COLOUR ME MARTIN

The film Colour Me Kubrick is the true story of a man called Alan Conway no less who posed as director Stanley Kubrick during the time of Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, “despite knowing very little about his work and looking nothing like him”. At the ACO we had a similar encounter which we can now call Colour me Martin

In 1991 after the resignation of a previous Assistant Leader, we advertised the position in Australia and overseas. Amongst the responses to these we received an application from a certain Laurence Martin from England.

After hearing his audition tape and reading the accompanying documentation, we arranged for Mr Martin to fly to Australia so that we could give him a trial.

During the period for which we engaged him there was a tour with Marc Minkowski in an all Beethoven program and another program that included The Four Seasons with Richard playing the solo, and Mr. Martin expected to play the lead orchestral part.

During the first day’s rehearsals for the Vivaldi, it became painfully obvious that there was something amiss. Mr Martin’s playing was woeful. As a consequence, at the end of the day we began to investigate his background and look again at his resume. After many enquiries, faxes came in from all over Europe; nobody had heard of him let alone played with this fraudster.

He claimed that he had played a viola d’amore concerto with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields; had performed in a recital shown in the BBC’s Radio Times, worked with Pierre Boulez and Harnoncourt and provided other relevant material to back up his audition tape.

The next morning Tim Walker (the then ACO General Manager) spoke to Mr. Martin who then admitted he had ‘upgraded’ his resume, cutting and pasting the information. In addition he admitted that the tape was falsifed. He also claimed a side profession as a restaurant reviewer and that he was writing an article on food in Oz for the Wolverhampton Star, UK (funny that Wolverhampton gets a mention in Colour me Kubrick as well). When we rang the paper to enquire of his claim, a voice yelled out “someone’s havin’ you on mate”. Thank you.

When confronted he also claimed to play the viola as well and tried to offer himself up for a viola job.

He had the gall to ring RT himself and after receiving a right blasting (it had cost us months of wasted time and many thousands of dollars) Mr. Martin’s last words were “Well I didn’t like your playing anyway”.

He was sent packing and this experience modified our audition requirements regarding the provision of performance material. If played in a studio, the recording technician was required to state that there were no edits on the tape.

Subsequently, the requirement for performing material is requested to be from a live “one take” performance.

DEBUSSY STRING QUARTET

1893

In our next tour we are performing Debussy’s String Quartet in arrangement for strings along with many other remarkable works in our upcoming series featuring Christian Lindberg as trombonist and composer (see entry for him).

There still lives a woman who was born in the same year Debussy wrote his string quartet. American Edna Parker is reported to now be the oldest person in the world born 20 of April, 1893. Incidentally, she lives in the same retirement village as Sandy Allen, the tallest woman in the world.

I've pointed out to Barry Humphries that Sandy and Edna are alive in the same retirement complex.

Also in 1893 (from Wikipedia which appears to work in much the same way as the PPC prison gangs, much like an ant colony):

Rudolf Diesel receives a patent for the diesel engine.

# May 1 - The 1893 World's Fair, also known as the World's Columbian Exposition, opens to the public in Chicago, USA. The first United States commemorative postage stamps were issued for the Exposition. The most memorable cultural events were the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. The hard times and utopian dreams that characterized the era were immortalized in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

# May 5 - Panic of 1893: Crash on the New York Stock Exchange starts a depression. Prior to the Great Depression, a huge wave of investing in the stock market had taken place, which created artificially high prices of stock. This process was driven by the fact that shares were being used as a collateral for loans in order to buy more stocks (ie. buying stocks on margins). When the economy showed signs of slowing and share prices plummeted, this caused an extensive domino effect. As investments lost their face value and the loans on them "went bad," many financial institutions collapsed, triggering a monetary crisis. This analysis has been sharply disputed by noted monetarist economists such as Milton Friedman (dubbing the Great Depression the Great Contraction) who wrote that the Great Depression would have been merely a "garden-variety recession" if it weren't for the response of the Federal Reserve to the following runs on the banks and that most investments were made unsound by the effects of a massive deflation, the increase in real interest rates and decline of real personal and business incomes.