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Sydney Park.
"I used to say I'd found in Steve's bar the fathers I needed, but this wasn't quite right. At some point the bar itself became my father, its dozens of men melding into one enormous male eye looking over my shoulder, providing that needed alternative to my mother, that Y chromosome to her X. My mother didn't know she was competing with the men of the bar, and the men didn't know they were vying with her. They all assumed that they were on the same page, because they all shared one antiquated idea about manhood. My mother and the men believed that being a good man is an art, and being a bad man is a tragedy, for the world as much as for those who depend on the tragic man in question. Though my mother first introduced me to this idea, Steve's bar was where I saw its truth demonstrated daily. Steve's bar attracted all kinds of women, a stunning array, but as a boy I noticed only its improbable assortment of good and bad men. Wandering freely among this unlikely fraternity of alphas, listening to the stories of the soldiers and ballplayers, poets and cops, millionaires and bookies, actors and crooks who leaned nightly against Steve's bar, I heard them say again and again that the differences among them were great, but the reasons they had come to be so different were slight."
www.tenderbar.com
The years slid by, that was what astonished him the most. One minute it was all future, next minute it was all past. There was no way forward and no way back. His present days were quieter than usual; the sadder darker traces having subsided, if not for good at least for the moment. He was happier than usual, which was strange, because he had never been happy. You're so laid back, people would say, but that was not the way it felt from the inside. He gazed at ordinary people with envy, he wanted to be like them, young, fresh, sun glinting off their brand new cars, handsome in the daylight. Before the chaos overtook him and turned him into a wretch, before everything turned into sad chaos. There were threads stringing by, bits of life, fragments of others, buildings, cars, misshapen design, none of it meant anything. He just wanted the day to be over.
There was a new dark force and it all had to do with growing older; being somewhere he had never expected. It was easy to be drunk and charming when you were young and handsome; now the days were long and dry and his heads ran championships everyday. Went to see No Country For Old Men yesterday. Maybe I missed something, it all seemed so grim. I was conjured forth from dust; we were telling stories and the stories ran out. He railed against the system and nothing changed, nothing at all. Priceless, talentless prats controlled the world, the flow of information, and there was no way to break through. He tried to summon up the past, to give his own days meaning, and all there was were fragments, moments he had felt more truly alive; images that coalesced into his own story.
In Amsterdam, the horsemen had come at dusk. The police sat mounted high on their steeds. The knots of junkies scattered, reforming in their wake. In Spain, the parks filled each evening with people buying, selling, lurking. They were light fingered, and he couldn't believe they would rip him off, but they did. The heat filled their waking days. Time was at a premium. Cara had her wallet stolen, the wallet full of the very credit cards we were living on with such abandon. I was always good at helping heiresses spend their money, a good buddy in times of identity crisis, undemanding, funny, always able to get whatever was required.
The Spanish waiters served the bourbon and coke with panache, there was always hash if you wanted it. We would be wasted before sunset, crying out for a solution, our sacred, guiding angels long ignored, the spiral still fun when there was plenty of money. Two days ago he made a fool of himself. He was angry at having made himself vulnerable, at giving these talentless gits the opportunity to say no. It was all meant to be a put down. But you can't be put down unless you allow yourself, and his flash of anger, contempt, showed a different self. They wouldn't know a story if it sat on their face, he stormed. They're happy to run propaganda and garbage from someone else, but a genuine story about a man who had been jailed unjustly three times, nope.
It was all too much. He knew the media was rigged. He knew the world he inhabited was a floating castle, full of talentless gits who rode the hierarchy, while he went nowhere, sitting in the same place year after year. No one had the courage to change things. There were no redundancy offers. His life at Fairfax, so long ago, kept coming back. He had thought a life in journalism would lead somewhere. But all it led to was another story, another story, the humble hack on the highways of print, the fingers flying across the keyboards. That was all. It was no way to survive. The exodus is on. Yesterday's papers headlined the story that half of Sydney wants to escape; it has become too expensive to live here, nothing adds up anymore, things we have been saying for years now, grizzling in tune with shop keepers. You can't get ahead, you can't get ahead.
At the same time as there was vast amounts of wealth in Sydney, flash cars, vast stone piles perched around the harbour, enormous homes. Multi-millionaires in grand castles. And even in the suburbs, the mini-mansions, McMansions, grass castles, all transformed around us while we remained poor, just got up and went to work. Failed to prosper. They could make you feel second rate; the hierarchical nature of man perfecting the put down. Those talentless gits could say no to story ideas; and he just had to cop it sweet. The travesty of these days, these people, these swarming cockroaches. Someone should step on them. Someone should put them out of their dreary little misery. And he could rise up again, be glorious again, create great swathes of stories where there was no one to say no; to prosper in a dark time. Instead, the colours didn't fit, and the rewards were poorly dispersed. The worst people did well in this upside down world. He was so glad he had built an escape route.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-great-sydney-exodus/2008/03/02/1204402275498.html
ONE in five Sydneysiders are so sick of traffic and the high cost of living they are considering moving to another city.
And in a blow to Sydney's creative energy, NSW is falling behind the rest of Australia as people in artistic and cultural jobs abandon the state.
The latest Herald/Nielsen poll found 21 per cent of people surveyed are thinking of leaving Sydney, with 39 per cent identifying the city's high cost of living as their reason.
Crucially, 22 per cent cited job opportunities elsewhere or a job transfer as their main reason for considering moving, while traffic congestion was the reason for 13 per cent.
A separate study by the Centre of International Economics found NSW is losing jobs in a once-thriving sector that helped give Sydney its "glamour city" tag.
Employment in creative and cultural jobs fell by 2 per cent in NSW between 2001 and 2006, compared with 1 per cent growth nationally.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/03/2178178.htm
The Sydney Chamber of Commerce says the New South Wales Government urgently needs to improve Sydney's public transport and infrastructure to stop a mass exodus of skilled workers.
An AC Nielsen poll shows one in five respondents are considering leaving the city because of problems with traffic, public transport and the high cost of living.
Chamber executive director Patricia Forsythe says while there is no evidence of people actually leaving, it is just a matter of time.
"Sydney is the engine room of the economy of Australia," she said.
"Twenty-five per cent of our GDP comes from economic activity in the Sydney basin.
"We are dependent on growth and economic activity, and at a time of significant skills shortage, the very last thing that employers can afford is to have any sort of exodus."
Ms Forsythe says the public transport and traffic congestion in Sydney is not acceptable.
http://www.smartcompany.com.au/Free-Articles/Trends/20080303-Planning-a-move-to-Sydney-You-might-want-to-reconsider.html
Planning a move to Sydney? Why? Everyone wants to move out
Monday, 3 March 2008
One in five Sydney residents are considering moving to another city, says a Fairfax/Nielsen poll of 986 Sydneysiders and reported in Business Spectator.
Of the respondents thinking of moving away, most blamed the high cost of living in the harbour city.
Forty per cent of those considering a move cited living costs, while 22% cited job opportunities elsewhere or a job transfer.
This trend could have negative repercussions for business operations and the job market in Sydney.
Sam and Major, Sydney Park.
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