Snakes & Ladders

I have always liked the throbbing tunes and spiky lyrics of the group called Men at Work. They took it upon themselves, years ago, to talk about life in the perfectly normal working world—except that there is a timeless quality about their thoughts. Here, for example, are the lyrics of 'Snakes and Ladders':

I could stand but I don't like the feeling
I could fall but I'm always on the floor
You could make a million staring at the ceiling
You could break your back and still be poor

One for the liar
One for the cheat
One for the man who you'll never meet
Piece of the action and a portion of pie
They'll be there waiting when your big chance comes by

There's a snake on top of every ladder
Who will tell you that he's your best friend
Everyone important needs an adder
But subtraction gets you in the end

One for the liar
One for the cheat
One for the man who you'll never meet
Piece of the action and a portion of pie
They'll be there waiting when your big chance comes by

They don't care, they don't mind
The in-betweens will steal you blind
I don't know, I can't say
It seems it's always been this way
You won't feel or complain
The gentle leech will cause no pain

It's one sharp vignette of working life. There's always someone creaming off your work and not attributing it to you; this is seen as right and fair by some people. They fish you out when they need good work done; they bury you when you are inconvenient; this is the way of the world.

I've been reading the interesting and hair-raising accounts in the first book of Samuel the prophet. Things were the same then too.

Men At Work

I think that Men At Work was probably the greatest southern-hemisphere band of all time. It wasn't just the fact that they operating during my teenage years, but the fact that among all other bands, they managed to combine a sort of odd Caribbean sound with Australian toughness and very chill-out friendly melodies. That, and the fact that besides the standard drums, bass, guitar and keyboard(s), they also had very good sax, harmonica, and flute.

The only way to really absorb the manic aura of the group is to have a look at some YouTube video clips, these days. Like this one.

There's a practical application, by the way. I studied a lot while listening to them. And it worked, kind of...

Who Can It Be Now?

I was having a meal with the Japanese currency speculator today. La divina principessa was waxing lyrical about the life up in the aerie, and Hyperion joined in soon after. It was, however, a somewhat tragic libretto that unfolded first in her redoubtable harmonics, and then in his gravelly baritone.

As I chatted with them, I suddenly became conscious of an overwhelming sense of detachment, as if my umbilical to the world of everyday events was detaching slowly and stealthily. People I had known for more than a decade were falling away, fading from the picture, like those retouched October Parade photographs in the former Soviet Union – almost as if they no longer existed even though they were still walking around the workplace. I could only thank the Highest that I no longer feel like Trotsky in Mexico these days.

Yeats's famous lines are of course in the air. They have been for years now, as we transit the post-millennial epoch. But I still get that frisson of sinister premonition when I read those opening lines:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It is possibly worse than that. We see the heads rolling in the winter of our discontent, in the galling revolution against the right order of things. We see the southward migration of birds, and all the auguries spell troubling times ahead. And we are afflicted with a dull and nagging paranoia: who is the third who walks always beside you? It is indeed Eliot's fear in a handful of dust. Why do these tiny things concern us? Because they strike at the root of our reasons for existing the way we do, the way we hope the world should be – a world and not a waste land; a world enough, and time.

As it is, I sit here in the calming amber light of my reading room and try very hard not to think of that portentous jazz riff, the one that first inspired this evening's post, the one in Men At Work's Who Can It Be Now?