There's still a long way to go

Sigh.

There have been all sorts of distressing stories on the news here in the last few days. The kind of stories that make me question our culture and wonder if there's something I can do to make a difference to it.

The opposition leader in one of our States has just resigned in disgrace after making a drunken racist comment about the wife of his recently retired political rival. A couple of days later, when the media pressure hadn't let up after his resignation, he tried to commit suicide.

I'm not going to write about that story just now. I'm going to write about a story that was almost a non-story.

What definitely WAS a story, yet again, was Muslims and terrorism. We had various politicians trying to top each other in the patriotism stakes, telling Muslims that they needed to learn and adopt 'Australian values' or get up and leave.

Never mind which values those are. I take it they're talking about things like compassion and tolerance and our disdain of class barriers. As opposed to our ridiculous propensity for drunkenness and celebration of all the worst excesses of masculinity.

Following on from that, a bright young right-winger said we should ban headscarves in public schools. To be fair, she did also say ban skullcaps and large crucifixes, to appear even-handed and to copy the French. But most of the reporting concentrated on the headscarves.

(The French have quite deliberately separated church and state for centuries. We have prayers when Parliament is opened. It's not really the same situation, people. And what is so terrible about cultures 'clashing' anyway? How we about teaching children to understand that not everyone is the same as them and not everyone thinks like them? Maybe they won't behave so insensitively when they grow up and travel overseas.)

The Prime Minister quickly came out and said no to a ban on headscarves. Worryingly, he said it wasn't practical, rather than saying a ban would be wrong, but at least he said something.

It's what he did that wasn't reported very much that really caught my eye though.

Whether it was just fortuitous timing, or whether he had already decided he needed to boost his multicultural credentials (there was a summit with Muslim leaders recently as well), the Prime Minister visited an Islamic school within 24 hours of the headscarves story gaining momentum.

The fact that he couldn't pronounce the headscarf-wearing teacher's name, I can forgive. I doubt I could get her name on the first go either. But a moment later he also asked her "how long have you been out here?"

To which she replied in her perfectly Australian-accented voice "I was born here".

That's it in a nutshell. Despite all the rhetoric, all the statements of tolerance, the leader of our nation sees a woman wearing a headscarf during an unscripted moment and assumes that she's an immigrant. Because she couldn't possibly be a native Australian, despite her accent.

I've wanted to talk about this with the people around me, but I've felt constrained from making a big thing about it. I keep wondering whether they'll even understand my problem with it. Clearly someone on one TV station understood it's significance, as they slipped it into the wider story about the Prime Minister disapproving a ban on headscarves. But I suspect it passed most non-Muslims by completely.

It's the message that's been sent to Muslims I worry about. A message that no matter what platitudes come out of our mouths when everybody's looking, what we really think is that 'you don't belong'.

I'm afraid they'll believe it.

Every blessing

Some days are just so... oh, gosh, I suppose 'wonderful' will have to do.

Last Sunday (28th August) was one of them. The day got off to a great start when I played piano at the 8am service at church. All the music I'd picked fitted in so well, and people really sang. And when it was over, I walked outside to see a sky that was the most breathtakingly intense and rich blue I could imagine.

On the way home I bought the ideal stand for my indoor plants. I'm still marvelling at how perfect my big blue pot looks standing next to earthen-orange curtains on a white stand.

It was the warmest day in months - about 20 degrees C. I didn't have to have the heater on at all. I opened up the sliding door and sat in the sun streaming into my lounge room, listening to Tori Amos live in Chicago and eating home-made nut loaf for morning tea.

My washing actually dried in the sun, in only a couple of hours. All winter I've been struggling because there's a tree that was planted too close to the washing line.

I did some other cleaning up without feeling rushed or hurried. In the afternoon I felt I had time to watch an episode of The West Wing.

Before that I got a phone call from Dad which led to meeting him at the furniture shop, where he bought me a bookcase.

And late at night I opened the bottle of port I had got way back on my 30th birthday.

Pretty near on perfect. The only thing I could improve on is if the nut loaf had been replaced, no supplemented, by 2-day old black forest cake. That was Friday night, while listening to Doughnut Song live in Los Angeles. My God, the only thing better than fresh black forest cake is one that's been left sitting around for a couple of days!

Terribly random thought

Olives aren't native to China, are they?

So what kind of oil did they use for cooking stir fry?

Thrill 4-17: Single {Goodbye Pisces}

Somewhere, in a parallel universe - or maybe just another part of the planet I'm sadly unaware of - Tori Amos has always featured prominently on the airwaves.

Around here, though, she's pretty well completely absent from commercial radio. I say 'pretty well' because I realised recently that the opening bars of the remix of Professional Widow form the background music to traffic reports on the most popular local station.

Years ago I was convinced that Jackie's Strength was the song that would give her true mainstream (albeit modest) success. It didn't. I've pretty much given up hope of her making inroads in Australia now unless she has a monster hit in the USA first. And I don't really think that will happen. But by golly, if she keeps writing songs like Goodbye Pisces she at least has a shot.

Musically, the song couldn't be any smoother. An obscenely short but sparkling verse gives way to an even more obscenely singable chorus. The 'Chinese' effect (something Tori is evidently aware of, given how frequently she is pairing this song with China) is cute enough to be noticed without being overbearing. I really like the guitar riff as well.

The lyrics are simple - at least by Tori standards - without being trite. There aren't any wince-making metaphors like the ones I'm still getting over in Cars and Guitars. I love phrases like "is that all I am, just a doll you got used to?" and "if it could freeze my heart wouldn't float away".

You know you're doing well when amazon.com says you've written one of the better break-up songs in recent memory. The ache of being back on the shelf, alone... with a melody that might just help you through it.

Within about three listens of the album, Goodbye Pisces had risen to near the top of my favourite songs, and it's stayed there ever since. Please, dear God, get it on the radio so more people have a chance to agree with me.

Scary!

I know I have a generally excellent memory, and especially for numbers...

...but no sane person should know their Visa card off by heart. And I just proved that I do.

Monday bliss for one

How to create a perfect Monday evening, at least for orfeo:

- come home to find not one, but TWO CDs in your letterbox, both of them without a single note you've ever heard before

- put the first CD on while getting ready for dinner, and while getting dinner ready

- succeed in cooking a particularly succulent stir fry

- continue to listen to the first CD, revelling in it

- watch the season finale of Desperate Housewives, delighting in it

- watch your favourite interviewer in the world in action (incidentally, if you buy an American record from the 80s with what sounds like a black man wailing wordlessly at the end of a track, there's a good chance that wail was done by a white Jewish woman from Australia named Renee Geyer...)

- put on the second CD while washing up and writing in your blog

- ignore the ironing.

Busy.

Not unhappy about it really. I've got several ideas for blog posts that may or may not last until I have time to work on them.

Apparently this is my 100th post. Celebrate as you see fit!