They've done what?

The national broadcaster has apparently produced an allegedly comic mini-series, to be aired later this year, about the Prime Minister's private life.

Can you imagine anyone ever writing or saying that sentence about any one of the other (ie male) Prime Ministers in Australian history, while they were in office?

No, neither can I.

In which recycling occurs

Back in 1994 I was writing a TV column for Eureka Street. Here's what I said about Laurie Oakes, whose weekly political interviews were the cornerstones of Channel Nine's now-defunct Sunday.

The 'political' interview often becomes a news event in itself, a focal and sometimes pivotal point in the affairs of government. While it purports to deal with the events of recent days, bits of it frequently end up in everybody's news bulletins on the following Monday night; constructed thus as 'news', it sometimes produces further consequences.

Keeping track of these unfolding causalities is disquieting. Among other things, they indicate just how much power Oakes has to help make things happen; his recent interviews have had a hand in the ebb of Ros Kelly's fortunes [remember Ros Kelly? -- Ed] and the flow of Bronwyn Bishop's. Remarks edited out of context, and then repeatedly re-broadcast both by Nine and by other stations, can have major consequences; and sometimes those remarks have been lured, coaxed or goaded out of reluctant ministerial mouths in the first place by strategies comparable in subtlety and sympathy to a well-aimed jackboot to the groin.

Cheryl Kernot, interviewed a week or two before Ros Kelly's resignation and taking a tough stand on accountability, is one of the few politicians I have ever seen remain unflustered by Oakes throughout an entire interview. Kernot, like Gareth Evans [ooh, prescience! -- Ed] but unencumbered by what Jane Austen would have called his uncertain temper, is both spectacularly well-informed and possessed of high-level debating skills; at one point she left Oakes speechless, sweetly but mercilessly showing him up through a hole in his own research.

One of the most noticeable features of this interview was the difference in its participants' rhetoric: Kernot's images and metaphors were those of consensus and integration, Oakes's those of strife and fracture. His language, illuminated by the difference, revealed his view of political affairs as essentially antagonistic, competitive and hierarchical; 'win' and 'lose' are two of his favourite words. This world view, like the medium through which it is expressed, is coercive; in shaping his questions according to it, Oakes builds whole suburbs of verbal dark alleys down which it becomes very difficult for his subjects not to go. Most politicians' terror of silence is such that a simple 'I don't accept the terms of your question' would never occur to them, even when that is clearly the case.

When Julia Gillard patiently said 'I don't accept your premise, Kerry' to Red Kezza on the evening of the day she became Prime Minister, in response to just such a begged question about the 'stabbing in the back' of Kevin Rudd, I whooped and hollered and applauded and frightened the cats. I'd been waiting (at least) sixteen years to hear a politician say that to a journalist.

Much of the rest of it also reads as though those sixteen years had never existed. Perhaps these are the glory days for which Oakes yearns, and that's why he's behaving the way he is now.

What's prompted me to dig this out of the filing cabinet is the news that Cheryl Kernot may be standing as an Independent for a Senate seat. Go Cheryl.

You want me to cook what now?

I don't watch MasterChef, for the excellent reason that the telly is borked and there's no time to get organised with a new antenna and shifting the furniture around and blah de blah. Clearly I don't care about TV as much as I thought, or all else would have been swept away before the dire emergency of not having one, so there you go. One continues to learn things about oneself even at my age.

I have no doubt that once I get the TV situation sorted I'll be glued to MasterChef whenever it's on, but in the meantime I need someone to explain this dish to me.

Each was given three and a half hours to cook 120 raspberry, beetroot and black olive macarons and assemble them on a cone reminiscent of Zumbo's 2009 croquembouche, which terrorised contestants in season one.

Macarons hold no terrors for me, nor am I scared of scale. But my understanding of the chemistry of a macaron is that sugar is kind of central. Am I alone in thinking that 'raspberry, beetroot and black olive macarons' sound utterly disgusting? (And they look even worse than they sound.) Can someone who knows more than I about contemporary cuisine please explain?

In praise of women's tennis

As I type, Elena Dementieva and Justine Henin have been on the court for two hours and they're not even halfway through the second set, which is at deuce, two-all. It's the most beautiful, forceful, elegant match I think I've ever seen: two evenly matched slender blonde stars of the game, both having a good night and whupping each other all over the court except when doing delicate precision work at the net. It's like watching a magic cheetah trying to catch Tinkerbell.

UPDATE: and the unseeded, unranked Henin has just beaten the world no. 5 in straight sets, 7-5 7-6.

From the Bureau of Meteorology

FIRE WEATHER WARNING FOR SOUTH AUSTRALIA
Issued at 6:55 am CDT on Thursday, 19 November 2009.

Thursday, 19 November 2009 is forecast to be very hot and dry for all of South Australia. Fresh to strong north to northwest winds over the west of the state, will shift fresh southwesterly with a change reaching Ceduna mid afternoon and a line Tarcoola to Adelaide around midnight.

Catastrophic Fire Danger [100+] is forecast for the West Coast, Eastern Eyre Peninsula and Lower Eyre Peninsula Total Fire Ban districts.

Extreme Fire Danger [75-99] is forecast for the Northwest Pastoral and Flinders Total Fire Ban districts.

Severe Fire Danger [50-74] is forecast for the Mid North Total Fire Ban district.

The Country Fire Service advises that fires burning under these conditions are likely to be fast moving, unpredictable and uncontrollable. You should action your Bushfire Survival Plan now.

The forecast maximum temperature for Adelaide today is 43 degrees. Ceduna and Leigh Creek are expecting 45, Port Augusta 47.

Yesterday was the first day on which the new system of identifying fire danger in South Australia made use of the category Catastrophic. 'Catastrophic', aka 'Code Red', basically means 'Leave now, flee, run for your lives.' One of the regions listed under this red code is Lower Eyre Peninsula, the site of an uncontrollable bushfire in January 2005, a fire in which nine people died and dozens more were rendered homeless, penniless, and/or permanently damaged in some other way. The events of the fire had a long tail of depression, PTSD and suicide.

On the news last night they were interviewing people from the affected rural areas. Obviously the TV station (Seven, I think) edited their footage to suit their own purposes, and who knows what agendas lurk in the hearts of producers of commercial TV news, but everyone whose interview made it to the screen responded with that combination of steely and laconic that I remember so well from having grown up with it, in a slightly (but only slightly) kinder, gentler part of rural South Australia. (UPDATE: here, in fact, where the only SA bushfire of the day so far has broken out two paddocks across from the house I grew up in. Fark.)

Two fortyish, weatherbeaten male farmers said they wouldn't leave unless there was an actual fire. A young woman with kids was cross that the schools had been closed, not because it meant she had the kids at home (most country people regard that as an advantage; they can help with the work) but because she felt her kids were unnecessarily missing out on a precious day of education. One dear old hatted dude in the pub, a man of at least 80 and probably older, scorned the idea of leaving. 'There's no fire. And,' he added, looking the camera in the eye, 'I wouldn't be scared or worried if there was.' It was very obvious that he didn't necessarily mean he thought he was safe. Country people live with death on a daily basis and learn to look it in the eye.

My guess is that in the endless quest for ratings the station was pandering to the prejudices of urban viewers by trying to make country people look too stupid to come in out of the rain. If so, it sort of backfired; they looked at least as brave as they looked silly. I wasn't sure whether to admire them or scream at them. But I guess those two things aren't mutually exclusive.




The Curramulka fire started about a mile back over where my right shoulder would have been when I took this photo, which faces south. The paddock you can see to the right of the tree in the middle of the picture would have been one of the first to burn. My childhood home is a couple of hundred metres down this road on the left. The township is down where you can see the land dipping into a hollow like a saucer or a nest, about 5 km south of here.

The fire passed by very close to the town and headed south-east. It's now been contained, but about an hour ago there was supposed to be a wind change that might push it back towards the town along a projected path that would lead it directly towards the cemetery where my great-grandparents and great-great grandparents are buried. If those gravestones are damaged my father is going to be very seriously dark.

UPDATE UPDATE, 10.30 pm: Yep, here we go; the cemetery and further north what used to be our family farm are smack in the middle of this danger area. I've been watching that dry lightning in the western sky across the gulf ever since it got dark.

In December 1869, great-great-granpappy got forced over the cliff and into the sea with his son John and the horse and cart by a bushfire that unbeknownst to them until hours later had already killed the shepherd, the shepherd's son and over a thousand sheep. G-G-Granpa and his boy trod water while bits of burning debris rained down on them, along this same stretch of coast that's now under threat again, in the same bay where I learned to swim. The fire will probably pass over all four of their graves, and they'll be shaking their heads skulls and saying Oh great, here we go again.

This region is family heartland. Not happy.

UPDATE #3, midnight:

Okay, that was scary.

It's still filthy hot here, oven-hot, so I got in the car and drove the ten minutes to the same beach where the boy from the Bruce Springsteen song held his girl so sadly while the sun set into the sea and the kids rode the water slide and the merry-go-round a couple of nights ago. It's another Springsteen night tonight, the sea roaring and shadowy couples in shorts and sundresses lined up in cars along the edge of the dunes or trailing down to the beach with ice creams and tinnies.

I'd thought I might be able to see some sort of glow from the fire across the gulf. But I wasn't prepared for the actual line of golden, flickering flames where my and my father's and his father's and his father's childhood beaches were on fire in the dark, due west across the water. A few miles south of the fire I could see the faint lights of a town that must have been Port Vincent, now quite a big town, full of apprehensive people all still up with the lights on, thinking about what to do: full of women alone, still up, still dressed, making cups of coffee and cups of tea, checking on the kids, watching the phone while their blokes were out at the fire, waiting for their blokes to come home.

I pulled up on the esplanade and wound down the car window. Under the heavy complicated smell of the incoming tide and the wind in the pines and the cars along the foreshore and the warm spitty rain hitting the hot road in tiny drops and steaming, under all that, there was the faintest note of smoke.

Hey hey, who dunnit?

Here's what I want to know: who was it who watched the Jackson Jive act on old Hey Hey footage from decades ago, when the participants were all young medical students, and decided that it would be a good, funny and appropriate thing to do to invite them back? Who thought that was a good idea? Surely this can be tracked down to a single name. But I bet we never hear it.

Unless it was Daryl Somers himself, of course. He certainly appears to be living in the past in every other way.

For the record I think (a) that when it comes to humour, context is everything, especially with parody and satire, but (b) that blackface, whose origins lie in open mockery (and badly-concealed fear and loathing) of African-Americans, is not appropriate, at all, in any context, ever. (And I did enjoy Germaine Greer's comments on Q&A last night comparing the Hey Hey fallout with women's tolerance of men in drag. I've always taken it for granted, especially after seeing Priscilla, that theatrical drag -- as distinct from private or non-performative cross-dressing, which is about something else -- is grounded in ferocious hatred of and contempt for women, but that is true of so many other things, like The Footy Show, that one has to acknowledge it as a norm.)

Part of the context for the Jackson Jive fiasco, of course, was that one of the judges was a guest from the American South. So whoever set the whole thing up either was too ignorant and dim to realise, or did it deliberately. I'm not sure which is worse.

Baracknophobia: pace your rage

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Baracknophobia - Obey
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

You forget how awsum he is until you're actually watching him.

Australian Open, day 1: the good, the bad and the ugly

THE GOOD

-- Alicia Molik's commentary. Possibly the most intelligent, articulate and personable player Australian tennis has ever produced, Molik has played most of the women on the tour and is very familiar with their games. I've been watching big chunks of boring matches in the lead-up tournaments just to listen to her.

-- Todd Woodbridge's commentary. He's also very smart, and pulls no punches.

-- The sight of 16-year-old Bernard Tomic winning the first set of his Open debut game. Australian teenage boys have been getting publicity for all kinds of stupidity and excess over the last year or so and it is very refreshing to see a tough, talented, focused, hard-working kid playing controlled, thoughtful tennis on his first big day out.

-- The return to form of Jelena Dokic, and, one hopes, the continued absence of her daddy.

-- John Fitzgerald.


THE BAD

-- Lame second-string TV 'journalists' doing the rounds with their mics looking for 'features', which mostly means asking incredibly lame and vapid questions of people like Bernard Tomic's father and coach John, who obviously just wanted to sit and watch his kid play tennis but answered the inane questions politely and calmly.

-- Channel Seven's apparent indifference to the basic courtesy of pronouncing other people's names properly. They ought to research the pronunciation of the name of every player in the draw and then drill all the commentators in all the names until they can pass a test. NB this applies in particular to Russians and Frenchpersons. NBB Cricket commentary would also benefit from this practice.

-- John Alexander's apparent inability to notice, much less mention, any other player on the court if Lleyton Hewett is present.


THE UGLY

-- The cod-French pronunciation of sponsor Garnier of its name in its ads as 'Garny-air', to which one must listen approx 10,000 times a day if one has the telly on to follow the tennis while doing other things. But I have whinged about this before.

-- The appalling sexism that infests every level of Roger Rasheed's commentary. This is a hangover observation from last year, and one can only hope that Channel Seven sent him to re-education camp over the winter, or at least keeps him away from the women's games this year.

Is this family working?

During the lead story on tonight's 7.30 Report about the extensive recent storm damage in south-east Queensland and the high likelihood of more, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer both took advantage of the mics under their noses to say the word 'families' as often as possible, as in 'providing help for families'.

Any visitor to these shores idly watching the teeve in his or her hotel room could be excused for thinking that the single and the childless were expected to sod off and fix their own roofs, re-wire their own houses and clean up all the tree branches and sinister floating typhoid-harbouring garbage themselves. The homeless, of course, are not burdened with roofs and therefore require no attention either.

Word Nerd Corner (now with bonus nostalgia and film critique)

And today we have two:

1) "Fraudster"

Where did this bit of nonsense excess come from? It looks like tongue-in-cheek vaudeville Yiddish, or possibly Lolkitteh, whose construction is based partly on the addification of superfluitude. Whatever happened to the perfectly good, indeed lovely, word "fraud"? By this logic I could write you a list of some of my favourite blogs: The Viewster from Elsewhere, Hoydenster About Town, Pea Soupster, Baristaster, Humanities Researcherster ...

2) Socialite

In yet another cautionary tale about over-trustful reliance on the spell-checker, this week's TV guide, courtesy of News Ltd via the Adelaide Advertiser, contains a plot précis of tonight's ABC movie A Room With a View: 'Much to the disapproval of her chaperone, a young woman is drawn to the son of a socialite while visiting Florence in search of adventure.'

Now I wrote an Honours thesis on Forster back in the mists of time and to this day remember whole chunks of A Room With a View by heart ('Most excellent Honeychurches, but you know what I mean') and this does not sound to me like Forster's plot. For a start, the heroine is already engaged to the son of a socialite (a strange way to put it, I thought) and her arrival in Florence precipitates the new romantic direction away from him, not towards. And secondly, her chaperone, far from disapproving, is in fact excited and inspired by her new romantic adventure.

[UPDATE: well, I've watched it now and I take some of this back. What I was remembering was the chaperone Charlotte's own repressions and projections; chaperone is indeed outwardly over-horrified about Lucy's attraction to George but later proves to have been excited and stimulated by the romance, and a friend to it in the end. That was what I was remembering, not helped by conflating the character of the chaperone with her friend the novelist Miss Lavish, who finds it all terribly romantic and colourful. My bad. NB although I could sort of see what Davies was doing turning so many of the subtexts into super-texts (one of which in particular Forster would have been relieved to see end its long sojourn in the closet, so props to Davies for that) and obliterating others altogether, I thought this new version pedestrian, heavy-handed and literal-minded, though some of the casting was good, the music was nice, and Florence was Florence even though the cinematographer tried very hard to make it look ordinary with a palette of bleached Dickensian greys.]

I thought I'd solved the first mystery after two minutes' thought when I recalled that the new love interest is the son of a socialist (something Forster barely mentions in passing), and either some twelve-year-old sub had never seen the word 'socialist' but was intimately acquainted with the life and works of Paris Hilton, or (slightly more likely) they simply hadn't bothered to check. After all, it's not so long ago that I used the word 'interiority' in a book review and was subsequently horrified to see it rendered in both the online and the dead-tree edition of the paper in question as 'inferiority', which still made a kind of sense but, as you might expect, grotesquely changed the meaning of the sentence. (Both 'socialite' and 'inferiority' in these instances are variations on the theme of the eggcorn.) However, I remained bewildered by the chaperone part.

The TV guide gives the date of this production as 2007 so it is clearly not, I thought, alas, I thought, the substantial, sumptuous and multiply-Oscar-nominated Merchant Ivory adaptation of 1985 with Daniel Day-Lewis, Helena Bonham Carter, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Rupert Graves and Denholm Elliot.

No, a quick Google revealed that it is this adaptation by the ubiquitous Andrew Davies, who for reasons best known to himself has decided to change the ending in a way that would have Forster turning (or, more probably, knowing Forster, smiling gently) in his grave. And for all I know, not only has he made the chaperone disapproving but he's turned the love interest's father from a socialist into a socialite. Heck, why not.

Just as well I Googled it, or I would be spending an hour and a half tonight intermittently tearing my hair out and screaming at the TV. But Forster, as I say, is beyond caring. And as though to underline the point about spell-checking, up there in that last paragraph I originally typed 'smiling gently in his grace'.

Knowing Forster, that too.

We have always been at war with [insert name of country here]

Many people will have seen this footage on TV but I've not yet seen anyone blogging about it (probably because I tend to confine myself to the Ozblogosphere) and it seems worth making a note of. In a clip I saw last night of one of the Republican rallies where McCain was obliged to go into hosing-down mode against his own rabidly racist and moronic supporters, who were explicitly calling for Barack Obama to be murdered, one woman who had the microphone and was speaking directly to McCain, who appeared to be wandering around freely in the crowd answering questions, said of Obama 'And ... and ... he's an Arab!'

The split-second expression on McCain's face was indescribable. You have to wonder whether whether he can think much faster than he looks as if he can and was merely deciding how to play it, or whether his answer was actually based on a sincere belief. 'No,' he said, biting the bullet. 'No, no. He's ... a decent family man.'

Got that? The opposite of "Arab" = "decent family man".

AFTERTHOUGHT: In a way this is even worse, but has anyone else noticed that apart from a few true diehards (and I use the word advisedly), people seem to have been genuinely not noticing that Obama is, in fact, black? The race anxiety appears to have been displaced onto the evil Ay-rabs. My dad, who is 81 and has therefore seen a fair amount of recent world history played out (and spent most of 1944 and 1945 on a corvette in the Pacific), is barracking (sorry) for Obama but says he simply can't see America voting in a black president when it comes right down to it. But I'm getting the impression that in putting pressure on the running 'Ay-rab terrist' sore, the Republicans have -- quite accidentally, I'm sure -- taken the racist focus off its other obvious target.

In honour of Blog Like a Pirate Day ...

... we present the meta dead parrot. Arrrr.

For all your Idol needs

And in news of a very different order from this morning's portentous announcement (I hope you all remember who Malcolm was in Macbeth the Scottish play, and if you don't, ask yourself what the date 11/11/75 means to you), I'm thrilled to report that the brilliant PetStarr is doing her annual thing with the Australian Idol wrap-ups. Who needs to actually watch the show when you can read this instead? And why aren't politicians this funny?

This week PetStarr puts her finger on two important trends in contemporary Australian life:

... this "slack moll slurring" (as Raoul puts it) is an epidemic in modern music. Lisa Mitchell (aka Shuffles McBalletflats) was famous for it in Idol 2006, and Sarah Blasko's not immune, either. Can't we take all these birds to June Dally Watkins and make them prance around the room with books on their heads and marbles in their mouths, singing "The rain in spain falls mainly on the plain" until they learn?

Madam apparently moved from New Zealand to Australia to "make a better life" for her and her child. This angers Sooty, who screams "She's acting as if New Zealand is a fucking savage outpost!" She has a point. I mean, what did she do when she arrived in Sydney? "What be those horseless, metallic chariots? And what be this light that comes from a globe when all else around be dark? Ooh Australia be a far advanced land, for certain!"