Michael Green

Writer and producer

Gelato at Brunetti’s

In Culture, Environment on

“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods.” That’s the first line of Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote.

Me – I am always drawn back to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the sentences and their paragraphs.

Every autumn, for the several years I’ve rented a room on an elm-lined street in Carlton, I get an urge to read the novella. I want to read it sitting in my terrace courtyard in the waning sun; on a stool in the window of a busy café; on my grandmother’s old armchair in my room, looking out to the yellowing trees.

It’s an autumnal story, gentle and sad, lonely and tender, its scenes fluttering with falling leaves. It begins and ends in fall, and the narrator first meets Holly Golightly in September, on “an evening with the first ripple-chills of autumn running through it”. It barely wisps through winter and spring, and Holly “hibernates” in summer.

The narrator she calls “Fred”, after her brother, or sometimes Buster or Cookie, and who shares much with a young Capote – and something with me, too – says he doesn’t care much for springtime; autumns, rather, “seem that season of beginning”.

I’ve never thought about the book all that much, about what it means, or why I like it so. I just want to read it when the mornings are crisp.

But this year, I was drawn to it before the leaves alerted me, by the New Yorker, which carried a dismissive review of a new Broadway adaptation. The critic adores the novella, however: it is “so extraordinary a work,” he wrote, “that it incites not writerly envy but pride”.

Yes, I thought, that’s true. When it was published, Norman Mailer said Capote was “the most perfect writer” of his generation, who wrote “the best sentences, word for word, rhythm upon rhythm”. Mailer said he “would not change two words” in the book. Yes, I should read it again. Maybe its sentences will rub off on mine?

That was in early April. Normally, the leaves on my street would have begun to fall by then. One summer during the drought they fell at Christmas and we all worried it was the end for the trees. But the council installed all kinds of sprinklers and mulched around the trunks, and gradually they recovered. And this year, autumn arrived late. The hottest summer on record stretched deep into March and April: an extended, gelato-summer, my evenings still punctuated by the short walk across the park and around the corner to the ice-cream counter at Brunetti. Beneath those balmy days and mild nights the trees remained green. 

***

I do not know how many times I’ve read the book; less than ten, I’d guess. But I do remember when I first heard of it. I was in a crummy bar in Canberra, visiting an old friend, my first housemate when I moved there after university. He is several years older, a contrary character, alternately passionate and ambivalent about day-to-day life.

The bar has a sour smell, sourer every time I return. There were three of us: my friend and an old comrade of his – a socialist turned sensualist with a large tattoo of a rat on his forearm. We were drinking beer and talking about books; or rather, they were talking about books and I was listening. The socialist adored Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My friend agreed: “It’s a gorgeous story,” he said and his eyes grew moist, as they do in all the conversations with him I like best.

I thought it improbable. I’d never seen the movie – still haven’t, as a matter of fact – but I had the notion it was a swooning romance. I was suspicious of the book. Nevertheless, I bought a copy, one of those cheap, orange, Penguin classics. It contains the novella and three short stories, same as the first edition in 1958. It is pleasingly slim, enough to fit in your pocket.

The story isn’t a romance, I found out – not that sort, anyway. It’s all memory, belonging and loss, and a platonic kind of love. A decade on, Fred recalls the cycle of seasons he spent living above Holly Golightly in a New York brownstone; at first captivated, then burned and finally, warmed, by her reflected glow.

It was wartime, 1943, and young Fred had moved from the south with a fancy to be a writer. Before he’d even met her, the card above the girl’s mailbox nagged him “like a tune”:

Miss Holly Golightly

Travelling

Holly is a society girl, not a prostitute, though she understands the gossip; after all, she admits, “I’ve always thrown out such a jazzy line”. Assorted unpleasant men exchange generous tips for her company; Capote described his creation as an American geisha. She’s only 19, escaping her past, but always remembering it – playing sad country songs in the fire escape while her hair dries – and then inventing herself anew.

I’m not one for recalling plots, and I know it. But even so, Breakfast at Tiffany’s surprises me every time. By the end, yet again, all I have is a shimmering sense of her, and an impression of the writer too, the outsider upstairs, sometimes writing, often listening in, wishing he were nearer.

This year, though, I noticed a few things along the way.

It’s the ’40s, sure, but Holly stumps for marriage equality. She’s settled down some by this stage, and tells Fred she loves her man just fine, but he’s not her “guy ideal”. And who is? Jawaharlal Nehru, say, or Greta Garbo: “Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or – listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man o’ War, I’d respect your feeling. No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.”

Man o’ War was a famous thoroughbred horse.

This too: I discovered – again surely – that Fred’s birthday is 30 September, the same as mine. And Capote’s. Not only that, but it’s also the day on which everything unravels: “So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I’ve lived.” That’s how Fred described our birthday. It was really the three of us there, you know: Holly, Fred and me.

But most of all, I thought about Holly and the “mean reds”. Not the blues.

“No,” she tells Fred, slowly. “No, the blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re sad, that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is.”

Her only cure is to hail a cab to Tiffany’s and look in the windows. “It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in the nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets.”

Holly yearns for a real-life place that makes her feel the way Tiffany’s does, maybe in Mexico by the sea, when her lost brother returns from the war. She went there once – they’d raise horses, and he’s good with horses. But even as she says it, Fred and Holly and me, we all know it’s an impossible dream.

***

In my street, the first heavy leaf fall came on May 1, the first day of the last month of the season: there was a cold wind and the yellow leaves fell like a storm. But then it got warm again, and once more I went for gelato. In most respects I’m an advocate for variety, but when it comes to ice cream, I’ve settled on my gelato ideal: two scoops in a waffle cone, chocolate and lemon.

This autumn Brunetti moved around the corner from Faraday Street, where it had been for nearly 30 years, and into the space on Lygon Street vacated when Borders died.

I visited the new store on a Saturday night, on a date. I had the mean reds that day, shot through with the blues: I knew well the cause. I’d been writing about climate change – the worsening disaster projections now, next decade, throughout my lifetime and beyond, together with the profound absence of either prevention or preparation. Nothing new, I know, but nothing tolerable either, when you think about it. In a recent journal article, a speculative “future history” by respected American science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, I read a throwaway line: “The human populations of Australia and Africa, of course, were wiped out.”

The store was alive, teeming and hollering like an old-time trading floor in a stock boom. As we entered, it became clear there were two kinds of people. Dozens of waiters strode after their errands, wearing bow ties and black waistcoats or else slim black aprons tied in a cross at the back, while all around the rest of us tottered, distracted and enraptured by the cakes, tarts, chocolates and macaroons, and the mirrors, the bonze trim, the patterned tiles and the blown-up, black and white photographs on the walls. We gaped alongside infinite desserts, we stared at the baristas on the central podium and we swept past pastries and savouries, croissants and paninis, until we stopped before a huge, tiled pizza oven.

I was agog. Sparkle-eyed. I turned to her and gestured toward all the people, sitting, talking, waiting, laughing, fattening: “Isn’t it wonderful?”

To our left there was a roped-off section commanded by a waiter in a headset. Straight ahead, the gelato, more flavours than ever before. “Maybe,” she replied slowly. “But it’s so much. It’s awful. It’s madness – it’s everything that doesn’t make sense.”

I agreed: awful. And wonderful. We slipped out of there, without gelato this time, and back into the autumn Carlton night.

***

I read the novella for a second time, writing this story, but the moment had passed. I’m done with wistfulness, for now. Everything – endless summer and falling leaves, apathy and indulgence, reds and blues, bad governments and worse; brown coal, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and humanity – it all has its season.

Read this article at the Wheeler Centre website

Other people’s cars

In Community development, Culture, The Age on

I’D been invited to a wedding in Darwin in July. Somehow, August arrived. I was still in Melbourne, mired in the worst of winter, those bitter weeks when the calendar says it is nearly spring. A friend said a knot had formed in my forehead.

“Bugger it, I’m going north,” I decided. “Who knows what’ll happen?”

I cadged a lift with two bushwalkers on their way to the Grampians. There, I waited by the highway, smiling and waving at cars. Within minutes a taciturn Brazilian named Carlos, who delivers phone books for a living, stopped his small truck and drove me all the way to Adelaide’s central market. Whoosh! But it wasn’t until the next day that my brow really began to lift.

I’d been dropped at the turn-off to Port Pirie and I was standing in the dirt, head down, scribbling in my notebook: “Bobbi and Tim, maroon Mazda 323, nurse and plasterer, adult kids, Coca-Cola beanie, booze and bipolar, the golden rule tattooed on Tim’s left forearm…”, when a white van pulled up ahead.

It was Harm, a wiry fellow with a thin grey ponytail and great joy in his face. The joy is always there – I knew that straight away – but he was particularly elated right then, thrilled by my means of travel.

We enthused together. He reminisced about his wandering days after migrating from Holland, and showed me his gallery and home in the old shipwrights’ workshop in Port Germein. He made coffee and explained how, for more than two decades, he’d been growing tree seedlings and giving them to locals.

Later, I walked the town’s long jetty, one-and-a-half kilometres over the shallow Spencer Gulf, while the sun set on the Flinders Ranges behind me. I looked back and saw the once-barren port nestled in green.

From there I went north through the desert, gathering momentum, standing by the road and sitting in other people’s cars: Squizzy the resentful, racist roofer; Robbie and Jimmy Barnes, Arabunna mob on their way to a mine; Speeding Amy, the Vietnamese woman too tired to sleep; and Dave, who’d crashed into a tree and broken all his body, but found his backbone – he was moving north to make a better life.

Before long I was in the Alice, both attracted and repelled. Attracted by the rocky MacDonnell ranges and the sharp, generous people I met; repelled by welfare dependency and idyllic ex-pat cafes. Attracted by a football final with its mixed, lively crowd. Repelled by a day watching court. I was shocked by the nihilism of the drunks and the recklessness of a new government removing controls on alcohol supply. I was confused and spellbound by it all.

In Yuendumu, about 300 kilometres north-west, I volunteered at the community arts centre. I filled paint pots and took the artists cups of tea, listening all the while to the sounds of Warlpiri: the fast, rolling combinations of the consonants j, n, p and r, and the vowels a and u. I read a book by an anthropologist who’d lived in a women’s camp there. She learnt to abandon planning her days, to submit to the collective will instead. She gave up control, but gained a profound curiosity upon waking each morning.

Back in Alice, I tried my own brand of recklessness. Four days I hid at the freight terminal, ready to hop a cargo train. Four nights I trudged home, nine-parts despondent and one-part relieved – the trains either hadn’t come or lacked a place to stow away. I’d have kept trying, and might have fried like an egg on a hotplate, but for Macarena, a sparky Chilean traveller who offered to hitch with me the next morning instead. I went with Macarena.

On and on I went, north through hot springs and waterfalls, high-school visits and football games, canoeing days and speedway nights. Until, after two weekends of laksas and mangoes at Darwin’s markets, I turned around and came south.

John McDouall Stuart took five years and six attempts to cross the centre on horseback. He searched for waterholes and ached with scurvy. I hitched the Stuart Highway home from Darwin in just four days. I slaked my thirst at roadhouses and scanned the narrow ribbon of asphalt through seven different windscreens.

For Stuart, the desert brought purpose and quietude, an escape from the awkwardness and alcoholism that dogged him in colonial society. For me, it brought conversation and gratitude, and insight into the lives of people I’d never otherwise meet. Exactly 150 years apart, both of us yearned for salad.

After breakfast on a Friday, I walked to the highway near Coober Pedy. At lunchtime, a fitter-and-turner named Greg stopped for me in Port Augusta. He’d wrecked his fender – hit a dingo on the left side and a roo on the right. I said I was headed for Melbourne.

“You’re in luck,” he replied. He was from Cranbourne. He’d drop me to my door.

At 3 am we crested a hill on the Western Freeway and the big city’s lights sent shocks of surprise through my fingertips. I’d gotten into other people’s cars and put myself in Harm’s way: I was joyful. It was late, but my eyes were bright and my forehead clear.

“Who knows,” I wondered, “what will happen tomorrow?”

Read this article at The Age online, with three other great road trip yarns, from Cate Kennedy, Simon Castles and Fran Cusworth.

Choir hits a high note in Europe

In Culture, The Age on

CALEB Foster-McLachlan could barely contain his excitement yesterday, the eve of his departure for the ancient cathedrals of Europe where he will perform with the Australian Children’s Choir.

”I’m so excited I can’t get to sleep at night any more. I just want to go,” the 17-year-old said.

Foster-McLachlan, who has high-functioning autism, said he tends to worry too much: ”I get stressed about expectations and results a lot of the time. Sometimes I think I’m going from one stressful thing to another.”

That made his first night in the choir after his successful audition particularly nerve-racking. ”It was very scary at first,” he says. ”I was so nervous my voice wobbled and the conductor commented that I sounded like a pregnant turkey being strangled.

”But I learnt quickly and the last comment I had from him was a few months ago – he said I had too much of a cheeky grin, which was off-putting from a distance!”

The choir’s tour of Europe has been two years in the planning. For just over three weeks, 50 children – aged from 10 to 18 – will sing in several cities across Germany, Austria and England.

The schedule culminates with a performance at Canterbury Cathedral, where the group will take part in the International Children’s Choir Festival, singing with young choristers from six countries.

Choir director and conductor Andrew Wailes says he has been able to organise for the ensemble to perform in some remarkable venues – places far removed, and not just geographically, from the children’s normal base in Mitcham.

”It’s mind-blowing just to walk into some of the glorious Gothic cathedrals in Europe and know they are between 500 and 1000 years old,” he says. ”And when you go in there to sing, it’s the most inspirational setting. These spaces were designed all those years ago to make the human voice sound its best.”

Wailes says the tour party is excited and nervous – and that goes for the accompanying adults, too. Last week, he held the final briefing for parents.

”Suddenly one of the kids looked up to me with these forlorn eyes and said, ‘We’ve only got one rehearsal left!’ And I said, ‘Yes, you betcha. I’m acutely aware of that, young man’.”

The choir’s repertoire for the trip comprises 43 songs, including a Latin Mass and a few pieces in German, all learnt since the beginning of the year at twice-weekly rehearsals.

”It’s a huge amount of music for the kids to have prepared in six months, but they’ve got there. We’re ready and raring to go,” Wailes says.

”They’re going to come back different people, with a whole lot of experiences and wonderful memories to inspire them.”

Foster-McLachlan has felt restless for the past two weeks, but this time it’s out of anticipation, not anxiety. He has been daydreaming about walking in German forests, descending upon mediaeval castles and singing in thousand-year-old chapels with gilded walls.

”I could have spent my sleeplessness productively, packing my bag,” he admits, ”but instead I sit there imagining being inside the Canterbury Cathedral or how I’m going to talk with the American choirs we’ll meet.”

The year 11 student’s mother, Brenda McLachlan, says being in the choir has helped him understand the subtleties of communication and socialising in a group – scenarios that can be challenging for autistic people.

”Singing in the choir is calming and therapeutic because at times he can get quite wound up,” she says.

Wailes said the benefits of singing are clear for the young and the old.

”It’s the basic human form of relaxing that doesn’t require gym fees or expensive equipment,” he said. ”When you’re singing, that’s all you think about, you don’t worry about anything else. It’s good for the soul.”

Read this article at The Age online

Martin Schoeller: Close-Up

In Culture, The Big Issue on

Photographer Martin Schoeller gets up close and personal with some familiar faces.

BEFORE he takes portraits, photographer Martin Schoeller thoroughly researches his subjects. If they are actors, he watches their movies. If they are writers, he reads their books.

“A lot goes into each shoot,” the photographer told the Artinfo website in 2008. He brainstorms concepts, scouts locations and sources props. All of which seems curious, as each of his photographs looks much the same: a passport-style close-up, enlarged to epic proportions, with shallow depth of focus – the eyes and mouth are sharp, the tip of the nose and the lobes of the ears are not.

Close-Up, an exhibition of Schoeller’s portraits, is now on show at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. The gallery’s walls are lined with his large images, some the size of muscle-car bonnets. Almost every square inch within the frames bulge with the (mostly) famous faces they contain, from a grizzled Jack Nicholson and an alien Paris Hilton, to a waxy Christopher Walken and a crinkly Helen Mirren.

The Schoeller exhibition raises an intriguing question: is celebrity, blown up and unretouched, still just celebrity? Or does it convey something more substantial? Michael Desmond, senior curator with the gallery, admits to some initial trepidation as to how the exhibition would be received, before it opened in November. “I was a bit cautious,” he says. “I thought people were over celebrity. They’re so familiar with Brad Pitt’s face that they might not come and see this show. Interestingly, they’ve responded really well. Most people come in as fans. Some come in slightly cynically – as I did – and are then converted.”

Schoeller was born in Munich, Germany, in 1968, and studied photography in Berlin at Lette-Verein – a training more technical than artistic. At 25, he moved to New York to be an assistant to Annie Liebovitz, the renowned celebrity photographer. He has since described that time as very challenging.

“My English was not that good when I first came [to New York], and she’s extremely demanding,” he has recalled. “She doesn’t have that much patience. I got along with her very well after about a year, but the first year was very intense and not very pleasant.”

After three years, Schoeller became a freelance photographer and later began contributing to The New Yorker and other prominent magazines, including Rolling Stone, GQ and Vogue. Dissatisfied with the glamour and commercialism of conventional celebrity portraits, he devised his trademark technique. “They allow me to walk away with something for myself – a very honest, simple portrait that no publicist can say anything about. You can’t see what they’re wearing and they’re not having to do anything, so no red flags go up. Only three or four times have people refused to have a picture taken that close,” he told Artinfo.

Schoeller, who is still based in New York, uses a long lens and simple lighting in his portrait sessions. He takes about 200 frames, talking incessantly to put the sitter at ease while he seeks an expression between expressions: a moment when the subject is temporarily not posing.

His headshots are often praised for their ‘democratic’ approach. By presenting every subject the same way, regardless of their status, the photographs can invite reflection and debate on the nature of celebrity.

“The images are commissioned by high circulation magazines, so in that sense, they’re reinforcing the cult of celebrity,” Desmond observes. “But, on the other hand, the way they’re photographed undermines it. They’re not necessarily flattering. When you are confronted with the images you think about what makes these people famous. Why this person? What are the things you actually see? The size is a bait to make you question the notion of fame.

“The large scale creates a sort of false intimacy,” Desmond says. “You’re forced to make an emotional connection. There’s a feeling that the faces are really close to you. Normally people only get that close when they’re either in love with you or you’re having a fight.”

Close-Up also includes a number of portraits of Indigenous people from South Africa and Brazil, shot and presented in the same way. But given the bias towards celebrities, is ‘democratic’ really the right word for Schoeller’s approach? Arguably, it’s only democracy in the most corrupt form: a means of placating the many, while reinforcing the power of the few.

But Desmond argues: “Maybe it’s an Australian version of democracy, where we bring the rich and famous down to our level,” he says. “They’re imperfect. Barack Obama is one of the most powerful men in the world, but when you see his face in the exhibition you’re conscious of how misshapen it is. He doesn’t look particularly powerful. Even the rich and famous are mortal.”

Desmond also believes the portraits transcend notions of celebrity. “In the end, you’re conscious less of the fame and more of the physiognomy: eyes, noses, mouths. Some are beautiful, some are engaging, some are quite freaky. You see so many faces that you leave with a feeling of the breadth of humanity, which is not something you expect when you walk in.”

Close-Up is at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, until 13 February. See the article in The Big Issue for photos.

Paul Kelly, How to Make Gravy

In Culture on

A FEW days before I was scheduled to interview Paul Kelly, I happened to be in Newcastle, watching a singer-songwriter night in a quiet bar. A rangy looking man stood up and performed a halting, anguished cover of Kelly’s song How to Make Gravy.

In the lyrics, a man calls his brother from jail, just before Christmas. He passes on his gravy recipe, together with an extra serving of regret. It’s the kind of taut, empathetic storytelling for which Kelly has been acclaimed throughout a career spanning 30 years and two-dozen albums and soundtracks.

Now he’s added a “mongrel memoir” to his catalogue – and it’s also called How to Make Gravy.

“The title suits the way the book mixes things up,” he explains, on the phone from his St Kilda home. “You’re cooking a roast, and you throw in a bit of this and that, and you make gravy. That’s what writing the book felt like to me: it was a by-product of something else.”

In 2004, when the Spiegeltent first arrived in Melbourne, Kelly performed a series of special shows. Over four nights, he sang 100 of his songs in alphabetical order, and leavened the one-man act with a selection of stories. Audiences gobbled it up, and he later toured the format around Australia and overseas.

How to Make Gravy follows the same A-to-Z structure. Each chapter contains the lyrics to a song, together with an anecdote. The result is something like a big, snug patchwork quilt, in which Kelly has stitched stories about his family history and song writing, together with pop music lore, literary references, band travel yarns, and hard-won life experience. There are even occasional puzzles.

“I wrote it in sequence, starting with the letter A. Some stories I had for a while, but generally, when I sat down I didn’t know what I was going to write. It was only when I got to the Ds or Es that I had the confidence to say, ‘I think I’m writing a book’,” Kelly says, sounding surprised he ever got through it.

“I didn’t set out to write a memoir. I just used the songs as a jumping off point to write in a different way. Love Never Runs On Time had one little mention of bad coffee in it, so I thought I’d write about the struggle to get a good coffee on the road.”

He strove for his writing to be “companionable” – and it is. It’s the kind of book you read with a smile on your face. You get up to make a cup of tea, and notice you’re still smiling, and humming too, and pondering some dusty escapade from your childhood.

Or you might be contemplating one of Kelly’s lists. The book is full of them: from Good Smells (Bakeries at dawn, Onions frying…), to They Don’t Make Names Like This Any More (Frank Necessary, Earl Scruggs…).

“I’ve been a bit of a lister,” he says. “I like list poems. Walt Whitman is the obvious example – the poet who lists. A few of my list poems snuck into the book, like Reasons To Wear Black (Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash…). And I would often use lists to get me started writing.”

In one sense the whole book is a list, an extended tribute to Kelly’s many collaborators and to his eclectic sources of inspiration, both musically and intellectually. The ‘Index Of People and Bands’ runs to eight pages of tiny type, and includes poets, playwrights, authors and activists, as well as musicians.

“I’ve always seen myself as a collaborative writer,” he says. “I’ve relied on other musicians to realise my songs – I don’t write bass lines or guitar riffs.

“Then there’s the invisible collaboration, which is the books read and the music listened to. And there was always letter-writing with friends and family.”

As the chapters roll on, Kelly reflects on friends who’ve influenced him and those who’ve died, on aging and the passing of time. In the chapter corresponding to the song Winter Coat, he describes listening to a Frank Sinatra album in the dark on the night Ol‘ Blue Eyes died. After surrendering to an overwhelming sense of loss and fading possibility, he emerged “refreshed by tears…and glad somehow to be sad”.

“Looking at the book at the end, I realised that it’s all about time, death and getting old. You get over 50 and you can’t help it,” he laughs. In any case, for him, the subject isn’t wholly grim. “No one can do anything about loss. But you can be attuned to it, respond to it, and derive some joy from it, because it’s part of life.”

Back at the singer-songwriter night in Newcastle, when the rangy singer sat down after performing the heart-rending cover, a punter approached him, bearing compliments: “Great song choice man – I love Paul Kelly. He’s a voice for the nation.”

“Yeah,” the singer replied. “Everybody loves him.”

As I listened in, I could scarcely believe my good fortune. But, of course, when I tell Kelly the story, he has none of it. “Oh, well, I think you tend to hear about it more often when people like you than when they don’t,” he says humbly, after stifling an awkward cough.

He does, however, admit to nerves about the way people will respond to How to Make Gravy. “My CDs are fiction,” he says. “This is like standing naked in the street.”

Published in Readings Monthly, October 2010.