Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

23-29April2006 :: This Week

30April2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched Roman Road
• watched Holy Man, despite having decided not to watch movies on commercial television ever again; at least this time I was reading a book in the ad breaks
• read the first two parts of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood; then got really bored with it and couldn’t continue
• read Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation
• watched Ocean’s Eleven; commercial tele again but was more just on in the background; some really classic scenes in this movie

16-22April2006 :: This Week

22April2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched Mr Harvey Lights A Candle; feel-good and trying to be Mr Chips but otherwise interesting comments about religion in contemporary (English, but easily more widely applicable) society
• watched Moonlight Mile; don’t think I’d seen a movie with regular ad-breaks since 2004, had forgotten how extremely annoying they were
• watched King Kong; takes over-the-top to a whole new way-too-long level
• watched Heights
• read Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin
• watched Night Watch; unsatisfactory ending, but still want to see the rest of the trilogy
• watched Serenity
• watched Howl’s Moving Castle
• read Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park; really goes for overload with the American nightmare, which is kind of numbing, but one gets the impression that the writer Bret Ellis is just as messed up as his character Bret Ellis
• watched The Importance of Being Earnest (2002 version)

Fou Amoureux

20April2006 [directLink] [personal]

Je suis amoureux, mais de qui ou de quoi, je ne sais pas. J’aime Paris, j’aime la France, j’aime le français.

J’aime une personne, une chanson, une fille, une idée.

Et je n’aime personne.

9-15April2006 :: This Week

15April2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• watched Corpse Bride
• saw James Blunt perform at the Hordern
• read Sara Douglass’ God’s Concubine (Troy Game Book 2); great tension with lots of double-triple-crossing, but the anti-christian bit gets tedious
• watched The Nightmare Before Christmas

Venus and Mars and some other planet

14April2006 [directLink] [myth]

1. Men and Women are different; their brains work differently
2. Not everyone conforms to (1)
3. Because of (1), those in (2) are outnumbered when they behave differently
4. Because of (3), too many people believe (1) only and discriminate against those in (2)
5. Despite (1), we should recognise (2) and allow (3) to happen without (4); nor should we forget the general reality of (1)

Team B Mark II

13April2006 [directLink] [myth]

Saw James Blunt perform at the Hordern Pavilion last night. It was impossible for him to live up to what we had turned his Brussels performance into, but still amazing.

I love to feel the power when a crowd gets behind someone, and it was picked up on a couple of occasions: once when clapping out a particularly militaristic beat; singing along to Goodbye My Lover and actually sounding amazing; and when watching the home video footage from Kosovo during No Bravery the crowd was completely enraptured.

At one stage, Liz, unable to see, turned to me and asked, What is he doing? I couldn’t answer; all I could think was, Becoming a god.

These photos were taken on the new Nokia 6280 and on night mode; aside from being rather speckly they look alright

Rehearsing for Fourty Thousand Years; On Cultural Curiosity

10April2006 [directLink] [myth]

Having watched the latest Australian Tourism ad I’m starting to wonder if it was banned simply because it’s such an awful ad. Sure, I know tourism is sold on cultural curiosity, but that’s usually left as a subtext — there’s very little to be gained in the long term by simply exoticising. And I thought the country had grown up a little in the last few years, particularly in the way it marketed itself to the rest of the world. But this latest ad represents a significant regression. Admittedly, they have to differentiate, but this is just nasty. Plus it looks like it was extremely expensive to shoot, which is money seriously wasted.

The ad sets up a series of shots of ‘iconic’ Australian scenes: the outback pub, the outback ranch, the outback, that big rock in the middle of the outback, Aborigines in the outback, a golf course which must be somewhere in the outback, cause how else does one explain the kangaroos. And the beach of course, though that’s mainly just Lara Bingle in a bikini. Each of these has someone speaking to camera, telling the viewer that Australia is open and ready for their tourist dollars: “we’ve poured you a beer”, “your taxi’s ready”, &c… (I’ll mention that there is some clever incongruity with some of these lines, suggesting that things are a little different here: the beer is somewhere in the outback, the taxi is a boat on the harbour, the front gate is a hundred kilometers across the outback). As if making Australia into a Croc Dundee-esque curiosity isn’t bad enough, there’s a spectacularly awful scene in which a handful of Aborigines dance in front of Uluru, decked out in traditional gear; the lead girl says “We’ve been rehearsing for fourty thousand years”. That’s right, the entire long history of Aboriginal culture has been reduced to a rehearsal, so that they’d be ready to entertain the white man when he arrives.

So I’ve been thinking about cultural curiosity lately. It kicked off back when I saw The Constant Gardener, a truly awful movie that wastes much time exoticising Africa — images of cute little African kids (poor people are happy) and fly-overs of big African landscapes. It might as well be a tourism ad itself. Then there’s the Aussie tourism ad, which turns Australia and the Aborigines into curiosities (to say nothing of completely ignoring the cities, which conveniently means only showing White Australia). And there’s the biggest problem with cultural curiosity: it’s reductive. And that’s what the worst of tourism is all about: reducing the destination to a curiosity, something to look at, to take photos of, but not to engage with. (See that, it’s all take).

I was reminded of all this yesterday, watching the French news on SBS. There was a brief update on the Italian elections, followed by a long report about Catholicism in Italy, and its influence on the elections. The eventual conclusion was that the Church doesn’t actually endorse either side, &c, but it was full of references turning Catholic Italy into a curiosity: it opened with a Sunday mass, saying that what was taught there would be remembered all week (it being the day before the polls); it spoke to an Italian couple who said their beliefs influence their entire lives; it spoke to one Italian who said she’d vote for the candidate who supported Christian Values (both do); it showed numerous shots of Vatican officials, and spoke of Berlusconi visiting the Pope; and it closed with a childrens soccer game, between two parish teams — the local priest says a brief prayer before the game and the reporter cracks a (not very funny, and as such, typically French) joke about the separation between Church and Football. Now if this was just a report about Catholicism as it’s practiced in a modern, European nation, then it’d be fine. But all told, the report turned Italy into a curiosity, made it out to be unenlightened, and basically said: “gee, be glad we got rid of this meddlesome Church or they’d be controlling our country too” (a nonsense on both counts, but still a truism in France).

2-8April2006 :: This Week

08April2006 [directLink] [weekly]

• finished reading EL Doctorow’s The March; quite a good read, lots of good ideas come together towards the end; was slightly disturbed by a rather saviourific portrayal of Abraham Lincoln
• expanded my short film opening into a scene breakdown
• bought a Nokia 6280; cheap little feature-packed 3G phone (not quite, but almost that convergent gadget)
• bought and am listening to Talib Kweli’s Right About Now; spectacular hip hop

Rethinking that Convergent Gadget

04April2006 [directLink] [wishlist]
This item was changed on 05April2006

Mostly inspired by my current cash-strapped state, and the lack of any paid prospects, I’ve been thinking about the gadget I want. I’m starting to wonder if maybe I want two separate gadgets: one that can go in the pocket and does the things I want always-on access to (eg music, phone, camera, in that order), and a separate one in the bag that’s not used as regularly — not a fully-fledged laptop but certainly a bigger screen than a smartphone offers — mostly for email, internet and notes.

So I’ve taken my previous list of requirements, and tried to prioritise them (the bold options being the ones I want all-the-time access to):

• Phone: calls, SMS
• PIM: calendar, tasks, contacts
• PIM: notes
• Media Player: mainly audio
• Web Browser and Feed Reader
• WiFi
• External media
• Peripherals: eg larger keyboard and portable headset
• Camera: for snaps

(I split what I’d called ‘PDA’ into two PIM sections: one calendar, tasks and contacts, and another notes. I’m thinking that the first PIM stuff I want predominantly electronic so I don’t have multiple copies of things; but notes I can jot down on paper if I don’t have a keyboard handy.)

While two separate gadgets is slightly more expensive than one smartphone, I ‘save’ because for now I’ll only buy the music/phone/camera bit, and get the second one later… Still not sure if that’d be a small laptop (eg a 12” MacBook) or a tablet like the Nokia 770 (not interested in a Windows Tablet).

Also, part of the reason I wanted the feed reader on one gadget was so that I could catch up on some reading while away from the home computer… But after a couple weeks of uni I’m finding that I’m not really needing that. When I want to read I’ve got enough on paper, between set readings for classes and magazines. And I’m even thinking of downloading podcasts to the phone to keep up that way while riding the bus…

Of course this falls apart if I think too much about the fact that I want that always-on net connectivity, for email/IM/news access… Though given the state of wireless internet options in Sydney I’m probably limited to using the 3G phone networks anyway, so could do so from a phone… And there seems to be fairly decent software for phones to cover these needs — it will at least keep me connected enough to do IM and read emails, though sending emails is trickier from a phone. …Not a huge problem though as I can probably get to a computer relatively easily at uni anyway.

I wrote the above a couple weeks ago, and have had it sitting on my laptop as I researched my phone options. And now I think I’ve found the one I want. It’s the Nokia 6280 (CNet.com.au link) and it’s under half the price of the N series phones I was looking at. It’s 3G and does the basics I need: Music/Phone/Camera and PIM. What does one pay twice the cost for? A better interface (Nokia’s S60, meaning Symbian apps can be installed instead of just Java ones) and Wifi, and the associated battery loss… And with wireless internet in such a hopeless state here in Sydney (whether with WLAN or 3G, there’s patchy connectivity and it’s absurdly expensive) I probably won’t be using it much in the next couple years…

Update: Rethinking: The quoted section all still applies, but not sure about the phone. …Am now trying to decide whether or not I want 3G. It’s annoying, because the 3G offerings now are pretty hopeless, but there’s a lot of potential (but then, there has been for a few years now) and I want this phone to last…

Two of Three Short Scripts

04April2006 [directLink] [film]

Have just uploaded a couple short scripts to the ?film section. I wrote both last week for my ‘Writing for Performance’ class. The first is a monologue for stage kind of entitled ‘Michael’. It’s only a couple minutes long, and probably stands alone, though it could be adapted to fit inside something longer.

The second piece is the opening minutes of a film noir with vampires that I’m working on. I’ve since developed a longer story outline, and will get it online soon too. Oh and ‘Adam’ is now known as Jeremy.

V For Vendetta

01April2006 [directLink] [movies]

On the surface, this film appears to be a fairly decent comic adaptation, with a smattering of action, Natalie Portman with a shaved head and Hugo Weaving in an odd looking mask. Weaving is a true master, managing to bring life to a masked character who is theatrical to the point of the absurd, while still being believable. What action there is looks pretty cool; I had feared it would be a Matrix rip off but there was no wire-work in sight. But the trailer has already shown most of the action, including blowing up the Houses of Parliament, which one learns fairly quickly will be the movie’s endpoint! Further, the movie crams a lot of talk in, and it rarely becomes mere exposition. But, beyond the comic action movie, there is the politics. And politics brings problems.

I have seen two reactions to the movie, which are, quite predictably, based on the viewer’s politics. Either the film justifies terrorism, or it doesn’t go far enough in its condemnation of today’s governments. Certainly, one brings what one will to the viewing. But really, I find it hard to believe anyone with a passing familiarity with 1984 and/or Hitler can see the film as justifying terrorism. The film is really black and white: the government is a Big Brother/Hitler-esque tyranny, V helps the people rise up in revolution. It’s all too easy to justify (most of) his actions as those of a revolutionary. The movie has a happy ending! And therein lies the film’s greatest weakness. It falls for the Judas problem I’ve written about before, turning the bad guys into monsters. The guys in charge are the Nazis with a bit of technology ripped from 1984. John Hurt plays Chancellor Sutler, not as Big Brother, not as Tony Blair, but as Hitler, in his mannerisms, his speech, his increasing madness. Anyone who’s ever seen footage of Hitler addressing a crowd will immediately recognise him. And that’s way too easy. It pulls the movie’s future out of the realm of possibility and into the realm of fantasy. And on the other side, suddenly blowing up the Houses of Parliament is no big deal, because it never really happened.

In some ways, though, the film does push against current issues, and pushes pretty hard. It’s just that every time it brings something up, I wanted the film to take it somewhere, but it never did; it always pulls back to the black and white. I’m guessing it’s actually these in-between bits that are riling up the people who condemn the film, not the revolution. And admittedly, I suspect it would be difficult for a blockbuster to push any harder; I just wish they’d taken it where it could’ve gone. There is mention that the government of the film persecuted Muslims and gays, that it bans works of art it finds objectionable (for the too-easy Hitler links), that it used/uses fear and the media to control the population, that the media repeat the government’s lies knowingly. But again, with the obvious Hitler link, it conflates all the slightly-dodgy things of our society with the obviously evil things, leaving no room to show that this is what we could become.

And finally, though the ending is somewhat satisfactory, justice prevails and all that, it doesn’t leave one wanting to take to the streets like London’s citizens in the film. It’s just too easy. Good will prevail, so why bother doing anything about evil. Whatever happened to “Evil wins when Good Men do Nothing”? I haven’t read the original comic, so I don’t know how the ending compares, but this one is way too happy. 1984‘s ending is far more confronting, and makes the whole story much more satisfying for it. But instead of seeing Winston Smith walking out of his cell thinking all is right with the world, we are Winston Smith, walking out thinking all is right.

26Mar-1April2006 :: This Week

01April2006 [directLink] [weekly]
This item was changed on 04April2006

• saw Adam Alexander play at The Basement; he opened with Talk of Funny Days which is still a beautiful song; he’s got a CD on the way too
• wrote ‘Three Short Scripts’ for my Writing for Performance class; they include a monologue for theatre, a radio skit, and the opening scene/s of a short film; Update: the monologue and film opening are now online
• finished reading WG Sebald’s The Emigrants
• saw Capote; a very interesting piece of work, but it’s difficult to feel sympathy for any of the characters, except perhaps Capote’s friends (who I didn’t realise included Harper Lee!)
• started reading EL Doctorow’s The March
• saw Inside Man
• saw V For Vendetta; pretty cool, but as many people have commented, doesn’t go quite far enough