New Year
Happy new year everyone.
We experienced NYE in slightly ritzy style over looking Yarra Park, home of the MCG and by popular usage, known as the MCG carpark. We were watching the family crowds get drenched by the fabulous electrical storm sweeping across the vista. The SO's mum has an apartment halfway up a tower block there.
Earlier we'd battled through the chirpy throngs to experience mainstream state sponsored entertainment. The experience reminded me of my preference for counterculture.
I really just don't get mass public entertainment. Is it my Eeyore like outlook or perhaps my Glass Half Empty stance that detests the mind numbing crowds, the interminable queues, the dust, the noise and the underlying inevitability for exploitation?
I think that when it come to so called Family Entertainment, the organisers usually rely on childrens' underdevoped taste and limited life experiences to foister mediocre offerings. Socially obliged parents glibly accept the various mono-gluteal acts that some lowest tender winning flunky sanctioned as worthy entertainment because they don't understand that they can have a passive yet effective role in determining the quality of the product - by not being there!
The best entertainment is usually free, and in our case we got more out of watching the buskers and making a vinyl headband for our daughter than anything else. We baulked at paying $20 for four tickets to then line up with 150 others to slide down the alimentery canal of a crocodile, or to jump around on a huge jumping castle, or to ride a comparitively small merry-go-round. Each line had at least ten cycles of expectant adrenaline starved try-hards and there was better value to be had from looking at the inclement skyline.
We walked through lines of the ten or so food vans and each one had about a hundred hungry partons waiting their turn to buy their obesity ration.
Despite all this crapola, we saw mostly pretty happy family units everywhere, the parents grinning and bearing it. Mostly they bore rictus smiles and yet occasionally some were euphoric. I wouldn't have wanted to use most of my time at the place standing in a queue. The point of the exercise, the sharing of the experience of the turning of the year was not prominent on the Midway.
Where one could find the state sanctioned happy-happy of the imminent anniversery was at the nearby concert where the audience don't mind being force-fed left-overs from the Cold War.
We didn't infiltrate the area of the concert, there was no need to bother, we could hear it anywhere in the entire carpark. The acts that we heard were Marcia Hines and "Daddy Cool/Mondo Rock". Public entertainment is a funny business. Who'd've though that what appeals to families of today would be the pop music that their parents used to like. (or even their grandparents). The Wikipedia article on D.C. states that the music was based on doo wop style from
the late fifties! I guess Australian Bands from the eighties or nineties or contemporary acts aren't appealing enough compared with these has beens.
From the balcony view 30 metres up, we saw the huge cold front streaming across the dusking sky. At one stage the bank was halfway across the view, with blue sky over the East and boiling grey/brown/black to the South and West. The lightening would discharge every ten seconds or so, and sometimes the bolts would ground sequentially across the vista. We all enjoyed the free show and soon enough the lightening gave way to a deluge that made the partygoers test their resolve to endure the concert and the upcoming programmed human fireworks. They duly arrived and povided an equal if quaint foil to the natural show of twenty minutes ealier. Both spectacles reminded me of the introduction of colour television. What was before in Black and White was now in Colour.
We experienced NYE in slightly ritzy style over looking Yarra Park, home of the MCG and by popular usage, known as the MCG carpark. We were watching the family crowds get drenched by the fabulous electrical storm sweeping across the vista. The SO's mum has an apartment halfway up a tower block there.
Earlier we'd battled through the chirpy throngs to experience mainstream state sponsored entertainment. The experience reminded me of my preference for counterculture.
I really just don't get mass public entertainment. Is it my Eeyore like outlook or perhaps my Glass Half Empty stance that detests the mind numbing crowds, the interminable queues, the dust, the noise and the underlying inevitability for exploitation?
I think that when it come to so called Family Entertainment, the organisers usually rely on childrens' underdevoped taste and limited life experiences to foister mediocre offerings. Socially obliged parents glibly accept the various mono-gluteal acts that some lowest tender winning flunky sanctioned as worthy entertainment because they don't understand that they can have a passive yet effective role in determining the quality of the product - by not being there!
The best entertainment is usually free, and in our case we got more out of watching the buskers and making a vinyl headband for our daughter than anything else. We baulked at paying $20 for four tickets to then line up with 150 others to slide down the alimentery canal of a crocodile, or to jump around on a huge jumping castle, or to ride a comparitively small merry-go-round. Each line had at least ten cycles of expectant adrenaline starved try-hards and there was better value to be had from looking at the inclement skyline.
We walked through lines of the ten or so food vans and each one had about a hundred hungry partons waiting their turn to buy their obesity ration.
Despite all this crapola, we saw mostly pretty happy family units everywhere, the parents grinning and bearing it. Mostly they bore rictus smiles and yet occasionally some were euphoric. I wouldn't have wanted to use most of my time at the place standing in a queue. The point of the exercise, the sharing of the experience of the turning of the year was not prominent on the Midway.
Where one could find the state sanctioned happy-happy of the imminent anniversery was at the nearby concert where the audience don't mind being force-fed left-overs from the Cold War.
We didn't infiltrate the area of the concert, there was no need to bother, we could hear it anywhere in the entire carpark. The acts that we heard were Marcia Hines and "Daddy Cool/Mondo Rock". Public entertainment is a funny business. Who'd've though that what appeals to families of today would be the pop music that their parents used to like. (or even their grandparents). The Wikipedia article on D.C. states that the music was based on doo wop style from
the late fifties! I guess Australian Bands from the eighties or nineties or contemporary acts aren't appealing enough compared with these has beens.
From the balcony view 30 metres up, we saw the huge cold front streaming across the dusking sky. At one stage the bank was halfway across the view, with blue sky over the East and boiling grey/brown/black to the South and West. The lightening would discharge every ten seconds or so, and sometimes the bolts would ground sequentially across the vista. We all enjoyed the free show and soon enough the lightening gave way to a deluge that made the partygoers test their resolve to endure the concert and the upcoming programmed human fireworks. They duly arrived and povided an equal if quaint foil to the natural show of twenty minutes ealier. Both spectacles reminded me of the introduction of colour television. What was before in Black and White was now in Colour.