I’ve done the “Symphony in the Domain” series on a couple of occasions previously. I also done “Tropfest” on a couple of occasions. Both events involve walking long distances, taking along a hamper of wine and food, and sitting on the grass watching distant big screens, surrounded by thousands of people in a similar situation, many of them drunken yobbos. It’s usually good fun, but to be honest, probably a little disappointing, since you feel like a total pleb. Now that I’ve done “Symphony” in the VIP tent, there ain’t no going back.
As we arrived at about 6.30pm, entering via the Hospital Road Entrance, we were greated by friendly faces giving us wrist-bands and confirming our tickets which would allow us to enter an area where the wine flowed freely and where we were given small containers of food. But this was no Neil Perry Qantas Pack, this was very nice, with my vegetarian meal offering a very tasty chick pea salad. After wining and dining, we entered the VIP area, with the only difficulty being getting up and down from seats so low to the ground, although it provided much hilarity for the young people sitting next to us.
With all of the drama of the “Domain” series out of the way we were able to truly enjoy the music. Tonight it was the Sydney Symphony Orchestra playing the works of George Gerschwin, who I hadn’t known, had died tragically young at the age of 39. I was pretty aware of Gerschwin’s work, and have a number of CDs in my collection, especially the better known works. I was unaware, however, about some of the other works performed, including a work based on Cuban rhythms and sounds, composed while he was living, briefly in Cuba. Caroline O’Connor also came on the stage to sing about a half a dozen Gerschwin’s songs, many of them very moving. This was truly an evening of musical delight, offering both substantive works as well as the more popular. The conductor, who often played piano, clearly understood the works with a great deal of depth, thus allowing him to “play around” just a little, varying the pitch and speed at which some of the works were played.
At the end of the night the orchestra, reluctantly I think, played the 1812 Overture, which is a regular part of the “Domain” series, along with fireworks and explosions. There was a real sense in the words he used the conductor loathed this work, especially in the context of an evening of Gerschwin. But the fireworks went off, the explosions occured, and this really dramatic and exciting work went ahead, being a real crowd pleaser. Unfortunately, during the performances, many of the other people in the VIP area, including people on both sides, thought instrumentation was an invitation to conversation. If they’re not singing, it’s time to chat. I guess it’s okay if you’re out to impress a new girlfriend, but I think if you’re lucky enough to be that closed to a terrific orchestra playing beautiful music, it’s best to shut up and enjoy it!
I don’t think I’m alone in saying I sometimes think about how I might die. Thoughts range from the peaceful (dying in my sleep in old age) to the sad (after a long illness with cancer) and to the dramatic (in something resulting in a newspaper front page).
One of the thoughts that’s always been with me is the fear of being wiped out by a car or a truck or a bus while standing on the footpath, waiting to cross the road. It’s the reason why I always stand a few feet back from the road when crossing the road, or why I always walk in the middle of other pedestrians.
Tragically, some poor man has died today in such circumstances. As I wandered through Chinatown this afternoon there were lots of people, lots of police, and a rather large bus stuck underneath the awning of a restaurant on the corner of Dickson Street. I later found out there was a man underneath that bus, having been caught in the accident in just the kind of circumstances I fear myself. Best wishes to his family and friends in this terrible, freaky, accident.
I can’t decide if I was more angry or more sad (I was both), as a few of the speakers at a talk I attended this morning spoke about “faking disability”. Something I didn’t know about until this morning’s talk, was that if you go through some “stock photograph” libraries, you can actually find groups of models alternating between standing up and being seated in a wheelchair. If you use a wheelchair, or you have an awareness, you can pick it straight away: sometimes by the way the person is sitting, or by the type of wheelchair they have, we were told.
I was at a talk held at Ted’s Cameras in Sydney, with a number of guest speakers talking about the trend towards greater authenticity in the photographs being submitted to image galleries, and being used in advertising.
A woman (whose name I can’t remember) who works for Getty Images (they make their income from selling images to advertisers, the media, and other organisations) told us there’s been significant change in the type of images being downloaded for use.
This slide shows the change in the most popular/downloaded images of women over the last decade or so. Up until 2014, the most popular image of a man was consistently of a solitary white man in a suit.The first time EVER they had downloads at Getty for LGBTQ was in 2009. In 2010, there were no downloads. In more recent years, things have diversified somewhat, though the most common LGBTQ images remain, overwhelmingly good looking, white, middle class men..”What do you need to be involved?”, is a phrase Angel Dixon told us this morning is one which should be used. She spoke about her own experiences as a woman with a disability who has launched a career as a model. She noted there are some things which needed to be taken into account. But when you do, she said, you can end up with much better results.Also speaking today was Catia Malaquias, founder of the organisation “Starting With Julius“. Ten years ago she had a child born with Down’s Syndrome. After a little while she noted none of the advertising she was seeing from major retail chains “looked like” her family. So she wrote to K-Mart. They replied, saying they were “ashamed”, invited her family to be involved in an advertising campaign, and things have expanded from there.
“Isn’t it the advertisers, not the photographers who need education about all of this?”, a man asked from the audience. In reply, Catia made the point “you can’t make a choice if you have nothing to choose from” (or similar words).
The audience was made up of many keen amateur and professional photographers, many who were contributors to a new image catalogue called “This Is Australia”, which is all about making available a more diverse range of images for advertising, media etc. https://www.canon.com.au/explore/challenges/getty-this-is-australia
Though I didn’t contribute to the discussion, I know from my own work and life experiences there’s a strong “business case” for more diversity and inclusion in the media. If you don’t look and sound like your audience or customers, they’ll find an organisation which does. And much of the lead work being done is because of the increasing diversity of media workforces.
If you don’t look or sound like your audience, you’ll probably never notice the faking of wheelchair photographs.
“Nothing about us, without us” is a phrase I’ve heard a lot and which springs to mind.
“Oh my god, I’m sure that’s Danny Saucedo”, I thought to myself as I watched the SBS-2 screening of the Swedish film “Ondskan” (“Evil”). A bit of Googling and the IMDB indeed confirmed he was an uncredited “bully” in the film. The scene in which he appears, which is about a third of the way into the film, portrays ritualistic bullying in a Swedish private school in the 1950s.
At the heart of the film is the character of Erik Ponti, who lives with violence both at school and at home, where he is also beaten by his step-father.Arriving at the private school at the age of fourteen or fifteen, he refuses to abide by the hierarchical way in which the school is run. Even though you realise many of the school staff are opposed to the system, the older students, by virtue of rich parents, are able to control the younger students through the detention system, and through systematic and ritualistic bullying.
Danny Saucedo in Ondskan
Erik’s academically-inclined room-mate, Pierre is also the subject of bullying. But unlike Pierre and many young boys who are bullied at school, Erik is good at sports, and more than physically able to defend himself. Erik fights back, both physically and mentally, against the older students. He is a very powerful character. In the end, Pierre decides it’s almost too much to continue with, and Erik also comes undone when he develops a forbidden relationship with one of the school cooks. His mental focus, however, allows him to continue.
Erik och Pierre på Ondskan
It’s a film I enjoyed very much, and in doing a bit of additional research, I discovered it’s based on a very well known Swedish novel, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 2003. Oh, and of course, it features Danny who went on to become a Swedish pop star, and likely Eurovision Song Contest entrant for Sweden this year. And, who I got to meet a few months ago at Stockholm Pride, when I went up to him and asked if he would be happy to have a photograph with my friend, The Best Judge.
The Best Judge meets Danny Saucedo
The only unfortunate thing about the film was that I had to watch it in two parts. I’d set the film to record last night, as I was at a party, and because it had begun late the last 20 minutes, yes 20 minutes, of the film was chopped. Thank goodness there’s plenty of copies of the film on file-sharing sites both in the original Swedish, and with English language sub-titles.
Here’s a bunch of photographs I’ve taken over the last few weeks, which I thought might interest. There’s no coherent theme, just stuff I’ve noticed recently, or which gave me a smile, in the neighbourhoods around inner-city Sydney.
It’s late Monday night, my final night in Sweden (sadly), and I’ve just arrived home from the music, fireworks and celebrity-spotting of the official opening of the long-awaited ABBA Museum.
The idea for a permanent ABBA Museum in Stockholm has been around since the end of 2006. The original idea was for the museum to inhabit the space now occupied by the city’s Fotografiska Museet. When that didn’t prove to be economically viable, the organisers launched a number of short-term exhibition spaces in a number of countries including two quite different exhibitions in both Melbourne and Sydney.
ABBAWORLD Melbourne Waterloo Costumes
In Melbourne the exhibition was very much about the global story of ABBA (with a lot of Swedish language material); while in Sydney it was very much about the story of ABBA in Australia. Here in Stockholm, it’s very much the global story once again, though probably not as comprehensive as it was in Melbourne. In Melbourne, for example, there was a fair bit of material covering their individual careers after ABBA.
Owe Sandström, costume designer, chatted with fans about his work with ABBA.
Naturally, there’s a fair bit of Australia in the exhibition here, due to the amazing success ABBA enjoyed, and because “ABBA – The Movie” was filmed mostly in Australia. There’s quite a good quote attributed to Bjorn in the exhibition. Reflecting on the record-breaking 14-weeks “Fernando” spent at number one on the Australia charts, Bjorn is quoted as saying something along the lines of how they have been forever grateful for the Australian “kick-start” to their career at a time when there wasn’t much interest in the group outside Sweden.
Of course, you see the costumes, the gold records, the photographs and so on. You also get to see some of the recreated spaces from the story of ABBA, including the offices of Polar Music and the famous island shack in the Stockholm Archipelago where Bjorn and Benny composed many of their songs. These are lovely spaces, indeed.
There are also some lovely intimate touches in the new museum. A few weeks ago, speaking at the International ABBA Day, curator Ingmarie Halling mentioned two of them. “If you’re in the ABBA Museum and you’re standing near the Ring Ring exhibit, you should answer the phone, as it’s probably going to be Frida. And if you see the piano suddenly playing, it’s gonna be Benny doing it remotely”, she told us.
You can sing-a-long with ABBA holograms.
The telephone call from Frida (or indeed any member of ABBA, as “they all have the number”, we were told) was inspired by a John Lennon exhibition in New York. When Frida heard that Yoko Ono would sometimes call the telephone there and speak randomly to people visiting the exhibition, she replied instantly that she would love to do that also.
ABBA Soap
“You want to start a riot?”, I said to a friend, as we stood near the telephone during the fan club preview on Friday. “I have an old fashioned ring tone on my phone. You go over there, stand next to the phone, and when I play the ring tone you answer it”, I joked with him. Of course, we didn’t do that, as that would be cruel, but it gave us quite a laugh.
The Arrival Helicopter
Ingmarie mentioned how all four members of ABBA had been interviewed for the exhibition, and how she was constantly checking facts to make sure everything was just right. She told us, for example, the lengths she went to trying to find out the real story about the transformation of the famous white piano from its previous brown colouring which has featured in the “archipelago room” of “ABBA World”. “Oh I can’t remember. There were so many pianos”, Frida reportedly told her with a laugh. All four members of ABBA have recorded parts of the audio commentary to accompany the tour.
Live on ABC Radio in Australia from the ABBA Museum Opening
Much of the interactivity from the previous ABBAWorld incarnations is there also, including a sixty-second electronic ABBA Quiz (I got 12 out of 12 correct), and the ability to sing along with holographic images of ABBA, and later download a video of your performance.
Talking about the ABBA Museum opening on ABC Radio NSW
When she spoke about it a few weeks ago, I wondered how Ingmarie had maintained her enthusiasm for the project. You could imagine having spent several years of your life working on this project (and before that many years working with ABBA when they were an active group), Ingmarie would be a little bored with the project. However, she spoke with such passion that it was fairly evident that wasn’t the case. She spoke, for example, about exercising her own personal creativity in the design of some couches which will feature in the exhibition, and how she approached some young designers in Sweden to further develop that idea. “When you visit the exhibition you’ll be able to sit and listen to ABBA on couches which look like a stack of vinyl”, she told us. Along the way, Ingmarie also mentioned she has been writing a book that will go with the museum. “It’s the one book about ABBA I might be willing to read”, Benny reportedly said to her.
When you know so much about something before actually experiencing it, there’s always the risk you will be disappointed. I wasn’t. The museum has been clearly put together with care and an eye for detail. I liked it very much and would recommend it to anyone visiting Stockholm.
And then of course tonight, we had the big opening event. As has become the “norm” for these big ABBA events, only three out of four ABBA members attended. Agnetha was a no-show. The only time all four have been seen together in decades was for the Swedish premiere of the “Mamma Mia” movie in 2008. I actually arrived in Stockholm the day after that appearance. I was determined not to miss this one, so I booked my flights only after the date for the gala opening was confirmed.
Talking about the ABBA Museum opening on ABC Radio Brisbane.
Rather than concentrate solely on ABBA, the museum will have a longer-term focus on the success of Swedish music more generally. Apparently, that’s something all members of the band were keen to see when agreeing to support (and invest money) in the initiative. As such, the musical opening tonight featured a range of musicians performing a collection of ABBA songs, but also classics from Monica Zetterlund to Swedish House Mafia. As the museum also houses a hotel, our “stage” for the night was actually the hotel room. Windows and curtains opened and closed, and coloured lights focussed our eyes on the performers. It was spectacular, and of course, ended with fireworks and a performance of “Thank You For The Music”
Fireworks for the ABBA Museum OpeningTalking about the ABBA Museum opening with Rod Quinn on ABC Radio.
I really love the notes which accompany the video work, “Billenium Waves”, by the artist, Tang Nannan, “Waves are the mountains of the sea” he says “and mountains are the waves of the land. They just rise and fall at different rates”. How cool is that? It’s one of three favourite works of mine in the current exhibition, “The Dark Matters” at Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery. Images of the other two works I really like also appear below.
For my liking, there were probably too many people at the gallery this morning, so I’ll look to find another time, sometime soon, when I can go back and spend some more time enjoying this extraordinary collection.
The ancient Chinese got their ink from smoky oil lamps, brushing away deposited soot and mixing it into a paste that hardened into “stones”. This black was pure, indelible and did not fade, and they fell in love with it. By adjusting the ink’s dilution and the density of their brushstrokes, painters could create a multitude of shades, from deepest blue-black to palest dove grey. Black had always been the colour of mystery, night, the void. The better the artists got to know black ink, the more superficial, even gaudy, colour seemed. As the Daoist philosopher Laozi declared: “Colours cause the eye to go blind.” Black—utterly simple yet infinitely subtle—allowed one to see the truth.
Chinese artists no longer live in a simple, natural, orderly world. They get their blacks not just from ink stones but from printer cartridges, spray cans, propane torches, X-ray film, newsprint, polyester, computer bits and steel. And they use blacks to convey realities the classical masters never dreamed of: oil spills, air pollution, megacities, mass production and political machinations. The artists in this show don’t shun light or colour, but in using them they follow Laozi’s advice: “Know the white, but hold to the black.” Containing more than ever, the dark also conceals more than ever. And it matters more than ever that we see.
