So climate doomsayer Dr. Tim Flannery has been reduced to spruiking for a solar panel company. He fell foul of the agency which licenses commercial television advertising over his claim that "global warming is the greatest threat facing humanity", and that you should therefore rush out and buy Horatio Huffnagel's fantabulous solar panels. Commercials Advice refused to allow the ad to go out with Flannery's puff, leading to predictable howls of "censorship" from the usual quarters.
As usual, the real question here is a Journalism 101 no-brainer. Look at the ABC's report and ask, what's the question the journalist is avoiding? Anyone...anyone...Bueller? Of course, it's why the ad was pulled. The answer, presumably, is that while hysterical claims of climate doom might be all very well to fill the op-ed pages of quality broadsheet newspapers, (and to sequestrate untold oceans of public money) they are, being highly debatable, inadmissable as an inducement in the more rigorous arena of commerce. Dr. Tim should stick to proven, tested science, like the Ab-blaster.
Update: the ad has now gone to air, as originally scripted. Miranda Devine has a good piece on this story. The solar panel company brags that they're "doing Kyoto anyway". Well good news, kiddies, so is the Australian Government.
Readers of the Age will be aware that the paper recently ran a poll on attitudes to the Howard government at its 10-year mark. Even with the hopelessly skewed methodology employed (including idiotic rorschach-blot questions about how 'mean' Australia has become), they still came up with some good results for Howard, such as strong approval for his handling of terrorism. This must be biting, because today they ran an editorial cartoon from Ron Tandberg (who looks almost sensible next to Michael Leunig but, hey, who doesn't?) which takes the rather extraordinary step of bagging the respondents to the poll for giving inconsistent, and insufficiently Howard-bashing, answers.
Now there's a first: newspaper asks your opinion on something, then runs cartoon bagging you for not giving the right answer. Actually, Ron is right to point to the inconsistency of some of the responses, but he fails to draw the correct conclusion, i.e., that the methodology of the poll was loaded and confused. I thought this myself when seeing the result that many of the respondents who approved of Howard's handling of terrorism simultaneously thought going to war in Iraq was 'wrong'.
ABC Radio National was running hot this morning over Treasurer Peter Costello's speech to the Sydney Institute, which apparently referred to "mushy multiculturalism". If it hadn't been so early in the morning, I would have instituted the 'Fran Kelly drinking game', with one rule: every time Fran repeated the phrase "mushy multiculturalism", you take a drink. You'd have been legless before the weather report.
Costello made the unremarkable comment that Australia would not be adopting sharia law anytime soon, and anyone who preferred to live under such a system might seek a more congenial homeland elsewhere. Fran and regular commenter Michelle Grattan were scratching their heads as to why Costello, and PM John Howard, a week ago, have felt the need to make these "un-nuanced" comments at this particular time. Well, a time when half the muslim world is ablaze because of some cartoons might be a good time.
Michelle was particularly hard on Howard's recent comments that a small section of the Muslim community in Australia presented problems that no other immigrant group did. Well, huffed Michelle, there was always the 'Yugoslavs' in the 1960s (an Ustasha training camp in rural Victoria) and, "if you go further back, the Irish were pretty bolshy". The Irish? Is this woman kidding?
David Williamson, the man who wanted to nominate Michael Leunig for Greatest Ever Australian, is at it again. He has a piece in today's Australian which I won't even try to summarize - it would be like trying to arm-wrestle a jellyfish. Suffice it to say that the Howard government is apparently lulling us into a lotus-eater obliviousness on the subject of Global Warming by conducting vicious midnight purges of artists and intellectuals, the only people who can warn us of Mother Gaia's impending day of wrath. 'kay? Reading this piece, I was reminded of a tragic figure I used to see at my local market. Jim Cairns, Treasurer in the Whitlam government, ended up self-publishing books with titles like New day: liberated biological human potential and selling them - or rather, not selling them - from a folding card-table. Formerly rational people become enthralled to some deceptively simple theory which explains everything, and they can't understand why the rest of us just don't see it!
Global warming is clearly one of these all-embracing ideas for Williamson, but looking at an article about his latest play, it seems he has at least one other. 'Conferencing' is apparently some kind of technique for conflict resolution (a new 'technique' for this sort of thing seems to come along about every ten years or so). This radical new technique involves people, er, sitting down together and, um, talking. Williamson is so enamoured of it that he trained as a 'facilitator', and has written a trilogy of plays structured as 'conferencing' sessions, of which his current play is the last instalment. Even the Sydney Morning Herald has to admit that, as a way of making plays, it "sounds dire".
So the Age has a new environment reporter, Liz Minchin. Surely the former incumbent, Melissa Fyfe, can't have found something more important to do than warning us, in dire tones, of the doom about to break upon our heads? What other kind of reporting could possibly compete with that? Maybe it was that email I sent her, inviting her to enlighten me on a glaring contradiction in one of her reports. She never replied. Maybe she quit that day, in tears.
Still, the new tenant of Cassandra's Corner has made a good start, reporting the heroic decision of new-chum climate guru Dr. Clive Hamilton, of the invaluable Australia Institute, to name names. The names, that is, of those he deems to be involved in a conspiracy to silence dissent on climate change. Because, let's face it, one never hears a word about this subject in Australia. Read Liz's report in full: it has the kind of breathless hysteria that makes Who Weekly look like The Economist.
The cover of today's Age carries a photo of two female politicans laughing and clinking champagne flutes to celebrate the passage of the bill which will effectively make the abortifacient drug RU-486 available in Australia. That's right, they're drinking champagne to celebrate the release of a drug which only does one thing: it poisons a human foetus in utero. Do I really need to say anything? The Age is curiously ambivalent on this, because it runs the picture, even while acknowledging that it's not really a good look, with a headline so weaselly it almost looks like sarcasm: After the battle, the winning women drink a toast, decorously
Oh, decorously. Well, that's okay then. I mean, it's not like they're choofing magnums of champagne and spraying them over the Press Gallery, Grand Prix-style.
The article continues (print version only): "But even in the historic moment, they were nervous about appearances: too much joy on the touchy topic of abortion could be misconstrued."
An informant with a better memory than mine has filled in that gap about the television debate I mentioned at the start of my Michael Leunig post below. Apparently it was hosted by the ABC, to choose the greatest Australian, past or present, living or dead. The first person I recalled was in fact standing up to nominate Lord Love-a-duck for this honour. That's right: forget Sir John Monash or Weary Dunlop or Vivian Bullwinkel. Leunig for The Greatest. But wait, it gets better. The person doing the proposing was none other than...David Williamson, the man who is to the Australian stage what Leunig is to the editorial cartoon.
As for the young woman who stood up to rudely prick the bubble of Leunig-love, my informant doesn't substantiate my recollection of an audible gasp running around the room, but does assert that they cut to a reaction shot from David Williamson, who could be seen open-mouthed and speechless. In the commentary that followed this golden moment in Australian television, it emerged that the young woman was a Sydneysider, and it all fell into place. The Leunig cult is very much a Melbourne thing. Unlike real prophets, Leunig is without honour, save in his own land.
Today comes the maddening news that the morons who vandalized the Sydney Opera House in 2003 with an anti-war message, will get their paint pot back after all. It had earlier been ruled that the pot and roller would be withheld and destroyed by the Police, as part of the policy against criminals profiting from their crimes (the morons wanted to auction the pot and rollers for charity). As I jocularly blogged at the time, this also meant these implements would not end up in the lefty-friendly National Museum. The curse of Cuckoo strikes again: there is now talk that these sacred relics may well end up in Sydney's Powerhouse Museum. On the other hand, the Police, who evidently have a sense of humour, appear to have also made a bid to acquire them for their museum.
Again, credit points to the Age for reporting these cretins as vandals, plain and simple.
I wish I could remember exactly what it was: some years ago I was watching a televised debate, from the heart of ABC-land, and at some point, a speaker used Michael Leunig as a reference point for something positive, that everyone could agree on. The next person to speak was a twentysomething young woman, who began by observing parenthetically that she hated Leunig, and so did all of her friends. Even watching at home, you could hear a kind of gasp go round the audience. Hate Leunig!? B-but how could anyone hate Mr. Curly-ducks, whom we all love?
Those people, and the rest like them, are a big part of what's wrong with Michael Leunig. He started off decades ago as an edgy, ratbaggy young cartoonist working for the 'alternative' press at a time when that term still meant something, and some of his cartoons from that period still strike me as clever and funny. It's probably inevitable that with the passage of time, he should have acquired a more reflective outlook, as most of us hopefully do. His problem was that, as his audience aged with him, and assumed their places in the cultural establishment, they immersed him in a hot bath of sycophantic adulation that seems to have completely leached any kind of self-critical faculty out of him.
It's clear from the cartoons themselves that what we might call his thought processes are fairly muddled - his mis-remembering of a key detail of his 'Auschwitz' cartoon (see top), in a recent interview, is significant (he recalled the figure of a Jewish death camp prisoner as a Nazi guard - Prisoners? Guards? Whatever.) But what really sets the seal on this matter are his embarrassing attempts at a written response to his critics (here and here). Without fisking these in detail (it's been done) the main conclusion to draw is that Leunig has obviously never had to argue one of his 'points' to a critical or sceptical interlocutor.
It's not irrelevant to observe here that, on any objective professional standard, Leunig's work has declined markedly in the last few years. Instead of drawing a cartoon from scratch, he has come to rely increasingly on existing photographs, artwork and illustration with minimal or in some cases no intervention. On at least one occasion he has simply submitted an existing news photograph with a 'funny' subtitle. The cartoon he published today in the Age, when eyes are on him in a way they haven't been for a long time, plumbs a new depth of pointlessness: two retro ad illustrations of a man and woman, emitting empty speech- and thought-bubbles. Leunig has arrived at the point where, if he blew his nose on a piece of paper, the Age would publish it, and that can't be good for any artist or cartoonist.
As a critical exercise, I tried to construct a meaning for the 'Auschwitz' cartoon, but eventually had to give up, foundering upon the hopelessly woolly notion of 'war' in the Leuniverse. On the most generous interpretation, i.e., that by 'war' Leunig means the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, one can only ask, what alternative does he offer? That everyone should just go off to their hobby farms and hug a duck? We don't expect editorial cartoonists to solve the world's problems, but it's not too much to ask that their visual shorthands should represent some kind of reasoned, defensible position.
Leunig's tone-deafness to the real world is also painfully apparent in his waffling on about his hobby farm. It's obviously meant to make him look like a humble, modest man, in touch with the things that really matter, when anyone outside the Age-Leunig bubble sees it for what it is: an indulgence available only to a relative few, mostly the kind of people Leunig likes to excoriate - businessmen, executives, professionals, rich people.
Why do people hate Lord Love-a-Duck? Here are a few suggestions:
Hypocrisy Leunig has an agenda, as you would expect of an editorial cartoonist, but he pretends he doesn't. He claims to be against universal evils called 'war' and 'fascism', but he's never done a cartoon about Ba'ath torture cells or Palestinian suicide bombers or Jihadi head-hackers. On the contrary, he's only too happy to publish nonsensical cartoons excusing Sheik Yassin as a 'poor defenceless old man in a wheelchair'. Compare him to Peter Nicholson or John Spooner, who both have back-catalogues of strong cartoons on these subjects.
Cant As in 'religious humbug'. Leunig loves to drag God in. He is, for that matter, the only star in the Age stable who would dare do this, and moreover not be mocked for doing so. According to Brother Michael, we were supposed to love and forgive Osama bin Laden. I might take this appeal a little more seriously if it were not apparent that Leunig hates John Howard and George Bush with a venom that clearly goes well beyond the good Christian's righteous anger against wickedness. This gentle, loving man of God can obviously imagine no fiery pit sufficiently deep or sulphurous to receive the souls of Howard and Bush.
Finally, in my longest post ever (may I find a worthier subject next time) a word on Leunig's Pacifism. George Orwell identified two different kinds of pacifists: the honest ones, who realised and acknowledged that pacifism may mean submitting yourself to destruction at the hands of an enemy who does not share your scruples, and the frauds, who preached pacifism, but were always careful to do so within the borders of a country with a strong standing army, and a firm policy of self-preservation. Leunig obviously fits into the second category, but one suspects that, while an honest fraud always knows somewhere deep inside himself that he is a fraud, Leunig has for so long lived such a sheltered, unchallenged life that he genuinely does not make that connection. That most of the people who live quiet lives in peaceful, prosperous countries are able to do so only because somewhere down the line, "rough men stand ready to do violence in their behalf". Why, he wonders, can't the whole world just be like his Peaceable Kingdom, where the ibis lies down with the grasshopper? If he really wants an answer, he might start by asking the people who used to own his paddock.
Australian journalists have twigged by now that if they ever need a wacky, ratbag quote on a popular custom or festivity, they need only phone the lef...I mean, independent think tank The Australia Institute. This growth-phobic institute makes much of "happiness" studies, but its recommendations usually seem to involve the avoidance and discouragement of things people actually enjoy doing. When last we saw them, they were trying to stop us feasting and giving presents at Christmas.
Faced with the tragic spectacle of yet another growing market - red roses for Valentine's Day - they had this to offer:
"For those concerned about the cost, Andrew Macintosh, of public policy research centre the Australia Institute, says: "Given the exorbitant prices that are charged for roses on Valentine's Day, a suggestion is to pour more energy into your anniversaries. You'll get the same outcome at half the price."
Unfortunately, the Curse of Cuckoo is something of a boomerang. Only a few days after I was sneering at the failure of Media Watch to reappear, it, well....reappeared. Tim Blair is having an early taster's report.
A bad situation to find yourself in is when you have to either do a particular thing, or not do it, and both actions are completely predetermined by the circumstances around you. Not doing the thing has become just as much an action as doing it. You can't really abstain. Of course, I'm talking about the Mohammed cartoons. Once, it wasn't an issue. Who, after all, ever needs to publish a Mohammed-mocking cartoon? Now, however, if you edit a major newspaper or magazine, it's become an action that you really can't make a free choice about any longer. If you do want to do it, fine; if you don't want to do it, no matter how good or valid your reasons are, you end up looking like a gutless appeasenik. Blatant hypocrites - the various media who have demonstrated a long-standing hostility to non-Muslim religious sensibilities - are not entitled to this sympathy, but there are a lot of other people out there caught in an uncomfortable no-win zone.
At the same time, when I see the increasingly bewildering lists of who has and who hasn't published the cartoons, it seems to me no longer relevant. The genie is so comprehensively out of the bottle that it doesn't matter who pulled the cork. Does anyone really think that the burn-a-flag rent-a-crowd are keeping some kind of score on who did and didn't publish? That Tariq and Azim are rushing to renew their subscriptions to the New York Times because they spared Islamic sensibilities?
Currency Lad is keeping a keen eye on the fatuousness of our legislators in the RU-486 debate, and thinks he has a winner: the head of the Democrats Lyn Allison has described the passage through Senate of a bill effectively granting freer access to the abortifacient drug as a "win for women and their families".
I think I have a close second to that, from last year, when a minor scuffle occurred outside a Melbourne "fertility clinic". (It took me a while to realize, while watching the news report of this incident, that what they meant was "abortion clinic".) Approached for a quote, Democrats senator Natasha Stott-Despoja gravely remarked that "fertility clinics" needed to be the kind of places "women felt safe to attend with their families". Safer for the women, than for their families, perhaps. Or, to paraphrase the old cartoon, "Two go in, but only one comes out".
Crime is normally no part of the Cuckoo's beat, but I can't help posting on something I saw on the news last night. Since the recent re-eruption of Melbourne's gangland slayings, camera crews have been permanently posted outside the house of one of the last surviving members of the 'Carlton Crew', Dominic Gatto. So far, all this has told us is that Mr. Gatto prefers 'shortie' dressing gowns, and his weapon of choice against pesky cameramen is a fresh egg. They should count themselves lucky: he could have grabbed their cameras and returned them in pieces, but surely it would take a truly warped criminal mind to do something like that.
Anyway, what really caught my eye was the sight of Mr. Gatto taking his own wheelie-bins in, including the recycle bin. Somehow I can't see Tony Soprano getting Joey Two-fingers to separate the class 4 plastics from the glass and neatly flattening the empty cereal boxes. The other thing about this vignette was its uncanny resemblance to the final scene of Scorsese's Goodfellas. Failed mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), hiding out under witness protection, has become the very thing he most despised: a 'civilian', lost in suburbia, paying taxes, taking in his own rubbish bin, but still, at least, wearing his shortie dressing gown.
What is it about abortion that turns our legislators - some of them - into puerile idiots, as exemplified by Greens Senator Kerry Nettle giggling like a schoolgirl over her t-shirt slogan "Mr. Abbott, keep your rosaries off my ovaries"? I don't know what score Senator Nettle got for biology if she thinks abortion has something to do with ovaries. And of course the impeccably politically correct Senator would never indulge in religion-based ridicule, would she?
Watching Health Minister Tony Abbott answering the usual inane, hostile buzz of questions at the door of Parliament House (and incidentally, one of the reasons Australia is a great place is that a senior minister in the Federal Government can arrive at Parliament on his racing bike, and go straight into an interview while still in his Lycra), I had to admire the restraint with which he answered the idiotic slurs against his religious affiliation. Playing the game of 'what would I say?', my answer was something like this: "If I were an orthodox Jew - another religion that opposes abortion - would you be trying to paint me as some kind of zealot? Would you even dare to refer to my religion?" (Memo to researcher: find out Islam's position on abortion).
News comes from Tim Blair that ABC radio presenter Virgina Trioli has made an on-air remark that she is reluctant to even raise the matter of the Mohammed cartoons, for fear that "someone will set fire to the building". I will wait with interest to see if the Broadcasting Authority, or Media Watch (should it ever reappear) will censure Virginia for this comment, which on the face of it characterizes muslims as a class of people prone to violence against persons and property in the expression of their grievances. If a shock-jock had made this comment, David Marr would be all over it. If Virginia had said it in Victoria, she would probably find herself in receipt of a summons inviting her to follow the trail blazed by the two Dannys. Or maybe not.
I've been told that one of the many entertaining claims made by the late actor and fabulist Al Lewis (Grandpa Munster) was that, as a very young man, he had worked on a committee to free Sacco and Vanzetti. As Hollywood seems to be in liberal overdrive lately, I'd be willing to bet a small sum of money that at least one script is circulating on the Sacco and Vanzetti story. Anyone familiar with American popular culture knows that S and V - two Italian immigrant anarchists who were executed in America in 1927 on a charge of armed robbery and murder - are martyr-saints in the pantheon of American leftism (classic poster at left by Ben Shahn). I often wonder, in an age when a sexual-harassment class action is seen as a good subject for a multiplex movie, why no-one has revisited this story. As far as I can see, the last time it was filmed was an Italian production of 1971. Maybe my people can talk to George Clooney's people.
"Islamic prayers could be illegal under new laws" screams today's Age on page two, reporting recent comments by international law specialist Dr. Ben Saul. Gee, which prayers would those be? Oh, you know, the standard ones. Such as? Err, y'know, the standard prayer - as the Age describes it - "May God grant victory to the mujahideen in Iraq".
This post is about the idiocy of the Age, and of 'international law specialists', even when they're speaking at government-funded conferences, not about any wish to 'make windows into men's souls', which would be as evil as it was futile. Still, I can't resist the tu quoque of wondering what would happen to any Christian priest or cleric who dared to offer public prayers for the victory of coalition forces in Iraq.
I have nothing special to offer regarding the Danish Cartoons saga. The kind of people we've seen burning the Danish embassy in Beirut suffer from the defect of possessing in combination an emotional age of about seven and the memory of an elephant. As for their attention span, who can say? I hope it will blow over, but then I have a feeling that a British officer in India in 1857 might have said the same thing at news that his Muslim Indian troops were getting agitated over a rumour that their rifle cartridges were greased with pork fat. At least this affair has already had the effect of showing up the hypocrisy and cowardice of the Western mainstream media - and beyond them, the community of 'transgressive' artists - always so ready to bravely challenge Christian religious sensibilities.
On that subject, I recall the fuss here in Melbourne when Andres Serrano's Piss Christ was on display. A meeting was organised by the bien-pensants to show support for Serrano, and in my morning coffee spot, I overheard two artists discussing it. Asked if he would be going, Artist B replied that, unfortunately, he was busy that evening preparing his next grant submission. I felt a warm inner glow, knowing that the rotten capitalist system would somehow remain upright as long as the transgressive artists - who could otherwise smash it with a single blow - had had their mighty right arms permanently frozen into the handout or 'baksheesh' position.
So, Moira Shearer has finally 'taken off the red shoes'. I confess I was amazed to learn that she was still alive. The Red Shoes (1948), in which she starred at the age of 21, seems to belong not just to another age, but almost another world, and she did not appear in many other films. One of the muses of director Michael Powell, she also appeared as the victim of a serial killer in Powell's career-ending Peeping Tom (1960). I always found that bit of casting particularly disturbing: it was like casting Julie Andrews or Audrey Hepburn as the victim in a slasher flick. But then, I suppose that's just the unsettling effect that Powell was aiming at.
If I had to pick a single scene to commemorate her by, it would be that wonderful scene in The Red Shoes, in which she is summoned to the Monte Carlo villa of the impresario Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), to be offered the part in his new ballet of 'The Red Shoes'. Most of Powell's films are fairy tales, in one way or another: either directly (Tales of Hoffman, A Matter of Life and Death), or as fairy tales that somehow bleed into real life (TRS), or as stories of charmed 'worlds apart', where a different reality holds sway (Black Narcissus, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going).
The moment when Vicky (Shearer) goes to Lermontov's villa presents an almost Surrealist change of mood, in a film which up to this point has been a romantic, lighthearted backstage drama. Dressed in a ballgown and wearing a regal tiara (in the middle of the afternoon!), she is diverted from a dinner engagement by a chauffeur bearing Lermontov's summons. She is driven to the gate of an apparently abandoned villa high in the hills above Monte Carlo. A vast stone stairway rises before her, thick with weeds. She slowly mounts the stairs, to appropriately eerie music. (At this point, a blooper occurs which should wreck the moment, but somehow doesn't: one of the reflectors being used to fill in the shadows slips, and a square of errant sunlight skids across the scene.)
Once inside, the previous mood of the film resumes. But this is the pivot-point. Vicky has entered the world of the fairytale, and something has been set in motion which will lead inexorably to that moment when she reaches the fatal limit to which the Red Shoes have dragged her. For many years, one of my personal favourite movie last-lines has been the one Vicky utters, to her lover: "Take off the red shoes".
The running gag of the Austin Powers movies is that Austin's sexually liberated swinger philosophy is constantly at odds with the uptight, politically correct world of the Nineties and Oughties. I was reminded of this when visiting the exhibition British Art and the Sixties at the National Gallery of Victoria today (touring from Tate Britain). Most of the work is only interesting historically: artistically, it's as dead as a dodo, and I think it's significant that the NGV chose not to use the Tate's original and rather ambiguous tagline "This was tomorrow".
Pop Art relied heavily on images of women taken from girlie/nudie/soft porn magazines, and modern-day curators writing explanatory labels for these works have quite a job on their hands. Their solution in this exhibition is in fact quite simple. In every single instance in which some kind of 'sexy' image of a woman is used, we are told categorically by the label that this represents the artist's 'critique of the objectification and commodification of women', or words to that effect. In some cases, it's arguably true, as in a Richard Hamilton work comparing aspects of American cars to female anatomy (hey, it seemed profound 40 years ago). But there are many cases in which it's not so clear, and the texts offer nothing like a quote from the artist to substantiate the clairvoyant assertion. There are definitely examples where the artist is dealing with something he does get his jollies from.
In itself, this would simply be the standard PC schoolmarmishness of modern cultural institutions, but in this particular exhibition, there's an added twist. The show also contains one of David Hockney's paintings of a man taking a shower, and, as I'm sure the curators are aware, Hockney based these paintings directly on gay porn magazines of which he was an avid collector. He talks about this in David Hockney by David Hockney, one of the most entertaining memoirs ever written by an artist, after Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography. Now, it doesn't seem to be presuming too much to guess that Hockney actually enjoyed this subject matter, but funnily enough, the curators don't find anything problematic about this, nor do they feel the need to invent a fiction about him 'critiquing the objectification of the male body'.
