Ok, here goes. This “road map” is absolutely useless, risk averse to the point of suffocation, all stick no carrot. There we were, the faithful music industry, once again the lap dogs of our overlords encouraging everyone to get vaccinated. “Vax the Nation” my peers screamed loyally from their social media platforms to hopefully cajole the suspicious, reluctant, terrified (rightly or wrongly) community, to go get the jab so we could get back to what we do. And despite best efforts, and the great uptake amongst people who were not persuaded at first but then maybe thought better of their initial decision, for all kinds of reasons, we are being royally screwed anyway. Does anyone understand amongst this leadership cohort that gigs with the kinds of limits being touted will not work?
We don’t know where we stand with this disease & that’s ok, it’s one of life’s challenges. We don’t know everything and most people will admit to that, that is the courageous, practical and honest thing to admit and with all these unknowns, risk is something best judged on an individual level, not by fiat. But that is not something we hear from our leadership, all we hear is certainty, certainty that will often contradict the previous certainty. Either the vaccines work or they don’t. The campaign being mounted would suggest they do work, so if you’re only allowing double vaccinated people into venues we should be able to fill our venues with music and punters. If they don’t work it’s long past time our leadership admitted they don’t know. We do know from overseas experience that a tiny percentage of double vaccinated people will potentially contract COVID, an even smaller percentage will get sick & a vanishingly small percentage will die. And if that concerns an individual you don’t have to take the risk. But this holding pattern cannot hold.
At some point we have to be able to get back to work. At some point we have to embrace life which also involves embracing risk. Hey guess what, we’re all gonna die, it’s an inescapable reality, the great bargain every living creature embarks on at birth.
Happy New Year to the faithful & the unfaithful, to the movers & the shakers, the sad & lonely, to those who get it done & those who want it done. May you appreciate this is all a gift that one day is taken away and passed on like a baton in a relay that you wish could be held onto just a little bit longer. xx
From 1999 a rarity called Happy New Year. By the time New Year rolled around in 1999/2000 we were in hospital with a one day old baby girl, our third. We briefly wished each other a happy one and then went back to our dreaming.
From Paul Kelly’s self-described ‘mongrel memoir’ ‘How To Make Gravy’ pg 139-140
"Everybody Wants To Touch Me’ is sometimes read as a riff on celebrity. That seems to be Sydney cabaret singer Paul Capsis’s take on it on his album of the same name. Medusa-haired Deborah Conway, Melbourne singer-songwriter and mother of three, knows a little about celebrity and pregnancy both. She fronted a band called Do-Re-Mi in the eighties and had a big hit with a song called ‘Man Overboard’, featuring the memorable lines ‘Your pubic hairs on my pillow, your stubble rings the sink.’ Her shapely posterior was also famous, full-framed and proudly bare on big Bluegrass Jeans billboards nationwide, with the tagline ‘Get yours into Bluegrass’.
Do-Re-Mi functioned as a collective - a shaky construct in pop music at the best of times - and used language such as ‘ideologically unsound’ (the predecessor of ‘politically incorrect’) in their band meetings. Deborah, with her ...
Antarctica, destination of majesty, of mystery, of dreamlike otherworldliness; the air so clear you could see the future. Our nights rocked by the seas, our days filled with light, colour, wildlife, adventure.
And no internet! For 11 whole days the world could not intrude.
Thanks @Chimu & @Intrepid
Back in Australia with almost enough days to recover from jet lag before the next stop - Israel.
