Out of key?

Figuring out whether most bands are playing out of key is a science. It's not difficult to detect when, say, The Living End or - well, insert post-1970s-band-that-I've-never-heard-of-here - drop a semi-semitone on a hangover.

But AC/DC are different. Not because of the backing - there are few things more unambiguous than the perfect E-major in-keyness of Malcolm Young every day of his adult life. Rather, because of the vocalist - or 'vocalist' - Brian Johnston.

I know this is not the first time that this blog has raised the spectre of a band more associated with Triple-M listening, Hooters-frequenting, Bacon-Busting subscribers* than with vegetarian nerds with macho dreams. Who still watch 'Thriller' on a regular basis. But still.

Procrastinating for a few hours like I generally do on Sunday nights, I noticed that The Australian's website contained footage of AC/DC's 'Black Ice' tour, recorded in Auckland last week. The exerpt was 'Rock n' Roll Train' - another piece frequently discussed on the blog.

So, what was wrong with the performance? For the first 10 seconds, I couldn't put my finger on it. The performance sounded like two songs playing at the same time. Then I realised that the problem was with the singing: Brian started off in no key at all, then gradually moved up to something approaching the 'correct' key.

The most disturbing part of the whole experience was the fact that Brian's unusually heightened musical ineptitude creating a kind of Brechtian alienation effect - that is, it enabled me to sit back and listen to AC/DC with my ears and brain instead of my testicles for a change. Figuratively speaking.

They are all alarmingly old. And ugly. Has anyone else noticed this before?

What's more, as Robert Forster said in The Monthly a while back: a 50-year-old Angus looks quite strange in school uniform.

It's all sacrilege, I know it is, but it was only temporary!

The other members suddenly (and temporarily!) looked like geriatric old men who had wandered into a film casting session for the 'Rock Band: AC/DC' computer game. Cliff Williams, the bass player, was caked in makeup. Phil Rudd, the drummer, looked as if he was trying to remember where he put his slippers. The fact that there is a gigantic mass of the world's population - including, and especially me! - who loved these odd little old men totally mystified me in that brief instant.

But then I listened to an awesome version of 'War Machine' in Berlin on YouTube, which made it all better. That lurching, 30-second thicket of self-realisation was quickly banished.


*i.e. the restaurant, not the actual biological formations. (Apologies for Mark Dapin for the use of asterisks: sometimes it's the only symbol that will do).

World's Gayest T-shirt

The escalators at Flinders Street Station now seem to be my primary Human Folly Observation Point. I'm not sure whether this is because so many people use the escalators, or whether there is something about Flinders Street that makes people act oddly. Nevertheless, it is indubitably true.

Yesterday, as I was about to catch a train, I noticed a man (approximate age: 50) at the top of the escalator wearing a pink T-shirt. There's nothing unusual about that. Case closed.

Or is there?

The back of the man's pink t-shirt was decorated with a large love heart, including an arrow pointing to the wearer's right. Inside the heart were written the following words:

"I love this man with all my heart".

This meant, of course, that anyone standing next to Mr. Pink t-shirt wearer - willing or no - would be temporarily thrust into the shoes of his beloved.

I thought I was the only one who noticed the t-shirt. However, a man ahead of me (who was in a hurry) noticed it too. Although Hurrying Man desperately wanted to catch a train that was just about to leave the platform below, the only available position on the crowded escalator was the one right next to Mr. Pink t-shirt.

Hurrying Man, realising that he had just been forced to assume a position for which he considered himself unsuited, tried to diagonally push ahead of Mr. Pink to escape the t-shirt's accusatory motto. But his passage forward was blocked, and he was forced back beside his newfound true love.

Hurrying Man's next - and brilliant - move was to move backward. Although this would place him further away from the train, it would also put a dampener on the situation's incipient homoeroticism. But it was no good: by this stage, there were a bank of people behind Hurrying Man, preventing an easy escape from ManLove's granite-carved, accusatory message.

For the rest of the escalator trip (all this, miraculously, happened at lightning speed!), Hurrying Man assumed the posture of a laboratory rat in a cage who had suffered repeated electric shocks. That is, he demonstrated behaviour that Psychologists have termed 'learned helplessness' - the name given to the despondent and submissive behaviour that develops in lab rats after they realise there is nothing they can do to evade randomly-administered punishment.

I am not sure whether Pink T-shirt man was aware of all this, or whether he was completely oblivious. However, it was worth it to see Hurrying Man being hoisted out of his comfort zone for 15 delightful seconds.

The Bicycle Thief

If you are lucky enough to be in possession of my brain - and I don't mean in a 'jar beside the bed' sense, so don't get any ideas - you may have the unique experience of losing and regaining your faith in humanity on a rapidfire basis. Let me explain.

Nothing makes me more upset than theft. When you leave something somewhere with a reasonable degree of security, I think you have a right to expect it to be there when you get back.

Imagine my disappointment, therefore, on Tuesday afternoon. On getting to Yarraville Station after work, I went to unlock my bike, only to find that it had vanished. This unexpected event allowed me to tap the deep, dark reservoir of cynicism that I generally try to keep a lid on in order to function relatively normally. Some of the questions I asked (silently) of the world were:

- why are people so dishonest? I'm not dishonest, so why is everyone else?
- why did the bike lock company make such a shitty lock? Is it just something that looks tough but is designed to crumble in a real conflict situation, like Mr. T?
- is the bike lock company more or less culpable than the thief himself?
- why did the thief spend so much time sawing a huge lock off a crappy bike? Does he hate me personally?
- does he in fact know me?
- and what's happening to Yarraville, anyhow? Last time I looked, it was a shiny, newly-gentrified yuppie paradise. What's with the horrific (bike-related) crime rate?

I brought up all of these issues to anyone who would listen over the next week. Uniform reaction: disappointment in humanity. When someone else shares your disappointment in humanity, it's - well, how can I put it? - really quite a lovely and satisfying feeling. It almost makes getting the thing stolen in the first place worthwhile.

My parents, all things considered, were very sympathetic. Inured by now to my habit of, well, losing stuff, they almost seemed pleased that I had something stolen for real this time. Walking through Yarraville with Mum and Dad, lamenting my misfortune to the tune of soothing parental tut-tutting, I saw something chained to a No Standing sign that looked familiar.

"Why, that bike is just like the one that was stolen!" I thought, amazed at the coincidence. "And the helmet is the exact same colour as..."

Oh.

Where's My AM Radio?

I recently purchased an MP3 player from Dick Smith. Being a cheapskate who is convinced that the Apple Corporation ranks at the very bottom of the bottom-feeders (despite its talent for making lovely shiny things), I purchased a series of inadequate MP3 players until I found this one. It's perfect and it only costs $40. Oh, it's not cool - Dick Smith is never cool - but it is sleek and compact and mine.

It has everything: except, I just found out, an AM Radio. Being at least 10 years' out of touch in terms of musical matters, the main radio station I listen to is Radio National. It rends my heart to write those words, but there you are. Becoming one's parents is never a pleasant process.

So, I am now wondering - why do MP3 players lack AM radios? Although a significant proportion of people who purchase these items are 'cool', an equally significant minority - namely, me - are not. And I bet Dick Smith, of all people, spends a large part of his radio-listening quota listening to Radio National.

As far as I can tell, it would not cost anything extra to include an AM receiver with all MP3 players, as AM radios are more low-tech than FM ones. (And they're both pretty darn low-tech these days). Is this a conspiracy to drive us all into the arms of FM, whose main benefits seem to be Hamish & Andy (admittedly divine) and RRR blues Marathons?

Roman DNA

Are we the same as the Ancient Romans, deep down?

Of course, we're not exactly the same. But still - are we pretty much the same? If you took the average guy, swapped his shirt and trousers for a tunic, and put him to war against Carthage, would he behave like a Roman, i.e. utterly ruthlessly?

I went to Rome recently and was stuck by the single-minded militaristic nature of the Ancient Romans. (Modern ones are quite nice). That probably sounds obvious - everyone knows that the Romans were bloodthirsty bastards. But historians are fond, these days, of saying that nothing has changed: it's the same old human nature, just dressed up a little and made to look nice. Our inner Roman is still there.

At first, this seems crazy. We're not particularly violent, after all. But the historian will point to similarities. Look at sports festivals: they're just like Gladiatorial contests! etc. But I am more of an optimist, who likes to think that we somehow managed to tamp down the violence a while back. To support this, I've jerrybuilt a dodgy social Darwinist theory to back me up.

First: think of how pale a facsimile ball sports are of blood sports. We have got to the point where watching someone pass a round object to another person quenches the bloodlust that could only have previously been quelled by witnessing the bloody deaths of brutal fighters in the ring. Isn't that odd?

This may sound crazy, or even borderline eugenicist, to others, but: what if we have had the violence systematically bred out of us over the years? To see what I mean, think of this: most extremely violent people, in Roman times, had the opportunity to rise to the top levels of power. Where are the people with violent tendencies now? Unlike in Rome, in Australia far more of them are in prison than in the military. Being aggressive towards others, in a secular democracy, generally gets you incarcerated rather than revered, except for a few small subsets (bikie gangs etc.). Now, if you're in prison, you have fewer opportunities to have children. Could a society like ours, that generally condemns violence as a vice, therefore, instigate a kind of genetic 'feedback loop' that steadily breeds violent tendencies out of the population? Or is it obnoxious just to ponder this?

I realise that a good argument against this theory is the recent existence of totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. These obviously contained many extremely violent people, and they were only a few years ago - too short a time for any significant genetic change to occur.

But still - we're so much less violent these days than we were that it's hard to believe nothing's changed. Has our 'genetic temperament' changed at all since Ancient Rome? And if not, how do we manage to be so darn peaceful to one another most of the time?

An escalating conundrum

Being processed through the intestines of an international airport recently, I noticed a strange phenomenon: traffic flow on working vs. non-working escalators. Let me explain.

When pedestrians are presented with a choice between taking the stairs or taking the escalator up to the next floor of a building, I estimate that 10% take the former, 90% the latter. Those who take the stairs when the escalator is working are generally fitness freaks or masochists. This makes sense.

However, when the escalator breaks down, something unexpected happens: the percentage of people taking each form of conveyance is reversed: that is, 90% of people now take the stairs, while only 10% walk up the broken escalator. Why should this be? If neither option offers an advantage over the other, the percentage should be split equally, surely?

The answer seems to be that people who are walking up a broken escalator automatically deduct the escalator's expected speed from its actual speed - that is, walking up a broken escalator feels like you are going backwards; whereas walking up stairs doesn't. This is the opposite phenomenon to the strange sensation of jumping off a trampoline and onto unexpectedly unyielding ground: the ground feels unnaturally hard as our brain has adjusted to the bounce.

Incidentally, the escalatorial behaviour of Europeans is far superior to that of Australians. The reason? Europeans instinctively know that it is polite to stick to one side of an escalator when stationary, so that people who choose to walk up can do so unimpeded. Australians seem to have no concept of this. It annoys me so much that I've been tempted to pitch a series of community service announcements to the Government, aiming to raise public awareness. But that's probably a bit obsessive.

The Monkey Speaks

Those privileged enough to see the New York Times' Head Performing Monkey, Tom Friedman, on Lateline the other day were in for a treat. Beginning the interview with his trademark lack of humility - "And I'd just like to say hello to all my fans in Australia" - Friedman, disconcertingly resembling Dr. Phil in appearance, content and delivery, went on to offer his scarily off-the-planet analysis of the causes of the US financial crisis.

Friedman, who writes about global economics with all the subtlety of an ADD child playing Hungry Hungry Hippos against himself, told the host the following (I'm paraphrasing, as usual):

"This year, the world hit not one wall but two. The first was financial; the second, environmental. This year, the earth hit its carrying capacity. The US business model is unsustainable. We borrow money from China so that we can borrow more of their junk, devaluing our currency in the process by stacking the Chinese treasury with US dollars. Then we do it all over again. When the US lost the ability to pay for the junk, the system collapsed.

Now that other developing countries are starting to consume like Americans, the earth could no longer sustain what we all were doing and it said, 'enough'."

This is true in a sense: the US-based model of growth is unsustainable all right. But Friedman effectively blamed the rising middle class in the developing world for what was going on. Of course, this is nuttier than feeding time in the elephant enclosure. The world didn't suddenly hit an 'environmental wall' in 2008, and the developing middle class's increased resource consumption didn't cause the crisis.

The crisis occurred because - and this is something that the frantically pro-US Friedman is congenitally blind to - the US financial system is run by criminals. I don't mean that in a bug-eyed Chomskian way, but criminality is really the only logical definition of what was going on. The US, like Russia, had become a society based on gangster capitalism. And now that Obama and co. have done their best to ensure that this clique of suited psychopaths will be able to continue pretty much as they were - albeit with a few mild spanks on their Armani-cosseted botties - we can all look forward to a Dow Jones recovery curve flatter than Boris Karloff's head.

The conversational low point was Friedman's assertion that "the time for fairness is over" - as if 'fairness' was something that only know-nothing NASCAR-appreciating Joe Sixpacks wanted. By denying the need for a massive, exhaustive purge and nationalisation of the US banking system and shifting the blame onto those nasty poor people screwing up the environment, Friedman confirmed his status as the most hilariously over-promoted source of authority since Prince Charles.

So, please allow me to present my alternative analysis of the causes of the financial crisis (note: metaphorical representation only):