I was in Adelaide visitng some friends and ended up at a dinner party for New Year's Eve in Blackwood.
There was a particularly articulate and argumentative elderly lady at the table there with whom I got into certain discussions about amongst other things, Rock Music and its place in history. I guess I get drawn into discussions and arguments easily, and this is a great personal failing on my part.
She seemed to think that all popular music was garbage and was waiting on the big comeback of classical music to happen. I explained the economic imperative of music over the ages and how performance music has always been trending downward from orchestras to smaller and smaller units until performance music itself was supplanted by recorded music. She then asked for a working definition of rock music in the broadest sense and I had to say it was the music of the electric guitar as invented and mass-marketed in the 1950s; and that it's era as a socially important form was drawing to a close.
Then we got into various discussions about the nature of water supply and greenhouse emissions. I steered right clear of expressing any opinion about 'Aboriginal Art' and yet managed to totally slag off on the National Museum in Canberra. I think I even got a few hits in on Kim Beazley's leadership and the failure of the Labor Party to recapture the middle ground. I had a particularly long discussion with her son Dermot, who seemed to be some kind of academic, about the negative consequences of the late 1980s Dawkins Reforms - and I wasn't particularly nice about it, I flat-out panned the current status of Tertiary Education in this country.
Dermot and his mother left around 10:30pm and it was only afterwards that I was informed that the elderly lady was former Senator Rosemary Crowley.
1 comment:
I wouldn't worry too much about making an "ass" of yourself Art. I think it would have been a real 'hoot' to be a fly on the wall at that party. Mrs Crowley obviously has some pretty strong opinions and ought to be ready to back them up when she comes face-to-face with someone with equally strong opinions, so it would've been fun to be watching from the sidelines :)
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