David Dale Is My Hero

Staying In Touch (With Trivia, With Style)

Growing up in 80s, the most fun part of the SMH was the backpage of the main section where David Dale held court with his 'Stay in Touch' column. The SiT column covered bizarre news snippets from around the world - the sort of weird-ass news that comes in the AP 'Oddly Enough' wire. It most probably was the AP Oddly Enough wire to which he had access and we were not to know it back then, but all the same, David Dale made the silly parts of the world and its affairs a must-read everyday.

When I reflect on it further, the tone of this blog might find its roots in the tone of SiT columns of the 1980s, in which case David Dale would be my spiritual father of journalism. Sometime during the time I dropped out of Med School, he left the Herald to go edit The Bulletin where he was criticised for bringing his style of whimsy to a 'serious' publication. I never bothered to read The Bulletin under his editor-ship which goes to show any artist or journo performs as a function of his/her context.

Anyway, today I noticed I clicked on 2 articles by the said David Dale and enjoyed them both so I thought I'd link them here.

The first is his observation about Nathan Rees.

In just eight weeks as NSW Premier, he has said two gloriously unpredictable things: that his favourite book is Paradise Lost, published in 1667 by the puritan poet John Milton, and that if you think you are in love, then you are in love (said last week when discussing traffic).

That's two more surprises than Morris Iemma gave us in three years as premier (unless you count his resignation). It is starting to look as if we might have an interesting person running the state and, in my book, that's much better than having a competent one.

If we're honest, we elect politicians to entertain us. Canberra and Macquarie Street are soap operas, sometimes overlapping with crime thrillers and screwball comedies. The public service can do the grunt work. The job of politicians is to engage our emotions and inspire our imaginations.

State politics throws up too few eccentrics. The finest in the past 20 years was the mercurial Jeff Kennett in Victoria, who revealed only after he retired that he suffered from depression.

In NSW, Bob Carr never felt the need to justify his preference for Roman history over football. I ran into him once on a bus that was taking people round Sydney's museums. He said he was late for his official duty of launching the museum tour because he'd been watching a TV documentary that proved it was not Nero who set fire to Rome but Christian terrorists trying to bring down the empire. Carr couldn't stop talking about it.

Nathan Rees's fascination with Milton ranks with that. Paradise Lost tells the story of Lucifer's attempt to organise a revolution by the angels in heaven and overthrow the dictatorship of God. God wins and banishes Lucifer and his freedom fighters to the underworld.

Milton clearly had sympathy for the devil. Lucifer is the most interesting character in the narrative. The illustrator William Blake said Milton was "of the devil's party without knowing it" - which may reveal something about Rees's continuing relationships with some Labor powerbrokers.

Quotes we should expect to hear soon in Rees speeches: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n" and "The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heav'n of hell, or a hell of heav'n". Sounds a lot like NSW to me.

Eccentricity is underrated as an incentive for voters. Gough Whitlam was the first of the Great Unpredictables, because his brain overflowed with ideas that didn't fit within standard political rhetoric. His divagation on the pronunciation of the word kilometer ("The versifiers among you have always used pentameters and tetrameters, and you've got a pretty fair diameter and perimeter yourself") makes Rees look positively pedestrian.

The bounding joviality in his writing is infectious and it actually threw me back to my teenager revelry just reading it. I don't know what to make of Nathan Rees as of yet, but I'm already positively disposed towards him as a result of reading this article. It may be the case that David Dale has made the unpalatable, palatable; but there is much to be said for a column that can persuade on the strength of its wit, and this is the essence of David Dale - he's one witty bastard.

The second is a regular column of his current column, 'The Tribal Mind'.

Australia's top-selling DVDs (first week of October): 1 Supernatural Season 3; 2 Horton Hears A Who; 3 AFL Premiers 2008 Hawthorn; 4 Two And A Half Men Season 4; 5 Heroes Season 2 Digipack Box Set; 6 Two And A Half Men Season 3; 7 Heroes Season 2 Slimcase; 8 Two And A Half Men Season 1; 9 Beverly Hills 90210 Season 5; 10 Happy Feet.

Only two of the 10 are movies. One is a sports documentary. The rest are TV shows. And therein lies the mystery: why are three of the 10 best sellers based on a TV show which Channel Nine is already showing for five hours a week, two of them from a show Channel Seven is showing for an hour a week and one from a show Channel Ten is showing for an hour a week?

This is my speculation: it's because there is no longer any trust between viewers and TV stations. The fans of Two And A Half Men, Heroes or Supernatural are thinking: "Yes, they may be showing it now, but any minute they'll cancel it, move it to late at night without telling me, play it out of order or interrupt the sequence with old episodes. The only way to be sure of seeing it in the correct order, when I want to, is to buy every possible DVD. And then I'll never need to watch TV again."

Of course, no blockbuster movies were released around the time that chart was compiled. The top 10 a month from now will no doubt include Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Sex And The City, and Indiana Jones And The KIngdom Of The Crystal Skull. But if my thesis about the breakdown of trust is correct, the remaining six next month will still be TV shows.

Interesting how he never pulls punches. One has to admire a guy with much spine and I suspect the one thing about David Dale is that he;s not short of spine. I like that. A couple of years ago, he made the astute observation that not even the top grossing Australian films at the Box Office were making a profit, and promptly got rebukes, but he's been right all along.

Anyway, I thought I'd fly that out there, just because it hit me today, just how much I still get a kick out of reading his columns after all this time.