Melbourne!

There's an article in today's New York Times, "36 Hours in Melbourne, Australia". Right now, if you click on the NYT online there's a link on the homepage! How exciting. It's part of a series - 36 hours in Bogota, Vientianne, Des Moines and so forth.

It's not bad but it doesn't really capture the strangeness of Melbourne; you could read it and be none the wiser. But then again, it could be worse. They used to do a similar thing, with the title "What's doing in [whereever]", and you can imagine my surprise when, within about a month of my moving to New York in the late 80s they had "What's doing in Melbourne". And what was doing in Melbourne? They'd gotten a local journalist to write it, and he'd spent the whole page talking about the opera, the ballet and whatnot. Cultural cringe, provincial hubris, pathos.. it was all there. I can't imagine what he was thinking, maybe people in NY would forsake the Met and the half-dozen ballet companies around Lincoln Center to go to Melbourne to see the same thing? One of the really great things about New York is that to the native New Yorker (which I almost became) everything in the City is, by definition, the biggest and best. World's best opera company? World's biggest bookshop? It didn't matter if it was true or not. So if you're trying to sell Melbourne to New Yorkers you'd have to sell it on the basis that it's not at all like New York. Say there's kangaroos in Collins Street, anything. (In the 80s it was possible to make up the most fantastic stories about Australia and still be believed.)

The journalist's first name was Julian. It would be, wouldn't it?