Bill Henson Investigations Continue

More Raids On Art Galleries

In a perfectly logical yet somehow hysterical development, the Federal Police went to the National Gallery of Australia to inspect the 79 Henson photographs housed there. None were seized.

The director of the National Gallery of Australia, Ron Radford, was reportedly questioned last night over the gallery's collection of 79 photographs, all of which were in storage.

Police said inquiries related to child pornography.

No photos were seized in yesterday's raids on the NGA and other Canberra galleries.

"If we determine there are offences disclosed, then we will go through the process of seizing whatever needs to be seized in order to prove the offence," a police spokesman said.

Photos held in storage were subject to as much scrutiny as hanging works because child pornography charges included possession, he said.

"If you're in possession of child pornography, whether you have it on your computer and whether you view it or not, that's an offence."

It stands to reason that if they are willing to venture that some of Henson's work is kiddie Porn, it is entirely possible his other works are kiddie-porn too. How, in an oeuvre of art, they decide which is kiddie-porn and which is not kiddie-porn totally escapes me; especially given that they were all intended as works of art and were shown as works of art and were understood to be works of art by the art community. The AFP must be confident their eyes are better than those of the curators and Gallery chiefs such as Mr. Edmund Capon.

Mr. Henson has declined to be interviewed by the Police on legal advice. The interesting bit in the linked article is Malcolm Turnbull coming out to bat for the artist.

The Federal Opposition treasury spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull, supported Henson yesterday. He owns two works by the artist, although neither is similar to the photographs seized.

"I don't believe that we should have policemen invading art galleries," he said . "I think we have a culture of great artistic freedom in this country."

Despite an outcry from the arts community, the Prime Minister stood by his original assessment of Henson's exhibition as "absolutely revolting".

"I gave my reaction. I stand by that reaction and I don't apologise for it," Kevin Rudd said yesterday. "I am passionate about children having innocence in their childhood."

His refusal to apologise follows an open letter from artists urging Mr Rudd and the NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, to "rethink" their criticism of Henson. Mr Iemma had said the photographs were "offensive and disgusting".

The actor Cate Blanchett and the writers J.M. Coetzee and Peter Goldsworthy were among 43 members of the 2020 Summit creative stream to condemn the portrayal of the artist as a "child pornographer". They warned against art censorship.

The Arts Minister, Peter Garrett, has remained silent.

Well, of course Mr. Garrett is going to try and stay out of this mess. As a guy who stopped being a practitioner to be a politician, his credibility and loyalties have already been shredded. Need we take him seriously at all?

On Malcolm Turnbull's point, it is encouraging that somebody on the Liberal side is taking a small-'l' liberal position, especially given how uncompromisingly moralistic the previous Prime Minster was, and how equally a wowser the current Prime Minister is.

The weekend letters section of the SMH provided an interesting read in as much as there really doesn't seem to be a middle ground. One side says, "Yes, Kiddie-Porn is bad, but you can't go around locking up artists because their work reminds you of Kiddie-Porn," while the other says, "Yes, Freedom of Speech is important but when you cross the line of bad taste into Kiddie-Porn, we should string up the artist and lynch him".

If The Label Fits, Wear It
Miranda Devine is on the crusading side of this issue. She brought up the initial outrage, and is trying to label the arts crowd as puerile and the real philistines. Again, normally I would not want to sink to the level of discussing the un-sound reasoning shown by jaded columnists such as Ms Devine, but this piece does seem to shed some insight into the mind of the wowser.

So artists want the freedom to exploit budding pubescents as nude models, but they don't want the Prime Minister to freely express his thoughts?

If the arts community is so creative and "edgy", why do they all travel in lockstep on such things? Their single voice suggests not originality and boundary-pushing, but a suffocating conformity.

Who in the arts community - whether creator, curator or critic - has come out and said: "This is wrong," not just "provocative" or "controversial"? They say they are happy to have the debate but they have never had the debate, perhaps for fear of being seen as prudish or out of touch with the in-crowd.

This deficit of moral courage was most stark last week in people who have since told friends they felt "uncomfortable" about the image on the invitation from Roslyn Oxley9 promoting Henson's show, but kept their feelings to themselves. It might not all be cowardice; through the relentless normalisation of the abnormal, the annihilation of taboos and the persecution of traditional moral guardians, we may have reached a point of such communal moral ambiguity that these people don't quite trust their instincts.

And on and on she goes.
The first point that the arts community doesn't want the PM to express his opinion is not true. The Prime Minister is entitled to his opinion and is accepted in expressing them. It is when he condemns artists sight unseen, the arts community would rightfully bristle. We also bristle at the thought that the Prime Minister's opinion is one which gives no benefit of the doubt for the artist. Then, when the Prime Minister says it should be left to due process, having poisoned the waters of public opinion itself, it is logical that the arts community take umbrage. On top of all this, his position is that of a wowser philistine.

The second point that somehow the arts community is in lockstep and therefore are all somehow brainwashed lefties, is a mis-characterisation. The fact of the matter is, Freedom of Expression is one point all artists of all walks would agree upon; and equally, regardless of the political persuasion of the artist , an artist cannot surrender their Freedom of Expression on suspicions alone - Just as if Ms. Devine herself were to be rounded up by a political organ and sent to trial and prison for her (rather daft and misguided) opinion pieces, there would be an equally vociferous solidarity by the same people for her behalf. The same Freedom of Expression that allows her to sound off her political diatribes day in and day out without injurious consequences, are exactly the same freedoms which these artists are unanimously supporting.

It shows an incredibly over-privileged perspective and irresponsible attitude for MsDevine to think that somehow it is the Lefty artists who have lost their own 'moral instinct' that are squealing in the face of proper moral rectitude. But of course such an obvious point would be shoved under the carpet so she can score ancillary partisan points.

Thirdly, to try and say there is a 'deficit of moral courage' because they don't see the moral questions in the same way is a kind of Orwellian double-speak. It is just as moral to champion the said freedoms of and for and by the artists themselves. If people felt uncomfortable, they should be grateful that they had just experienced a truly artistic moment. Art isn't all pretty flowers and nice colours. It is going to be challenging. To try and construe a position that "smut sells" and therefore the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery was trying to make a buck out of prepubescent nudie girls is an insinuation that says more about Ms Devine's own lack of taste more than anything else.

On a side note, I have met the owner of the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. Truth be known, she insinuated that I was somehow a Chinese person who through racial association was therefore a cannibal. Though it was brief, it was a most distasteful conversation. She was so wrong in so many ways, but I let her have her nasty little spit at me because I figured she's entitled to her opinion, no matter how wrong (as in incorrect, mistaken, and false), and did not need to be prosecuted for such words spoken in rash prejudice.
So, yes, I do have sufficient moral courage.

Getting Ripped Off Again

Happy Duopoly

Here's an interesting article worth a read.

Ever wondered why you pay $3 for a toothbrush at Woolies and Coles when a toothbrush costs all of 20c to produce, after packaging?

The latest market research from this bureau into the price of toothbrushes, arising from a trip to the local Coles supermarket last night, showed there was one item - an Oral B toothbrush - ''on special'' at $3.99, down from $5.25.

When you consider that you can buy a whole set of steak knives from the $2 shop for $2, forking out $3.99 for a toothbrush is about as ''special'' as being pick-pocketed.

And of one thing you can be sure, Woolies pricing will not be far from the Coles mark. Most toothbrushes it seems are still manufactured in the US, Germany and even Switzerland so first-world costs are factored into the price. Besides, trust and branding are paramount with a product one puts into one's mouth. Hence the brand premium.

For some time I've noticed I've been paying some insane prices for some pretty basic things at the supermarket. One of the first to really tick off my radar was toothbrushes. How can bits of molded plastic with bits of brush be that expensive when an ipod nano is like 200bucks? It just doesn't make any sense in a world where manufactured goods should be getting cheaper.

Anyway, the other thing that I've noticed over the years is that Woolworths shares have been considered very good shares to own for some time, and that reputation would not have happened had they not been turning extraordinary profit over a sustained period. Even allowing or a 4-5% inflation in the last year, some of the prices they are charging for staples such as rice or fruit and veggies is a little outlandish. The article then goes on to talk about this:

In 1975, Woolies had 17.7% of the branded grocery market and Coles had 17.5%. Franklins, the third player, had 4.8%, wholesaler Davids had 6.3% and the numbers trailed off from there with the state-based supermarket chains which were swallowed up in the 1990s.

Remember Composite Buyers (3.3%), Foodland (1.7%), IHL (4.1%), QIW (5..6%) and TIW in Tasmania? Half the market was small, family owned supermarkets and corner stores.

In 1975, the dominant chains - Woolies and Coles - controlled 35% of the market. Now they control 80% - roughly 43% to Woolies and 37% to Coles. You won't hear that from them though. Neilson stopped providing figures in 1995 after being leant on by Woolies.

As demonstrated by the ACCC inquiry, Woolies and Coles prefer to use their own, specially concocted, measure to evaluate market share. ''Share of stomach'' it is called. And it is sheer nonsense. Woolies relied on research from retail data consultant Anthony Dimasi to come up with its ''share of stomach'' research. It also commissioned Dimasi.

Their argument is that Woolies competes against the local hotdog stand, restaurants and any other vendor of foodstuffs, presumably the lady who sells fairy floss at the local fete too.

The reality is that Woolies and Coles stores are in every town in the country and when a customer walks in there to buy packaged groceries that customer is highly likely to buy fresh food - okay, recently unfrozen food - too, for the sake of convenience.

Almost everyone goes to Woolies and Coles to buy packaged groceries and while some consumers may buy their fairy floss elsewhere, they will spend most of their food dollar at one of the two chains.

And the pricing is neck and neck. See the table attached from retail trade publication, Retail World. The most result pricing for a broad basket of goods, calculated this month, shows Woolies's basket cost $100.22 and Coles $101.04.

It's a little bit like the banking sector. If you really want to win back your banking fees, you need to own shares in your own bank and collect the dividends. If you want to win back some of the money disappearing in your grocery bills, you have to own shares in Woolworths and Coles.

The crappy thing is, there's so little competition now, they can afford to dictate the price and even if there isn't collusion, there may as well be collusion because a Duopoly like this simply does not have to make concessions. Unless the government is willing to break up such duopolies - which they clearly are not - then these artificial prices are here to stay. The joke is that we have a government that's been elected to help 'working families', but they won't even do the most basic things that could help them. I didn't think my inner glow in seeing a Labor Government would vanish so fast, but it has.

Movie Doubles

The Inadequacy of 'Film Theory' in Film Schools
Since 'Apocalypse Now', we've become inured to certain kinds of war movies. If you got to a Film School like the one I went to, you will find routine discussions of how hypocritical Hollywood cinema is because they claim to make anti-war films but end up glorifying violence anyway. At least that is the underlying tenor of most Film Theory classes you end up in. Part of the problem is that the most Film Theory classes are short in discussions of method, and so the theory gets abstracted beyond what you see into discussions about ideological positioning.

If the world was as simple as pigoen-holing ideological positions I'm sure we wouldn't have so many wars in the first place. Clearly, there is something about war and violence which precedes the justifications and positioning that goes on with the ideological pigeon-holing. In the great disconnect between theory and practice, film students struggle to come to terms with a basic fact: You can only shoot objects. So whatever you shoot becomes 'objectified'. It's what happens when you point a camera at anything. If everything is objectified, then it seems, the rest of the discussion is about matter of degree.

All that said, I want to point out one more thing. In 'Bergman on Bergman', there is a passage where the interviewer throws Film Theory jargon at Ingmar, king him if he agreed or disagreed with the position. Ingmar responds, perplexed that the theory constructed by such critics are apropos of the production. He even gets a little agitated and says words to the effect that "That's all very nice, but it just not useful."

In the same book, Bergman points out that the strength of cinema is that it can portray movement, and so therefore it is suited to depicting violence. Once you come to that point, you realise that the Film Theory classes where they try to dissect the ideological orientation of a shot of helicopters in 'Apocalypse Now' is a misguided attempt to place shackles on the joy of viewing cinema. More to the point, they're barking up the wrong tree. Cinema is about conflict. How these conflicts get resolved is an issue of genre, but conflict needs to be in the structure; this is why war lends itself to cinema more than, say, love. Whether a shot glorifies war or not actually inadequate to the central question of why wars are fought and how wars are fought. You can imagine how that went down in a room full of ideologues - they thought I was a fascist.

Anyway, keep in mind, I was having these kinds of arguments in 1990-1991. Around the time of the first Gulf War.

This Is My Rifle - 'Full Metal Jacket' & 'Jarhead'

Stanley Kubrick, having made 'A Clockwork Orange', wanted to make a film about 'the phenomenon of war'. And so he set about making 'Full Metal Jacket'. It makes sense. The first half of 'Full Metal Jacket' is dedicated to illustrating the process used by the US Marines to turn a bunch of young men into combat troops. Famously, the foul-mouthed drill sergeant is played by a real drill sergeant, with real invective and foul-mouthed abuse.

Unfortunately, it was released at a time when everybody with half a story was making a Vietnam War movie that made claims to realism and authenticity. These films ranged from the bombastic Oliver Stone films 'Platoon' and 'Born On The Fourth Of July', to more conventional war-stories like 'Hamburger Hill'. All these films including Kubrick's work laid some kind of claim to its artistic truthfulness; and in all fairness, they all came equipped with technical advisers and people to authenticate the look to events to clothes to music. two decades on, the late 1980s seem like the decade where America won the Vietnam War in Hollywood.

Considering how much Kubrick wanted to make the experience of going to war as direct to the audience, his film was ironically drowned out by the more spectacular presentations of war. If Kubrick had indeed gone out to show that war was not glamorous as 'Apocalypse Now', he had inadvertently joined the chorus of films that ended up glorifying it. It is not insignificant that within three years, America was brazenly sending troops to Kuwait to fight Gulf War I. So much for the warning. It didn't take long before the Gulf War spawned its own generation of war films, and so we got to see pretty much the same thing in 'Jarhead'.

What is interesting is that 'Jarhead' plays out the same training process that takes up the first half of 'Full Metal Jacket', and then sends the troops to a war that is utterly unlike Vietnam. It is a war that is mostly fought on spin through CNN and propaganda; then it is followed by 40 days of an 'Air War'. The marines never come into serious conflict with their foes. The front as such moves so fast, they are unable to participate in the relevant action. So as the War ultimately closes with the ceasefire, the Marines never get to kill in the way they are trained.

Thus 'Jarhead' transposes the problems raised by 'Full Metal Jacket' and manages to fold it in on itself. In 'Full Metal Jacket', all the training leads to a battle with a sniper who turns out to be a 12 year old girl, whom the main character must shoot. The tragedy is not just that he must shoot her, it is that all the training comes to the this horrible, most inglorious moment. It is almost a self-abnegation when Joker shoots the girl. Most significant is that we do not see the close up of the gun or the bullet hitting her. We see his expression as he pulls the trigger.

In 'Jarhead', the moment arrives where the main character finally gets to take a shot, but his order is belayed. Instead, they get to watch the Air Force take out their target in a 'surgical strike'. The moment is equally inglorious, but it is also deeply ironic because it resonates with the same tragedy - except they are now irrelevant. They don't get to do the tragic slaying; they get to watch impotently, from the sidelines.

This doesn't mean Kubrick's film doesn't have a universality any more. It is hardly the case that mobile infantry is made redundant by the Air War. They are the ones bearing the brunt of action in Iraq as we speak. His warning probably is more relevant today than it seemed at the time of the Gulf War. When I reflect upon my experience of *watching* the Gulf War unfold on my TV in 1991, I recall being oddly comforted knowing that Marines who had been brutalised by Drill Instructors were going out there to 'do their jobs'. If anything, by being shown to us by Kubrick how the Marines trained their men, we as a society have come to accept that brutality as a necessity.

And that's the weird thing. When you watch the two films back to back, you begin to see that our very own views of what is acceptable has been forced to shift as a result of these wars in the last 20 years. Panama, Gulf War I, The Balkan Wars, and Gulf War II have all collectively made us accept differing standards to what we had before, and that is perhaps the most frightening thing about these films. Our governments and press, all tacitly accept torture and 'renditions' and other things we never would have countenanced back in 1988. What was once a brutal tragedy to Kubrick is something our press and governments just shrug at today.

What Censorship Looks Like

Obscenity Trials To Come

I just wanted to post up the above picture.
The pixellated face, the black band through where we might anticipate the nipples... it's so much more tasteful than the smut that was there before... not. It actually makes it look a though the girl participated in something incredibly illicit and disgusting, when all she did was pose nude for art. People have been doing the latter for centuries. You sort of shake your head at the sensibility of the moralists. For heaven's sakes, even a wowser like Hitler didn't ban nudes; he was willing to call modernists a bunch of degenerates, but he thought nudes were an important part of 'Germanic Art'.
Thus, this image is the face of idiotic censorship in Australia so we'd better get used to it.

While I'm updating, here is an article that's worth a read.

The public threshold for outrage is notoriously low, while the art world's taste for challenging and "subversive" work is insatiable. This has led many artists to actively seek out sensation and scandal - but Bill Henson is not of this persuasion. He obtains the full co-operation of his subjects and their families, many of whom have remained friends. Few Australian artists are so articulate or well-read, few have such a genuinely philosophical turn of mind. The worst charge that could be levelled at Henson is that he is an aesthete - with the ability to make anything at all seem beautiful.

It is not surprising that many people are shocked and disturbed by images of naked adolescents, but according to the dealer, Roslyn Oxley, the current exhibition was actually less confronting than some of Henson's previous shows at the gallery. There is no denying that it was less confronting - and far less public - than the massive retrospectives of 2005 that packed out the state galleries. After ignoring Henson for decades the self-appointed guardians of public morality are suddenly burning with rage. So what happens now? Are Henson's works to be purged from public collections and burnt? Are his books to be pulped?

A bit rhetorical, but you get the drift. The Art law Council is lining up to defend Henson.

New South Wales Law Society president Hugh Macon says the case against Henson could be very difficult to prove.

"The Crimes Act requires two things - an intention and an act," he said.

"The Act is usually fairly easily established but if the intention is to produce a work of art and solely to produce a work of art, then I can not see how a crime has been committed."

Kind of goes without saying, really. Then there's this comment which is very clear.

Like any really interesting artist, Henson has been trying his whole life to make the perfect picture. He is compelled to keep making the same work in many ways.

His images may take the viewer to an edge, to an uncomfortable place, but it's like great music or great literature. I don't look at Henson's work and see it as anything other than a broad field of possibilities.

Art and pornography are entirely separate things. It is an art gallery's job to deal with art, whether it is by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, or Bill Henson.

... And there's still no further comment from the philistine Prime Minister. If there's really going to be an obscenity trial, I think it's going to get pretty ugly.

Cloning

Bringing Back The Extinct

Earlier back in the decade, the Australian Museum undertook a program to try and clone a Tasmanian Tiger from what remained of specimens in bottles. In 2005, this project as abandoned due to difficulty.

Yet, the notion of cloning the extinct animal lives on. A group of scientists have cloned one gene, and imported it into a mouse.

For the first time, researchers have inserted the genetic material of an extinct animal into a living one. The finding shows how lost information about species from the past can be retrieved, and also provides a glimpse into how long-gone creatures may someday get a second chance at life.

"Now that we've shown you can do this, it opens up the floodgates for all kinds of extinct species," says Andrew Pask, a fellow in zoology at the University of Melbourne in Australia and lead author of a paper published in the online journal PLoS ONE. The gene that the scientists activated in mouse fetuses contained instructions that helped produce cartilage in the rodent's developing skeleton.

The Tasmanian tiger DNA came from specimens that had been preserved in a museum for over a century. The researchers selected a gene called Col2a1 that is possessed by many vertebrates, ranging from mice to people. By attaching a marker to the Tasmanian tiger's version of Col2a1 that glows blue when stained by a chemical, scientists were able to see the where the mouse's body had expressed the gene of the departed beast.

"We saw the genetic information of an extinct animal get read out into a blue pattern," says co-author Richard Behringer, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The blue tint is colouring from yet another species. The mouse is expressing the Col2a1 gene in its cartilage as you can see. With something like 30,000 genes, a full Tasmanian Tiger is going to be hard to recreate through this kind of gene technology, but it is interesting to see some parts of the Tasmanian Tiger that can be brought back.

Movie Doubles

Beyond Good And Evil - 'Dirty Harry' & 'Zodiac'

One of my earliest movie loves was 'Dirty Harry'. That is to say, I dug this film so much as a 8-year old, I used to try and draw the exaggerated Dirty Harry Magnum .44 everywhere. On my notebooks in class, to the side of my lunch box, and even a bit of wall next to my bedside table. To me, there is still no handgun mightier than the Magnum .44, and as a punk, I feel lucky. In comparison to the Walther PPK wielded by James Bond, it seemed to me a gun that could stop a speeding car was more valuable in fighting crime. One of the first bits of movie dialogue I tried to copy was a clenched teeth: "I know what you're thinking. Did he shoot five, or did he shoot six? Well, to tell you the truth, I kinda lost count in all the excitement..." etc.

What I didn't realise as a young kid was that the villain Scorpio was based on a real killer on the loose in San Francisco at the time, the Zodiac. How could I have missed it? Partly because I was always more concerned with Harry's concern than the sociological significance of 'Dirty Harry'.

The Zodiac killer has been made into various bits of movie fiction since his heyday. The worst of the bunch is not 'Dirty Harry' but 'The January Man' starring Kevin Kline. Why is 'January Man so awful? It's because the central premise is that warm fuzzy reasoning will always beat out psychopathy. It's enough to make you let out a deep sigh of disgust. If the world were so rational, maybe the San Francisco Police Department would have had little trouble in catching the real Zodiac. They certainly weren't a pack of dummies like the NSW Police.

'Zodiac' by David Fincher actually thrusts us into the world of 1960s and 1970s policing as it really stood. There are even references to 'Dirty Harry' where the detectives in charge go to the movies only to be confronted by their jobs. If 'Dirty Harry' is exhilarating in its fascist penis-gun worship as it blows away Scorpio, 'Zodiac' is studious in assaying the facts of
the case, from start to murky end. We are pitted against the realities of technology, procedure and protocol. The epistemological unknowable stands in the way of the characters as they try to sort through the fog of information - very much like the fog of war as described by Robert McNamara.

There were so many pitfalls in figuring out the Zodiac case. The multiple murders and assaults were spread across four police areas. Each of these police forces had a piece of evidence or testimony that might have combined to give sufficient cause to investigate the prime suspect; but never having enough, the judges would never grant a search warrant. And so the story goes as the case slowly drifts down time, right down all of the 70s and 80s. In the process we are even treated to a scene where they end up watching 'Dirty Harry' and are incensed by the portrayal.

To be fair to 'Dirty Harry', it probably represents the frustrations of the public more than a critique of the SFPD. Harry Callahan is a cop who plays at the edge of the rules. He's a homicide detective who is willing to pull out his gun and fire. He goes so far as to make an arrest of Scorpio, but Scorpio ends up walking the streets because Harry used excessive force in his arrest and an unlawful search. In other words, Harry is the original movie anti-hero cop who has zero respect fro protocols. He's a bit like an early model Steven Seagal character, but better acted and no martial arts. It's not that the film-makers thought the SFPD was inept; they just wanted them to catch the Zodiac through all and any means necessary. As the tagline to 'Out for Justice' once read: "It's a Dirty Job, but somebody's got to take out the Garbage."

The Zodiac villain character is far less confrontational than Scorpio. He is evasive, and sporadic where Scorpio is effusive and frenetic. In the end, Scorpio does take over a school bus full of children - something Zodiac threatened to do and never did - and it leads to the climax where Harry guns him down . Harry delivers the Magnum 44 speech like the last rites, Scorpio reaches for the gun, giving ample excuse for Harry to blow him away with the Magnum .44. Most importantly (and I will never forget this image) Harry throws away his badge into the body of water. The very elusiveness of the Zodiac character makes this whole confrontation unlikely. He simply won't come out into the light. Instead he taunts and writes commentaries from the dark - and it is in this darkness that the paranoid imagination grows. 'Zodiac' shows us that in the absence of solid patterns, we start clutching at straws for answers. the unknown factors clamor. The half-truths, the half-clues drive people nuts - it starts to look like a no-win scenario.

The makers of 'Dirty Harry' understood implicitly that if Harry was going to 'win', and by win, we mean slay Scorpio, then he would have to go beyond protocol, and beyond ethics to do so. In turn, he would cease to be a police officer. Don Siegel obviously thought it was a fair exchange. The cops in 'Zodiac' never get to make that choice, even when they come face to face with their prime suspect. They have full restraint and reason - they desperately want to get him, and get him the right way so that he stands trial. That their prime suspect doesn't come to that point forms the great tragedy of the film. It must have been infuriating to watch 'Dirty Harry' while the case remained open.

What emerges from watching these two films together is the notion that ethics starts at the point where protocol is exercised to the maximum. The protocols safe-guard procedure and procedure leads to justice being served. If we want to take a moral course of action, we have to abandon ethics and revert to a morality of a bygone era. So as the real life cops tried to work the problem, the fictitious Harry Callahan 'abandons protocol to do what's right'. Not only do we come to learn a lot about the case, we come to understand America as it was in a certain point in the 20th Century. Having seen 'Dirty Harry' so many times made 'Zodiac' that much more fascinating; and having watched 'Zodiac' several times, 'Dirty Harry' has returned to me as a very rich text.

Art And Porn

Kevin Rudd, Philistine

I normally just want to sail right by these kinds of reports, but I have to say something while I still have my freedom of expression. Call it an ethical responsibility as a practitioner in the arts.
First of all, Artist Bill Henson is about to be charged with Child Porn laws for his most recent exhibition.

NSW police have seized 20 of 41 photographs from Bill Henson's Sydney exhibition of adolescent girls with the intention of launching criminal proceedings under the Child Protection Act.

Police say charges will be laid under both the NSW and Commonwealth Crimes acts for publishing an indecent article.

The alleged Commonwealth offence relates to publishing some of the photographs on the internet.

The decision to launch a prosecution was made public by Rose Bay police commander, Superintendent Allan Sicard outside the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Paddington while detectives carried out a search.

Superintendent Sicard said police had taken possession of the Henson photographs that were due to go on public exhibition on Thursday night.

"Police at 3.30pm yesterday received a report from a concerned member of the public that an exhibition was occuring at this gallery,'' said Superintendent Sicard.

"Police attended the gallery yesterday and it was the agreed position between the gallery owners and police that the exhibition not go ahead last night.

"This morning police have attended the gallery and executed a search warrant and seized some items depicting a child under the age of 16 years in a sexual context.

"Police are investigating this matter and it is likely we will proceed to prosecution on the offence of publish an indecent article, under the crimes act.

"It is likely that a future court attendence notice will be issued for the offence upon the completion of the investigation.''

"The child depicted in the image is female. We believe that the child is 13 years of age. The information is that the child... is not a resident of New South Wales and we have referred liaison through our child sex crime unit to liaise with the state where the child is believed to live.''

Police would not say if they had interviewed Mr Henson, or where the child lives.

So, let's see now, the inbred-idiot-farmer-boys who cannot get other jobs, who are the NSW Police know Art when they see it, and they think this isn't Art, it's filthy child pornography?
Great.
Sack Edmund Capon now and let the Police Chief in charge of the AGNSW. Get a black marker and colour in all the genitals on display in the art gallery. There are reasons this doesn't happen, and it's mostly to do with common sense and social norms. There are expert curators and critics for these things, just as we don't put Mr. Capon in charge of the NSW Police. This isn't some artist who suddenly popped out of nowhere with this stuff. He's an established artist who has been working this field for years and years.

Isn't it the oldest ruse of wowser-ism to shout "I might not know art, but I know smut when I see it" and shout down objections on the grounds that you're secretly a communist or a pervert or a homosexual or something like that? Didn't we leave this kind of moronic discourse behind with the Howard Government?
But, No-o-o-o!
Our fearless Prime Minister Kevin Rudd weighs in saying he's "revolted".

"I find them absolutely revolting," he told the Nine Network.

"Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected. I have a very deep view of this. For God's sake, let's just allow kids to be kids.

"Whatever the artistic view of the merits of that sort of stuff - frankly I don't think there are any - just allow kids to be kids."

*Ugh*. Where do we begin?

First off, Kevin Rudd has not seen the work of the artist. So he's going on second hand misinformation. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on his artistic tastes on this point (just for now, but I will take him to task in point four), but it has to be said, the over-riding moralist concern in his utterances is not a sign of somebody who understands the position of an artist in society. Art is going to challenge your sensibilities Prime Minister, and you've surely got to be ready for it.

Secondly, he presumes that the work of art is sexual and therefore is pornography; as if there were only two possibilities!
This is the part that reveals Kevin Rudd's greatest misunderstanding of sexuality itself. Just because there is naked-ness it does not immediately equal cheap provocative voyeuristic sexual imagery. Sex is deservedly one of the greater mysteries in life that we must tangle with and wrestle with against and through our existence. Just because there is a nude girl does not make it child porn. His professed revulsion says more about Kevin Rudd than the works of art themselves.

Thirdly, we always get this when a work of art goes against the prevailing moral wind of society. Anybody remember 'Piss Christ'? While I haven't seen Bill Henson's work either, I can well imagine that Henson's work actually poses a tremendous question against moral certitude that the mainstream society wants. What if a thirteen year old girl was indeed sexual? It's not unheard of in history. There are plenty of instances where woman have been married off at such young ages in history. It's just that today, we pretend that onset of our sexual beings is much later.

A figure no less than Gandhi for instance married a 13 year old when he himself was 13, and had children. The famous anecdote is of Gandhi having sex with his wife at the time of his father's death; something for which he beat himself up over. We certainly don't judge Gandhi negatively for this fact, but I think Mr Rudd would - and again, that says more about Mr. Rudd's own pathetic prejudices, more than anything else.

The fact of the matter is, sexuality itself is an incredibly motile, bendy, tricky, difficult subject. It's nice if we could deal with sexuality by decree, but it just isn't so. Just scanning the SMH headlines on the same day we have this story for instance where a school teacher was jailed for having sex with his student.

David Barry Quinn, 33, of Croydon, pleaded guilty in the County Court in late April to four counts of sexual penetration of a child under 16 under his care, supervision or authority between August 7 and September 4, 2004.

In sentencing today, Judge Frances Millane said Quinn had committed a serious breach of trust.

"The victim was infatuated with you ... at the time she was a child nearly half your age and because of her infatuation with you ... she was no doubt extremely vulnerable."

She said Quinn had sex with the year 9 student from his geography class after she initiated an SMS flirtation.

"If you ever just want to fool around, text me, I'm all for it," one message from the 15-year-old girl read.

"It seems very very wrong but I do enjoy your company," a message from Quinn to the victim said.

Quinn acted on the invitation and arranged to pick up the girl, who cannot be named, from her part-time job one Saturday. They went back to his house and had sex, Judge Millane said. They then went to see a movie and Quinn then took the girl back to his house and had sex with her again.

On another occasion she stayed the night at his house.

Judge Millane said an aggravating factor in the case was Quinn's attempt to hide the relationship by making an agreement with the victim to deny the affair if it was discovered.

"Not content with the sexual corruption of this student, I am told you sought to enter into an agreement with her that if your relationship is discovered you would both deny the relationship."

The girl told a workmate of the affair and the school principal was notified. But both Quinn and the victim denied the relationship and the inquiry was dropped, she said.

At the plea hearing Tim Sowden, Quinn's lawyer, said the victim had obsessively pursued Quinn and he found it hard to resist her persistent advances.

Mr Sowden told the court Quinn regretted his actions greatly and knew what he had done was wrong.

You can just feel the judge, the lawyers, the defendant, all squirming in their chairs because a 15 year old girl wanted it badly, and went and got it. Isn't this exactly how the lyrics to 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' go?

Young teacher, the subject
Of schoolgirl fantasy
She wants him so badly
Knows what she wants to be
Inside her there's longing
This girls an open page
Book marking - she's so close now
This girl is half his age

Dont stand, dont stand so
Dont stand so close to me

Should we express our revulsion as Kevin Rudd, round up Vladimir Nabokov, Stanley Kubrick, Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland and start prosecuting them for child porn? Clearly not. In fact, the so-called 'sexualisation' in Mr. Henson's work isn't remotely about sex itself. It's not like he's busily thrusting dildos and Drilldos into a thirteen year old girl. They're nudes. Not exploitative images.

Let me make this clear: I don't approve of this teacher doing what he did, but I accept it happens, and happens often, and that it is one of the quandaries of our society because sexuality poses such a destructive question to our so-called moral integrity. It's not easy stuff. It's the stuff that makes the book and both movie versions of 'Lolita' great art, as well as Sting a great song writer. It is not inconceivable that Bill Henson has produced great art. To condemn his work, sight-unseen, is nothing but philistinism.

The sad part is, I really thought we left this kind of crap behind with the Howard Government. Clearly, not.

Fourthly, if indeed it is his artistic opinion that they are devoid of artistic merit, then he should express them in those terms, as his personal take. To judge from the office of the Prime Minister calls into question whether he should be anywhere near the arts portfolio, as he is most likely out of step with most artists, curators, and audiences.

And the best clue to the intensely painterly quality of Henson's genius, the least distracting way of getting a grip on it because both the ripeness and the exultation of the girls (or the sense of portent or ruin which sometimes afflict his figures can be disturbing is the way he can make some rusty old ruin of a landscape in urban or suburban Australia look like a place where some unearthly spirit blows as it will.

Of course there are legitimate concerns about the ways in which kids can be pushed prematurely into a hyperconsciousness of sex, but we should hardly blame this on a major visual artist simply because his art fills us with a kind of awe because of the way it plays on both the capacity for sexual intensity and the disturbing apprehension of beauty in someone alarmingly young.

The great paintings of the Renaissance do this and so does Shakespeare's Juliet (who happens in terms of our own culture to be underage) and through whom Shakespeare showed the massive power of passion in a girl who is forced tragically to make the transition from girlhood to womanhood too soon and is crushed by society and by circumstance.

But we should bear in mind that artists and writers do not create the world they express themselves in, however much their art reconfigures it in startling ways that reveal truths.

I'm glad I'm not alone in my outrage.
What really gets me is that this is not the kind of discussion I thought I would be having in Australia in 2008. It's as if 11 and a half years under the Howard Government has made us backwards cultural munchkins. If this is the best we're going to get from a Labor Prime Minister, Heaven help us all.

Alex Gordon Blues

Why Alex Gordon Is Not The Next George Brett

George Brett used to kill me when I was 10-13. Every year, he'd beat out my guy Nettles and be the All-Star Thirdbaseman; year after year it happened that way. It did add some joy that the Yankees went through kansas twice in their 77-78 seasons to win the World Series. Frankly though, Brett was a better hitter, but he wasn't anywhere near the fielder my guy was. But just how much better?
When I look back, I realise now George Brett was actually one heck of a hitter - he scared the hell out of me every time he came to bat in those Play-Offs when the Yankees squared off against the Royals for good reason. He really could hit all the Yankee pitchers. Indeed, the rise and fall of the Kansas City Royals essentially is about how they rode the the career of George Brett and have been looking for his replacement since.

So, the arrival of Alex Gordon has been nothing less than galvanising for the Kansas franchise. I was so sucked in by the hype I picked him up and kept him in 2 leagues. Yes, it's crazy, but I bought into the hype, swallowed it whole, hook line and sinker. Put it this way, if this guy was going to be the next Brett, I wanted 'in'. Well, he's now had a season's worth of PAs under his belt so I think it might be time to see how he is living up to the hype.

First, is the OBP comparison:


On first glance, it's not too bad. Gordon is certainly hitting his stride at the same age. In terms of getting on base, he is on par with George Brett at a similar age.

Here's the Isolated Power comparison:

Gordon did better than Brett as a 23 year old, but Brett found more power in his age 24 season. Gordon has stayed essentially the same.

Then there's this BB/K Ratio Chart:

Just look at the difference!
Brett was simply an extremely difficult hitter to strike out. He didn't walk more than average - he didn't need to because as his ISO chart indicates, everything he could hit, he *punished*. The point of the above graph is that when it came to judging what to swing at and what to let go, George Brett was absurdly good. If you glance around, you'll find he's in league with the likes of Ruth and Gehrig. In fact, in his 24, 27 and 31 y.o. seasons, he was off-the-charts good as you can see above. Alas, Gordon, has no such eye.

Right now, Alex Gordon is about a 6 runs per 27 outs kind of hitter, which is probably a Top 50-100 hitter. He might even be Top 10 regularly through his peak, but he's simply not going to be the 9-12 runs per 27 out hitter George Brett was in his peak years. Not unless he starts seeing the ball like Brett.

Just for comparison, I've selected 2 other third basemen in the same age group: Evan Longoria (LOVE that name) and Blake DeWitt.

You can see that even the highly touted Evan Longoria is only managing League Average at 23, but the less-heralded DeWitt is ahead of both. Maybe this is an indication that DeWitt is under-appreciated - or perhaps his sample size is still too small. I've been watching this comparison for about 3 weeks now since Longoria got called up and I have to say it's remained pretty stable. DeWitt's been ahead of Gordon, Longoria, Reynolds and even the likes of Troy Tulowitzki for most of this season to date. If this keeps up, I'm guessing DeWitt is going to be the star out of this bunch.

Weekend Snappies

Blue Mountains

My partner had never been to the Blue Mountains, so we decided to take a quick day trip up to Katoomba. When we left, it was sunny and warm. It was sunny and warm as late as 2pm which is when we staggered out of the over-priced organic bakery place in Leura where we had pies with price tags like $5.60.
What is that?
Perhaps I could complain more... but I shan't. :)

Anyway, by the time we drove around to Echo Point, it started to get cloudy. Once we were there on the observation deck, the weather quickly changed and this freezing rain came in from the south. That white fuzzy thing in the middle of the frame there is the sheets of rain coming in at us. We ran like hell to get into the kiosk where they sell over-priced tourist food.

I don't know if it was a great day out, but it was a good day out.

Dumb Consumerism

New Mobile Phone

It doth suck that mobile phones barely seem to outlive their contracts. Just when I was getting used to just paying the phone bill and not for the phone, the phone died. Such is life in the world of mobile phone ownership. I think the rule of thumb is, just when you think you need to change the battery is when you're due for a new phone.

Anyway, I went into the Telstra shop to get the cheapest phone I could get and ended up spending more than that plan, which is a shame. What can you do? As I bought my phone, Telstra's people made a fuss that I was nominally going to a cheaper phone rate so I had to pay an exit fee. In the end they waived the fee; and so they should because I stayed with their lousy network rather than move to the lousy competitors.

The new phone is what they call Next G, or 3G. It comes with the capacity to do all kinds of doodads for a price. It has WAP galore, but for the life of me, I've never been one to want to watch sitcoms on my phone - I mean, who has the time?

The added problem is, the next phone down actually has reliability problems. So the phone I got is this Sony Ericsson number with a glossy silver top which I can't seem to resist wiping my finger prints off every few minutes. It's perverse. however, I did have a similarly configured hire phone in Tokyo, which I found a lot more usable than my recently deceased Nokia, so I'm not unhappy with it. I had this idea that maybe I'd wait for the iphone, but it simply wasn't to be.

Movie Doubles

How Many More Times Can You Buy The Same Piece Of Music?

As it turns out, one more time than I previously thought. Look, it was a silly idea, so much so that my partner sneered "You have so many versions of the same songs," as she rolled her eyes and I forked out yet another lot of money for the DVD above. For 30bucks, you sort of go "well honey, it's $10 per disc and I'll probably never see them live..."
Life is full of bad rationalisations. :)

As the years go on, I find it deeply ironic that I was a Japanese kid who grew up in Sydney in the 1980s that happened to like a band that constantly sang about white working class English kids growing up in Post WWII England. Theoretically, I should have had very little in common with the substance of their corpus. Even the kid who introduced me to them back in Year 10 probably doesn't listen to them much now, let alone go out and buy 3 disc-set DVDs. It's life. People move on; I'm the abnormal one who seems stuck on this stuff. What can you do?

The discs are NTSC and 4:3 so really, the picture quality is some what lacking. That's about the first and last disappointment. It's 3 discs, but mostly from 2 different post-Kenny Jones era of The Who. That's right, there is such a thing as a "post-Kenny Jones era" of the Who. A number of drummers have sat in for The Who since the death of Keith Moon, and the most maligned would have been Kenny Jones. Honestly he's actually quite good when you listen to him on 'Face Daces' and 'It's Hard'; it's just that he's decidedly not Keith Moon. With the distance of time, it's quite forgivable. In fact I really like his work on songs like 'You Better You Bet' and 'Another Tricky Day. Kenny was no slouch.

The Tommy disc in the set comes from the 1989 reunion tour in which Simon Phillips (of '801 Live' fame) sat in on drums. This tour yielded the 'Join Together' double live album. The 'Quadrophenia' disc comes from a mid-90s incarnation of The Who featuring Zak Starkey on drums. Yep, that's Ringo's boy who got his first drum kit from Keith Moon - who, amazingly duplicates the entire corpus of Keith Moon's pinnacle work, live. You could say I bought this disc just to see what this incarnation of The Who was like at playing 'Quadrophenia' live, and in all honestly, it's a lot better than I thought.

The third disc consists of them banging out the classic hits 'My Generation' 'Substitute', then a rave up on Won't Get Fooled Again'. Painfully predictable, obstinately obligatory, enduring, endearing and incredibly tired. It's never as good as the version on 'The Kids Are Alright'. Even the most recent studio album featured a bonus live disc with them winding their way through this stuff. Hell is yet another bonus recording of 'Won't Get Fooled Again', but hey, I never, never, never, ever say no.

So 'Quadrophenia', What Gives?
A little bit of historical perspective here... Of all the Who studio albums with Moon on drums, the most difficult to reproduce live for The Who was Quadrophenia. They tried to tour with these songs with taped backings, much as they had done with 'Who's Next', but the tape machines kept breaking down and the frustrated band eventually abandoned the prospect of playing a 'Quadrophenia' show after only a handful of outings. By 1975, the Who stripped down their arrangements back to basics and 'Who By Numbers' is a very stark album in comparison to the preceding two majestic recordings.

Thus, playing 'Quadrophenia' live is one heck of a technical challenge, much more so than 'Tommy'. When you see this DVD, you see just why. Apart from the core 3 members, there are 12 other musicians listed in the credits. PJ Proby and Billy Idol appear as guest vocalists, Pete's younger brother Simon handles the Electric Guitar work, and 3 guys get credits as keyboard players, with a horn section and a percussionist to boot.

Quick impressions: Simon's a daggy player. His guitar playing is really disappointing; so much so I felt "I coulda done better!" - which is not what you want to feel watching it. Zak Starkey on the other hand amazes from start to finish. Every drum fill, every roll, every Moon nuance from the original album is recreated lovingly in his playing. It's actually quite mind-boggling, but there it is, he's like a reincarnation of the man himself.

The music flies along much like the album. The video vignettes explaining the story seem a little redundant if you know the album, but the show was prepared for a largely ignorant American audience so you have to just take it in and ignore the bits you know. After all this time, it seems unlikely there would be Who fans anywhere on the planet that didn't understand their Mod roots, but there you go.

Tommy Can You Sell Me More?
The Tommy disc is less rewarding, partly because these performances are familiar from the 'Join Together' album. As great as Simon Phillips is, he actually doesn't mesh well with The Who. His fills are his own and his feel actually makes the music feel more 'up and down'. Where Zak Starkey recreates the natural ebb and flow, and the swing in Moon's work, Phillips' playing sounds more clinical and uninvolved. Where you expect Moon's fills, you get expert Phillips fills instead and it's quite alienating. The horn section in the 1989 incarnation actually adds a swinging funky feel than the Memphis/R&B feel that John Entwistle had arranged.

Once again, somebody else handles the bulk of the electric guitar work. Steve Bolton is a boring guitar player. He is efficient, clinical and really uninspiring - the opposite qualities to what I find in Pete's own playing. Of all the people they could have hired, why this guy? It's that bland.
I don't know which rock they found him under but it's a good thing he didn't stay. Where Simon Townshend is 'no great shakes', Steve Bolton is 'vanilla'. Well, I don't like my Who songs in vanilla.

I remember being so grateful that any incarnation of The Who were touring back in '89-'90 but over the years, I've come to dislike the 'Join Together' album. It sounded tight and modern for its time, but it hasn't survived the years. The really great live set after 'Who's Last' (It sure wasn't) is actually the 2000 Royal Albert Hall fund-raiser concert. The Tommy disc is therefore a documentation of that era more than anything else.

This all got me to think about how much of The Who's stuff is out there yet to get?
There's 'the Vegas Job' DVD out there yet and I think there's some other DVD doing the rounds. Then there's the boxed set of remastered recordings. I still haven't got 'Who Are You' on CD - I held off on that a while back, and now it's nigh impossible to spot at JB Hi-Fi. I might have to Amazon that one in.
Life goes on. I guess I just keep buying this stuff.

PAPA!

Power Amplified Personal Armor

I think that's what it used to b called in the old Sci-Fi books. Turns out the US army is working on one about the time Iron Man is hitting the screens. Of course Iron Man's latest incarnation for the movies is the story of PAPA, but here is somebody working on something less comic book, but power-amplified all the same.

Rex Jameson bikes and swims regularly, and plays tennis and skis when time allows. But the 5-foot-11, 180-pound software engineer is lucky if he presses 200 pounds — that is, until he steps into an "exoskeleton" of aluminum and electronics that multiplies his strength and endurance as many as 20 times.

With the outfit's claw-like metal hand extensions, he gripped a weight set's bar at a recent demonstration and knocked off hundreds of repetitions. Once, he did 500.

"Everyone gets bored much more quickly than I get tired," Jameson said.

Jameson — who works for robotics firm Sarcos Inc. in Salt Lake City, which is under contract with the U.S. Army — is helping assess the 150-pound suit's viability for the soldiers of tomorrow. The suit works by sensing every movement the wearer makes and almost instantly amplifying it.

The Army believes soldiers may someday wear the suits in combat, but it's focusing for now on applications such as loading cargo or repairing heavy equipment. Sarcos is developing the technology under a two-year contract worth up to $10 million, and the Army plans initial field tests next year.

Before the technology can become practical, the developers must overcome cost barriers and extend the suit's battery life. Jameson was tethered to power cords during his demonstration because the current battery lasts just 30 minutes.

But the technology already offers evidence that robotics can amplify human muscle power in reality — not just in the realm of comic books and movies like the recently debuted "Iron Man," about a wealthy weapons designer who builds a high-tech suit to battle bad guys.

"Everybody likes the idea of being a superhero, and this is all about expanding the capabilities of a human," said Stephen Jacobsen, chief designer of the Sarcos suit.

The Army's exoskeleton research dates to 1995, but has yet to yield practical suits. Sarcos' technology sufficiently impressed Raytheon Co., however, that the Waltham, Mass.-based defense contractor bought Sarcos' robotics business last November. Sarcos also has developed robotic dinosaurs for a Universal Studios' "Jurassic Park" theme park ride.

And they still can't catch Osama in Laden.

Movie Doubles

Putting Together A Fraternity - 'Fight Club' and 'Old School'

I know what you are thinking. How can these two films even be put together? And if you only looked at marketing genres, you would be right. Years ago when 'Fight Club' came out, I was struck by the audacity of hoping to pull together people to a common radical cause. We just don't do that in a post-suburban, multi-corporatised, cross-collateralised, post-modernity. We don't invest in one another as people as soldiers do. Our individualism and freedoms lead us further and further into our own little lairs, seated in front of computers down-loading images and sounds o objects of desires - whether that is shopping catalogues or porn, that is your preference, but that is the world we have come to.

'Fight Club' appeared like a rock smashing the glass, thrown by somebody inside the glass house, just to remind us how trapped we have become. The chorus line of critics lined up to say how bad the film was and the world went on regardless. At the time I was working with female producer who had heard from a friend it was awful.
"Your friend said it was 'awful'?" I asked
"Yeah. He said it was just terrible."
"'He'?"
"Yes."
It was one of those classic moments in a company when you just think "I'm working with an ideologue" - and you resent it.
"Let me guess, he's gay, right?"
"How did you know?" She said, wide-eyed.
I just shrugged.
Well I can imagine a certain type of gay-pride culture to resent a film that tears down a picture of masculinity built around beauty and desire. What I understand now is that the fraternity of men that is not built around those things, is potentially hostile to the gay-pride-parade crowd. And the film makes no apologies for its own hetero-prejudices. Or maybe it was the abject fear of "poofter-bashings".

One of my favorite anecdotes about 'Fight Club' is how Rupert Murdoch saw it and got incredibly incensed that one his own companies, Fox Searchlight, produced it. He got on the blower and yelled at them and admonished them never to make such a film again. The old media tycoon certainly understood exactly who the thrown rock was aimed at, and he did not like that at all.

Yet what are the young dogs of our society to do today? Take up Parkour and run amuck through parks and streets? There is no street fight, no festival of the fist; there is no revolution, there is no cause. If you read 'Stiffed' by Susan Faludi, you will realise that men have been trapped by the consumer culture as readily and as completely as women. The so-called Crisis of Masculinity' isn't some advertising copy to sell toothpaste. It's actually out there, and people ignore it at their own risk.

'Old School' appeared four years later, and the masculinity in this film is equally an un-reconstructed barbarian heterosexual one. Yet, being a like a comedy in the style of 'Porky's' of old, it slipped past the cultural censors who do want to stifle the return of the testosterone charged hetero male. Don't ask me why. I can't imagine what's wrong with boys growing up boys, but it's been unacceptable for quite some time. 'Old School' actually presents a vision of a fraternity that is almost autochthonous.

Whereas in 'Fight Club', the fraternity is born out of Jack's Insane Mind, the fraternity that forms around Luke Wilson's 'Mitch' character gathers to recapture a moment in life. Fight Club is stoic, Mitch's fraternity is epicurean and pleasure-seeking. What is really interesting that both films go through some very similar scenes, when the protagonist tries to explain to the love interest that he is not the crazy person he seems to be, but is interrupted by a waiter who is already a member or wishes to pledge.

Even the initiation rites in both films echo each other, both involve pain; but in the instance of 'Old School', the basement fight is an old WWII vet jelly-wrestling some topless co-eds. Both films have scenes where the boss accidentally finds the protagonist abusing the company photocopier for the purposes of the fraternity, as well as strong, uncharacteristic rebukes of corporate bullies. Both films present a transformed man at the end, who is probably better off for having recaptured their masculinity. Yes, feminists would be disconcerted, but that is exactly the point. In the absence of fathers men must make themselves, not take mother's advice.

Both films reject a productive position in society. As such, they do not buy into consumerism, but instead, reject it unequivocally. Fight Club defines itself by what it is not - Brad Pitt intones over the megaphone that the space monkeys are not their cars, their house, their khakis; they are not a unique and beautiful snowflake. Mitch's fraternity pledges that it will do as little as possible to help the university and part of its plan is to have as little responsibility to society; to not do any charity work, to simply be a fraternity of fun activities, with minimal links to the university. It's not that they are anti-social people - the society of their respective fraternities are highly social, and they are fine in that context. It is that they band together to reject the norm as presented by marketing and advertising. What's amazing is that these two films dovetail as two ways of working through the problem: one goes through stoicism, the other, epicureanism.

I don't know if I would be the sort to join a American-style fraternity as such. Such opportunities did not present themselves to me on my campus days. It seems a little hokey for my tastes. However, what is increasingly obvious to me now is that if men do not find some kind of fraternity, whether it be official or unofficial, they simply won't be surviving the emotional mayhem that is post-industrial capitalist society. Perhaps building Fraternity together with Liberty and Equality as the French Revolution once advocated, is indeed the way to go.

Movie Doubles

Ecriture As Pennance - 'Capote' And 'Infamous'

This movie double combo is probably a lot easier to understand. Here are two movies based on the life and times of Truman Capote, the same incident which prompted his writing of 'In Cold Blood'.
What's even more interesting is that both films were made within 12months of each other, and one of them went on to garner an Oscar for the actor's portrayal of Capote himself. How unimaginative is Hollywood really? I think in these two films, we do begin to see a glimpse of just how unimaginative these people can be - but that is not the point of this post. I just wanted to draw people's attention to the weirdness of being able to see the same story twice, back to back.

Both films are steeped in the cinematic vernacular of the period piece covering the middle 20th century. 1959 of the films feels so distant as to register as an entirely different continent to the one we are familiar with; In both films, it's hard to believe this is an America that is about to explode into the 1960s, let alone elect John F. Kennedy for President. Nonetheless in both films, Truman Capote preens and struts about with an outlandishly in-clandestine gay manner. In both films, detective Alvin Dewey comes over as stodgy as potato salad, and Nelle Harper Lee as a troubled co-traveler who witnesses Truman Capote's journey into the deep dark matinee hour of his soul.

So what exactly do we have here? Between the two films, we begin to get a larger picture of the Truman Capote persona, and perhaps another reason why two films were made about the same topic and same man. The name dropping, gossiping socialite act segues right into the contempt that allows him to write with the style he does, and in so doing we get a glimpse of Hollywood preening and looking into itself in the mirror. This is particularly true in 'Infamous' where the stellar cast includes Sandra Bullock as Nelle Harper Lee and Jeff Daniels as Detective Alvin Dewey.

Sandra Bullock's performance, when contrasted with Catherine Keener's portrayal of the same figure is at once poignant and phony in a way that only Hollywood camp can attain. It's a sad fact that stars carry all their previous roles as luggage into their new roles, but it is particularly taxing to see the woman who gave us two 'Miss Congeniality' movies and a raft of ugly Rom-Coms playing an introverted, circumspect writer. While her performance is passable to good, she never shakes being Sandra Bullock.

Equally, Jeff Daniels carries the 'Purple Rose of Cairo' as well as 'Dumb and Dumber', so he is just as vexed in his characterisation of a Kansas detective in late 1959. By contrast the cast surrounding Philip Seymour Hoffman in 'Capote' are decidedly understated as they trudge through a lonely grey patina filled with the sorrows of USA '59. Chris Cooper's Alvin Dewey is less expressive, more weather-beaten, more studied, less glamorous. Keener's portrayal of Harper Lee is in the same vein, and clinically short in glamour, but steeped in nuanced looks.

This is not to say that one film is decidedly better than the other. Whereas the sheer mass and gravitas of the cast surrounding Toby Jones as Capote in 'Infamous' leaves us unconvinced (Gwyneth Paltrow appears at the start in a cameo, singing; and if that really is her singing, why isn't she selling more albums than Coldplay?), we are surprised by the variety of facets Toby Jones' Truman brings to life. Equally, we are convinced of the bravura performance by Hoffman in 'Capote', and feel somehow that the understated mood of the whole enterprise misses something crucial in the interaction between Truman and Perry Smith.

In 'Infamous', we are treated to an incredibly muscular and super-charged Perry Smith, played by a recently minted James Bond, Daniel Craig. His screen presence is so big, it totally eats up Toby Jones' hammy characterisation in the jail scenes. The incredible dynamism in his performance style is nothing like the brooding performance by Clifton Collins Jr.
who sits in the dark, dank, cell opposite Phillip Seymour Hoffman and just mumbles his despair - in extreme close up.

It's clear 'Capote' has a larger budget as the sets are more lavishly built, the wide shots are wider, and the closeups more delicate and yet strong and centred. Even the shooting style in 'Capote' suggests the writing concerns of Truman Capote where objects substitute themselves as metonymy. A picture here, a knife there, the cell bars that cast moving shadows, the slight back-light that pours in from the corridor. The incredible depth to shots and sequences is staggering at times and enchanting in other scenes.

'Infamous' has none of that. In its place is a patient appraisal of relationships. We are treated to the lavish conversational, raconteur world of Truman Capote as he smarms and charms his way through Manhattan life. The master shots are off-kilter, the closeups are loose and mismatched, the angles are odd. All of these aspects adds up to a more jocular, didactic film. As a director, my tastes lie with 'Capote', but as a writer, I suspect my sympathies lie with 'Infamous'.

Watching the two films, one thing does become clear: Truman Capote actually goes home to his spiritual home in trying to write this book. He encounters a figure in Perry Smith, somebody he might have become, and in turn, this fuels his insight. He writes the book not so much to document what has happened but to bring out the scope within himself to encompass the crime. I cannot judge the book - I found it hard going when I tried reading it years ago. I don't even relate to the urgency within Capote to write this story; And it is true this story of four murders pales into insignificance when compared to the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, or Charles Manson which is to say, the crime itself has dated - a strange notion in of itself too.
Yet, what both films do successfully deliver to us, is the sheer desperation of Capote trying to write his masterwork. He sold his soul to get it done.

Movie Doubles

Sometimes you can only talk about movies in relationship with other films. This may be because you saw two films together back to back; or it may be that the 2 films cover the same terrain; or for that matter, the very same subject. I thought I should quickly jot down a few combos I've seen recently that can only be appreciated as movie doubles.

Teenage Wasteland, It's only Teenage Wasteland - 'Brick' & 'Superbad'

The big myth in teenage-hood is that it is anything like a Hollywood movie. As a good friend of mine Case once pointed out, we never get to say the lines we wished to say in our teenage years. Yes, we know what they are, but we only get to say them years afterwards when maturity and self-assuredness sets in. However we die for that line in our school years. The clever riposte, the profound insight, the cutting remark, the praise of the sparkling beauty of a girl in your year - all those lines escape us, one after the other and pretty soon, you're at University talking to entirely different people, working on your witty lines. It's all too late.

So if there is one thing that is ultimately fake, it is the clever lines we see in movies about growing up. Whole movies are littered with brilliant lines written by screenwriters who are imbuing and imparting so much life wisdom on to characters, who simply cannot exist.

So what are we to make of 'Brick', a film entirely spoken in Hard-Boiled Dashiel Hammett-style dialogue? It's brilliantly preposterous, and wonderfully sanguine; all the same, if you ignore the entirely false proposition that teenagers could have the mature insight of a 40year old, then it's great.

Ironically, I can remember the time I went to watch 'Hammett' with my high school friends on the 6th August 1982 at the Glebe Valhalla cinema when it reopened. How do I remember this? It was Walk-Off HBP's 16th birthday. I still have the Valhalla poster from that occasion. We were smart kids, but I can assure you, *none* of us had the kind of maturity or insight to speak like Hammett characters. Maybe it's because we were simply Australian and therefore a lot less nuanced as American teenagers. Really, our Australian teenage-hoods were totally devoid of such machinations and meaning.

The tongue-in-cheek humour then lies in the witty way in how the whole story is set up to be a High School drama about cliques and reputation; much like a 1940s city with mobsters and their reputations. What's truly interesting is how animated the kids depicted in American high school films are about their cliques. 'Napoleon Dynamite', 'Rushmore', and even 'American Graffiti' paint a despairing picture of the cliques, but in 'Brick', it becomes the central device which allows the story to flow.

Similarly in 'Superbad', the very existence of cliques prompts the central drama: how to get laid in High School. Where in 'Brick', dialogue almost becomes opaque with half-formed meaning, in 'Superbad' it becomes coarse to the point of pure perspicacity. Perhaps the best line in the film is:

"Look, you know how some chicks say, 'Oh I got so drunk last night and slept with some guy.' right? Well, this is our opportunity to be that guy."

Indeed, this is the central premise of the film. Because the cliques are so well established, the boys believe that there is a clique of guys out there who get laid all the time - and if they could only procure alcohol for this certain party, they could join that secret society of boys who get laid all the time. The rest of the film is simply a hilarious working out of this problematic - if it can indeed be given such a self-important word, but yes, it is a problematic, and that is all part of the fun.

The net effect of watching these two films is that you begin to understand the untenable nature of being a student in an American high school. Language doesn't help you. Logic doesn't help you. Looks, money, reason, good grades, none of these are worth anything next to the whims of how cliques are run. The grinding, brutal social mechanism is crippling and dictatorial; it creates alienation faster than it allows for bonding. The world is crumbling system of signs that actually have no deep meaning, just a bunch of dead ends,which is what both these films elaborately point out and illustrate. The parties, the sneers, the prejudices born of fear creates a tapestry of fear and loathing that makes your hart sink. And when scriptwriters give these characters lines of pristine dialogue, the effect is miasmic and a little disconcerting, but you do find yourself rooting for these characters.

Also in favor of these two films is how they capture the anxiety of youth. The incredible yearning, the feelings of inadequacy, the desire to explore sexuality at full throttle, the guilt, the shame, the boredom, all of these things are fully expressed in both these films. They're standouts in the genre. They seem to say to us that we only live that moment once, but if we only understood it better, maybe we could all sublimate it into art instead of squander it as misguided passion. Alas, that is not to be in most of our lives. But with most things, that may be a better thing for one's mental health in the long run. Each of these films are fine films in their own right, but their effect is multiplied when watched back to back.
Try it some time.

Update

Yup, I'm Writing Again
It was my New Years' resolution to write more this yar, but the thing is you need a bit of mental space to do it. I've sort of cleared the decks of musical projects for now so I need to knuckle down and write scripts, but it's been hard with the day job and whatnot. There are so many aggravating things in life, like DIMIA and Visas and all else day-job-related stuff. Anyway, I have a few days off and already I've started writing stuff.

Today I trotted off to the library to get a concentrated load of writing in, and I feel great. I'm fixing the script I've been working on with Kendal. There have been all these notes that I've had in my head for months and I simply haven't had the mental space to just dive into them.

Fortuitously I've also been co-opted into a group of screenwriters trying to hatch a group project so we'll sort of see how that one goes. I'm kind of interested in how that one could go as it has some ties to money in NZ. We're trying to get a low budget movie for direct-to-DVD sort of markets. Definitely genre, definitely simple.

Also, my parody of self-help books, 'Happiness is Easy' needs to be typed up. My in-tray is effectively full, so I really needed to geton with this stuff. There's a lot to get done in the next few days before I trudge back to my day-job.

Logic Studio
I've ordered the software package known as Logic Studio. Once I get this I shall be... back to square one learning how to do stuff. It's been a while coming but I've been feeling a little scared of jumping into the deep end and ordering this fully Pro Audio thing. I mean, how will I ever make that time and money commitment back? (Never) Haven't I recorded my best songs already? or am I going to try and do it all again with Logic? A bit scary just to think.

At the same time I've been feeling I've hit the production limit with the range of software I've been working with Garageband is nice and all, but I need far more mixing control than it has; and pumping out sounds to Sound Track Pro, track by track for the mix was getting to be a real bore. It would be much better to have one software to rule them all.

Then there's the issue of samplers and synthesizers: I can't afford multitudes of hardware versions of these things, so I need something with some oomph in the software versions. So you can see I was due. I have high hopes for this package.