City of Nets? City of Dreams

Occasionally I have visions of places which look ideal to me. I remember once dreaming of an island in a beautiful bay surrounded by hills and inlets. It was an Australian scene but bushland unlike anything I'd seen around Melbourne where I'd then spent most of my life. Some years later I was at West Head in northern Sydney's Kuring-gai Chase National Park and there, looking up toward Brisbane Water across Broken Bay was the scene I'd dreamed, with Lion Island in the middle. It suggested to me that I'd been meant to move to Sydney in 1987.

Lion Island in Broken Bay, NSW. John Dalton, 2006

I also used to dream of an Alice Springs-like landscape but with the valleys filled by a big city. Walking up behind Griffith Park, Los Angeles last year, I came across this scene as I looked out across the San Fernando Valley.

To me, this is quite beautiful. Otto Friedrich's book on Hollywood is called City of Nets. I think I might call LA the city of a dream. I have started to wonder why I don't have the aversion to Los Angeles that many Australians express. Talk to the majority of Australian travellers and they'll say Los Angeles is too spread out; you've got to have a car; it doesn't have the compactness that makes for a lively city. Well, I suppose. Imagine if in Sydney the Opera House was at the Quay, the Art Gallery of NSW was at Penrith, the MCA at Sutherland and the Wharf Theatre on the northern beaches. But I wonder if it's my Central Australian experience which makes me realise community can be created across any distance. (And certainly, the arts institutions here in LA are well patronised.)

I remember being in Pipalyatyara in northern South Australia in January 1976. The only "contact with the outside world" was the radio shack and one day we had to wait a seeming eternity while two women chatted over the airwaves. "Old ducks" we called them in our impatience, but then I realised that they were doing what neighbours anywhere will do. They were probably ringing in from cattle stations hundreds of miles or kilometres apart, and yet here they were indulging in the Central Australian equivalent of... chatting over the back fence.

A dreamlike bonus: Arpitt's photograph of Lion Island at sunset.

If you liked this blog, others of mine on Central Australia are:

Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow's The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012
Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira, 20 May 2012
Opera in a land of Song, 29 July 2012
Drowned Man in a Dry Creekbed - Happy New Year 1993, 6 August 2012
Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 2012
  
others of mine on Los Angeles are:

A daily reminder, 1 April 2011
When you take a closer look, 21 April 2011
The frame (thoughts on the Getty Center), 24 April 2011
A light on the hill (the Reagan Library), 30 April 2011
A couple of snapshots (Malibu and the Valley), 1 May 2011
More to love about LA, 6 Jan 2012
Walking with stars, 10 Apr 2012
En plein air and a little elan, 16 Nov 2012
LA Substantial, 18 Jan 2013
City of Angels, 20 Jan 2013
City of Nets? City of Dreams, 31 Jan 2013
The combination of effects, 1 Feb 2013
Rounding off - LA vignettes 1, 2 Feb 2013

Pivoting

A documentary film-maker recently observed to me that "the way you get out of a film is not always the way that got you in". I think I knew what he meant. Back in 1996 I had wanted to write a dramatisation of the whole life of T.G.H. Strehlow. It was not until some years later that I wrote something that I could complete (Journey to Horseshoe Bend) which was based on only ten days in Strehlow's early life.

Apparently, this kind of re-focussing has a term - 'pivoting'. You start off intending to do one thing (and I think by definition not getting anywhere) and end up refining your intention which then produces a successful outcome.


I've been thinking about this in relation to Abraham Lincoln. It took him nearly three years of warfare to refine the purpose of the US Civil War in the Gettysburg Address as "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". Until then the war had been about preserving the union - not exactly a galvanising invitation.

I also wonder whether 'pivoting' took place in the creation of the Spielberg film, Lincoln. Back in 2009 I read that Lincoln was to be based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals. It's a wonderful book - a four-or five way biography describing how Lincoln chose his cabinet from among his nomination rivals (Seward, Chase, Stanton, Blair); an influence on President Obama - but (I wondered) how dramatic?

Lo and behold, the film is actually about Lincoln's effort to try to ensure the congressional vote for the 13th amendment (making slavery unconstitutional) before the war is won and people such as the pro-slavery Unionists decide there is no longer any urgency to do anything. How smart is this from a screenwriting point of view? - suddenly there's a race on, the pressure's up. I noticed in a recent edition of The New Republic that the screenwriter Tony Kushner acknowledges Michael Vorenberg's book about the passage of the 13th amendment Final Freedom as one of "20 or 30 books that were significant to me" though he denies that it was his principal source (Doris Kearns Goodwin still gets the screen credit for 'parts of' Team of Rivals). But, I wonder, at what point did Kushner and Spielberg decided to focus on the 13th amendment fight? How did this come about, and was it an example of 'pivoting'? I could look into this and find out I suppose, but for the moment I'm content to speculate.

And this is something else I'll speculate and pivot on. I reckon the next Lincoln film could be based on Nora Titone's My Thoughts Be Bloody. (The title is a quote from Hamlet.) Titone's book covers the rivalry among the Booths, the greatest theatrical family of the 19th century. Edwin was the greatest actor of his generation, inheritor of his father Junius's mantle. Younger brother, John Wilkes couldn't hold a candle to him.

Edwin Booth as Hamlet, c.1870. Photograph J. Gurney and Sons, New York

John Wilkes, Edwin and Junius Booth Jr in Julius Caesar, 1864

Yet, John Wilkes worked out how to upstage his brother once and for all - the Confederate sympathiser shot President Lincoln on Good Friday, 14 April 1865. It was a dramatic last act, as Booth jumped from the presidential box to the stage at Washington's Ford's Theater and spun around to the audience with the phrase "Sic semper tyrannus" [Thus to all tyrants], forever fusing the Booth name with villainy.


Can you imagine this as a film, since so much of Titone's book is also about acting as it was practised in those days?

City of the Angels

I hardly need words. It's a beautiful city, I don't care what anyone says.

Honolulu Ave, Montrose

with "Alice Springs" scenery, twenty minutes from Downtown

The view from a Monrovia shopping mall carpark for heaven's sake

and great, quaint architecture at Toluca Lake

If you liked this blog, others of mine on Los Angeles are:

A daily reminder, 1 April 2011
When you take a closer look, 21 April 2011
The frame (thoughts on the Getty Center), 24 April 2011
A light on the hill (the Reagan Library), 30 April 2011
A couple of snapshots (Malibu and the Valley), 1 May 2011
More to love about LA, 6 Jan 2012
Walking with stars, 10 Apr 2012
En plein air and a little elan, 16 Nov 2012
LA Substantial, 18 Jan 2013
City of Nets? City of Dreams, 31 Jan 2013
The combination of effects, 1 Feb 2013
Rounding off - LA vignettes 1, 2 Feb 2013

LA Substantial

We're back in Los Angeles, which the current issue of the Qantas inflight magazine The Australian Way quotes Werner Herzog as declaring the most culturally substantial city in the United States.

One of those evening views of LA that I love - it reminds me of the cover of an edition of James Ellroy's LA Confidential

Many will baulk at Herzog's claim but he goes further to say that "This is a place where, if you look beyond the glitz and glamour of Hollywood you find all the writers, photographers, musicians, mathematicians." Well, think of all the musicians and writers and playwrights who've lived here - Schoenberg, Heifitz, Isherwood; the Los Angeles Times recently published an interactive map of "John Cage's Los Angeles", Brecht premiered the second 'American' version of Life of Galileo here, at the Coronet Theater 366 North La Cienega Boulevard [Charles Laughton was in the title role and had worked with Brecht on it], Stravinsky composed half of his neo-classical and most of his late works around Hollywood... The question is whether the presence of these people and their activities added up to a Los Angeles cultural identity. But they continued to influence the world from here.

I caught a glimpse of Catalina Island coming in, but grabbed the camera too late and only saw the top of it as it disappeared under the wing.

I remember that Catalina was my first glimpse of the US in 1996 and Dvořák’s New World Symphony happened to be on the headset at that moment. It was a nice coincidence.


If you liked this blog, others of mine on Los Angeles are:

A daily reminder, 1 April 2011
When you take a closer look, 21 April 2011
The frame (thoughts on the Getty Center), 24 April 2011
A light on the hill (the Reagan Library), 30 April 2011
A couple of snapshots (Malibu and the Valley), 1 May 2011
More to love about LA, 6 Jan 2012
Walking with stars, 10 Apr 2012
En plein air and a little elan, 16 Nov 2012

City of Angels, 20 Jan 2013
City of Nets? City of Dreams, 31 Jan 2013
The combination of effects, 1 Feb 2013
Rounding off - LA vignettes 1, 2 Feb 2013

Observations from the Hill

As we prepare for another trip back across the Pacific, I reflect on my favourite experiences of Sydney. I remember when I moved here in 1987 this was the view that floored me. I didn't know it existed until that first time I wandered up onto Observatory Hill.

For the first time I realised there was an upper Harbour that was just as beautiful as the lower stretch which contains the Opera House and Bridge. It narrows out to the west (left) of here and eventually becomes the Parramatta River carrying along with it lovely indentations and complications. From up here also you can see parts of the old Rocks historical district, Harry Seidler's Blues Point Tower across the water...

You know you're standing on history, the site of the old colony's original observatory.

And you can reflect on the fact that most tourists, and certainly I, as a newcomer from Melbourne back in 1987, mostly only see what's on the other side (east, to the right) of that bridge.

Anyway, this is not the greatest text I've written I admit; it's mostly an excuse for this series of photographs. And I can't resist asking: aren't those Moreton Bay Figs magnificent? In America I can see Australian native plants - bottlebrushes in Savannah (which is warm and humid like Sydney) and Tasmanian Blue Gums in Los Angeles (which has weather quite unlike Tasmania) - but I doubt I'll see Moreton Bay Figs.

Echoes of 'Marvellous Melbourne'

From a distance, Melbourne looks like a glass and steel Oz.

Up close however, at street level, it's still Marvellous Melbourne, the architectural beauty of the 19th century.

Chapel Street, Prahran, my old stomping ground rediscovered

The city has changed a lot since I last lived there in 1987. I remember in those days you would never have walked west of Spencer Street after hours (or anytime, if you didn't need to). Now it's the Docklands, sought-after. It's as if the whole city has been re-orientated to face west. But they're on the brink of overdoing the formulaic apartment blocks.

A lot to not sing about

The United States has made genuine contributions to world thought. In 'their' Revolution and Civil War and  in the documents associated with those conflicts, the players in American history have refined the concepts of liberty and freedom and civil rights. Even more... if William Jennings Bryan had won the 1900 presidential election, his address to the Democratic National Convention - The Perils of Imperialism - might forever have spelt out the difference between a republic and an empire. ("A republic can have no subjects. A subject is possible only in a government resting upon force; he is unknown in a government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.")       

I often wonder what Australia has contributed to world progress. Women got the vote in South Australia before most of the rest of the world, the High Court's MABO decision of 1992 knocked for six any idea that a country is uninhabited ("terra nullius") just because it's not inhabited by the conquerors.

The other day, in Carlton, I realised that Australia played perhaps the major role in implementing the 8-hour day. Yes, the 8-hour day movement started in Britain. The British socialist and factory owner Robert Owen may have coined the slogan "Eight hours labour, eight hours rest, eight hours recreation", but the movement's biggest splash was made in Victoria, Australia. In April 1856, stonemasons working on the University of Melbourne downed tools and marched on parliament, also under construction. As a result of their protest parliament decided that they could work eight hours a day with no loss of pay. Stonemasons celebrated with a holiday and procession on 12 May 1856.

Just outside the Melbourne CBD (Downtown), in Carlton across the road from the Trades Hall Council, is the 8-hour day monument. The triple-eight symbol later became decoration on many union buildings.

How many Australians are proud of this, or even know anything about it? We don't make much of a song and dance. (If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr had addressed an Australian audience in his 'I Have a Dream' speech and rung out: "No, no, we are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream", some prosaic Australian up the back would have called out, "Oh, turn it up!" )

And yet, Australia has a democracy to be jingoistically proud of; a democracy with a slightly more liberal nuance to the idea of freedom. Because it isn't just personal liberty, which can easily be perverted into exploitative behaviour by successful individuals; it's real practical rights across the board. And it could be argued that we have greater real liberty because Australian workers were able to form themselves, as unions, into more exact counterweights to the controllers of capital. At any rate, the fact that we don't trumpet our achievements too loudly is also perhaps a sign of a non-intrusive humility.

A trip through the yellow inland

Australians often complain that the country between Sydney and Melbourne is boring. I don't find it so. Once you get past the sandstone of the Highlands and the scribbly gum country of Goulburn the country is essentially, for about 8 hours, that expanse of yellow and blue that was celebrated by the Australian Impressionists in the 1890s. However, I'm reminded of the statement by Tchaikovsky to Mme von Meck after he came back to Russia from Switzerland: "Mountains are fine, but I'm dying for a plain."

I took some shots from the window as we travelled by XPT between Harden-Murrumburrah (NSW) and Seymour (Victoria) on Thursday.

Getting into the foothills of the Australian Alps around Albury

On this journey you see typically Australian country towns:

and it's not all plain:

Back through the Southern Highlands going the other way

Some might say this is boring country, but I disagree and I don't think I'm anticipating a future nostalgia because I don't know when I'll be coming this way again.