Dan Fogelberg and The Innocent Age

Many Australians ask me why I left Ireland. They are mainly ones who haven’t been there. I think they have an image of freckly red heads dancing jigs before Guinness addled tourists in Western Seaboard pubs. Even the ones who have been there seemed to have spent their time flirting between castles and ceilis and managed to leave before the harsh realities kicked in.

There are many reasons why I left of course and most of them I’m not even consciously aware of myself. I guess it had more to do with the arriving than the departing. I wanted to come here more than I wanted to leave. But I don’t tell people this. I just mention the weather.

The truth is Ireland has the worst weather on the planet. Never cold enough to ski, slide or even throw snowballs. And never warm enough to leave the house without a woolly hat and gloves.

Australia on the other hand has ‘proper’ weather. Snow, ice, cyclones, spectacular electrical storms and blazing hot days when you could fry an egg under the sun, if you had an egg. And you get all this in a seven day period in Melbourne. Most days in Ireland it was too cold to leave the house. Ironically, today in Melbourne it’s too hot to do so. It’s 30c outside and it’s 11pm. I know this because I’m looking at the most popular website in Australia (OK, Australian Idol probably gets more hits, but I’m looking for dramatic effect here). The Bureau of Meteorology weather outlook. This gives 15 minute updates on temperature, humidity and rainfall. But everyone just looks at the temperature and wonders if they can make it from their air-conditioned office to their air-conditioned train without melting.

It peaked at 35c today. Not particularly a scorcher, we’ve had 45c this summer already, but hot enough to make you think twice about going for a jog on the beach. It’s the nights that are a problem. If it doesn’t drop below 20c you are faced with the prospect of a sleepless night or a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc induced slumber. On nights like this, I realise why Australia has such strong wine sales.

So I stuck the air-conditioning on at home and opened the internet to keep an eye on the weather. Technology is such now, that it’s easier to get accurate information from a web page than it is to stick your head out the window. While surfing the information highway, I stumbled across You Tube. I’m too old for bebo, too middle class for MySpace and too paranoid for facebook. You Tube gives me social networking without having to divulge any more information about myself than I’m a heterosexual male who likes female country singers who hate men.

I visited the site to do something I’ve meant to do since Christmas. For those of you who don’t know, Dan Fogelberg left us on December 16th and as the man said, I didn’t even know he was sick. Actually that’s not true. I heard he had problems a couple of years ago and that friends were rallying round. I wanted to call but it had been so long I was scared the shock might kill him. Little did I know then that the Big C would finally get him? And I don’t mean drowning!

Dan and myself kind of lost touch around 1992. I had moved to London and lost his address and he stopped writing (I actually only ever got one letter from him and that was a demand that I lay off the stalking back in 1985). The CD age had arrived and I had all his records on vinyl. It took me a while to backfill his catalogue and my tastes had kind of moved on then to maudlin tunes sung by anorexic long haired females. Dan was my teenage years, my growing up, my innocence. It was a bygone time when we had all our conquests planned before our dreams were turned to water and they trickled through our hands.

I first heard him sing on RTE Radio 2 on a tinny transistor back in 1981. The song was “Same Old Lang Syne”, a poetic tribute to a lost love. Back in 1981, I hadn’t had any loves, never mind lost ones, so it’s strange that this song should have touched such a chord. I saved up some money from my early creative work (overcharging drunk punters in the pub I worked in and pocketing the difference) and bought one of the seminal albums of all time. Dan Fogelberg’s “Innocent Age”. This was a double album, favoured by connoisseurs of “concept albums” like myself and it must have been really classy, because it contained all the words to the songs on a booklet inside.

I bought the album just before Christmas of that year and lost myself in its melodic tunes of Innocence Lost. Ironic really as my other obsession at that time was losing my innocence. I brought it to a party at Larry Cotters house around then as was the fashion in those bygone days. My mates were into The Human League and Duran Duran and I was hoping to educate them. I also wanted to impress a girl called Dearbla but she showed as little interest in me as my mates did in quality music.

I retired to a back room and put the Innocent Age on the record player, sat on the floor in the dark and listened to all four sides before returning to the party. Dan helped me through those years. He gave me a sense of common thought in a confused world.

So I logged onto You Tube tonight and typed in “Dan Fogelberg”. Maybe you have to die to get noticed, but Dan is certainly being noticed now. There are hundreds of videos and tributes to the man. It’s strange to read words written by somebody in Japan who is saying the same things as I’ve said above. It’s comforting to know that there are a lot of people out there as soppy as me.

Shoshin Seishu left this message and I think he sums up well for me.

“His music: So wonderful & full of insight & vulnerability (which in the privacy of our interior worlds, allowed even well-defended & emotionally walled-off men such as myself not only to feel but also to express our tenderness). In a particular four-year period, I can track passages, transitions, ups & downs, triumphs & heart-breaks, loves won & lost by certain Fogelberg songs & albums.”

Dan and the Innocent Age. It was nice knowing both of you.

A Letter from St Kilda

Controversy abounds in St. Kilda this week. This hippy Latin Quarter of Melbourne seems to have awoken from years of marijuana induced slumber to realise that Capitalism has overtaken it. The City is booming with rich migrants (like my good self) and heaps of foreign investment. A lot of this finds its way to St. Kilda each weekend, if it doesn’t get way laded at the casino on route.

The cake shops and pubs are the main beneficiaries, although there a few novelty shops that do well too, like the one on my street that only sells dog accessories. Or the one that sells only one brand of sports shoe and only in one size and colour at that.

But while the good folk of St. Kilda are happy to rake in the shillings, they don’t seem to like it when the shillings ask for something in return. Two issues seem to be bothering the locals at the moment. The triangle development is an attempt by big business to build 50 or so shops on the last remaining piece of land in this suburb. Which would be fine except the land is about the size of a postage stamp.

At the same time the government have decided to dredge the bay. This seems to have created the fear that two hundred years of sludge are about to be dumped on the fair beach of St. Kilda, which already has several hundred used syringes and condoms to deal with. Given how dirty the beach already is, you’d wonder why they care. But I guess even bag ladies don’t like being rained on.

The St. Kilda festival was on last weekend and it allowed protestors against both issues to campaign amongst the thousands of young people who had come to drink and listen to music that was free. To my educated ear, I am guessing the music was free because no-one in their right mind would pay to listen to it.

There are many fine festivals around the world, which will specialise in Art, Music, Comedy or Film. They allow patrons to indulge in a feast of similar events. Like seven movies you’ll never see at the cinema over seven nights. Gluttony of comics at a comedy festival or six Shakespeare plays over a long weekend. They can be exhausting but they serve a purpose. The St. Kilda festival is not like this.

It just seemed to be there because people remember St. Kilda festivals from years gone by and vaguely remember having a good time. After two hours of wandering around concession stands and avoiding novelty stilt walkers, I found myself turning into the Steve Martin character from Trains, Planes and Automobiles. I wanted to hunt down the festival organiser, grab him by the throat and yell “if you’re going to have a festival, have a bloody point”.

So I wasn’t feeling very positive when the first petition was shoved in my face. The girl holding it looked like she’d just disembarked from a Greenpeace anti whaling ship. The development was the issue exercising her dreadlocked mind. I asked her where the development would be and she looked at me blankly before replying “St. Kilda”. I told her that I’d kind of figured that much out from the name. She looked a bit lost, so I pointed over her shoulder at the patch of waste ground that stood like a carbuncle between the grand old Palais Theatre and the newly renovated St. Kilda Baths.

“What would you suggest we do with it if the development doesn’t happen?” She turned to survey the weeds and rubble and said ruefully “I guess we should just leave it as it is”.

And that’s the problem with development. Big business gobbles up any free space available and seeks to fill it in the same way that nature abhors a vacuum. Being big business it will concentrate on fast food outlets and chain store shops. The council planning process will hoist some altruistic requirements upon them, like the inclusion of an ethnic fruit and vegetable market or a water fountain.

The sad thing is that most people’s experience of similar developments has been negative and so they would rather leave the plot empty and ugly and give St. Kilda the impression of being unfinished.

The irony of course is that the beach front is already filled with fast food outlets and chain stores. The conspiracy theorist within me feels the heavy hand of Capitalism on both sides. The loudest complaints against the development come from the existing business community. Like all good capitalists, they are happy to fumble in the greasy till, but will raise the ‘rent a mob’ of anti progress protesters whenever competition raises its head.

I had barely moved ten metres when an identikit protester approached me. She was adorned with “Save the Bay” stickers that nestled between her Greenpeace and PETA badges. If there is one thing protesters enjoy more than stopping something, it’s saving something. It’s a cause and happy are those who race to protect its flag.

The interesting thing about the bay dredging debate is that most scientists are in favour of it. The bay has an average depth of only three metres as I discover to my cost whenever I’ve gone for a swim. The water is so shallow; you expend more energy walking out to find depth than you ever will expend swimming.

The channel through which the big container ships pass is clearly deeper, but the scientists say it needs to be dredged or else trade will dry up and Melbourne will lose the rationale for its existence.

But science gave us GM foods, nuclear waste and Anthrax. So when Joe Soap is faced with a scientist on one side and a nice, articulate college student who claims that Pandora’s Box lurks beneath the silt of Port Phillip Bay and should stay untouched for fear of what it might reveal, then the sympathy will go with the college student.

I smiled and took the pen and signed “Charles Haughey”. As someone who knew everything about corrupt development, I thought it appropriate that he should start atoning for his sins from beyond the grave.

Zen and the Art of Cooking

I’m not sure why I never took up cooking. It’s not as though I have been fed tasty morsels each night by talented chefs and waited on hand and foot by nymphs.

Until the age of 22, most of my meals were cooked by my dear old mum. She has many wonderful qualities, but conjuring up high class cuisine is not one of them. As the old saying goes, she could burn tea and is the only person I know who could make curry taste like apple tart and vice versa.

And yet I never took the logical step of taking up the pots and pans and doing it myself. I had three sisters but that wasn’t much help. In Irish culture, you have to be in your seventies before spinster sisters will cook for bachelor brothers.

When I left home I moved in to a flat with two mates. One of them lived on nothing but sausages for the first year, while the other thought that yogurt and bananas provided all the necessary food groups and give you all your daily requirements.

It wasn’t haute cuisine, but by then I was living in London and was surrounded by thousands of Indian, Italians and Lebanese who would happily cook for me for a small price. Thus began a life long love affair with take-away food.

Then there was the lost years when I questioned whether I was up to it or not. Would my chicken give you (or more importantly me) botulism? Would my pies implode, my trifles disintegrate into a thousand constituent parts, my sausages take on the consistency of soup and my curry, through some genetic curse, taste like apple-tart?

I lost what little confidence I had and stopped completely. Even old staples, such as my world famous garlic bread and scrambled eggs went by the way-side. I sold my soul and stomach to the consumerist, disposable age and happily let it feed me a cocktail of salt and sugar fuelled stodge.

I decided all this had to change and searched my conscience for motivation. Some people are motivated by dreams of glory, financial reward or sheer competitive drive. For me, only shame will work. It is only when I’m exposed to a mocking world that I can rouse myself from years of slumber.

Australia provides such a mocking world. St. Kilda beach is packed with bronzed Adonis’ while the roads of the city are filled each night with joggers, cyclists, roller bladders and various other forms of healthy transport.

And then there are the public displays of cooking. Every weekend the parks, beaches and balconies of Melbourne hum to the beat of a million singing BBQ chefs. Even more gallingly, most of the chefs are men. It’s a right of passage thing here that blokes have to be able to cook a steak, some fish and two fried eggs on a barby before they can graduate from primary school.

My shame being complete, I finally found the motivation to change. It helps when you have a girlfriend who is not only a master chef, but is also someone with great patience and a low fear of being poisoned. She volunteered to teach and supervise me, perhaps not realising that the task she was about to undertake was akin to Robinson Crusoe teaching Latin to Man Friday.

We started with a pasta sauce which was a delicate mix of roasted tomatoes, red wine vinegar and olive oil. It was damn tasty, but I think the thing that most impressed me was that this was the first time I’d ever made something that looked completely different when it was finished to what it looked like when I started.

I’d managed to go all these years eating tomato based sauce and never thought to think how it got to that state from a fully formed fruit.

But a pasta sauce is a pasta sauce after all, so this week I thought I’d branch out into something more substantial. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have had a long and often beautiful relationship with curry. It’s been tough love at times. My stomach hasn’t always thanked me for pouring 3 curries into it on weekend trips to London. I was a connoisseur of Chicken Tikka Masala when it was still trendy and hadn’t overtaken fish and chips as England’s favourite dish. But my curry fetish wasn’t monogamous. I liked up Thai Green Curry and queued for hours in the rain to get a Vietnamese curry chip in Dundalk after every visit to the pub in the 1980’s.

So I consider myself an expert on spicy Asian foods. I know my Szechwan’s from my Nepalese and Rogan Josh’s from my Bombay Aloo’s. But my expertise falls heavily on the eating side of things so it was a daunting task that faced me as I arranged the ingredients neatly on the sideboard.

Eggplant curry was my challenge. I haven’t branched into chicken or beef yet. But this is not because of any vegetarian bent. I had toyed with the idea of becoming a fully signed up tree hugging vegi. But I looked to God for guidance and one night over a juicy steak he came to me and said “If I wanted you be vegetarian, I wouldn’t have made animals out of meat”. I’m still a bit scared of cooking that stuff to be honest.

The eggplants needed to be roasted first. And I thought ovens were only for heating up pizzas! While you’re doing this, you chop up your veggies and get your spices ready. I went heavy on the cumin and ground coriander and light on the chilli powder. Chilli is such a cop out for curry chefs and I wasn’t going to fall into that trap first time up. Fry your onions until your kitchen smells like an Irish chipper, then peel and mash the eggplant and lamp the whole lot into a pot, spices, vegetables and all and cook for ten minutes.

And surprise, surprise, out comes something that is not only edible but bloody tasty to boot. I don’t think I’ll ever be Jamie Oliver (I don’t have the hair) but I really could get into this.

And the best part of it all was, it didn’t taste anything like Apple Tart.