Rod Stewart returns, thongs on my feet, alternate realities, power flows, what editors do, Dutch football, holiday in Sydney and more ... Wong Kar-Wai In the Mood for Lacoste, kari chicken don, downsize survivor, the Sopranos, the secret life of a pass-activist, CD playlist, Richard Ford, early typography, Pixel porn, Jesus of the ballpark, Sartre's bath, robo-roach, cats and dogs lost, Mario Bava retrospective, a problem with metaphysics, rumba football and more ... The Clash forgotten, Proust unread, pushy media, Tokyo cityscape, Peach Milk Tea, Afro-Australian guitars, the future of English, The Sopranos, Ghost World (the movie) and maybe more ... |
6 November, 2005 A 737 crossed the sky from east to west, thirty degrees above the horizon, tracking parallel to Bell Street on its landing approach to Tullamarine. Frank made the Sign, touching his forehead, his chest, his left shoulder, his right shoulder. Everyone made the Sign now, whenever a passenger aircraft appeared overhead. It started some time in the first decade, no one could remember when exactly, or where, or who started it. 13 May, 2004 somewhere in north america people are skiing. a starving african child is stalked by a vulture. a man is decapitated by his captors -- on videotape. these are the images on my desk -- magazines, newspapers, a rough layout. every time i open the newspaper there is another image that i could not possibly explain to my son if he asked me what it was -- a naked man on the end of a leash held by a young woman; a naked man cowering before two guard dogs on leashes held by other men in military uniforms; a pyramid of naked huuman bodies. it is as if the internet has finally filled to the brim with pornography and spewed the overflow into the real world. i fold the paper quickly and throw it on the recycling pile to stop him seeing it. if i were an artist -- a painter, a photographer, some kind of image maker -- i would be rendered mute by this excess of images, by the feeling -- the demand -- that it is no longer possible to make images, to look at images -- in a world where the image has gone rampaging out of control.
3 August, 2002 Toy piano manArdath, Ardath, you’re a star
Every time my daughter presses a certain key on her little electronic keyboard, it plays the melody of ‘Twinkle, twinkle’. And every time it plays that melody, I hear the words of a 30-year-old cigarette commercial in my head. Think I better say it twice,
The commercial featured people in the streets singing the words, egged on by a fake TV reporter. They were meant to be a cross-section of ordinary Australia — working-class men, middle-aged women with ‘serious tobacco habit’ etched on their faces, probably a middle-class buffoon in a suit who didn’t quite get it. As advertising it was unnerving — the catchiest tune of all time hooked around an artfully postmodern piece of copywriting, the song you sing to your children and grandchildren papered over with a new imperative — and as politics it was scary and predictive. Other keys play other tunes when the keyboard is set to Magic mode; ‘Yankee Doodle’ (I hear the theme song of an American cartoon show from the 1960s, Roger Ramjet); ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ (which evokes a couple of lines from a saucy ballad that is probably as old as the original tune; maybe older); ‘Frere Jacques’ (which set us all off singing a song we made up that lists the names of southern Italian towns we visited on holidays once). It also plays ‘Row, Row’; to a child, it’s lyric — ‘Life is but a dream’ — is almost meaningless. When you’re forty it’s either a soothing mantra or a frightening reminder. I decided to treat it as a mantra. 16 August, 2002 A sign on the roadTwo weeks pass and -- nothing happens ... while one of us finishes a grant submission and another finishes some other work ... But then someone draws our attention to this:
We also discover that Fairfax is now publishing a cut-down version of Corriera della Sera from Tuesday to Friday in Melbourne (that is, the previous day’s edition transmitted electronically from Milan and printed here). It also comes with an eight- or ten-page version of la Gazzetta dello Sport, wherein we can read of Euro super teams like Milan, Inter and Man United struggling with unheard-of minnows from Eastern Europe in the preliminary rounds of the Champions League ... all for $1.50. But what I really like it for is a different perspective on world events ... nowhere near as filoamericano as the view from here ... plus news that doesn’t always make it to our papers: a big feature on the Asian Brown Cloud this week, proposals for a year of parenting leave for men and women in Italy, and a UK proposal to put a square on ballot papers you can mark if you vote for NONE of the candidates. And it’s paper. Fold it and take it in your bag ... spread it on the kitchen table when evertone else has gone to bed ... read it anywhere. |