Mark Mordue's Blog, page 4

Consuming Passions: Jarvis Cocker, Pulp and This Is Hardcore

Jarvis Cocker wanders through London's Tower Books and Records like a spy in a foreign country. Close by, music fans are harvesting the racks of pop releases, among them the extraordinary 18-year legacy of his band Pulp.
"You must feel like you're running the gauntlet," I whisper. "It's OK," he says crisply, "as long as you keep moving."
The lead singer has acquired a taste for the disappearing act. Aged 35, he's staging a contradictory battle with stardom, from the very core of his being through to the icy soundtracks and acoustic regrets that characterise Pulp's latest CD, This Is Hardcore.
Hit him with a direct question about fame, however, and he'll state that he is "barely at the mezzanine level". Pulp are a British phenomenon.
Originally we'd arranged to meet at Bungees, a London cellar cafe, but it turns out to be closed. Cocker is disappointed - the area it is in reminds him of his past as an art school student in the late '80s. We move to a wine bar, where he keeps fidgeting with his watch until he confesses that the American writer, Ken Kesey (famed for One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest and his antics leading the Merry Pranksters), is doing a book signing down at Tower. "Do you want to come?" he asks.
Interviewing Cocker you encounter his diffident intelligence, a humility mixed with self-loathing, and a certain indefinable will. He has cycled to our meeting (cycling is admittedly de rigueur with London groovers right now), and once we check out Kesey he ends up giving me three hours of his time. When Cocker does encounter the odd fan on our walk through the city and in the store itself, he quietly extends the conversations. He's at pains to be like them.
Cocker himself is something of the ultimate fan. He slaughtered all comers on Pop Quiz and aside from a fascination for Kesey and '60s obscurities he maintains an avid interest in the culture around him, from fronting a new Channel 4 series on "outsider artists" to fossicking around the city for books and CDs. He's declared a moratorium on reading magazines - "it got so bad I'd have opinions on films without ever seeing them" - and is making efforts "to read more novels. I'm about 50 pages into Irvine Welsh's Filth but it's too early to say what I think. I've also got a copy of [F. Scott Fitzgerald's] This Side of Paradise by my bed. A friend says it's perfect for me," he says, raising his eyebrows.
The oily brown hair, the sallow skin, the burgundy polyester of his matching shirt and slacks, the slightly hunched posture of a man used to diminishing his own height ... he's cool in the way that all suburban dreamers are when they've managed to transform themselves into something exotic and uncertain. At heart, there's the polite Sheffield lad with permanently damaged eyesight from a meningitis attack when he was five, the young man who didn't lose his virginity until he was nearly 20. It is hard to recall this is the same strutting creature who dazzled an open-air crowd of 20,000 in North London recently, parading like a cross between a refined Iggy Pop and a strange, venal bird.
"Being on stage is about the only exercise I get," he says dryly.
Poor sales and uncertain critical responses for This Is Hardcore and a pair of stunning, if uneasily beautiful, singles ('Help The Aged' and the chilling title track) have been cited as benchmarks for the death of the Britpop phenomenon. Cocker was "gutted" by the popular rejection of 'This Is Hardcore' as a single, probably the most ambitious gesture of his recording career.
This Is Hardcore is a dark, epic world away from the almost vaudevillean, kitchen-sink wit of 1994's His 'N' Hers and 1996's Different Class. Its alienated sex fantasies, fears about aging and droll confessions don't fit the pop mould at all. And yet it is this material that the band - Nick Banks (drums), Candida Doyle (keyboards), Steve Mackey (bass), Mark Webber (guitar, keyboards) and Richard Hawley (a guest guitarist from The Longpigs) - attack with a devouring intensity in the live arena. And although one can immediately sense a quantum leap between most of the pre-Hardcore material and the orchestral, marooned density of songs such as 'Seductive Barry', it is clear that, for Pulp, this is the way to go.
"Pop music traditionally deals with young flash things but pop music itself is middle-aged," Cocker says. "I just want to find a way of being an adult without it being boring. I don't want to continue acting like a teenager for the rest of my life because I can't hack it, you know."


This Is Hardcore may sound bleak, but it combines all the glamour, sophistication and decadence of Pulp's major influences: Roxy Music, The Walker Brothers, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, glam rock and John Barry's James Bond movie-theme urbanity and drama. 


Or, as Cocker sings: "This is our music from a bachelor den, the sound of loneliness turned up to ten."
It's been a long trip to the lizard lounge. Pulp actually made their first album, It, in Sheffield in 1980 and did a live-to-air performance for DJ John Peel when Cocker was only 17. It would be quite a while (and several albums) before 'success' came their way again.
Frustrated with his band's progress, Cocker left Sheffield for art school in London. But the urge for making music never went away. "I heard the other day that crocodiles can slow their heartbeat down to three times a minute if they're conserving energy. That was kind of like what we [Pulp] were doing - we weren't actually dead, we just looked like we were."
With his National Health Service specs and geeky cool, Cocker made his name as "the Mike Leigh of Britpop", securing hit after hit from the mid-'90s with songs about hiding in a cupboard to watch his girlfriend's sister having sex ('Babies'); losing your virginity ('Do You Remember The First Time?'); taking drugs at a rave ('Sorted For E's and Wizz'); and the tale of a northern lad being seduced by a female art student interested in some lower-class experiences ('Common People'). The last song virtually became the anthem of 1996.
"'Common People' transformed things for us in this country. It seemed to enter the public imagination," Cocker says.
This Is Hardcore is an about-face, a blow against that "imagination" and any possibility that Jarvis Cocker could continue in the role of Britpop's quirky jester, the man who waved his arse to Michael Jackson on stage at the 1996 Brit Awards.
Of fame, he would later tell Time Out magazine: "It would be great to walk into a club like John Travolta does in Saturday Night Fever and have everyone give you a high five and yelp 'hello', but the reality is some pissed-up bloke going, 'How's your mate Michael Jackson, eh?'"
It brought other dubious rewards, too. A 1996 Sunday tabloid kiss-and-tell expose of a fling he had with a make-up girl. Of this he says, "You really have to keep it locked away. You don't want to do a Clinton, do you?"
Even more painfully, a tabloid newspaper in Australia tracked down his estranged father in Darwin. Cocker hadn't seen or heard from his father since he was seven. They offered to pay Cocker's air fare to visit him. Cocker quietly declined.
It's an awkward subject. "I only met my father face-to-face this year for the first time. It's a personal thing. Something that can only be worked out by the two of us. The papers only cloud the issue," he says, before holding each word like a blow, "it's ... not ... right."
To add to the events of the two years leading up to This Is Hardcore, Cocker also broke up with his long-term girlfriend. He is now single. Again, there's that sense of Cocker being hit by his own words as he speaks.
"It's not the best thing to happen to you if you want to keep the relationship together ... to be successful."
'Help The Aged' and 'A Little Soul' were inspired by his encounter with his father. In the latter, Cocker sings: You see your mother and me, we never got along that well/I'd love to help you but everybody's telling me you look like me/I've had one, two, three, four shots of happiness/ I look like a big man, but I've only got a little soul.
"I know it's boring," he says, hating the moaning rock star image as much as recent depictions of him as "a porn-fixated heroin addict". "But you do get a distorted view of what life's about, chasing this thing called success. When you get it you have to ask, 'Is this it?' There's a loss of innocence."
"Pornography seemed like an appropriate comparison. Because it takes all the romance out of romance. It's like there's always a forward urge in people's lives to go deeper. That when you get there it's going to be better."
He talks about the process of reflection, the way "you accumulate a lot of stuff, then sit in a room and instead of taking more stuff in, you dredge it out. It's like you get too cluttered.
"Your 20s are a period of exploration, finding out who you are. But you do have to cut back on experience. And find some kind of order instead of leaving stuff strewn about everywhere. When you are young you don't understand that. Secretly at the back of your mind, you're quite pleased to go through trauma. It gives you something to write about. You might even see something noble in it. But as you get older it just f - - - s you up. It does you in.
"I hate the consumer-based society," he says. "Everything is based on consumption, using something and throwing it away. It's no surprise divorce rates are rising. People do the same with relationships."
The restlessness that burns away in him found some respite in his work for Channel 4. "I first read about outsider artists in a book by Roger Cardinal when I was a student. It's stuff made by people who've never had any training: people who are in institutions or people who are isolated, usually.
"They're pleased that people look at their stuff. But that's not the reason they made it. It's more that they feel compelled. They say they had a dream, or that God made them do it. In the me, me, me world of popstardom, who has that attitude? "
- Mark Mordue
* This story first appeared under the title 'Pulp Friction' in the Sydney Morning Herald Metro, 18.09.98

When Cool Goes Cold

The very thought of writing this story made me feel like vomiting over my laptop and down my flannelette shirt. Yet another lifestyle piece on Cool with a capital ``C", another voice-deadening set of icons whose style and attitude should be genuinely rebellious and outside easy mainstream embrace. I imagined how it would go: the file photos that would link Lord Byron, James Dean, Jeff Buckley and New York's latest rock'n'roll bad boys of dissident pretty, the Strokes.


Trying to capture Cool is a loser's game worse still, it's uncool. Plenty of you have no doubt groaned and rolled your eyes already at the very idea of this story, turned the page sneering, said no.In keeping with this mood of negation and refusal, Cool can be regarded as the street's desire to turn stardom inside-out: to strengthen what's moving beneath the radar, what's not apparent, and so-far undiscovered. It's a kind of secret identity that corporations and the media will eventually wish to mine, but they can't have it or define it no matter how hard they try, or at least they can't have it for long. 
In his 1998 essay The Birth of the Cool, an analysis of Miles Davis's groundbreaking 1949 album of the same name, Greil Marcus observed that, ``Cool is a mystery, because while everyone knows what cool is nobody can define it. It's like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous pronouncement on pornography: `I know it when I see it."'I'd dare to say it's a synonym for integrity. And that's what it has always been, even at its most anarchic or dissolute or just plain unlucky.Perhaps that's why Cool is often fatal, like those last steps Jeff Buckley took fully clothed into a tributary of the Mississippi for a gentle swim in 1997, his music left to us in a state of permanent promise. As his mother said in the memorial documentary Fall in Light, ``I have a picture in my mind that was actually a metaphysical image. That the body of my son was not the speck of dust they pulled out of the Wolf River but the body of his work." Cool is this kind of moment or person or subculture up ahead of the present or lost somewhere far behind it but still intact in some sacred, radioactive way, still living a half-life of intensity, self-possessed and eternally unpossessed, like Marlon Brando's feminine shyness in The Wild One or Sonny Rollins walking away from jazz at the height of his career to practise his saxophone devotions to no-one but the wind as it blew off the Williamsburg Bridge. It's danger in vulnerability. And you can't buy that.Cool can become fashionable, of course, but becoming fashionable is often what ends it. More usually it is the opposite of fashionable, a force of reaction like punk rock in its heyday and grunge when it first broke, movements whose anti-beauty aesthetics attacked the high style directives of consumer culture before becoming self-annihilating in themselves. The dialectics of fashion Cool are certainly constant and unforgiving, if strangely cyclical: I often yearn for the wardrobe I had when I was a 12-year-old boy in Newcastle, recast in adult sizes of course, because it was so right, so ``now", when all it felt to me back then was wrong and out of place. This suburban discomfort and the rages of its energy, from AC/DC and Cold Chisel through surf culture and silverchair are enjoying a comeback in Australian Cool, something the ``aging hipster" and author of Golden Miles, Clinton Walker, attributes to ``the fact it's all localised Australian stuff. It's real. Cool to me is about that localised quality. Look at the old muscle cars like the Charger and the Holden Monaro, now they're cool unlike all those silly cars and 4WDs you see people driving in Sydney's east". 
The distance of Australian suburbia from international design and fashion, and its being subsumed into kitsch, also explains the surreal bent at work in everything from the humor of Roy and H.G. to the films of Baz Luhrmann: a genuinely Cool Australian style.Equally vital now is the nascent formation of what Social Change Media's Tony Moore identifies as ``deadly culture" (``deadly" being an Aboriginal slang for ``cool"), and what Bangarra Dance Theatre's Stephen Page sees as the surge in Aboriginal influences on a contemporary Australian identity. ``Look at Cathy Freeman," Page says. ``There's a spirit that's Cool. A cool spirit is what I want to know about something joyous and sacred. I wonder if the word `cool' comes from spirit?" Maybe there's a virginity of cultural experience to this as well, to that true spirit of Cool and how one encounters it, like reading J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye when you are in high school, or hearing Nick Drake's Pink Moon at university and thinking you are the first one of your time to know it again, take it deep inside. As Kerouac so famously and so lovingly put it in On The Road: ``The only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, delirious of everything at the same time..."Speaking about that vitalising energy in his 1999 manifesto Against Cool, the writer Rick Moody (The Ice Storm, Demonology) recalled his love for ``beat writing as a young reader. The velocity and the spirit, the opposition to the stuffiness of academic writing (to the monolithic sobriety of New Criticism), the sheer, dizzy glee. What the great beat writers did for American letters was appropriate America's one truly indigenous music form, jazz, and fuse the lessons of that music with the transcendentalism that had been irrigating American literature for a century. The beats yoked Miles and Bird to Whitman and Emerson. And by the late '50s and '60s, the cool beat idiom had become as frankly spiritual as its transcendental models".Whatever happened, though, to that passionate, spiritual form of Cool? How did Cool, so romantic, so possible, so immersed, get so cold and superficial today? How did we move from Jackson Pollock and Brett Whiteley to wallpaper; from the spiritual might of Sonny Rollins to the ironies of cocktail muzak and a self-congratulatory, thuggishly macho rap hyped as ``sonic reportage"; from the anarchic situationist theories of Guy Debord and Paris 1968 to modern advertising with a sly conspiratorial wink?Of course, it's easy to identify another strand to Cool, the very opposite of the transcendental mode I've been pushing: the reptilian slither and icy nihilism extending from Burroughs through Warhol into Bret Easton Ellis, the electronic ennui of Radiohead. But this does not explain the shallowing of the feeling.Nor would it be fair to say that Cool no longer exists, or that it has lost its spiritual or activist edge, whether one speaks of Patti Smith's ongoing musical career and techno-music-inspired environmentalists or magazines like Adbusters and concepts like ``culture jamming" (media pranks like the recent ``Dole Army" fiasco that saw A Current Affair and Today Tonight led down stormwater drains looking for a subterranean world of bludgers).Cool is still happening out there, fighting for life, but the word itself has been given a mainstream makeover and a mobile phone to keep it busy. Cool now: it's what you buy to look good, isn't it? Isn't it?
In their book Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, writers Dick Pountain and David Robins (the former an author of computer textbooks, the latter a student of criminal sociology, a combo somehow appropriate to the subject at hand) study the political and cultural history of Cool. They trace its origins back to the slave trade and acts of ``silent rebellion" against authority, a ``pose of resistance" unable to make itself explicit.They then move through the classic and archetypal history of what Cool became as a style, noting ``a strikingly similar attitude to be found in European culture, the sprezzatura of Italian courtiers during the Renaissance, the famous reserve of English aristocrats and the Romantic irony of 19th century poets. Cool is by no means an American phenomenon, although its modern manifestation was incubated among young black American jazz musicians during the first decades of the 20th century, before being discovered by hard-boiled crime writers and Hollywood scriptwriters of the '30s and '40s, and finally injected into youth culture during the '50s by Elvis Presley and rock 'n' roll."Obviously the beats, the hippies and the punks get a look-in, along with the influences of French existentialism and the nouvelle vague cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Berlin cabaret and Brechtian theatrical techniques, the paintings and aphorisms of Warhol, the debaucheries of '70s rock as epitomised by the Rolling Stones, and era-defining films like Easy Rider, Taxi Driver and Pulp Fiction.From the beginning of Cool Rules, Pountain and Robins announce a desire to ``show how this attitude, which originally expressed resistance to subjugation and humiliation, has been expropriated by the mass media and the advertising industry in the '80s and '90s, and used as the way into the hearts and wallets of young consumers". A little more bluntly, it's stated: ``Cool consumer capitalism has discovered, as Thomas Frank puts it, how to construct cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent."For those in the know, Thomas Frank is the giant killer of Cool today, a philosopher of anti-Cool. In his book The Conquest of Cool, and more regularly at his Web-magazine The Baffler, Frank argues that big business hasn't just appropriated the language of youth culture, it's always been the driving force behind it.This business revolution is ongoing today as ``a host of self-designated corporate revolutionaries outlining the accelerated new capitalist order in magazines like Wired and Fast Company gravitate naturally to the imagery of rebel youth culture to dramatise their own insurgent vision".It's this depressing landscape of Cool that made Rick Moody cry out for a Cool that was ``gone, long gone. Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it's time to retire from it. To move on. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop labourers in Third World countries. Cool is Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid."
Since September 11 there is a desire to rerun the 1950s in America and with it a creepy rage for consensus at any price. Conservatives everywhere have taken possession of the event as a vindication for their righteousness; there is no room for dissent, for unsettling voices, off-kilter words. The national agenda is one of unity, ``healing": a new conformity. The McCarthyist tone, the lauding of material satisfaction and security at any cost is very familiar. Speaking of Kerouac and the beat phenomenon in a famous 1957 essay ``The White Negro", the title an acknowledgement of the influence of black jazz musicians on a new style of American revolt and literature, Norman Mailer wrote: ``The only life-giving answer to the deathly drag of American civilisation is to tear oneself from the security of physical and spiritual certainty, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey with the rebellious imperatives of the self." He was being extreme; the end result of that thinking for many was perversion, suicide. But in this squarest of times, ``the rebellious imperatives of the self" remain a necessary adjunct to any lifestyle and the purchase it has on you, an interrogating and humanising request from within to stay Cool but keep warm.  - Mark Mordue* First published in the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum Essay section,Saturday, February 23, 2002.

John Cassavetes: A Sovereign of Space

THE 19th century French writer Charles Baudelaire once compared the plight of the poet to that of the albatross. A sacred bird which would "nonchalantly chaperone a ship across the bitter fathoms of the sea", it sometimes suffered the boredom of sailors who would capture and torture it, "a sovereign of space... exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered, he cannot walk because of his great wings".


John Cassavetes had something of that grace and futility in him every time he chose to occupy a screen, whether as a director, actor, or often both. A strange, subtly erotic presence that hinted at an existential update on Bogart's tough charm, he went for a realism in his films that kept him mostly alienated from mainstream success.

"Nowadays, the big question is: Can a picture make $100million? Who the hell cares? If you're thinking that way, you're making money. If that's what it's come to, let the audience look at pictures of money. Put money on the screen, and then rape it, shoot it, defecate on it - because that's basically what everyone is doing."

Eschewing the materialism of success, and with it Hollywood's smooth aesthetic codes, Cassavetes's films were long and winding, populated by middle-aged, complex characters, and rarely resolved in a pat or comforting manner. Love, loneliness, madness, and the struggle for identity were his themes, unbalanced in tensions between private and social worlds, as if the latter's imprisoning rituals somehow bullied the former's visionary fragility.

His death on February 4 this year from complications incurred by a three-year battle with cirrhosis of the liver, was not a surprise. During the making of Lovestreams (1984) he'd been warned he could die at any moment, perhaps the reason why it is suffused with an intensity that is almost hallucinogenic, reality-in-overload, as a dissolute writer tries to cope with his loneliness and mortality.

Regarded as the father of a New Hollywood, Cassavetes was one of the first to rebel against the studio system and prove that independent filmmaking could force its way past American cinematic values bound to the chauvinism of the 1950s.

Cassavetes had built a reputation quietly as an actor in live television drama as well as low-budget social conscience films. But it was his starring role in the television series Johnny Staccato (1959-60) that put Cassavetes on a celebrity map he only ever saw as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Playing the part of a jazz pianist in Greenwich Village who moonlighted as a private eye, he immediately found himself touted as a sensitive sex symbol with his lean, Greek, good looks, clear intelligence, and coolly-disposed execution of one of TV's first hipster roles.

Born on December 9, 1929, to immigrant parents, Cassavetes' father was a Harvard-educated businessman who made and lost millions. Consequently, Cassavetes knew the middle class territory of Long Island (a world whose infidelities he explored in Husbands in the 1970's) and the much tougher, more ethnic Bronx area (whose compassionate and murderous loyalties he would celebrate in Gloria, a delicately-humoured, Latin-paced thriller in the 1980's) - experiences that caused him to mature as a leading man with a distinctly New York blend of the urbane and the savage.

But rather than accept a careerist momentum that cast him as a sex symbol or an American rebel, Cassavetes ploughed his earnings into directing an inter-racial love story called Shadows (1961). The film sprang out of improvisational acting classes he had been running, and took away a major award at the Venice Film Festival, establishing him on the international arthouse circuit. For the next three decades, though, Cassavetes never really belonged anywhere except in his own, almost capriciously obsessive, milieu.

His days as an independent film-maker were launched when the big studios filmed on sets and dubbed their sound. Instead, Cassavetes used his garage, warehouses and the streets, incorporating extraneous elements like traffic noise and passers-by with a stylistic freedom considered absurdly crude, even outrageous. The likes of Martin Scorcese would be grateful for these technical liberations, let alone the new visceral possibilities they unleashed.

By the time Hollywood was catching up with the counter-culture, in films like Easy Rider and Woodstock, Cassavetes was busy taking his hand-held camera into the malaise of suburbia and to an older, disenchanted and lost generation. He was questioning what was driving society in places where people weren't looking, confronting the burgeoning 1960s myths of youth and freedom with portraits of age and doubt.

Wary of being stereotyped, he once angrily said, "I'm not an intellectual. I'm not an intellectual film-maker"; a feeling borne out in the way he approached one of his greatest films, A Woman Under The Influence (1974), which featured his wife, Gena Rowlands, in an Academy Award nominated role as woman struggling with mental instability against domestic inertia and the dumb romantic faith which cruelly underpins it.

Mortgaging his own house to finance the kind of film he's been repeatedly told over the years there was no market for, Cassavetes split the costs with the help of its co-lead, Peter Falk, a close compatriot who used the earnings he'd made from the popular television detective show Colombo. Cassavetes then rejected conventional wisdom that would have had it distributed as an arthouse release, opting instead to book the film into blue-collar working-class neighbourhoods where it became a box-office success.

Cassavetes had always explored relationships with an unflagging sense of the insoluble. In his films it's just when you think you hate someone or have them boxed that their capacity to be human shakes you, just as his heroines or heroes invariably display problems or moments of horror so convincing you can understand the pain they draw, the negative gravity they've somehow set in motion.

Interestingly, Cassavetes' own relationship with Rowlands, personally and creatively, thrived since 1958, and they had three children - Nicholas (also an actor), Alexandra and Zoe. Reflecting on A Woman Under The Influence, Rowlands only remarked, "I'm a little crazy. We all are. And sometimes I let things go. It was a question of taking that small, wild, desperate feeling we all get and raising it to the highest pitch."

Born into a Welsh community in America that still speaks its own language, Rowlands still returns home every year. An intense and uncompromising actress, her eccentricities clearly charmed Cassavetes, particularly her jumping from hobby to hobby - from diamond cutting, to studying languages, to mechanical engineering.

It was the positive quality of his relationship with Rowlands that inspired Cassavetes's scouring journeys into love. In Faces (1968), which was typically financed from his leading role as Mia Farrow's husband in Rosemary's Baby, he bemoaned the lack of truth at the core of America's love life.

"I was bugged about marriage. Not my marriage. Gena and I have always disagreed out in the open, we never hold back. But I was bugged about the millions of middle-class marriages in the United States that just glide along. Couples married 10-15 years, husbands and wives who seem to have everything -big house, two cars, maid, teenage kids - but all these creature comforts have made them passive. Underneath, there's this feeling of desperation because they can't connect.

"What's worse is most couples aren't even aware they can't communicate. The whole point of Faces (and much of Cassavetes's work before and after) is to show how few people really talk to each other. These days everybody is supposed to be so intelligent. 'Isn't it terrible about Nixon getting elected?' 'Did you hear about the earthquake in Peru?' And you're supposed to have all the answers.

"But when it gets down to the nitty gritty - like 'What is bugging you mister? Why can't you make it with your wife? Why do you lie awake at night staring at the ceiling? Why, why, why do you refuse to recognise you have problems and deal with them?' - the answer is that people have forgotten communication. There is no communication between people.

"Instead it's long-winded stories, or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody's really laughing. It's more an hysterical, joyless sound. Translation: 'I am here and I don't know why.'

"Nobody knows how to use himself or love himself. That's the tragedy of our age."

- Mark Mordue

* First published as 'Sense of Grace and Futility', Sydney Morning Herald, 5th May 1989.