Day 300 | settling into Esperance: time for a slow weekend

Esperence day 2

I have bought the latest The Monthly magazine, (a big $7.95 and out in the first week of the month) and that has sufficient substance to keep me sporadically occupied until the next edition.

Australia’s best essayists are regular contributors, (Peter Conrad, Robert Manne, David Marr, Hugh White, etc), and subjects range widely: February bushfires; boat people, (a perennial favourite); the implications of China, or India, for Oz; the Australian film industry.

Robert Foster of the Go-Betweens writes a music column: for December it’s on the remastered Beatles collection. For the record he thinks one of the reasons for their success was the long 5 year apprenticeship, (1957 – 62), and that their last 3 vinyl efforts weren’t very coherent as albums, (Sgt Pepper was a dud and the White Album worse.) In his opinion there was a golden period of 32 great songs from October 65 to September 66 with not one crap song on either Rubber Soul or Revolver.

For some reason I’ve never listened to any of these albums: they always seemed to be someone else’s music, another generation.