Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
From the beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower to the cobbled climb to the Sacré Coeur in the cycling, the Paris Olympics have provided a store of happy memories. Sure, the troubles of a disorderly outside world never went away, but in the City of Light the spirit of convivial competition has prevailed over two glorious weeks. For that, the French organisers deserve immense credit — as do the crowds of good-humoured spectators and, above all, the athletes, some of whose achievements will be remembered well beyond the next Olympics in 2028 in Los Angeles.
When Julien Alfred crossed the line in the women’s 100 metres final, she not only won gold for herself but secured the first ever Olympic medal for her home island of St Lucia. The men’s final was so close that, even at the finish, it seemed any of the eight sprinters might win — Noah Lyles of the US edged it by just five-thousandths of a second.
As for Armand Duplantis, Sweden’s pole vault champion, he broke the world record for the ninth time with a perfectly judged leap so far ahead of his rivals that it recalled the stupendous long jump of Bob Beamon at the Mexico City Games of 1968. No less remarkable was the victory of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone of the US in the women’s 400 metres hurdles — the sixth time she has broken the world record.
The home supporters had plenty to cheer, too. Before the Games started, the rancorous, polarised political climate gave rise to the suspicion that France’s national slogan should be reworded “Liberté, Egalité, Morosité”. Then Léon Marchand, a 22-year-old swimmer from Toulouse, notched up five medals including four individual golds. Sheer joy greeted the French success, inspired by the hitherto little known judoka Joan-Benjamin Gaba, over Japan in the team judo event.
The beauty of the Olympics is that silver, bronze and non-medal winners can also delight and impress. One crowd favourite has been Yusuf Dikeç, the pistol shooter who, with one hand in his pocket and a pair of modest spectacles, won silver to become Turkey’s oldest medallist at 51. At the other end of the age spectrum, 11-year-old Zheng Haohao, China’s youngest ever Olympian, did not win a medal in the women’s skateboarding, but who would bet against her in 2028? A remarkable photo of Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina, suspended in the air, celebrating, has also become a defining image of the Olympics.
A joyful spirit among the athletes coexisted with the intense rivalries of the individual and team competitions. It was on display in two events staged for the first time at these Olympics — breaking, otherwise known as breakdancing, and the marathon race walk mixed relay, won by Spain’s Álvaro Martin and María Pérez.
Not everything went exactly to plan. The arson attacks on France’s rail network on the eve of the Games caused temporary disruption. There were some difficulties over the distribution of tickets. Was the Seine too polluted for swimming events? In the end, no.
Some previous Olympics have been marked by tensions and tragedy. Think of the terrorism in Munich in 1972, or the cold war-era boycotts that overshadowed Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984. This time, thankfully, has been different.
It might have seemed a risky bet to stage so many competitions in the middle of the French capital, but the organisers pulled it off. Soon life will return to normal — if that’s the right word for a country that still needs to find a government after the inconclusive legislative elections of June and July. In the meantime, let’s celebrate a wonderful Olympics. Merci et bravo, France!
In Hamilton, bad-guy Aaron Burr has an epiphany: his life’s desire is the inner circle, “the room where it happens”.
“I gotta be in the room!” he sings, eyes gleaming with yearning, “Click, boom!”
Blockbuster musical Hamilton has returned to Sydney. DANIEL BOUD
Hamilton triggers a similar gleam in audience eyes. It has smashed box office sales all over the world since it was first performed in 2015, hoovered up a record-breaking number of awards (Tonys, a Pulitzer, Grammy, Emmy, and Olivier), and catapulted creator Lin-Manuel Miranda to global fame. The hip hop musical about the USA’s Founding Fathers is a cultural juggernaut, a revolution in itself.
On Thursday’s opening night for Sydney’s second season at the Lyric Theatre, the audience screams with each character’s entrance (Hamilton! Lafayette! THOMAS JEFFERSON!). The hysteria is justified because watching Hamilton is like being blinded by genius. The costumes, set, and lighting (all the original Broadway designs) are serviceable but unspectacular, and some of the singing in the second act had minor pitch issues. But who cares?
It’s Miranda’s music and above all his electrifying words – over 27,000 of them – that leave you dazed, buzzing. Like Hamilton, he “writes like tomorrow won’t arrive”.
Hamilton averages 144 words per minute, boasts Broadway’s fastest rap (Guns and Ships at 6.3 words per second), and requires leads that are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Persons of Colour) who can act, sing, and rap.
My distinguished colleague John Shand recently likened Miranda’s word-smithery to James Joyce. I’ll add Miranda went further because Joyce never pushed an entire demographic into the limelight, writing them “back in the narrative” (as Eliza sings) like Miranda did with BIPOC artists.
The Australian cast is brilliant. The ensemble is a hothouse of triple threats, featuring plenty of fan favourites from previous seasons returning as leads.
Jason Arrow makes Hamilton his own – smoother, more youthful and honey-voiced than Miranda’s acerbic interpretation. Callan Purcell brings complex humanity to Burr. Akina Edmonds is a powerhouse as Angelica. Elandrah Eramiha shines then smoulders as Peggy/Maria. And Brent Hill steals every scene as King George.
Brent Hill in all his regal glory as King George III. DANIEL BOUD
The newcomers also impress. The night’s discovery is Googoorewon Knox’s Washington: world-weary, commanding, and richly voiced. Gerard-Luke Malgas is pure glee as Lafayette and even more riotous as Jefferson. Etuate Lutui and Tainga Savage shine as Mulligan and Laurens. Vidya Makan’s Eliza is sweet-voiced, though her theatrical depth in the role seems still developing.
Hamilton has been criticised for sidestepping thorny historical issues inconvenient to its racially diverse casting, like slavery (the historical Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson and Schuyler family are all tainted). But on this second season viewing, it’s clearer than ever that Hamilton was never about textbook history. Its central premise is a romantic dream of the American mythos: that anyone – regardless of race, status, or privilege – can shape a nation. With enough talent and determination, even migrant outsiders like Hamilton (and Miranda) take their place “in the room where it happens”.
It’s this that led Hamilton to be described as the supreme artistic expression of Obama-era multicultural nationalism and optimism. In today’s tired, divided political climate Hamilton especially charms, with its brilliant story of statesmen who are flawed but sympathetic visionary heroes, and its core message that there are values worth living for, and dying for.
There are experiences in life that strike at the center of our being, sundering us in half with unforeseen pain for which we were entirely unbraced. Because we know that this is possible — from the lives of others, from our own past experience, from the history of the heart recorded in our literature — we are always living with the awareness, conscious or unconscious, that life can sunder us at any given point without warning. This is the price of consciousness, which makes living both difficult and urgent. “Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment,” Tove Jansson (August 9, 1914–June 27, 2001) writes in her almost unbearably wonderful 1972 masterpiece The Summer Book (public library), written in the wake of her mother’s death.
Jansson’s observation here is literal: Her protagonist — a little girl named Sophia, who is living on a small Nordic island with her elderly grandmother after her mother’s death — finds herself thinking about what it’s like to be a worm, fabled to go on living two new lives when split in half.
One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is love’s other name.” Even without intentional deception, people will surprise you, will shock you, will hurt you — not out of malice, but out of the incompleteness of their own self-knowledge, which continually leads them to surprise themselves. More often than not, when someone breaks a promise, it is because they believed themselves to be the kind of person who could keep it and found themselves to be a person who could not. If we live long enough and honestly enough, we will all find ourselves in that position eventually, for in the lifelong project of understanding ourselves, we are all reluctant visitors to the dusky and desolate haunts of our own nature, where shadows we do not want to meet dwell. But in any human association that has earned the right use the word love, we must be in relationship with both the light and the shadow in ourselves and each other. All authentic relationship is therefore a matter of clear sight — of seeing through the shining pane of the other’s self-concealment and removing the mirror of our own projections.
“I hear bravuras of birds… I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,” Walt Whitman exulted in his ode to the “puzzle of puzzles” we call Being. How puzzling indeed, and how miraculous, that of the cold silence of spacetime voice emerged, in all its warm loveliness — this vibrating interaction of energy and matter, this oscillating displacement of particles, that can give rise to a mother’s lullaby and the nightingale’s song and Nina Simone, that can praise and blame and slay with silence. To me, voice is an unequaled portal to the soul and the supreme pheromone. When I miss someone, it is their voice I miss the most.
For eons, we could capture the likeness of a person far in space or time, but not their voice: all the portraits of kings and queens staring down from palace walls, all the marble thinkers and the nudes descending staircases, all the photographs of lovers and children, all the mute millennia of them. Voice was life incarnate, impossible to immortalize. Then we harnessed electricity, dreamt up the phonograph and the telephone, began translating these ephemeral oscillations through the air into electrical waveforms to be transmitted and recorded. You could suddenly hear the nightingale across the globe, you could hear the voice of the dead.
“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb investigation of the parallels between art and morality. There could be no such realization without imagination, which is our only instrument for fathoming what it is like to be somebody else — that most difficult triumph of unselfing. It is only through the imagination that we are capable of empathy — in fact, the modern sense of the word empathycame into usejust over a century ago as a way of describing the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art.
We are living in a strange time, a time tyrannized by a moral fashion forbidding that vital act of imagining lives radically different from our own, narrowing the permissible locus of creativity and conversation to tighter and tighter self-similarity — censure that defeats the very project of fathoming otherness in order to, in Audre Lorde’s lovely words, “use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future.”
Three decades ago, at the dawn of this tyrannical regime that continually mistakes self-righteousness for morality and enslaves the soul in servitude to identity, the poet, essayist, teacher, and political activist Grace Paley (December 11, 1922–August 22, 2007) issued a sonorous wakeup call it is not too late to hear.
