'Beautiful Man, Beautiful Woman Blues'

Invidia Is An Ugly Emotion

For a while back in the 90s I was living in Neutral Bay where all the beautiful people lived. I was cash poor in a Yuppie suburb. I think I struggled with this fact a lot. I wrote songs about the people I was surrounded by that I didn't relate to, some of them awful as hell and others, well... What can you say about people you don't really know but simply meet in the car park beneath the argument block?

All you candy is imagine their life. Except you have so few clues just by looking at them. And so I had this really blank, nondescript notion-not even a solid idea - about these people. They are an immaculate couple that got around in a black BMW sedan that was always polished shiny. They wore  matching reflective sunglasses made by some famous brand and if you didn't know any better they looked like clothes horses from a department store catalogue.

At the same time I was reading and re-reading Takeshi Kaikoh's book 'Into a Black Sun' and of course the opening epigraph is a quote from Heidegger wherein Heidegger says "the future will be a shining darkness." Indeed the Japanese title of the book translates as 'The Shining Darkness"(which goes to show the translator Cecilia Segawa Siegle totally missed the point of the book when they re-titled it - and I mean it Cecilia!).

I was meditating on what the shining darkness looked like and I thought I could see it on the Silver screen at the movie theatres That the future would be these moving images in the dark, glorious bits of fiction that tangentially took off from reality. Or they would be incandescent lights in the night or fluorescent tubes lighting up in the night streets like scenes from 'Blade Runner'. It was all kind of abstract given how doomed the world looked in 1964 to Kaikoh as he watched the Vietnam War unfold. Or maybe the shining darkness was the reflection of the world in the reflective sunnies worn by Yuppies as they drove by in their BMW.

If you're wondering what that means, it means the future is now and we're living out the logical ramification of past failures of humanity. The Shining Darkness that Heidegger reference points to is world of petit bourgeoisie life, and easy consumerism bankrupting the the world, depleting resources and destroying the environment.

But hey, if you're living in Neutral Bay getting around in a shiny BMW, maybe everything's working out just right for you.




Come join the fun at Spotify.