The politics of rock n roll

I have many friends that are musicians – some very good, some less so, some successful, some less so. It has long bothered me that friends (and people I don’t know) who make incredible music whether it is in their garage or in a large recording studio cannot make enough money to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. I have always gone out of my way to support local musicians whether they are friends or not. I insist on paying to get into gigs, I buy records, merchandise and listen to community radio to hear what new music is being produced in my part of the world.

So why is it that someone who kicks a ball around a field has a mansion by the sea and enough food to feed an entire nation when talented artists are relegated to the corridors of call centres out of the necessity to make a living? Why can’t musicians, painters, poets, writers et al be endowed with the financial means to hone their craft and continue to create great art without having to take up a day job?

Of course, there are artists out there living the high life or at least living off the proceeds of their work, but they are few and far between, and all too often their work is pedestrian at best. In Australia there are maybe two or three bands that make a living solely from their music. With the advent of downloads and online music sales, it goes without saying that even their proceeds would be decreasing.

It certainly seems that in terms of music, the mediocre are being applauded more than ever and to be successful financially you must adhere to the fashion of the moment. A good friend of mine who used to play in a local band was constantly frustrated with the music scene and the punters. He eventually walked away from his dreams and now pursues music as a hobby only. While there always has and hopefully always will be an audience for local, underground, obscure, or indie music their numbers are not enough.

Augie March are a Melbourne band that I love more than I dare go into here. They commenced their career in 1996 and played small pubs around town and released a few EPs before their critically acclaimed debut album came out in 2000. The following year I found myself following the band around Australia to see every live show they put on. They released another critically acclaimed album a few years later and I loved them even more. In 2005 I moved overseas to Germany where my exposure to music was mainly limited to MTV and other music video channels. I returned to Australia in 2006 to find Augie March on Video Hits and MTV Australia and I heard their music on commercial radio, in shopping centres and at half time during football matches. I was blown away and utterly confused. What had changed in the 12 months that I was gone? There had been a shift in what was viewed as fashionable by radio stations and subsequently what was viewed as fashionable by the consumers. Bands had replaced pop singers and it was now cool to wear “rock chick” outfits and attend concerts. Radio was playing bands that had previously wallowed in obscurity and it seemed that musicians were finally getting the recognition they deserved.

On closer inspection, radio was branching out but still playing it safe. Mediocre rock bands popped up out of nowhere and stormed the record charts with their three minute rock-pop singles. Popular acts were still being groomed by A&R representatives and record company big wigs. The public was still being fed music that didn’t excite or challenge. They were mesmerised by guitars and boys in tight jeans.

Augie March toured nationally in mid 2009 amidst rumours they were calling it quits. Glenn Richards, singer/songwriter for the band said that they were on hiatus because they were sick of not being able to pay the rent. Despite their success – or perceived success – they still didn’t have any money.

I can’t blame Augie March for walking away from the music industry. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to have a nice place to live or the comfort of knowing where their next pay cheque is coming from. But I get angry and I get frustrated that despite their talent, ability and success, it still wasn’t enough. How devastating it must be for an artist to hang up their guitar, put away their paint brush, or lay down their pen when they have had enough of the struggle. And how devastating for myself and others who look to these artists for inspiration, courage, comfort and guidance when all we are left with is Vampire Weekend and Twilight. It’s enough to make you want to blow yourself to pieces in a cornfield as Van Gogh did.

"Art has no survival value, rather it is one of the things that makes survival valuable."

Hughie O'Donoghue

In my quest to understand and appreciate modern art, I was told to check out the work of Hughie O'Donoghue. I must say I quite like his work but it is far easier to like work of this calibre than the abstract modern art that I am yet to connect with.

Hughie O'Donoghue is one of the most ambitious painters at work today. Often likened to Anselm Kiefer, his subjects are history, memory and myth. At the heart of his work is the reimagining of individual lives such as the hardship of itinerant Irish labourers or the experience of his father in the Second World War.

O'Donoghue's powerful figurative paintings and drawings often draw from the old Masters and have been compared to School of London painters such as Francis Bacon, but over the last decade photography has also played an increasingly important role. This has extended from the artist's initial use of found and documentary imagery to recent paintings where the painted image incorporates within its surface photographic compositions set up by the artist in the land around his studio in Ireland.

from James Hyman Gallery

Why does God allow natural disasters?

At the heart of Haiti's humanitarian crisis is an age old question for many religious people - how can God allow such terrible things to happen? Philosopher David Bain examines the arguments.

Evil has always been a thorn in the side of those - of whatever faith - who believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God.

As the philosopher David Hume (echoing Epicurus) put it in 1776: "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" Faced with this question, Archbishop of York John Sentamu said he had "nothing to say to make sense of this horror", while another clergyman, Canon Giles Fraser, preferred to respond "not with clever argument but with prayer".

I have nothing to say that makes sense of this horror - all I know is that the message of the death and resurrection of Jesus is that he is with us
Archbishop of York, John Sentamu

Perhaps their stance is understandable. The Old Testament is also not clear to the layman on such matters. When Job complains about the injuries God has allowed him to suffer, and claims "they are tricked that trusted", God says nothing to rebut the charges.

Less reticent is the American evangelist Pat Robertson. He has suggested Haiti has been cursed ever since the population swore a pact with the Devil to gain their freedom from the French at the beginning of the 19th Century. Robertson's claim will strike many as ludicrous, if not offensive.

And even were it true, it wouldn't obviously meet the challenge.

Why would a loving deity allow such a pact to seem necessary? Why wouldn't he have freed the Haitians from slavery himself, or prevented them from being enslaved in the first place? And why, in particular, would he punish today's Haitians for something their forbears putatively did more than two centuries before?

So what should believers say? To make progress, we might distinguish two kinds of evil:

* the awful things people do, such as murder, and
* the awful things that just happen, such as earthquakes

Johnson Beharry, Victoria Cross recipient for bravery
Would those hailed as brave still exist in a Magical World?

St Augustine, author CS Lewis and others have argued God allows our bad actions since preventing them would undermine our free will, the value of which outweighs its ill effects.

But there's a counter-argument. Thoroughly good people aren't robots, so why couldn't God have created only people like them, people who quite freely live good lives?

However that debate turns out, it's quite unclear how free will is supposed to explain the other kind of evil - the death and suffering of the victims of natural disasters.

Perhaps it would if all the victims - even the newborn - were so bad that they deserved their agonising deaths, but it's impossible to believe that is the case.

Or perhaps free will would be relevant if human negligence always played a role. There will be some who say the scale of the tragedy in natural disasters is partly attributable to humans. The world has the choice to help its poorer parts build earthquake-resistant structures and tsunami warning systems.
Krakatoa engraving 1883
A still smoking Krakatoa in 1883, which caused a devastating tsunami

But the technology has not always existed. Was prehistoric man, with his sticks and stones, somehow negligent in failing to build early warning systems for the tsunamis that were as deadly back then as they are today?

The second century saint, Irenaeus, and the 20th Century philosopher, John Hick, appeal instead to what is sometimes called soul-making. God created a universe in which disasters occur, they think, because goodness only develops in response to people's suffering.

To appreciate this idea, try to imagine a world containing people, but literally no suffering. Call it the Magical World. In that world, there are no earthquakes or tsunamis, or none that cause suffering. If people are hit by falling masonry, it somehow bounces off harmlessly. If I steal your money, God replaces it. If I try to hurt you, I fail.

So why didn't God create the Magical World instead of ours? Because, the soul-making view says, its denizens wouldn't be - couldn't be - truly good people.

It's not that they would all be bad. It's that they couldn't be properly good. For goodness develops only where it's needed, the idea goes, and it's not needed in the Magical World.

In that world, after all, there is no danger that requires people to be brave, so there would be no bravery. That world contains no one who needs comfort or kindness or sympathy, so none would be given. It's a world without moral goodness, which is why God created ours instead.

But there is wiggle room.

Even in a world where nothing bad happens, couldn't there be brave people - albeit without the opportunity to show it? So moral goodness could exist even if it were never actually needed.

And, anyway, suppose we agree moral goodness could indeed develop only in a world of suffering.

Doesn't our world contain a surplus of suffering? People do truly awful things to each other. Isn't the suffering they create enough for soul-making? Did God really need to throw in earthquakes and tsunamis as well?

Suffering's distribution, not just its amount, can also cause problems. A central point of philosopher Immanuel Kant's was that we mustn't exploit people - we mustn't use them as mere means to our ends. But it can seem that on the soul-making view God does precisely this. He inflicts horrible deaths on innocent earthquake victims so that the rest of us can be morally benefitted.

That hardly seems fair.

It's OK, some will insist, because God works in mysterious ways. But mightn't someone defend a belief in fairies by telling us they do too? Others say their talk of God is supposed to acknowledge not the existence of some all-powerful and all-good agent, who created and intervenes in the universe, but rather something more difficult to articulate - a thread of meaning or value running through the world, or perhaps something ineffable.

But, as for those who believe in an all-good, all-powerful agent-God, we've seen that they face a question that remains pressing after all these centuries, and which is now horribly underscored by the horrors in Haiti. If a deity exists, why didn't he prevent this?

David Bain is a lecturer in the philosophy department of the University of Glasgow.


from the BBC

Beauty is Subjective

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Or so we are told, but is that true or is there a consensus within cultures or even world wide as to what constitutes beauty?

I have long struggled to appreciate modern art. I often find it too abstract to identify with, too harsh and ultimately too ugly to appreciate. A documentary by the BBC entitled Ugly Beauty posed the question "has beauty disappeared from modern art?". I think another question that needs to be answered is whether or not beauty is even essential in art, whether it be modern or not.

Has beauty disappeared from modern art? Several influential modern thinkers insist that it has. And this belief has inspired them to publish a clutch of recent books which claim that modern art is no longer capable of capturing true beauty: that beauty has gone from art. Art critic Waldemar Januszczak fiercely disagrees, believing that great art is as interested in beauty as ever. Art's search for beauty has manifested itself in depictions of the idealised female form, glorious landscapes, lovely flower studies and perfectly arranged renaissance altar pieces - but where does this search continue today? We know so much about the atomical make-up of our universe that the search for beauty can seem old-fashioned or unscientific. And because so much horror and darkness have passed through modern times, the quest for 'beauty' can even be dismissed as escapist and irrelevant. But of course, it isn't. Waldemar Januszczak would argue that the need for transcendent beauty in art is greater than it has ever been. And - most importantly - art knows this. Beauty is out there. You just have to know where to find it. However, beauty today can be electronic or scientific; subtle and elusive. It can be found in the LCD sculptures of Tatsuo Miyajima or the subtle light installations of James Turrell. Carl Andre discovers a stern modern beauty in squares of industrial materials dropped around a goods yard. The cancer paintings of Damien Hirst find a terrible modern beauty in the deformed human anatomy. These and other great searchers after beauty are the subject of this film. The world today needs beauty more than it has ever needed it - and modern art is one of its few suppliers.

My studies in the field of psychology have dispelled many a myth and raised many a question. One topic that has been explored is beauty and perception. As it turns out, science suggests that there is a mathematical explanation for what beauty actually is and the beholder has sweet f*%k all to do with the equation. Bruno Maddox is a plastic surgeon and wrote the following article:

What is Beauty?

Very little has surprised me more, in my years as a public intellectual, than how often I get collared on the street by some desperate pedestrian demanding an answer to this most fundamental question. Almost never. It hardly ever happens.

Which is odd, because people still care about Beauty—quite a lot in fact—especially here in Southern California, if I can be the first to make that observation. Last night in my room at the Sunset Marquis I reached out for what I assumed was the room-service menu and passed a few fleeting surreal moments trying to imagine what “Upper Leg with Bikini” might taste like, for a mere $100. It turned out that I had grabbed the Beauty Menu by mistake and that for $240 someone was prepared to come to my room and give my skin a “Firming Renovateur".

But while people may care about being beautiful as much as they ever did, it seems they have largely stopped trying to figure out what Beauty actually is.

A Moment with Simon Hoy

Posted on 01 February 2010.

Resident Choreographer, Melbourne Ballet Company

By Rebecca Martin.

From eleven years of age Simon Hoy trained in the Vagonova ballet style and at 16 was accepted into The Australian Ballet School. During the next three years at the ABS he gained much experience dancing leading roles in the school’s productions of Napoli, Sleeping Beauty, The Snow Queen and Trios. He was chosen to represent the Australian Ballet School in his second year at the Royal Academy of Dance Gala in Osaka, Japan and performed the Peasant Pas de Deux from Rudolf Nureyev’s production of Giselle. Simon toured with The Australian Ballet’s ‘The Dancers Company’ in his final year at the school, graduating in 1997 with an Advanced Diploma in Dance.

Since then Simon has worked as a soloist and danced Principal roles with Ballet Graz in Austria, Ballet Mainz in Germany, Schaufuss Ballet in Denmark, Carolina Ballet and Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in New York. He has toured throughout the United States, Europe and Asia working with many outstanding ballet masters and choreographers and has performed works by George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, and John Cranko. Since returning to Australia Simon has played a leading role in the renaissance of the Melbourne Ballet Company as its resident choreographer, and has so far created nine new works for the Company. Simon spends much of his time working overseas but is based in Melbourne where he has just wrapped up a successful sixth season with Melbourne Ballet Company.

Simon found the transition from dancer to choreographer to be a natural progression. “When working on a new piece I’m very influenced by my background as a classically based dancer. I am especially inspired by the music chosen, and also the sheer physicality of dance. But I try not to over intellectualise the process and let the language of dance speak for itself. There are many similarities between a dancer and a choreographer, and I think that in most professional dancers there is a choreographer and in most choreographers there is a dancer. Sure, you can be both, but in reality only one at a time. The choreographer necessarily has a different perspective from the dancers, more holistic perhaps”.

Long before the dancers arrive at rehearsals, Simon has been in the studio alone preparing his pieces and familiarising himself with the music. “My process always starts with a certain amount of time spent developing choreographic concepts and material. My work is quite technically based so I need to know that I’m not recreating a ballet that I created last month. It takes a bit of work to go down a path that is in many ways a result of what has been done before but is not the same. Often you spend a lot of time with a certain amount of content and it becomes embedded in you and then you create a new work and you start to choreograph what you have already choreographed”. Despite beginning the creative process alone, Simon believes it is important for the dancers to be involved in the development of a new work. “I am very aware of the vocabulary I am creating myself and for the most part can explain the choreographic line or the language. I feel that if I let the creative process get too out of my hands, I lose that. While the dancers I work with may bring a more creative approach to the work, I need to hold onto my own choreographic line. I need to understand it myself, I need to be able to feel it in my own body, in order to move onto the next part of the piece. Often somebody will say ‘what about this?’ which is great, but I don’t know where that came from, and I’m not quick to say ‘yeah let’s keep that, I like it’ because I need to know why you put that there. I develop a concept in my head before working with dancers and then look at what the dancers bring to it. Dance is a language and most choreographers have their own language that fundamentally needs to stay clear and true to themselves. When I go into the studio I need to understand the music in regard to phrasing and know the counts and exactly what I want in terms of narrative or motive, and for the most part I know what steps I want. Maybe that will change, but for now that is how it is for me”.

So what motivates and inspires him to create new dance pieces? “Above all, I am inspired by music. I don’t necessarily need a score to hear the music; it’s more about finding a rhythm within (finding a pulse). Through my work I try to speak with a classical voice. Line and shape are very important to me. A lot of the material I tend to develop alone listening to many, many, repetitions of the music while searching for a dance structure, and only then moving to translate the work for the dancers. The motivation to create is instinctual and subconscious and derived from a life time of experiences that cannot always be pinned down. It is circumstance and the nature of existence. Choreography is a language in which some people choose to express themselves and all the rest of it is just business. You are not given a performance based platform where there is no judgment or review at the end of the day. I enjoy a response from an audience, I enjoy communicating to an audience and I enjoy the process with the dancers but whenever there is a conclusion or review at the end of it all you cannot dismiss the business side of things but you can be aware of that while remaining true to your work”.

While there is much contention over what constitutes art, and whether it exists to entertain, Simon believes that art is entertainment resulting from a line of communication between artist and audience. “Art is such a general term covering music, opera, dance, television, movies, fashion, literature or poetry, but it has to entertain on some level. It has to stimulate you and for me being entertained and stimulated is relatively aligned. As an artist you don’t necessarily have to be aware of entertaining an audience but you do need to understand fundamentally that what you are doing or creating is a source for people to respond to. You need to communicate with the audience and ultimately, I think art is communication. When I respond to art it is because it has entertained me on some level”.

“As a dancer I was lucky enough to be exposed to a lot of very influential choreographers, directors, teachers and dancers and I enjoyed my years dancing very much. I enjoyed performing, but above all I enjoy being a student of this craft that is so perfect. It is a wonderfully simple technique in so many ways but impossible to master. Classical dance is a wonderful voice to use”. At the conclusion of his dance career, Hoy chose to continue using the voice of dance. “My inspiration above all is my absolute respect, passion, lifelong commitment and love for dance. I simply have a personal approach to the philosophy, technique and language of dance. I can take about five percent of the credit for what I create – whoever created ballet over the centuries takes the other 95 percent. I will do anything in my power to continue to speak the language of dance. It is a difficult thing though, because there are very few people that can support themselves financially as a choreographer, but where there is an audience, there is a way. In Australia we have a very educated and diverse audience that is open to supporting new works. Melbourne is a great place to create works with a generous and responsive audience and I think it is a city that can continue to be the home of many creations”.

Melbourne Ballet Company’s next performance season will be Project Seven – “Infinite Space” from June 3^rd to 13^th.

For further information about Melbourne Ballet Company visit www.melbourneballetcompany.com.au

from Dance Informa