She sleeps with the fishes...well, mammals

Although I try to avoid controversial topics, like gay marriage, I have to share with you my conclusion that I could only ever answer that particular question with another question. For some time now, when asked my opinion on this subject, my best answer was that if a man can 'marry' a man, why can't he marry a goldfish? You could advance, for marrying a goldfish, every single reason that is advanced for making meaningful the 'marriage' of two men, or women. I would defy the advocates of gay marriage to advance a single valid reason against man-goldfish love. That always seemed to be my best shot at a counter-argument to gay marriage.

As usual, truth eventually trumps mere hypothesis.

Night Stalker

There are times when I wish I was one of those hot-dog citizen journalists, free to roam around like Carl Kolchak, asking private citizens all kinds of impertinent questions. If I were, I'd be riding the train down to Geelong, to speak to Mr. Graeme Angus.

Mr. Angus published a letter in the Age today (online link has expired), telling the story of an unnamed friend of his, a serious amateur photographer who recently took some sunset shots of Geelong's Shell Oil Refinery on Corio Bay. According to Mr. Angus, this friend was visited at 9.30 that same evening by two "policemen", who questioned him about his photography, cautioned him not to photograph the refinery in future, and to pass this advice on to the other members of his camera club.

By now, your BS detector is probably going wild. When people set out to tell stories like this, I do wish they would, as a courtesy to the rest of us, workshop them a bit more, before launching them on the letters page.

Since this chap wasn't nabbed on the spot, there presumably weren't any spooks or cops on the beach. In which case, how did the "policemen" who came to his house know who he was and where to find him? Spy satellites, no doubt. Or maybe that GPS tracking device located in all cameras - you mean you didn't know? And no doubt the editor of the Age will be getting an evening visit at his home from more of those "policemen", as they have published an aerial view of the facility on their website.

This is not the first time someone has tried to tell me a story like this, and my answer is always the same: in the present climate, there are any number of media outlets and public paladins who would be all over this story like Oprah on a baked ham. So take it to them: take it to Kerry O'Brien or George Negus. Take it to Radio National. Take it to the Greens or Democrats. Of course this never happens, and it isn't because of Howard's sedition laws. I'll happily bet my favourite Christmas present that the Age conducts absolutely no journalistic follow-up on this story.

Update: something about that letter niggled at me. It was the overly precise detail, when all else was swallowed in surmise, of the time when the "police" called on Mr. Angus' friend - 9:30pm, we are told. All I can say is, those spooks don't waste time. According to the letter, the sunset photos were being taken 'shortly before Christmas' - so let's say about a week ago. In this part of the world, sunset is currently around 8.45, and twilight lasts until about 9.30. So this chap barely had time to get home before the mysteriously well-informed "policemen" showed up. That 9:30 time-stamp is starting to look very much like what Pooh-Bah calls "corroborative detail, intended to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."

Critticism

Yes, that's right...critticism. That's my catchy new name for the pearls of wisdom which daily drip from the lips of ABC Radio National's Summer relief host on Breakfast, Stephen Crittenden. Get it? Crittenden...witticism...criti...oh, never mind.

Yesterday's critticism came in his review of a list of the top 100 science stories of 2005, for which his guest was longtime ABC-bubble-dweller Robyn Williams. The top story? You guessed it: global warming. As Stephen's breathless introduction put it:

"This was the year we all decided - together - that global warming was real."

Gee, really Steve? I must been out of the room, or maybe I didn't get that memo.

Halloween for grownups

I owe Steven Spielberg an apology. Having now caught up with the 'Collector's edition' of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I realize that for twenty-five years I've been blaming him for something that wasn't his fault. I refer of course to the 'coda' that was added to CE3K in the 'Special edition' (1980), showing Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) inside the mother ship. At the time, I couldn't believe that someone capable of making such a good film, with such a brave ending, could then wilfully mutilate it in such a fashion. Now I learn that this coda was imposed on Spielberg by Columbia, as a trade-off for being allowed to re-cut the film. Now, finally, with the Collector's Edition (CECE3K?), Spielberg has rightly dispensed with this embarrassment, and once more Roy floats off, as he should, into a completely unknowable future.

(Anyone interested in a blow-by-blow account of the different cuts should read Jocelyn Briggs' essay on the Spielberg fansite.)

It's easy to forget how original it was, in 1977, to take a subject - flying saucers - that was the preserve of mostly-bad pulp science-fiction films, and give it the emotional dynamic of a major drama. Although, only two years before, there had appeared the telemovie The UFO Incident, dealing with the real-life case of Betty and Barney Hill, a couple who claimed to have had an alien encounter, and who supposedly gave completely consistent independent accounts of the incident under hypnosis. I can remember this story scaring the bejeezus out of me as a teenager. The UFO Incident, as I recall it, had a distinctly sociological approach, placing the incident within the social and personal context of the Hills. I can't help thinking of Lacombe/Truffaut's exclamation at one point in CE3K: "It is an event sociological!"

CE3K frames the story of one man's rendevous with the extraterrestrials against his own breakdown, and the collapse of his marriage; in any other film, even any other Spielberg film, Roy would end up back with his beloved family, hugging them as they all watch the UFO sail away. Instead, Ray never gets back to his family, but still ends in a state of ecstasy. (Spielberg cleverly uses the device of the abducted child Barry being returned to his mother to close this particular emotional loop in the audience; one returns home, one leaves home forever).

CE3K is also one of those key films in the debate that dogs Spielberg, namely his perceived inability to make a 'grownup' film. It's all about adults who won't grow up, kids who aren't interested in childish things (Pinocchio), aliens who are either ancient or childlike. One line I'd never noticed before comes in the scene where Roy is arguing with his estranged wife Ronnie on the phone: "I'm an adult...even though I don't believe there is any such thing!" (My paraphrase from memory - a correction will follow if necessary). Did Spielberg's choice of Truffaut as an actor have something to do with the latter's remarkable films about childhood (The 400 Blows, Pocket Money)? For the sake of a glib aphorism, one could observe that Truffaut's children are like adults, and Spielberg's adults are like children. Still, even if Spielberg's vision is limited in this particular way, this is the moment when that vision, and its subject, came perfectly together.

A forgotten face

During the quiet Summer time on Radio National, they have an 'intern' on the job of summarizing what the papers are saying. Young Petra Kamula sounds like a charming lass, and probably got what passes these days for a good education, but it let her down this morning. Describing this cartoon by the Australian's Peter Nicholson, on the subject of lowered fitness standards for the Australian Defence Force, she described it as showing an 'Uncle Sam' figure. The cartoon, in fact, directly quotes the famous recruiting poster of General Kitchener, on which the equally famous James Montgomery Flagg poster, which does show Uncle Sam, was later based. (The significance of the reversed Australian flag on the uniform continues to elude me).

Miscellaneous pre-Christmas roundup

Blogging will probably be light over the Christmas/New Year period. As the media circus folds its big tents, and the clowns wipe off their greasepaint, sideshows like the Cuckoo must follow suit. I want to wish my readers - both of you - a Merry Christmas, and I want to record my gratitude to two bloggers of inspiration - Tim Blair and Currency Lad - who added me to their blogrolls this year.

In unrelated miscellany:

Perhaps you saw Kofi Annan losing it when asked a 'cheeky' question by a journalist. (Kofi is able to get angry without losing his cool, a talent I wish I possessed.) The question - of inconsistent accounts given by Annan about various matters, including the dodgy importation of a luxury car by his son Cujo, er, I mean Kojo - was hardly in the same league as the kind of inane, hostile and often openly contemptuous questioning that mere leaders of elected governments like George Bush and John Howard are regularly subjected to, but Kofi made clear he was above such things.

Today's Age actually gives away a sheet of Michael Leunig 'Christmas' wrapping paper. Good. I've got some fish heads at home.

I was intrigued to hear, in coverage of the New York transit strike, a transit union official refer to future, hypothetical union members - on whose behalf he claimed to be striking - as "unborn members". Well, if Democrats can vote after death, they should be able to strike before birth.

Last night's SBS bulletin covered the Saddam trial at length (SBS has stopped transcribing its TV bulletins, so no link). Naturally they were keeping an open mind as to whether he had been tortured, as he claims. They were careful to remind us of the 'rough handling' he received when first captured (news to me). They also showed the well-known footage of his medical examination - brutal! - and reminded us of the 'outrage' which this atrocity had sparked around the world. (The medics probably even used one of those yucky wooden tongue depressors - oh, the humanity!) To cap it off, they showed the latest court broadcast footage of Saddy breaking into yet another of his irrelevant free-form rants, and having the sound - quite properly - cut. Not allowing him to rant on uninterrupted is, of course, a gross breach of his human rights, and the journalist who prepared the report was careful to point out that the company which runs this courtroom TV service...is American!

Atomic supermen?

This has got to be baloney, but I love it anyway: the news that Josef Stalin supposedly asked his scientists to cross-breed apes and humans to create a race of super warriors. Where's Ed Wood when you need him?

"I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat" Stalin is said to have told the scientist.

Sounds like he was talking about Australians. But seriously, it reminds me of a quip by a Polish wit as to why the English had succeeded in creating so great an empire. He explained it as "Indifference to climate, indifference to food, indifference to sex."

Happy holidays?

Recently I quoted George Orwell's question 'Can Socialists be happy?' To be fair, George was really asking 'Does anyone concerned about the state of an unjust world have the right to be happy?', but I'm happy to co-opt his question to my own meaning, i.e., Socialists are just too screwed up to ever be happy. In that vein, comes something from today's column by Ross Gittins in the Age.

Ross used to be a very informative commentator on economics: I never came away from one of his columns without feeling I'd learned something. But lately, he mostly does columns about how we're earning more but enjoying it less, and if we learned to live more simply, we'd all be happier. Unfortunately, the kind of 'simplicity' that Ross is talking about is mostly only achievable in modern, developed capitalist economies, by people with a considerable disposable income. (Along similar lines comes a report today indicating, as we knew already, that there's a correlation between social 'disadvantage' and being overweight. Think about that: being fat is now a sign of being 'poor'.)

So now Ross specializes in reporting on the latest 'happiness' research. Today, it's about holidays, and how they never quite match up to what you hope. Here's the money quote:

"The great attraction of holidays - that they take us out of our familiar surroundings - may also be their greatest drawback. People often feel less in control while on holidays. They can suffer a loss of status and feel lower self-esteem."

For what it's worth, my experience of holidays is always the direct opposite. My time is my own, and I have a carefully-accrued fund to spend as I wish. I swan around, feeling, for a few weeks, like a gentleman of means and leisure. And I hope you do too.

Shakin' Stephen

Radio National's Stephen Crittenden could barely contain his excitement this morning as he promised us a "corker" of an interview with retired Lt.Gen William E. Odom, who would tell us how the US Army was already "broken" in Iraq. Nothing like a bit of defeatism before I've even had my Sultana Bran. Crittenden's almost sexual excitement in the face of imagined US defeat reminds me of Tokyo Rose, except that she showed more self-control.

Crittenden certainly got the 'climax' he wanted, when Odom concluded by comparing the American troop commitment to Iraq to Hitler's folly in persisting beyond reason with the siege of Stalingrad. Crittenden turned to his listeners and, mustering his best Cronkite/Edward Murrow manner, reminded us: "You have just (pause) heard retired Lieutenant General William E. Odom (pause) comparing Iraq to Stalingrad..."

Ask a silly question...

Damn Tim Blair for beating me to this one, but I'll post it anyway. The loopy poll that supposedly proves Australia is a racist country, or that people think it is, has been getting the MSM very excited. Unfortunately, journalists seem to completely shut down in the face of anything that requires any kind of quantitative analytical thinking, so they seem to be genuinely unaware of the absurdities they've been peddling.

Not so our beloved Prime Minister John Howard, who pointed out yesterday that the selfsame poll cannot meaningfully return two mutually inconsistent results. The 'racism' poll returned a result of 75 percent yes to the question 'Do you think there is underlying racism in Australia', and an 81 percent yes to the question 'Do you support multiculturalism'. Now, as the PM points out, if this poll represents the Australian people accurately, the large support for multiculturalism must mean that we are not a nation of racists.

The problem is, of course, with the first question. Firstly, it's phrased in such a way as to contain the assumption that the respondent will not self-identify as a racist. If it means anything, it's asking: "Of course you're not a racist, but do you think most other Australians are?" A rubbish question.

Secondly, there's that weasel word 'underlying'. Now, what exactly does this mean? If it means anything, it means 'invisible'. It is, if I can coin a phrase, a dog-whistle question, which is asking the respondent to identify racism of which they personally have seen no evidence. Translated, the question is saying: "Now, we all know there's racism out there, and are you going to seriously stand there and tell me you're too stupid to know that, even if you haven't seen any evidence of it?"

It's a basic fact of polling psychology that people will answer some questions differently in the context of an opinion poll, than they would if asked the same questions in another, more familiar, context. One of the motives is a wish not to appear stupid, so people will claim to know things they really don't, or to be aware of things they actually have no firsthand experience of.

Silly season

Maybe it's just the silly season, but the Melbourne Age seems to be turning an ever tighter death-spiral. When I picked up yesterday's copy, it felt about half of its usual weight, and my newspaper guy explained that this is because the advertising pulls back over the holiday period. Judging by the sheer physical evidence of weight, and the number of full-page ads it runs in the news section, the Age is no longer a newspaper that runs advertising, but an advertising broadsheet that runs a few news items. And what news items.

Today's lead is about a 'poll' that rebuts John Howard's claim that Australia is not a racist country. So there. Of course, Kim Beazley also said this, but we don't see a headline saying 'Poll rebuts Beazley'. Then there's the page three piece on 'research' into why girls torture their Barbie dolls. At least they didn't make them form human pyramids, or flush pages of the Koran in front of Burqa Barbie. Page 8 has the cheery festive headline: 'Humble Bush admits he made errors'. God bless us, every one!

Most of this pales beside yesterday's bizarre essay by former New York Times editor Howell Raines, about how the Bush 'dynasty' is using political office to enrich itself. George W. is apparently too crass to even know that the correct, NYT-endorsed way to enrich yourself is to marry a series of wealthy women. The Age reminded us of Raines' Pulitzer Prize, but somehow left out the bit about him having to resign over the Jayson Blair scandal.

The Afghan Phoenix

At a time when the mainstream media can barely be bothered reporting events which, if they were occurring in Eastern Europe, would be considered epoch-making, I suppose I should be grateful that this morning's bulletin on ABC Radio National led with the inaugural session of the Afghan Parliament. Still, in a twenty second spot, they managed two references to 'invasion', and quoted President Karzai as saying that Afghanistan was "rising from the ashes of invasion". I have a feeling that when the ABC talks about the invasion of Afghanistan, they're thinking about Coalition troops, and not asshats like David Hicks.

Anyone for tennis?

The Age's critic Helen Thomson does her roundup of the year's theatre today, and naturally there's a spot for the one Melbourne production that provoked the most comment, Hannie Rayson's Two Brothers. This of course was the (publicly-funded) play about a fictional Australian Prime Minister who not only orders that a boatload of asylum seekers be left to drown, but personally murders one himself. Are you still with me? (For more background, this is probably the most balanced review you'll find online.)

Helen opens with general comments about the prevalence of certain themes in this year's theatre - asylum seekers, refugees, war, terror, and the 'underclass':

"Left-leaning commentators...

Oh, you mean, like you Helen?

"...would sum this up as the inevitable detritus of decades of right-wing government policies dominated by the market..."

Well, as long as it's those 'left-leaning commentators' - y'know, those ones...over there... who are saying it. Helen acknowledges that Two Brothers "infuriated even the left with its melodramatic depiction of clearly recognisable wickedness":

"Making Australia's PM a murderer (of an asylum seeker, what's more) was probably more than most could accept."

Gee, d'ya think so?

"My feeling is that director Simon Phillips was too timid in finding the appropriate performance style to match Rayson's exaggerated script. A more controversial, less realism-constrained production might have made the play less controversial."

Now, that first 'controversial' is obviously a typo, so I won't make anything of it, but a nice Christmas holiday puzzle for you is to work out what word Helen meant to go there. And anyway, she has another idea for the 'real' reason Two Brothers tanked:

"Or is it (that) local audiences are too timid and squeamish to embrace politically explicit insults directed at fictional versions of elected representatives?"

Um, I'll get back to you on that one Helen - just now I'm busy working on my play about the sex-life of a fictional Democrat President. I just hope you're not too...squeamish.

[Two postscripts: When Helen Thomson originally reviewed the play, she had nothing but praise for Simon Phillips' direction. Ah well, the benefits of hindsight.

My insider at the Melbourne Theatre Company told me at the time that even they thought it had been staged prematurely, and that it needed another year of workshopping. What kind of a play needs a year of post-script workshopping?]

Annus horribilis deplorable

Maybe it's just the Christmas spirit, but I was tempted to think that SBS News might finally be growing a brain: their coverage of the Iraq elections was a surprisingly fair, mature and positive report, with only a trace element of Bush-bashing. 24 hours later, however, they're jumping the shark again. Lee Lin Chin introduces the bulletin, and even before the lead item, she announces that they'll be playing a funny video about George Bush's "annus horribilis" later in the bulletin, so hey, stay tuned.

Annus horribilis? 24 hours after the Iraq elections? Please, if a Democrat President had achieved what the Bush administration has achieved this year, SBS would be campaigning to have his face carved on Mount Rushmore. There wouldn't be enough town squares in America to hold the statues Democrats and moonbats would be erecting to him. We'd be seeing commemorative silver dollars and special postage stamps. Barbara Streisand and Bruce Springsteen would be recording a love ballad duet to him. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee would be sending out early notices that nobody else need bother applying this year. George Clooney would be optioning the film rights.

Instead, because you're George Bush, fashion-victim public servants (I mean you, Lee Lin) snigger over 'funny' videos about you.

Still, the video, by the JibJab team, is funny, clever, and well-done. Importantly, the 'Bush' voice is spot-on: have you noticed how many self-styled satirists, when they come to 'do' Bush, give him some kind of Ozark hillbilly mannerisms, which have about as much to do with his Texas accent as if they did him in the voice of Fat Tony, the Swedish Chef, or the 'City Wok' guy from South Park?

Christmas cracker

My recent post on Christmas killjoy Clive Hamilton triggered a memory of something similar, and it took a few hours for the penny to drop. It turned out to be one of the marvellous columns that George Orwell wrote for Tribune under the title 'As I Please' - this one, from December 1946, being about Christmas as a time of over-indulgence. Orwell takes the view that, even in a time of austerity and near-starvation across Europe, it's important to occasionally allow yourself to overdo things:

One may decide, with full knowledge of what one is doing, that an occasional good time is worth the damage it inflicts on one's liver. For health is not the only thing that matters: friendship, hospitality, and the heightened spirits and change of outlook that one gets by eating and drinking in good company are also valuable.

Orwell recognised that 'teetotallers and vegetarians are always scandalized by this attitude', and he might well have added, left-wing, sorry, I mean 'independent' think tanks. Hamilton was talking about gift-giving rather than feasting, but one imagines that his attitude to the latter would correspond to his feelings about the former.

Orwell in fact wrote a few Christmas columns in this vein, including a real cracker, published pseudonymously in December 1943, entitled 'Can Socialists be happy?' Perhaps I should put a copy in Clive's Christmas stocking.

"Solemn silence as Iraqis vote"

That's one of the ludicrous headings in the Age's website today, which can hardly be bothered stifling a yawn as it turns in minimal reporting of the Iraqi elections. Solemn silence as lefties are forced to watch tragic progress of democratization in Iraq might be more accurate. Still, articles like this give the Age a chance to remind us of more important things, like George W. Bush's recent 'admission' of 30, 000 civilian deaths in Iraq - a piece of mendacious MSM spin which was hurriedly yanked elsewhere after being exposed in the blogosphere.

In the meantime, for a picture of some typically silent, solemn Iraqis, look here.

Out of the mouths of babes

As has already been noted, Radio National relief Summer host Stephen Crittenden is a man who can find head-shaking paradoxes where the rest of us just see clear daylight. Not surprisingly, Stephen's paradoxes tend to inhabit that liminal territory where the ABC mindset rubs up against what the rest of us think of as the Real World.

On this morning's Breakfast he was talking to Foreign Minister Alexander Downer about the largely trouble-free first day of polling in Iraq. Stephen was puzzled - he contrasted the 'Iraq' in which, as he put it, civil war has already broken out, with the Iraq in which a national election can be conducted in relative calm:

"It sometimes seems like we're talking about two different countries."

Exactly, Stephen, exactly...

He knows if you've been bad or good

Sanctimonious Claus is comin' to town, in the form of Dr. Clive Hamilton of leftie thinktank the Australia Institute. Everytime you think you're enjoying something, Dr. Clive pops up with a survey to let you know just how wrong you are. Amazingly, all of Clive's surveys always come up with exactly the results that fit the philosophical framework of his modestly-named institute: rich people are awful, 4WD drivers are vile sexually-inadequate homophobes, economic growth is evil, etc.

Now he's here to tell us that we're giving presents to people we don't like, and getting useless things we don't want:

Given the widespread prevalence of unwanted gifts and unwanted giving, the survey also asked Australians if they would be happy if somebody made a donation to a charity on their behalf rather than giving them a present for Christmas. Nearly three quarters (73 per cent) said they would be happy, with women in particular (83 per cent) pleased to see a charity benefit (only 63 per cent of men feel the same way). Oddly, Tasmanians appear to be much more reluctant than other Australians to accept a charitable donation instead of a present.

Got that? Men are greedier than women, and Tasmanians are greedier than anybody.

There won't be another one along in a minute...

Sad news for one who has long considered himself a Londoner-in-exile: the iconic London double-decker bus, the Routemaster, has made its last run. How these beautiful machines survived England's nanny-state safety regulations as long as they did was a mystery to me. Death, or at least serious injury, seemed to beckon to you with a bony finger from the bottom of their ladder-like stairs every time you alighted. Yet Londoners of all ages and physical conditions took it in their stride. If you share my love for this symbol of a wonderful city, look here.

Cronulla riots

I'll confine myself to a few footnote observations on how this is being spun.

The Age's report this morning made mention of some rioters wearing swastika gear and Eureka flags, which I don't doubt, but they made no mention of the professionally printed banner clearly seen in last night's TV coverage, in which the anarchist 'A' featured. Selective observation? The Age also got very maiden-auntish over the fact that the rioters had been 'chanting obscenities'. Apparently chanted obscenities - a regular feature of every dreadlock-hippie anti-Howard protest - are only deemed noteworthy or offensive if it's drunken bogan thugs doing the chanting.

On Radio National this morning, Stephen Crittenden was naturally trying to put the riots into their 'proper' context, i.e., Howard's so-called 'War on Terror'. Don't even bother trying to follow that train of thought. Crittenden was speaking to Stepan Kerkyasharian, Chairman of the NSW Community Relations Commission, who rightly and vigorously condemned the riots, but who didn't hesitate to identify a cause, at least in the short term, in gangs of Lebanese 'thugs' trying to turn the Cronulla beach into their own 'comfort zone'. You could practically hear Crittenden falling off his chair as he lunged for the mike: he cut Kerkyasharian off mid-sentence with a stammering and irrelevant observation that he had spent lots of time at Cronulla beach and never seen any problems. So there.

Another footnote: as of this morning, the ABC no longer refers to "middle-eastern appearance", but "so-called Middle Eastern appearance".

Consider yourselves warned

And so the Government's legislation abolishing compulsory student unionism has been passed, by the vote of Family First senator Steve Fielding. According to today's Age, Fielding's electoral office has been vandalised, though as they don't give details, one can assume no major damage was done. Monash University Student Association president Nick Richardson claims no knowledge of the incident, but surmises that it was probably the work of 'students'. No shit, Sherlock!? Nick warns that as part of the student response to the passage of the legislation, a 'conservative senator's office' will be targeted by protestors on Monday (tomorrow). C'mon Nick, give us a hint.

Sought out for comment, Robert Nicholas, 'education officer' (wtf?) for the Queensland branch of the National Union of Students had this to say of the vandalizing of Fielding's office:

"He has made himself a political target by voting for the legislation, so he'll have to live with the consequences."

Got that, legislators? If you make the mistake of passing legislation unpopular with campus lefties, you have only yourselves to blame for what follows. Consider yourselves warned.

A couple of months ago, I was talking to a student union official from one of Melbourne's biggest campuses. She amazed me by her matter-of-fact acceptance that student unions were finished. "B-but", I stammered, "aren't there going to be protests, rage, papier mache puppets?" No, she told me, everyone on the inside knew that the jig was up, and she was already making plans to dispose of her union's archive.

A Scanner Darkly

While digging up the link to Goodnight and Good Luck for the previous post, I was amazed to see that Philip K. Dick's marvellous novel of a near-future drug culture A Scanner Darkly has finally been filmed. This is a project that has been in turnaround for decades, and the last I had heard, it was in the hands of Emma-Kate Croghan. Croghan's debut feature Love and Other Catastrophes (1996) seemed to me a massively over-valued little film, which launched the career of Frances O'Connor and not much else. To hear that Croghan had her hands on what was, to me, a very important property, was not happy news.

But things move on, and now the film has been made by Richard Linklater with a pretty strong cast - Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder. If you've touched the link above, you'll already know that ASD has been filmed in the Rotoscope technique that Linklater used for his 2001 feature Waking Life. I'm not sure what I think of this, having only seen the online trailer, but my initial reaction is not good. If I can make a pre-emptive analogy, Dick always grounded his fictions in a very mundane narrative realism: he never tried for verbal fireworks, and the analogy would seem to be to film this novel in as straight a manner as you can. Still, I should reserve judgement here.

Judgement is also reserved on the contribution Reeves will make to this film. His wooden manner is probably just right for playing a junkie, and Dick's characters tend to be fairly numb and alienated, so Keanu might be good casting after all. Still, when I hear him intoning, on the trailer:
"Two...hemispheres...of my brain...are...competing?", I seem to hear an audience nervously tittering.

A Scanner Darkly is precious to me as my entry into the world of Philip K. Dick. After a few abortive tries with some of the minor novels, this was the one that really set me alight and started me on what I will always recall as one of the great reading adventures of my life. Thinking about Dick again, I realize that he is an almost unique figure in contemporary political-literary terms, in that he was a kind of liberal, who was able to construct paranoid fantasies about a fascist America under the heel of a Nixon-figure (in Radio Free Albemuth and Valis), which are still deeply rewarding as literature. Can you imagine any contemporary liberal writer capable of doing this? No, instead we get slop like Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale, or the 'poems' of Harold Pinter.

Part of the answer, I think, is that Dick was drawing from a much deeper fund of ideas, about mysticism and transcendence, than are available to a shallowly secular liberal intellectual. What sort of exterior values does a liberal writer have to draw on? Most of them have a barely concealed disdain for democracy, and their contempt for the means by which freedom is generally purchased and preserved tends to hollow out the value it should possess for them.

Another thing that makes Dick's political science fiction rewarding - even when it should be ludicrous - is his depth of feeling and human sympathy. If you have read his remarkable essay 'How to build a world that doesn't fall apart in three days', you'll know that even though Richard Nixon was, almost literally, the Beast of the Apocalypse to Dick, he was still able to imaginatively empathize with him, in the dark days after Watergate. Again, can we name one liberal writer who would be capable of, or willing to sympathize with George W. Bush?

Clooney tunes

Radio National's Fran Kelly could barely contain her excitement this morning as she played an excerpt from an interview between ABC's Julie Rigg and...George Clooney!

George was of course promoting his new film Goodnight and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow and Joe McCarthy. He was fairly sensible, and amusingly self-deprecating: as he put it, the worst thing that had happened to him was that he'd appeared in a 'liberal traitors' deck of cards, and not even as an Ace. He accepted that if you speak out on controversial matters, you've got to expect to be criticized, and he had never suffered anything comparable to blacklisting and the HUAC.

However, at this point Julie Rigg focused her laser-like antipodean insight (quote from memory):
"Yes, but you're protected by celebrity...you won't be hauled off for giving aid and comfort to the enemy".

Yes, that's right Julie. The only reason George isn't in an orange jumpsuit right now, hoeing turnips in a slave labour camp in Idaho or Nebraska, is his celebrity.

Death imitates Art?

Scarcely had I finished the previous post, than the news came that US air marshals had shot dead a man on an airplane at Miami airport. According to reports, he had claimed to have a bomb, had failed to comply with directions from air marshals, and had been shot while reaching into his bag. He was subsequently described as suffering from bi-polar disorder. Think of this poor man, and his widow, in your prayers.

It was interesting to see how the different news bulletins covered this. SBS, of course, portrayed it as a case of blood-crazed trigger-happy goons who had gone huntin' for passengers, preferably mentally ill ones. As Mr. Alpizar's bag was blown up on the tarmac, the SBS voiceover announced, in as portentous a manner as she could muster, that "no...explosives...were found...". Gee, you mean the air marshals failed to use their X-ray vision prior to opening fire?

Everything which SBS knew about Mr. Alpizar, at second hand, was reported as absolute fact, except the one detail - his having claimed to have a bomb - which was carefully bracketed with the magic word "alleged".

Flightplan

(Warning: spoiler ahead)

When Jodie Foster's latest film Flightplan first appeared, some in the blogosphere were concerned about the idea of a major film, post 9/11, set aboard an airplane, in which the bad guy turns out to be an air marshal, and in which there is a conspicuous cameo for an Arab, falsely accused of wrongdoing, who gets to show at the end of the movie what a nice guy he really is.

If I was looking for a Hollywood liberal 9/11 whitewash, I didn't find it in Flightplan, which is a good, solid thriller, with roots in the best of these films, notably Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. Despite Hollywood's liberal idiocies, I would defend their right to make, say, a film in which an Arabic man is falsely accused of a terrorist plot: The Wrong Man, with Art Malik instead of Henry Fonda. Yes, I know Art's Indian, but, damn he was good as an Arab terrorist in True Lies. (Interesting to reflect, too, that Hitchcock was not a liberal: The Wrong Man proceeded not from some weepy liberal breast-beating about injustice, but from a much deeper Catholic wellspring of ideas about guilt and innocence. It's not one of Hitch's best, but imagine what an unbearable film it would have been if made by Stanley Kramer.)

But political considerations pale against the chance to watch another performance by Jodie Foster. She's that rare thing in Hollywood today - a female 'star' who is also a genuinely interesting actress, and for whose already long career one can see no imminent end. I'd like to say that my admiration for her grows with each film, but in fact I don't think it will ever pass the highwater mark of Robert Zemeckis' Contact. Zemeckis knew exactly what he was doing with her: everything that this film wants to say about the alien, the beyond, the sublime, it says with Jodie Foster's face. Probably the best use of an actor's face since the famous last shot of Garbo in Queen Christina.

As many have already observed, Flightplan is Panic Room at 30,000 feet. The thematic concerns, claustrophobic spaces, and physical action (especially that elbow-swinging run Jodie does when she periodically bursts into action) are very similar in both films. She definitely needs to do some different roles - one wonders if her Leni Riefenstahl project will ever get up, and the synopsis of her second proposed directorial project Sugarland sounds rather dire:

"A recent law school graduate teams with an experienced public-interest attorney to take on a sugar baron on behalf of exploited migrant workers." (IMDB)

Can't wait.

Apart from its merits as a suspense thriller, Flightplan deserves praise for its attention to detail: the casting and performances of the actresses who play the stewardesses is faultless. The physical types are perfect - they get the walk absolutely right, and that unmistakable air of combined hostility, indifference and disdain. Also, the casting of extras is notably good. Very often, directors who would take great pains to get a set or a costume right are surprisingly indifferent to the casting and direction of extras. Nobody in this film strikes a false note - with the possible exception of Peter Sarsgaard as the flight marshal. Perhaps the rationale is that, in real life, air marshals aren't meant to look like air marshals.

As a final comment, for anyone who values the art of screenwriting, Flightplan has a wonderful moment in which a crucial fact is revealed to Jodie, and to the audience, in a way that combines absolute plausibility with a deeply poetic, moving, level of symbolism. I dare not break its spell by describing it.

A Correction

I must have been more dazed than usual to suggest, as I did in the previous post, that the famous ABC news theme ('Majestic Fanfare') was scrapped only a year ago (from TV - it still plays on radio). It was, of course, scrapped some eighteen years ago. This only emphasizes the point I was trying to make, but it shows that to blog in haste is to repent at leisure. More than one person agrees with me that the current ABC TV theme is an over-orchestrated bucket of musical slop, the work of Martin Armiger, a one-time leading light of Melbourne's 'alternative' rock scene.

News bulletin music is an interesting sub-genre. The mandatory element, like a trill in a funeral march, is some kind of syncopated staccato figure, usually in the tuned percussion (e.g., xylophone), intended to evoke morse code: the current GTV-9 news theme is a perfect example. Now, morse code has not been a medium of news communication for about seventy years, and 99 percent of the people who hear a TV news theme today have never heard morse code for real, only as a sound effect in an old movie. A fascinating example of the persistence of aural iconography - the symbol lives on long after the underlying reality has disappeared.

There's a bear in there

Trish Bolton, who lectures in 'media and communications' at Swinburne University of Technology, has news for those of us in the blogosphere. Forget all that talk you've heard about getting your news from the Internet as an alternative to dead-tree media: there's a truly independent voice you've been overlooking. It's...the ABC!

"All the research shows that Australians trust their ABC....Hands up who doesn't know the ABC news theme, or who didn't watch PlaySchool?"

Er, gee, Trish, what happens to me if I do put my hand up, cause I sure as hell never watched Playschool? And exactly which 'ABC news theme' does she mean, given that the famous TV news theme was scrapped at least a year ago?

But I'd be happy if Trish could answer just one test question: if the ABC is so independent, and the Internet so captive, why is it that I only heard about the Sandy Berger case on the 'net, and never a single word on any Australian mainstream media, let alone the ABC? It couldn't be anything to do with the fact that Berger was an ex-Clinton staffer, could it? If he had been an ex-Bush staffer, the ABC would have been running this story 24/7.

My learned friend

Having posted on this earlier, it's only fitting to note that Melbourne QC Robert Richter has made a partial retraction of comments he made during a public rally to mark the passing of Nguyen Tuong Van. He now regrets any 'misunderstanding' of his earlier comments that the hanging of Nguyen was worse than the atrocities committed against Allied POWs in Changi during the Second World War. Apparently Richter got in a few other sprays during that speech, against George W. Bush, naturally, and right-to-life protesters who, being the vile hypocrites that they are, are somehow more concerned with the lives of unborn children than they are with the lives of competent adults who choose to run drugs through jurisdictions with mandatory death penalties.

Richter is the second example I've seen (Geoffrey Robertson being the other) of men with unquestionably brilliant legal minds, who become indistinguishable from the dumbest, dippiest media studies undergraduate the moment they open their mouths on politics. And we won't easily forget Richter's statement that the brutalities of Japanese guards in Changi were committed "in the heat of war" (I quote from memory). Well, no they weren't, and even if they were, surely the same defence could then be used of Lynndie England and her friends?

Koko pops

News that one of the most intriguing workplace disputes of our age has reached a settlement. Two women employed as keepers of Koko, the gorilla famous for being supposedly able to communicate by sign language, complained that they had been pressured to comply with a request from Koko to see their breasts. (Apparently, Koko hadn't even offered to buy them a drink first.) It takes the edge off, somewhat, to learn that Koko is in fact a female, but I still think this episode will probably be dredged up if Koko ever becomes a Republican nominee for the Supreme Court.

Another Koko lawsuit (same link) concerns a teacher who had been hired to design a Koko-related curriculum for schools, but who ended up being employed as a janitor. Let me guess: 'Koko teaches numbers', 'Koko teaches global warming', etc. (Maybe Koko, like Tookie Williams, will now redeem herself by dictating children's books about inappropriate workplace behaviour). Any so-called teacher willing to be involved with such a project deserves to work as a janitor.

Somebody somewhere is probably doing psych research into the whole lefty/animal thing. Why do they (lefties, that is) get so excited about supposed links between humans and animals? Koko was quite a star in her day: nowadays she'd be lucky to get a gig on Celebrity Squares. The modern version of this meme is the 'discovery' that humans and chimps share 97 percent of their DNA. So what? Those chimps, lovable though they are, don't seem to be doing a whole lot with that 97 percent.

Mr. Killjoy

Life must have been a barrel of laughs in the Degauque household. Monique Degauque was the 'troubled teen' from Belgium who converted to Islam, and set off to Baghdad with her Moroccan husband on a suicide bombing mission in early November. Life with the in-laws wasn't easy: Monique's mother recalls that her son-in-law, Issam Gorris, made them do things his way.

"When we saw them, they imposed their rules. We were at home, but my husband had to eat in the kitchen with Issam while the women ate together in the sitting room. There was no question of putting on the TV or opening a beer."

Suddenly I see an idea for a new sitcom - a kind of 'All in the Family Jihad', or 'Bomb thy Neighbour'. Here's the pitch:

Scene: suburban living room. Slobbish Archie Bunker type sits on sofa. Young Muslim man walks in. Audience whoops.
Issam: Hey Infidel, I'm home.
(Studio audience whoops some more and applauds)
Archie: Hi, meathead, grab y'self a beer.
Issam: By the beard of the prophet, do you not know I am forbidden such things!
(Audience laughter)
Archie: Okay, keep your keffiyeh on. Let's watch some TV.
Issam: What, and witness the shameless infidel whores flaunting themselves? I've a good mind to...(reaches under his jacket...audience whoops and cheers...shouts of 'Allah Akbar'...)

Mr. Downer's bad language

Get ready for the confected outrage as the easily shocked members of the Fourth Estate gather up their skirts: Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer has referred to eminent Melbourne QC Robert Richter as a 'creep', for suggesting the Australian government didn't do enough to save Nguyen Tuong Van. Apparently, vigorous demotic expressions like this are forbidden to silvertails like Downer, while much coarser epithets are perfectly okay on the lips of plebeian aspirationals like Mark Latham.

Aeon Flux

In what promises to be the most pointless big-screen adaptation since Garfield, here comes Aeon Flux, starring Charlize Theron. Fans of the original series of animated shorts, created by Peter Chung, will remember the dreamlike narrative derangement that came from their eschewal of any form of dialogue, and their refusal to provide any kind of context or backstory to the adventures of this mysterious female assassin of the future. Who was she? Was she a goodie or a baddie? Were there any goodies or baddies in her world? Who was she fighting? Where? When? Why?

Add to this the bewildering premise that Aeon, for all her superhuman skills, is killed at the end of each episode, usually as a result of some ridiculously trivial accident. In one episode, she manages to unwittingly catch a loose nail in the sole of her boot, but every step she takes after that involves her, with an ingenuity not unworthy of Buster Keaton, in some form of movement that does not require her to bring her feet flat down on a solid surface - she's climbing a ladder, edging along a window ledge on her heels, etc. Finally, at the crucial moment, she brings her foot down, driving the nail into her sole - the sudden pain, while not fatal in itself, proves to be a distraction with fatal consequences. Of course, by the time you tune in for the next episode, she is alive again, without even a perfunctory attempt to explain how.

Needless to say, this kind of exhilarating narrative recklessness is unlikely to survive the process of translation to a multiplex popcorn movie. One page of the official website signals this:

"The twisted conspiracies and agendas that were so signature (sic) to the cartoon (sic) are given some meaty and satisfying continuity in the film"

When I first heard they were doing Aeon Flux as a live-action feature, I only had one question: Are they going to get that bizarre hairdo right, part-60s hostess, part-manta ray? As you'll see if you visit the website, the short answer is definitely no.

Divine secret of the Ya-Ya priesthood

Ex-priest Paul Collins' name must be in the rolodexes of many Australian journalists under the heading 'Vatican, reliable critic of'. While softly spoken, he can be depended on to criticize most attempts by the Church to assert its traditional teachings. Last night, on ABC news, however, he seemed to be over-reaching his expertise (no transcript, so you'll have to take my word for it) when he asserted that gay men actually made better priests because they were more oriented towards 'service' and had better empathy. More and better than, what, exactly? He didn't say. Shetland ponies, maybe? Ohhhhh...than straight men... of course.

I like to think that the gay men I know would find this statement just as ludicrous and patronizing as I did. As well, it buys into the happy-clappy notion that priests are meant to be sob-sisters, whose primary job is to make you feel good about yourself. I don't recall that part in the Gospels where Jesus advises the Apostles: 'Those whose low self-esteem and poor self-image you amend, they are amended...those whose frowns you turn upside down, they are turned upside down...'