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Keywords: Music

  • AUSTRALIA

    The dawning of the Age of Unpleasantness

    • Brian Matthews
    • 28 February 2014
    7 Comments

    Joe Hockey's idea of an age of entitlement is shallow and facile. Announcing the end of an 'age' is just another way of obscuring the truth that you haven't the faintest idea what the hell is going on, or that you suspect what's going on but not how to influence, redirect or stop it. So you fall back on this persuasive notion of a great shift in the times. The next 'age' for those whose entitlement is disappearing will be marked by unpleasantness.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Troubled Belfast's rickety punk prophet

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 14 November 2013

    In a city riven by violent hatred between Catholic and Protestant, non-religious and charismatic music lover Terri Hooley managed to stand outside and above the conflict. He became a kind of rickety prophet to Belfast's disaffected youth, as godfather of the city's burgeoning punk music scene. If any community had a reason to embrace the rage and unity of punk culture, it was Terri Hooley's Belfast.

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  • RELIGION

    Pope Francis' three types of intelligence

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 18 July 2013
    31 Comments

    When policies affect people's lives, imaginative intelligence should come first into play. It is the inclination to see people, not simply as the objects of policy, but as persons each with their own face and life story. The Pope exemplified this when he visited Lampedusa, 'Italy's Christmas Island', to mourn the dead and console the living. And in so doing he stated the priority for others.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Music rising from the ashes of abuse

    • Frank O'Shea
    • 24 October 2012
    8 Comments

    In their stylish red and blue uniforms, they were a central part of big football games. They played before the game and at half time, led the teams in a formal march, 60 or more kids blowing brass and beating drums. The thousands in the stands were unaware of the harshness that these boys faced every day.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Feather on the breath of god

    • Mark Tredinnick
    • 18 September 2012
    5 Comments

    You, too, despite the false witness of the mirror in your mind, are part, a very small part, of a very old music ... Poetry writes the only prayers you feel free to offer these days. It is the glint in the eye of the god you stopped believing, when she started causing you all this pain.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cultural snobbery and Wayne Swan's Springsteen mania

    • Ellena Savage
    • 03 August 2012
    6 Comments

    In Australia, land of the cultural cringe, the social elite mainly consume middle- and low-brow culture: mainstream cinema, best-sellers, and Bruce Springsteen, for example. Swan's admiration of Springsteen is positive in its belief in the legitimacy of mainstream taste, which is dictated more democratically than highbrow taste.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Canary in a nursing home

    • Louise McKenna
    • 31 July 2012
    3 Comments

    At times the music holds him still, and a jonquil light beams through two pinholes in his brain, singing of a caged soul.

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  • EDUCATION

    Thought under threat at Australia's universities

    • Paul Collins
    • 23 May 2012
    27 Comments

    The Australian National University vice-chancellor's proposal to asset-strip Canberra's School of Music prompted the biggest university demonstration in 30 years. ANU isn't the only uni in financial stress, thanks to successive governments' under-funding of tertiary education and user-pays attitude.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The crossing guard and the dawdler

    • Vin Maskell
    • 01 February 2012
    8 Comments

    He'd pick up sticks and stones, turn them over, put them in his pocket. He was often the last to cross, arriving as the school's public address system played 'hurry up' music at 8:55am. Some people laughed when I said I'd become a school crossing supervisor, but they don't see the things I see.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Learning to walk and to dance

    • Various
    • 13 December 2011
    2 Comments

    When I last saw you, still horizontal, interrogating the floor, you'd begun reversing Kafka — a slow transformation from beetle to vertical human. Powered by a new locomotion, you steer yourself towards the stereo; music erupts into your world, is taken entirely for granted.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Record store pilgrim

    • Vin Maskell
    • 11 May 2011
    5 Comments

    Once, I soaked up so much music it seeped from my pores. A week wasn't complete without buying a few albums, seeing a few bands, talking music with mates until dawn. Now I wonder if my weekly pilgrimage to a city music store is merely a break from the working day, or a respite from fading dreams.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Gen Y, iPods and isolation

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 13 April 2011
    1 Comment

    Pavel's meanderings are soundtracked by rock music blaring through his earphones. Increasingly the iPod seems to symbolise some nonchalant skein that isolates self-centred youths from the world around them.

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