Dallas-Morning-News-ladlitter

You’ve probably seen the footage on the news. The CCTV from the Kings County Hospital in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York City, which shows a 49-year old black American woman dying on the floor of the waiting room. It’s here. The TV News in Australia described her as a psychiatric patient who had already waited 24 hours for unspecified treatment and that the other patients in the waiting room, who ignored her for the whole hour she was dying unattended, were also psychiatric patents.

You would also have seen how she was observed and successively ignored by: a security guard; a doctor; another security guard – that’s right, the one who rolled his chair back to have a look and then rolled it back out of frame. And of the nurses who finally did come to her aid, one gave her a bit of a kick before bending to check on her.

The news you saw probably also had a New York public official saying something like:

“You might expect something like this to happen in a Third World country. You do not expect this sort of thing to happen in New York City.”

I disagreed with her. I’m not totally surprised that something like that happened. And I’m also not surprised that it happened in New York. I thought that the American cities I visited in the mid-80s all looked a lot more like Third World countries than I was comfortable with, including New York. I think there might also be quite a few Americans who are similarly unsettled by the nature of American cities.

And if there are any of you out there who’ve also been to New York City, you might just have picked up the same vibe from many of its inhabitants that I did.

That people seemed to be predisposed towards being deliberately unhelpful. And further, would even appear to take some deadpan pleasure in you being disadvantaged by this unhelpfulness. Always politely, of course.

Some of it was epitomized in the TV show Seinfeld: In scenes where the main or other characters would delight in or be dismissively uninterested in someone else’s misfortune. And then when the plot resolved and some disaster had overtaken the indifferent, their despair and pathetic pleading for assistance. I picked that recurring motif as very much a New York thing. In Australia, it appeared to be perceived as a combination yuppie Gen-X thing. The final two-hour episode was probably the quintessential example of what I’m talking about here.

Now, I’m happy to cop a roasting on this, particularly from any Americans who don’t see it as an indictment on New York or America anymore than backpacker murderer Ivan Milat reflects Australia. But that’s just it. He does reflect Australia. If you’re able to, check out some of the statements attributed to him by people who encountered him and tell me they’re not (admittedly) extreme examples of attitudes to women and crime that are not entirely rare in Australian males.

The indifference and deliberate inaction of those officials in the CCTV footage towards the dying woman is an (again admittedly) extreme example of attitudes you would not find altogether uncommon among New Yorkers.

We should be shocked, but not surprised.

You might have seen the article in this morning’s Age by now. It’s about a group called unChain St Kilda trying to prevent the destruction of the Palais Theatre in a proposed redevelopment of the St Kilda Triangle.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/rock-stars-chip-in-to-restore-palais/2007/12/28/1198778704746.html
The hook for the article is the $5000 pledged to the preservation of the Palais by the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen and verified by spokesmen from Sony BMG and Paul Dainty respectively.

I’ve only seen two concerts at the Palais: Joe Cocker in 1977 and Rory Gallagher in 1980. Both were excellent concerts and I remember the comfort, atmosphere and sound quality at the venue as being pretty high. Certainly higher than Festival Hall or the Tennis Centre.

You’d reckon a decent developer would be able to come up with something to include the Palais, wouldn’t you? Not so Citta Properties, a Sydney-based firm. Let’s hope the unChain group are successful in their efforts.

Actor Rachel Griffiths and artist Mirka Mora, among others, have also lent their support to the group. I don’t know Mirka at all, but my family does have a somewhat tenuous connection to her.

Mirka and Me:
We’d been invited to visit my dad’s uncle out in Nth Balwyn. I must have been about three and a bit because I can remember my younger brother being a baby. Uncle Jack was pretty well-to-do. He’d made a decent living running black coal mines near Wonthaggi but was in his 60s and retired by this time. He might even have been one of the bad guys in Richard Lowenstein’s film Strikebound (1984), which depicts a long and bitter industrial dispute in the mines. I’ve got some research to do, I know.

But as we entered Uncle Jack’s house, the first thing we saw was a painting on his lounge room wall. It was of a rooftop landscape, crowded with attic-style windows. Uncle Jack had only recently purchased it and wasn’t too impressed.

My older brother saw it differently and said so. He thought it was pretty good. The rest of the visit passed pleasantly as I remember it. I spent most of the afternoon in the backyard having a conversation with Uncle Jack’s cockatoo. And it worked. I spent the next few days saying "Hello Cocky" and little else.

About a week later, we were surprised by a delivery. Uncle Jack had shipped the painting over to my older brother as a gift. These days, it’d be what you might call a win-win situation.

My brother told me later it was called The Tenements of Paris, and had been painted by Mirka Mora in 1957. Mirka ’57 was her signature at the bottom of the painting. I’ve been unable to find any reference to the work under that title on the web.

The painting hung in his room and the family lounge room for many years. About five years ago, I saw a copy of Mirka’s autobiography in the local library. No mention of the painting, so it’s safe to assume it wasn’t a long-lost masterwork.

I mentioned it to my brother and asked of the painting, but he’d been short of cash about five or six years previously and had sold it to William Mora’s Gallery. I was a bit saddened to think that a painting by such a prominent artist was no longer in the family. But it seemed to have gone to the right place.