Tuesday night I was dropped off near my place in Carlton by a great chef, along with a gifted young saxophonist I'd just heard play. How could this happen to bookish writer's-blocked yours truly? It all goes back to Carlton house shares, which seem like the productive formulas for endlessly interesting permutations and combinations.
Flash back a few hours, and you'll find a table of seven people tucking into dinner at Mecanix, the training restaurant of the Prahran TAFE (Technical and Further Education college). The host was D, a college friend of K (back in Germany, her other life), who's taken me under wing a bit this past year; I think we're now officially mates. Other guests included D's lovely partner and two women, both of whom had shared a house with K twenty-odd years ago. The food was prepared by TAFE students but presided over by chef G, who ran (if I'm remembering correctly) a restaurant or two in Carlton when D, K and others were students here. Since then he ran a renowned restaurant in the country south of here for a while, since closed (Melbourne mourned) - but at Mecanix you can still encounter some of his culinary wonders. Fantastic fish soup, a sweet and sultry beef dish, crisp ratatouille, a lavender and yogurt ice cream alongside quinces cooked with raisins and pine nuts were only highlights.
The conversation was as delightful as the food, in a way I'm starting to recognize as one of the pleasures of living in a country with a small population. Someone at the table had a personal connection to almost everything which came up, though we tittered at the young people thrilled to find sausages being sold at the St Kilda (was it?) market by an actor they recognized from "The Matrix." Saw you in a movie? That's nothing: We talked of the film of Raimond Gaita's memoir Romulus my father which has just come out; star Eric Bana's married to one of our cousins, and the film was shot in a house rented from part of one of our families! That's a connection! I mentioned I'd just read Lily Brett's Too many men, recommended by K the last time we came to Mecanix, a not non-autobiographical novel about Brett and her father. We quickly passed over the book to Brett herself; two people at table had just seen Brett's father at a do in New York. (The Australasian diaspora includes two or three cities down here and everywhere you'd want to be in the world.)
Then D got an SMS from the young saxophonist, announcing that he was playing in a 5-person combo at a jazz club that evening. The saxophonist, a student at the Victorian College of the Arts, is the son of - you guessed it - someone with whom D shared a house years ago. The meal over, D and his partner and I hitched a ride with the chef to the jazz bar, where we were the only patrons not exact contemporaries or blood-relations of the very young (and gifted) quintet Wilu, centered around a trombonist and her jazz-guitar-playing brother. (You can hear some of their soulful compositions on their myspace page.) Later, when D and his partner were going to the place of - I'm sure - yet another ex-housemate, the chef dropped me and the saxophonist off on Lygon Street. The Saxophonist is of course sharing a house in Carlton, and so the cycle goes on.
Is there something like this in New York, perhaps in Brooklyn? If so, I'd love to be part of it. Sharing a house this year has been terrific. Even though it's with people it's taken me a year to like and still not friends, we've become comfortable with each other; were I staying on in the house or in town we'd probably end up becoming friends at least in the extended sense of thinking of each other when something of interest to the other came up. Very nice indeed to have this community matrix working alongside those of work, family and (if you're into that) religion.
What's the analog in the US? College roommates, I suppose, but that's not quite the same thing, since it's only for a few years. Here, it's not in university dorms and continues naturally into the life after uni, sometimes for many years. (Our next door neighbor at 450 Lygon - a friend, needless to say, of a friend of D's - moved in thirty years ago and is there still.) It all seems a wonderful corrective to the materialism and isolation of modern life. Remember my October rhapsody on sharing and Wohngemeinschaften (inspired by an early outing with D)? It's all true.
So if anyone knows of a promising share situation in Brooklyn, starting in August - do let me know.
