Tally Ho Old Boy

*

Along with sanctuary, Steve provided nightly lessons in democracy, or the special plurality of alcohol. Standing in the middle of his barroom, you could watch men and women from all strata of society educating and abusing one another. You could hear the poorest man in town discussing “market volatility” with the president of the New York Stock Exchange, or the local librarian lecturing a New York Yankees Hall of Famer about the wisdom of choking up on the bat. You could hear a feebleminded porter say something so off-the-wall, and yet so wise, that a college philosophy professor would jot it on a napkin and tuck it in his pocket. You could hear bartenders—in between making bets and mixing Pink Squirrels--talk like philosopher kings.

Steve believed the corner bar to be the most egalitarian of all American gathering places, and he knew that Americans have always venerated their bars, saloons, taverns, and “gin mills,” one of his favorite expressions. He knew that Americans invest their bars with meaning and turn to them for everything from glamour to succor, and above all for relief from that scourge of modern life--loneliness. He didn't know that the Puritans, upon landing in the New World, built a bar even before they built a church. He didn't know that American bars descend directly from the medieval inns of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which descended from the Saxon alehouses, which descended from the tabernae along the roads of ancient Rome. Steve's bar could trace its lineage all the way back to the painted caves of Western Europe where Stone Age elders initiated young boys and girls into the ways of the tribe nearly fifteen thousand years ago. Though Steve didn't know these things, he sensed them in his blood and enacted them in everything he did. More than most men, Steve appreciated the importance of place, and on the cornerstone of this principle he was able to build a bar so strange and shrewd and beloved and wondrously in tune with its customers, that it came to be known well beyond Manhasset.

J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar.

The nightly decline, that's what it was like throughout his thirties. All day he worked at the Sydney Morning Herald, a front page journalist, lauded for his writing skills. All night he obliterated himself. Yes, he had always been an oblivion seeker, but now it became a deadly routine, work all day, play all night, never let the bed bugs bite, never let time catch you, never admit your youth was gone. Never admit they weren't queuing at the door like they used to; he didn't walk through the door, as he had once done at Brutus's, and have every queen in the room turn to look. He wasn't the centre of attention anymore. He was just another queen on a bar stool. You know why you write so well about those drunks? Because you're half way there yourself, Malcolm Brown said. Malcolm suffered from Turret's syndrome, and was notorious for his eccentricity, his blunt assessments of things.

The nightly drinks, the nightly oblivion, the nightly waiting for the dealer who always came, it became, now he had money from employment, simply an entrenched habit, a way of being. Yes, they'd wander over to the pub, the Australian, on Broadway, for lunch, in those heavy drinking days when Peter Smark's rotund form dominated the office - and the resentments of us lower paid mortals. Robert Haubt, who dropped dead in Moscow after drinking a bottle of vodka, was yet another of the characters. And the photographic editor, Zac. Those were the days when the head honchos made an appearance in time for morning conference, and then disappeared to the pub for a few normalising ales, or went out on their extravagant lunches, in the days when lunch was a fringe benefit and restaurants across the city thrived from the trade.

When editor in chief John Alexander tied up all the cars while he took his guests to lunch, the cars circling the block for hours while he indulged himself and his friends. They would show back up at the office in time for afternoon conference, sometimes barely able to stand. And it was all perfectly acceptable. They drank. They smoked. And they thought themselves very fine gentleman at the top of their game. Nowadays young things ride to work on their bikes and drink ever present bottles of spring water, and regard journalism as a sensible career choice like any other. But those were the grand days when alcoholism reached its peak, when our fractured sensibilities came together under the massive weight of excessive alcohol, and nobody thought anything of it. Everybody drank, and drank heavily. Lunch wasn't lunch unless it was accompanied by half a dozen schooners.

They named the freshly renovated beer garden at The Australian hotel after the environment writer, Joe Glascott, the Glascott gardens. Joe was a gentleman of the old school, who drank top drawer scotch and smoked top drawer cigarettes, Benson and Hedges, in the days before cigarettes became entirely unfashionable. Earnest young greenies would come to the office looking for the esteemed, powerful Mr Glascott, peddling the urgent theories, in the days when environmentalist was nothing but a nascent religion, and had not adopted the all powerful hysteria of the later years, when to declare you were against the environment was akin to declaring yourself against motherhood. Or sainthood. Because in those tight little lunches, where he joined the great men and worshipped at their knees, drinking, drinking, and drinking in their stories, laughing, because here, now, he was entering the heart of the city's journalistic culture.

He loved the elaborate, hysterically funny stories above all else. The days when a country tour was little more than a pub crawl, the day when Joe, after going from pub to pub throughout the day on whatever the story may have been, floods, droughts, farm prices, lost his reporter's pad. And when he got to the final pub in the late afternoon, sat at the bar with scotch in hand and filed perfect copy over the phone placed on the bar, never hesitating. Fact, fiction? A clever amalgam of both? The editors never knew. The readers would never know. It read perfectly well. These times were the best times, when things were still working, when to be a heavy drinker was just a part of life, expected, when he listened in rapt attention, call it all, to a young Tracy Aubin, who later drank herself to death, or a young Dennis Shannahan, who went on to have a distinguished career as a political commentator at the national paper.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/07/michael-jackson-body-forest-lawn

When the crowds of adoring fans thronging the Staples Centre in Los Angeles have gone home, Michael Jackson's family will lay him to rest. Where, is anyone's guess.

Many have speculated Jackson will meet the ages at the secretive Forest Lawn Memorial Park, a privately owned cemetery in the Hollywood Hills that is the purported home to the graves of Sammy Davis Jr, Humphrey Bogart, Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, and other American show business stars.

The Jackson family held a private service there this morning before the police-escorted funeral cortege made its way to the Staples Centre for the public memorial.

But the New York Post reported yesterday that the family may cremate the body to evade regulations that prevent his burial at Jackson's Neverland ranch. The paper reported the family would scatter his ashes there. The newspaper also reported the family would temporarily inter Jackson's body at a section of the Forest Lawn cemetery called Lincoln Terrace, which features a large statue of former American president Abraham Lincoln.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25749522-5013871,00.html

JULIA Gillard has condemned the Australian Fair Pay Commission's decision to freeze minimum wages, saying it failed to "strike the right balance" and would send low-paid workers' incomes backwards.

Employer groups and the opposition hailed the move as the necessary decision to protect jobs.

Despite the government not specifying a wage rise figure in its submission to the Fair Pay Commission's latest wage deliberations, the Acting Prime Minister said the freeze decision was "disappointing".

"We didn't nominate a figure; we suggested that the Fair Pay Commission should consider a pay rise for these workers, and we were obviously concerned that people should, at least, maintain their real wages," Ms Gillard said yesterday.

"This decision inevitably means that there will be a real wage reduction for low-income Australians."

In its final decision, the Fair Pay Commission decided to leave the federal minimum weekly wage at $543.78, or $14.31 an hour, despite unions asking for a $21-a-week increase.

Ms Gillard said changes to the tax system and the federal government's stimulus package had provided real increases in disposable incomes for most households.

The decision incensed unions and won immediate backing from employer groups, who said it would save jobs.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5h66J1UYJfa_TQrfb48nfeCniNTegD999OPFO0

BEIJING (AP) — The brawl between Han Chinese and Uighurs in southern China was scarcely covered by state media, but accounts and photos spread quickly via the Internet and became a spark that helped ignite deadly riots thousands of miles away in the Uighur homeland.

Even in tightly controlled China, relatively unfettered commentaries and images circulating on Web sites helped stir up tensions and rally people to join an initially peaceful protest in the Xinjiang region that spiraled into violence Sunday, leaving more than 150 people dead.

In China, as in Iran and other hotspots, the Internet, social networking and micro-blogging are playing a central role in mobilizing people power — and becoming contested ground as governments fight back.

In the Internet age, events in "places like Xinjiang or Tibet, which were always considered very remote," can suddenly become close and immediate for people around the world, said Xiao Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley.

Since the outburst in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi, the Chinese government has blocked Twitter and Facebook, scrubbed news sites, unplugged the Internet entirely in some places and slowed it and cell phone service to a crawl in others to stifle reports about the violence — and get its own message out that authorities are in control.

Key-word filters have been activated on search engines like Baidu and Google's Chinese version so that searches for "Xinjiang" or "Uighur" only turn up results that jibe with the official version of events.

That a fight in one part of China could impact a riot 10 days later thousands of miles away underscores how slippery fast-evolving communication technologies can be even for an authoritarian government with the world's most extensive Internet monitoring system.