Of Sheehan and footie and Cate and Andrew and Richard and deep food for thought ...

(Above: and if you want more old rugby photos - the absent lord might know why - go here. And yes the pond does understand the difference between rugger buggers and bugger ruggers).

Time out please, time out.

Paul Sheehan embarks on an extended rant this morning about football, in Mongrel-headed gladiators put their brains on the line, revealing a deep concern about the current American National Football League lock out, player safety and the dangers of chronic traumatic brain damage. Not to mention the usual pre-season scandals delivered up by the professional Rugby League culture of sex and drinking ...

It all sounds terribly serious and solemn, until you get to this:

Which brings me home, to the opening game of the 2011 rugby league season, which I attended, between the Sydney Roosters and the South Sydney Rabbitohs.

Yes Sheehan went to the football, and then begins to rabbit on about the play the ball rule like any besotted fan, and bemoan the cheap shot, and then rounds it out this:

Every parent should drill this fact into their kids: beauty and bravery on the sporting field does not translate to beauty and bravery off the field. To survive in professional contact sport you need a streak of mongrel and with some players mongrel is all there is.

Actually every parent should drill this fact into their kids: you should only play professional football if that's the only way you have to make a buck and escape the lumpenproletariat, because the risks are high and the punters really don't care, they just want the violence and the sight of mountain rams butting heads, and only the feeble minded rabbit on about the dangers of CTE and then head off to a game to watch it being inflicted on the spot in real time ...

There is an alternative, Mr. Sheehan, and I'm sure the Sydney Symphony have tickets standing by to take care of your Friday night entertainment.

Moving right along - since the time you see me at a game of rugby league is the time some wayward morgue attendant wheeled my corpse past the gate to sneak a look at a game on the way to the cemetery - and since we're speaking of the arts and Sydney's infinite capacity for navel gazing, now might seem the time to mention the valiant Cate Blanchett and consort's attempts to revive the old tart's dead heart, as explained in Sydney needs some of its old-time black magic back, a set of views also rehashed and regurgitated in Rachel Olding's Walsh Bay could be the beating art of a revived city.

At the time I felt a quiver of rage - the standard sign that the wind had begun to whip up the waters of the pond - but then Ben Eltham said everything worth saying in Hey Cate, you wouldn't know a cultural heart if you planned it yourself.

Eltham rightly points out that what's needed for vibrancy is old buildings and cheap space (and practitioners willing to accept a little poverty along the way in the quest for an audience), and if you want to stimulate a vibrant grass roots arts community, then the last thing you need to look at is an Opera House spending hundreds of millions on upgrading its loading dock, or a complacent STC soaking up $2.4 million annually (imagine that spread amongst indie theatre companies), or bright shiny new Barangaroo developments glistening in the downtown sun ...

But it seems that Eltham was whistling in the breeze, because this morning Richard Evans fronts the bar with Artists need a long-term commitment from the state, wherein he conflates the needs of artists with the needs of buildings.

This is not surprising since Evans - also slagged off by Eltham in his piece - runs the Sydney Opera House, and he sees the solution to the arts as being ... infrastructure.

Yep a new theatre in either Barangaroo or nearer Chinatown on the site of the Entertainment centre will surely fix what ails Sydney, and prevent the tossers from Queensland or Melbourne seeming more vibrant and alive to the possibilities of the y'arts.

The answer, it seems, lies not in artists and audiences, but in government subsidy, government planning, government administration, government organised education programs, government initiatives, government policy settings, new government funded buildings, and did we mention ... government funding?

Naturally the only way to appeal to Sydney-siders is the politics of envy.

In the distance, two of our neighbours have been making inroads. Well-toned strategic cultural muscles and money have surfaced and successfully created a sense of what is important. They have set a clear path for how they intend to get there and have shown us what success looks like. News of recent exhibitions at the Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland has been heard throughout the Asia-Pacific, as have the high-profile visits on stage from the Cubans and French. The local artists are working hard and achieving notoriety and there is a sense of Queensland being the artistic ''place to be''; supportive, sunny and surprising.

In the distance? Queensland is in the distance? Well I suppose Paul Sheehan could regale us with the evils of the Broncos, not to mention the fiendish Melbourne Storm ...

But it's deeply alarming and troubling isn't it, that Queensland could actually have its own cultural life, and be visited by actual Cubans and French people. Oh how I envy them, and their blithe supportive, sunny ways ...

Yep, now you know how closely Sydney inspects its navel. Of course the simple retort is that Evans perhaps should head to a more supportive, sunny and surprising environment, but the second is to wonder why Evans doesn't visit Newtown more often ... even if it's 'in the distance' so to speak - yes, it's a full five miles from the Opera House - because the precinct offers a surprising range of activities, and is a little more accessible than downtown ... unless of course you share an apartment with Rusty at Woolloomooloo's Finger wharf ...

That's why I'm off to see Daniel Kitson in the Seymour Centre tomorrow night, since he wisely avoids the Opera House as a venue ...

Feeble envy-laden resentments aside, it was when I came to the final par that the water in the kettle began to boil:

In a MasterChef competition of the arts, our NSW contestants do not yet have the practice, precision or indeed power in our kitchens to compete with the enticing and well-balanced offerings of our interstate competitors. We do, however, have access to superior ingredients and innovation. How about we get the entree out of the way and proceed to the main course?

Of all the most loathsome fully extended vile metaphors to hand, the best Evans can come up with is a vile reference to the loathsome MasterChef?

The y'arts as a rough equivalent to vile television pabulum of the lowest kind?

What we need is a kind of superior cuisine? Entrees and main courses? And so practising the arts is just a kind of superior cooking, perhaps in the French style, or perhaps in a neo syncretic fusion synthesised style all its own?

Well so much for the transcendental, and the meaningful, and insight into the existential void that confronts us all, it seems all I need is a hearty breakfast of eggs with truffles ... preferably in a handsome structure with a good view of the habour.

Evans first ran this line in a piece by Bryce Hallett Sydney's arts scene a pale imitation of its vibrant, go-get-it neighbours, which if you read it carefully has to be seen as a kind of pre-emptive strike designed to resonate inside the minds of a new Liberal government seeking bold innovative strategies.

Unfortunately, as Eltham notes, it's more likely to sound like the tinkling of cowbells ...

The irony of the boss of Australia’s best-funded cultural icon complaining about “the absence of a strong grassroots movement of artists” has not been lost on some. Former arts policy adviser and small venues campaigner John Wardle — a key player in the ultimately successful effort to remove NSW’s onerous place of Public Entertainment regulations — responded, saying Hallett “does a terrific job in his article of validating the impression in the wider community of the major performing arts being pampered and out of touch”.

Personally I have no problem with the Opera House being pampered, given a makeover and scoring a new loading dock, but the notion that more of the same in Barangaroo will somehow generate a strong grassroots movement of artists is ... as Eltham succinctly noted .... nutty.

Now it's true that neither major political party has spent any time on an actual arts policy, but given the state of New South Wales, that's understandable. It wouldn't hurt to have a revised public transport policy that might enable punters to travel to newly revived grassroots artistic events ...

What's hard to understand is what outcomes the well heeled, well fed, well subsidised Upton, Blanchett, and Evans expect to get by tossing interstate rivalries in the air, and demanding more well heeled infrastructure ...

Here's a suggestion that doesn't involve big buildings. How about more funding for public sculptures, and public art to enliven spaces? Give some money to plastic artists doing their thing? (And what's the bet that Barangaroo will end up with the usual committee chosen brain dead public sculptures that litter public spaces like sea gull poo?)

Ah well, when it comes to navel gazing, be it rugby league or the y'arts, Sydney offers up to the world the finest exponents going around ...

But when Evans talks about the need for arty types to prick the mainstream, I do sometimes wish that someone would heartily prick Evans, Upton and Blanchett ...

(Below: and now to First Dog on Master Chef, the new exemplar for the y'arts in Sydney. Click to enlarge).