In which the sins of Sydney and the joys of the iceberg lettuce are considered ...

(Above: okay let's not start off with a long rant about the sin of using the Opera House yet again to illustrate a story, the sin of trading off and passing off, the sin of a million graphic artists short of an idea, or the sin of the pond for repeating the sin by putting a plug for the Sydney Anglicans mis-using and abusing the Opera House at the top of the pond).

The good news is that Michael Jensen has promptly delivered his sixth meditation on the sins of Sydney for the Sydney Anglicans - The Second Last is not the last - but the bad news is that it's possibly the weakest in the series.

So many sins and already out of puff?

It's agreeable enough that Jensen leads off with atheist Paul Kelly's song in praise of Sydney as seen from a 747 - Kelly has always teased the religious with kindly references to god and religion and love - and let's not get into a detailed textural argument whether it should be a 727 rather than the updated lyrics involving a 747 - no-one's a purist these days, not Paul Kelly and not even hard line Calvinists - because straight away, there's a bigger issue, as Jensen commits the sin of parochialism:

It is kind of gauche the way the citizens of Sydney go all misty-eyed when they talk about their home town, but the truth is simply this: there is simply no better place to live in all the world (if you are relatively prosperous of course). There are moments living here when you simply cannot imagine life being better, at least for a moment.

Which is simply absurd. People spend an inordinate amount of time deciding the best place to live, and you can get strange results that see Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Osaka and Paris beat Sydney into fifth place (here).

Then if you turn to the astonishingly inept and silly Economist Intelligence Unit, you discover that Melbourne tops the charts as the world's most liveable city, followed by Vienna, Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary. Sydney only makes sixth (wiki the nonsense here).

No well-travelled sensible Sydney-sider gets misty-eyed about Sydney, a sea side town like many other sea side towns.

The real point is Jensen's out clause - if you are relatively prosperous of course.

Well of course if you happen to be relatively prosperous there are many fine cities in which to live - the pond would immediately score an apartment in New York, and thereafter not give a second thought about Sydney or its Anglicans (and Paris wouldn't be far behind).

From there, it's all downhill. Jensen commits the sin of hedonism over and over again, contemplating the sapphire blue sea, a barbie with quality beers, a nice red wine, a game of golf, a swim (and not even a warning about the dangers of skin cancer), and determines that Sydney is a kind of heaven.

To arrive at this picture, he has to commit the sin of omission, which is to say nary a mention of Parramatta Road at nine o'clock on a Monday morning commute.

And then Jensen commits the sin of over-compensation. After rabbiting on about how Sydney is paradise on earth - in a way no sensible Sydney-sider caught in traffic or on public transport could manage - he has to mutter darkly into his quality beer (which presumably isn't a beer made in Sydney):

We can believe Sydney is heaven on earth only if we don’t look too closely. Sydney is what other cities are: a mixture of all things human. Only, Sydney pretends it is somehow different. It has had plastic surgery to cover its wrinkles.

It's a classic bipolar Jekyll and Hyde strategy. Sell the sizzle, then sell the despair.

The pond has looked high and low for the plastic surgery that's covered the wrinkles of Parramatta Road and the 428 bus service, but buggered if it can be found. It's likely the wrinkles were there all along, and no miracle cream could help out.

Of course all this lyricism, followed by plastic surgery is only building up to a good old dose of Anglican remorse and Calvinist guilt and what sounds suspiciously like a sermon from the 101 school of reproaching indolent sinners who forgot to wear their cilice:

Jesus Christ – a name many Sydney-siders would still think favourably of – spoke strongly about the foolishness of our way of life. It is self-deluding. It is, for one, happy with far too little; it is too easily satisfied. We are satisfied that the truly complete human life involves a few passing pleasures on a day with nice weather. What we are offered in Christ is something far beyond this. The man who plans for bigger barns but dies suddenly could have lived in Sydney. He is caught unawares by his own mortality, and forgets that he is answerable for his life.

Indeed. But the man who plans for bigger barns and carks it could just have easily lived in Tamworth, and more to the point, been able to afford the real estate for his rustic lifestyle.

If Jensen is trying to make a point about mortality and answering probing questions by St Peter at the pearly gates, surely the entire point is that it doesn't matter where you live.

Sydney's got nothing to do with it, in and of itself, it's just a city, like a lot of other seaside cities, but should it come to pass, the pond will - in a grand and kindly way - forgive the long absent lord for what she has wrought on Parramatta road.

But by golly there's going to be a long hard chit chat about Sydney Anglican crimes against women and gays. And while we're at it, the failure to precisely locate heaven and hell, or as Joe Joe Hill would have it, pie in the sky when you die.

The funniest thing? The pond is reading about Jensen rabbiting on about nice weather on a weekend when gale-force winds, bitter cold, and rain have swept through good old Sydney town, with the beaches closed because of the raging seas. Now that'll teach those hedonistic sapphire water sinners a trick or two!

Never mind, confronted with the rich diversity of life, Jensen commits the sin of ingratitude by charging others with the sin of ingratitude:

This sin is a sin of ingratitude, for another thing. It craves the bliss of created life, but snatches it greedily without a thought for its source. It celebrates the created thing, and forgets the creator, whose eternal power and divine nature ought to be recognised in what is made.

And that's it, more a splutter and a putter than a knock-down thing, since the closest we've got to finding the creator at the moment is the discovery of the Higgs Boson, which so far as the pond can confirm seems to suggest that the Garden of Eden was established by the Big Bang about 13.75 billion years ago in a galaxy far away (yes there are still Sydney Anglicans who communicate regularly with the site on the literal accuracy of all that lies within the Old Testament, and one response to Jensen's piece even manages to drag Genesis into the discussion).

Jensen wraps up proceedings with a truly execrable song about Sydney by Tommy Leonetti, which confirms - if ever evidence was lacking - that Sydney can be a veritable purgatory on earth (not that the pond is arguing for purgatory or limbo, which would be dreadful theological lapses).

With dozens of songs about Sydney to chose from - and a wiki that helpfully lists them all here - Jensen commits the ultimate sin ... of bad taste. He should realise he's answerable for this.

It's not as if there aren't plenty of songs to chose from that berate Sydney for its expensive or tawdry or wicked ways.

Here's another Jensen favourite, atheist Richard Clapton - what is it with his taste for atheist-composed music? - brooding about the wrinkles, without any sign of plastic surgery:

Sitting out on the Palm Beach Road,
I'm so drunk and the car won't go,
And my crazy eyes keep looking out to sea,
The Sunday drivers are cruising round,
I wish they'd all go back to town,
What do they expect to find,
Sure as hell ain't peace of mind.

Not to worry Richard, thanks to Michael Jensen and the Sydney Anglicans, we know you can never find peace of mind in Sydney.

It's too pretty, it's too superficial, it's too ugly, it's hell on earth, repent Sydney, or be punished! And whatever you do, avoid catching the 428.

Finally let's throw into the mix a message from Cardinal George Pell, in these deeply troubled times, noted last week and found here:

At a deeper level of frustration no one in Rome who makes a salad has encountered an iceberg lettuce. The alternative greens range from ordinary to bad; but in Italy you can still find strawberries and tomatoes which taste like they should, although their appearance is unattractive.

You cannot judge fruit by its cover.

Dammit, so it's not just Sydney that has issues. Those damned Roman Italians pretend to offer sophisticated salad, but can they drum up a decent iceberg for a Cardinal? No way. Talk about suffering.

Now if only Michael Jensen had read that, he might have understood the truth about Sydney. Forget the sapphire blue water, forget the beer and the wine and the barbies and the brilliant winter weather. It's a town that delivers the very best iceberg lettuces.

All the Italians have got are romaine and red and butter lettuces, and rocket and Belgian endive and chicory and dandelion and escarole and other decadent stuff for the salad bowl, while arrogant Sydney is iceberg pure to to speak, and not just at Bondi with the icebergers ... (and more for your salad here).

Oh dear, distracted again, by a lettuce, but perhaps all this just goes to show the dangers of personifying a city, and then taking the personification seriously, as if it actually means something, when generally generalisations are worth generally little ...

And now, since it's Sunday, let's see what Sydney can really deliver, in Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells, about the loss of a friend in water (go here for the opening part of it where Melbourne scores a mention and here for a little background):

In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,
We argued about blowing up the world,
But you were living backward, so each night
You crept a moment closer to the breast,
And they were living, all of them, those frames
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck,
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
And tablets cut with dreams of piety
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.

Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water's over you,
As Time is over you, and mystery,
And memory, the flood that does not flow.
You have no suburb, like those easier dead
In private berths of dissolution laid -
The tide goes over, the waves ride over you
And let their shadows down like shining hair,
But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;
And you are only part of an Idea.
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,
And the short agony, the longer dream,
The Nothing that was neither long nor short;
But I was bound, and could not go that way,
But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.
If I could find an answer, could only find
Your meaning, or could say why you were here
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath
Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?

I looked out my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze,
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal
Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells,
Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.
Five bells.

Tommy Leonetti, eat your heart out.

And speaking of the Opera House, as we did at the start, any visitor will likely enough have come across John Olsen's tribute to the poem. There's no way to appreciate the work without seeing it in the flesh and without understanding its source (and you can find more about his work here).

Sadly it's too easy to label Sydney a sin city.

There's more to life and art and Sydney harbour than is dreamed about in Michael Jensen's universe ...

(Aand if you've not read Slessor, why not try Beach Burial while you're at it).

(Below: and now back to the light tone, and there you go, it's all or nothing, Sydney or the bush, Rome or an iceberg lettuce, and Sydney Anglicans or rights for women and gays).