Green IslandFriendship Association
October 15th 2011 07:58
It seems like a contradiction in terms: friendship is something profound. Blake said: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” Association is something else. You get damned by associating with the wrong types. Association is a proximity born of necessity not a love of your fellow man or woman.
The oxymoron is lost in officialese. Friendship Associations do grand things like ‘promote cultural exchange’. Again another odd phrase – ‘exchange’ is the language of money, of barter, of profit; ‘culture’ is the word I give to Michelangelo, Dante and T.S Eliot.
Anyway, hold on to your hats here come Susono and Frankston and their friendship association brimming with cultural exchange.
First up was Japanese school kids dressed as waiters doing an energetic waiters dance to the piped sound of festival music. Not in time, but an endearing effort by the wippersnapper waiters. The Australians were hoping to get some points on the board early and so went toe to toe and pulled out an entourage of kids. They were dressed in black and did something I can only imagine is Australian. They did some lame side stepping dance to some hoedown techno music. The effect was mesmerizing, and I felt an example of cultural pollution at its finest. I made it 1 nil to the home side.
Things went quiet on the stage after that. Japanese and Australian MCs mumbled into the mike like they weren’t sure if it was on. Nobody was listening. The crowd was getting their faces painted and eating rice bubbles dipped in chocolate and coconuts.
Eventually things moved down a notch in terms of entertainment and the real business of friendship association got under way. This was of course the important dudes making speeches. We had chairmen and mayors and other important bodies reading platitudes about friendship and cultural exchange. The mayor of the fine city where I live looked like a retired transsexual roué. He pulled an unexpected cultural keynote by bowing to the piano as he approached the podium. The Australian mayor wore a big gold medal and was an astonishingly young man. He had approached me earlier and I had assumed I was talking to some Aussie student until he introduced himself. Nice chap. Bit of exchange there. He gave a speech that did justice to his ‘nice blokeness’. He quoted Kennedy and said nothing of purpose.
Next up was a cheeky Japanese chap who missed the opportunity to bow at the grand piano on the stage but had a pub entertainer atmosphere about him. He started with some garbled English that got a round of guffaws from the Japanese suits and pointy shoes standing next to me.
The whole thing pinnacled with an exchange of gifts. The Japanese dug out a picture of Mount Fuji (I guess they have hundreds of these in sister town back in Frankston) and the Australians presented the Japanese mayor with a complete box set of Johnny Cash. The restless and painted crowd high on sugar was finally treated to the underwhelming site of the reaffirmation of city friendship with a piñata of streamers.
The deal was done. 30 years of friendship association was marked and the future assured. Like Gorby and that cowboy signing non-proliferation agreements. I needed to be alone to absorb the significance of the event; so I snuck off for a fag.
When I got back musicians had taken to the stage. I had met the chaps back stage -3 Japanese and 1 Italian Japanese man. They played jazz music with an Australian aboriginal flavor (namely a didgeridoo). That was 2 nil to Japan. They had pulled out the wild card of doing Australian culture better than the Australians. And to add insult to injury the piano bow had given the Japanese the finest moment of entertainment.
With things swinging Japan’s way and friendship just banging along. I went off for lunch; but not before being waylaid by an old Japanese man who had walked around the world. He seemed to be frothing at the mouth. Had he be bitten by a rabid dingo? Apparently his global peregrination was to cheer up the victims of the Tohoku Earthquake. I’m sure that all those homeless people in the North of Japan were given a real fillip by this man’s efforts. Just like we in England are much enlivened when Rooney gets caught banging an escort in a hotel room. I’m sure the number 10 did it for the poor and needy of Liverpool. After all, he paid 200 quid for a pack of B n H. That money probably paid off the mortgage of some scouse grandma back in Poland.
I returned to the fray an hour or so later and the jazz group were still playing. The audience had thinned out. All this professionalism had clearly driven away the old ladies and the gaggles of kids. The jazz group finished their last 15 minute epic piece and left the stage to muted applause. This puzzled me. Here was originality and creativity. This surely was culture, and a culture that embraced Africa, Australia and Japan. I guess you need to smoke something to get into culture. The Japanese plan had clearly backfired. The moral advantage was back with Australia.
It was time for the Aussie comeback. The spawn of criminals and Welsh people took to the stage and started off by baffling the hall with an animal story. The Aussie contingent put on animal masks and the mayor read a story about a watering hole running dry from too many animals drinking from the pool. The overweight kangaroos slightly distracted my appreciation of an allegory that clearly spoke to me that we the motherland, England should have culled some of the Aussies back in the infancy of the colony or else introduced Jamie Oliver to try and limit their consumption of natural resources.
Overall the attempt flew wide of the uprights. I still had Japan 2 nil up and the clock was ticking. The Aussies pulled all their subs from the bench and they belted out ‘We are Australia’, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and drew level quickly with the Far Easterners. What a comeback.
The Japanese had completely capitulated. They never got the ball back. The Aussie’s laid the killer blow with a conga line style Macarena that was poorly mixed into Tina Turner’s Nut Bush City Limits. ‘Let’s do the Nutbush’. I needed some bush myself. Hordes were leaving the Japanese camp and joining in the nutbush. My God the Aussies had done it. 4 -2 to the visitors was the final score. Pure Aussieness and a game plan of wearing the Japanese down with hoedown, joie de vive, bizarreness and a blatant disregard for culture had secured a famous victory.
Bragging rights had not been won yet. As the little ladies left clutching Australian flags and balloon poodles the Japanese team were preparing for the evening show that was going to climax in a fish dissecting exhibition. Would they show the Samurai spirit? Somehow I doubted it.
The point of all this? Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that only people in London, Rome, Paris and New York want culture. The rest of humanity prefers Ricky Martin, the Macarena and associated friendship.
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