Tony's Tidbits

A sense of place

2005-10-15T18:54:00.000-07:00

A sense of place

October 15, 2005

Place is crucial to all Australians. It is fundamental to the human sense of self, sense of community, sense of mortality and sense of destiny, argues Hugh Mackay.

ONE OF the silliest ways of trying to put cultural distance between Aborigines and other Australians - particularly those of Anglo-Celtic stock living in the suburbs - is by attributing to indigenous people a mystical sense of place, a special relationship with the land that transcends anything we urban types could comprehend.

It's all rubbish, of course. Not the special relationship bit; that's true enough. What's rubbish is the idea that the sense of place is unique to indigenous people, or even that it's more special, more "spiritual" for them than for us.

Different cultures obviously have different ways of expressing their sense of place; we revere our "tribal grounds" in different ways.

But connection to place is vital to our sense of identity - both personal and communal.

In fact, I suspect that much of the uneasiness, anxiety and moral uncertainty of modern urban societies can be traced to our loss of a strong sense of continuous connection with places that help to define us. Cyberspace, it turns out, is no substitute for the real thing.

So where did we get this weird idea that a relationship to the land is important only in agrarian, nomadic or hunting cultures?

In Australia, the continuing debate about land rights has been part of the problem (and no, this is not a polemic against land rights; on the contrary).

We say "Mabo" and we think "land", and so we should. But many Australians say "indigenous" and think only of land, as if the sense of place is uniquely magical and central in Aboriginal culture.

Perhaps I need only mention the MCG, Flemington, the SCG, the WACA or the Gabba to make the rather obvious point that urban Australia has places of almost mystical significance - places that symbolise deeply embedded cultural values and mark the location of great struggles, great triumphs, great defeats and great outpourings of human emotion.

Sport may not be your thing, and you might think I'm belittling indigenous culture by daring to mention sporting venues in the same breath as Aboriginal sacred sites.

But you'd have to be either prejudiced or blind not to have noticed the profound, if not spiritual, significance of such places as settings for the acting out of ancient and primitive tribal rituals of the battle and the hunt.

If sport doesn't do it for you, think of Gallipoli, Changi or the Kokoda Trail. Think of the Australian War Memorial, or the smaller memorials - parks, plaques, obelisks and halls scattered across Australia, marking the spots where homage is regularly paid to those who made supreme sacrifices on our behalf. Those places matter, their location essential to their role.

Still unconvinced? Revisit your primary school playground, then, or a classroom you once sat in.

The powerful sense of that place - the look of it, the feel of it, the smell of it - will stir all kind of emotions in you, positive and negative, not accessible via mere memory.

Those emotions spring from deep wells of half-forgotten longing; reservoirs of an aching simplicity; the momentous nothingness of a child's life lived without any real sense of a past and not much connection with the idea of a future that once yawned in our faces, but has already swirled past us.

Go to the suburb where you grew up (it's probably not very far from where you live now, stamping grounds being what they are) and walk the footpaths, the shops where you strolled and loitered as a teenager; the park where you learned to kick a football, fly a kite or trained your dog to fetch; the backyard where you took your first catch or learned to skip, climb, hide or whistle. Not significant? Go and have a look.

The rush of recognition when we hear songs that supplied the soundtrack to our adolescence and early adulthood is an evocation of place as much as time, because the places matter.

You can see how much they matter when they're torn down or ripped apart. The cinema where you learned about good and evil writ large now a Persian rug shop, forever closing down.

And whatever happened to that corner? Why have they widened the road? Where is the ...

Where is the ... Hey! Where is the house I grew up in? Where is my neighbour's house? Shocking stuff, the removal or disruption of place.

The place where you worked at your first job. The quad at your university, the lawns where you lay in the sun, scarcely daring to believe she was feeling as you were feeling (and usually finding she wasn't). The harbour. The river. The lake. The holiday destination with its beaches, or its mountain tracks. The caravan park, year after year. Go back and feel it. Sense it. Tell me it doesn't mean anything.

It doesn't have to be a primitive, unspoiled place. It doesn't have to be grass and rocks and trees and streams. Ask the people who live in Carnegie if those places mean something more than just spaces to sleep and walk and eat in. They don't have to be charming, trendy, beautiful or even well defined.

"My street" is magic in every nuance, and sometimes the magic lingers: I have two streets like that - one in Sydney, one in Melbourne - where an occasional pilgrimage is both reassuring and gut-churning (that tree, that hedge, that fence, that veranda, those ghosts).

What about the cathedrals, churches, chapels, courts and concert halls - places that have enclosed and inspired some of our most numinous, uplifting, heartbreaking or clarifying moments?

Or the places where we stood and heard terrible news: we know where we were when we heard the news of Kennedy's assassination, or the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre because we were rooted to the spot.

And there are places we never want to go to again, because they contain demons or ghosts we know will catch us if we venture too close. I know of one man who will never, under any circumstances, visit his old school again; another who refuses even to drive down the street where he grew up in a desperately unhappy family.

Why would he: the place is the most powerful of all the symbols of his unhappiness.

Some places contain our personal secrets, but places also create and capture our sense of belonging to a community: indeed, it's arguable if we can hold on to a sense of community without anchoring it to places.

The places where we . . . where the family . . . where our neighbours . . . The places that stood for our emerging sense of ourselves as people who belong somewhere, and don't belong somewhere else.

The sense, as a child, of even the next street being alien, let alone the next suburb. The sense of a relative's house in a distant suburb being like an oasis of familiarity in a desert of strangeness. Tribal grounds? Stamping grounds? Of course; what else?

What's less mystical about any of that than the mystical status of place in indigenous culture? It is neither to detract from that culture, nor to honour it any less, to say that place is fundamental to the human sense of self, sense of community, sense of mortality and sense of destiny.

It's also fundamental to our sense of morality. Only when we feel connected to others do we seem willing to accept some responsibility for their wellbeing.

The real test of our moral sensitivity is not how nice we are to our friends and family members, but how we treat the people who share the places where we live and work, whether we happen to like them or not. (Funny how we so carefully choose the places where we'll live, but not the people we'll have as neighbours. Did you ever interview the people in the street before you bought a house? No; it was the place that spoke to you.)

Places shape us. Living in a mean little concrete box will take its toll on you, as surely as the design of Parliament House will shape the attitudes and behaviour of the politicians who work in it.

If you're interested in raising the moral tone of a community, look first to the creation of spaces where people can meet, walk, talk, play, eat, drink. (Is the regional shopping mall really the best we can do? Did any community ever find its soul in such a place?)

The places where we discover the magical sense of being connected to a neighbourhood - the pub, the park, the church, the schoolyard, the shops - lodge in our memory.

The "global village", by contrast, is just a hoax perpetrated by the high priests of the IT revolution. Villages, urban or otherwise, need real places to foster the incidental connections - the smiles, the nods - of village life. Falling in love on the net is usually a hoax, too: love needs a place to grow, just as herd animals need a place to graze together. One video screen is much the same as another (a bit like shopping centres and airports), whereas real places are unique. Cyberspace is a clever name, but we must resist the idea that it bears any relation to the other kind.

Our problem is not that we lack the yearning for a sense of place; that yearning is universal. Our problem, especially compared with Aborigines, is that we've often failed to acknowledge the deep need in ourselves.

Aborigines don't have a mortgage on the sense of place, but they could teach the rest of us a thing or two about how to nurture it.

Hugh Mackay is an author and social commentator.

UK Aussies a refined lot

2005-09-30T18:53:00.000-07:00

By James Button

Europe Correspondent
London

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/29/1127804608188.html

September 30, 2005

SHE is in her 20s, working as a professional and earning the equivalent of $50,000 to $150,000 a year. Though she plans to return home one day, she has a British husband and is even buying her home. Meet the typical Australian living in Britain.

It's a far cry from the "Bazza McKenzie" and backpacking image of Australians in London.

In a paper given to a London conference yesterday, Adelaide geographer Graeme Hugo cited Australian Immigration Department statistics showing that 46 per cent of Australians who make permanent or long-term departures to Britain are now professionals, while a further 10 per cent are managers and administrators.

Professor Hugo said young Australian women were more likely than men to engage in what he calls "rite-of-passage migration" to Britain.

Two-thirds of people who left Australia for the UK in the past 10 years were aged 20 to 29, and nearly 56 per cent of them were female — a contrast to usual emigration figures, which are dominated by men.

While some educated emigrants may be pulling beers in a London pub, another survey of Australian graduates working in Britain showed that 30 per cent were earning the equivalent of $100,000 or more, and another 33 per cent more than $50,000.

Of the 660 graduates surveyed, two-thirds were married. Of these, a third had an Australian partner, while half had a partner born in the UK. A quarter had married since they left Australia. While 55 per cent planned to return to Australia one day, more than half owned or were buying a home in the UK.

Presented at The Australian Diaspora in Britain since 1901, a conference funded by Monash University's Institute for the Study of Global Movements, Professor Hugo's paper shows profound changes in the movement of people between Australia and Britain in the past 30 years.

While fewer Britons are leaving to live permanently in Australia (the UK share of Australia's overseas-born population is at an all-time low of 25 per cent) since the 1990s there has been a "spectacular increase" in people on working holidays and tourists. After the Japanese, Britons now comprise the largest number of short-term visitors to Australia.

The changes reflect shifts in "global international migration away from settlement migration to increased circularity in flows but also a shift in Australian immigration policy, which for the first time, (has) allowed substantial temporary immigration for work," Professor Hugo said.

Among other changes, in 2001 and 2002, "there were more permanent departures from Australia to the UK" than the other way, reversing a 200-year pattern. While it is unclear how many Australians live in the UK — many are not counted in the census — Professor Hugo cited several estimates of 300,000.

Inside Australia's third world

2005-09-15T20:31:00.000-07:00

September 15, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/14/1126377372484.html

What sort of future do they face? Children atop a burnt out car as they play.
Photo: Glenn Campbell

Children begging for food, chronic health problems, overcrowded houses - this is not some basket-case nation but the reality of Aboriginal communities in northern Australia. As world leaders gather in New York to discuss poverty, Lindsay Murdoch looks at the distress in our own backyard.

Tracker Tilmouth points angrily at a tin shanty where 23 Aborigines are living in squalor. "Take a look. That's not only a disgrace. It symbolises what I believe amounts to a form of cultural and social genocide," he says. "This is as bad as anywhere on Earth, right here on Australian soil."

Tilmouth knows more than most about Aboriginal poverty, poor health, high crime, alcoholism and substance abuse. Snatched from relatives living in an Alice Springs creek bed when he could barely walk, Tilmouth has spent most of his life in remote indigenous communities.

New research shows that a population explosion and 30 years of under-funding in education, health and infrastructure has created a social time-bomb in these communities. "I have to speak out now because things are getting worse for people in these communities," says 53-year-old Tilmouth, a former head of the Central Land Council, the peak Aboriginal body in central Australia. "The system delivering services to these places has collapsed. But nobody wants to talk about it. Governments have one last chance to get it right or else they will be dealing with a catastrophe."

Bob Beadman probably knows more about the problems of Aboriginal Australians than any other non-indigenous person.

He also says it is time to speak out to shock Australia about the state of remote indigenous communities.

The former top public servant, who is chairman of the Northern Territory Grants Commission, says that 30 years of policies that bureaucrats considered generous have failed tragically because they ruled Aborigines out of having any effective role in their own lives.

We just want to be a normal part of Australia
with all the services and opportunities that
are available to the rest of you."
LEON MELPI, elder.

"We are now on the rocks," he says. "We need to fundamentally set a new course and abandon the old tiller settings. People need to be shocked. They need to be moved from their tacit acceptance that everything is okay. A huge task confronts the nation and particularly Aborigines themselves."

Beadman says that people need to abandon political correctness and tackle the taboos associated with indigenous communities such as child molestation, family violence and poor diet and personal hygiene. "Only when the dirty linen is put out for the wash will it be washed," he says.

But Beadman says that above everything, Aborigines need to be reengaged so that momentum for change comes from them. "They have been encouraged to think ... that government would prefer them to be paid to sit down rather than to work," he says.

Children outside a dilapidated house.
Photo:Glenn Campbell

"Billions of dollars have been thrown at this problem and we still have a deteriorating outcome."

University lecturer Steve Sunk has decided to expose what is happening in remote indigenous communities where he has worked for the past eight years in the hope that community elders will get the same help that is available to other Australians.

He has written to the Northern Territory's Chief Minister, Clare Martin, to tell of children in these communities who are starving and begging for food from teachers.

Appealing for urgent government action, including protection and daily meals, the Charles Darwin university lecturer says that children are being raped and "there is a lot of molesting and incest going on with the kids and it's too disgusting to mention the facts".

"They (children) are sleeping on concrete floors, they don't have the luxury of a mattress even to share with a camp dog," Sunk says in the previously unpublished letter. "Kids have sores all over which are not healing up because of lack of proper food."

Research by the Australian National University's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research reveals that fertility rates in 1300 remote indigenous communities are so high that the present total population of about 100,000 could double in 20 to 25 years.

John Taylor, a senior fellow at the centre, believes that unlike the rest of rural Australia, where economies are shrinking and populations declining, the "clock is ticking for remote indigenous communities".

Speaking in Wadeye - the largest remote community, 420 kilometres south-west of Darwin, where he is updating his earlier research - Taylor warns that unless there is an immediate major response from governments, the cost of attempting to fix the inevitable social dysfunction in the future will be enormous.

He says the communities have remained largely out of sight of mainstream Australia, which for years "managed to avert its glance".

But as the communities become increasingly accessible and open to the outside world "Australia cannot afford to avoid them any more."

The problems confronting Wadeye, a former Catholic mission with a population of about 2100, are similar to those of other remote communities.

An average of 17 people live in each sweltering, graffiti-covered house such as the one that Tilmouth pointed out. Almost half the population is under 15, most of the teenagers cannot speak English, infant mortality is four times the national average and life expectancy is 20 years less than that of non-indigenous Australians. Up to 80 per cent of the prisoners in Northern Territory jails are indigenous and many of them are from remote communities.

The administrators and elders in almost all the remote communities complain of a lack of basic services that are available to other Australians.

Many of the communities look like Third-World refugee camps. There are no banks, high schools, libraries, bitumen roads, child-care centres, restaurants, old people's homes or even privately owned service stations, milk bars or hardware stores - the sort of facilities you would see in a town of similar size elsewhere in Australia.

While thousands of well-paid public servants from federal and NT departments work on indigenous matters in air-conditioned offices in Darwin and Alice Springs, administrators in remote communities complain that their pleas for help mostly go unanswered.

Ngukurr, a community at the edge of Arnhem Land, asked for eight months for help on chronic petrol sniffing among teenagers. One social worker with expertise in the problem arrived for one day.

Wadeye, which has a new, invigorated governing body based on centuries- old traditions, has declared that enough is enough. It is planning to sue the NT Government for years of neglect of its children's education.

According to a report written by Taylor, the community receives less than half the education funding for each child compared with the average for the rest of the Territory.

But remote communities lower the average and Taylor says that a direct comparison between Wadeye and Darwin is likely to be many times worse.

The revelations about the state of life in remote communities come amid signs that a bold experiment by the Howard Government to trial a "whole of government" approach to delivering services to 10 indigenous communities, including Wadeye, is faltering.

In early August, federal Family and Community Services Minister Kay Patterson was taken aback when she was told during a visit to Wadeye that community elders were close to quitting the second stage of the Council of Australian Governments trial.

Patterson, whose department leads the trial in Wadeye, was not aware that the community was missing help from government departments because it was wrongly believed it was getting all the help it needed from COAG.

A report written in August by Wadeye's Thamarrurr council told COAG that the trial was "placing unsustainable pressure on council members and staff and on council resources". The report suggested that the trial had caused the community to chase its tail. "We have come across our own tracks many times," the report said. "Our people ask ‘how can this be?' "

Of $1.3 million allocated to another COAG trial in the Far-East Kimberley region of Western Australia, only $327,000 was spent on Aboriginal people and programs over two-and-a-half years.

The rest of the money was spent on salaries, travel and other related administrative expenses of the Department of Transport and Regional Services, which administers the program.

Tilmouth described COAG as a Band-Aid solution and a waste of time. "There are so many meetings that they have to hold more meetings to discuss the problem of so many meetings," he said.

As the Howard Government pushes Shared Responsibility Agreements it has negotiated directly with communities such as Wadeye, Aboriginal leaders and administrators in central and northern Australia are questioning how much of federal funds that are sent to the NT Government to tackle Aboriginal disadvantage actually reaches communities.

Norman Fry, the chief executive officer of the Northern Land Council, the peak indigenous organisation in northern Australia, says that spending on indigenous health, housing and other programs by the NT Government remains a "deep, dark secret" that his organisation wants investigated.

He says the truth about Aboriginal funding "must be exposed so that the true causes of dysfunction in remote communities may be addressed".

Northern Land Council chairman John Daly told the National Indigenous Times last month that "every indicator and every report points to serious concerns with the Northern Territory Government's expenditure of monies targeted for Aboriginal disadvantage".

Indigenous leaders point to reports that just over $1.5 billion of the $4 billion of the GST revenue expected to be collected in NSW and Victoria in 2005-06 will go to the NT Government to meet the needs of Territory Aborigines.

They say that $1.5 billion is more than the entire national budget of the now-dismantled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. They point out that while ATSIC's taxpayer funds were spent primarily on work-for-the-dole and infrastructure maintenance programs, the NT Government is responsible for education, health and infrastructure.

Indigenous leaders in the Territory regard education as the most important priority and want to see an exact account of where the money is being spent.

Taylor says that on any school day, only a quarter of children of school age in remote communities actually sit down behind a desk. But the NT Government continues to receive 100 per cent federal funding for these children's education.

The delivery of health services is also one of the main areas of concern. The NT receives about $115 million from the Federal Government for Aboriginal health.

Territory indigenous leaders strongly believe that, following the demise of ATSIC, the Howard Government should establish powerful regional authorities that would receive and distribute Commonwealth funds for disadvantaged Aborigines.

Both the Darwin-based Northern Land Council and the Alice Springsbased Central Land Council have told Canberra that they believe it would be more efficient for federal funding not to be sent first to mainstream government departments and agencies.

Beadman, a former head of the NT Office of Aboriginal Development who has written a report on the future of Aboriginal youth for the Menzies Research Centre, says the establishment of strong regional authorities would be a "better co-ordinating mechanism for state and territory-level funding and federal funding".

Leon Melpi, a respected elder of Wadeye, is fed up with bureaucrats coming to the community with pieces of paper to discuss one solution or another. "They should stay away and do their business and not come back until they have a final solution," he says.

"All I will say is that we want to deal directly with the people who actually make the decisions that affect us. We want to cut out the middle man."

In the meantime, Melpi is planning to build an ecologically friendly motel on his land above a magnificent, white sand beach that few non-indigenous people have ever stepped foot on.

"We just want to be a normal part of Australia with all the services and opportunities that are available to the rest of you," he says.

Topping the kitsch list

2005-08-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

Topping the kitsch list
August 19, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/topping-the-kitsch-list/2005/08/18/1123958136462.html

Fiona Scott-Norman analyses why actors bother to release albums.

Different things bring joy to different people. Some folks are elated by the advent of spring, others by the birth of a new child, still others are exultant if they score a free baseball cap from the back of a Fox Black Thunder.

For me, the most recent fast-track to joy town was the discovery that William Shatner and Russell Crowe have released new albums. I know: it doesn't get much better than that.

Crowe's downloadable solo album of original folk tunes is called My Hand, My Heart, and it is a significant release for two reasons.

One, because it raises the important question: which other body part did Russ have his hand on?

And, two, it is a welcome addition to the always irresistible world of kitsch musical recordings, the collecting of which can quickly burgeon into an addiction.

There are as many gloriously dubious musical releases as there are angels bootscooting on the head of a pin.

There are child stars (hello Nikki! Could be worse. At least you were born too late for Young Talent Time), religious albums featuring grim-faced and unlovely Christian families on their covers (most of these releases, disturbingly, originated in Waco, Texas), and there's also a small, seething pit of out-and-out megalomaniacal wrongness - Charles Manson and Imelda Marcos spring to mind.

Yes, they both have albums, eponymously named. Manson's is as ghastly an effort as you'd expect from a deranged killer, and Imelda, disappointingly, let slip through her elegant, thieving fingers the opportunity to claim These Boots Are Made for Walking as her signature tune.

The grand pooh-bah of them all, of course, is William Shatner. His transfixing 1968 recording The Transformed Man immediately achieved - and retains to this day - cult kitsch status, which is why a new album from him, 36 years later - titled Has Been - is so intriguing.

The Transformed Man came out at the height of Shatner's fame as Star Trek's Captain Kirk and was a hysterical, self-absorbed, psychedelic, sincere, spoken-word experiment, with Shatner talking his way through the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. It is unlistenable without the appropriate medication and therein lies its charm.

Russell Crowe, having already released several albums with the uncomfortably named and now defunct Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts, was also already a card-carrying member of the collectable kitsch celebrity subset: Actors Who Are Convinced They Are Serious Artistes/Rock Stars.

It's an exclusive club in which Crowe and Shatner rub shoulders with fellow serious not-so-young insects Eddie Murphy, Don Johnson, Craig McLachlan, Bruce Willis and even Tony Barber.

The paradox that traps all of these actors in a vortex of torment is that the fame that gives them the platform to launch a music career makes it essentially impossible for anyone to take them seriously.

Tony Barber, despite releasing many albums, has never broken out as a singer and overcome his image as Australia's perky quizmaster.

The others - especially Murphy, Crowe and Johnson - are all earnest singer/songwriters but hopelessly associated with the devalued currency of the celebrity album, where anyone with a spot of fame whacks out an album to cash in.

John Travolta, for example, released an album at 22 on the back of Welcome Back Kotter; other hit-and-run celeb offerings came from Cameron Daddo, Scott Baio (aka Chachi from Happy Days), Pia Zadora, Twiggy, Dennis Waterman, Leonard Nimoy, Torvill and Dean, John Laws, Don Lane, Bernard King (Pot of Gold) and Abigail (No. 96 and the first woman to get her breasts out on Australian television).

King and Abigail at least had their tongues firmly in their cheeks; King's A Man of Style is as camp as all get out, and following from her hit cover of Serge Gainsbourg's Je t'aime - on which she simulated an orgasm - Abigail released an album so stuffed with double entendres that Benny Hill would have suggested toning it down.

Understandably, the general public, when confronted with an album from Don Johnson at the height of his pink-jacketed and designer-stubbled Miami Vice fame, was not going to put him in the same creative basket as, say, Madonna or Bowie, even though the songs were original and he'd collaborated with Tom Petty.

Ditto Willis and his blues album The Return of Bruno on the back of the Moonlighting TV series. Ditto Captain Kirk of Star Trek releasing The Transformed Man, and Russell Crowe releasing My Hand, My Heart off assaulting a hotel employee with a telephone.

As Crowe attempts to reinvent himself as a sensitive, guitar strumming, folk balladeer, writing songs about cane cutters, his wife and deaths in the family, it may cross his mind that it's difficult to get the credibility you crave when you present in public as an antisocial wingnut.

What must be especially galling for Crowe is that the more seriously he takes himself, the greater the credibility gap, and the more ridiculous he becomes - and Crowe takes himself and his music very, very seriously.

When he first flagged the existence of My Hand, My Heart he invited a journalist into his home and spent 4 hours explaining his songs. That's not an interview, that's a hostage situation.

You can approximate the experience for yourself by visiting http://www.myhandmyheart.com. Crowe explains the history of every song, every thought, in extravagant, almost compulsive, detail; gives you three different potential over-designed CD covers to vote for (one made of wood, another an oil painting of Russ); and displays quotes from Billy Bragg and Sting praising Crowe's songwriting.

A fan site contains a blog from Crowe complaining that he's misunderstood, but to be fair, it's not for want of him explaining.

It's not Crowe's music (an unremarkable but pleasant and sincere folk album) that places My Hand, My Heart on the kitsch list; it's Crowe.

In stark contrast, Has Been lifts William Shatner entirely out of the abject company of Crowe et al.

Collaborating with Ben Folds, Joe Jackson, Henry Rollins and a kick-arse choir, Shatner has created a genuinely great album; funny, compelling, moving, sophisticated and self-aware.

His cover of Pulp's Common People has been getting justified airplay, and the entire project emanates wisdom and fun.

The secret is actually quite simple - after 36 years, Shatner learned to stop taking himself seriously.

Dealing with the X factor

2005-07-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

Dealing with the X factor
July 30, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/dealing-with-the-x-factor/2005/07/29/1122144004015.html

Douglas Coupland is still haunted by the extraordinary impact of his first book. Before his visit to Melbourne, he speaks to Ben Naparstek.

Douglas Coupland recently chewed up several of his novels with his molars. He then sculpted hornets' nests from the mush. For the Vancouver writer and visual artist, who feels closer to art society than the literati, the exercise made for an intellectually satisfying meal.

"For years I've been thinking, 'What is a book materially? When does the book stop being a book and become a sculpture? Or is a book a sculpture in itself?', " says the writer credited with introducing the term generation X into the popular lexicon with his 1991 novel of the same name.

Coupland fell into writing almost by accident, while living in Hawaii after graduating from art school. A magazine editor in Vancouver, amused by one of Coupland's postcards, asked him to write an article.

At first, journalism was merely a side gig to shore up his income as an artist. Then he began writing a regular comic strip, Generation X, for a corporate magazine. It attracted the attention of a New York publisher, who commissioned Coupland to write a lifestyle handbook for his age cohort.

Coupland produced a novel instead but the title, illustrations and vernacular glossary planned for the original non-fiction book remained. Published when Coupland was 29, Generation X portrays three disaffected 20-something "slackers" who withdraw to a desert bungalow in California. They shun the society controlled by rich baby boomers, hogging the spoils while consigning their offspring to low-paying "McJobs".

Coupland claimed, however innocently, that he only wanted to tell a story. Despite his protests that generation X referred to a particular mind-state rather than his generation, the book was hijacked by social anthropologists and advertising agencies, casting Coupland as the ring bearer of the prematurely jaded generation.

As Coupland reached rock star status, the inevitable false rumours started circulating; he was said to live in Scotland, store letters in a vault and collect meteorites. Thirteen books on, it's understandable that he should bridle at being asked about the X phenomenon. "Good God! It's 2005."

Yet, despite his attempts to distance himself from the spokesman-for-a-generation mantle, his novels continued to tap into the anxieties of post-baby boomers, while remaining pocked with up-to-the-minute schlock-culture references.

Coupland suffered a critical backlash with his next books, Shampoo Planet and Life after God, where he was seen as failing to move beyond the cool phrase-making, lists and aphorisms of his debut. "My 15 minutes of fame ended somewhere around 1993."

His image was rehabilitated with his 1995 novel Microserfs, a satire of computer programming apparatchiks that The New Statesman called "the first great work of cyber-realism".

Coupland's latest novel Eleanor Rigby is possibly his most autobiographical work. It is narrated by Liz Dunn, an overweight 42-year-old cubicle worker, who sleepwalks through life with no passions or aspirations, and lives alone without friends, lovers or pets.

The novel stems from the loneliness that dogged Coupland throughout his 20s. He thought he needed to swallow more Prozac. Only in retrospect did he identify his malaise as loneliness - an affliction without a drug cure. Coupland thinks that the Canadian high school curriculum should introduce a new subject: Loneliness 101.

"If they told us in school that there was this weird thing you were going to experience the moment you turn 20, that would have been a great service. It might be just a North American thing but you always have to smile for the camera and give it your best. Negative emotions, or inevitable emotions, never get discussed."

Coupland believes that most protagonists automatically become synonymous with the latest Hollywood pin-up in the reader's imagination. With the obese Liz, Coupland forecloses that possibility.

"We really do have these generic, interchangeable hero and heroine characters in our head. You have to work really, really hard to combat the tendency to default back to that generic narrator."

It occurred to Coupland, while working on Eleanor Rigby, that he was writing to his younger self.
"I used to operate under the belief that everyone has as good a chance as anyone else. Now, at a ridiculously late age, I realise that looks, family and education wildly skew people's lives. I figured out how and why the world works quite late in the game. I wish I hadn't been as clueless as I was."

As with his previous novel Hey Nostradamus!, there's an ambiguous religious undertow to Eleanor Rigby. Hey Nostradamus! was partly narrated by the ghost of a victim of a Columbine-style school shooting, whose body is found next to a binder on which she has scrawled: "God is nowhere/God is now here."

In Eleanor Rigby, the heroine's long-estranged, now terminally ill son, re-enters her life as a Christ-like figure to nudge her towards redemption. While he has apocalyptic visions of items dropping from the sky, there's never any question that they're illness-related hallucinations.
So is Coupland religious? "That's one of those questions where if you answer in the affirmative it means you're not. I like to think of myself as being religious, but it's something you really have to work at, or else you stop being it very quickly."

Coupland's trademark offhand prose, sitcom-like repartee and outlandish chance events remain in force in his last two books. Yet there's also a compassionate, moralistic voice that was absent from his earlier, surface-obsessed works. He shrugs off the suggestion that he has been gradually reaching for more spiritual themes, promising that his forthcoming novel, jPod, will turn that idea on its head. "I wanted to do something which is flat-out funny, that has no other scheme in mind."

Still, he struggles to recognise himself in the younger writer who said: "Writing that sets out to prove something isn't really writing - it's a kind of lobbying."

Coupland credits art, rather than literature, with influencing his style. "I approach the creation of words from a visual standpoint. The way I look at the literary world is that there's no modern art there.

"Quality is based on how well you draw a feather, as opposed to generating new forms. In the art world, popular culture, high culture, middlebrow culture, no culture - nature, science and mathematics - morphed together in the '60s. Thinking about where you can get ideas, and how you can use them, is the opposite of rigid."

He's an unapologetic connoisseur of plastic surgery makeover faux-reality television programs, joking that if Extreme Makeover and The Swan were submitted as art films to the Venice Biennale two decades ago, they would have won the Prix d'Or.

For his first five books, Coupland carried around notebooks, recording detailed observations that formed the basis of his novels. "I was putting myself through my own personal journalism school." This might account for why reviews of his early books sometimes characterised him as a jumped-up journalist, more interested in fad-spotting than character or plot. Eventually he realised that newspaper and magazine editors were mostly excerpting passages from novels
that he wrote spontaneously rather than from notes. He hasn't used notes since.

Coupland only recently started working with an editor. When he switched publishers for his 2000 novel Miss Wyoming, his new editor issued him a 15-page memorandum, criticising the manuscript for mawkishness. She even likened it to Patch Adams.

"When I read the old books, I think, 'For god's sake, why didn't anyone ever edit you?' If I was lucky, they got spellchecked. I'm not some sort of freakish exception. Editing has become about acquisition rather than editing."

Coupland rarely tours, but is looking forward to visiting Melbourne for the Writers' Festival because, he says, "everyone tells me it's almost identical to Vancouver". Coupland signs off his emails: "Cheers from the Other Melbourne." He did his last major publicity jaunt in 1995 - a three-month trip through Europe that triggered a severe breakdown. On return to Vancouver, he suffered what felt like an epileptic seizure. "I felt my DNA disintegrating. It was terrifying."

He spent the following year in what he likens to a waking coma, too crippled by depression and agoraphobia to write or leave his house. "There's only so much travel I can do before I become a madman, but I didn't know that then. Now I say no to practically everything."

Coupland is still stalked by the ghost of the washout he once feared he might become. "When you went to art school in Vancouver - the middle of nowhere back then - you made certain assumptions about the way your life was possibly going to go. If I'd ended up in a methadone clinic, I wouldn't have been surprised. I'm always aware of the spectre of what might have been."

Douglas Coupland will be a guest at next month's Age Melbourne Writers' Festival. Eleanor Rigby is published by HarperCollins.

Gonzo, not forgotten

2005-07-24T23:45:00.000-07:00

Gonzo, not forgotten

http://www.theage.com.au/news/books/gonzo-not-forgotten/2005/07/23/1121539189130.html

Rich Tosches
Aspen, Colorado

July 24, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson's memorial service will be as unusual and dramatic as the writer's life.
In just a few weeks a cannon will roar a few kilometres down the road from this Mecca of Mink, a cannon that sits atop a bizarre 47-metre metal sculpture of a fist. The big gun will launch half of the ashes of Hunter S. Thompson hundreds of metres into the air above his rustic Woody Creek home.

Thompson's wife and his only child will keep the other half of the author's ashes. They sent the rest to a Hollywood explosives expert who packed them into a mortar shell, above a layer of gunpowder.

His memorial service, like his life, will be very loud.

And if the weather charts hold true, the wind will blow from the west or north-west as usual and carry the whacky journalist from his backyard into the majestic White River National Forest to spend eternity in peace and harmony.

In the short term, until there's a good cleansing rain, he might spend some time in the thick hair of a bewildered elk that might still smell the scotch in Thompson's ashes.

Thompson, whom the BBC called "an unflinching and acerbic chronicler of US counterculture", was riddled with disease and confined to a wheelchair when he shot himself in the head at his home on February 20. He was 67.

The cannon-blast of his ashes through his trademark gonzo fist will mark the six-month anniversary of his death. It will be part of a private service because his widow, Anita, does not want it to be like a circus. This means, presumably, that when he is blasted from the cannon, there won't be a net.

Thompson became famous with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a 1972 work that the New York Times Book Review called "the best book on the dope decade".

Here is what Thompson wrote in that book — just on the first page — about a trip with a lawyer friend from Los Angeles to Nevada: "The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge."

He wrote 14 similar books. The Curse of Lono in 1983 and Songs of the Doomed in 1990 still have legions of followers, mostly in the waiting rooms of methadone clinics.

Then he killed himself and now they're going to fire the brilliant, funny, politically incorrect scribe's ashes out of a cannon in his backyard, three kilometres from the Woody Creek Tavern where he often sat, his right hand seemingly glued to a glass of Chivas Regal.

Among those invited to Thompson's last blast is Bob Braudis, sheriff of Pitkin County.
Sitting in his office in Aspen, Braudis talked about the man who was, for 35 years, his best friend.

"It will start, I think, as a solemn memorial service and funeral, and eventually become a celebration of Hunter's life," said Braudis, 60, a big man with really bad knees from too many years of attack skiing.

He came to Aspen from Boston in the mid-1960s, a ski bum reporting to duty, and met Thompson in 1970 in a local bar. They shook hands. The next thing Braudis knew, he was drunk, and the two men became inseparable.

In a few weeks, he will stand in the same yard where, for more than three decades, the two friends drank, talked and laughed.

"I think of Hunter as a clown and a jester, and a polo star and a man with a good conscience," Braudis said.

"When he talked about the cannon and his ashes he was serious with a smirk. But Hunter was always serious with a smirk."

And when the cannon goes off, Hunter S. Thompson will vanish on the wind into the national forest.

The wind could gust from the south-east towards the neighbouring town of Basalt and its many open-air-patio restaurants, which makes for the reasonable chance that a tourist could get an extra topping on their pizza.

- Denver Post

What'sa matter you, hey?

2005-07-24T19:19:00.000-07:00

What'sa matter you, hey?

http://theage.com.au/news/music/whats-a-matter-you-hey/2005/07/23/1121539192279.html

By Clay Lucas
July 24, 2005

This month marks 25 years since North Carlton musician Joe Dolce recorded Shaddap You Face. Was it just a catchy song or a serious contribution to multicultural Australia?

What'sa matta you, hey!
Gotta no respect, whatta you think you do,
Why you looka so sad?
It's-a not so bad, it's-a nice-a place,
Ah, shaddap you face!

Since May, European mobile phone company Connex has been blanketing Romanian television and radio with ads for its slick new 3G mobile service.

And what catchy little jingle has the phone company employed to flog its wares? For reasons perhaps best understood by Romanian marketers, it is using Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face, the 1980 megahit that sold 4 million copies and topped the charts in Australia, the UK and 11 other countries.

It remains Australia's highest selling single.

Many Australians would recall Dolce's song as even more teeth-grindingly irritating than the tune it replaced as Australia's best selling single — singer and ad man Mike Brady's Up There Cazaly.

But is there more to Shaddap You Face than an annoying pop ditty that only served to egg on Dolce, three years later, to record You Toucha My Car I Breaka You Face?

Shirley Strachan, the late Skyhooks front man, didn't think so when in 1981 he told Dolce he pitied him because his only hit was a novelty song.

"It wasn't a hit. It was a phenomenon," Dolce remembers telling Strachan. "Better to have one phenomenon than 10 piddly little hits."

When Dolce's song came out in 1980, it was an instant singalong classic. But at least one music critic thought it was the phenomenon Dolce had described.

"Shaddap You Face summed up the change in Australia when multiculturalism displaced the derogatory label 'New Australian', when colourful Immigration Minister Al Grassby regularly graced the national stage, and SBS was about to take to the air," music journalist Craig Mathieson wrote in a 2001 attack on the Australian Performing Rights Association. The association's list of the 10 best Australian songs of the past 75 years did not include Dolce's. And as cheesy as Shaddap You Face was, Mathieson argued in an opinion piece for The Age, it was too important to Australian pop history to leave out.

"It's not a perverse critical gambit to suggest including (in that list) what your memory probably places as a novelty song of the late 1970s," wrote Mathieson. "It caught a social current, and gave voice to it in about three minutes."

Everything a good pop song should be. And perhaps the reason Dolce so staunchly defends Shaddap You Face as a great folk track.

Versions of the song have been recorded by a remarkable 37 acts, in 15 different languages (including three in Spanish, two in German, two in French and an Icelandic version). Proof, Dolce says, that it bridges cultures.

And it has been covered in many different genres, from early British dance outfit EMF to US rapper KRS-One. "No one called it a novelty song when he covered it," quips 58-year-old Dolce from his North Carlton home.

If you look past the original recording's ham-Italian accent and limp comedic mandolins, the song speaks of a migrant teenager's battle with his domineering mother, of the new society the family had found itself in, and the struggle of their working-class life.

"People snigger at Shaddap You Face, but it still earns us a lot of money, even today," says Mike Brady, who released the song on his record label Full Moon Records (established with earnings from Up There Cazaly).

Brady also believes the song played a part in the emergence of new attitudes to multiculturalism. "Ethnic Australians finally felt comfortable enough to laugh at themselves."

Many others, of course, just saw it as a chance to laugh at migrants.

Dolce himself believes his song was the start of a rising tide of tolerance in Australia — that ethnic minorities could finally be accepted, and that humour was a way to shimmy them through the door of acceptance, rather than a dour-faced political correctness. His song is as unlikely a place as any to pick up the rich vein of ethnic humour that ran through 20th century Australia.

It began with John O'Grady's 1957 book They're A Weird Mob (written under the pseudonym Nino Culotta), and continued through Wogs Out of Work and Mary Coustas' Effie, to present-day comedians Fat Pizza, Hung Le and Tahir Bilgic.

Dolce himself is an interesting study in multiculturalism. Born in Ohio to an Italian-American family, he came to Australia in 1978 with his Australian first wife, after almost a decade trying to forge a career in the American music scene.

What he found in Melbourne horrified him.

"Back home, to be an Italian entertainer was something to be proud of. In America, Frank Sinatra was the benchmark," says Dolce.

Here, there was barely a mark. There were no Italian entertainers, and people from southern Europe were roundly derided as "wogs" and "dagoes". And they weren't terms of affection.

"In those days, the word wog was like the word c---," says Dolce. "If you said it, you said it low."
He first performed Shaddap You Face at a talent night in 1979 at the long-gone Marijuana House in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

He had recently visited his childhood home in Ohio, and heard phrases his Calabrian and Sicilian grandparents had muttered to him as a child: "What's the matter you?" and "Eh, shaddap". He incorporated them into a song about Italians in Australia, and played the song as the character Giuseppe.

"At the end of the night, I'd sing Shaddap You Face, pass the hat around, and make about $20," says Dolce.

Though it was comedy, Dolce also used the performance to confront racism.

"Giuseppe would get audiences to talk about their idea of a 'wog'. At first, everyone would be silent and embarrassed. Then, with a bit of coaxing, they would eventually start pulling out these foul, repugnant terms for a 'wog'." After a while, everyone would pick up the absurdity of what Dolce was doing and laugh at themselves. "It was kind of like group therapy."

ON JULY 3, 1980, Dolce rented one of Mike Brady's studios and recorded the song. He took it to Mushroom and Festival Records, who laughed him out of the building. He took it back to Brady.

By November, it was atop the Australian charts.

By the end of 1980, even Elton John had recognised Shaddap You Face's selling power. John had heard the song while touring here, and had his manager approach Dolce with the idea of buying the rights for the UK market.

After Dolce knocked them back, John's group immediately contracted Andrew Sachs (Manuel from Fawlty Towers) to cover the track, perhaps in the hope the Australian's lack of knowledge of the European market would allow them to release a slightly altered version (Manuel was to be from a Spanish family).

But Dolce was no bumpkin from the boondocks: an immediate injunction with a British court stopped the release of Sachs' version, and a judgement in Dolce's favour forced the recall of all copies of that version.

But the song stands as evidence of multicultural Australia's new-found ability to laugh at its own ethnic stereotypes, says Dolce. "Australians laugh at Crocodile Dundee," he says. "Barry Humphries magnifies Australian characters. Italians make fun of their characters in the same way."

Once the humour is accepted, so is the minority group, says Dolce. "If you can't really laugh about something, it's still marginalised."

He cites the Koran as a contemporary example. "You can't make jokes about it because you'll be killed. You can't mess with Allah."

Today, much of Dolce's time is taken up writing new material and performing a stage show called Difficult Women with partner Lin Van Hek.

If ever he sings Shaddap You Face it's in an Aboriginal dialect. In the song, he tells the story of a Dreamtime teenager being scolded by his mother. "Noone recognises what I'm doing when I perform it till a few minutes through, because I'm starting off on the basis that, because it's an Aboriginal song, it's a serious song."

Milestones
Name Joe Dolce

Age 57

Lives North Carlton

Born Painesville, Ohio

Famous for Shaddap You Face, which sold 350,000 copies in Australia, knocking off 1979's Up There Cazaly as Australia's best-ever selling single. Cazaly had only recently overtaken Slim Dusty's Pub With No Beer.

First Australian single 1978, Boat People, a protest tune about Australia's shabby treatment of Vietnamese refugees. The song flopped.

Last recording 2003, One Iraqi Child, a protest song about war in Iraq.

Website joedolce.net.au

London Hurts

2005-07-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

London hurts

You seem to have missed one of the most telling examples of online reactions (Defiance on the web, July 11).

Livejournal.com is not a "community forum for London", but a host for web journals for people round the world.

One well-meaning American decided to start a "London hurts" community to allow people in other countries to share their thoughts: hence the slogan "Today, I'm a Londoner and today I hurt".

But this was abruptly derailed when the community was discovered by actual Londoners, who proceeded to mercilessly satirise it with a succession of spoof images such as "Today, I am a Londoner, and I got a day off". – Clare Sainsbury, London (The Guardian)

PostSecret

2005-07-14T16:31:00.000-07:00

PostSecret

14 July 05
Carol T Chung

Frank Warren initially started this as an interactive art piece.
PostSecret (http://www.coolhunting.com/linkout/?http://postsecret.blogspot.com/) is a blog in which people anonymously submit their secrets on handmade 4 x 6 inch postcards via snail mail.

Although some of the submissions are very humorous, others are very sad and some politically incorrect. Not only does the work evoke strong sentiments or even memories from the audience, but it also provides an outlet for those that feel the need to free themselves from their secrets.

New secrets are posted every Sunday.

Bathroom Diaries

2005-07-14T16:27:00.000-07:00

At www.thebathroomdiaries.com you'll find more than 8,000 reviews of public toilets in more than 100 countries

Hell

2005-07-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

"Hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix – a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing."

The End of the Rainbow

2005-07-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

The End of the Rainbow

Fred R. Conrad
The New York Times
Dublin

Here's something you probably didn't know: Ireland today is the richest country in the European Union after Luxembourg.

Yes, the country that for hundreds of years was best known for emigration, tragic poets, famines, civil wars and leprechauns today has a per capita G.D.P. higher than that of Germany, France and Britain. How Ireland went from the sick man of Europe to the rich man in less than a generation is an amazing story. It tells you a lot about Europe today: all the innovation is happening on the periphery by those countries embracing globalization in their own ways - Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe - while those following the French-German social model are suffering high unemployment and low growth.

Ireland's turnaround began in the late 1960's when the government made secondary education free, enabling a lot more working-class kids to get a high school or technical degree. As a result, when Ireland joined the E.U. in 1973, it was able to draw on a much more educated work force.

By the mid-1980's, though, Ireland had reaped the initial benefits of E.U. membership - subsidies to build better infrastructure and a big market to sell into. But it still did not have enough competitive products to sell, because of years of protectionism and fiscal mismanagement. The country was going broke, and most college grads were emigrating.
"We went on a borrowing, spending and taxing spree, and that nearly drove us under," said Deputy Prime Minister Mary Harney. "It was because we nearly went under that we got the courage to change."

And change Ireland did. In a quite unusual development, the government, the main trade unions, farmers and industrialists came together and agreed on a program of fiscal austerity, slashing corporate taxes to 12.5 percent, far below the rest of Europe, moderating wages and prices, and aggressively courting foreign investment. In 1996, Ireland made college education basically free, creating an even more educated work force.

The results have been phenomenal. Today, 9 out of 10 of the world's top pharmaceutical companies have operations here, as do 16 of the top 20 medical device companies and 7 out of the top 10 software designers. Last year, Ireland got more foreign direct investment from America than from China. And overall government tax receipts are way up.

"We set up in Ireland in 1990," Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computer, explained to me via e-mail. "What attracted us? [A] well-educated work force - and good universities close by. [Also,] Ireland has an industrial and tax policy which is consistently very supportive of businesses, independent of which political party is in power. I believe this is because there are enough people who remember the very bad times to de-politicize economic development. [Ireland also has] very good transportation and logistics and a good location - easy to move products to major markets in Europe quickly."

Finally, added Mr. Dell, "they're competitive, want to succeed, hungry and know how to win. ... Our factory is in Limerick, but we also have several thousand sales and technical people outside of Dublin. The talent in Ireland has proven to be a wonderful resource for us. ... Fun fact: We are Ireland's largest exporter."

Intel opened its first chip factory in Ireland in 1993. James Jarrett, an Intel vice president, said Intel was attracted by Ireland's large pool of young educated men and women, low corporate taxes and other incentives that saved Intel roughly a billion dollars over 10 years. National health care didn't hurt, either. "We have 4,700 employees there now in four factories, and we are even doing some high-end chip designing in Shannon with Irish engineers," he said.

In 1990, Ireland's total work force was 1.1 million. This year it will hit two million, with no unemployment and 200,000 foreign workers (including 50,000 Chinese). Others are taking notes. Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said: "I've met the premier of China five times in the last two years."

Ireland's advice is very simple: Make high school and college education free; make your corporate taxes low, simple and transparent; actively seek out global companies; open your economy to competition; speak English; keep your fiscal house in order; and build a consensus around the whole package with labor and management - then hang in there, because there will be bumps in the road - and you, too, can become one of the richest countries in Europe.
"It wasn't a miracle, we didn't find gold," said Mary Harney. "It was the right domestic policies and embracing globalization."

A rigging yarn that cuts to the quick

2005-07-10T16:47:00.000-07:00

A rigging yarn that cuts to the quick

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14934-1686216,00.html

July 10, 2005
By AA Gill

Rolf Harris: a name that is to the art world what woodworm is to an antiques shop.

Purely by accident, I caught sight of him in Africa last Sunday, daubing fake San rock art and terrifying Ghanaian children with his chronic musical panting, which always sounds so unpleasantly suggestive. And then, the all-round entertainer was off carving an Ashanti stool. “I’m thinking of doing a Jake the Peg thing with this and giving it a third leg, ” he breathlessly told us, before mentioning that Picasso liked an African mask, and finally painting, in acrylic, a hideous, cheap, plagiarising, crassly patronising, culturally steam-rolling postcard picture of a colourful woman with a baby strapped to her back that defied either irony or excuse.

All this coming the day after Live 8 was a bit of a shock. Haven’t they suffered enough? Is the price of making poverty history importing cultural poverty? What has Africa done to deserve Rolf on African Art (Sunday, BBC1), on top of everything else? Some time ago, I said that it was difficult to hate Rolf Harris, but that we should persevere, because he is probably the devil.

What do you think the devil is going to look like — Vincent Price? Peter Mandelson? No, he’s going to be Rolf Harris. Since I wrote that, we’ve had a couple of stern letters from my learned friends and, as a consequence, have to publish this correction: “The devil has never at any time taken on, doppelgängered or in any way occupied the persona of Mr Rolf Harris. The devil takes strong exception to the implication that he might be or might use the methods of Mr Harris.

“The devil has always appeared solely and only as himself and is the author of all his own work. Furthermore, he never dabbles in cultural abomination. There are strict rules about that sort of thing.

“He is evil, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”

Well, I’m happy to put that straight and offer an unconditional apology.

The big bang

2005-07-09T10:10:00.000-07:00

The big bang
By Graeme Philipson

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/06/1120329497679.html

July 9, 2005

Ten years ago there were 6655 bank branches in Australia. Today there are just 4888. Over the same time the number of bank tellers has declined by half, according to the Reserve Bank.

There are no figures on visits to banks, but most likely they have fallen by an even greater margin. Today every PC is a bank branch, and we are all tellers.

Online banking is just one way technology, and in particular the internet, is changing our lives. Consider what the world was like in 1995, just a decade ago.

In that year, Microsoft released Windows 95, the first version that worked as advertised. Labor was in power in Canberra, and out of power in Britain. O.J. Simpson's trial in the US redefined the meaning of justice.

Best picture Oscar was won by Mel Gibson's Braveheart. Carlton won the AFL premiership (maybe it really was a long time ago), and the Bulldogs stormed into the rugby league premiership from sixth spot.

In 1995 Amazon was a small firm struggling to survive and email was a novelty. Digital cameras and iPods didn't exist. Analog mobile phones were clunky, expensive and unreliable. PDA still stood for "public display of affection". The Java programming language was announced that year, as was the first Sony PlayStation.

Since then a whole range of new technologies and services have come into being that have totally changed our behaviour and habits, at work and at play. We are surrounded by electronic digital devices. We buy our cars, do our banking and read our news online. Newspaper circulations and cinema attendances are declining. Most dating services, job ads, and encyclopedias are now online.

We can send and receive SMS messages from fixed phones, watch TV on our computers, and surf the net and take pictures with our mobile phones. Wireless communication is widespread, for voice and for data, and the day of seamless integration of wired and wireless networks is almost upon us. The internet, only a baby 10 years ago, has matured. We rely on it and we trust it.

The key has been the movement of information from analog to digital. Analog signals represent information as waves. All analog signals are different, and storage or retransmission means an inevitable loss of quality. With digital, all information is expressed as zeros and ones, which means we use the same technology for storing and transmitting all media and all computer-based information. TV, CDs (and now MP3 players), DVDs and telephony all employ a string of binary digits, called bits. Digital signals can be stored, copied and retransmitted an infinite number of times with no loss of quality and at virtually zero marginal cost.

The internet has been around since 1969, when the United States Defence Department started connecting its research computers to each other. But initial growth was slow and in the early '90s still largely restricted to government and academic users. It was hard to use, text based, had poor search capabilities and required arcane commands to navigate it.

But in the late '80s Englishman Tim Berners-Lee worked out a way to make the internet easy to use, by introducing a new naming convention and the concept of hypertext. He called it the World Wide Web. Suddenly, it became possible to search the internet, and people began to build web pages for other people to look at.

Then in 1993 the US Congress changed the law to allow the internet to be used for commercial purposes. That year also saw the introduction of Mosaic, the first easy-to-use web browser. At about the same time, PCs became commonplace in business and the home, and data communications improved to the point where dial-up internet connections were good enough to handle simple graphics - as found on web pages - as well as text.

This classic combination of technological advances caused what many people call an inflection point - when all the conditions are right for a major new advance. Nobody really predicted the explosive growth of the internet. As late as 1994, even Bill Gates called it a transitionary technology "that doesn't even have a billing system" (Gates is into billing systems). But the inflection point hit hard in the mid '90s, leading to a frenzied tech boom and some of the biggest changes we have ever seen in the effects of technology on society.

Falling prices and vastly improved ease of use switched the focus of technology from corporations to the individual, and to the home. The biggest changes have been in personal communication - the internet, the mobile phone and pay TV.

In April this year, research company Connection Research Services released the results of a major survey into the digital usage habits of Australian households. CRS interviewed more than 1000 households, and found that 65 per cent were connected to the internet. More than one-third of these were on broadband, with the proportion predicted to grow to half over the next two years. Ten years ago less than 10 per cent of homes were on the internet. All connections were dial-up - the concept of broadband didn't even exist.

The CRS study also found that more than 80 per cent of Australian homes have at least one mobile phone, and most own more than one. Most homes have DVDs and a digital camera. They also have multiple TVs, and 80 per cent have at least one computer. Home theatres, driven by the plummeting cost of new TV technologies, are now found in nearly 20 per cent of all homes, often in rooms dedicated to the purpose.

For a glimpse at the future, look at South Korea. Nearly 80 per cent of South Korean homes have broadband connections - and South Korean broadband is truly broad. Most connections are at 2 megabits per second (2Mbps) or higher (a typical residential broadband connection in Australia is 512kbps). The South Korean Government expects that 70 per cent of internet connections will exceed 20Mbps by the end of 2006 and that most will be at 100Mbps by the end of the decade.

At these speeds, and with this level of penetration, the internet pervades South Korean society to an extent unknown in the rest of the world. But with success come problems. In South Korea, cyber crime is out of control, and a quarter of all teenagers are classed as internet addicts, many with behavioural problems.

New cultural tools have appeared, such as "avatars", digital characters used to identify yourself online. There exists in Korea a digital world, of the kind predicted in Tad Williams's sci-fi trilogy Otherland, which is as real to its inhabitants as the corporeal world. Gangs of cyberyouths roam the net, stealing cybergoods from unfortunate avatars and disrupting things.

There are other challenges. What is the future of intellectual property when music, films and software can be transmitted around the world in an instant and copied an infinite number of times? How can we make the virtual world as secure as the real world? Can we even distinguish real life from cyberlife?

In 2005, we already have the sub-$1000 notebook, the terabyte (1024 gigabytes) of storage on our video recorder, and the video camera in our phone. Ten years from now, everything we have now will be cheaper, smaller and easier to use, and a lot more mobile. The phone network, pay and free-to-air TV networks, and the net itself will all merge into a larger network, which some are calling the Supernet.

True broadband internet will let us reliably make telephone calls (VoIP) and watch TV (TVoIP) on the net. It's all digital, which means it's all about bandwidth. Forget ADSL - even the much-vaunted ADSL2 is not truly high-speed broadband in comparison. Broadband is best achieved with a fibre optic network, which will reach most Australian homes by 2015. Within homes, a combination of structured multipurpose cabling and wireless will keep us connected - everywhere, all the time.

A lot has happened in 10 years. But the information millennium has barely begun. The technological changes we are witnessing are just the beginning - anybody under 30 today will see changes on this planet our grandparents could not even dream of.

Over the next generation we will see the interconnection of all devices at bandwidths incomprehensible today. We will see the marriage of carbon and silicon, the merging of computers and organic life. Fancy a terabyte of data at the base of your brain?

How humankind adapts to these changes will determine the fate of our species. The past 10 years are not even a dress rehearsal. A good rule of thumb is - if you can imagine it, it will happen. The only question is: when?

Five essentials

Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the web, says he's looking forward to the day when his daughter finds a rolled-up 1000 pixel by 1000 pixel colour screen in her cereal packet, with a magnetic back so it sticks to the fridge. That will happen and probably sooner than we think.

Today we rely on technology to stay in touch and to do everyday things in an entirely different way from how we did them just a decade ago. Consider the following technologies and how they have affected your life.

Mobile phones. Truly the communications phenomenon of the decade. There are now nearly as many mobile phones as people in Australia. How did we ever stay in touch before? Text messaging is even changing the grammatical structure of the language.

Digital cameras. Film is all but dead. Our photo albums are in our computers - or our mobile phones. But will we be able to show our grandkids? Electronic images are more fleeting than those on paper.

Email. If you don't have an email address in the information millennium, you are a non-person. Email and instant messaging is how the world stays in touch. It's also the preferred vehicle for viruses, spam and flaming (organised electronic abuse).

Pay TV. OK, not a necessity, but it didn't exist in Australia 10 years ago, and it's where the world is headed. But pay TV as we know it today is a transitionary technology - 10 years from now, it will be delivered via the internet.

Online banking and shopping. The banks aren't closing branches just to save money. The whole nature of banking has changed, thanks to the internet. The net is a giant shopping mall, where you can buy and sell anything. Amazon and eBay have truly changed the world of commerce.

Food Critic

2005-07-06T16:36:00.000-07:00

Food Critic

06 July 05
Parker Hutchinson

Artist Nicolas Touron’s new exhibit at the Virgil de Voldère Gallery (http://www.coolhunting.com/linkout/?http://www.virgilgallery.com) in New York City uses most unlikely objects to tell his startling fables of global affairs. Armed primarily with sugar and ceramics, he has set out to portray the world as he sees it, a sphere where the world’s daily machinations can be both overwhelming and terrifying, and things are rarely as sweet as they appear.

Touron, who holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, presents his work in his first solo exhibition, entitled "Stories, Tails and Adventures." This showing, which runs until August 7th, is the French artist's tenth since arriving on a Fulbright scholarship four years ago.
The bulk of the exhibit consists of two sculptures and walls of ink drawings. The first sculpture, entitled “Soft Landing,” is a dioramic scene depicting a sleek but massive porcelain airliner that apparently failed to defy gravity. Although the title suggests the craft, with ribbony joints of pink silicon, was brought down gingerly, a slew of what seem to be casualties sink beside it: cars, broken-necked flamingos, small aircrafts, toilets, and melted spoons.

The collection’s flagship sculpture piece, “Food Project,” uses porcelain and pastry products as its primary media to construct a scene that suggests a commentary on fossil fuels. A small aluminum rig spouts rainbow sprinkles high in the sky and over to another, which is covered in the colorful confection. Shiny white cars are filled with and fueled by the stuff as they drive among industrial semi-spherical blossoms of red icing and mounds of Nesquick. In both pieces the media, scale, and placement on the floor are all reminiscent of childhood playsets.

Probably the most impressive in the exhibition are the drawings. Employing similar imagery, these fifteen pieces use brightly colored and metallic inks to depict international relations as the circus it often seems to be. The drawings carry with them an implied geography; lands made of sugary pink fluff and stiff lumber are arranged in map-like composition littered with weaponry, news surveillance copters and anamorphic fauna whose anatomy contains everything from Nutella jars to detergent bottles.

Though the art’s choice of imagery and media may seem random and outrageous upon first glance, the exhibit’s title offers insight into its purpose. “Stories, Tails and Adventures” is like a collection of fairy tales for modern times. Long before their capitalization by Disney and on-screen animators, fairy tales were told to children for a much more serious purpose. This narrative form, best exemplified in stories like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Hansel and Gretel,” was devised over centuries of French and German oral tradition to warn children from an early age of the grave and bleak realities of serfdom. These grim stories served to prepare the young for a life of malnutrition, disease, poverty and exploitation at the hands of feudal lords. At their core, most are terrifyingly violent, but softened by the settings of candy-filled lands and the displacement of human rogues and murderers by animal counterparts. They are fables meant to warn us of the worst of human nature in early childhood before we encounter it.

Likewise Touron’s quixotic narratives, however abstracted, are cautionary tales that sweeten very serious issues in a contemporary world. Instead of dark and dangerous forests, he situates his adventures in industry, urban microcosms and global disputes and laces them with colorful confections and bubble-gum landscapes (not surprising choices considering his past as a professional chef in Paris and Amsterdam).

All in all, it’s hard to say if Touron’s work can be considered criticism. As much as it deals with heavier issues such as unbridled enterprise, xenophobia and warfare, viewers must realize that these realities simply exist, shaping the world we live in and having bearing on our lives. The most apt way to approach a description of what he’s doing may be to simply peg it as observation, for his works seem to pass no blame, contain no call to action, and offer no solutions. They are visual narratives of the artist’s modern-day concerns and fears, told with a playful gravity that is uniquely his own.

Virgil de Voldere GalleryA.K.A. Slingshot Project526 W. 26th Street, Room 416New York, NY 10001
June 23 - August 7, 2005Monday - Saturday 10 am - 6 pm

What it's like to live on $1 a day

2005-07-06T10:31:00.000-07:00

What it's like to live on $1 a day

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0706/p01s05-woaf.html

Xanthe Scharff
The Christian Science Monitor

July 06, 2005 edition

A Malawi family budgets 16 cents for doughnuts.

At 8 a.m., after seeing her husband off to work and her children off to school, Selina Bonefesi puts on her entrepreneur's hat. Mrs. Bonefesi has a small business making fritters - fried cakes made of wheat, salt, sugar, and yeast.

She'll spend the morning mixing, waiting for the dough to rise, and frying, cranking out as many as 300 of the tasty treats and selling them from her home to passersby. By the end of the week, between her household chores and running her business, she'll have logged more hours than a

But she'll only earn about $1 a day.

Selina, her husband, and four children are among the 1.2 billion people in the world living on less than a dollar a day - what the United Nations calls "extreme poverty." Many of them are in Africa. Some live in rural villages, others in urban shantytowns; some can be found in the deserts of Chad, others in the jungles of the Congo. Yet Selina's family in Malawi is typical: they have limited education, little access to jobs or capital, and are ruled by an indebted government that lacks a coherent plan for helping its poorest citizens. It is families like Selina's that the leaders of the world's wealthiest nations will be looking to help as they meet in Scotland for the G-8 summit this week.

The Monitor visited with Selina to learn how a family of six lives on so little - and to hear from them what would be most helpful from the richest nations in the world.

Selina's message to donors is quite simple. "Monetary help is needed," she says. "We want iron sheets on our houses. We want capital for our businesses."

In a typical week, Selina will make 1,125 Malawian kwatcha, or $9.09, in fritter sales. With the $5.17 that's left over after she buys supplies for her next batch, she'll purchase food and amenities for her family and tuck away $1.25 into savings. Her annual earnings, combined with her husband's earnings as a farmer, will give the family of six, after business expenses, about $453 to live on this year.

Selina married her husband, Bonefesi Malema, when she was 16 and took his first name as her last. Selina's fritter business is meant to be a buffer against hard times, warding off the insecurity that comes with each growing season. Selina says her contribution is only to "take some of the financial strain off my husband and to help his farming business." But this year, Selina is the main breadwinner.

The fruits of her labor are 150 small fritters and 150 large fritters, which will sell for about $.02 and $.04, respectively. Her customers are her neighbors, schoolchildren hungering for a midmorning snack, and people headed to the market three miles past her town. They all know Selina's house and yell out to her from the yard for service with a smile.

With the exception of the trip to the market to buy supplies, Selina's entire business - preparation and selling - is done within the confines of her house, allowing her to continue her primary role as the caretaker of her family. "Some women have had problems with their husbands when they engage in economic activities," she explains. "Those are the women who neglect their family duties."

Some weeks, Selina may be able to make two batches of fritters, doubling her take. But with nearly 15 percent of Malawians HIV-positive and life expectancy at 37.5 years, funerals often occur twice per month, and require donations and communal labor, dipping into her work time.
Selina has been in business for three years. In 2001, the Malawi country office of Care International, a private volunteer organization based in Atlanta, Ga., targeted the 10 most destitute women in Selina's village of 333, just outside the capital, Lilongwe, for a road-maintenance program. The women received economic and personal-empowerment training in exchange for their labor. Selina qualified for the program, learning how to save money with the group and start her own business. The women have now saved $125 for things like fertilizer to boost their husbands' harvests.

Three miles to market on foot.

On a new day, Selina walks the three miles to the market. With the money that's left over from buying $3.92 worth of fritter supplies, she'll purchase fish ($.24), tomatoes ($.08), and practical items - soap, lotion, and salt, for a total of $.51. Trousers and two blouses for her youngest children tally $.50 after bargaining down the price. Next week she'll give her son $1.25 to select his clothes but will spend up to $1.60 on her daughter, knowing the importance of an attractive wrap. She motions to the brightly colored cloth that covers her legs. "If a woman has more than one of these, then she is a real woman," she says.

When Selina returns at dusk on tired legs, her children run to meet her. They tug at the parcel she has balanced on her head and unveil four doughnuts. While the treats cost a total of $.16 - about half the cost of dinner - any mother could understand why she splurged. "I bought them so that when the kids are coming to meet me and calling, 'Ma! Ma!' I can have the pleasure of giving them something to make them even happier," she says.

With the fish and tomatoes, Selina will make a special porridge supper. Usually they will eat porridge garnished only with dried pumpkin and bean leaves, picked from the surrounding area in season and dried for use throughout the year. Greens from their garden also provide some variety to their meals. But because the diet is generally bland, Selina says, "I do struggle to get a little tomato for flavor." If they ever find themselves with extra funds, Selina and her husband will treat themselves to luxury items: a liter of milk for $.38, a loaf of bread for $.50, or half a pound of beef for $2.50.

The family has precious few belongings, all bought from the local market - a pail for water, a handmade lamp, and some plastic chairs that they hospitably lay out for visitors not accustomed to sitting on the hard-packed dirt. Several years ago, after a particularly fruitful harvest, Bonefesi bought his most powerful possession: a bicycle worth $50, which is used to transport tobacco from the field. He also enjoys a radio he bought for more than $4.

Bonefesi farms both tobacco and maize on his three-acre holding. He laid out a whopping $67.87 for fertilizer this year and will struggle to see returns on his investment. Bonefesi will pay an entrepreneurial neighbor with an ox cart about $2 to bring his harvested maize to the house. He treats the crop in his storage shack with a chemical solution to keep away termites, which runs him another $1.62. Bonefesi hopes to receive $21.25 for each of three 110-lb. bags of maize that he harvested this year - $63.75 total.

While tobacco requires more input than maize, it's an export crop so the reward is greater. Bonefesi will shell out $2.42 for tobacco seeds, $.81 to use a tobacco press, and $4.04 to transport the goods to the auction house. He will be content if he receives around $100 for his one bale of tobacco.

The income from Bonefesi's farming activities will total $197.07 and will yield $118.29 in profits this year. With this, Bonefesi can pay for the $75.14 in annual family expenses that Selina's earnings do not cover, including school uniforms and fees. This does not leave much margin for investment in business, or for emergencies like funerals, illness, or a low return on crops.

Fortunately, the sale of 15 of the family's chickens will add $36.36 to the kitty, as well as protein to Selina's dishes. They don't eat the eggs - they would rather let them mature into full-grown birds. This year they could save about $175, some of which they will put aside for harder times.

Children help out.

While all the children pitch in to help in the fields or by selling fritters, Anne, the oldest daughter, bears the brunt of the household chores. While her 19-year-old brother, Sifiledi, attends 11th grade, she stays home to help her mother. Anne completed 8th grade, the last free year of public school, but her parents cannot afford the cost for 9th grade.

They do, however, consistently pay Sifiledi's yearly tuition bill of $29.09 and a per annum of $6.46 for school supplies and smart pink-and-blue uniforms for the three school-going children.
Bonefesi proudly tells of Sifiledi's ambition. "He would like to work in the government in the rank of official," he says. They hope that if he continues to study he will achieve his dream. Anne has ambition, too. She would like to be a nurse. While the children will hope to earn more than their parents, the majority of teens will remain in the village as farmers and housewives.

Selina and Bonefesi's economic situation is like many families in Malawi, where 65 percent of the population of more than 11 million live on under a $1 per day. The couple talks about the realities of their village, which sits close to the international airport. It has a murky well filled with gray water, distant hospitals, and scarce and expensive fertilizer. "We do struggle to live a good life like others but we fall short each and every day," Selina says.

While Selina and Bonefesi will continue to work diligently at their businesses, Bonefesi wants Western readers to know: "It is good to live in Malawi, but poverty is the real struggle. If there are other countries that are willing to help, let them help us fight poverty. Poverty is the biggest enemy we know."

Manhole covers hide secret Moscow

2005-07-05T10:55:00.000-07:00

Manhole covers hide secret Moscow

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4648569.stm

Nigel Wrench
Diggers of the Underground, BBC Radio 4

July 5th, 2005

Wading in underground tunnels offers some people peaceThe manhole cover was in the middle of a park in the centre of Moscow.

"Here we are," said Eugin, putting a small bag down on the grass. "This is where we go underground."

It didn't seem terribly likely. Outside, at 2230 on a summer's evening in Moscow, it is light enough and warm enough for Russians to sit in groups and on benches drinking cans of beer and talking.

All around the park near our manhole cover, that is exactly what they were doing. Now, while they watched, we were about to go underground.

Eugin pulled a peculiar-looking garment from his bag.

"Put these on. The water down there is not very nice."

I began to attempt to pull on a pair of rubber dungarees.

Secret railway.

Eugin is 22. He has his own group of "diggers" - the word used in both English and Russian to describe an emerging sub-culture of amateur explorers who attempt to penetrate the secret spaces underneath Moscow.

I'm not sure I'd do it again, but I think I do now understand the appeal of this hidden underground world.

Eugin had already shown me spectacular images on a laptop computer of one of his most extraordinary adventures. He told me they were of a journey along the entire length of a secret underground railway system, first built to evacuate Soviet leaders from the Kremlin in time of civil disturbance or war.

The existence of "Metro 2", as it has become known, has long been rumoured. Officially, even in these post-Soviet times, it does not exist. Agents of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, called in one Russian journalist for questioning after he wrote about the secret network.

If Eugin's story is true, he is one of a very few outsiders to have been to Metro 2, and emerged with photographs to prove it.

They are images of huge tunnels, well-lit, a floor of concrete with rails set into it: ready for a train, a truck, or perhaps a tank. According to Eugin, the tunnels run for 25km, out into the countryside. He would not say how the diggers got in.

There are said to be around 100 diggers in Moscow. They are, on the one hand, extreme sportsmen and women seeking an adrenalin rush. But they are also uncovering the secret history of their city and their country as, on the streets above, smart boutiques and flashy cars are the new face of Moscow and of Russia.

Ankle-deep

The underground is an escape, too, from the pressures of a fast-changing society that is still in transition from the many decades of Communism. One woman said to me: "I feel at peace underground."

And there are stories of buried treasure. Some seek the lost library of Ivan the Terrible, priceless documents in a secret chamber, hidden for hundreds of years. I learn that this may or may not be a Russian fantasy.

Moscow's manhole covers hide a secret subterranean world"Go! Now! Quickly!" Back in the park, the manhole cover had been dragged aside. Several of the beer-drinkers looked up. Eugin was gesturing towards the dark hole.

My dungarees more or less in place, I scrambled down, my feet just catching some rungs below the surface. There was the sound of water, ankle-deep as it turned out, and fast-running.
As I reached the bottom, the manhole cover above was pulled back into place as Eugin followed me down. Another digger was ahead of me, with a torch. I'd been told this was the Neglinka River, first diverted underground by Catherine the Great.

It felt like a large drain.

Alone

There was a bricked arch a foot or two above my head, wide enough to touch each side with my fingers, pipes coming into it from every direction, and a strange rumble from above as we walked on.

"Cars," said Eugin when asked.

"Why on earth do you do this?" I asked. He just shrugged.

We walked for a while. My heartbeat began to return to normal. I began to see the point. There is a strange beauty about being underground. A kind of serenity.

There was no doubt that we were alone, but for the water, and the smells coming from the pipes leading to our river.

Our little party turned at what the diggers called the "waterfall", a drop of several metres at a
right-angled turn.

We walked back, upstream now, the water running fast towards us. A stop, and then up to another manhole cover, opened quickly to reveal the extraordinary sight of the sky, a dark almost-midnight Moscow sky.

I had been told you had to experience being underground to understand what being a digger means and why they do it. I'm not sure I would do it again, but I think I do now understand the appeal of this hidden underground world. And I certainly look at manhole covers in a very different way.

You can hear Diggers of the Underground on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday 6 July at 1100 BST and for a week afterwards on BBC Radio 4's Listen Again page.

This is a stick up

2005-07-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

This is a stick up

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1519726,00.html

Tim Adams
Sunday July 3, 2005

The Observer

Chewing gum gets under our feet and costs us millions a year to clean up. Yet, for all the annoyances it causes, it can inspire artists and philosophers. As the late Primo Levi observed, it sticks to your mind as well... Facts stick to chewing gum. Read anything about it and you come away with non-biodegradable numbers, stubborn statistics: there are 28 million regular chewers in Britain; nearly a billion packs of gum are sold here each year. By some estimates, up to 3.5 billion gobs of gum have at one time or another been spat or dropped on to our streets; 92 per cent of city paving stones have had gum stuck to them.

In 2003, local councils received half-a-million complaints about gum on pavements or, worse, on shoes, or, worst, in hair. Each piece dropped costs about 10p to remove. And - this one is often the killer - despite the efforts of Swat teams armed with lasers, scrapers, dry ice and high-pressure water nozzles, about 300,000 bits of gum adhere to benches and pavements in London's Oxford Street at any one time.

One thing that these numbers prove is that sometimes it's hard to see what's right in front of you. I walked over many million paving stones before noticing that those irregular, black-and-grey circular markings on them were flattened pieces of Doublemint or Juicy Fruit. The moment of realisation came about 10 years ago, when I read a posthumous collection of newspaper columns by Primo Levi. Not long before his suicide, it seems, the chemist and survivor of Auschwitz had become preoccupied by the ground beneath his feet, seeing everywhere remnants of human traffic, little memento mori. 'Adhaesit pavimento anima mea'; 'My soul clings to the pavement,' he wrote.

Along with Levi's soul on the asphalt was all the other evidence that 'future archaeologists will find there like insects in amber: Coca-Cola caps and the rip-off tabs from beer cans [showing] the quality of our alimentary choices', and, in particular, 'chewed gum.' Levi became something of a cartographer of this streetscape. 'Gum can be found everywhere,' he observed, 'but a more attentive examination reveals that it reaches maximum density in the vicinity of the most frequented bars: the chewer who is headed there is forced to spit out to free his mouth. As a result, the stranger, not familiar with the city, could find these places following the direction of the more thickly massed gum blobs, in the same way as sharks find their wounded prey by swimming in the direction of increasing concentrations of blood...'

I have, once or twice, in the absence of a guidebook, attempted to use this method of navigation - it is, in my experience, at best hit and miss - but Levi was right in one sense: once you have started to see the gum, you can't stop. It's like 10,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire; you have to count them all. For a long time, it seemed, most of us could live with the fact of discarded gum without undue worry. Recently, however, all those numbers, all that gum, have come to look, for some, like a symbol every bit as potent as a 'hoodie' or a graffiti tag, a signifier that we are going to the dogs, that social bonds are loosening, that 'yob culture' is ascendant. It is for this reason that the battle against chewing-gum blobs has become a new front line in the war on antisocial behaviour.

The minister for Gum, among other things, is Ben Bradshaw, the MP for Exeter. He chairs the Chewing Gum Action Group, which is responsible for a new system of on-the-spot fines for gum-dropping and for gum-educational initiatives. Bradshaw is not a chewer himself except, he says, in his youthful New Labour way 'when dancing or clubbing', and, even on these big nights out, he is sure to wrap his wad in a piece of silver paper and dispose of it with proper care.
I met him, along with a couple of civil servants last week, at his offices at Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), to ask why chewing gum has been receiving government attention of late. He replied with something that these days sounds a bit like his party's ideology.
He'd just come out of an election campaign where the issues people talked to him about on the doorstep were not the issues that concerned the upmarket media and the political classes - pensions, Iraq and so on. More often than not, these people were concerned by the things going on outside their front door. It was, he believed, only right for central government to respond to these concerns.

'We've had fantastic feedback from the public for our pilot [gum] schemes. I was presented yesterday with a two-inch stack of local-newspaper cuttings. Also,' he said, with some glee, 'it's very rare that the Labour government gets a front-page splash and a generally positive editorial in the Daily Mail. It shows these are issues that are a concern for people.'

The chewing-gum issue feeds into the Prime Minister's 'Respect Agenda' (which backbenchers, apparently, have a cruel habit of calling the 'Ali G agenda'). Blair, in some reports, stumbled upon this set of policies quite early in his political career when he opened his door in Islington one evening and found a man peeing up his neighbour's wall. It wasn't on, he thought. In the years since, this surprise encounter has hardened into legislation. A ministerial committee on respect is currently being convened. The chewing-gum pilot schemes, supported by the Clean Neighbourhoods Bill, are one aspect of this.

If this sounds a bit like government being led by the red ink of local newspaper letters pages, micro-attentive, that is exactly what it should sound like. 'People notice these things,' Bradshaw says. 'In the way that they do not, say, notice climate change, on a daily basis. They may think climate-change is serious but how imaginable is it in reality? But if your street is cleaned, if your bin is emptied, you notice immediately. It is not just that it is the right thing to do but also in terms of public perceptions these are important initiatives.'

Never slow to react to the idea of public perception, the government's gum policy has been quickened by the calls from some more militant councils, for a gum tax. In February, half-a-dozen city councils, led by Liverpool and Westminster, held a 'gum summit', where delegates signed a giant postcard that was delivered to Wrigley's head office in Plymouth. The card showed pictures of the cities involved with the words: 'Dear Wrigley's, wish you weren't here.' The gum lobby, fed up with lasering, scraping and water nozzles, was working on the principle that 'the polluter pays'.

Bradshaw sees this idea, of taxing Wrigley's a penny a pack to help out with cleaning pavements, as the 'Singapore route', penalising the multinational for the behaviour of the consumers (Lee Kwan Yew famously banned chewing gum in 1992 for the same reasons). 'It would be absurd,' he says. Instead, the government is looking at co-operation with the maker, at gum wardens and gum-dropping fines. 'Wrigley's has put considerable amounts of money to fund the three pilot schemes in three areas,' Bradshaw says. 'And the evidence is encouraging.'

Alan Bradley, a Westminster councillor and spokesman for the gum-taxers has little faith in wardens. 'It's ridiculous. How often do you spot someone in the act of dropping gum?'
A couple of days after I had seen Ben Bradshaw, I put Mr Bradley's question to the two employees of Maidstone City Council whose new job is to do just that.

Nick Harrison is an ex-policeman, and his right-hand man, Trevor Ford, is a former trainee in the environment department. They wear litter- warden uniforms, and have constant radio contact with the police. The key to successful gum-wardening, Nick explains, is not to walk purposefully, but to amble. In this way, they cover maybe eight miles a day.

In the six weeks that they have been patrolling the city's pedestrianised shopping area, with the back-up of 24-hour CCTV, so far Nick and Trevor have seen one man in the act of dropping gum. They threatened him with a £50 fine, though, in the end, they could not make the fine stick because it was not clear whether 'the target' had dropped his gum on public or private property.

In addition, they have issued 30 fines, one a day, for people dropping cigarette butts or sandwich packets. This relatively small return is either proof of Councillor Bradley's point, or, as Nick and Trevor suggest, evidence that their educative message is getting through.
There have been suggestions that chewing-gum and cigarette-butt fines might be used as a cash resource for the council. Maidstone has said that revenue raised would be swallowed by the annual £50,000 cost of employing the 'street-protection officers'. Trevor and Nick's primary responsibility as regards gum is to help distribute 'Stubbis', reusable plastic pouches, airtight and heat-resistant, in which cigarette ends and gum can be stowed. With the help of Laura and Sarah in a gum-information caravan in the precinct, they have given away 14,000 Stubbis and everyone has seemed positive. The only problem, Nick points out, in the fact that a number of people who have picked up one of the pouches have wandered off and dropped the cellophane packet in which the Stubbi is packed on to the street.

One of the problems with trying to stop antisocial behaviour, it seems, is that no sooner have you curtailed one nuisance than you have encouraged another. The outlawing of smoking has been so effective that many smokers have been turning in desperation to gum. As a result, Wrigley's sales figures advanced by 17 per cent in the first quarter of the year. This is the latest stage of expansion in the gum market that began a century ago and shows no sign of slowing.
Wrigley, which dominates the worldwide chewing-gum industry, was the initiative of one man.

If William Wrigley had been around today, he might well have qualified for an Asbo. He was expelled from school in Philadelphia aged 11 for throwing a pie at the nameplate over the entrance hall. He was subsequently sent to work in the family's soap factory, where he spent years stirring pots of boiling soap with a wooden paddle.

In 1891, aged 29, he arrived in Chicago with $32 in his pocket and a plan to sell soap and baking powder. A machine to produce chewing gum had been patented in America 20 years earlier by Thomas Adams, who had bought a consignment of a particular latex, chicle, from the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico in order to make tyres, but found that chewing the stuff, as the Mayan Indians had done for centuries, might be more marketable. Wrigley thought mint-flavoured sticks of chicle gum might work well as a free gift with his soap powder.

Like all great empires, Wrigley's was built on a mixture of exploitation and myth; the exploitation was of the chicle farmers who lived as tied labour in the most desperate conditions, climbing trees with a haphazard system of ropes to tap the latex. The empire's myth came from Wrigley's marketing genius. 'Anyone can make gum,' Wrigley said. 'Selling it is the hard part.' In many ways, as Wrigley was among the first to understand, gum is the perfect consumer product. It is cheap, infinitely replicable and is a reliable conveyer of a minor, fleeting gratification. It is harmless, and mostly purposeless, so you can make it mean anything you want.

Like any good snake-oil salesman, he managed to link his product to health - it could calm nerves, relieve thirst, freshen breath and sharpen appetite - and to sex and celebrity: it was Wrigley who introduced baseball cards and who invested heavily in making his product assume a kind of rebellious glamour. He bought the first electric signs in Times Square. By the time of his death in 1932, Wrigley was one of the 10 wealthiest men in America; he had never raised the price of his gum, but had invested more than $100 million in the new concept of brand advertising.

His famously secretive company has stayed in the family ever since, and is now run in 180 countries by the fourth William Wrigley Jnr. Wrigley's world domination came in part from a very good war. Because of its thirst-relieving properties and because it was, as every council environment officer knows, virtually indestructible in extremes of heat or even submersion in water, gum was standard issue in every GI's rations; chicle became one of America's most significant wartime commodities and 150 billion sticks of gum were shipped out to boost the troops. The war was, also, the ideal export campaign for Wrigley's. The gum handed out by GIs across the world was often the first contact foreign populations had had with America and chewing became associated with the new freedoms and sexual possibility of pop culture.

Jo Hartop, head of communications for Wrigley's UK, and the company's representative on the Chewing Gum Action Group, still believes those values adhere to the gum, along with new, more health-conscious sugar-free associations that have brought five million new chewers to the British market. This latter group looks set to expand as the gum-maker explores the possibilities of gum as a potential 'delivery system' for all manner of pharmaceuticals, from aspirin to Viagra.

A more pressing challenge, though, is to respond to the demands of street cleaners and produce a biodegradable gum. Apparently, the world's great polymer scientists have been locked away for years in pursuit of this particular holy grail. I ask Jo Hartop how it's going. 'We are working on a less sticky gum base, but it's difficult, in that stickiness is what makes the product what it is. If we can't keep that chewiness in gum, then it ceases to be chewing gum.' So far, apparently, Wrigley has spent £5m trying to make a biodegradable gum, unsuccessfully (other attempts such as one announced by Bristol University last Friday, are a long way from being commercially viable).

If they thought it would help, Jo Hartop suggests, Wrigley's would even countenance going along with a chewing-gum clean-up tax, but all the evidence suggests it would be futile. 'What is coming out of the research is that people who drop gum mostly don't realise that they are littering.'

The Chewing Action Group spent £60,000 of tax-payers' money on a chewing gum segmentation survey, a 162-page report, based on 1,000 street interviews, which revealed how people chewed and why they spat. The survey identified five types of gum-droppers, and helpfully provided cartoon drawings of each of them. The 'Selfish Cleanser' at one end of the scale was typically a nicely groomed young woman who chewed because it freshened her breath.
Though she was revolted by the sight of other people's discarded gum, she would blithely spit her own out of her car window. The 'Bravado', meanwhile,was a young, male Sun reader who chewed his gum ostentatiously. The 'bravado' imagined it to be both big and clever to spit out the gum and kick it. And so on.

The expertise that Wrigley can bring to the action group, Hartop insists, is in communication. 'We are very good at educating people about our product. But gum-dropping is not just Wrigley's problem,' she insists, 'it is a wider problem in society.'

John Carey, Merton professor of English at Oxford, argued recently that, 'like fly-tippers, gum-spitters register themselves as a disaffected underclass with no share in communal aspirations. Our ruined education system is partly to blame, but so is the vast inequality of wealth we permit, which breeds despair'.

I was thinking about this - can we really blame gum-spitting on vast inequalities? - while following a sporadic bright trail of carefully painted gum blobs, each one a unique little work of art, along Barnet High Street in north London. At the end of the trail, I found Ben Wilson. Wilson is a wonderful, playful carver of wood. For the best part of the last year, however, he has devoted himself to painting painstaking miniatures on gum on pavements. His original plan was to make his trail run from his home in Barnet into the city centre, but, mostly, he has ended up working from 7.30am to 6pm in his local neighbourhoods. Wilson, 41, doesn't like to intellectualise what he does very much, but it's a political act as much as anything. 'In part, you are turning a thoughtless action into something positive,' he says. 'And, technically, it is not criminal damage, because you are painting the gum, not the pavement.' More than that, though, he believes local people like the continuity. 'It is important that I am here every day and people can see that I care about what I am doing.' He burns the gum first with a blow- torch, then adds a clear enamel, then colours, acrylic enamels. And, finally, a varnish, so you end up with a vivid, solid picture.

He has a large exercise book full of backlogged requests for designs, which he flips through. Local kids and grandmothers ask him to do particular designs; he commemorates, on gum, births and deaths, young love and marriages. 'You will get a gang of kids; one of them wants to do a picture, something personal to them. I've got to know a lot of the taggers, the graffiti writers, and they understand it all immediately.'

Wilson's take on what leads to the disaffection implicit in gum-dropping is somewhat different from John Carey's.

'Kids are not allowed to feel any connection with where they live,' he says. 'They can't play in the streets because they are likely to get run over; then you have the national curriculum, and all this testing at school, and no opportunity to play or to make things, and everything you do outside is recorded on surveillance cameras. The only imagery that children see around them are billboards and TV; every part of their environment is out of bounds or sold off. That's why they don't care about their streets. This is a small way of connecting people.'

Wilson laughs at the idea of fines. The government should be thinking about the causes of antisocial behaviour, not posturing about fining kids. 'At a time when you have a government labelling all young people as yob culture, I think it is important to try to give people a voice. It is such a destructive definition. If you get to know young people, you realise they are all individual. They all can find their own creativity. My paintings are a way of reflecting people back to themselves.'

Wilson was arrested recently in Trafalgar Square for doing a careful miniature of Nelson and Hardy on a piece of gum. 'The police tried to stop me and I jumped up on a stage that was there and said I was being arrested for painting chewing gum. The police were all after me, eight of them scaling this podium. They got these handcuffs on me.' He was put in the back of a van, fingerprinted, photographed, DNA-tested. They held and questioned him for three or four hours.

I wondered if he imagined he might be starting a movement, a trend, and that all the dropped gum will one day not be scraped up or left greying but transformed into vibrant life.
'It could go any way,' he says. 'I like the quietness of what I have done. If people want to start doing things on a local scale, it could be fun. It might even be beautiful.' He laughs. From quite early on, he says he has had advertisers approaching him, wondering if he would do product endorsements on the gum. 'The kids look out for them, you see, and the advertisers love that.

Those people get everywhere.'

The Go-Betweens

2005-07-02T00:09:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if i can put my finger on it exactly, nor into words exactly, to describe the kind of pop sensibility that's flowing thru the airwaves at the moment, but there seems to a particular, select group of bands getting phenomenal amounts of airplay on Seattle college radio. There is one particular thread that spins thru a number, but not all, of the bands, and I strongly hesitate to use the phrase because it seems to mean so many different things, both good and bad these days, but I think an 'alternative country' feel, or at the very least, influence, pervades in this sound, with a heavy focus on tightly written, sung and performed story-based songs with a laid-back and mellow feel. They also have some sort of emotion behind them. I know that's a very loose and rambling description, but as a KEXP DJ wrote to me when I asked her opinion for this piece, "It's like asking someone to describe sex. Sure you can try, but until you feel it or with music, hear it, it's almost impossible".

Anyway, among bands that I've recently discovered, recently re-discovered or have been a fan of for years, which fall into this particular strong song-writing pop sensibilty, and am I'm liking at the moment include The Mountain Goats, Okkervil River, The Flaming Lips, The Decemberists, The Lucksmiths, The Postal Service, Mike Doughty (formerly of Soul Coughing), Devin Davis, My Morning Jacket, The Eels, Death Cab For Cutie, Wilco, The Sleepy Jackson, The Wedding Present, The Dears, and Elliott Smith.

In any event, nearly all of these bands tend to operate on fairly independant level, either releasing work on thier own labels, or on very low-key, low budget small record labels. I don't think any of them are contracted to a major label or get much, if any airplay on yer standard generic commercial radio station. This is also another common thread - it seems that any kind of band with any level of integrity and credibility, that follows this particular path, well, that seems to flow thru to their music, they write songs that have strength, character, and a real feeling of warmth in them. They write songs that have some purpose and meaning, the plaintive singing, intelligent lyrics, and sparse instrumentation with a good narrative in an understated manner really strive to get a message of some sort across. They also most definitely have a less 'throwaway or disposable' feel about them, like these songs will stand up to the tests of time, the stories being told emoting more to the listener than any of the vacuous crap being dished out on commercial radio.

Among these is Melbourne band The Go-Betweens.

This band had a reasonable level of success in Australia in the 80's and i think early 90's before calling it a day, and have reformed in recent times, releasing a new album on which they are promoting on tour thru the States. I never really paid much attention to them way back then, but I most certainly as now. This band have a sound that's, how do I put it, more along the adult-oriented rock scope (but that makes it sound like a bad thing, whereas they're actually not). They're also getting a truckload of airplay on KEXP, which is what basically prompted this blog entry. They were always kinda sorta on my musical radar growing up as a kid, but were probably (definitely, actually) a bit mature for my teenage ears to wrap around at the time, And this time round, they've kinda come in from left field in my musical awareness, but very much in a positive way. The way the DJ's rap about them made me realise just how much respect and adoration they've gained in this part of the world that I was totally was never aware of in the past. . And, to be honest, I think it goes back to that style of song writing i ranted on about that has enabled them to come back and reform and be as successful as they have second time around. The American market is so fickle, and for them to be able to pick up where they left off is a testament to them as a band.

So, after discovering them on their second go on the musical merry-go-round myself, I highly encourage you to check 'em out for yourself. (www.go-betweens.net)

Tangled up in blue-chips

2005-06-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

Tangled up in blue-chips
Dylan's deal with Starbucks should not surprise us

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1517624,00.html

Mike Marqusee

Thursday June 30, 2005
The Guardian

'One more cup of coffee before I go / To the valley below ... " Will Starbucks customers be dwelling on death's incoming darkness as they sip their mocha frappuccinos and listen to Bob Dylan?

Clearly the corporation is confident that its appeal can withstand even the most mordant Dylan lyric. It's just announced a deal for the exclusive marketing rights to a new Dylan CD, or rather a new release of one of Dylan's earliest recorded concerts, a historic performance at the Gaslight coffee house in New York's Greenwich Village in the autumn of 1962.

The alliance will dispirit many of the master's fans, but it should come as no surprise. Dylan has been at war with his protest image since at least 1964, when he publicly renounced the left and "the movement". He's flirted with Christian fundamentalism, played the White House and the Vatican, let a bank use The Times They Are A-Changin' as a TV jingle and starred in a lingerie advert. "I used to care, but things have changed," he drawled bleakly in one of his later songs. The Starbucks deal seems to confirm that self-assessment.

But Dylan's struggle to shed his association with early-60s idealism will not blunt the irony of Starbucks' announcement. Coffee houses such as the Gaslight were once breeding grounds of dissent and nonconformity. The espresso was cheap, the furnishings improvised and the music defiantly noncommercial.

With its corporate regimentation and single-minded dedication to maximising profit, Starbucks is diametrically opposed to the ethos of the Gaslight. In fact its cut-throat policies have pushed independent coffee houses out of business. Yet it likes to present itself as the inheritor of the old coffee-house ambience - informal, hip and socially responsible. It calls its low-paid workers "partners". It wants to be associated with the "fair trade" movement, even though the bulk of its raw material is not bought at "fair trade" rates. In other words, it has a huge investment in persuading us all that it is something it's not. And that is one reason why it's willing to pay handsomely to be linked to folk-era Dylan.

It's impossible not to marvel at the apparently limitless capacity of corporate behemoths to appropriate the trappings of their opponents - from images of Che Guevara to G8 protests. Dylan himself was precociously aware that gestures of rebellion could be reduced to fashion statements. Watching President Lyndon Johnson purloin the civil-rights slogan "We shall overcome" on a TV broadcast, he observed: "If you want to defeat a movement, steal its song."
Long ago, Dylan warned us about heroes with feet of clay: "Don't follow leaders, watch your parkin' meters ... "

Regardless of his apparent determination to demean his own artistry, in his great songs he offers an enduring indictment of the tyranny of commodities: "Money doesn't talk, it swears." So when the apocalyptic lyrics of Hard Rain ring out at Starbucks later this summer, they may not carry the same charge as they did at the Gaslight in 1962, but they'll still challenge anyone who really listens to take a step beyond caffeine-hyped consumerism.

Mike Marqusee's Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the Sixties, a revised version of his Chimes of Freedom, will be published in the autumn
www.mikemarqusee.com

Why Hollywood Sucks

2005-06-17T19:11:00.000-07:00

Hi,

I couldn't have said it better myself!!

Tony

Brain drainers
June 17, 2005

Popcorn cinema is insulting our intelligence. So why do audiences turn up in droves to watch Mr & Mrs Smith make a killing? Jim Schembri explains.

Well, it did its job.

Over the past weekend, Mr & Mrs Smith, the $US100 million ($A130.9 million) action comedy romance starring Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and more fireballs than a bad day in Baghdad, positively raked it in.

It was a worldwide hit, easily topping the box office charts in Australia with a $4.7 million take, in Britain with $7.1 million, and in the US, where it made more than $US51 million ($A66.7 million).

This was great news for Jolie and Pitt. It's the biggest film either has ever headlined.
Same goes for director Doug Liman, who's never had a hit this huge. It's great news for filmgoers too, as it's now more than likely that Pitt and Jolie will team up again soon to make a sequel to this monumental piece of crap.

The box office performance of Mr & Mrs Smith, of course, came as no surprise to any of the bean counters at its studio, 20th Century Fox.

The film simply had to do this well on its opening weekend to justify the enormous cost of making it and - much more importantly - of promoting it to the nth degree, so that even the emperor penguins of the Antarctic were phoning up for tickets.

Producers of mass-market multiplex mulch like Mr & Mrs Smith are not interested in relationships with audiences; they are interested in one-night stands. In fact, the relationship doesn't have to go the whole night. All they require are the few moments it takes to purchase the ticket at the box office.

In the modern era of the hyper-hyped corporate blockbuster, this basic transaction has taken on added symbolic weight. For unlike almost any other product on earth, a movie ticket, once purchased, cannot be refunded merely because the film didn't deliver on its promise. Once you've forked over your hard earned, the marketing has done its job and you're on your own.

The weekend a blockbuster opens is the one that counts. Indeed, there is now so much emphasis on how a big film opens that the term "opening weekend" has become somewhat dated.

Nobody ever hangs out hoping for great second-weekend figures, because by then the film's fate has been well and truly sealed. Big films can't afford the luxury of growing or finding audiences.
In fact, the vigour of a blockbuster's performance over its theatrical run is calculated by the rate of the audience decline - or "drop-off" - over successive weekends. After its record-breaking opening weekend, Hulk was declared a dud because of the record drop-off in its second weekend.

If films don't hit large straight out of the gate, recovery is extremely unlikely. That first-weekend take is what matters. So films are geared to maximise that initial bite at the mass-market pie.

Thus it is that we have films like Mr & Mrs Smith. And Miss Congeniality 2. And Catwoman and Hulk and The Day After Tomorrow and The Stepford Wives and Oceans Twelve and Planet of the Apes and Independence Day and Tomb Raider and Godzilla and so on and so forth and such like.

These films are designed and packaged to hoover in as many megabucks as they can as quickly as they can before the next blockbuster lines up for its share.

Big films are not sold on whether there is a story worth telling, let alone whether the story is well told. This is why the art of big-screen storytelling has been in such dire condition, especially since the headache-inducing dopiness of Independence Day in 1996.

Once-important elements such as plotting and internal logic are simply irrelevant to popcorn pulp. How else could a studio have the gall to release The Stepford Wives?

In the case of Mr & Mrs Smith, we have a story premise that is an insult not only to the art of
story, but to Charles Darwin.

Jolie and Pitt play two professional assassins who are married but who keep their real jobs secret from each other. That is, however, until they are sent on the same job. And why are they sent on the same job?

The reasoning given in the film is that their rival employers finally discover they are married, think the arrangement is awkward and so decide to eliminate them. This they hope to achieve by sending them on the same assignment, where, having suddenly discovered the truth, they will promptly kill each other instead of their target.

This conceit is a prime example of a Hollywood blockbuster not giving a shit about story. There are a dozen other examples in Mr and Mrs Smith of narrative holes you could sail an Essex-class aircraft carrier through - not the least of which is why any agency that specialises in killing would choose such a clumsy way of killing two killers.

And if they're professional assassins, why are they such bad shots? Why do they continue trying to kill each other after they realise they've been married for six years? And how can you like a guy who is so happy to subject somebody to torture? Is Mr & Mrs Smith actually trying to be the stupidest Hollywood film since Catwoman?

But surely such questions are too nit-picky. It's all just throwaway, comic-book stuff that doesn't take itself seriously. Come on, hombre. Lighten up. Where's your suspension of disbelief? It's just a popcorn movie. Story doesn't matter.

Yes, it does - especially in popcorn movies.

The refrain "suspension of disbelief" has become the flimsiest, most overused excuse for bad cinematic storytelling in the past decade. Suspension of disbelief is fine but it is not the same thing as suspension of intelligence.

Whether a serious drama or a throwaway piece of multiplex fluff, a story has to make sense on its own terms. However outlandish the premise, there must be an internal logic.

An illustration: We watch a Superman movie and there he is, flying about and fighting evil. We buy it. That is suspension of disbelief. Now, if we see Superman eat a Kryptonite hamburger, drink a Kryptonite smoothie, then fly about and fight evil, we don't buy it. Why?

Because we know Kryptonite is the only thing that drains Superman's powers. To accept such a thing in a movie is not suspending disbelief, but allowing ourselves to be treated like idiots.

Story logic matters. Or it should. But in films like Mr & Mrs Smith, story doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the package. Deals are what sells films in Hollywood, not stories.

Sign up big stars, get a mid-list director eager to please the corporate overlords, throw in lots of money to get those universally understood production values and never mind the story.

It doesn't have to be good - hell, it doesn't even have to make sense - it just has to include all the standard elements of the mono-dimensional global narrative template common to most blockbusters: extreme personal conflict, large-scale disaster, romance, visual comedy and, most of all, action.

Present it in a high-gloss, frenetically edited mish-mash of explosions, gunfire, colour and movement. And with as little dialogue as possible, please.

Why the emphasis of movement over dialogue? After the success of Jaws in 1975, foreign countries became a big part of the business, and you can't draw in big audiences if all they're going to do for two hours is read subtitles.

The intent is to blitz the eyes, rattle the ears and provide plenty of close-ups of those big, expensive stars. Pummel the audience with the package. Overwhelm them with starpower and firepower.

That's what audiences are being sold now - not films, but deals.

This dumbing down of movies - it's still very hard to believe that Miss Congeniality 2 actually does exist - has been accompanied by a dumbing down of audiences.

This condition is achieved courtesy of the studio film marketing behemoth. Fortunately, this dumbing down is not a permanent condition, nor is it foolproof, as the occasional mass-market rejection of the odd blockbuster attests: RIP Hulk and Catwoman.

It is, however, testament to the famous observation made by Canadian satirist Stephen Butler Leacock, who stated: "Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it."

Applying the same principle, and to paraphrase slightly, film marketing is the art of mesmerising audiences long enough to extract from them the price of admission.

So why do film audiences file in to see such staggeringly expensive showcases of mediocrity? Because they have to. Or, more accurately, because they feel they have to.

Publicity blitzes have always been a big part of pushing big movies onto the public. The 1939 classic Gone With the Wind is one of the earliest examples of a film that achieved the ideal of 100 per cent market awareness.

But never before - never - has marketing a movie been so intense, so relentless, so unavoidable as it is today.

With Mr & Mrs Smith we couldn't turn in our beds without seeing signage. TV ads, cinema ads, radio ads, magazine ads, cross promotions on Big Brother, billboards the size of Godzilla, profiles on 60 Minutes.

And that extensive tabloid coverage of the nothing story about how Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were - get this - not having a relationship. The media is so eager to be part of the next big movie "event" it seems even a non-story qualifies as a story.

Then, of course, there's all the carefully co-ordinated collaboration with print outlets to play up Angelina Jolie's glam factor. Her visage presently sports the covers of Cosmopolitan, New Woman, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar and OK.

The exposure has gone beyond saturation marketing, it's virtual wallpaper.

You can't even wait for a bus. As animator John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy, recently said of the Shrek 2 marketing tsunami, it's so full-on it feels like your eyeballs are being raped.
It all serves a form of social conditioning that impels people to see the film not because they necessarily want to, but because they feel they need to.

After all, who wants to be the only one on Monday in the school yard or in the office kitchen who hasn't seen the latest big movie event?

And if the machine has done its job, you get figures like Mr & Mrs Smith got last weekend.
And the film doesn't have to be good. It just has to be good enough so that audiences don't talk it down to their friends and so generate the one thing Hollywood filmmakers have no control over and no defense against - bad word of mouth.

Mr & Mrs Smith is now showing

Humorous article on Aussie racism - 'Racism made easy'

2005-06-17T10:44:00.000-07:00

Hi,

A humorous take onthe racism debate that seems to be an ongoing inssue in Oz at the moment.

Tony

Racism made easy
June 17, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/Opinion/Racism-made-easy/2005/06/16/1118869037393.html

Jim Schembri offers some handy tips on a popular Aussie pastime.

I've been looking for a lifestyle alternative for some time now, and given the way so many people have been behaving lately I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and give racism a go.
Some people are very "down" on this lifestyle, and it's easy to see why. It gets such bad press.

Yet, truth be told, it is to be warmly recommended as the benefits are many. Just allow its charms to work their magic and within minutes you, too, will be calling talkback radio to let those (insert name of target group here) know exactly what you think of them.

A big part of the appeal, of course, is how there's almost no overhead. There's no joining fee, no running costs, no uniform, no equipment, no membership renewal. What you spend is entirely up to you! Go nuts or do it on the cheap.

The best thing, however, is the sheer convenience of it. Suddenly the world becomes so much easier to figure out. There's no more thinking or considering different points of view or any of that sort of stuff because now you know exactly whose fault everything is.

And you can blame anything on anyone. Try it. Why are you paying $5.20 for an 80 cent muffin just because you're at an airport? It's all because of those damned dirty (insert favourite scapegoat here) and their lousy (insert country/culture/religious practice/legal system/sport/TV shows/other here). See how easy it is?

Getting into the groove is a breeze, and - get this - there's no training or experience necessary. All you need do is overreact to (insert hot-button news item here), then take an alarmist position as part of a popular backlash by threatening to (cancel holiday/withdraw aid/write sternly worded letter to editor/ban eatery/other).

Give boycotting a go. It doesn't really matter what you boycott, just be sure to do it at the drop of a hat. Issuing boycotts is great, not just because it causes a big fuss on the news, but because, hey, nobody ever checks to see if you're doing any actual boycotting yourself! How sweet is that? After all, it might serve your purposes to declare a boycott on, say, microwaveable popcorn from (insert name of enemy nation here), but are you really going to sit through an entire OC marathon without it?

You can even switch your prejudice any time - from colour to religion to nationality to, well, whatever you like. Let your imagination run wild! How about trying a different bigotry each week? It's really up to you.

Friends and family may initially protest what you are doing, but this can be readily dealt with by simply locating the cable connecting the cerebral cortex to your brain stem and unplugging it (see fig. 1). It's advisable to do this at your earliest convenience as higher cortical functions will only hamper your enjoyment.

And because you don't have to answer for anything you do any more, you can say anything you like about anyone and not worry about lawsuits. Send anonymous letters, make abusive phone calls, slander people on the internet. Go for the classic and yell insults at people from a speeding car. "Hey, you filthy (insert racial epithet here)! Go back to where you came from!" (Note: slur does not work on indigenous Australians.)

At some point you'll need to put out a flyer to tell the world about your views. A crucial part of this is, under absolutely no circumstances, use spell check. Don't even proof read. Bad spelling and poor grammar have been the hallmark of racist street literature for decades, so maintain the tradition. Just whack the pamphlet on the office photocopier and start stapling it to telephone poles. (With an office stapler, naturally!)

When it comes to personal presentation you may feel the need to do something extreme, like tattoo a swastika on the tip of your nose, or trim your moustache until it resembles the 1935 Nuremberg Rally. These are creative options, of course.

A much-favoured style, however, is to simply dress exactly like everybody else in the office - then, at the most opportune moment, such as during a high-level board meeting, stand up and begin singing Why I am a Klansman.

It may not win you any converts, but as they drag you from the premises take comfort in the knowledge that there are many others like you just itching for any excuse to let those (insert favourite target group here) know what's what.

And, above all, remember - have fun!

No wonder the Yankees are so fat!!!

2005-06-16T23:01:00.000-07:00

Hi,

This is the tail end of an article on Melbourne's best burger joints, which leads on to Yankee burgers. Seriously, once you've finished reading the article, click on the link to the burger joinst website, and navigate thru to their 'burgers' mini-site - you'll be amazed, flabbergasted and disgusted all in one instant!

Tony

The world's biggest burger

Buxton's 20-centimetre tall Cathedral burger ($9.50) is big but it pales into insignificance compared to those contenders in the "bigger is best" burger war currently being waged in the US.

This all started with chains such as Carl Jr's and Burger King launching self-styled "Thickburgers" like one made of 2.6kg of Angus beef. Then Hardee's launched their "monster thick burger" containing two 140g patties and enough cheese, bacon and mayo to push the calorie count over the 1400 mark and the fat reading up to a hefty 107g!

This flagrant nose-thumbing at Super Size Me went down wonderfully in a country in denial about its weight problem where 13 billion burgers are consumed every year.*

Things started to get out of hand when Denny's Beer Barrel Pub in Philadelphia put a 2.7kg burger with 2.25kg of toppings on their menu. This was quickly eclipsed by a place in New Jersey offering a 5.6kg burger known as the "Zeus".

The Beer Barrel responded with a $40 Belly Buster burger that weighs in at almost 7 kg. It comes with gargantuan buns - which is something you'd be naïve not to expect after ingesting that much fat.

Visit: www.dennysbeerbarrelpub.com

Australia's forgotten migrants

2005-06-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

Hi,

I like this article - about the British migrant experience in Australia.

Tony

Our invisible migrants

http://www.theage.com.au/news/General/Our-invisible-migrants/2005/06/15/1118645865276.html

June 16, 2005

At first, Australia baffled them but then they settled in, and learned to live with us. Jill Stark reports on the 'Ten Pound Poms'.

A million of them came to Australia by boat, in search of a better life. Many struggled to fit in, and were branded "whingers". They were the post-war British migrants, commonly known as the "Ten Pound Poms".

If they could raise 10 for their fare, the Australian Government paid the rest. But if they decided to return home within two years, they had to pay the 10 back and raise their travel costs again - an almost impossible ask for the predominantly working-class families.

Unlike other migrants, their stories have rarely been told. But now a new book, Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants - the culmination of a five-year project - documents their hidden histories. It charts their experiences through interviews, letters and diaries.

The book was produced in Melbourne and Britain by Dr Jim Hammerton of La Trobe University, and Dr Alistair Thompson, a Melburnian lecturing at Sussex University. They interviewed British migrants who left for Australia between 1947 and 1972.

"Compared with the way other migrant groups have been treated the British are an invisible majority," Hammerton says. "They spoke English so they weren't regarded as migrants and couldn't have the problems migrants have. But the Brits are migrants like anybody else.
"You change your country and it's different," he says. "They still have a migrant identity rather than an explicit Australian or British identity."

Many immigrants from Britain were baffled when they arrived. Some faced verbal abuse and were mocked for being different. In the book, many talk about being asked to bring a plate to an Australian barbecue, and simply turned up with a plate - with nothing on it.

The post-war British immigrants generally dispersed to the outer suburbs of Australian cities and were not known for making their fortune in Australia. They did well in their chosen field but didn't enjoy great wealth like other migrant groups.

"I think the Brits fit the Australian mythology of the battler very well," Hammerton says. "They tell a story about how life was really tough. They'll say: 'It was awful before we left. We made this decision to get out of it, we crossed the seas, we had a hell of a time when we got here, there was nowhere to live, we struggled from job to job, built our own house and in the end we were vindicated."

John Howell, 61, Skenes Creek

Howell has tried to understand Aussie Rules, but he can't shake his love of soccer. It's the only hint of his English heritage.

Since emigrating in 1958, Howell's thought of himself as Australian. When he returned to Croydon in Surrey for a holiday, he found it crowded and noisy, and couldn't wait to get "back home".

"In Australia you can lose yourself more and I prefer that sort of life," he says. "When we went back to England to the street I lived in, the same people lived in the house next door, and that was 25 years after I left. They still do their washing on a Monday and go to Bognor Regis on holiday.

"Everything over here is just so much bigger, and you have a lot more freedom. Our kids have had a wonderful start in this country. I don't think they would have got that in England."
Howell (pictured left) left Britain as a wide-eyed 14-year-old. His older brother had already left for Australia, and when their father died it meant a new beginning. Howell boarded a boat with his mother and sailed to Melbourne.

His knowledge of Australia was sketchy but he saw the voyage as a great adventure. "I didn't really know what to expect. I had an aunt living in Australia and when she'd returned to England on holiday, she brought eucalyptus leaves back. She would set fire to them just to describe what the smell was like. She used to bring home pictures of parrots, and as a child I was full of wonder at this place we were going to.

"My father also came to Australia before World War I, working on a sheep station, so he'd told us a bit about it. I think I expected to find my dad's horse tied up at Station Pier. When we docked I was surprised to see trams running down the street. I imagined it to be a lot more rural."

Howell moved in with his aunt and uncle in Wantirna South before his brother bought a family home in Ferntree Gully. His sister later joined them from England. He took up an apprenticeship in cabinet making and joinery and eventually settled in Skenes Creek, near Apollo Bay. He married his wife Pam, had three sons, and built up a successful building business.

He now lives on 20 hectares and has another 160 hectares in Colac. It's a long way from his humble Croydon council house.

"We felt that we could really get something for ourselves here in Australia that we would never dream of having in England, just from sheer hard work. In England, the chap up the road had a motor car and had bought his council house and he played golf. To play golf in England you had to be someone, but in Australia everyone goes out and has a game of golf.

"I'm very thankful we did come to this part of the world. We've built a lot of houses and put a lot into our community so I feel I've contributed a lot to Australia. I still feel that where I originated from is home in a way, but I don't look at it as somewhere that I hanker to go back to."

Margaret Hill, 73, Edithvale

Hill could be the archetypal Aussie battler had she not been born in England. At 24, pregnant with her fourth child, she left the dreary hardship of Birkenhead (near Liverpool) for Australia.
It was 1956; the Suez crisis was creating tension in Britain. Merseyside was struggling and Hill's husband, recently released from the army, longed for warmth.

The Ten Pound Pom scheme was a chance to reinvent themselves. But for Hill, migration was the beginning of a long struggle to find her place in a strange country, and escape a violent marriage.

"My husband was the one that wanted to come to Australia. I just didn't want to leave," she says. "I saw myself with a little home and a little family and watching my cousins grow up. But we had a couple of bad winters and the kids got bronchitis. In the end I said 'OK, we'll go'.
"It was very traumatic saying goodbye to my family. I didn't ever see my father again. I'd always had this understanding with my parents that if we didn't settle, we'd go back. But it didn't turn out like that."

The family boarded a ship, which they'd been told would bring them to Melbourne. Instead the boat docked in Adelaide. On a stiflingly hot December day they were taken to an "extremely grim" migrant hostel.

"When we pulled into the dockside there was nothing to be seen except this shrub, this bush. It was very disturbing. After the war I'd seen pictures on the television of concentration camps and to me the migrant hostel was like that. We'd had all these brochures from Australia House about nice flats, but once we got there we found out it was all promotional."

A shortage of migrant accommodation meant Hill spent two years in a hostel before her husband took a job with the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service. For 18 months they lived in isolated lighthouses in South Australia. They finally found a home in Adelaide and had four more children.

But Hill's husband was unsettled. The marriage broke down and he became violent. Fearing for her life, Hill escaped to Melbourne; she worked menial jobs to support herself.

By now, her mother and brother had come over from England. She spent several years fighting for custody of her eight children and eventually settled in Chelsea, later moving to Edithvale.
"When my marriage broke down it went against everything I ever thought," Hill says. But she was determined to settle here. "I was able to become my own person. It was cleaner, it was brighter, it was warmer, friendlier, there were no social pressures."

Hill says the "whingeing poms" tag was probably justified.

"We complained, we did. The Italians complained, but they complained among themselves. One of them who could speak English would go out and do the shopping, whereas Poms were in your face the whole time moaning.

"We complained about the heat and the quality of the clothing, and the meat. We complained about everything because a lot of us were unhappy. We were in a strange place. Everything was different. We were missing our families. We didn't mean to complain, we were just letting off steam."

Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants is launched today at Australia House in London.
It will be launched in Melbourne on July 1. Dr Jim Hammerton's sequel will look at British people who migrated to Australia between 1968 and 2005.

If you want to participate, contact him at J.Hammerton@latrobe.edu.au

Australia's current backwards immigration policy - 'Howard's present is our past'

2005-06-16T20:48:00.000-07:00

Hi,

this article highlights how far backwards Australia has gone on immigration under John Howard's leadership.

Tony

Howard's present is our past

http://www.theage.com.au/news/Opinion/Howards-present-is-our-past/2005/06/15/1118645864721.html

June 16, 2005

Arnold Zable hopes for the day we again have a prime minister who can fully embrace an inclusive and plural society.

History has a habit of repeating itself. In 1964, the newly appointed immigration minister, Hubert Opperman, held discussions with prime minister Robert Menzies in which he argued for significant reforms to the White Australia policy and a less discriminatory approach to non-European immigration.

The 1964 meeting has uncanny parallels with recent discussions between Petro Georgiou and his fellow Liberal dissidents, and Prime Minister John Howard, over immigration policies. Like Menzies, Howard has held fast to the old regime and, like Menzies, he is convinced he has public opinion on side. But in the longer term the new reforms prevailed.

This incident is one of many documented in a new book by La Trobe University historian Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death Of White Australia. Tavan traces the gradual erosion of Australia's race-based approach to immigration and the actions of senior bureaucrats, commentators, academics, church leaders and a range of pressure groups such as the Immigration Reform Group, in facilitating the change. The White Australia policy was finally abandoned by the actions of both ALP and Coalition governments in the 1970s.

Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser were the first Australian prime ministers to embrace a non-discriminatory policy and the ideal of multiculturalism. By the 1980s, Australia had developed one of the best resettlement schemes in the world and a plural society, internationally admired and respected.

It is hard to believe, in retrospect, from Tavan's account, that in the early 1950s new rules required that mixed-race people could only be admitted to Australia if they provided genealogies that proved they had either three European grandparents or two European and two half-caste.

Tavan's book helps place Howard's approach to immigration in perspective. We can see the degree to which he has wound back the clock after almost a decade in power. Before Tampa appeared on the horizon, the Coalition Government had cut benefits to migrants, cut the numbers to the annual refugee intake and family reunion schemes, and cut support to multicultural institutions. Howard also gave tacit support to the anti-Aborigine and anti-Asian views of Pauline Hanson and, in 1999, introduced temporary protection visas for asylum seekers found to be genuine refugees, rather than offering permanent visas as had been the case until then.

Australia became the only Western country with indefinite long-term mandatory detention, a system that has driven some detainees to madness and the brink of suicide. By October 2001, Howard was able to declare, after the children overboard affair: "I do not want people like that in Australia." In a departure from the recent past, populist politics reigned supreme.

There is another side to the story. Tavan's study highlights the actions of individuals who, with the benefit of hindsight, can be seen as visionaries.

In 1947, for instance, Methodist minister the Reverend Alan Walker published a pamphlet in which he argued against the White Australia policy on moral grounds at a time when it was fully endorsed by most Australians. Walker believed that the policy had helped shape a parochial Australian soul. A new policy that did not discriminate on the grounds of colour or race would, said Walker, allow more Australians to know nationals of other lands, and deepen our emotional life, extend the range of our imagination and give new horizons to our mind.

Another forward thinker, future deputy leader of the ALP Jim Cairns, wrote in the Argus newspaper in June 1954, that Australia could be a bridge, geographically and spiritually, between East and West. He pointed out that the White Australia policy was the main obstruction to such a bridge.

Again there are parallels with contemporary events. There have been many individuals who have promoted a more inclusive vision of Australian society at a time when asylum seekers have been denied their basic human rights. Among politicians they include Liberal dissidents Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan, Australian Democrats Andrew Bartlett, and the ALP's Carmen Lawrence.

The new bridge-builders include national organisations such as Rural Australians for Refugees and support groups throughout the country. In Melbourne they include the Fitzroy Learning Network, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, the Hotham Mission and the Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture among many others. They encompass the many Australians who have sent letters of support to detainees in outback centres such as Port Hedland and Baxter, offshore centres on Nauru and Christmas Island, and city centres such as Villawood and Maribyrnong. It includes the growing numbers of Australians who are desperate for an act of compassion that would put an end to mandatory detention and to lives wasted in the limbo of temporary visas.

These individuals have forged enduring friendships between cultures and faiths at a time when, after September 11, 2001, they are sorely needed. They have, in turn, become welcome guests in the temporary homes of new arrivals from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries. They have discovered their common humanity.

Perhaps, one day, we will again have a prime minister who can fully embrace an inclusive and plural society based on the recognition that we are, in essence, a land of indigenous peoples and immigrants, a new world with an ancient past.

Meanwhile, we rely on the efforts of advocates and support groups with an alternative vision, and on the efforts of dissident backbenchers. We also need studies like Gwenda Tavan's to learn of the hard-won reforms that took Australia beyond the racially based policies of the past.

Arnold Zable is an author and refugee spokesman for the writers' association International PEN. He will launch Gwenda Tavan's The Long, Slow Death Of White Australia at Readings' Carlton store tonight.

Stupid Aussies, part 2 - 'Dumb and dumber' robber pleads guilty

2005-06-16T18:58:00.000-07:00

'Dumb and dumber' robber pleads guilty

http://theage.com.au/articles/2005/06/16/1118869021949.html

June 16, 2005 - 11:05AM

The first of Australia's bumbling "Dumb & Dumber" teenage armed bandits, Anthony Prince, has pleaded guilty to the bank robbery that made headlines worldwide.

Prince entered his guilty plea in the US District Court in Denver, Colorado, today.

The US government and Prince's lawyer, Warren Williamson, have recommended in a plea deal Prince serve between four and 10 years in jail.

Judge Phillip Riga, however, could sentence Prince to up to 25 years in prison.

Prince appeared briefly in court, arriving in a yellow prison jumpsuit and his hands handcuffed behind his back.

His parents, Peter and Jennifer, flew from Australia to be in court today.

Prince told the court his guilty plea was voluntary.

The 19-year-old's alleged bank robbing partner, Luke Carroll, is expected to also enter a guilty plea in the same court next week, Carroll's lawyer has said.

The March 21 armed robbery of $US132,000 ($A171,520) from a bank in the ski resort of Vail caught the media's attention for its apparent string of blunders by the two Northern NSW teens.
Their accents tipped police off to their identity.

They also wore name tags during the robbery from a sports store they worked at in Vail.
Vail police also knew of Prince and Carroll after arresting them on January 4 for shooting windows with BB guns. The pair used similar guns in the hold-up of the WestStar Bank.
Prince and Carroll had also attempted to buy one-way tickets to Mexico after the robbery and were eventually caught by security officials at Denver airport. When Prince was captured he had $US7,600 ($A9,875) in cash stuffed down his pants.

They had also dumped a backpack filled with $US26,000 ($A33,784) outside the airport because they thought it would be discovered when they went through metal detectors at the airport.

Prince and Carroll confessed to the robbery soon after their arrest.

The pair were charged with bank robbery by force or violence and face up to 25 years in jail.
The childhood friends were in Vail on a snowboarding working holiday.

The "Dumb & Dumber" nickname comes from comedian Jim Carrey's 1994 film about two dimwits.

- AAP

Stupid Aussies, part 1 - Me and my stupid mate

2005-06-13T19:01:00.000-07:00

Me and my stupid mate

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/06/12/1118514927434.html?from=top5

June 13, 2005

An irrational robbery is set to ruin the lives of two young men who should have known better, writes Robert Wainwright.

AUSTRALIANS are making a big mark overseas, but for once it is for all the wrong reasons. Criminal feats of petulance, stupidity and just plain evil are quickly overwhelming the triumphant deeds of skill on the international sporting field and generosity in humanitarian aid.

While Schapelle Corby continues to argue her innocence from a Denpasar prison, the international spotlight has also fallen on the heroin trails of the Bali nine, Russell Crowe's short fuse and the unfathomable ineptitude of two teenage Australian bank robbers, Anthony Prince and Luke Carroll.

We know how, when and where, but three months after two teenagers from the sleepy surfing town of Byron Bay robbed a bank in the ski resort town of Vail, Colorado, and escaped with $US130,000 ($170,000), we still don't know why they did it or why they thought they would get away with one of the most ham-fisted robberies in memory.

The 19-year-olds face 25 years in jail for a robbery that most who know them say was larrikinism gone mad.

Anthony Prince will appear in a federal court on Wednesday to formally enter a plea. His lawyer, Warren Williamson, says Prince will plead guilty to the crime in the hope of a reduced sentence - perhaps five years - and the chance to serve it at home under a prisoner exchange program, rather than at a federal prison in the US. Luke Carroll is expected to do the same a week later.

It would be difficult to enter any other plea, considering the weight of evidence and public ridicule levelled at the pair since details of their exploits became known, not to mention the public apology issued within days of the robbery by Prince's distraught parents, Peter and Jennifer.

"We are the parents of Anthony Prince, one of the two boys who robbed the WestStar Bank last Monday," it read. "We are so sorry for the damage inflicted on your community by this event. We offer our sincere and unconditional apologies to the people of Vail and especially to the two female employees of the WestStar Bank.

"We also apologise to the local family and to the staff at Pepi Sport who sponsored Anthony and provided the opportunity for employment. We fail to comprehend how our son, who was raised in a family with strong ethical values and all the love and support in the world, could contemplate such an act. We will never understand the reason why. We know this act was so out of character for Anthony and we know that his remorse is absolute. Our thoughts are with you all."

The absurdity of the crime is detailed partly in court documents and filled out by witness statements and media interviews which have emerged in the wake of the robbery, labelled "Dumb and Dumber".

Just before 10am on March 21, the pair walked into the WestStar Bank brandishing a pellet gun bought from a Wal-Mart, manhandled a cashier and ordered another to fill up a bag with cash from the vault.

Although wearing masks, the attempts to cover their Australian accents failed dismally. Neither had they bothered to take off name tags used by employees at a sports store that had sponsored their working holiday.

Shaken staff, one of whom later resigned, told police their voices were "disguised but familiar and with a European or Australian accent".

The young men had been in the bank before. A cashier, Kim Vasquez, recognised them. WestStar Bank's president and chief executive, Dan Godec, said it took less than a couple of hours to work out who was behind the masks: "With their accents and descriptions, we had a good feel of who we thought they were."

It didn't take local detectives long to finger Prince and Carroll. The pair, who had arrived in the town last November, had been arrested two months earlier after a neighbour had reported them for firing air pistols and paintball guns at houses. "I think these guys have seen too many Ned Kelly films," the neighbour, Jim Donovan, quipped.

The description, including their accents, was passed onto the FBI and radioed to police patrols.
The next day the fun really started. Prince and Carroll were spotted making their way through security at Denver Airport after buying one-way tickets to Mexico. Again, it was their accents that gave them away.

Detective Greg Faciane, on duty at the security desk, had been given a flier with photographs of the robbery suspects only a few minutes before the pair sauntered towards him.

He let them through the metal detectors then asked a security screener to talk to them to determine whether they had accents and to check their passports. "When I was sitting there, I made eye contact with one of them and just got a feeling," he told the media later.

The arrest was immediate and without incident. The confessions came swiftly after police found $US9800 on Carroll and another $US33,000 stashed in a backpack dumped in a garbage bin outside the airport. Most of the cash, however, was in Prince's luggage.

Since their arrest, details have filtered out about the fun-filled hours immediately after the robbery. Apparently they used snowboards as initial getaway vehicles, travelling several kilometres out of town to get to their car. A quick change of clothes and they were off on a spending spree which defies belief. First stop was a McDonald's, where they took a series of "gansta" photos of themselves in the toilets, posing with guns and money. Police later found the digital camera with the pictures still on the memory chip.

The next day they walked into a jewellery shop in Denver, two hours west of Vail, and tried to buy a $US30,000 Rolex watch. Not only did the sales assistant think the request was strange, but the means of payment - cash in 6000 $5 notes - was enough for her to threaten to call the police. Prince and Carroll took the hint, left and went to another shop to buy diamonds before renting a limousine to take them to the airport. Their smiles, recorded on airport CCTV cameras, were soon wiped as their world fell apart.

Back in Byron Bay and Lismore, where the two men grew up, there is still disbelief and wonder at the chain of events. Mates and class colleagues from Trinity Catholic College in Lismore, where Prince graduated in 2003, variously describe him as the class clown, likeable and agreeable, who wrote in his final year book of an ambition to "have a successful career in something I love and enjoy".

"He was a bit of a larrikin, I mean he wasn't the studious type. But I don't think anyone expected him to rob a bank," a former classmate, William Richey, says.

Nick Russo, an old school friend, said people who knew the boys were still searching for an answer: "He [Prince] was always a bit of a troublemaker but nothing serious. I think he once got into trouble for stealing some lollies but it wasn't a big deal.

"We are all still wondering why. The only thing I can think of is that they might have been a bit strapped for money in a town where people around them were spending up big. They did something thoughtless without considering the gravity. It's pretty sad really. I think his girlfriend, Clare, is doing it tough. They have been together for a couple of years."

Russo had met Luke Carroll, a former student at the nearby Marist St Johns College Woodlawn, but didn't know him well. The link between the pair appeared to have been a love of surfing.

Jeremy Harrison, who knew Prince during nine years of their schooling, was forced to shut down a website blog because of local anger about the case. "People were a bit upset about the whole thing. It's pretty embarrassing and seems totally out of character."

One of Prince's closest friends, Brett Nebelung, a Ballina labourer, said the pair had saved hard for the trip, working two jobs to pay for the air fares.

Carroll's family has not spoken publicly but acquaintances are equally perplexed by their behaviour. "Never been in trouble" and "out of character" are common refrains from those who know him.

Even the lawyers are saying little. Warren Williamson says Prince is hoping that accepting responsibility for the crime will help reduce the inevitable jail sentence.

"I think he's trying to make the best of a bad situation," Williamson commented after his client's initial court appearance … He's trying not to waste his time. He's doing everything he can to turn this into a constructive experience. He's behaving himself in jail and staying in touch with family and friends."

Carroll's lawyer, Daniel Smith, is even less forthcoming, refusing to say what length of sentence he would try to negotiate. "He's just fine," Smith snapped, perhaps understating the situation just a little.