Watching Television on my Computer,

The Australian crime-epic Underbelly, in particular, with its amazingly high production values, and its intriguing cast of actors portraying criminals who, in real life, drew the conscious inspiration for their glamorous, glitzy, sex-drenched and blood-soaked lifestyle from the Hollywood movies of the previous decade in which stars like Al Pacino celebrated the glamorous, glitzy and blood-soaked (but perhaps less sex-drenched) lives of American criminals--Art imitating Life imitating Art imitating Life.  And somehow this is plainly evident as you watch it. 

Also plainly evident as you watch is the citizens of Australia's (both the grindingly self-righteous, and at the same time pervasively corrupt middle class and the violently vile lower class--and there aren't any other classes, apparently) seemingly permanent state of psychosocial and political retardation--no more so than that of, say, the citizens of the United Nations, or of the countries of the NATO alliance, or of China, or of the Kingdom of Thailand, but, shockingly, quite as much so as that of (my fellow Americans) the still true-believing thralls of the official corporate entity (USA) of the Evil Empire:   Australia's cops, and far, far too many of Australia's middle class actually believe in the goodness and righteousness--or at least the moral necessity--of the Drug War.  I keep reminding myself as I watch that these are, after all, the same relatively few people who have made so many stunningly excellent movies and delicious wines, and from whose various loins have sprung Nellie Melba and Julian Assange, to name but two.  Of Dame Nellie I have just read an amusing and possibly pertinent anecdote--But first of all, I must say that, some 48 years ago (amazing!), listening to f.m. radio in Seattle one fine April morning, I chanced to hear a then ancient recording of Nellie Melba singing (I think it was) the Jewel Song from Faust, and it was fucking ravishing.  You have to know that to make sense of this:  Melba hated Sir Thomas Beecham, who was then Schauspieldirektor at Covent Garden, and said of him, simply, "I dislike Beecham and his methods."  Beecham, for his part, opined that, "while [Melba] had nearly all the attributes inseparable from great artistry...she was wanting in genuine spiritual refinement."  This of the original Mimi!

But--How strange we were then!--Melba had to argue strongly (?) for the production of La Bohème at Covent Garden, "in the face of distaste expressed by the management at this 'new and plebeian opera,'" which was overcome by public enthusiasm for the piece which was bolstered in 1902 when Enrico Caruso joined Melba in the first of many Covent Garden performances together.

Yet the aspersion so sniffily cast by his baronetship, liver-pill heir Sir Thomas Beecham, lingers and still attaches to the Titanic Dame Melba, "like a scent of dung beneath the fingernails," and maybe explains why she never seriously attempted to sing Mozart (with Beecham, beyond question, the greatest exponent of Mozart of his generation, right there to tell her how she was doing it wrong). "Genuine spiritual refinement" is probably just what that astonishingly beautiful person and angelic voice were lacking--and it would have been noticed, the instant that, say, as the Condessa, she had stepped forth to sing "Porgi Amor."  Perhaps, maybe. And maybe it had something to do with her being Australian:  Something about how when you start out being a penal colony, a snake-infested human refuse pit, you never really rise above it, never lose the stink of it, nor the inveterate vulgarity.  Ever.  Acid-tongued, lynx-eyed, perfectly phrased and articulated Mozartean Sir Thomas might just have been snob enough to think so.  And I think that means he was a heartless poofter.