Welcome to Australia

The Tomasz Stanko concert was on the Friday night, so I'd originally planned to stay in Sydney on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, but Mrs Fool, ever sentient of the opportunity to save a few dollars, found that the hotel tariffs were cheaper on weekdays than Saturdays, so we decided to fly into Sydney on the Wednesday. This was Australia Day, but we saw no reason why this should affect us, especially as we wouldn't be arriving till the evening.

In fact there were advantages to arriving on a public holiday. For a start, the streets were relatively free of traffic, making the taxi journey from the airport to our hotel a swift one. We checked in and went out for a walk, intending to buy some food at a supermarket or convenience store on the way back to eat in our room. It had been a scorcher of a day (the hottest Australia Day in decades, apparently), and the temperature was till in the 30s. Along the way we passed a cheap pasta and pizza place with outside seating facing the street and decided to try it out. The pizza and Greek salad were surprisingly good.

The restaurant was near Darling Harbour, and as we were eating we watched people walking by on their way to view the fireworks display later that evening. A surprising number had Australian flags draped over their shoulders, wore Australian flag T-shirts, or had Australian flags painted on their faces or bodies. I said to Mrs Fool I thought there was something childish about such displays of nationalism. In truth, I find them rather disquieting. Mrs Fool agreed with me, mainly because Haruki Murakami had expressed similar sentiments in a book she had just read (written after Murakami visited Australia during the Sydney Olympics). Mrs Fool then ventured an opinion of her own, expressing surprise at the number of Asian people with Australian flags painted on the faces. I countered by saying that nationalism was about nationality, not about ethnicity, but deep down I knew she had a point. One only needs to think back to the ugly scenes in Manly on Australia Day in 2009, when a mob of up to 100 drunken youths verbally and physically attacked non-white Australians, to realize how easily the celebration of national identity can become a celebration of racial or ethnic pride, something exclusionary as opposed to something inclusionary. On the television news that night, much was made of the fact that arrests in 2011 were down 20% on the previous Australia Day, with only 180 boozy revellers nabbed by police in the entire state of New South Wales.

The following day we shopped (can you call it that even if you don't buy anything?) and in the evening caught the bus to Leichhardt, where we'd booked a table at Elio's, an Italian restaurant we went to several years ago and liked. The meal was OK (and I learnt what a spatchcock is), but negotiating Sydney's bus system during the evening rush hour to get there took some of the gloss off the evening. On the way back, the bus driver (a Sikh) had to swerve and brake to avoid ploughing into a car door, whose owner had chosen the moment the bus driver was pulling out from a bus stop to open it. This was dramatic enough, but the interaction that followed was even more startling. The bus driver, who had brought his vehicle to a stop, opened his door and shouted something at the female driver of the car. (She was plainly at fault; not only was she parked in a bus lane, but she hadn't looked behind her before opening her car door.) She responded by striding over and yelling at the top of her voice, "Don't drive so bloody fast. This is Australia." The subtext was obvious.

The next day we spent the morning looking around the Museum of Contemporary Art and the early afternoon exploring The Rocks. For dinner we went to Medusa, a lovely Greek restaurant not far from Darling Harbour. We had the most delicious entrée of grilled octopus. As we tucked into the tentacled treats, we mused on how the Japanese and the Greeks both share a passion for munching on these multi-limbed molluscs. For a main I had the vegetarian Moussaka, which was so satisfying I had no room for any baklava, a pity seeing as it's possibly my favourite sweet thing on the face of the earth.

And then it was off to see the Tomaz Stanko Quintet at the City Recital Hall. Once again, Stanko delivered. Mrs Fool said it was the best jazz concert she had ever been to. For me the concert didn't quite live up to the experience of seeing Stanko's quartet in 2009, but I put that down to the fact that this time my expectations were so high. It was interesting to see him playing with a completely different line-up. I tend to prefer purely acoustic jazz over anything with amplified instruments, but I found it difficult not to appreciate the skill and sensitivity of the young (compared to the 68-year-old Stanko) electric guitarist and electric bassist. Occasionally the quintet produced a Bitches Brew-like barrage of noise, but for the most part the music was restrained and melodic with just a touch of melancholy. Just the way I like it.

Buzzing

The blogosphere is abuzz with talk of Sacha Baron Cohen playing Saddam Hussein in a movie adaptation of a novel penned by the late Iraqi dictator, but I'm still reeling from the news, first revealed to me in this article on the Guardian website about the current obsession with fact-based movies and novels (Is the concentration on reality stopping writers using the imagination for storytelling?), that Baron Cohen is playing Freddie Mercury in a biopic of the Queen front man. Due out in 2012 apparently.

Speaking of buzzing, I'm off to Sydney tomorrow to see the Tomasz Stanko Quintet. Hoping the concert's as good as the one put on by Stanko's quartet in Wellington a couple of years ago. Back on Saturday.

Fossil

I spotted this can carcass by the side of the road as I was leaving Chino on day 3 of my Koshu Kaido walk. Who knows how long it had been lying there? If I'd been travelling by car or cycling I would have passed it by.

An embarassing admission

Until yesterday I thought the word "teetotaller" was spelt "teatotaller", its derivation having something to do with drinking lots of tea instead of alcohol. Its exact etymology is unclear, but one possible explanation, which traces the word's origins to a meeting of the Preston Temperance Society in 1832 or 1833, is quite intriguing. To quote from Wikipedia:

The story attributes the word to Dicky Turner, a member of the society, who had a stammer, and in a speech said that nothing would do but "tee-tee-total abstinence".

Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo

As I've alluded to previously, it was as a result of seeing a documentary about him (Burden of Dreams) and learning of his passion for walking that I first became interested in the German filmmaker Werner Herzog. Only later, after seeing Encounters at the End of the World at a film festival, did I become a fan of his documentaries. Since then I've watched Grizzly Man, Wheel of Time, The White Diamond, and most recently, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Until a few weeks ago, however, I'd only seen two of his features (Rescue Dawn and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans), neither of which I really enjoyed. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down the other day to watch one of Herzog's first features, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), a DVD of which I borrowed from a friend.

The opening sequence alone, shot near Machu Picchu on the side of a mountain with a sheer vertical drop of 600 metres, is, as they say, well worth the price of admission. And Klaus Kinski is anything but dull. Some of the other cast members, however, are not so convincing, perhaps understandably so given they're not professional actors. This amateurishness extends to other aspects of the production. But then Aguirre, the Wrath of God was shot on a budget of just US$370,000, a third of which went to Kinski (apparently he demanded another US$1 million to come into the studio to dub his own dialogue, forcing Herzog to hire another actor to do his dialogue instead). Amazingly, it was all shot on a single 35-mm camera, which, according to Herzog, he stole from what is now the Munich Film School.

A decade after the release of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog returned to the jungles of Peru to make another feature, Fitzcarraldo, this time with a budget of US$6 million and a number of famous actors. But to say things didn't quite go to plan would be a gross understatement. Both Jason Robards, who was cast in the title role of an obsessed opera fan who dreams of building an opera house in the Amazonian jungle, and Mick Jagger, who was cast as Fitzcarraldo's "retarded actor sidekick", had to pull out midway through filming, Robards due to illness (his doctor in the United States forbade him to return) and Jagger due to Rolling Stones touring commitments. Herzog himself briefly considered playing the part of Fitzcarraldo, but in the end he called on his old "friend", Klaus Kinski.

Central to the story of Fitzcarraldo is the transportation of a 340-ton ship over a mountain between two rivers. Herzog insisted on shooting this part of the film on location using a real ship and old-fashioned technology (pulleys and cables), and the problems this created helped establish his reputation as a megalomaniacal film director with little regard for the safety of his cast and crew. Herzog emphatically denies that anyone was ever at risk while the ship was being pulled over the mountain. And contrary to popular belief, no one was killed on the film set, although one extra drowned after stealing a boat and capsizing it on a river.

In Herzog on Herzog, Herzog explains the decision to use a real boat as follows:

I want to take cinema audiences back to the earliest days, like when the Lumiere brothers screened their film of a train pulling into a station. Reports say that the audience fled in panic because they believed the train would run them over. I cannot confirm this, maybe it is a legend, but I do very much like this story...

...Nowadays even six-year-olds know when something is a special effect and even how the shot is done. I remember when the film was shown in Germany there was shouting from the audiences at the moment when the boat was hoisted up on to the mountain. Little by little they realized that this was no trick.