Seeing thousands of happy young Catholics on the streets of Sydney this week has really impressed me. For someone whose impression of Catholicism has been dominated by old guys and long, boring services (no, wait, that’s Anglicans, right?) the youth and enthusiasm has changed my perspective.
Shame then, that the public reporting of the Pope and Cardinal Pell’s messages has mostly focused on them decrying the ills of the modern world - sex, violent entertainment, not breeding enough. It’s one of those things where the medium and the message get a bit confused. Apart from the robes and Stations of the Cross and so on, it’s been a highly contemporary event - live music, text message alerts to the pilgrims, a social networking site to keep in touch with friends. Cultural trappings have been adopted but then the overall culture is condemned.
Maybe the message has been lost in communication via the media - it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. But it’s a question all Christians face when looking at a culture that has so much good and so much bad. Do we pick and choose the bits we like and use them to make our message and our church culture funkier? Do we retreat into some kind of anti-cultural seclusion? Is there another option?
Making church culture “relevant” works sometimes. Occasionally a kid will come for the band, stay for the faith. But culture is more than technology and music and visual flair. If you’re sharing a message that conflicts with the conventional wisdom, you have to realise that the people you’re speaking to are part of that culture and shaped by that culture - what they hear isn’t always what you intend. So when you stand up and criticise that culture outright, sometimes you sound like an old man in red shoes having a whinge.
I’m not a fan of major public events and this city is full of the suckers. Last year my sleeping and waking hours were cut through by the sound of the choppers protecting George Bush from (presumably) air-to-surface missiles during APEC. This year my walk to work is being disrupted by a big fence around where part of World Youth Day will be held.
But they’re minor annoyances, in truth, and the amount of vitriol that is being spewed around about World Youth Day clearly has nothing to do with traffic and pedestrian movements. It’s much more to do with the Catholic Church and how it’s viewed in sections of Australian society. You’d think we’d moved on from old fashioned Protestant hatred of “Micks”, but it’s just been replaced by secular, liberal bile. I’m not sure it’s any better.
The excuses are all around condoms and AIDS and kiddy-fiddling priests. I’m pro-condom and (yes, amazing this) anti-pedophile like most folks, but do my fellow caring, sharing lefties realise that, gosh, there are actually REAL people in the Catholic Church? That it’s not a big self-flagellating, mediaevalist mass of religious maniacs hell-bent on making every last African die of AIDS? There’s something profoundly anti-humanist about the way humanists demonise and belittle religious believers - something I’ve discussed regarding Richard Dawkins et al. And it makes my blood boil.
I admit, I’m biased. I’m a Christian, a right-wing nutjob, a pre-modern, ignorant, gay-hating, sexually repressed ball of irresponsible, dangerous beliefs I’ve blindly accepted. Actually, most people wouldn’t call me those things to my face. Even some anti-religious people might choose to qualify it with a “Christians are like that but you’re different.” Maybe I am, but maybe I’m not. That’s the problem with demonising an entire section of the population - you’re going to accidentally include a hell of a lot of well-intentioned, good people. I guess the question is whether you care.
I’m a nomadic kind of guy. My parents trained me well, moving towns four times in my first fifteen years of life. Since then I’ve clocked up another two of my own and then returned to the city of my birth, Sydney. It’s not a life that equips you for staying put and laying down roots.
Readers of this blog and its predecessor will know how much of my time in Canberra was spent thinking about leaving. And there were plenty of ex-Canberrans ensconced in other cities that were encouraging me in that. That made sense. There were also Canberra residents doing their bit to persuade me to stick around. That also made sense and was really kind of nice.
Now I’ve got a girlfriend on the other side of the world who’s making it her mission to get me to join her. Funnily enough, I’ve had a couple of Sydney friends tell me recently that I should do just that. Maybe they want to get rid of me. More likely (I hope!) they’re just big fans of Young Love and want to see me happy.
Right now there are reasons to go and to stay, as is always the case. I just know that running for the next thing has always been too easy for me.
Tonight I finished off the last of my three book reviews penned in the last week. The first two were positive but this one was a doozy. It was a perfect storm of book criticism. I’d had a rubbish day at work and I came home and cracked open a bottle of red. After a couple of glasses I was on fire - the frustrations of my day combined with the crapness of the book in question and inspired me to new heights of savagery. The vitriol and bile were flowing and I thought I was soooo damn funny.
Then I stopped and thought about it. Sure, some big shot writer isn’t going to care what an unqualified 26 year old writing for a free webzine thinks about his book. But an Aussie writer carried by a boutique publishing house? Maybe.
So I took out the most gratuitous insults and added some compliments (well, ONE compliment). I’ve still only given it 4/10 because it annoyed me and ruined a perfectly good Monday night. I think the only way to be truly brutal as a critic is to not care what the writer would think, or to convince yourself that your tough love will do them good.
With any luck, tomorrow night I’ll be venturing out for some karaoke action. Who would have thought that I would become such a fiend for the microphone? Not I.
My first experience was at The Laundry’s “Extreme Karaoke” night back in my student days. One night, well-liquored and over-confident, I stepped up to perform Pulp’s “Common People”. At the time I felt it went really well. Hindsight tells me that I was tuneless and encumbered by an appalling fake accent. And I spilled my beer.
Second time was back at The Laundry and the song was Ash’s “Girl From Mars”. Sadly, I couldn’t remember the lyrics or the tune and I didn’t even have the fuzzy distance of beer to delude myself.
I’ve never rated myself as a singer and these inauspcious beginnings made me think my rockstar ambitions might be better served as a guitarist. Or a roadie.
But four years later, I found myself hiring a karaoke booth with a few friends. We drank smuggled-in VBs and took turns on the machine. Maybe it was the smaller group setting, maybe it was a fluke, but I sounded pretty good. Sure, I failed to pull off Babylon Zoo’s “Spaceman”, but in fairness to me half the vocals are at double-speed. You try it sometime.
Then in March I got my Bryan Adams on at a friend’s 30th with “Summer of ‘69″. Not flawless and more enthusiasm than technical skill on display, but it went down a treat.
I think the secret is that I don’t care anymore that I’m not a brilliant singer. I don’t hurt people’s ears and I have a good time doing it. And for a chronic perfectionist, I think that’s a good place to be.
My blogging here has been pretty intermittent, especially in recent months. It occasionally seems it’s because I don’t have things to say - but I do, I just don’t say them here. And yesterday it hit me that I was never really a solo blogger.
In the early days (c. 2005) I blogged as part of a little gang of Canberra people, expanding to include others around Australia and the world whose blogs I interacted with. Looking at my blogroll, it’s depressing to think about how few of my blog friends are still writing regularly. In 2008, it’s mostly just the irrepressible Jen.
So if I want to keep doing this and to feel like my blog is something more than the public face of my inner monologue, I think I need to expand the circle once more.
After over two years of book reviewing for Popmatters and never once getting a free book, I felt it was safe to put my hand up for a massive wishlist, thinking they would never come through. Well, I now have three books to read and review in the next three weeks. Pessimism will be my downfall.
This year I’ve bettered my Sydney Film Festival attendance in one night. Last year all I managed was Hong Sang-Soo’s Woman On A Beach, which was pretty good but a bit too detached to get any real affection from me. Tonight, I saw Roy Andersson’s You, The Living (Du Levande) and Pang Ho-Cheung’s Trivial Matters. Both were classic film festival fare - off-beat, random and kind of sweet.
You, The Living is the one that will probably stick with me. It’s not going to be a lovable film for a lot of people - it’s deeply pessimistic (even for a Swedish film), it’s shot inside some of the ugliest buildings ever, and most of the cast are obese, middle-aged losers. But it’s so funny and true to life in a lot of ways. The characters are constantly experiencing the little humiliations and frustrations and conflicts that we all do - and yet remain completely oblivious to the similar experiences of those around them, exclaiming “No one understands me!”
There’s actually a beautiful moral to the film, or at least there seems to be to me, and that’s be nice to people, because they’ve probably had a shitty day too.
Well it looks like it might be curtains for Hillary by the end of the day - and one bitter, claws-out political battle will be replaced with another. It makes you wonder what kind of person voluntarily puts themselves in a process whereby they endure a year of insults and personal attacks to be briefly in charge of a tanking economy for which they will be personally blamed.
Once upon a time, this here blogger fancied himself as a budding politician. Something about the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate and the mental challenge of policy-making appealled to me. Then I read Mungo MacCallum’s How To Be A Megalomaniac - sort of an Australian political Screwtape Letters - and I had my doubts. And I saw the pissiness and immaturity of Melbourne University student politics and it was all over.
I’ve spent my last four years working around politicians, which is my indirect way of experiencing what I once aspired to be. The more I see of them, the less I want to be in their shoes. And the less I think I would have what it takes. Key attributes I am missing include: total self-belief; a flexible approach to the truth; and the “killer” instinct.
For all my faults, I have been faced with the startling revelation that I’m just not enough of a shit.
