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Universal Stranger

~ on Alienation, Being and Belonging

Universal Stranger

Monthly Archives: August 2014

Sydney’s Forgotten Songs

17 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by Rody in Metro

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Angel Place in Sydney is a back street that runs between the city’s two main shopping strips, George Street and Pitt Street. It’s at the prestigious end of town, tucked behind Martin Place, a swathe of light and space that cuts across four city blocks and creates an illusion of transparency at the heart of the city’s business district. The George/Pitt end of Martin Place has a particular gravitas that only money can buy: its stylish Victorian buildings, built to house the head offices of some of Australia’s oldest financial institutions, are home now to Macquarie Bank—a quintessentially modern, home-grown success story in global financial services—and a handful of jewellers and couturiers of the if-you-have-to-ask-the-price-you-can’t-afford-it variety. It doesn’t so much symbolise Australian capitalism as distil its essence. The other end of Martin Place, the Elizabeth Street end, stands at a slight elevation from which the functionally modern office block of the Reserve Bank of Australia can look down imperiously upon the money-grubbing mortals. Or so the semiotics of architecture and planning would suggest. You can stand at either end of Martin Place and be in no doubt as to which is the tonier. The Elizabeth Street end may look down on the George/Pitt end, but it does so in a physical sense only.

Anyway, back to Angel Place: it hosts the City Recital Hall, which is noted for its brilliant acoustics, and two or three good restaurants. These, and the proximity to Martin Place, give the little lane the appeal of genteel bohemianism. There’s something else, too. Like all such streets—sequestered from the white noise of the city, below the tall indifferent backs of city blocks—Angel Place has its own sonic ambiance, a sort of muffled echoing peacefulness. That’s the first thing you notice as you enter; the second thing is also a sound—an astonishing variety of bird song drizzling down through the silence. Looking up, you see the cages.

Hanging-Bird-Cages-Angel-Place-Sydney-550x550

This is a clever, beautiful and thought-provoking art installation—Forgotten Songs, by Michael Thomas Hill—in which every (empty) cage and recorded song represents a bird once common in what is now Sydney but no longer found there, forced out by European settlement (short video here). I was prompted to write about it when I came across this stunning photograph, taken by—who knows? Google Images isn’t terribly helpful on authorship and copyright, so if anyone reads this and has the answer, please let me know. I’ve added a few lines of my own to the pic which, though conceived independently of Hill’s excellent artwork, work for me as a kind of ironic (but reinforcing) counterpoint to his theme. Worth a visit if you’re in Sydney.

 

To Anne: a Tribute

06 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by Rody in International

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Back in April this weird little bloggy thing joined in the celebrations of Shakespeare’s 450th anniversary. Today marks another Shakespeare-related red letter day which, in the normal run of things, would go unnoticed: on August 6, 1623, Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife (or widow, as she had become), passed away.

(How do I know this? Because Mrs Shakespeare—aka American actress and writer Yvonne Hudson—told me! See link at the end of this piece.)

Anne is every bit as obscure as her husband, in the sense that very little is known about the personal histories of either of them; and unlike him, of course, she left no creative legacy. We think of her, if we think of her at all, in terms which these days we consider sexist—as Will’s lover, wife, muse and mother to his children; as an appendage to a man.

We’ll never know what she amounted to in her own right. We can, however, reimagine her in our own terms. What does she represent for us?

AnneHathaway_CUL_Page4DetailB

Anne Hathaway? Probably not.

I like to think of her as epitomising ordinary, everyday people who understand that what they do in leading ordinary, everyday lives is perfectly serious and has a value; who may recognise genius when they see it, but who neither envy nor indulge it; for whom living quietly in a small community is not an inferior choice or destiny, but a congenial and fulfilling way of life.

Thinking about Anne in this (wholly arbitrary) way for some reason reminds me of Katherina’s controversial “submission” speech in Taming of the Shrew:

 

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee….

Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,

And place your hands below your husband’s foot….

 

This outrages modern feminist sensibilities. But what’s really going on here? Has Petruchio broken Katherina’s fierce, man-hating spirit, or has she discovered, through him, a new way to express her integrity and independence? Remember that, earlier in the scene, Petruchio takes bets with Hortensio and Lucentio to see which of their respective wives would obey most readily when called. Only Katherina responds to the summons.

One interpretation might be that she has become a parody of the submissive wife. Another (likelier, in my view) is that she is enjoying a new way of expressing her opposition to the hypocrisy, materialism and loveless manipulation that characterise the lives of Padua’s residents, including her own family. In Petruchio she has found the “real thing”—a man who, like her, has a sense of the unreality of things (“It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,/Or ere I journey to your father’s house”) and with whom even a conventional relationship, because it is grounded in truth, is not only bearable but joyous.

Having previously expressed her rebelliousness against the values of Padua through anger and violence, Katherina does so now in sweet and conservative rhetoric about a wife’s duties, much to the dismay of Bianca and the Widow, whose refusal to be ruled by their respective husbands clearly arises from commonplace selfishness and not the troubled psychology that had previously motivated Katherina’s shrewishness. One can sense the mischievous pleasure and genuine satisfaction that Katherina derives from the women’s reaction to her speech, which achieves its effects through exaggeration, not irony: it is wholly sincere, the more so because it gives voice to a spirit that was once broken but is now whole.

Was Anne Hathaway a model in some respects for Katherina? No-one will ever know, but Shakespeare’s fine reading of human nature should warn us against dismissing or marginalising somebody who appears to be conventional. One can only guess at Anne’s personal qualities, but I for one am prepared to believe that she had some richness and depth that genius could appreciate.

So let’s rehabilitate Anne as something more than Shakespeare’s support act and allow her to be, on this day at least, a complete if shadowy figure in her own right.

Thanks to Yvonne Hudson/Mrs Shakespeare, to whom we dedicate Sonnet 18 this month…and also to Sport for Jove Theatre in Sydney, Australia, whose brilliant, illuminating and hysterically funny production of Shrew is the benchmark for all others, in this humble hack’s opinion.

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