before climbing, the road straight for no more than a hundred metres at a time. For the most part forest grew on either side, native mostly, but at times plantations. In between occasionally a narrow track would divert, either a 'road' the GPs wanted me to turn in to or the driveway to a home invisible to the road, a letter box at the junction.
I drove for over 30 minutes without seeing another vehicle or person. Finally I saw a man, a farmer I presume, by the side of the road who waved at me as I passed. In time I found vehicles coming the other way, and a pensioner on a cyclist climbing the winding hill in my direction. Civilisation, I thought, must be near at hand.
And so it was, if paved roads and traffic can be termed civilisation. I joined in the throng, making good time on the homeward journey until 20 kilometres from home when an accident on the Monash caused a traffic jam kilometres long.
Home now, tired, well and truly overfed, somewhat bleary in total and wondering how I'm going to adjust back into real life tomorrow. Life could be harder.
Depending on who you speak to I'm either in Mirboo North, Milford or Dumbalk North right now. Regardless of how you call it it's a very pretty place.
I drove up yesterday with an over-excited, borderline hyperventilating Rigby in the back seat. It took about two hours all up. For most of it I was driving on the M1 freeway, or a dual lane highway. It was a good drive. The traffic was steady, but moved quickly. For much of the drive the speed limit was 110 kmh and so managed that pace or a little above all throughout.
It was fun to be on a trip. It was a lovely day for a drive, the sky clear and the sun winter bright. I enjoyed being in the car and really stretching its legs for a change. I listened to an audiobook while Rigby quietly whimpered in anticipation or else rested his head on the centre console.
As before I observed patterns on the road. It reminded of a cycle race and how as the race goes on the peleton is stretched out into clumps of leading and following riders. On the road the peleton as such is split by on ramps - vehicles emerging onto the freeway in clumps separated from each other. While the road was relatively clear I was one of the quicker drivers there, and so moved between peletons, like a chasing cyclist, leaving the front end of one to bridge the gap to the next, and then moving through it to repeat the process.
Something else I noticed was a good sprinkling of doubtful types on the road. Out in this direction there are some pretty good concentrations of regional bogans, and so heading out that way amongst the long weekend traffic were the mandatory types in Subaru WRX or souped up Holden's with personalised licence plates. In the thick of the traffic, when it was virtually travelling in a quick moving convoy this lot were discernible by their insistence in travelling too closely behind.
Soon enough I ventured off the highway and into the back roads. The roads were single lane. They wound between hills covered in lush growth of gum trees and plantations. They climbed and dipped in a general inclination, the ground falling away in places to spectacular valleys and deep gullies. It was very pretty.
Along the way I passed through small townships and by pretty homesteads built into the hills amid the trees. Signs along the road advertised cheap potatoes, 10 kilograms for $6. Once I was stuck behind a caravan, another time a timber truck slowly taking the curves and with a stockpile of patient drivers behind them. Rigby mewled behind me, my audiobook described a strange battle in a sc-fi world as I paused in line and waited, taking the opportunity when it came to press down on the accelerator and zip around the traffic in front on the winding road.
What traffic there was thinned still more as I neared my destination. By now the road was largely a little wider than a single lane to accommodate traffic going in either direction. At times we travelled in the bright sunshine atop a hill or following the razorback the road hat been cut from, but more and more as we dipped the sun came filtering through tall trees on either side into a shaded, cool road not yey properly dry from recent rains. I turned and turned again, the road higher one side than the other and somewhere on my left - the high side - the farm I was looking for. Look out for the toilet paper at the front gate I had been told, and I was releved to see the pristine white paper tagged to a fence post. I had arrived.
The property was up a hill in which a track had been carved. There was a slurry of mud at the front gate churned up by the heavy tyres of 4WD. I stopped wondering if the Audi would make it up there, before deciding to play it safe and reversing the car into a clear spot on the other side of the narrow road. I roused Rigby from the back seat keen to explore this new place and together walked up to the household and rang - literally - the bell.
That was it. Managed to get the car up and thereafter spent the afternoon eating cheese, drinking beer, taking a tour around the very pretty farm, and generally chatting. Last night was a roast dinner, a bottle of wine and a DVD.
Rigby loves it up here. This like Luna Park for a dog. He runs and runs, he jumps and plays. He has a permanent smile on his face going from one person to the next. He's such a beautiful, happy, affectionate dog that no-one can refuse him. Last night he slept on the bed next to me. This morning we ventured out into the cold to see the mist in the valleys.
It's now about lunchtime. I'm a little sleepy. It's the country air maybe, and the mindset in a place like this that loosens the tight bonds that confine you to sensible options back in the smoke. Here it's ok to take it easy, to live differently, to read all day if you want. For all the sun outside - and it is bright - there is a chill in the air and inside the warmth of the fire and the tang of wood smoke in the air. I settle like an old man who's found a good place to rest. I missed this. It's great to get away, great to get down to the bush again and remember what it's like. I should do more of this, it's definitely my thing.
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Twenty-five years after its release, John Hughes's most-loved work doesn't hold up
Gee I hate articles like this. They take a cultural icon and they wring every bit of joy from it. I can recall particularly some small minded writer taking to task Salinger for A Catcher in the Rye. Only one person will win that argument, but that doesn't seem to stop a steady procession of journalists taking cheap pot-shots at big targets.
Now, reasonable criticism is, well, reasonable. I'm all for dissenting views, they're one of the things that make our society healthy, but there is a difference between expressing an opinion and didactically proclaiming opinion as fact, efectively I'm right and all you are wrong.
In any case the writer here - as so many do - has completely missed the point. For the most part movies are escapism. They are a fantasy world we enter to be entertained, thrilled, amused by, and occasionally to experience a wistful sense of wow, I wish that was me.
For fuck's sake Ferris Bueller's Day Off (yes, one of my favourite movies to) is not a fucking social commentary. It's not meant to be dissected for hidden meaning and nuance. The relationships portrayed in it, like the characters, are purely for entertainment purposes. They are like people we might know, or wish we did; situations that seem familiar but somehow enhanced, outsized. This is not reality, it is escapism in its most pure form. Fantasy.
What's wrong with that? Nothing. It means what it does for so many people because it is emblematic of a time and an attitude writ large. For many in my generation it is one of those movies that make us feel good, defying authority, going out to have a good time and ultimately getting away with it big time. Shit, it even has a happy ending.
As soon as we begin to attribute deeper meaning to entertainment like this we begin to lose something. It's not meant to be analysed. It's not meant to be deep and fucking meaningful. It's not high art, and there's nothing wrong with that. As I'm fond of saying, it is what it is.
I can't help but read a piece like this and think the writer is taking cheap shots. It's an easy, big target after all, a much loved movie. What do you expect after all? The movie is a product of the times it was made, 25 years ago. It might seem smart to reappraise it now through the cultural prism of the day, but it's not relevant. Like the guy taking on Salinger there's only one winner. The writer comes off sounding too smart by half, and totally out of his depth.
My message to those who seek to deconstruct and dismantle these icons we live by is the same as in the article title: get over it. There are better things to write about.
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