Comedy In The Making

All You Need Is The Canned Laughter

We would say, "this stuff writes itself" when we find a good vein of comedy gold. I've been saying this for a few days now since Tony Abbott knighted HRH Phil husband of Royal Betty II. The ridicule and the disarray in the Liberal ranks, while unseen to us on the streets, has been enough to hit the front pages every day with a juicy bit of morsel.

Although it did get me thinking a bit, as to what Buckingham Palace might have made of Tony Abbott handing out a gong to Prince Philip. The problem is that having fought so hard against Republicanism in Australia, he put Republicanism right back on the map by drawing attention to the Royals in Australian political life. One would (and could) well imagine this might have prompted a phone call to Governor General Sir Peter Cosgrove from the Palace, asking him just what in the name of all that is good, is going on Down Under.

The short reply might be that we Australians have elected themselves a brain-damaged entity who is doing some crazy shit in the driver's seat of government. And the Palace may well tell Sir Peter to sort it out. Not wanting to be a second Kerr, Sir Peter himself might be working the phones of the Liberals to remove Tony Abbott.

I jest.
Although Peter Hatcher is not kidding when he says the ray of light for Abbott is that he has no immediate rival.

Still, when you read that the Liberal backbenchers have appealed to Mal Brough to raise his hand in a spill because Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull have said no, you get the feeling that the Liberal Party is possibly in some kind of rush to remove Tony Abbott, and anybody will do. Right now, more than the electorate itself, they want to vote for "Not-Tony-Abbott". The cabinet minsters are allegedly circling the wagons but if you are a backbencher in a marginal seat, every bit of errata generated by Tony Abbott would be votes being driven away from your name. You'd get pretty nervous and right now there maybe even more nervous-nelly-Liberals in Queensland, following on from Victoria.

Yes, the other blowhard idiot from the right, Campbell Newman is getting voted out tonight. He's even going to lose his seat, much like John Howard did. You'd think this phenomenon would lend itself to the vision of a one-term-only Coalition Government in Canberra. The seeming success of the 2013 election was in fact no kind of success at all except the Steven Bradbury variety. The Liberal backbenchers in marginal seats are right to be very antsy. Tony Abbott is giving them nothing but turd balls to take back to their electorates as the fruits of their labour.

It's all deliriously funny. I am now getting an insight into how the Liberals must have felt between 2010 and 2013 as the ALP underwent its civil war between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and kept getting smashed the polls. The delightful titter of Schadenfreude, the poisonous laugh of the cynic, the ticklish mirth of watching the misfortunes of the other, are all here in plain sight. It must've been a wonderful laugh for them and that totally blinded them to the fact that in reality Tony Abbott was a terrible candidate to be pushing as leader and then Prime Minister.  If there's one thing worse than a politician that is full of bullshit, it is a politician who believes his own bullshit and acts accordingly regardless of consequences. That's their man Tony to a tee.

They say History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then comedy. I think we're watching is the funniest show in Australian politics right now. It's the 'House of Larfs'. Where's the canned laughter?

News That's Fit To Punt - 29/Jan/2015

Everybody Has Advice For The PM

If you screw things up as knottily as Tony Abbott has done in his short tenure as Prime Minister, it becomes something of a sport to offer up advice. The best one for laughs I have seen to date is from Rupert Murdoch tweeting that Abbott should sacrificially sack Peta Credlin as his chief of staff. In other words, in a partnership of a brain and the mouthpiece, the mouthpiece should sack the brain. I guess if Abbott just took calls directly from Rupert all the time, it would save having to talk through Credlin, presumably.

Oddly enough Bill Shorten defended Peta Credlin. Then again, I would too if the opponent is about to sack its worst tactical liability.

Andrew Bolt thought the 'Knightmare' was so bad, it was possibly fatal for Abbott's prime ministership. Of course, on a long enough timeline, all prime Minsters fail and leave office in one way or another, so something will remove Tony Abbott eventually. Perhaps ridicule is more powerful than the sycophantic support of rightwing nut job radio broadcasters. If so, hooray for ridicule!

Tony Abbott's standing is so low, he's been asked not to go up to Queensland for the state election,  by the incumbent LNP Premier himself; I might add it is a premier who is in danger of losing his own seat, and he still doesn't want any 'help' from the Federal branch of his own party. It's so bad NSW ALP strategists think Tony Abbott alone is worth 3-4 seats coming off Mike Baird's Liberal Party majority. The Liberal Party strategists think it's more like 6 seats.

And so, the latest scuttlebutt is that yes-maybe-probably the Liberals are considering alternatives and this is rounding on the usual suspects of Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull. It's so transparent that bookies are taking bets. The problem with all this is of course the Right wing (of a largely right wing party, which is like saying the "glans of the dickhead") won't tolerate Malcolm Turnbull and well, Julie Bishop is - Margaret Thatcher's fine fascist career notwithstanding - a woman, and such a stunt as to installing a woman as a Liberal Party Prime Minister and one not by election at that, is just too Gillard-ian for their own tastes. Let's face it, Malcolm Turnbull probably still hasn't developed any judgment and is liable to run the party into the ground in his own way, the way he did with Ute-gate; and Julie Bishop's best attributes are still the death-stare-denial-of-reality and the moral nihilism that allowed her to defend James Hardie and Big Tobacco together with the strategically acquired Claire Underwood hairdo.

Be that as it may, the cat is surely out of the bag and working the phones, canvasing for votes. Do I bet on equities, bonds, derivatives, horses or do I bet on who will replace Tony Abbott? It's a tough choice. Here's my advice to the PM: If I were Tony Abbott, I would march in to the party room before any spill and announce a Double Dissolution and go to the polls.

Are We Done Yet?

The Politics of I-Don't-Even-Know-What-Any-More

At the turn of this decade, politics in this country hit a kind of low note. It was deceptive because we simply thought that the low was about as low things would go. That is to say, at the first sign of waning polls, Julia Gillard marched in and removed Kevin Rudd from the office of Prime Minister. Which of course unleashed so much ill will in the electorate that it resulted in a hung Parliament for Julia Gillard who subsequently rushed to the polls. The rest of it is in the history books, but it bears repeating because for some reason we seem to be at a similar impasse.

The only exception I would make is that Tony Abbott has never so much been popular as grudgingly accepted by even those in the Liberal Party, and in a quick 16 months or so has exhausted the support of even his own party through his inability to govern. Predictably - and it was no great shakes predicting this - he has been an awful Prime Minister who has essentially mistaken his winning the election as a big mandate for him to do things that were not asked of the Coalition in government.

We won't go over the tragic decision of repealing the Carbon Pricing or the Mining Tax. but it is also their budget that has been nothing short of a disaster and 9months later is yet to be passed, by a decidedly hostile senate. Everything they've done has either been shit or a mess indiscernible from shit.  It has in most part, been a government of idiots, flailing like an angry mongoloid child having a tantrum in a supermarket aisle. The evident lack of self-knowledge amplified into a rejection of the world as it truly is, but the main protagonist incapable of understanding the intellect-gap and how short they fall.

But weeks after my last denunciation there are now serious murmurs amongst the Coalition ranks that Tony Abbott might have to go, or that Peta Credlin at least must go. Just as it came about with the ALP in 2013, the self-preservation instincts of backbenchers has kicked in. Yes, they really are muttering about who might replace Tony Abbott (who like Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard before him when deposed, is still in his first term). This time the conservative base is very upset with their own man because he flip-flops, and can't sell the message to the electorate.

This is quite noteworthy because it suggests the Coalition's conservative base actually thinks what Tony Abbott tried to push through in the budget and the negotiations since are good ideas worth pursuing. A rather frightening thought. There's basically a goodly portion of the Australian electorate that can't resist its inner fascist and freely let's reign their fear and loathing. There are a lot of delusional nutbars out there voting for the Coalition. That being the case, we have to surmise that Australia is a lot more fractured and diverse than ever before. The diversity includes many hues of righting nut-jobbery. Is it any surprise this 'diversity' gets reflected in the necessarily fractious and disagreeable Senate?

You have to feel a little bit for the social conservatives of this country because they're on the wrong side of history, but they have to be wedded to the economic hardline ideologues who are also changing this country in a such a way as to disadvantage them. They probably just want change to slow down and for things they took for granted - like being able to be homophobic, racist, class-prejudiced and xenophobic - to not disappear. It's a crappy position to take or be in, but they just want to keep the things that give them a sense of identity - like being able to be homophobic, racist, class-prejudiced and xenophobic - and keep being that way without being ridiculed; but alas history is moving away from that sort of thing. And so they rail against the "politically correct" 'elites' who live in urban centres, but their very own political partners are psychopaths who want to tear down most social institutions so that economically it resembles a game of Monopoly where each man/woman is on their own and winner takes all.

The changes being pushed by the Liberals are going to hurt the bush. It's no wonder Clive Palmer and Bob Katter can see an angle that slants differently to the National Party, and run with it to the extent that they have.

All the same, it's impossible to feel sorry for the Liberals who find themselves in the pickle of having believed their own bullshit (and not, say, climate science); they've now led themselves into a political cul de sac with a monarchist nut job ex-trainee-priest ideologue. That one, is all on them. This current phase in the electoral cycle where they have discovered that none of their ideas are any good and their leader is despised by the majority of Australians, is all of their own making. It makes for much Schadenfreude joy. The shoe really is firmly shoved on to the other foot now. If the defeat of Kevin Rudd in 2013 was inevitable, then so was this descent into the abyss of hostile public opinion. They got there through pursuing a single-minded political unreasonableness and denying basic reality as presented by science and economics. I wouldn't mind seeing them twist in the wind for a while longer for comedy value. They are such idiots.

Some  may say this is no laughing matter; I would contend the LNP Coalition Government is Laughing Matter itself. A pure, distilled essence of Stupid.

It would be curious to see if the Liberals replace Tony Abbott with anybody. I feel they likely won't do any such thing. This is because the Liberals tend not to swap leaders in Government; they tend to swap their leaders more often in Opposition. They didn't try to change mid-stream in the last year of the Howard government to Peter Costello, and they sure didn't change horses at the end of the Fraser government. You have to go all the way back to the post-Menzies era to see the Liberals swapping Prime Ministers and that sort of led to the rise of Gough Whitlam. I'm sure just the thought of that makes them leery.

If they don't replace Tony Abbott, they are likely looking at a one term government. If they do replace Tony Abbott with anybody (Bishop, Turnbull, a sack of catfood, it doesn't matter), they'll be reliving the ALP script. Whilst they are the best friends of the boardroom psychopaths, I do wonder whether they have the sort of gumption to be psychopaths themselves and replace Tony Abbott with a straight face. You know, channel the inner Mark Arbib, or for that matter their inner Bill Shorten.
Somehow I think that is not on the cards. We're going to be in for 18 more months of Tony Abbott as PM. So no, we're far from done yet.

'Boardwalk Empire' Season 5

And So it Ends With An Abrupt Bang

Anything to do with mobsters and organised crime of Twentieth Century America has a certain appeal on the big screen. Whether it was a contemporary portrayal of Al Capone or the labyrinthine story of the Godfather movies, organised crime stories have their cache. Boardwalk Empire cut a great swathe into that terrain the early seasons so the promise has always been that wends its way through the roaring 20s to the '29 market crash and into the 30s.

For some reason, they've decided to wind up the show and so Season 5 has come as a sort of fast-forward-and-flashback sort of series to answer a whole bunch of questions and tie up the loose ends.

Spoiler alert... Now!
Really, don't read on if you hate spoilers.

What's Good About It

The story continues with the same old cast of characters. Sadly, that's about it.

What's Bad About It

Suddenly, these characters aren't much whack as the series rushes to an end. Moots the loose ends get tied up by killing off characters. Some of them are more arbitrary than others, some are more arbitrarily dealt with than others. You think nothing of Sally getting whacked, but you really wonder about the wisdom of Chalky White allowing himself to be killed to give Maitland a chance at singing again. Mickey finally gets it, but it's super off-the-cuff. A new character Arquimedes gets introduced and dies without appealing to us in the same way as his predecessors.

All the flashbacks to when Nucky and Eli were kids, and then Nucky as young man working for the Commodore are expositional and boring. I didn't realise how little I was interested in the Commodore and Nucky as young man. If this stuff was so deeply interesting, this is where the story would have kicked off - in 1884 instead of 1918. The simple truth is, it's just not that interesting, and so it doesn't add anywhere narthex value as the unfolding story itself. Because it takes up so much screen time, you only get half of the normal unfolding story.

So they end up whacking everybody - which is like the second half of 'Goodfellas' by Martin Scorsese who is the executive producer, but it really doesn't do justice to the first 4 seasons. If you told me this was how it was all going to end, I might not have bothered investing my time in this thing. It was really good up until Season 4. This final season is nothing short of disappointing.

What's Interesting About It

I've been thinking about how disappointed I was with the ending, and I think it's because the story comes up against a wall of its own devising. Nucky Thompson is loosely based on Nucky Johnson. The writers gave themselves licence to be very different to history in creating Nucky Thompson as a parallel universe type figure. But they also populated it with historic figures like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Mayer Lanky and Arnold Rothstein. In the early going, it maddest more colourful and interesting. But conceit got down to the business end they couldn't rewrite history. So when it comes to the Thompson clan facing off against Lucky and Mayer, you know the Thompsons can't win and supplant Lucky and Mayer. It's just not how things went.

Boxed in by the writers' own devising, Nucky is suddenly weak and cannot bring himself to have the courage or brains to beat these guys. It is as if he necessarily had to become weak and dumb in the face of reality. It also made for very bad viewing right down to the end where Tommy Darmody - Jimmy's son, and Gillian and Commodore Kaestner's grandson  - shoots Nucky dead. It might be symbolic and a natural playing out of the revenge cycle but it's a really awful and truly stupid choice by the writers. Especially when you consider Nucky Johnson himself survived all of that era and lived to 1968. They killed off Nucky to forcibly end the series. It's a terrible choice.

Parallels With 'Mad Men'

Nucky's story, like Don Draper's story is essentially a picaresque, Both series go into elaborate flashbacks to childhood in order to explain the idiosyncrasies of the character. This device worked a lot better in 'Mad Men' than it does in 'Boardwalk Empire'. Whereas Don is truly mysterious as to how he came to be Don Draper, there is no real mystery as to how Nucky became the man we see. What we don't know in specifics, we can guess.

Whereas 'Mad Men' successfully navigated the 60s for us, 'Boardwalk Empire' abruptly cuts out of its project of the 1920s before the market crash. It's a shame they couldn't work through that dynamic; instead they opted to go forward to a time after the crash and straight into the Great Depression, but it doesn't really give us a sense of the Great Depression that would have been unfolding.  The story oddly narrows down to Nucky's contracting circumstances.

The problem with the flashback sequences is that it robs Nucky of his self-made greatness. What we see instead is a Nucky who is simply a cog in history who in the end cannot supplant the Commodore by deeds or by blood. if nothing else you want Nucky to succeed, but the flashback sequences lower the bar for Nucky's success to such a pointy realise that nothing we've seeing seasons 1 through 4 are of any consequence except for the way he ends up killing Jimmy and that in a roundabout way gets him killed by Jimmy's son. All of which has a certain symmetry but it is so dissatisfying, given the scope of the man built up in the previous seasons.

We learn subtle things about Don Draper in his flashback that flesh out the character. In these flashbacks we learn things about Nucky that we really didn't want to know.

It really is a shame it all ends the way it does.

Al Capone And The Chicago Story

We've seen a great Al Capone already in 'The Untouchables' with Robert DeNiro delivering one of the most manic unhinged performances for Brian DePalma's film. Here's Stephen Graham takes a lot of cues from the earlier DeNiro performance and works him into a just as manic, disturbed, unpredictable and violent entity. It's a bit of a shame that they opted not to retell the Eliot Ness story from Capone's side. Instead the elder that damns him is casually handed to the undercover agent. It's a far cry from the train station shoot out in 'the Untouchables'.

Considering the detail they went into with the succession from John Torrio to Al Capone, it seems amiss to simply abandon the Capone story in this context. It's just another one of those things that just didn't see fulfilment in the series, and it's big shame. Stephen Graham's defiant and crazy Capone with too much front is a fantastic performance to the end.

'American Sniper'

Joyless In Fallujah

I had never even heard of Fallujah until *we* (the Coalition of the unWitting) invaded Iraq and found ourselves a quagmire. You kept hearing this was just like Vietnam and that the *allied* (we use this term loosely) were seeing terrible casualties. If there's a place in the 21st Century one wouldn't want to know about, it would be Fallujah.

Of course in movie land, it's exactly the kind of place where curious and dubious legends are born so we had 'the Hurt Locker' depicting defusing IEDs (another abbreviation we came to learning loathe in the 'aughts) and now we have a movie about a sniper who made his name in that shitfight. If it weren't Clint Eastwood directing, I might not have watched this film.

As it is, it's a true-story-loosely-based-on-fact - the usual recipe for a misleading, misrepresentation time of entertainment. Are we assholes for wanting this entertainment? Perhaps. This film certainly lends credence to such a view.

What's Good About It

It's typical Clint Eastwood fare. It's aesthetically stripped down and pretty simple and to the point. Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller put in reasonable performances and the special effects in the war scenes are in most part not distracting or annoying. Fallujah as a theatre comes over as the shithole one expects, and the campaign is gruesome as one remembers from reports.

I have a lot of complaints about this film as well as those who are complaining about it. it's a cornucopia of reasons for complaint but one thing that it is, is competent and well done (and not necessarily well-handled). The problem is that competence alone might not get you over the line into the good graces of history. After all Nazis at Auschwitz were competent at what they were doing.

What's Bad About It

It's a film that lends you the suspicion that the times have passed Clint Eastwood by. The kind of moral compass necessary to navigate the moral signposts of this film are very old. It predates a lot of the values we've come to embrace in the lat 40 years.

Also, Chris Kyle is a dodgy witness to his own actions. Okay, he's worse than that, he's been known to be a liar, so much so that Jesse Ventura pursued him into courts and won a defamation suit against him. And while you wouldn't hold a Hollywood testimonial biopic to be representative of the man, the film is incredibly circumspect and reticent about the more obvious faults of the man.

The film also skips over the many issues of a hunter shooting animals going to being a sniper shooting people instead. I walked out of the film feeling like I witnessed a film about a man who got PTSD and his solution to his problem was to become a psychopath.

It's not a *bad* film, but it's an immensely difficult film to leave one's politics at the cinema door and just watch. You get itchy with the desire to dispute the portrayal of what is essentially a killer on the loose that has state sanction to whack people for perceived intent. It's a heavy chore, trying to ignore these things.

What's Interesting About It

The film itself is pretty prosaic. It simply describes events with the utmost of simplicity. Whether they're relevant or made up events to make a life make some kind of biopic-narrative sense, it's really straightforward. What is not straightforward is the ideological battle that has burst out in the media as a result this film, and trying to parse this film for what exactly it means.

We can dispense with the gun nut NRA defences of the film. You expect the lobby of shooters to be in praise of a shooter who shot a bunch of people regardless of faith or gender or creed or age. You expect people who like shooting to be in praise of the shooters. Empathy for the shot doesn't come into it with these people so it's worth drawing a line and saying the NRA/gun-loving endorsement of this film is as shallow and stupid as it is psychopathic and self-interested to the point of being masturbatory.

What we have to tangle with a bit is the criticism levelled at the film auto whether it is misrepresenting the truth or rewriting history. One of the crits levelled against the film is that it attempts to justify going into Iraq on the basis of 9/11. Facts of the matter are - and much as it kills me - the George W. Bush administration were at pains to paint Iraq as somehow connected to the 9/11 events in order to go into Iraq. So while there is no connection whatsoever between 9/11 and Iraq, it is true that America went to war with Iraq after the events of 9/11 using it as a pretext.

Yes, it's super-frustrating. It was even more frustrating to live through. If you have forgotten or were too young to understand, but want a flavour of what that debate looked like, you can go right back to the 2004 entries of this very blog to see for yourself how frustrating the events were. Even allowing for that, in all fairness to the film it is true that 9/11 happened and then troops were sent to invade Iraq. The film does not justify or condone it, it just delivers it as matter of fact. There is no glorious scenes of the drive into Baghdad or clips of 'comical Ali' being dead wrong about his pronouncements on behalf of the government of Iraq. And if one were a soldier, that would have been the experience of events.

It's really not a fair criticism to say this film supports the argument that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. The opposite is more true. The film is snidely ironic in showing that 9/11 led to the difficult (and probably needless) street-to-street fighting in Fallujah. The problem of arguing that the film supports such a notion is that it's not taking the film on its own terms, it's whipping it with an ideological lash.

Cheering For The Killer

The other disturbing challenge is that the film gives us a cold-blooded killer as the guy for whom we're cheering; and it's really awkward. This isn't a picaresque, and this isn't a complete bit of fiction made to challenge middleclass values. The film kicks off with accounts of his childhood where shooting animals and beating up on other kids is justified. The guy joins the SEALs and shoots things really well, so he ends up as a sniper. His first kills are a civilian woman and child who try to lob a grenade at American troops. Tell me the bit where it gets pleasant because well into the film you want  to look for an escape hatch from the oppressiveness of the killing.

This is probably what war really is like, where it's distasteful traumatic choices all round, and then you pull the trigger at the shitty challenge du jour. Even so, the film sure doesn't make you feel good about it and anybody waving the star-spangled banner on the back of this is clearly, clearly, CLEARLY, an idiot.

The criticism levelled at the film is that it shows a total lack of empathy for the Iraqis who are not given proper identities except for characters how get shot, maimed and tortured. It's true. One can only surmise that the inner world of Chris Kyle was barren as the desert. That part, I blame the sources material, his autobiography. This is not a guy I would have wanted to know or with whom have had drinks.

If people thought Chris Kyle was a great guy on the basis of this film, then they're probably mentally deficient.

All Disquiet On The Iraqi Front

Back in my 20s, I had a hunch that maybe my generation - the Generation X for whom this blog is written - would get by without a war. That unlike the Baby Boomer generation that was saddled with the Vietnam War, Gen X would merely be drawn to minor conflicts like Grenada or even Panama where overwhelming US supremacy made for short, sharp, one-sided affairs. This was true even of the Gulf war, waged to evict Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait with a definite, self-imposed finish line. Then, the George W. Bush administration befell this earth and the rest is what we have of this miserable 21st Century so far.

The Iraq and Afghan wars became the wars for Gen X. And it has been much worse for Gen X than it was for the Baby Boomers for the single reason that both wars have driven America into the deepest debt, and the whole world economy has been dragged down by America's debt.

The war in both Afghanistan and Iraq were put on credit, so to speak as the Bush Administration went into deficit to fight 2 wars it had not financed, and then cut taxes for the rich. By the time he left office, he had given rise to the Global Financial Crisis as well as a crazy amount of national debt. Because what we borrow today subtracts from what we earn tomorrow, essentially the Bush Administration spent the money to be earned by Gen X.

The question then becomes what exactly did the Bush Administration buy with that debt. So far it seems it bought sweet fuck all. Thus it seems incredibly small potato stakes to be arguing whether this film is pro-war or not. The real question is, how on earth is anybody going to legitimate the value in the Iraq War?  Iraq is where our generation got sold down the river together with the future, for a song.

So with all that, the film singularly fails to answer the question, was the Iraq misadventure with all the chaos, mayhem, vitriol, divisions it unleashed, and the political acrimony that has resulted in our polity, the death and destruction... was it really worth it? If all we have to take away is that this guy in Fallujah killed lots of Iraqi combatants, semi-combatants, hemi-combatants and hemi-demi-semi-parital-almost-noncombatants through his great marksmanship, is that all that great? Is this film going  to be the equivalent epitaph to the Iraq War that 'All Quiet On The Western Front' was to World War I? Seems really striking in its paucity to me.

'Begin Again'

The Music Biz In The 21st Century

Surprisingly, there seems to be a music biz worth making movies about, leftover in this decade of the 21st Century. It's almost quaint how you can re-run the tropes of a 70s-style 'a star is born' sort of story line and give it a twist.

Keira Knightly as a singer-songwriter in search of an earnest, authentic expression plays off against a down and out gonzo-looking label boss and producer played by Mark Ruffalo. All sorts of things could go wrong with such a set up and I was dead cared of watching because you can just imagine how awkward a rom-com could get when music is involved.


Spoiler alert, because well, it's hard to talk about this one without talking about the spoiling sorts of things.

What's Good About It

Let's start with the good news- it's not a Rom Com. The bad news? I think it's an ill-formed musical.
In any case, it passes the time nicely enough. Mark Ruffalo's character and Keira Knightly's character don't exactly end up as a couple and that's good enough for me. It smacks of a bit of integrity even.

The handful of songs around which the story evolves are actually good. They're not the kind of songs or arrangements I'm a fan of, but they're surprisingly smart enough to keep you watching and listening.

What's Bad About It

Quite a number of scenes go by as music montage sequences which makes part of the film indistinguishable from a cheesy indie hipster film clip. It's as if the director doesn't really want to delve into the emotional issues, he wants to short hand it with the songs. The songs are good, but the movie-side of things sort of comes off the boil at times. 

I also don't buy the band coming together in a matter of scenes thing. I guess it's a personal prejudice based on my own life experiences but bands take a long time to gel even with good musicians playing in them. It's seductive watching scenes where the music just comes together, but it may be the least realistic thing about this whole exercise. 

Also, the character backstory of Mark Ruffalo's label boss-cum-producer makes no sense. You can't tell if he got kicked out of his marriage for being a drunk or being obstinate, but then the back story turns out to be something different and then you scratch your head wondering if he would have ended up so down and out. I can handle lack of reality with the band thing, but I can't really handle a character's backstory being this unbelievable. 

What's Interesting About it

The film offers up a slice of the discourse to do with artistic integrity and authenticity as a public figure. Being a film, it's busy demolishing the notion that any recording artist in recent memory is anything but confected, manufactured and handled. The music, on theatre hand was making its case for a posture of authenticity hard. I'm not a big fan of these really girlie songs, but certainly I can see how we've come to this point where songs have to be sickeningly earnest and emotionally bare. 

There's an interesting bit towards the beginning where Mark Ruffalo's character is listening to demo CDRs in his car and we get snippets of music - and the sentiment behind all of these songs are either bad, stupid or wrong. It is frustrating to be the artist submitting your demo work, but it is also frustrating to be subjected to them. The world is full of unwanted music. And yet the movie progresses with the notion that the world needs more music.

'Lone Stars'

Every album has a flagship sort of song and this song is the central number of this movie. On the soundtrack, I imagine it's the main song they play 3-4 times as they do in the film. What's interesting about it is that it has 4 versions that come and go and they never feel like the same song. This is because Keira Knightly sings her version with a wispy-girly voice in C-sharp and Adam Levine sings his in C with a falsetto in the verse. The semitone difference and different registers makes it just enough to make them sound quite unalike as songs. It took me until the third rendition to realise they were singing the same song over and over again but in different keys.
Up to that point I thought the songwriter had some patterns he liked repeating in his work.

Anyway, there's a really tricky little move in the verse where the vamping is between the IV chord with a major7th and the III chord minor with a 9th; and this obscures the I chord for a very long time. It's quite like 'Flame Trees' by Cold Chisel that way. Very jazz-influenced writing in a way and also strategic in building the interesting arrangement out of fairly mundane instruments.

The chorus is a I-IVvamp until it come to a change the the II chord, but then the II chord modulates to the minor II and then goes to the V. It's really clever and artful songwriting but there's no way it was composed on guitars. I sat there wondering which chord was getting the old major to minor key thing before resolving on the V.
Again, the songwriter was pretty tricky there and it's worth mentioning as one of the more interesting things in this movie. 

Silly Love Songs

Quite some time ago, I hit a moment where I had no more to write about love, in a song. For all the greatness of it, there's only so much you can write about love. The pain and suffering that comes from having your heart broken offers up a few more aspects, but in the long run, one finds oneself unable to contribute any new insight into the phenomenon worth singing about. The'Fuck-Off' song on the other hand offers a lot more hope. And so in this film we see a splendid 'Fuck-off' song - which led me to believe that  whoever was writing the songs for this movie was actually quite a deft and experienced songwriter. 

Recording In The Streets

I think the idea of doing this recording in the streets of New York thing is a lot better than how it would actually turn out. It's hard recording anything in public spaces. This is why even the most spontaneous live albums have overdubs. So, ten points for the visually arresting idea but it's just entirely unbelievable.

You can record great demos in a rehearsal studio with a couple of good microphones. That's different. Most rehearsal spaces are dismal, dark, unattractive spaced only fit for rock musicians and desperate rats.  And it take a really desperate rat to like them. Hence you can see why the film makers opted with the fanciful notion. 

I do give it points; it is cool. 

Quick Shots - 20/Jan/2015

I'm (Most Definitely Not) With Stupid

I figure I'm inadvertently coming back a lot to the book by Bernard Keane and Helen Razer, simply because it's causing bit of a stir in the media where it was lobbed as a bomb. It's a breezy read that does a philosophical survey of notions that have contributed to our gridlock of ideological positions and presentations of bogus cultural arguments. Mostly - I would have to say with a bit of a smirk - it reads exactly like the tome written by University of Sydney alumni. To that end, Jason Wilson at the guardian had this bit to say this week:

She thinks that feminism has lost its proper (narrow) focus — “the masculine matter of violence and the feminine matter of poverty” — and has fallen prey to the stupid idea that it “can be advanced through accounts of … lived experience”. She argues that the “safe spaces” of feminist and queer activism are now rigid zones of speech-and-thought policing. Postmodern relativism (Derrida’s fault!) has led us to thinking that what’s on television has political significance.  

In my observation, queer and feminist activists do a lot more than swap stories and watch TV, and in any case, Razer relies on an evaluative distinction between “real” and “symbolic” activism that seems inadequate in an age of information economies and mediated politics. Her depiction looks suspiciously like the straw-man we find in the work of other soi-disant lefties with largely reactionary audiences, like Brendan O’Neill and the rest of the “Living Marxism” crew. It’s not helped by the fact that much of Razer’s account is developed on the basis of things that happened in the 1990s.

This is a period she seems obsessed by, mining it for cultural references, intellectual controversies, and above all, anecdotes. For someone who disputes the value of personal stories, her intellectual case rests a lot on her own biographical experiences, especially those she had at the University of Sydney in the early part of that decade. Indeed, both authors were there at the same time. One is struck again by how much of Australian political debate is framed by (and constrained by) grudges and opinions acquired in Camperdown decades ago.

Otherwise, Wilson's column is a complaint that the book is mean towards lesser voices in the media scrum and is somewhat elitist. I'm no reactionary, but I figure I may as well state my disagreement here.

I happen to think Razer's issue with identity politics is actually more profound than Wilson's account of it. Indeed, it might be the biggest grenade lobbed toward the kind of studied posturing of bureaucrats and media commentators since Susan Faludi's 'Stiffed'. Razer's fairly simple analysis is that the urge to narrativise our personal stories into universal lessons is in fact a delusional attempt to draw the universal from something specific that may not have an universal point contained within it. And thus the bloated self-aggrandising subjective sense of self that goes with identity politics.

Helen Razer is very specific in how she mounts her argument, and it comes down to the simple fact that the bloated subjective appears to offer us handles for understanding other people, but is in fact a cul de sac of misunderstanding the problem. We are not object lessons in teachable life-experiences any more than we are our cars or jobs or bank account or vacations. Yes, Helen Razer arrives at the discarding of identity just like the space monkeys in 'Fight Club'. By doing so, she argues she can discard the stupid distraction of subjective narratives that are not in fact universals. i.e. you are not a unique beautiful snow flake, you are part of the all-singoing, all-dancing crap of the world, as per 'Fight Club'.

And maybe this is the thing. Maybe the University of Sydney student experience was always going to drive its students down an exploration of identity politics, given how half of the philosophy faculty was dedicated to unearthing the personal identity issues and making them political while the other half was busily working on a central state materialist epistemology and backing out of metaphysics. As Helen Razer puts it, the personal-is-political credo only takes you to the heart of stupid where we assign blame to a world we perceive to be arrayed against 'us' as an individual.

Personally, I don't care where it comes from, I find great validation in the idea that the bloated subjective attempting to draw out universal lessons from personal experience is a con, and the repetition of which is Stupid. We all should be better than just boasting on our badges or complaining upon our circumstance and happenstance. Yes, it is rather green and raw and undergraduate in its topic, but just as raw greens are healthy to eat, such discussions are necessary and good.

Jason Wilson's complaint that it is lacking in generosity misses the great gift the chapter gives us. It gives us the freedom not to be trapped by our own and everybody else's bloated subjective for once. To be us without the identity politics is actually liberating. It is the holy grail of existence to find footing in just being, absent of identity politics. Wilson's complaint could just as easily be dismissed as paternalism as it can be dismissed as his own personal anecdote.

Really, there is a lot of stupidity based on identity politics floating about, and it deserves to be pointed at and ridiculed for what it is.

We Want More Middlebrow?

Walk-off HBP sent me this link this morning which is worth picking over. It's essentially in praise of middlebrow and the suggestion that the Australian Film industry powers-that-be could do more by producing a film like 'The Water Diviner', more often.

According to the latest figures available, local films were tracking at a disastrous 2.3 percent share of the Australian box office in September 2014, the second lowest figure since 1977. Good reviews for some local titles made little or no difference. Neither did the industry’s relatively recent shift in emphasis to genre films. Witness the instant collapse of such touted titles as These Final Hours (science fiction), The Babadook (horror), Felony (crime) and The Little Death (sex comedy). 

Yet it’s not true that all Australian films failed to draw audiences to cinemas. Apart from the notable exception of Wolf Creek 2 (a campy sequel to a hit horror movie), last year’s most popular local (or part-local) films with Australian audiences fell into the middle ground: The Railway Man, a British-Australian co-production starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth, and Tracks, featuring Mia Wasikowska as the camel-trekker Robyn Davidson. 

Tracks’ $2 million-plus earnings reflected its relatively ‘arty’ exploration of a difficult character while its widescreen spectacle and literary connections anchored it into the middle ground as a reasonably marketable property. The Railway Man’s more impressive $7 million meanwhile reflected its star power and foreign locations (Burma and the UK – I’d be surprised if many viewers were even aware it was an Australian co-production).

You only need to see how the British film industry successfully carves out an audience in the teeth of competition from US blockbusters to see what too many Australian filmmakers and federal and state funding agencies are doing wrong in terms of winning over audiences.

Well... It's nice to know that critics still care but 2.3% market share is simply a terrible figure that reflects years of neglect and distrust more than anything else. If such figures are to be believed, then things are more dire, the audience numbers more dismal and the state of the industry is generally speaking, crap. Pandering more to middle-class prejudices won't necessarily bring the audience back. As being nowhere goes, we've sure come a long way towards oblivion.

Quick Shots - 18/Jan/2015

'The Ghostwriter'

I missed this one back in 2010. I let it slide because it looked not terribly thrilling.
Watching it now, it seems very prescient and relevant.
Basically, since the film came out it's become clear that the Coalition of Willing leadership of Anglophone nations - USA, UK and Australia - tacitly or overtly condoned torture. And so it is entirely within the realm of possibility that the said leadership might find themselves at the Hague.

The other interesting idea in this film is that the UK leadership was being manipulated by the CIA as a 'foreign asset'. The recent events in Australia surrounding the 'Rudd-Removal' in 2010 and the murky role of Senator Mark Arbib who, according to leaked documents was one of those foreign assets, makes this film a compelling bit of viewing.

It's a film that read the fault lines in politics very well. I was surprised.


'The Legend of Hercules'

Hollywood being totally unoriginal at times managed to come out with two movies about the muscle-bound greek demigod. This one is the lesser film which attempts a kind of super-natural events infused realism which makes no sense whatsoever.

It's a cruddy film. Only watch this film in a movie double with the Dwayne Johnson movie as a joke. Watch this first. Then watch the Dwayne Johnson. That way you're working up and not down.

If nothing else it tells me that I've become very jaded with the run of the mill action film and probably not the best person to be voicing opinions. But what the hey. It's a borderline terrible film, but straddling the side worse than terrible.




'Hercules'

A big Samoan dude playing a big Greek dude. this one is better than the other one in as much as the Rock is more interesting on the screen than Kellan Lutz. Same old stuff. Hercules is strong! No surprises.

Both films are beset by very strong oedipal complex story lines which culminate in the killing of fathers. I guess it's all the Greek thing that inevitably summons up the Oedipal complex as the central tragedy. It's very deep in Western culture. Both these Hercules films seem to drown in that depth.

If nothing - nothing - else, this film has a bit more joy in it.




The Grand Master

Wong Kar-Wai's kung-fu movie. Very arty, not very exciting. Has Ip-Man as a character in it but it's hard to say it's really about him. Wong Kar-Wai is a great director but that doesn't mean he can direct action. His own artistic instincts to work every scene for lush lighting and sensual visuals sort of undercuts the need-for-speed inherent in martial arts movies.

Tony Leung is very understated. He's quite like a Hong Kong Kevin Costner with the same kind of perpetual deadpan delivery. It looks like it works better because we're busy reading subtitles but maybe it's just something added (as opposed lost) in translation.


Zhang Zi-Yi is still the gal.

Flip-Flop Tony

Making Sense Of Tony Abbott

One of the things that makes Tony Abbott's government seem terrible in one way (there are many) is the ideological baggage he has carried with him from Opposition into office. In particular has been this histrionic insistence that the Carbon 'Tax' was a terrible burden on the economy and how he has characterised its repeal as a great political victory - which dove tails with his statement that "Climate Change is Complete Crap". The Mining Tax gets a similar sort of, almost idiotic reduction of notions, right across the board where surpluses are categorically good and deficits are categorically bad, and coal is good and industries protected by tariffs are bad and so on. That there isn't a nuanced policy decision that can't be bludgeoned into stupidity with his ideological baggage.

However there is an entirely separate aspect to Tony Abbott's government and in particular Tony Abbott that gets missed is that he flip-flops pretty hard on all these ideologically charged policies. It is is as if he's dedicated to running these dreadful policies up the flagpole at least once, gauging how negatively the electorate responds, and if it's bad enough, he flip-flops away form the position. Case in point is the medicare co-payment that was one o the surprises in the May budget (which of course didn't pass), which he then backed down, only to spring on the $20 reduction for bulk billing, which he also then pulled when the furore reached a crescendo.

Abbott basically wants to hoe into Medicare and universal healthcare for largely ideological reasons - even though he tries to dress it up in fiscal terms - and he's made two runs at it; but in the face of electorate backlash, he's had to pull it both times. This is where we start to see a different kind of politician. Tony Abbott may indeed be a bigger opportunist with no particular beliefs than a committed ideologue. The record is in the public for us to see. Malcolm Turnbull has reported to us that Tony Abbott flip-flopped twice on climate change, going so far auto describe himself as a weathervane. Whatever the strengths of his political persona might be, contrary to the presentation, he's hardly the kind of politician you would call a man of conviction.

What is emerging instead is a man who is rather ad hoc about the issues as they come and how he deals with them; who is also a master at contorting himself into suiting the prevailing winds of public anger. Otherwise it is nigh impossible to make sense of politician who slammed the ALP government for 1 broken promise, but then proceeds to break a dozen of his own promises once in government, and further more flip-flops twice on a point of policy which wasn't even contested at the election only 16 months ago.

When you add it all up, you get the picture of a man who is so much more of an opportunist than any man of conviction. So much so that we might have to take his professed ideological hardline as something he adopted along the way to get ahead; and maybe he doesn't even have those as non-negotiable. He's just been bluffing us really hard into thinking they're non-negotiable.

Indeed, he might very well say anything at any given time on any given topic - and try to pass it off as policy. Which is exactly what he did when he was challenged about his accomplishment as the Minster for Women. It's pretty psychopathic - and perhaps unsurprising because it is more than likely our political process and system rewards a certain kind of - almost pathological - opportunism. In Tony Abbott's case, these traits are very pronounced, and it's getting harder by the day to push the thought out of one's head. More importantly, what we're seeing is a guy who is nowhere near as steadfast as he lets on.

The problem is, if there's one thing worse than a man of conviction with all the wrong convictions, it is a man who has no convictions but is willing to do and say anything to grasp for power and keep it. Australia is in deep trouble under this government which managed to deter investment in renewable energy so much so, there's been an 88% drop in investments into renewables in Australia. That minus 88% tells you this government is not only doing a crappy job of controlling emissions, it's deterring business. The play at ideological purity about not handing out welfare entitlements has amazingly resulted in car manufacturing retreating out of Australia. He's hurting his own constituency for what reason? We could put some positive light on such things if he was going somewhere with this, but all indications are that they are collateral damage in a massive game of bluff he's running on the populace. He's doing all this so we don't find out that the doesn't really believe any of it.

So, if you thought it was terrible living in an Australia run by a terrible conservative ideologue, think again. Because deep down, he seems to have no principles whatsoever.

Being Charlie Hebdo Part 2

The Aftermath of Crazy Is More Craziness

Pleiades sent me an article by Guy Rundle where he argues that the western ideology is so bereft and bankrupt of ideas, when it argues in principle, it ends up arguing something incoherent. Instead of heading for a transformative idea, our commentators and politicians alike sink back to old Left-Right partisanship, seeking opportunistic angles to score points within our own polity.

It's content behind a pay wall so I can't link to it, but here's something worth bringing up.

The Right is falling apart as a political formation so fast you’d need stop-action photography to catch the process. Bruce Petty was quite correct, in his cartoon this week, to draw the Right sloping to the drawing board to sketch out a new plan for surveillance and control. But he was wrong I think, to draw it as a great beast. It’s more a Caspar Milquetoast/Monty Burns figure, barely able to hold up the pencil. The failure of Iraq, free-wheeling capitalism, the collapsed legitimacy of Western Right governments, and increasing wars between its liberal and conservative factions sees it without a program, coherent worldview, common sense, or much cheer as far as I can see. 

The Hebdo massacre brought all these contradictions to the fore. Hebdo’s nihilism is actually culturally corrosive, as conservatives charge such obscene desacrilising with being. Conservatives know that a viable culture is a closed system to a degree, and unless it has pinion points -- usually religious -- which are not themselves, by matter of custom, subject to a general back-and-forth, then it is quickly in trouble. This week, sundry idiots have been suggesting that "free speech is part of our cultural tradition".
What nonsense. 

Until the 1960s, hundreds of books, films and plays were banned, even in the US, as way of maintaining the limits of what was publicly talked of, in terms of sex, religion and the like. That maintained a Christian division between profane body and sacred soul. Once abolished, Christian Western culture collapsed. A transitional period lasted into the 1990s. Remember the furore over Madonna’s hokey video "Papa Don’t Preach?". Remember when the porn industry was some marginal thing, and not another career option?

Yes, does anybody remember the furore over things like 'Piss Christ?'

How about the PMRC/Mothers of Prevention episode when a bunch of conservative mothers formed a committee to censor rock music in the 1980s? And Frank Zappa had to testify to Congress?

As Frank would say, "I mean seriously, folks! This is altogether a ridiculous state of affairs!"
It's all well and good that the Conservatives like David Cameron and Tony Abbott are thundering that  Freedom of Expression is our way of life but you sort of wonder if this is because it's just bloody expedient. As somebody who was on the side that supported 'Piss Christ and liked listening to Frank Zappa and certainly never yielded from the position of letting gangsta rappers kill as many cops in their songs, I find it tremendously strange that the very same conservatives now want to stand up for Freedom of Expression. Yay for Free Speech, it's finally self-evident even to the dumbest Conservatives.

You know what? I somehow doubt Cory Bernardi is stocking up on Gangsta Rap music on his iTunes. Anyway, Rundle goes on to have a hack at the Left too:

But much of what remains of the organised Left has revealed its own exhaustion and bankruptcy too. Though Left figures were not the first to repeat the "this has nothing to do with Islam" meme -- Merkel and Cameron joining Hollande in repeating that mantra -- many were quick to adopt it, and to focus on a revival of Islamophobia due to such an event. 

The event itself was barely glanced at, not even in an analytic way. The only response to the ludicrous pseudo-politics of declaring for free speech when no one had declared against it, was to reconstitute Western Arab-originated/descended Muslims as a whole, a subject of history, and then become their representative against oppression. The old, old accordian, got out for one last wheezing squeezeplay. But the wave of attacks against Muslims failed to eventuate. Maps of such events showed about 20 such, not good, but no Muslim-pogrom. 

It was cautioned that the attacks would create a surge of support for the French anti-immigration party Front National. But there was no sign of that (though it may come), giving a strong suspicion that the FN had reached near-saturation level. Charlie Hebdo’s nihilistic style was taken as racism, its physical depiction of Arabs vastly exaggerated. Some jokes against the Right, using their language, were taken as witless Bill-Leakesque curmudgeonliness (the eternal fate of the satirist - if Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ were published today it would have a beyondblue tagline, a body image trigger warning at the top, and a "Visit Ireland" google ad pop up). This shoehorned French political style into Anglosphere political divisions, where such a robust space for pre-identity politics Leftism has largely ceased to exist. Implicit was a causal model, which constructed Charlie Hebdo as having a FOX News-ish right-wing, pseudo-populist style, which it was using to rag on racial-religious minorities only -- this effectively accusing it of a certain naivete as regards race and oppression, with lethal results. As Daily Kos’ selection of some of Hebdo’s anti-imperialist cartoons showed, that wasn’t the case at all. 

But the causal/determinative model dies hard. And one popular article tweeted around was one about the "anomie of the banlieues". Ah, the anomie (i.e. lack of meaning) of the banlieues (the featureless, high-rise housing around Paris and other cities) -- Shift-F1 on the keyboard of a certain type of feature writer.

There's been a growing opinion that maybe Charlie Hebdo with its crude, rude and pointed satire in some way had it coming, and that no, some of want to say 'Je ne suis pas Charlie' because some ideological sticking point makes it "none-of-my-concern". Which is probably more honest but also goes to show why the identity politics being exercised is (as Helen Razer would have it...) Stupid.

The added absurdity of arguing that Islamism is not to blame in the face of people who yelled "Allahu Akbar" after they shot 12 people is, you know, pretty Islamophilic - as in, an unnecessary love of things Islamic, - to excuse that crime on some level.

Nobody in their right mind is pinning the blame on all the Muslims the world over for what happened. Yet the guys who did it are saying they did it for Allah. So somewhere in the discussion of ideas, we have to tackle Islamism and ask it some probing questions. To date, the argument the Left-side commentators is mounting as whole is a kind of "it was just provocation by the magazine when they insulted their faith". In other words, simultaneously abandoning Freedom of Expression and condoning violent action. If we accept that, we're essentially accepting the brothers arguing "look what you made me do."
I don't think we're ready to dumb ourselves down to that level for the sake of political correctness. At least, I'm sorry, I'm not going there. And why is the Left suddenly acting Stupid?

None of this is going to play out properly without a major argument with Islamism. In Northern Iraq, it's being contested with lethal force. They are winning in parts because they have a lot of conviction in their bullshit. If we are to contest our ideas against them, we'd better get our shit straight. If it is going to be Freedom of Expression and that's where we plant a flag, it's a good start. Somehow I share Guy Rundle's doubts that what we have is just massive cognitive dissonance and a bare cupboard for transformative ideas.

More Rail Please

How Bad Are We At Rail?

A decade ago they did a survey of urban rail systems around the world. Predictably CityRail in Sydney cam last in a list of about 40 cities and Geneva came first. So they sent the best and brightest from the ranks of CityRail to Geneva to study how they made it so good. Upon his arrival the Swiss showed him around and explained to him how they did things. Alarmingly, he countered by telling them how they did things better in Sydney, as if the Swiss would be interested in how the worst rail system in the world did things...

Things actually haven't improved all that much in Sydney since. Yes, they've introduced the Opal card and a few extensions have been added on to the network but neither the immensely complacent ALP government that presided over the mess for over a decade (that would be you, Bob Carr!) and the Coalition government - which is even more beholden to general construction companies and their lobbyists - has barely scratched surface of needs. Of course the latter have come up with the fiasco we will come to know as Wasteconnex, and is pouring billions into it, but that is almost like the potassium benzoate icing on the Frogurt.

You could almost forgive the enthusiasm for more tollways if it was matched with an enthusiasm for building a metro network that actually worked. You could understand the utter disinterest in building a metro network if it was matched with an equally similar, utter disinterest in building tollways. As things stand, successive NSW governments of both parties have happy committed to what amounts to worst of both worlds. Worse still, they always couch the expenditure as an either/or proposition and somehow the bidding always goes the way of building more tollways (and tunnels!).

Now our State and Federal governments are so fixed in their ways and set on their contracts that we are committed to even more roads instead of much in the way of rail. You do wonder when things will begin to improve. That leads me to this article here today:

In numerous studies, international academics have demonstrated that there is a certain amount of time people are willing to spend travelling each day. That is their travel-time budget.

People may exceed their budget in the short-term.

But over a longer period, if they have to spend more than about 80 minutes travelling, they will make changes to their lives to fall back within their travel-time budget.

And if people start going under their travel-time budget – Seventy Minutes Plus or Minus Ten is the name of a recent review of the literature in this area by Asif Ahmed and Peter Stopher of the University of Sydney – they will probably find other trips on which to spend their travel time.

This seems to pass the commonsense test.

If, suddenly, your work commute drops to 10 minutes because you start living near your office, you might then be more likely to drive, cycle or walk to a better set of shops in the evening.

Now when you combine this concept of a travel time budget – we all have a limited number of minutes we are prepared to spend travelling – with the demonstrably worse congestion on our roads, an explanation for the drop in driving kilometres emerges.

"If the budget of travel time is the same and your travel time is mainly going up because of congestion, you are not able to cover longer distances because you don't want to spend much more time in your car," says Michiel Bliemer, Professor in Transport at the University of Sydney.

"That maybe explains this trend: if your vehicle is not getting faster on the road, you cannot cover longer distances," he says.

So what are the implications of this?

One response would be to build more roads.

Yes, that's right, more roads. Except there's a mathematical problem with more roads: Roads are inherently in support of a city expanding 2 dimensionally. As the city sprawls across a plane, roads go with it. Occasionally lifting up a level or going underground but essentially supporting a two dimensional schema.

The problem is as urban density grows, it tends to be three dimensional. Not only do people start living in closer quarts, they do this in high-rise blocks going upwards. The demand then becomes moving more people for shorter distances instead of moving fewer people across greater distances. i.e. the demands of an increasingly dense population centre is cubing (^3). Roads can only ever service it in squares (^2). No wonder roads with cars get congested.  

The congestion is so bad that there's a garden suburb on the edge of the sprawl where people can't get out of their driveways in the morning. The road is congested on the garden suburb local roads, all the way to the entry on to the M5. The M5 is now a lot wider going both directions but it still has the problem that the heavier traffic comes to a crawl, the closer it gets to Sydney. Again, it's just the maths of it - but the people who make the decision that roads should be built and expanded don't address the fact that all it does is it moves the congestion further out and closer in. 

Similarly, the government is under fire for not having built greater pubic transport infrastructure for all the high density dwellings going upon the inner city. It's all very nice to put the high density dwellings closer to the city centre but if it takes them 45minutes to get to work in the city, you haven't exactly helped things at all. 

The fact of the matter - and I keep bringing this up - is that the people who make these decisions are in the pockets of the general construction company lobby. So the general construction companies are happy to build the high density apartments, AND the roads that go out with the sprawl, but because they don't stand to make a dime on the railways, those crucial transport infrastructures don't get built. 

Worse still, the vast majority of these people live in suburbs where they can commute by car easily, so they don't see the problem as it really stands. And I won't name names because these people are trigger-happy with their defamation suits, but some of these people are people who ought to know better; but I guess business is what it is, and the public good doesn't come into it at all.  That's why they're giving us Wasteconnex without giving us a loser look as to what is in it. Some people are going to get very rich out of Wasteconnex, at the expense of the public purse, and nobody's exactly stopping them.

That's how we always end up with more tollways and not enough rail. 

Being Charlie Hebdo

Islamophobia Isn't Like Homophobia

In the years since I wrote this entry here 8years ago, the world has become just that little bit more volatile. Back then Islamophobia was a new word. Now it has gained currency - much in the way that a general acceptance of such things as Anti-Terror laws have become acceptable. I guess etymologically speaking Islamophobia would mean a fear of Islam. It doesn't mean hatred of Islam, but if we are to believe Yoda, fear leads to anger and anger leads to hate so we're two steps away from hating on Islam if we admit we're phobic, under that schema.

Based on the recent events in Paris where 12 journalists and cartoonists were shot to death by terrorists, it seems to be a legitimate fear to possess.

8 years ago, I joked that the term likens Islam to spiders, heights and homosexuals. I kind of stand by that. I'm not a big fan of the way the term is bandied about in shows like Q&A as if the term actually has some definitional - and therefore epistemological - truth to it. I wince every time I hear some talking head on the TV mentioning it, whereas the term Homophobia never struck me as odd in the same way. It really is a little like Muslims want to get a pass on the same identity-politic basis as LGBT people - even though their own religion wants to stone LGBT people. I smell hypocrisy there.

I guess whoever coined the term did so in the hope that if you could identify the phobia, you can smoke out the prejudices; which is exactly what the term homophobia has done for the gay community. If anything the construction of the term homophobia is even more precarious than Islamophobia because what we really mean by a homophobe is not somebody who fears homosexuality, but somebody who has gone straight on to hating on homosexuals. Even allowing for the more precarious construction, the term homophobia has allowed the world to move in to a direction where there is genuine emancipation of the LGBT community so in some sense there is hope yet for the term Islamophobia.

Be that as it may, the problem of all this is that terms like 'Islamophobia' force you into accepting a version of their identity politics, even if you don't accept identity politics at all. Identity politics is a pretty crappy tool. You can only claim so much ground arguing on behalf of the specific conditions of your birth. You can argue a position right up to equality, but arguing for exceptions is going to get you in trouble. Identity politics is at its core, pretty dumb. Ultimately it's the business of showing your scars and saying "somebody pay up or else back off".

I'm sorry, I'm done buying bullshit. I don't want more identity politics - my own included - when there already is enough in the world. I want more honest appraisals of what real equality means and how it gets achieved. And I dothink it gets achieved through such things as Freedom of Expression (heck, as much as it gets held back by religious dogma, but that's a separate topic). So if anybody calls you an Islamophobe, your answer should be "I'm not stupid enough to buy into your identity politics". If they shoot you for that answer, I guess that would be the point. They want the conversation to go to the Sword or the Koran.

All the same, the claim is that mocking the Prophet is simply not acceptable. That it's somehow reasonable for fatwahs to be put upon Salman Rushdie or that it is somehow understandable that people get so angered they go and shoot a bunch of cartoonists.

The law applies to us equally. There's no scope for identity politics based exceptions. That's how "equal in the eyes the law" works. So if somebody goes around shooting people, regardless of the perceived provocation, they have go before the law. And if they argue in court that cartoons were enough provocation to commit acts of murder, then they may find society and its values are dead set against you. And this would have nothing to do with their religion being belittled or persecuted. This is basic law-&-order kind of stuff. There isn't going to be some exception in French Law or European Law that is going to make this kind of thing okay.

If holding to equality makes somebody an Islamophobe, then maybe the fears are well-founded.

Takes Two To Terrorise

This business of shooting the editorial staff at Charlie Hebdo could have been carried out by once person. In which case we might have involved the lone-nut theory; yes, the same one I invoked with the Martin Place Siege. The, "that's not an act of terror because it's just one person." argument. I've been wondering a little about that call but I'm a little less certain of it now. I am now thinking that maybe we have a fear of the possibility that terror acts carried out by one suggests each and every individual is potentially a terror threat. And if that were true we would opt to abandon trust and liberty and give into our darkest xenophobic needs.

If anybody on their own is a terror cell then we have to start building a category outside of the individual and say "all muslims are potentially terrorists". It flies in the face of our own tolerance to say such things. So we opt with saying the lone gunman is a nutter. It may not even be true, when properly diagnosed.

Two brothers on the run with guns however constitutes a legitimate terror cell. This seems to be our acceptance of things base on events at the Boston Marathon as well as this week's Charlie Hebdo massacre. I guess it takes two people to have a conversation, which could then be characterised as a conspiracy. A lone person talking to himself is by most social counts, more crazy than conspiratorial.

'We' Do Terrible Things - But Do We Deserve What We Get?

One of the discussions I had this week in the aftermath involved talking about what the Colonial powers of the 19th century - that is Western Europe and Russia and the USA - still do today in the middle east. For a start the USA supports Israel and Israel isn't exactly a joy for the Arab world. Then there are the puppet regimes with dictators that dominated the second half of the Twentieth century. Name like Hussein, Gaddafi, Mubarak, Assad, tell us exactly how problematised the Arab world has been for a overlong time. Those countries have fallen into various states civil distress and in all these cases they offer up terrible choices.

We found out that much as we dislike Saddam Hussein, his government was stable enough to keep the waring factions from erupting into violence. We found out in Egypt that the alternative to a military government was the Muslim Brotherhood who essentially ruled in a way that made things worse, and whose democratic credentials quickly paled. Libya is oner-reported but it doesn't seem like things are getting better there, and Syria is in a terrible civil war where the enemy of our enemy ashore Assad, is ISIL. Even without the issue of religion - ignoring it outright, even - the Arab world is filled with difficult political issues.

The argument offered to me this week was that 'we' in the West are dropping bombs and insulting their prophet. That we should be more understanding when they rise up and exact their vengeance. As if Charlie Hebdo and its irreverent cartoons were just too much to bear; that this magazine constituted just provocation.

I have no problem with the notion that their grievances are legitimate. I have immense difficulty accepting that the terror act in paris this week is a legitimate act of war or defiance. At some point we are responsible or our own actions. These guys knew what they were doing. It doesn't matter that bombs are falling Syria or drone strikes are happening in North Pakistan or that Iraq and Afghanistan are in strife, if you live in Paris (or Boston or Sydney).
Yes, it's political. But it's shitty politics.

There Is A Problem With Islamism

This is hard to write because I have Muslim friends, but you're allowed to disagree with friends. My own reading of the Koran is mostly idle interest and morbid curiosity. There are parts of history where Islam found tremendous high points worthy of admiration and awe. Even so I'm really troubled by the way it keeps expressing itself in the contemporary world with violent bursts.

Bill Maher was seen in an interview talking about the problem of Islam as a religion and in it he has an interesting point. This is a religion where they behead people in Mecca for falling-out of religion. It's violently hostile to secular thinking. As Maher notes, it's amazing the world doesn't look at this a bit closer and harder. It would be like crucifying people in the Vatican forecourt for lapsing as Catholics.

Islam is ideologically opposed to our tolerance, even of Islam itself. Even though we talk about moderate muslims who are not violent benighted majority the 1billion-plus believers on the planet, at its very core is this beheadings at Mecca. There are crazy off-shoots of all the religions. Christianity alone has things like the Ku-Klux Klan and the Westboro Baptists Church but they are fringe. There are militant Buddhists in Burma rounding up and persecuting Muslims in Myanmar - but that is fringe stuff too; in the main Buddhism at its core is temples and tourism and selling trinkets. Hinduism, and Confucianism, alike have their odd violent fringes but it's not central to the practice.

Looking into Islamism at its core is like staring in to 8th century Dark Ages thinking in the desert of Arabia. it's unflinchingly uncompromising and brutal. It's so extreme one can think we're lucky they didn't enshrine cannibalism. There isn't a heart that says "turn the other cheek". It's "mock our prophet and we come shooting."

If we are indeed small-'l' liberals, it is worth considering how tolerant one must be to tolerate that which would kill you for your tolerance. Because that's a principle at stake. Our credo for tolerance says we believe in Freedom of Expression and standing by the cartoonists who lampoon Islam. They believe it's their duty to retaliate against the words (and especially images) with violence. It keeps coming around to the same collision point. If we're strictly talking the ideas, then Islam has a problem.
Yes, we're phobic for a reason.

'The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies'

Finally, The End Of The End Of the Beginning

The second run through Middle Earth with The Hobbit movies has been harder to take with the waiting between pictures, than the first time through with Lord of the Rings. The waiting got progressively worse even though these films were brought out on schedule. 'Desolation of Smaug' finished on such a cliff-hanger, waiting for the final instalment has been teeth grinding. Added to the fact that the rather slim book got stretched out to three movies in order to contextualise the entire Lord of the Rings cycle of movies, the added plots and sub-plots made the second film all but incomprehensible its own.

Well, this was the movie to end it all and complete the cycle across 6movies. It has been nearly a decade and a half since the original Lord of the Rings movie came out, and maybe we are all exhausted by all this wondrous Tolkien imagery and pageant and battle. Peter Jackson has said he does not have any rights to the other Tolkien material, so for him, this is the end of the line with Middle Earth. Those who wish for him to continue and pick stories out of the Silmarillion know not what they ask.

Uh, no spoiler alerts for a book this old being turned into a movie.

What's Good About It

It's pretty decisive. No loose ends. Everybody gets their hacks in and some go out in a blaze of glory. It's much better than how Star Wars 'Attack of the Clones' and 'Revenge of the Sith' close out the prequel. Maybe Jackson simply is a better director than Lucas. When all is said and done with this film, you don't feel like the whole thing was a missed opportunity, but that it leads in quite well to the earlier cycle.

What's Bad About It

The locale of the battle and its many faces gets really confusing, and some parts of the battle are simply left for dead so we ca concentrate on a bunch of action around the main characters - who miraculously have no trouble going from one part of the battle to another.

Some times they're just too crazy, and you're left thinking "If they can do that, why don't they just..."
It strains incredulity even though it is fantasy. Well, you know, there's fantasy and there's fantasy...

Also, I refuse to accept that Orcs bred for war are so easily dispatched.

What's Interesting About It

It would make no sense if you don't watch at least 'Desolation of Smaug' before walking in. You can't just watch this film and have it make its own sense. It's not a bad thing if you accept that it's a piece in a series films but it was like 5hours of viewing just to get through the no.2 and no.3 films in the story line. One sort of wonders if that is the kind of film making one just has to accept that it makes no sense its own.

I guess it's not a bad thing but they should at least tell you that you'd better brush up on your Hobbit-lore before walking in. The film kicks off with Smaug hitting Laketown turning it into a sea of fire. It's spectacular but would make no sense what is at stake if you can't remember who all these people are. It's a weird film that way. It's amazing that cinema has come to accept that you can make a 2hour movie that makes no sense internally as a stand alone, and still have it as a big hit.

Smaug Buys It

It's in the book, and yes it is the way it goes but Smaug for all his CGI magnificence buys a farm rather easily. Bard's shot with the Black Arrow is quite trilling, but you get the feeling that it's a bit of a letdown. The second film might have been better if they played it through to where Bard slays Smaug, and kicked off the third film from the dissension that takes place once the treasure is secured. As it is, they spend the better part of two movies building it up and then - bang, "lucky shot sir!" - and the villain presiding over the preceding 5hours of screen time is dead.

Smaug's problem is that he doesn't hold out until the Orcs and the Goblin mercenaries and the other things with wings arrive. He ventures out on his own and gets shot down on his own before the main event. Had he waited for the Orcs and the Goblins, concentrated his fire breath weapon on the ground troops, the bad guys would have had their day. He really is a rather stupid dragon.

It did remind me of Count Dooku. Count Dooku of course puts up a great fight at the end of 'Attack of the Clones' and you're led to believe he's a mighty Sith, and then somewhere in Act I of 'Revenge of the Sith', he gets cut down rather easily by Anakin Skywalker. It leaves a similar kind of "what-the-hell-was-all-that-fuss-about?" feeling. Of course, you can blame Jackson for lumping Smaug's demise into Act I of the third film instead of Act III of the second film. You can also blame Tolkien for being a bad dramaturg. But what Tokien really wanted to write about was 'the Treasure of the Sierra Madre' where Thorin goes all Humphrey Bogart, so maybe Smaug was the big MacGuffin.

Race Politics And Tolkien Part 6

I really like this film and the other films in this cycle but here's the thing... They're really racist and racialist.

I know the book is written that way by a guy who grew up in South Arica, in a time when it was okay to think like this, but the essentialism of the description of the character makes it really hard to discuss Tolkien without going into race discourse. The strangest takeaway this time is possibly how white-European Middle Earth is, combined across 6 films. It's not Vikings where you expect everybody to be white European by dint of time and place. This is a fantasy setting.

I feel like an idiot complaining about it, but Orcs are played by Marois - essentially assigned as the other. Even then you can't tell they're Maoris with all the CGI and special effects makeup. So all the humans are white except for a token asian woman extra in there (and we won't ask how she got there in the story, it's not important!), The Dwarves who are Demi-Human, are all white; The Elves are Hyper-White, Nazi-Delight; and the Orcs' skin tone is ... ghostly pale white.

It's a film where it's somebody's fantasy that there are only white people and white people concerns front and centre. And the excuse will be, "but it's loosely based on medieval Europe, of course it's only got white people." Well what's in the East of Middle Earth? Nothing good, and then the map peters out.

Maybe back in 2001when the first LOTR film came out, this kind of conception was okay. But in 2015, it sticks out like a sore thumb that Middle Earth is white as the driven snow. Tolkien and Jackson combined, offer no positive roles for blacks, hispanics, asians, south asians, indigenous peoples and Pacific Islanders or anybody else not white. In an era when Sylvester Stallone works really hard to include Jet Li and Terry Crews into his bunch of action has-beens, is this whiteness-galore all that great?

Yet, that's what sticks out. It's a bunch of films that puts on screen just how institutional racism and exclusion works.
I'm sorry I even have to write that, but it's painfully true of the whole genre spawned by Tolkien.

Tauriel's Love For Kili

A number of people objected when I characterised the love interest between Tauriel and Kili as interspecies sex. Let me just recap something here: Tauriel isn't any white beautiful woman, she's an elf.  Kill isn't some ruggedly handsome dude that's short, he's a Dwarf. Elves and Dwarves are not the same stock of anything. It's more like if Evangeline Lilly fell in love, not with a  ruggedly handsome short dude but an Orangutan. Maybe when Tauriel sheds tears for Kili's death at the end, it is more the tears of a pet owner shedding tears for a dead pet. That hurts, that's love too. But for it to be the kind of standard heterosexual movie love interest, we're really talking Pony the Orangutan and inter-species sex.

The only reason people don't see it immediately is because two white actors are playing the role. I'd be more impressed if they made this love interest stick with a Dwarf and an Orc and an Orc played by a white woman and a dwarf played by a black man. Then watch the furore.

'Pop To Popism' - AGNSW

The Expertly Polished Turd

When I was younger, I was a lot more enthralled with Pop Art. I was - for a start - much closer to it time-wise as well as having been in NYC in the 1970s, a stone's throw from where this action was allegedly going on. There were plenty of artists enabled by the industrial possibility of art doing wild and whacky things and all these galleries I got taken to as a pre-teen was packed with modern art that didn't look like what was supposed to be, being painted. The Guggenheim was filled with art that would make you read the title and giggle. It was a time and place in history that I was most fortunate to have been exposed to as a kid.

So I was always a big fan of Pop Art in principle; Just as Roy Lichtenstein adopted comic books, The Who adopted Pop Art in theory and operation, I had an instantly workable framework from where to start my thinking on art. It put a handle on art through recognisable image genres. You could walk into art through Pop Art, not just sneak in but walk right in like you belonged.

With all that in mind, this is a wonderful exhibition that finally shows just how bankrupt those ideas were. This is an expertly curated assembly of junk culture detritus which itself was more curated than it was created. It is a soul-destroying exhibition - one which revealed once and for all the Emperor of High Art wore no clothes and may have even been dead on the throne for a very long time.

What's Good About It

It's a far reaching survey of the important artists in Pop Art. The jewels in the crown are obviously the Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein works with other recognisable names such as Rauschenberg and Hockney to round out the more famous names. It also includes closer practitioners such as Colin Lancely as well as the descendant artists like Cindy Sherman which contextualises the whole impact of the movement.

It is informative and well thought out in terms of lay out as it guides you through the history. The works are undoubtedly representative of the movement from all parts of the epoch. It is kid-friendly, art-friendly, and so well annotated, it leaves few questions.

What's Bad About It

Maybe it's a little too reverential. Certainly judging from the content, it was hardly worth the reverence afforded to it.

Also, if you look at the works not produced by the famous people, there's a lot of immensely ugly art hanging around. It's a great way to see some truly awful art, hanging in the AGNSW like it's meaningful to our civilisation. It doesn't take long to figure out that one would be misguided in thinking that these are even remotely meaningful as a Picasso or a Pollock.

What's Interesting About It

Pop Art, as it is narrativised is the story of how Artists and the consumers of High Art simply gave up in the flood of industrial images. It's not coincidental that the term graphic design came to prominence around the time Pop Art found its break through. Commercial and industrial artist and designers found their footing in the world of industrial production of things, just a the 'High Art' artists saw the train leave, leaving them behind stranded.

So instead of selling technique or aesthetic insight, a whole bunch of artists took to raiding the fruits of commercial and industrial art and sold it back to the privileged as 'Art'. Truth be told, somebody did the graphic design of the Campbell soup can for Campbell's soup; but we do not readily recall that name. Instead, Andy Warhol sold the graphic design right back to the capitalist establishment, raising it to High Art. Lichtenstein similarly raided the larder of commercial artists drawing comic books and re-couched that as 'High Art', effectively selling the merchandise right back at the people who owned the capital markets that owned the enterprises.

The point is, this can be understood as what 'sampling' was to music, obscuring the first order creativity to celebrate the second order creative act. Other people call this theft, but we'll skip this discussion for now. In this exhibition, Pop Art reveals itself as the first Post-Modern art movement that won over the market for 'High Art'. All the while this was happening, it was dressing itself up in the language of Modernism and successor to various movements before but even that can now be understood to be a kind of parody of such language which for the sake of salesmanship, got co-opted.

The subsequent critiques of these works fed an entire industry of art criticism. What becomes very apparent in this exhibition is that the language of criticism is in of itself a kind of shroud that hides the meaning. The bleeding obvious in this show is that American capitalism is invasive, exploitative, pleasurable and devoid of philosophical depth. You can readily give yourself to it because on some level it just doesn't mean anything.

Thus, when subsequent artists quote the vernacular of Warhol and Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg, it is literally 'pop eating itself'. As the exhibition comes to its closing stages putting Popism on display, they show works by Cindy Sherman which underscores the aporia and narcissism of artist-as-art-object, while Maria Kozic's 'Masterpieces' merely echoes the original Soup Can painting but claims to be the post-modern reply. The joke is that the Post Modern commentary is already implicit in the prior Warhol work, so the commentary work merely exists as a redundant raspberry. It's not exactly edifying - but somebody paid great money for this work.

I Know This Is Bolshy But...

The series of Campbell Soup prints are not the original 1962 versions. They're a set that Warhol reissued in 1968. Clearly he did it for the money. Clearly they're not the very same important Campbell Soup Cans, they're replicas/forgeries that have the single distinguishing benefit of being made by the artist himself.

So who owns these Soup Can prints? Channel Seven owner Kerry Stokes. Think about that for a moment. An Australian billionaire went and blew some money on High Art, and he bought the wrong ones. But that is exactly why Warhol did the reissue - so some unsuspecting idiot billionaire could fork out money for them and feel like they understand art or are somehow more philanthropic. Or feel something-anything.

But this is what you get when you read labels, about prints of soup cans no less.

Marilyn Ad Infinitum

The famous Marilyn Monroe screen prints were included in this exhibition. Then there are the other works, which reference the Monroe screen prints. Of course the screen prints come from a photo that Andy Warhol himself did not take. However he was willing to infinitely expand upon her face as a found image and mass produce images based upon it. The importance of Marilyn to Pop Art culminates in the 'Eyesight to the Blind' scene in the film version of 'Tommy' where there is a church dedicated to a giant idol of Marilyn in her 'Seven Year Itch' pose, holding down her skirt above the railway vent.


The weird thing about this amplification of her visage is that if you really want to understand Marilyn Monroe, you'd be better off watching the oeuvre of her films. The proliferation of the face thanks to Warhol and Pop Art and all the subsequent referencing does not begin to form a metonymy for the actress. It's a weird kind of a co-opting of a face, to then load it up with a vacant consumerist dream. Somehow this time through, seeing all the Marilyn-images rammed home the point that the exploitation of her image is quite gratuitous.

It's nice that Andy Warhol sort of immortalised a single image of Marilyn Monroe for the High Art crowd. Her own actual work immortalises her much better. Watch her films instead - it will make you happier.  It's nice that Roy Lichtenstein raises comic book art for the High Art crowd to consume. If you really want to enjoy such images, just read comic books - you'll be much happier for it. Lichtenstein's work is actually redundant except to ratify this stuff for a select crowd of moneyed bourgeoisie. Rock music doesn't need Warhol to validate it through enlisting the Velvet Underground. Go listen to a real rock band - listen to 'The Who: Live at Leeds' instead. You'll be much happier for it.

And that, is the ultimate failure of Pop Art as capital -'A' Art. It's just not as good as the stuff from which it chooses to raid and pilfer, and then ruins it by abstracting the meaning out of it. It's so wilfully dumb, it's infuriating.

Oh and Martin Sharp's 'Jimi Hendrix' gets it so wrong. Jimi was a left hander, a southpaw. How could he have shared that time and space, and heard the music, and get that wrong? It sums up the shallowness of Pop Art.