SnoWOW!

Last Wednesday night started like most other nights for me. I unpacked my school bag, had an argument with my landlord about the hot water, felt guilty about not having written seven symphonies and a wind quintet that day, the usual. That evening I was planning on meeting my brother's friend's mum Tracy who was in town from Orange (and if anyone can come up with a more Australian sentence than that without using the words "kangaroo" or "vegemite" I want to see it). We went to a fancy-pants French restaurant in Tribeca and sipped red wine and discussed the differences between 42nd Street and Summer Street (there's a few, BTW). Over her shoulder through the front window I could see the snow start to fall. How magical, to be sitting in a dimly lit yet tastefully decored bar in New York sipping French wine and watching the snowflakes prance and fly outside a... a... an increasingly difficult-to-see-through window... Holy shit, did that cab almost hit that lady? Geez, Trace, it's really coming down out there! What the hell?!

My first ever blizzard. Awww. It was nuts. You know what it looked like? A snow globe. Exactly like a snow globe. It swirled and fell in waves, spiralled around street lamps and headlights, and fell in piles and piles on everything. The thinnest of perches would have a pile of snow half a centimetre wide and six inches high balanced on it. Pedestrians battled their way through the wind, coated from head to toe in a thin dusting of powdery snow, making them look like they'd just been hugged by the dandruff monster. Moving vehicles acquired lovely white toupees and drove through the streets at five kilometres per hour, floats in a really shitty parade celebrating albino hair pieces (SHUT UP, this is my blog). It blew through doors, across faces, down subway stairs, and caused little short circuits on the subway overpass near my house, mixing showers of bright orange sparks into the murky gumbo, giving everything a thrilling post-apocalyptic feel. I couldn't help but laugh out loud as I fought my way home.

The next day when I woke up the light outside my window was weird, almost fluorescent. I opened the curtains to see... well, an absolute fucktonne of snow. Eighteen inches, in fact. It was beautiful. It was magical. It caused school to be closed for the day. And, as it turns out, it is a massive pain in the goddam ass.

Eighteen inches fell on the city that night. That's what, slightly less than half a metre? Didn't seem like that big of a deal. Until you consider that eighteen inches fell across the entire city. As my previous mathematical research has uncovered, that's eighteen inches over 780 square kilometres of roads, buildings, footpaths and subway lines. My maths might be a bit hazy, but I think that is roughly equivalent to 351 cubic kilometres of snow. Where the hell is all that snow going to go?

As it turns out, unless you live in uptown Manhattan and can afford a man to come and take it away for you, probably nowhere. It's been five days now and snow still sits everywhere, stubbornly refusing to melt. It turns black. It dissolves into slooshy slippery crap at every intersection, so much so that when I walk to the shops I have to stick my arms out like a tightrope walker to stop from falling face first in this toxic sludge. Garbage, which is never absent from New York streets even in the sunniest of weather, begins to accumulate in teetering piles since garbage trucks can't get around the streets. And of course the local canine population makes its mark on the winter scenery, leaving both bright yellow uriney stains and dark brown turds, the latter contrasting so boldly with its white background that the utmost care seems to have gone into its placement, like the most thoughtful shit in history.

Today though, there seems to be evidence of the snow being dealt with. There are a couple of bulldozers moving the snow around (although to me it looks like they have the "eight year old cleaning his room" approach of just moving the snow from one pile to another, hoping that somehow this will make everything look better). It's sunny today for the third day in a row, so I'm cautiously optimistic that this will make some of it go away. Not because it isn't pretty mind you; despite the black road-gunk, the neck-snappingly slippery pavements, the rubbish, and the dog shit, it's still quite beautiful. It's that I know me - and if someone is going to go ass over tits into this crap, it's going to be yours truly. It's lovely and magical and all that jazz, but if it doesn't go away soon then my next blog might be entitled something like "Why it's hard to be a composer with a broken wrist".

Talk like me

You may have noticed that there’s been a bit of radio silence from the blog for the last few months. Oops. Like most awesome projects I start, without immediate and constant praise for my efforts, I quickly lose any motivation to continue them, which is why I have a desk drawer full of half-finished workout programs and barely used books with titles like “Teach Yourself German”. And like most awesome projects that I start and fail to see through to any sort of meaningful conclusion, I never really stop feeling guilty about them, and I involuntarily wince at their little baleful, papery glares accusing me of abandonment I encounter whenever I go hunting through my desk for a pencil (or, on rare occasions, a halfway decent looking gym-program that hasn’t been too filled-in to be resurrected). So when I came back to Australia I was surprised and flattered by the number of people who complained that I had stopped writing my blog, since no one ever complains when I stop going to the gym or learning German (which might explain why I neither have a six-pack or know what "Ich bin ein Zwerg, reitet auf einem Staubsauger" means). So thank you, you devoted half-dozen of blog readers – your bitching has paid off, and I’m going to start blogging again.

So it seems the most appropriate place for me to get this party started (again) is how different Australia seemed to me after only four months away. Things I’d never noticed before suddenly seemed adorably provincial, or fucking weird, or sometimes just filled me to the brink with homesickness and made me not want to go back to the USA. I noticed for the first time just how full of utterly useless and infuriatingly irrelevant celebrity Sydney gossip the newspapers are, and how such ‘news’ stories about which swimmer is sleeping with what underwear model are considered of such earth-shattering import that they occupy vast swathes of the opening pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, with pesky filler articles about things like a new nuclear-arms race in the middle east or the beginning of the seventh year of Australia’s involvement in two unwinnable wars relegated to the arse-end of the paper near the comics and horoscopes. I almost clicked my heels with glee each time I walked into a café and ordered a skim flat white without the cashier looking at me like I’d just make some obscure Ku Klux Klan reference. I unthinkingly made the common tourist error of ordering a pint of beer in the heat of the Australian summer and struggling to get it down before it turned into humid mug of piss. I loved being in Orange and hearing the cicadas. I loved being in Canberra and smelling the wet-earth-and-eucalyptus smell that pervades the whole city. I even loved walking through Newtown at night and reading the ineffectual socialist propaganda sticky-taped to lightposts and parking meters by angry twenty-year-olds in the middle of their arts degrees (“Facebook and the War in Iraq: How the Capitalist Machine forces you to buy homophobic cars”). But the thing that I loved the most and at the same time found so bizarre and perplexing is probably the one thing that most Australians living in Australia never give the slightest thought to: the enigmatic Aussie accent.

Americans love accents of all kinds, but in my experience none seems to fill them with such child-like delight as the Australian accent (although admittedly I haven’t got any other accent to try out, so perhaps I might be a little biased. But whatever). Something as simple as ordering a sandwich can be enough to make the cashier’s eyes light up as though an honest-to-God magical gnome has just wandered in off the street and ordered a turkey-with-swiss. It rings like a bell across the most crowded of rooms, and sticks out like dogs’ balls in the streets. Obvious words like “tomato” and “banana” are amusing enough, but saying the simple little word “no” can send the most world-wise American into a fit of giggles. I never understood why until I came back to Australia, and suddenly I heard it: Americans and British say “No”, Australians say “Naoeie”. It’s like someone’s strapped the word into a little inflection roller-coaster and sent it on its way. 

The personal result of this is that the mere fact that I say “banAHnah” instead of “banAANa” makes me much more popular than my personality probably warrants (although I am devilishly handsome and cheekily charismatic, which can’t hurt). I can confidently strike up a conversation with a stranger in a bar, since I already have the perfect ice-breaker: a nice broad “Howyagoinmaite?” usually does the trick. In fact, I suspect my accent has become even broader since I moved up North. It could be a subconscious defense mechanism to being immersed in American accents, but knowing my propensity to ham it up if there’s even the faintest glimmer of attention being paid to me, I might be (subconsciously) bunging it on. A bit. Sometimes. Just a little.

Part of the reason that Yanks love our accent might be that The Australian Accent is one of the last pleasures on earth that America can’t produce by itself. You wouldn’t think so, but apparently the Australian accent is a deviously tricky one to convincingly emulate. Most non-natives get the broad “aah” vowel that makes sentences like “is the car-park far?” sound like the speaker has a kazoo stuck in their nose, but apart from that most Americans I’ve encountered who try to speak with an Aussie accent sound like they’ve had the grievous misfortune of suffering from a stroke and anaphylaxis at the same time.

Furthermore the Australian accent is unusual in that, despite what many of us have been led to believe, there is no broad consensus on where the Australian accent comes from. (I learned this from a sweet article I read in the paper a few weeks ago, and you can check out the original here. Pretty much the rest of this blog totally plagarises it though, so maybe you shouldn’t read it and just think that I’m really smart). Anyway, accent experts can say with reasonable confidence that the Boston accent comes from the mixing of Irish and Italian immigrants in days of yore, or that the Californian accent is a mix of all the other states smooshed together, but recent studies have discounted the traditional theories that the Australian accent is a bastardized cockney accent, or that up until the beginning of the twentieth century we sounded as Irish as a leprechaun snorting shamrocks. Recent documentary evidence suggests that our English overlords were noticing a distinct Australian twang as early as forty years after white settlement (or invasion, however you prefer to look at it), and moreover they were not all thrilled with what they heard.

Even more interesting is that there are now actually three generally recognised Australian accents – the General Australian accent, (shared by myself and, depending on how ocker I’m feeling, either Paul Hogan or Nicole Kidman), the Australian Aboriginal accent, and weirdly but awesomely, the Australian Lebanese accent. But even most Australians would agree that the General Australian accent is fragmenting a little further producing such sub-species as the Melbourne accent (or, in the tongue of the natives, “Malbourne”), the glorious Bogan accent, or, my favourite, the Gingham-wearing knick-knack-shop-owning country-ladies accent which has definitely been around since I was a kid but has been thrust into the forefront of the Australian psyche by Prue and Trude from “Kath and Kim” (and I think it’s just graysche).

This variety in accents might explain the occasional difficulty Americans have in placing where I’m from. Absolutely no problem at all with that (I still have trouble telling Americans and Canadians apart until I subtly ascertain whether my conversation partner rhymes “house” with “moose”), but I was a little non-plussed at a conversation I had with a lady in the supermarket a few months ago. When she overheard me ordering my sandwich meat from the deli she said, “are you from London?”

“No,” I replied, without the minutest hint of condescension, “I’m from Australia”.

“Oh,” she said. After a short pause, she asked, “is that near London?”

What a stupid bitch.