Blatantly Stolen Content

I came by this work for a Brazilian artist called Icasro Doria. It rocks. And there's more. But never enough. I love this sort of shit. It's the type of stuff that led to me having a big stack of COLORS magazines a few years back. Man they were good. My sister still denies nicking them, but she has a history of poking her nose into places and not owning up to it. That's what sisters are for, isn't it?

GRR

Two things that have got my goat this morning:

• emails that begin "This actually works!!!": FUCK OFF.
• and people who do not refill the kettle and turn it back on, when they have used the last of the hot water. ARSEHOLE.

Heart and Seoul

A cautionary tale from the land of video games and fucked-up violence, from our man in Seoul, The Bee:

This is not a tale for everyone so if you don't enjoy blood and violence better to stop here. This is a story that i recently witnessed all too closely that sheds light on a darker side of korea.but hey,we're not perfect either.Not too long ago i was casually sampling a few sherberts at the local candy shop (aka a bar). sundown.nearing the end of the tastings a few disgruntled korean customers, one 30 something man and two similary aged and average looking women started a minor raucus when they steadfastly challenged the owner, a near eldery woman, that they were overcharged on the bill. the owner promptly double checked and reiterated that the bill was correct.stalemate.story should have ended there but this trio refused to back down or go away.they held their ground and voices began to roar. one of the girls was particularly vocal,noticeably inspired with dutch courage.the guy was equally stubborn but more controlled in his speech and of far fewer words.standoff.within minutes, any remaining chance of peace morphed into a ugly hardcore verbal wrestling match, without the script.the "ugly" korean woman was particularly abusive in her verbal attack on the older lady in a way which makes shane warne look like a perfect gentleman.while i don't understand the language i can read vocal volume, spitting and pointing - kinda like a john mcenroe outburst without the tennis racquet. lowdown.enter the young cook, a slight and slightly hunchbacked korean, nobly left the kitchen to bolster the home team.the 2 boys went outside.showdown.the next thing i saw was the cook stumbling back inside with a hole in his head the size of a golf ball and a trail of blood flowing from his temple at a worrying pace.a sickening sight,ostensibly the product of a glass bottle.takedown.the elderly lady voluntarily hit in the ground in an almost half faint/half statement and hysterically flapped her armed and legs about like a upturned beetle. tough to watch but she still had a element of control about her drama, and in fact i saw this same move on a tv drama several weeks later.laydown.looking at the growing pool of blood and the tears of the elderly lady set off my compadre, a 55 year a jolly,fat,white haired white bearded canadian red neck, appropriately named Santa Dave.Santa Dave had seen enough and quite liked this place.he shot a volley at the guy if he wants a war he's got one. nexts he fires at the witch "shut up." she snaps back with "i don't speak english" to which santa d gives her a free spelling lesson "B-I-T-C-H".putdown.Then he turns his attention to her male companion."look at this" gesturing at the ugliness of the scene."what's it all for?" he charged. "She overcharged me!" came back the original male antagonist."how much?"The most illuminating words spoken all night was the korean warrior's reply:"10 bucks." shakedown.Santa was in a festive mood and returned with "U f'n kiddn me - i'll give u 20 to f off right now!". "principle" came the korean reply.no backdown.Upon his offer to buy the group out from the premises being swatted down Dave promptly issued the staunch korean with one word "outside".meltdown.the most surprisingly thing was the korean dude held his ground.didn't move.despite possibly nearly killing someone, an ambulance on the way,the police probably likewise, and now he's been challenged by a man mountain of a guy who belies his 55 years.he hesistantly but not uncooly rebounds with, "this will be your grave" and made a series of phone calls with the air of a call for reinforcements. Santaty prevails on santa d and he calls the cops. calm down.ambulance arrives for the cook, a husband for our lady manager to relieve her after an enduring night and the police for the terrible trio.downtown.end of chapter but i think there's some sort of message about principle and korean culture in there.

You can't take it with you!

In lieu of the myriad draft posts I have not finished, I give you my greatest success of the week:

An ADDAMS FAMILY PB:

389,000,000 odd! All 12 mansion rooms! 3 extra balls! Tour the Mansion! 3 Replays and 6 free credits! Such success! The barman commented! And he works there! Highest Score! Grand Champion!

BEST SCORE EVAH!

All I need now is to conquer the king of Pinball: The Twilight Zone.

A vegetative state

One of my favourite little graffiti conversations is etched above the urinals at the Union Club. It warms my heart every time I read it:

"How many peas does it take to change a lightbulb?"
"None, they don't have any arms."

LAME!

Not really, it's just the way they're made

Silence is golden

The Trouble with Auntie

I'm not quite sure what the ABC is up to lately. It's the Saturday and Sunday night line-ups which have me puzzled. The old Sunday night in with Auntie is a long established tradtion in my household—well, it was when I was a kid, and it is now that I am a conservative old man. An old man who shakes his head in wonder that what on earth Mark Latham thinks he's achieving with all this bile; and the same goes for Robert Doyle and his spectacular policy launch last week; and for those New Zealandish voters; and, and I'll stop now.

The way I see it is grey-haired types stay home with a certain amount of regularity on a Saturday night. Agreed? Whereas, plenty o' people of all ages stay home on a Sunday night, what with work eating into our Mondays.

So the ABC gives us Midsomer Murders of a Saturday night. Fine. My grandmother will happily sit down with a stable-table and a boiled egg to sigh about how wonderful the old days were and reminisce about the verdant joys of a village life she's only ever dreamed of, where there was nothing untoward about two ladies co-habiting, the vicar rode a bicycle and red lipstick was considered garish (and red shoes too, for that matter). Nothing new there.

And on Sunday night, my parents, who are only just starting to grey, get all het up over New Tricks, about a quartet of grumpy old has-beens (both as actors and characters) including a feisty, muttony Alison Braithwaite, solving cases. The attraction here is that the characters in this TV show are slightly older than my olds, so they can sit there with their Sunday night boiled egg and guffaw at the old klutzes, thinking "thank christ we're not that old yet!" Nothing new there—onscreen, or off.

Recently, this has been followed by Canterbury Tales. My mother doesn't even get Canterbury Tales. "It's, like, Chaucer, mum. Surely you read this when you were at school. It was published around then." But no, it's the washing up and an early night for them after New Tricks.

The common denominator of this is that the audiences for both programs enjoy a boiled egg while they watch. They are old people. And these shows are on different fucking nights. Who on earth in the programming department deep in the bowels of Ultimo (it can't have been anything but some vogue-ish Sydney decision) decided that it would be fun to stretch the gerry programs over two nights, and follow them—each of them—with shows that younger people can relate to? Nay, can sit in front of with a pizza and still go "cool", or "phwoar!" or even just "what's this then?"at?

So, why doesn't Auntie program New Tricks to follow Midsomer Murders—that way, the boiled-eggers of this world could have a jolly good night in with a few chuckles and "I don't mind if I do have a little whisky before bed, it is Saturday night after all". While those of us with less, let me say, quintogenarian tastes, could stretch out on the couch with a nice little reefer, a vegetarian with hot salami and a cleanskin red, in front of Hustle, followed by Canterbury Tales. That way we get 2 hours of quality entertainment, each of us, on our respective nights. And never the twain shall meet.

OK, so all of this is because I was actually in on Saturday night, and caught Hustle again. And it rekindled my weak-at-the-knees crush on Jaime Murray:

Phwoar.

Out of Colac by way of Erinsborough

How awesome are Janelle and Janae Timmins, then?

Why I Love British Newspapers #13

SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING BORROWED,
SOMETHING BLEURRGHH

The Sun was thankful for a guerns to the stylish nuptials of Jordan and Our Peter Andre .

I want to be a part of BA, Buenos Aires' big apple

I'm going to be spending 5 days in Buenos Aires at the end of the year. At which of these hotels do you think I should stay?

• At an NH hotel?
• the Hotel Madero?
• at Hotel Bobo?
• the Four Seasons perhaps?
• or Wallpaper's recommendation, the Faena+Universe?
• 
  
• and now, a late starter, Malabia House
  

Decisions, decisions.

Kamikaze taxi

Saturday night, eh? Ended up hitting this Japanese restaurant that I've been a-hankering for for quite a while. Well, since I read a review about a year ago, and then discovered the place the old-fashioned way—that is, by walking past it—last week. It's all stick-ey, like yakitori-yum, with heaps of different varieties, so that the squid yaki came out wrapped round in a big circle, looking like some awesome white lollypop. Yum. And there were nasu dengaku ones and oh, I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. And then delicious thick white fish sashimi, and other mouth-watering pieces of tenderness. All preceded by lychee martinis and washed down with Tsing Tao. Not bad for an evening which began with a "what's up?" phone call at 7:45pm.

So the locals ended up grabbing a cab home together from outside the Metro. While we're waiting, and this dude starts talking to us. He was looking for a cab too, and talking about all sorts of shit, kinda making three-quarter sense, about how he's an engineer and is spouting off all this stuff about the energy consumption of public transport. OK, seems like a nice-enough bloke. Then he decided to that he'd hail our taxi for us, which he cocked up, and so decided we should share his ride. Him to Fitzroy, us to NM. Hmm. Brunswick street wasn't too far out of our way, and he said he'd pay. He was pretty insistent, but seemed like an alright bloke, he didn't smell, wasn't cross-eyed, so we said alright. Well, he was in the front seat, so it was hard to toss him out.

And so he's crapping on about working in the mines up in far WA, how he was two months on, two weeks off, and he did it for six years and had a girlfriend the whole time, and then he quit to spend more time with her and it broke up after three weeks. So we're thinking this guy's a bit weird, and he keep saying he wants to go to Easey Street Fitzroy, but Easey's in Collingwood. Meh. I couldn't work out if he was pissed or loved-up or what, but he kept kinda forgetting shit.

Anyway, we get to Brunswick street, and he goes "Oh shit, I'm not going to Easey Street Fitzroy, I'm going to Smith Street Richmond." "WTF?" "Sorry guys, I'll pay the whole way, I've got $20 for the fare, it's ok, we'll just keep going". Um, no we won't. So we're like "Um, driver, can you stop here please", and again with spirit, louder and sterner. And louder and sterner again, until finally Mr Taxi driver stops and we jump out and bid our fucked-up friend farewell, much to his continuing protestations.

Lesson of the week: don't share cabs with strangers.

Why I love British Newspapers

It's headlines like this one in today's Guardian:

Last gasp: French kick the Gauloise habit
Gauloises no longer to be made in France. Le pays, as the French do not say, is going to les chiens.

Gauloises, incidentally, are my favoured coffin-nail, en France.

What do these two people have in common?

The Question of Zion

If you've got a spare 15 minutes today, I highly, highly recommend reading the transcript of the interview Tony Jones conducted last night withProfessor Jacqueline Rose. Better still, watch it.

Jacqueline Rose is a British academic who works, as she said, on the borders of literature, politics and psychoanalysis. She is also a jewess. She has written a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in particular the use of rhetoric in support of the Zionist cause, that is, the expansion of Israel as a 'holy' Jewish nation. I have never been able to understand the ferocity of the hatred the Israeli right has towards the dispossessed arabs upon whose soil they live. I do not deny Israel it's right to existence. However, I am appalled by the military invasion and military occupation of the West Bank (and until just a few days ago Gaza). I am appalled by the subjugation and denial of human rights to people of the these areas. I am appalled by the policy of 'targetted assassinations'. I am appalled at the double-standard that inherently lies beneath these actions—that is, it is justifiable for us appropriate your land, because you were hostile towards us; to assassinate your leaders, because they oppose us; and to do all of this because the German Nazi party and the Third Reich treated us in similarly appalling ways. Somehow, because our people were the main victims of the Holocaust, because the property and livelihoods of (some of) our ancestors were visciously torn from them, we can do this to a current generation of people who were in no way related to the fascist concentration camps of Middle Europe, and upon whom we were foisted without their consultation.

To me, this is akin to me savagely beating and robbing a passerby, because my own great-grandmother had been murdered in another city in another part of the world many years before, and I felt I had the right to protect myself incase this person, child even, had a sinister glint in their eye. This is not respecting one's neighbour, it is not doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. It is not fair, nor decent, nor justifiable. Neither is suicide bombing, mind you.

Read or watch the interview. Professor Rose is a much more eloquent exponent of my point of view.

El Presidente

The week I decide to be a Venezuelan Leftist Fanboy is the very week the US Religious Right decides to out itself as the gun-toting fascist bullyboy that its always been. I expect a few harsh words will have been thrown down the phone from the oval office this week, along the lines of that Alanis Morrissette star-vehicle You can't do that on Television. For those of you who don't know what the fuck I'm on about, a quick primer on my hero for the week, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías:

• he's the president of Venezuela
  
• he's popular
• he's a lefty
• he's an ex-paratrooper
• a colonel, no less
  
• he's established free medicine
  
• and increased literacy,
  
• he's a good friend of Fidel's (and a friend of Fidel's...)
• HE'S DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED, and
  
• his is the fifth biggest oil producing nation in the world
• and it has the world's tallest waterfall
  

The US has already tried to unseat him twice, once covertly—by backing a coup in 2002—and once overtly—by funding a recall referendum they lost last year. All the while prattling on about representative democracy. And they have still manged to cock it up both times. And now, Mr Robertson, they can't much assassinate him because we'll all know who was to blame. HA! What's that about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face?

Somebody mention Salvador Allende?

Fuckers.

/rant

postscript: This is the article to read about Venezuela

George n Tony

Festival Finale

And so, a triumphant end to my Festival:

The Wayward Cloud

A woman returns from Paris to Taipei, with a suitcase, in the midst of a drought. The drought is so bad that people are encouraged to substitute watermelon for water. She can't open her suitcase. Upstairs, her love-interest is taking a lead role in a bunch of home made porn films. Yeah. And it's punctuated with high camp musical interludes.
An explicit Taiwanese lovestory, eh? This is one strange, strange film. It is easily the most aural film I have ever seen. With fuck-all dialogue—you never hear the lead male speak at all, and probably only get a good 40 words from the female lead (there's more dialogue between the Japanese pornographers than there is between the leads)—the emphasis is put on those everyday sounds: her constant footsteps up and down the hallway of her apartment block; the shooshing of plastic bags; a jackhammer; the gooey, crunchy sounds of chewing; of choking and swallowing; of slurpy, slappy sex; of heaving breathing, sighing and grunting; of pouring water, dripping water. So while we watch as our heroine goes about her everyday tasks, her suitor is upstairs shagging his co-star senseless, literally. Watermelons used as sex-toys, as food, as drink, as birth surrogates. And there are bodily fluids to match the sounds, there's saliva and tears and cum aplenty. And an ending that I am at a loss to explain. Just plain disturbing. Explicit and disturbing.

Le Pont des Arts

And within 15 minutes I was back in the cinema. For a pair of parallel love stories, of sorts. He on the poster is a disillusioned student with an all-too-serious serious girlfriend. She is a classical singer with an amazing voice, an arsehole conductor and a misunderstanding, well-meaning boyf. She is at the end of her tether. She can't handle it anymore. He hears her recordings and pulls his head from the oven. They fall in love. Ish, because she's dead.
Film-making by numbers this one. French film-making by numbers. The entire film was shot direct-to-camera, all speech by all characters spoken to camera, all very nouvelle vague. Our lead fills the role of Jean-Pierre Léaud, the self-substitute used by both Godard and Truffaut, very well—to the point that he looks like him. All very left-bank and outre and gauloises-smoking. And so while holding up the arts as lofty and sacred, it took the piss out of the arts, the arts being run, in this case, by a shady trio of ridiculous, aging, sugar-daddy queens sharing their aspiring art-boy 'stewards'. There was more direct-to-camera business. There was a bunch manifesto-like Godardian philosphy. There was musing and repression and very little expression. There was some humour, there was a lot of very beautiful music. I liked it. In a wanky French trying-too-hard kinda way. And it didn't end with a woman with a cock in her mouth and tears streaming down her face.

"We would have made more progress against terrorism if we had brought peace to Palestine rather than war to Iraq."

A man who had the strength of character to stand aside from his cabinet position in Tony Blair's government as a protest against the ilegal invasion of a sovereign nation, to voice his dissent publicly when so many kept their own counsel. Vale Robin Cook.

More Festival

Round two.

Ding ding

A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji

Back to Uchida Tomu, and this time a samurai flick. A road movie even, as a samurai lord and his two retainers make their way to Tokyo to deliver a teacup. Yep, a teacup. That you only see once. Briefly. This so-called cinematic masterpiece focusses on the experience of the samurai's lancer, played by the self-same actor who emotionally portrayed the birthmarked hero in Yoshiwara: The Pleasure Quarter. We also get to watch the enthralling escapades of a bunch of people we initially met on a ferry: amongst them a travelling player and her young child—a daughter who offers one of the most enthralling interpretations of the renowned 'slave dance', accompanied by koto; a reticent old peasant farmer selling his beautiful yet innocent daughter to a slave-trader, a nasty and deceitful thief and a comedy blind priest. Brilliant!
Well, kinda. A black and white genre pic. You could almost call it a buddy movie. A samurai film without violence (wha...?) but peppered with Ben-Stiller-type eeeww jokes. It was packed full of messages: all people are equal; violence is vanity; alcohol is evil. It sure moved at a clip compared to all the flicks I'd seen previously, and the sidekick kid stole the show.

Housewarming (Traveaux)

A French comedy in the tradition of Les Fugitifs and The Dinner Game, this one concerning a beautiful, lefty, dancing lawyer, a handful of illegal imigrants and the nightmare that is renovation. Yes, a high-kicking, dancing lawyer.
It's amazing the difference in crowd at these Festy screenings. For Saraband it was all grey-haired, serious types; for the Japanese ones it's nerdy-looking fan-boys and fan-girls; for the French comedy, it was all women in coats, mittens optional. And oh, it's fun. A light-weight laugh if ever there was one—and well worth it. I was a little peeved that ony the French was subtitled—and there was a fair bit of Spanish being spoken by said Columbianos. And [spoiler] the place looked better before the renovations than it after them.

Princess Raccoon

Legend has it that if an human and a tanuki fall in love, all hell will break loose.
Now,a modern film... but a Japanese comic opera? From esteemed director Sejun Suzuki—certainly the most arty of art films I've seen recently. It's very much a stage-y film, very much an opera: most of the action takes place on a set with a rousing chorus, complete with the comic characters you would expect from an Italian opera. Starring Zhang Zi Yi, you can't really go wrong—I mean there's one of the hottest women in the world up there, even if she is heading towards over-exposure. Yet, still, it ran for too long; it was slow, slow, slow.

The Mad Fox

The third in my Uchida Tomu homage, this film was strikingly similar to the aforementioned Princess Raccoon. To the point where I'm pretty damn sure that it was the inspiration for Suzuki's enthralling 'lyrical tale'. This one is about a man falling in love with a fox—the other of Japan's two mythical, mystical shape-changing animals. The fox, however, is wicked, while the raccoon is jolly. Whatever. This 1962 technicolour number, considered Uchida Tomu's best by someone, somewhere, starts with a simple court-intrigue plot, the murder of the royal astronomer and the jockeying for succession of our hero and the Lady MacBeth-esque widow's favoured replacement. Which all ends in disaster about halfway through the film with the burning of the sets. And instead we switch to this weird-arse fox love story. Trippy weird. Too weird. Complete with rotating stages, animation, paper butterflies and fire-lighter blocks on wires, and a doll wrapped as a baby. Oh, and no sign of my friend the samurai lancer/pock-marked rural silk mogul.

So the upshot of all this Uchida Tomu business is that, frankly, the fellow rightly pales into insignificance behind legendary names like Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi. Watch Tokyo Story. You won't need to see another film ever again.

And so a rating for these four?

1. Traveaux
2. A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji
3. Princess Raccoon
4. The Mad Fox
   

The Invasion of Iraq makes Australia a terrorism target

Can anyone seriously believe they are still trying to deny this?