Thursday 14 December 2017

taste tests

Last night was the fourth of six work Christmas parties. Too many Christmas parties! Not necessary! Christmas is bad enough on its own without the help it gets from six separate work Christmas parties. As you know I have spent months floating alone on a tiny wooden raft adrift in on an ocean of insomniac exhaustion, but now, one by one, my bedraggled colleagues are dogpaddling up to the edge, grabbing my hand, and hauling themselves up out of the water to sit slumped on the deck, salt water streaming down their ravaged faces...Everyone is completely over it and desperate to get away from the workplace and from doing work in it with each other, so it makes a lot of sense right now to spend great swathes of time sitting around tables doing nothing but eat and drink and look at one another, and even to do some of this sitting around outside, and thus in addition to, the normal times of going to work and working.

My favourite so far was party #3, an afternoon tea violently inserted in the small opening between party #2 (a sit-down rubber chicken affair at the Town Hall) and party #3 (two accurately timed hours of free drinks at the most ineptly run bar imaginable). You could deduce the psychological condition of the afternoon tea participants by looking at the aggregated foodstuffs we contributed: it was all comfort food, all stodge, all cake, all yellow or brown, no quarter given and no lip service paid to the simple truth that nobody really needs or wants to eat another shitload of sugar'n'carbs in between two punishing sessions of orality. It was great. I contributed a delicious panettone as big as my head. There is still a chunk half as big as my head left over, and I will happily consume it in a series of dollops, each one about one-tenth of the size of my head, along with a cup of tea, as part of the general effort I must now make to idle away some of the insufficiently rapidly dwindling hours between now and 4 pm on Friday 22 December.

If there was a perfume that smelt like panettone I would wear it every day. Possibly quite close is Old Spice, which I have always really dug the smell of, although it's too gentlemanly when I put it on my own skin. I just had an idea, though: I'll try layering it with Lush's Karma. That could work. If it doesn't, never mind; even if I just end up giving off the odour of a cheap brothel at least you will be able to smell me coming.

Christmas party #1 had its good points too I guess. This was dinner, in a room in a restaurant in Albert Park, with just the galleries and education staff and our director, who once again demonstrated her exquisite competence by ensuring that nobody talked about work. She did this by somehow instituting a game where each person in turn nominated a song from his or her "first" record (wide open to interpretation as to what that meant), then the boss found the song online and played it out of her phone, competing with the noise of the restaurant's music and the noise of the other patrons. I happened not to be paying attention when this game started so I missed seeing what prompted it, but I think what happened is not that the idea of the game came first but that one person incidentally mentioned what her first record was, then it got played and then the game started from there. This is important because that first person was of course the only one of us who chose a song without any factoring in of how this display of musical taste would make us look. And she, at 35 years old the youngest person at the table, chose Roger Whittaker's "Durham Town." So we all listened to that, and she was embarrassed. But lucky her; she got an exemption from trying to be cool. For everybody else it was an entirely different and kinda fraught matter, a losing game structured for many by calculations that the pre-dinner cocktails made only too visible. And you can't be cool by trying (it's extra impossible for this lot of people). But you can convey what it is that *you think* is cool. That was fun to see: Waterloo Sunset, She's So Fine, Space Oddity, Fernando, Cruel Summer, Personal Jesus, April Sun in Cuba. I went home thinking that I work at a place that's only pretending to be a war memorial, under the disguise it's really one of those FM stations that is great at ruining objectively good songs by placing them in soiling proximity with music that was itself once very fine but has been destroyed through overexposure and also, well, with music that is just shit.

I've been around long enough to be intimately familiar with a school of critical thought that goes like this. taste is just snobbery. Look carefully and you'll see there is something good about all music (or all TV or all fiction, or all recreational pursuits, or places, or ways of life, or people, indeed, or whatever expressions of culture.) And I go along with this principle a pretty damn long way, longer than many, but when it's framed as an absolute - there's something valid & good about all music/tv/places/people - I know then that the espouser is either bullshitting or else conveniently doesn't know about how bad things really can get out there. Yes, taste is relative and so you've got to do everything you can to genuinely respect other people's likes and choices and values. But taste only applies to a part of the cultural field - a large part, but still - there is also a region that is beyond the pale. And so standards must come into play.

I grew up in unsophisticated regional towns. We didn't have SBS and RRR, there wasn't much to work with in the library or at the one cinema, and our parents liked Roger Whittaker. So I know what it is to not have a broad experience under your belt and to indiscriminately pour all your love and longing and imagination into the random or more likely very commercialised little bits of cultural flotsam that wash up on your remote beaches. And I've been really happy living at different times alongside of people who aren't sophisticated and who don't need to mobilise a complicated apparatus of irony to enjoy, say, "Khe Sahn". I definitely have never shared the sneering disdain with which many members of the smug and chattering inner-city tribes regard the people who live in other places and have other priorities in life. Not much in everyday life makes me angrier than seeing some urban liberal laughing at the people who live in Melton or somewhere. But neither do I make a fetish of accepting and respecting all of their stuff. I don't look down on people who choose to live in Narre Warren or Springvale or Hoppers Crossing or Norlane. But I'm not going to pretend I think these are the real people, the salts-of-the-earth, especially the individuals among them who vote for the extreme far right and who are highly intolerant of feminism, environmentalism etc. And obviously, there are plenty of those people around. Whatever it was that happened in the twelve Western Sydney electorates that voted No to same-sex marriage, there can't be any sort of free pass on the grounds of cultural difference. As I mentioned a little while ago, I recently discovered that a volunteer at work, who I formerly had some respect for and enjoyed having conversations with, is an enthusiastic supporter of One Nation. That's a hard boundary, right there, and I think a whole lot less of him now, indeed much less than I do of the volunteer who is perpetually dropping sexist remarks to students, is a general pain in the arse, and by his own account, killed children in Vietnam 50 years ago. Different backgrounds, different values, different priorities, different tastes - great, makes the world go round etc. But always this: there comes a time when it's not a matter of taste anymore.

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