Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Separating the men from the boys
Unlike many bloggers I've been enjoying selected parts of the Olympics, especially the equestrian events which are always beautiful and exciting to watch -- the horses are wonderful, graceful, powerful creatures and the riders are incredibly gutsy and smart. My benchmark for watching horses and riders is an unforgettable afternoon once in Vienna when I went with my friend Helen to watch a training session of the Lipizzaner Stallions, in the indoor arena of the Hofburg palace where these horses and their riders are based.
Because it was a training session, of course some of the horses were only half-trained. They're stallions (duh), and everyone knows what that means. And because they originated as war-horse training, the elaborate, unnatural 'dancing' movements of these horses were originally designed to kill and maim, or to set up the rider to do likewise. Watching the strong, sweating, white-faced riders, some of them hardly out of their teens, as they controlled these horses without hurting them, was the second best lesson I've ever had in what it actually takes to ride a horse properly. (The best was when I fell off a cantering horse onto some rocks at the bottom of a dry creek bed and heard my mother's voice clear as a bell from 750 km away saying in ringing tones 'You get back on that horse.' I did.)
I've also been enjoying the swimming, which was my favourite sport as a teenager. What I have not been enjoying is the commentary; while I appreciate some (not all) of the commentators' knowledge and expertise, I've been depressed if not surprised by the way that the overwhelmingly male commentariat refers to male competitors as men and female competitors as girls. Several people have blogged about this over the last few days.
But I've had it on all afternoon and evening while pottering round the house and I've noticed something even more sinister. There are not two categories, but three. They're calling the women 'girls', the white men 'men', and the black men 'boys'.
Because it was a training session, of course some of the horses were only half-trained. They're stallions (duh), and everyone knows what that means. And because they originated as war-horse training, the elaborate, unnatural 'dancing' movements of these horses were originally designed to kill and maim, or to set up the rider to do likewise. Watching the strong, sweating, white-faced riders, some of them hardly out of their teens, as they controlled these horses without hurting them, was the second best lesson I've ever had in what it actually takes to ride a horse properly. (The best was when I fell off a cantering horse onto some rocks at the bottom of a dry creek bed and heard my mother's voice clear as a bell from 750 km away saying in ringing tones 'You get back on that horse.' I did.)
I've also been enjoying the swimming, which was my favourite sport as a teenager. What I have not been enjoying is the commentary; while I appreciate some (not all) of the commentators' knowledge and expertise, I've been depressed if not surprised by the way that the overwhelmingly male commentariat refers to male competitors as men and female competitors as girls. Several people have blogged about this over the last few days.
But I've had it on all afternoon and evening while pottering round the house and I've noticed something even more sinister. There are not two categories, but three. They're calling the women 'girls', the white men 'men', and the black men 'boys'.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Homage to Peter Cundall
I try not to do too much of this kind of thing, but since Peter Cundall of the ABC's Gardening Australia has announced his retirement, I thought I might put up, in homage, a condensed version of a piece I wrote about him for The Monthly in 2006.
‘But that’s what this program’s about. It’s about action, and the sheer beauty of it,’ said Peter Cundall recently in his introductory segment of Gardening Australia. For Cundall, gardening is simultaneously a form of activism and a form of contemplation: a way of self-sustenance, of landcare, and of eating good food that hasn’t been either literally or figuratively adulterated by the elaborate processes of capitalism, but also a means of recovery and regeneration. ‘If you’re in a world that’s a bit crazy, a bit mixed up, racing ahead,’ he said to the ABC’s Peter Thompson in a 2004 interview for Big Ideas, ‘no matter what you do in a garden, things still happen at the same rate. You sow seeds and they come up within ten or fifteen days … If you plant an apple tree or a lemon tree, you know it’ll be in fruit at a certain time ... And it’s that assurance and security about gardening. And there’s also a wonderful timelessness about it.’
Gardening Australia is now in its seventeenth series and seems to have survived the ABC’s recent decision to move its production from Hobart to Melbourne. Cundall himself, a proud Tasmanian, is the show’s focus and anchor but it also has a strong team of expert presenters from around the country. Unlike many programs that purport to be ‘national’ but are in fact firmly Melbourne- or Sydney-centric with only the occasional token, cosmetic gesture to other states and cities, Gardening Australia really does project the idea of a national presence, with regular features from cities, towns and climate zones all over the country.
Unusually content-rich for contemporary television, it rattles along at a great rate, with no vacuous chatter and no wasted time between the two or three main features and the three or four regular spots that make up each week’s program. With the more instructive segments – how to grow vegies in pots, or recycle your grey water, or protect your lime tree from frost -- there’s a lot of steady and highly illustrative zooming in and out, in close sync with the script.
There are constant shifts of scale, not just in the predictable and sensible variation of topics, but also in a more imaginative structuring of segments so that some are fine-detail examinations of tiny things while others are panoramic overviews of big urban and rural projects stretching over years, from aerial eagle-eye views of entire landscaped parks to magnified close-ups of tiny pods full of even tinier seeds. In one recent program, there was a segment on Brisbane’s Roma Street Parklands that featured sweeping shots of the city with an oasis at its heart, a former derelict railway yard that, over the last few years, has been magically transformed with graceful greenery and spectacular water-features making the most of the uneven ground. The following week, a segment on ‘the fascinating, wonderful world of fungus’ (and there’s a phrase you don’t hear on TV every day) featured lingering close-ups of a minuscule clump of finely-detailed Mycena clarkeana: seven or eight perfect little frilly-edged, dusty-pink umbrella-shapes, looking like a retro light fitting for a particularly funky doll’s house, or some miniaturized form of naughty nineteenth-century underwear.
Peter Cundall was born in Manchester in 1927, one of six children in a family he describes as the poorest in a poor district: ‘I actually thought, as a child, that to be rich meant that your Dad had a job.’ After the family had scrambled through the Depression, Cundall senior decamped to the army in 1939 and with the exception of one short visit on leave, they never saw him again. Peter joined the British Army and trained as a paratrooper, but the war ended and he found himself instead, at nineteen, posted to southern Austria and guarding the captive SS officers who had previously been in charge of the now-liberated concentration camps. Then one day, like a young man in a fairy tale, he besottedly and unknowingly followed a beautiful and mysterious blonde called Angela across the border into Yugoslavia, where he was promptly arrested as a spy and imprisoned in solitary confinement for six months.
After the war he saw an ad for recruitment to the Australian Army and responded as a way of escaping the miseries of postwar Britain; on arrival in Melbourne in 1950 he was immediately shipped out on active service as an infantryman to Korea, where his experience was educational but grim. Finally he was posted in 1955 to Tasmania, and stayed there; since then, apart from gardening, writing and almost twenty years in television, he has been a radio presenter, a foundry worker, and a spectacularly unsuccessful electoral candidate for the Communist Party.
Why do we love him? There’s that voice: the workin’-cluss, north-of-England accent that identifies him as one of Britain’s oppressed and therefore, like the Scots and Irish, oddly in league with Australians. There’s his passion -- for work, for life, for beauty and for action -- which is apparent in everything he does. We love him for his fearlessness, for the guts that got him unscathed through some truly dramatic life experiences and led him to say to himself, as the door of his Yugoslav prison cell clanged behind him when he was not yet out of his teens, ‘This is the first room of my own I’ve ever had in my life.’
We love him for his language about life in general and gardening in particular, and for the way he talks of both as though they were magical and wondrous things. In the July 1 program, he used the words ‘amazing’, wonderful’ and ‘enchanting’ in the first five minutes; they are three of his favorite words, along with ‘magnificent’, ‘beautiful’, ‘marvellous’ and ‘brilliant’. He means them all.
Finally, and maybe more than anything else, we love him for the fact that at 79 he seems still unjaded and unfaded, a cheerful, energetic, quick-witted and supremely fit old man, and as such he’s a walking reminder that old age is not inevitably to be dreaded but can be lived as a happy, useful, influential citizen.
Perhaps strangely for so joyous a man -- much less for one with so finely calibrated a sense of the miraculous -- he remains the uncompromising materialist that one would expect of a former Communist Party candidate, veteran of two wars, child of the Depression and Mancunian hard man. He wants no epitaph: ‘I can’t see the point,’ he said to Andrew Denton last year on Enough Rope, ‘of having a thing on your tombstone saying, here lies Peter Cundall … He died, right, and he lived a life. So what.’ And when asked by Peter Thompson to define the essence of wisdom, he replied: ‘To be able to reflect the world as it exists, accurately, and to be able to do something about it.’
‘But that’s what this program’s about. It’s about action, and the sheer beauty of it,’ said Peter Cundall recently in his introductory segment of Gardening Australia. For Cundall, gardening is simultaneously a form of activism and a form of contemplation: a way of self-sustenance, of landcare, and of eating good food that hasn’t been either literally or figuratively adulterated by the elaborate processes of capitalism, but also a means of recovery and regeneration. ‘If you’re in a world that’s a bit crazy, a bit mixed up, racing ahead,’ he said to the ABC’s Peter Thompson in a 2004 interview for Big Ideas, ‘no matter what you do in a garden, things still happen at the same rate. You sow seeds and they come up within ten or fifteen days … If you plant an apple tree or a lemon tree, you know it’ll be in fruit at a certain time ... And it’s that assurance and security about gardening. And there’s also a wonderful timelessness about it.’
Gardening Australia is now in its seventeenth series and seems to have survived the ABC’s recent decision to move its production from Hobart to Melbourne. Cundall himself, a proud Tasmanian, is the show’s focus and anchor but it also has a strong team of expert presenters from around the country. Unlike many programs that purport to be ‘national’ but are in fact firmly Melbourne- or Sydney-centric with only the occasional token, cosmetic gesture to other states and cities, Gardening Australia really does project the idea of a national presence, with regular features from cities, towns and climate zones all over the country.
Unusually content-rich for contemporary television, it rattles along at a great rate, with no vacuous chatter and no wasted time between the two or three main features and the three or four regular spots that make up each week’s program. With the more instructive segments – how to grow vegies in pots, or recycle your grey water, or protect your lime tree from frost -- there’s a lot of steady and highly illustrative zooming in and out, in close sync with the script.
There are constant shifts of scale, not just in the predictable and sensible variation of topics, but also in a more imaginative structuring of segments so that some are fine-detail examinations of tiny things while others are panoramic overviews of big urban and rural projects stretching over years, from aerial eagle-eye views of entire landscaped parks to magnified close-ups of tiny pods full of even tinier seeds. In one recent program, there was a segment on Brisbane’s Roma Street Parklands that featured sweeping shots of the city with an oasis at its heart, a former derelict railway yard that, over the last few years, has been magically transformed with graceful greenery and spectacular water-features making the most of the uneven ground. The following week, a segment on ‘the fascinating, wonderful world of fungus’ (and there’s a phrase you don’t hear on TV every day) featured lingering close-ups of a minuscule clump of finely-detailed Mycena clarkeana: seven or eight perfect little frilly-edged, dusty-pink umbrella-shapes, looking like a retro light fitting for a particularly funky doll’s house, or some miniaturized form of naughty nineteenth-century underwear.
Peter Cundall was born in Manchester in 1927, one of six children in a family he describes as the poorest in a poor district: ‘I actually thought, as a child, that to be rich meant that your Dad had a job.’ After the family had scrambled through the Depression, Cundall senior decamped to the army in 1939 and with the exception of one short visit on leave, they never saw him again. Peter joined the British Army and trained as a paratrooper, but the war ended and he found himself instead, at nineteen, posted to southern Austria and guarding the captive SS officers who had previously been in charge of the now-liberated concentration camps. Then one day, like a young man in a fairy tale, he besottedly and unknowingly followed a beautiful and mysterious blonde called Angela across the border into Yugoslavia, where he was promptly arrested as a spy and imprisoned in solitary confinement for six months.
After the war he saw an ad for recruitment to the Australian Army and responded as a way of escaping the miseries of postwar Britain; on arrival in Melbourne in 1950 he was immediately shipped out on active service as an infantryman to Korea, where his experience was educational but grim. Finally he was posted in 1955 to Tasmania, and stayed there; since then, apart from gardening, writing and almost twenty years in television, he has been a radio presenter, a foundry worker, and a spectacularly unsuccessful electoral candidate for the Communist Party.
Why do we love him? There’s that voice: the workin’-cluss, north-of-England accent that identifies him as one of Britain’s oppressed and therefore, like the Scots and Irish, oddly in league with Australians. There’s his passion -- for work, for life, for beauty and for action -- which is apparent in everything he does. We love him for his fearlessness, for the guts that got him unscathed through some truly dramatic life experiences and led him to say to himself, as the door of his Yugoslav prison cell clanged behind him when he was not yet out of his teens, ‘This is the first room of my own I’ve ever had in my life.’
We love him for his language about life in general and gardening in particular, and for the way he talks of both as though they were magical and wondrous things. In the July 1 program, he used the words ‘amazing’, wonderful’ and ‘enchanting’ in the first five minutes; they are three of his favorite words, along with ‘magnificent’, ‘beautiful’, ‘marvellous’ and ‘brilliant’. He means them all.
Finally, and maybe more than anything else, we love him for the fact that at 79 he seems still unjaded and unfaded, a cheerful, energetic, quick-witted and supremely fit old man, and as such he’s a walking reminder that old age is not inevitably to be dreaded but can be lived as a happy, useful, influential citizen.
Perhaps strangely for so joyous a man -- much less for one with so finely calibrated a sense of the miraculous -- he remains the uncompromising materialist that one would expect of a former Communist Party candidate, veteran of two wars, child of the Depression and Mancunian hard man. He wants no epitaph: ‘I can’t see the point,’ he said to Andrew Denton last year on Enough Rope, ‘of having a thing on your tombstone saying, here lies Peter Cundall … He died, right, and he lived a life. So what.’ And when asked by Peter Thompson to define the essence of wisdom, he replied: ‘To be able to reflect the world as it exists, accurately, and to be able to do something about it.’
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Actually he was saying "cyclonic" ...
... but for a minute I could have sworn the dude on the teeve was saying "psychotic vacuum cleaner".
Not that it would have been any kind of a surprise. I've never known a vacuum cleaner that wasn't.
My current Miele Cat and Dog with Turbo Brush, for example, would vacuum up the actual cats if given half a chance.
Not that it would have been any kind of a surprise. I've never known a vacuum cleaner that wasn't.
My current Miele Cat and Dog with Turbo Brush, for example, would vacuum up the actual cats if given half a chance.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Love and death: some stories just run and run
Did anyone watching Doc Martin tonight find the storyline vaguely familiar?
I think Dominic Minghella and/or the writers were doing homage to the story of Guinevere and Lancelot as told in the musical version where Lancelot brings Sir Lionel back from the dead after the Queen has set him up.
I mean, hero and heroine are kneeling either side of a dying, nay, dead body. Stitched-up but devoted hero magically brings body back to life. Heroine is mesmerised by his power and virtue and falls hopelessly in love on the spot. Hero reciprocates.
And in Cornwall, too.
I think Dominic Minghella and/or the writers were doing homage to the story of Guinevere and Lancelot as told in the musical version where Lancelot brings Sir Lionel back from the dead after the Queen has set him up.
I mean, hero and heroine are kneeling either side of a dying, nay, dead body. Stitched-up but devoted hero magically brings body back to life. Heroine is mesmerised by his power and virtue and falls hopelessly in love on the spot. Hero reciprocates.
And in Cornwall, too.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Two videos for the edification of aspiring Australian Idols
I'm working on a long post about No Country for Old Men (the movie not the book) but I've mostly been drifting around YouTube looking for hours in a hypnotised sort of way at early footage of all my formative musical influences. So while I work on the serious post, here as filler is one of said influences plus some girls I've never seen before, singing one of my absolutely favourite songs.
Idol aspirants of 2008! Will you be able to achieve even the palest shadow of these two performances (one for boys and one for girls here) when the time comes to co-operate and sing in a group? If not, go home now and save yourselves the humiliation.
So here are Crosby Stills and Nash around 1970,
and the Wailin' Jennys in 2006.
Note also that all six of these people actually look like adults. Observe in particular the mesmerising beauty of Stephen Stills at 25, already a veteran of university, the army, and Buffalo Springfield with Neil Young, and despite the early-70s hair and sidies -- that's genius you see glowing there. No amount of product or styling can replace it.
Idol aspirants of 2008! Will you be able to achieve even the palest shadow of these two performances (one for boys and one for girls here) when the time comes to co-operate and sing in a group? If not, go home now and save yourselves the humiliation.
So here are Crosby Stills and Nash around 1970,
and the Wailin' Jennys in 2006.
Note also that all six of these people actually look like adults. Observe in particular the mesmerising beauty of Stephen Stills at 25, already a veteran of university, the army, and Buffalo Springfield with Neil Young, and despite the early-70s hair and sidies -- that's genius you see glowing there. No amount of product or styling can replace it.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Satire, the crevasse at your feet
The standard of debate around the traps on the subject of Andrew Hansen's infamous 'eulogy song' on Wednesday night's episode of The Chaser's War on Everything has been pretty deplorably low, with most people apparently unable to get past the 'for/against' dichotomy and expressing their positions, either way, in unattractively primitive terms.
[UPDATE: apparently this song was actually written by Chris Taylor -- my bad. Auto-correct as you read.]
As with so much expression of public opinion, much of this has been not about the subject in question but rather about thinly disguised self-aggrandisement. Either you proclaim your own respectability by saying loudly and indignantly that trashing the dead is icky, or you trumpet your own honesty and fearlessness by savagely attacking people who are no longer in a position to defend themselves, regardless of how ruthlessly they may have done so before they carked it.
I'm no fan of the Chaser boys as a rule, and must be the only person in the country who thought the APEC stunt was puerile and dangerous, but I admit it: when I watched Hansen singing his song, I laughed. Not least because he actually understands how to scan verse lines and what a real rhyme is, and the cleverer and more precise the scansion and rhyming, the funnier that Tom Lehrer-style song always is.
I'm in the camp (see self-aggrandisement and respectability, above) that says there is something uncivilised and savage, something pathetically cowardly, even something a bit evil, in the trashing of the newly dead. It reminds me of that 'Teenage King of Werribee' caught last year on video pissing on the head of an intellectually disabled girl, simply because he could do so without fear of repercussion. But I wasn't 'for' or 'against' the song. I thought it was funny, which is a different thing. (Although, having said that, one saw far more brilliant and subtle satire about Kerry Packer back in the 80s and 90s when he was still alive and richly equipped to wreak revenge, and did.)
One defining characteristic of satire is its profound instability of meaning. In good satire, you know that something is being sent up, mocked, savaged, traduced -- but, try as you might and using every tool of literary criticism that you have ever met or heard of, you just can't ever quite put your finger precisely on the word or moment that pins down the satirist's meaning. Think of Edna Everage, or, even more so, Sandy Stone. Think of Swift's 'A Modest Proposal', a savage essay on, among other things, English-Irish relations in which a straight-faced projector proposes (modestly) that the solution to the problem of the Irish poor would be for the Irish to farm their richest resource -- their children -- out for food.
(I thought of this great Swift piece during the Adelaide Festival of Ideas before last when economist Clive Hamilton got up on stage and, also with a straight face, proposed that the solution to the over-population of Kangaroo Island with disease-ridden and habitat-destroying koalas (given that the SA government refuses to allow culling on the basis that it would harm the tourism industry if the news got out -- particularly if it got as far as koala-loving Japan -- that people were shooting koalas out of the trees) would be to develop organised koala-hunting tourism packages and market them to Americans. It would, he predicted, be so popular that they'd end up deliberately breeding more koalas on KI in order to provide enough targets for the sporting shooters of the US.)
But back to the eulogy song. As many have already commented (including, after a fashion, the Chaser boys themselves), the Belinda Emmett moment was the song's self-deconstructing mechanism, making the double point that (1) yes even satire needs to draw the line and (2) anyway, more importantly, Belinda Emmett was, in fact, a sweetheart, so there was no satire-inviting hypocrisy involved in the modest public mourning of her death.
So far, so good.
I maintain, however, that the song had a second and more important self-deconstructing moment, and this brings me back to the point about satire's instability of meaning. For what are we to make of this?
... her dress was wet with Arab semen stains. / Stan Zemanek was a racist jock ...
Regarding this crashing non-segue from racial profiling of hypothetical semen stains (and all that that implies) in one line to scornful accusations of somebody else's racism in the next, there are only two possibilities: either Hansen did this on purpose, or he didn't.
If he didn't do it on purpose, then it reveals a staggering hypocrisy all its own, far outstripping the mild and culturally understandable hypocrisies involved in eulogising the newly dead that were the ostensible target of the song's satire: an even-less-than-skin-deep racial problem that smacks very nastily indeed of the classic white male fear of miscegenation, of 'our women' being sexually appropriated by men of other races.
But if he did do it on purpose, then it means that he was satirising his own song, which would then call its entire message into question. And if he was calling its entire message into question, then what was it really about?
[UPDATE: apparently this song was actually written by Chris Taylor -- my bad. Auto-correct as you read.]
As with so much expression of public opinion, much of this has been not about the subject in question but rather about thinly disguised self-aggrandisement. Either you proclaim your own respectability by saying loudly and indignantly that trashing the dead is icky, or you trumpet your own honesty and fearlessness by savagely attacking people who are no longer in a position to defend themselves, regardless of how ruthlessly they may have done so before they carked it.
I'm no fan of the Chaser boys as a rule, and must be the only person in the country who thought the APEC stunt was puerile and dangerous, but I admit it: when I watched Hansen singing his song, I laughed. Not least because he actually understands how to scan verse lines and what a real rhyme is, and the cleverer and more precise the scansion and rhyming, the funnier that Tom Lehrer-style song always is.
I'm in the camp (see self-aggrandisement and respectability, above) that says there is something uncivilised and savage, something pathetically cowardly, even something a bit evil, in the trashing of the newly dead. It reminds me of that 'Teenage King of Werribee' caught last year on video pissing on the head of an intellectually disabled girl, simply because he could do so without fear of repercussion. But I wasn't 'for' or 'against' the song. I thought it was funny, which is a different thing. (Although, having said that, one saw far more brilliant and subtle satire about Kerry Packer back in the 80s and 90s when he was still alive and richly equipped to wreak revenge, and did.)
One defining characteristic of satire is its profound instability of meaning. In good satire, you know that something is being sent up, mocked, savaged, traduced -- but, try as you might and using every tool of literary criticism that you have ever met or heard of, you just can't ever quite put your finger precisely on the word or moment that pins down the satirist's meaning. Think of Edna Everage, or, even more so, Sandy Stone. Think of Swift's 'A Modest Proposal', a savage essay on, among other things, English-Irish relations in which a straight-faced projector proposes (modestly) that the solution to the problem of the Irish poor would be for the Irish to farm their richest resource -- their children -- out for food.
(I thought of this great Swift piece during the Adelaide Festival of Ideas before last when economist Clive Hamilton got up on stage and, also with a straight face, proposed that the solution to the over-population of Kangaroo Island with disease-ridden and habitat-destroying koalas (given that the SA government refuses to allow culling on the basis that it would harm the tourism industry if the news got out -- particularly if it got as far as koala-loving Japan -- that people were shooting koalas out of the trees) would be to develop organised koala-hunting tourism packages and market them to Americans. It would, he predicted, be so popular that they'd end up deliberately breeding more koalas on KI in order to provide enough targets for the sporting shooters of the US.)
But back to the eulogy song. As many have already commented (including, after a fashion, the Chaser boys themselves), the Belinda Emmett moment was the song's self-deconstructing mechanism, making the double point that (1) yes even satire needs to draw the line and (2) anyway, more importantly, Belinda Emmett was, in fact, a sweetheart, so there was no satire-inviting hypocrisy involved in the modest public mourning of her death.
So far, so good.
I maintain, however, that the song had a second and more important self-deconstructing moment, and this brings me back to the point about satire's instability of meaning. For what are we to make of this?
... her dress was wet with Arab semen stains. / Stan Zemanek was a racist jock ...
Regarding this crashing non-segue from racial profiling of hypothetical semen stains (and all that that implies) in one line to scornful accusations of somebody else's racism in the next, there are only two possibilities: either Hansen did this on purpose, or he didn't.
If he didn't do it on purpose, then it reveals a staggering hypocrisy all its own, far outstripping the mild and culturally understandable hypocrisies involved in eulogising the newly dead that were the ostensible target of the song's satire: an even-less-than-skin-deep racial problem that smacks very nastily indeed of the classic white male fear of miscegenation, of 'our women' being sexually appropriated by men of other races.
But if he did do it on purpose, then it means that he was satirising his own song, which would then call its entire message into question. And if he was calling its entire message into question, then what was it really about?
Friday, October 19, 2007
Pro-business = anti-worker, as everybody knows
Is it just me or is everyone else also finding the Coalition's saturation union-hatin' bogeyman's-gonna-getcha TV ad campaign intolerably crude and stupid? I've only watched an hour of commerical television (House, Wednesday night; does anybody agree with my best mate that House has jumped the shark?) since the election was called and by the end of it I was already climbing up the walls. The idea that this is going to go on without respite until November 24 (or whenever the blackout starts) boggles the mind.
The 'reasoning' behind these ads appears to be as follows:
1) All them Labor types are 'union officials' or at least used to go out with one which as we all know is the same thing.
2) Unions are there for the support and protection of the workers. That is, they are pro-worker.
3) As everyone knows, if you are pro-worker then you must be anti-business and vice versa, because, as everyone knows, the relationship between business and labour is always simply and precisely adversarial.
4) We haven't actually realised yet that running this argument makes it crystal clear that we are, in an absolute sort of way, anti-worker by definition.
Not being likewise a seer in black and white, I'm not all that thrilled about the unions myself. But that is strictly from a feminist viewpoint and based on bitter experience of masculinist values and tactics observed over many years -- values and tactics exercised mainly by those who have shouldered, bullied and bludgeoned their way into union officialdom in the first place. If I were in charge of an anti-union campaign, it would be run from a viewpoint even more horrifying to the current regime than that of the unions themselves.
The 'reasoning' behind these ads appears to be as follows:
1) All them Labor types are 'union officials' or at least used to go out with one which as we all know is the same thing.
2) Unions are there for the support and protection of the workers. That is, they are pro-worker.
3) As everyone knows, if you are pro-worker then you must be anti-business and vice versa, because, as everyone knows, the relationship between business and labour is always simply and precisely adversarial.
4) We haven't actually realised yet that running this argument makes it crystal clear that we are, in an absolute sort of way, anti-worker by definition.
Not being likewise a seer in black and white, I'm not all that thrilled about the unions myself. But that is strictly from a feminist viewpoint and based on bitter experience of masculinist values and tactics observed over many years -- values and tactics exercised mainly by those who have shouldered, bullied and bludgeoned their way into union officialdom in the first place. If I were in charge of an anti-union campaign, it would be run from a viewpoint even more horrifying to the current regime than that of the unions themselves.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Power Cream Kangaroos
It's a little one-line poem, isn't it.
And if the bloody Victorian commentators on Channel Ten's disgraceful telecast of Power v Kangaroos at AAMI Stadium this afternoon think that their sullen, dull-witted, mean-spirited, grudging and hopelessly biased commentary (or the way the afternoon was presented at the end as having been all about Glen Archer's final game) in any way spoiled South Australians' pleasure in the spectacle of the Power giving the Kangaroos an absolute bath, then you can forget it. It didn't.
Quite the reverse, in fact. We're glad we made you sulk.
September 29, Power v. Geelong: the Burgoyne brothers, the Cornes brothers and the Ablett brothers. Can't wait.
And if the bloody Victorian commentators on Channel Ten's disgraceful telecast of Power v Kangaroos at AAMI Stadium this afternoon think that their sullen, dull-witted, mean-spirited, grudging and hopelessly biased commentary (or the way the afternoon was presented at the end as having been all about Glen Archer's final game) in any way spoiled South Australians' pleasure in the spectacle of the Power giving the Kangaroos an absolute bath, then you can forget it. It didn't.
Quite the reverse, in fact. We're glad we made you sulk.
September 29, Power v. Geelong: the Burgoyne brothers, the Cornes brothers and the Ablett brothers. Can't wait.
Monday, September 17, 2007
I need three TVs, each with its own DVD recorder or equivalent
Monday September 17
7.30-8 ABC -- The 7.30 Report
7.30-8.30 Channel 10 -- Australian Idol: Monday Night Verdict
8.00-8.30 ABC -- Australian Story
8.30-9.20 ABC -- Four Corners
8.30-9.30 Channel 7 -- City Homicide
8.30-9.30 Channel 10 -- Law & Order: SVU
9.20-9.35 ABC -- Media Watch
9.30-10.30 Channel 7 -- Criminal Minds
9.30-10 SBS -- World News
9.35-10.35 ABC -- Enough Rope (with Robson Green -- *swoons*)
10.10-10.35 phone call from a beloved
10.30-11.30 Channel 7 -- Boston Legal
10.35 -- 11.10 ABC -- Lateline
7.30-8 ABC -- The 7.30 Report
7.30-8.30 Channel 10 -- Australian Idol: Monday Night Verdict
8.00-8.30 ABC -- Australian Story
8.30-9.20 ABC -- Four Corners
8.30-9.30 Channel 7 -- City Homicide
8.30-9.30 Channel 10 -- Law & Order: SVU
9.20-9.35 ABC -- Media Watch
9.30-10.30 Channel 7 -- Criminal Minds
9.30-10 SBS -- World News
9.35-10.35 ABC -- Enough Rope (with Robson Green -- *swoons*)
10.10-10.35 phone call from a beloved
10.30-11.30 Channel 7 -- Boston Legal
10.35 -- 11.10 ABC -- Lateline
Saturday, July 28, 2007
More Bracks: television at its best and worst
Thanks to Darlene Taylor's heads-up at Larvatus Prodeo yesterday morning as the Bracks news broke, I was able to rush out to the telly to watch events unfold. I flicked through the channels and found a live cross at Nine, where an excited young reporter was standing in the street telling the story. Bracks had made his announcement to his Cabinet and was expected to arrive at any moment for the press conference.
Not being any kind of daytime TV watcher as a rule, I had no idea what it was a live cross from until they crossed back to the studio to reveal Kerri-Anne Kennerley, framed against the backdrop of an oddly funereal floral arrangement and looking (Kerri-Anne, not the flowers) suspiciously paralysed about the mouth and eyes. The director then cut to her guest: none other than Sir Ian McKellen, still gazing intently at the monitor and clearly enjoying this little bit of unexpected drama.
When he realised the camera was on him, he sat up and spoke directly to it. 'And people ask me why I do Shakespeare!' he exclaimed, in a flawless segue from the interruption back into his conversation with Kerri-Anne. Currently in Australia playing King Lear, McKellen picked up the breaking Bracks news and ran with it, talking about Lear and family dramas and the abdication of power, and pointing out, quite rightly, that Shakespeare's plays are basically about things that we all see happening around us every day.
It was an amazing impromptu performance and it was perfectly tailored to Kerri-Anne's audience: conversational, interesting, charming, clearly expressed, and a brilliant bit of incorporation. And it was immediately followed, daytime television being what it is, by an excruciatingly protracted infomercial full of hyper-nasal, brain-damaged Valley Girl voices extolling the virtues of a miracle cure for acne.
Not being any kind of daytime TV watcher as a rule, I had no idea what it was a live cross from until they crossed back to the studio to reveal Kerri-Anne Kennerley, framed against the backdrop of an oddly funereal floral arrangement and looking (Kerri-Anne, not the flowers) suspiciously paralysed about the mouth and eyes. The director then cut to her guest: none other than Sir Ian McKellen, still gazing intently at the monitor and clearly enjoying this little bit of unexpected drama.
When he realised the camera was on him, he sat up and spoke directly to it. 'And people ask me why I do Shakespeare!' he exclaimed, in a flawless segue from the interruption back into his conversation with Kerri-Anne. Currently in Australia playing King Lear, McKellen picked up the breaking Bracks news and ran with it, talking about Lear and family dramas and the abdication of power, and pointing out, quite rightly, that Shakespeare's plays are basically about things that we all see happening around us every day.
It was an amazing impromptu performance and it was perfectly tailored to Kerri-Anne's audience: conversational, interesting, charming, clearly expressed, and a brilliant bit of incorporation. And it was immediately followed, daytime television being what it is, by an excruciatingly protracted infomercial full of hyper-nasal, brain-damaged Valley Girl voices extolling the virtues of a miracle cure for acne.
Friday, May 04, 2007
And the winner is ...
This week's Pav's Coffee All Over the Keyboard Media Award, which we hope to make a regular weekly feature if we can get that many laughs, goes to Simon Hughes for his report on the Logies in today's Crikey:
'But now -- the envelope please (I may want it to be sick into later).'
Mr Hughes receives the award partly because he made Pav laugh on an otherwise unfunny day but also for his correct placement of the full stop outside the closing parenthesis.
'But now -- the envelope please (I may want it to be sick into later).'
Mr Hughes receives the award partly because he made Pav laugh on an otherwise unfunny day but also for his correct placement of the full stop outside the closing parenthesis.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Better, if not bigger, than Ben Hur
Did anyone see K. O'Brien and K. Rudd on The 7.30 Report just then?
They were both at the top of their respective games, and they are conversationally really good for each other. O'Brien asked tough questions without spin or bullying; Rudd answered them all directly. Each was doing his life's work and doing it flawlessly. It was a meeting of minds in overdrive. As Gregory House would say, it was a beautiful thing.
I'm neither Kruddy's nor Red Kerry's biggest fan, but I have to admit they were both fabulous. Rudd's wonderfully articulate responses alone would have got me sucked in even without the obvious ease with which he was all over everything he was asked about, to say nothing of his obvious comfort in the interrogee's chair in front of the camera.
Given the shocking things that have been done to the ABC over the last few years, one forgets that in spite of it they can still turn on that kind of quality. It made me so happy I'm going to have another glass of wine.
They were both at the top of their respective games, and they are conversationally really good for each other. O'Brien asked tough questions without spin or bullying; Rudd answered them all directly. Each was doing his life's work and doing it flawlessly. It was a meeting of minds in overdrive. As Gregory House would say, it was a beautiful thing.
I'm neither Kruddy's nor Red Kerry's biggest fan, but I have to admit they were both fabulous. Rudd's wonderfully articulate responses alone would have got me sucked in even without the obvious ease with which he was all over everything he was asked about, to say nothing of his obvious comfort in the interrogee's chair in front of the camera.
Given the shocking things that have been done to the ABC over the last few years, one forgets that in spite of it they can still turn on that kind of quality. It made me so happy I'm going to have another glass of wine.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Elsewhere's TV meme
Elsewhere has made good her promise to invent a meme, and a meme is a thing I cannot ignore.
1. Earliest remembered television?
I Love Lucy. Which is still funny. But I also remember Gunsmoke, Roy Rogers, Sugarfoot, Bonanza, The Flintstones, Pick-A-Box (starring a very young Barry Jones, who frequently challenged the official correct answers and was always right), The Bugs Bunny Show, Channel Niners, the telecast of the John Martin's Christmas Pageant, and ditto the Anzac Day march, where we would always be able to spot our dad if we looked for the Navy's 'Corvettes' banner.
Pick-A-Box: that's Barry Jones on the right.
2. TV series you would want on a desert island
Prime Suspect, if that counts as a series. All seven of them.
3. TV that made you laugh
The Games. John Clarke and Gina Riley are both brilliant; together they were stellar.
4. TV that made you cry
The Stuart Diver rescue.
5. TV crap that you enjoy
Funniest Home Videos. There, my secret is out.
6. TV you'll never forget.
Hamish Macbeth. Best. TV. Ever.
7. Favourite TV adaptation.
Middlemarch. Not even the ubiquitous Andrew Davies -- a screenwriter who still, after having totally cornered the market in Screen Adaptations of 19th Century Women's Fiction, does not understand that 19th century women's fiction is not about the male characters -- could wreck Middlemarch for me.
Besides, Rufus Sewell was in it.
Rufus the Breathtaking. What is it about a man at a piano?
7. Favourite nerdish program
I don't like nerdish TV. I get enough nerdish in my head.
8. One TV program you are currently watching
The cricket.
9. One TV show/series you have been meaning to watch
I'm with Elsewhere on this one: I think I should at least try to see the point of Desperate Housewives. But oh Lord it's hard.
1. Earliest remembered television?
I Love Lucy. Which is still funny. But I also remember Gunsmoke, Roy Rogers, Sugarfoot, Bonanza, The Flintstones, Pick-A-Box (starring a very young Barry Jones, who frequently challenged the official correct answers and was always right), The Bugs Bunny Show, Channel Niners, the telecast of the John Martin's Christmas Pageant, and ditto the Anzac Day march, where we would always be able to spot our dad if we looked for the Navy's 'Corvettes' banner.
Pick-A-Box: that's Barry Jones on the right.2. TV series you would want on a desert island
Prime Suspect, if that counts as a series. All seven of them.
3. TV that made you laugh
The Games. John Clarke and Gina Riley are both brilliant; together they were stellar.
4. TV that made you cry
The Stuart Diver rescue.
5. TV crap that you enjoy
Funniest Home Videos. There, my secret is out.
6. TV you'll never forget.
Hamish Macbeth. Best. TV. Ever.
7. Favourite TV adaptation.
Middlemarch. Not even the ubiquitous Andrew Davies -- a screenwriter who still, after having totally cornered the market in Screen Adaptations of 19th Century Women's Fiction, does not understand that 19th century women's fiction is not about the male characters -- could wreck Middlemarch for me.
Besides, Rufus Sewell was in it.
Rufus the Breathtaking. What is it about a man at a piano?7. Favourite nerdish program
I don't like nerdish TV. I get enough nerdish in my head.
8. One TV program you are currently watching
The cricket.
9. One TV show/series you have been meaning to watch
I'm with Elsewhere on this one: I think I should at least try to see the point of Desperate Housewives. But oh Lord it's hard.
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