New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know the neighbourhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built for himself, and he realised that he had no intention of ever leaving it again.
Paul Auster, City of Glass.
He met Hillary absolutely by chance in the city. He hadn't laid eyes on her for at least ten, perhaps more, years. She was still the same person, but older, obviously, thin, a good looking woman riddled with unexplained neuroses, always tense and struggling with some internal drama. They went for coffee, in the old converted stone toilets on the side of Hyde Park, once one of the city's most famous beats, where men stood ten abreast wanking into the stainless steel urinal, all eyes and weird tension. Now the place is yet another upmarket Sy8dney cafe, where the tiniest biscuit will set you back four dollars and the owner is Italian, or faux Italian.
Her life had been a matter of letting go, she said, of almost all attention to physical or material things. There had been no children. There had been no job. There was no car, no house, no property. She worked occasionally as a gardener, but it was winter and there was little work. She lived at Mackerell Beach, an isolated cove on Pittwater. The last ferry over was at five; after which it was completely isolated. Once, only a few years ago, there had been a thriving community of 90 people there. Now she was one of the last, there were only 14 left. Most of the houses were owned now by wealthy Sydney siders. One was an architect designed masterpiece owned by a wealthy woman who owned so many houses she genuinely forgot she owned it. When she remembered, she sent her secretary to investigate. She had only been there in person twice, that chrome and black masterpiece. Hillary did her gardening.
She was going to Cockatoo Island to look at the Bienalle art installations, and to wander around the island, which was a fascinating slice of Sydney history by any measure. He hadn't been there since the 1980s, when as a young and comparatively inexperienced reporter he had been sent to cover the auction of all the old equipment from the ship building yards. The sale had been a crying tragedy from the very beginning, the rape and pillage of what could have been an astonishing working museum. The island was covered with red gums when Europeans arrived in the harbour in 1788. In the 1830s it had been used as a prison for allegedly recalcitrant prisoners. Holes were dug in the ground and the prisoners were thrown in and left to rot. Their food was thrown in through a hole at the top. It was just another example of the unspeakable cruelty of the English.
The island became the major ship building yard from the mid 1800s; and the last ship was built there in the early 1980s. There was more than a a century of working class life immaculately preserved there; the girly calendars from the 1940s still hanging on the walls, hundreds of lathes and giant machines whose function he couldn't quite determine. But it was a gold mine of industrial heritage. And the bastards in government, a Labor government if he remembered rightly, couldn't have cared less. All these massive old working sheds were stripped and much of the material sold off as scrap metal.
They caught the ferry out there; in one of those random days in Sydney where you can end up on one of the most beautiful harbours in the world more or less by accident, and he relayed this story of the pillage of this astonishing place; a place where thousands of men had laboured for more than a century building the nation's ships. Labour princeling Kim Beazely was Defence Minister at the time, and much of the equipment was being transferred over to Western Australia, to the shipping yards there. It was appalling greed; smashing this heritage for a few bob, for scrap metal.
It was then I realised that Labour has no respect whatsoever for its working class constituency, and no respect for the industrial heritage in which the men which made the party worked.
This trend in Labour has only worsened, with their takeover in the 1970s by numerous interest groups, urban greens, feminists, proponents of multiculturalism. They sold their soul and betrayed their origins long ago; and the ransacking of Cockatoo Island was a classic example. I told this story on the phone; of going back to the office to write the story, in the days before mobile phones, of trying frantically to find some urban architect or urban historian who would condemn what was happening. Such types were rare those days, wankers who couldn't be bothered answering their phones, or government employees too gutless to stand up. I couldn't find anyone to utter a single word of protest; and so I wrote the story and lamented in protest.
Nor were their voices raised in the coming days, and this tragedy of rape and pillage passed into the annals of Sydney history almost without notice. And now they're holding art exhibitions out their in those wonderfully atmospheric, utterly stripped old buildings. Putridly bad astonishingly boring video installations which somehow pass as art; celebrating more often than not the working class cultures of other countries, Spanish, Italian, American. The Chomsky abstract was nothing but a poor quality black and white video the great man himself going on about the evils of giant energy companies, as if we had never heard it before. Another exhibition celebrated the old posters of the Black Panthers. Yet another showed footage of an Italian workers uprising.
Here in the wreckage of our own working class culture. Here in the place where the bastards had stripped everything from this wonderful place. Here, now, a massively government funded art show of talentless and feeble exhibitions celebrating international working class culture in the raped and pillaged remnants of our own. It was an irony lost on almost everybody. It's nesting season for sea gullls, which normally breed on rocky islands off the coast, but hundreds of them have made the island their rookery, sitting on their dark green speckled eggs, occasionally protecting a little furry grey bundle. Everywhere you went the gulls squawked aggressively if you came too near. They put on a far more interesting exhibition than the art itself.
THE BIGGER STORY:
Skeptical quotes from Novelist Michael Crichton:
"I would like to suggest a few symbolic actions that right—might really mean something. One of them, which is very simple, 99% of the American population doesn’t care, is ban private jets. Nobody needs to fly in them, ban them now. And, and in addition, [APPLAUSE] "Let’s have the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), the Sierra Club and Greenpeace make it a rule that all of their members, cannot fly on private jets. They must get their houses off the [electrical] grid. They must live in the way that they’re telling everyone else to live. And if they won’t do that, why should we? And why should we take them seriously? [APPLAUSE]"
"I suddenly think about my friends, you know, getting on their private jets. And I think, well, you know, maybe they have the right idea. Maybe all that we have to do is mouth a few platitudes, show a good, expression of concern on our faces, buy a Prius, drive it around for a while and give it to the maid, attend a few fundraisers and you’re done. Because, actually, all anybody really wants to do is talk about it."
"I mean, haven’t we actually raised temperatures so much that we, as stewards of the planet, have to act? These are the questions that friends of mine ask as they are getting on board their private jets to fly to their second and third homes. [LAUGHTER]"
"Everyday 30,000 people on this planet die of the diseases of poverty. There are, a third of the planet doesn’t have electricity. We have a billion people with no clean water. We have half a billion people going to bed hungry every night. Do we care about this? It seems that we don’t. It seems that we would rather look a hundred years into the future than pay attention to what’s going on now. I think that's unacceptable. I think that’s really a disgrace."
Skeptical quotes of University of London’s emeritus professor of biogeography Philip Stott:
"What we see in this is an enormous danger for politicians in terms of their hypocrisy. I’m not going to say anything about Al Gore and his house. [LAUGHTER] But it is a very serious point."
"In the early 20th century, 95% of scientists believe in eugenics. [LAUGHTER] Science does not progress by consensus, it progresses by falsification and by what we call paradigm shifts."
"The first Earth Day in America claimed the following, that because of global cooling, the population of America would have collapsed to 22 million by the year 2000. And of the average calorie intake of the average American would be wait for this, 2,400 calories, would good it were. [LAUGHTER] It’s nonsense and very dangerous. And what we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes."
"Angela Merkel the German chancellor, my own good prime minister (Tony Blair) for whom I voted -- let me emphasize, arguing in public two weeks ago as to who in Annie get the gun style could produce the best temperature. ‘I could do two degrees C said Angela.’ ‘No, I could only do three said Tony.’ [LAUGHTER] Stand back a minute, those are politicians, telling you that they can control climate to a degree Celsius.”
“And can I remind everybody that IPCC that we keep talking about, very honestly admits that we know very little about 80% of the factors behind climate change. Well let’s use an engineer; I don’t think I’d want to cross Brooklyn Bridge if it were built by an engineer who only understood 80% of the forces on that bridge. [LAUGHTER]”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/us/politics/26YORK.html
Clinton Tells Her Supporters to Back Obama
DENVER – In a ballroom overflowing with many of her most diehard supporters, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday implored New York Democrats to work as hard to elect Senator Barack Obama as they worked for her.
Skip to next paragraph 2008 Democratic Convention
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Mrs. Clinton, while acknowledging that true party unity may take time, repeatedly told them it would be disastrous for the country to endure four more years of a Republican in the White House. Despite news reports of lingering tensions between her campaign and Mr. Obama’s, Mrs. Clinton sought to dispel those notions in her remarks.
“We were not all on the same side as Democrats, but we are now,” the senator said. Mrs. Clinton also took issue with a just-released ad from the John McCain campaign that questioned why Mr. Obama did not select her as his running mate, and used footage of her criticizing the Illinois senator during the primary campaign.
“Let me state what I think about their tactics and these ads,” she said a bit mischievously. “I’m Hillary Rodham Clinton and I do not approve of that message.”
The crowd rose to its feet and started shouting, “Hillary! Hillary!”
The event was emotional at times, and members of the audience interrupted her frequently with hearty applause and numerous standing ovations. People pressed a rope line to greet and hug her, some with tears in their eyes.
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10296609?source=most_emailed
BEIJING - By the third day of the Olympics, I had grasped the picture here. Loud and clear. With a cup of rice on the side.
I was at a restaurant around the corner from our hotel. I'd been there a few days earlier. Same waitress. She spoke English and exuded fun. But this time, before I could order, she had a special menu item she wanted to discuss.
"Eight gold," she said, holding up her fingers to show me the number. "China. Eight gold."
This would be a continuing theme.
As we learned during the opening ceremony two weeks ago, the Chinese invented gunpowder and paper.
As we learned before Sunday night's closing ceremony, the Chinese also invented the constantly updated Olympic scoreboard.
In 28 years of covering the Olympics, I had never seen anything like it. People always keep track of who's winning, of course. That's kind of the point. But the medal count is not supposed to be an official part of the Games. Usually, you see it only in newspapers and during the TV coverage.
Not here. The medal scoreboards were everywhere. On giant screens in the public squares. On small screens in the subway. At the immense Oriental Plaza shopping mall downtown there was a printed medal update posted daily at every escalator. Not to mention on the fingers of my waitress.
China was at the top, naturally. Thanks to a huge government push and huge government funding, the country made a huge improvement over its performance four years ago
Countryside near Gunnedah, NSW.
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