The View from Elsewhere

friday mogblogging

<cat who brings in leaves and flowers>

There's been much discussion of spurious female brain theories in the Australian blogosphere lately.  I would like to take the opportunity here to discuss the intricacies of the feline brain, a matter not unrelated to gender theory some may be surprised to learn.  (Warning: Friday mogblogging at The View is also Friday non-PC blogging day.)

Years ago, in fact, years and years ago (like about ten), I used to read this simply awful column in the Sunday Age written by some bird with a name like Amanda.  Why?  you might ask (not about the name but the reading of the column).  Apart from the fact that comprehensive reading of the Age at Thresherman's Bakehouse (or whatever it was called) was part of my post-yoga Sunday ritual, the Amanda-bird just had me captive with fascination.  You see, she used to write all these columns about things like 'fluffy floaters' and 'stinking sinkers' and putting on her wellies when she went into the garden (as you do, in Melbourne, but not the desert), and I was just spellbound by the hideous trite domesticity of it all.  Then one day, she wrote this column about 'boy brains' and 'girl brains' that the Age placed as the feature article for the lifetyle supplement section that weekend.  A cartoonist also drew some clever pics to go with it featuring a male brain with little sections in it saying things like 'sport' and 'sex' and female brain saying things like 'shopping' and 'lost car keys'.

Anyway, the article said all the predictable pseudoscience things about boy brains and girl brains (we could all do a bit of creative writing here and make up something similar ourselves, couldn't we?) but...but the crunch point came at the end when Amanda-thingie said, 'Just look at the animal kingdom!' and then went to into a whole description of how her male and female cats had gender-specific behaviour and she was sure she'd done nothing to socialise them.  And I thought, 'Fuck, she's got me there!'  Because I had observed exactly the same phenomenon in my own cats.

Jessie -- my female cat is timid, passive, gentle, docile -- all those things.  A wee-wee girl in every sense of the word.  She's right down the bottom of the pecking order and is constantly bullied by Leonard.  She looks best in a pastel or a floral collar, and if she were human, I can imagine her watching chick flicks, wearing pink, fluffy jumpers and eating chocolates all day long.

Leonard -- the leader of the pack is male, aggressive, combative, extremely playful and commandeers the living room sofa.  He bosses the other cats round, has been known on occasion to attack dogs, and looks best in a leopard-skin print collar.  In human form, I imagine him as a bit of rough trade (I used to call him the 'G**ff Cl*rk of the cat world').

Otty -- is my gay cat.  I found him humping another male cat (now deceased) one evening in front of the fire when he was a kitten.  He's kind of outgoing in the animal world (he's even interested in dogs), but not the human world. He has a substantial night life; indeed, in Sydney, he lived in the garden and rarely came inside. He takes things on the chin from Leonard (and washes and sleeps with him) and is not as low down the chain as Jessie.  I've given him a bejewelled and studded collar. If he were a human...I dunno, it's hard to imagine him as a human -- but maybe Bill Oddie, with all that fur.

So I found myself in hopeless agreement with the Amanda-woman, because my male cats were much more playful and better fighters than my female cat, who was far more passive and domestically-oriented.  Admittedly, as they all came to me as older cats -- Leonard literally off the street -- I had nowt to do with their initial socialisation, so was not able to lead them in feminist ways (tho Leonard has mellowed over the years).

A very slender case to build on such a small, non-randomised sample, I hear you say.  I guess it also says more about feline behaviour than brains, per se, and one would have to investigate the socialisation process of the cats and the perceptions projected onto them.  Could be much bigger trial with control cats, analysis of differently sexed cats being given to different owners for socialisation and so forth.

(If you're interested in any more essentialist theories, a friend who once minded my cats decided on different astrological identities for them, without even knowing their birth-dates -- Otty was an Aquarius, Jessie was a Libran and Leonard was a Leo with Pisces rising.)

Now, I know this is the point at which someone might send me a link to an article about homosexuality in the animal world or something.  If you think this post is stoopid, just remember that it is Friday and mogblogging day.

In other news: Apparently, the exact location of Steve Irwin's grave is to remain undisclosed.  Isn't that what happened in Arthurian legend, that the location of the Lady of the Lake and Arthur's watery grave was never totally known?  I reckon that if you did some Joseph Campbell or Vladimir Propp-style analysis, Irwin would register highly on the Hero-meter.

Personal Butler -- is on the warpath. The other day, I gleefully mentioned to MWA in the kitchen that I had stayed somewhere else apart from the Guesthouse -- without PB knowing.  She said, 'That's not true.'  As it transpires, PB bailed up her gf and said, 'Where's Elsewhere? I know she's in town, where's she staying?'  How can he know that -- unless he saw me walking along a road somewhere (tho I'm sure I didn't see his 4WD anywhere).  Who would tell him?

Now I feel like a complete and utter cow because I ate those garlic prawns he cooked for me as I was a 'loyal customer' (fully in the knowledge that I would be staying somewhere else the following week).  Apparently he was very shitty.

I think PB forgets sometimes that he's running a business.  I guess the 'personal' isn't in front of the butler for nothing.

purple weather

This week and last week, I've been surfing on a tide of lemsip.  I've had a sore throat and a virus, which I probably developed from the combined dose of the Day in the Dirt followed by Bumbledorean air-conditioning and back-burning. A colleague suggested I take lemsip: I'm now a total convert, so much so that I think I've drunk about 25 sachets of the stuff, which is probably not great, as it contains paracetemol.  I used to be a bit Thing about taking prescription drugs of any kind, painkillers or anti-biotics, for fear of what unnecessary things they might do to your body.  But after having taken a small truckload of warfarin (aka 'rat poison') several years ago, I've become more cavalier about throwing drugs down the hatch.

The other downside of being so viral is that I haven't been able to exercise -- not since I came back from the US -- and the Old Peoples' Games are coming up at the end of the month.  So I really should be training. I felt better today than I'd felt in a long while but not okay enough to go barrelling up and down hills or to brace myself against head winds.  So I decided to go for a walk instead.  I went back to the suburb where I used to live when I first came to Alice (the houses you see in some photos below) and walked along the ridge.

Enjoying the weather here at the moment, which is about 18--30 -- Sydney weather.  The Anangu say there are seven seasons here; I've no idea what they are.  Until I heard that, I would have said there was just the 'hot' season for about nine months and the 'cold' season for about three.  But on reflection, there is a slight reprieve from Sept to early October when you're just waiting, waiting, waiting for the real hot to begin.  I call it purple weather.

The Book of Revelation

In 1984 in Auckland, New Zealand, a university lecturer, actor and playwright ... was chained to a tree by a group of women.  The word 'rapist' was spray-painted on his car, and posters around Auckland University campus also denounced him for rape.  The group of women was never identified and no one ever went to court.  Whether Thompson was as guilty as charged and deserving of the attack was hotly debated...*

I recalled this story on seeing Ana Kokkinos's The Book of Revelation, a film dealing with a similar theme, the relatively unusual phenomenon of female-on-male violence.  There are some parallels.  As in the description of the case above, the motivations for the violence at the heart of Revelation are not clear but appear to be strongly ideological. The female perpetrators are never unmasked or tried. The film ultimately becomes an exploration of male vulnerability and trauma.  It is not comfortable viewing.

As I watched this film, the only audience member in an afternoon session (which gave it a suitably 'blue' ambience), I toyed with the question of what was actually the source of my discomfort.  I was definitely uncomfortable because I don't, as a rule, enjoy violent films. But was I all the more uncomfortable, as I suspected was intended, because Revelation upended both some traditional and feminist convictions about men being aggressors and women being their victims?  Or was I merely uncomfortable because the film's treatment of its subject matter did not measure up to its rather stylised aspirations? 

Revelation is an adaptation of Rupert Thomson's novel of the same name, which was set in Amsterdam rather than Melbourne.  Daniel (Tom Long), the principal dancer of an experimental dance company, leaves a rehearsal to buy his girlfriend some smokes.  En route from Southbank, he's abducted in dark alleyways near Flinders Lane by three masked women (it seems a pity he didn't think to buy a pack at Flinders St Station instead). Twelve days later, he's dumped unceremoniously in a middle of some paddocks. He returns to civilisation but with 'typical maleness' is unable to communicate any details of his ordeal to his girlfriend, the rather brittle and self-absorbed Bridget (Anna Torv), who leaves him. Daniel also finds he's lost his creative mo-jo and quits the dance company. He descends into a PTSD-type world of obsession, hypervigilance, and alienation, and through a series of flashbacks, we learn that he has been raped and tortured by the women. After a chance meeting on a tram, Daniel looks set to find 'healing' in the arms of Deborah Mailman (indeed, what better antidote could there be).  But the reprieve is short-lived, as he's driven by his internal demons to commit a crime that reflects his own abuse. Ultimately, he finds solace in an Oedipal clinch with an old cop (Colin Friels), who has a history of dealing with unpalatable, unsolved crimes.

In keeping with the theme of reversed gender expectations, none of the women in this film are particularly warmly-drawn, with the exception of Deborah Mailman. On Daniel's return, both his girlfriend and his boss, the company choreographer, are relatively harsh and unsympathetic in the face of his inability to communicate his absence (tho the choreographer mellows towards the film's end). For me, what was most difficult about this film was the lack of motivation or internal psychology given to the three masked women.  The rationale for their crimes, as given to Daniel, runs something like this: men objectify women and are violent towards them. It's not fair; we wanted some of the pie, too, so we decided to rape you because you're beautiful and to get our jollies. 

One reason why their motivations are so undeveloped is because the film is presented from Daniel's point-of-view, purposely, as the male victim -- and the women don't give away too much to him as captors.  The other seems to be that the film seeks to emulate European arthouse cinema classics such as Last Tango in Paris, in which rather arbitrary and stylised things can happen after all. Part of my problem with the lack of convincing motivation given to the perpetrators may well have been due to my feminist expectations that there must be some deep, dark, psychological reasons as to why women would commit such a crime. But upended feminist expectations aside, I think the film would have been strengthened by more insight into the women's psychology, given the subject matter's relative novelty. After all, characters like Hannibal Lector are afforded opportunities to provide well-developed rationales for their crimes.

In using a highly stylised approach in its portrayal of female-on-male abuse, Revelation seeks to highlight the potential for violence and vulnerability in all of us. The film opens with a portentous scene in which Daniel and his girlfriend are rehearsing a dance sequence with erotically violent overtones, and are instructed by the choregrapher to show less emotion. This sequence is later incorporated into the torture ritual, and there are plenty of stark, bondage-mistress type scenes in which the mighty phallus is shown merely to be a fragile organ, and so on. The difficulty with all this is that 'highly stylised' can quickly tip over into 'heavy-handed' and 'parody'. It's hard to not get the giggles after a while during the scenes with Tom Long lying around with his schlong, and some of the torture scenes seem like left-overs from 70s agit-prop drama. Rather than European cinema classics, the film that Revelation brought to mind unfortunately was that stinker, Eyes Wide Shut (which also has weak motivations and a seriously stupid story at its core): strange people in masks at undisclosed locations is always a tough ask.

In summary, Revelation presents a rather harsh and forbidding vision of reversed gender expectations about masculinity and violence. In one interview about the film, Kokkonis stated: 'There is so much male fantasy about being a women's sex object. We subvert that.' They certainly do, but I was left wondering why it had to be, in a sense, such a straight inversion, such an unequivocally brutal response.

See Revelation if you're curious or if you like erotic slam-dancing.

* C. Atmore, '"Branded": Lesbian representation and a New Zealand cultural controversy', Antithesis, vol 6, no 2, 1993, p11.

touching down

Wasn't it wonderful last night when Little Jess scored a touch-down?  Not just because of that incident last week with Kyle and the jelly belly, but because she's a Territorian -- in fact, maybe the first Territorian in the top ten.  Mind you, although she looked quite beautiful, her outfit did look like something you'd wear to a toga party (i.e. a sheet).  I preferred her in the jelly belly get-up.  Now all she has to do is spin a bit more narrative about herself, get the audience interested, keep on singing like that of course, and she'll be into the top three.  But like AFL, narrative is everything in this show.

Last night was actually my first Idol of the season, as I've been away and I haven't noticed it on Imparja until now (I think we missed the heats, which might not be such a bad thing).  As people have been saying, this year's finalists seem a lot better than last year, though I was surprised by how many of them still sang off key -- a couple of people even started flat and remained that way for a good while.  I guess it's nerves but you'd think they'd be able to find ten finalists who could sing in tune.

As for Bobby -- it's the first time I've seen him so I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt but I was just a tad creeped out by that whole moon and New York City thing.  And the hair and the name -- it's a bit Brady Bunch.  But the worst moment was when he said in the rehearsal clip how he was going to hold the mike as tho it were 'a lady-friend'. That made me feel a bit queasy. That's what lonely 'gent's advertise in the personals for -- a lady-friend.

Anyway, I'll be SMS-ing for Jess for now.  She did win a gong at Tamworth a few years ago (I remember this from reading the Koori Mail.)  Go NT!

bumblers of bumbledore

By popular demand (of Zoe, anyway):

Personal Butler

Hippy Man

Bathing belles in the Hippy Man's waterfall

Get your own copy here: stocks limited (warning: some images are a bit Wolf Creek)

the news you're missing

Yesterday, this made first page headlines in the NT News: Man stabbed with fish

Must still be some of that oceanic, risk-taking male energy around.

friday cat-blogging

Get yours here.

(Along with 'Lookin Good for Jesus'.  Truly an excellent link provided by the Coy Lurker.)

telecast grief

She thought about the Funeral, how bits from the telecast kept on straying through her mind unbidden all day. Even while she was teaching and watching The Piano with the students.

The evening before, she'd flopped onto her bed in the Bungalows* and watched TV because she'd been too tired and viral to do anything else.  She began by alternating between ABC News and Imparja's repeat telecast of the Funeral -- not that she needed to do a channel change at times -- and then, as she continued to watch the ABC, snippets from the Funeral were replayed in news bulletins and current affairs programs.  Until she felt as tho she'd watched the Funeral from woe to go.

The problem was that she was quite fascinated by the Funeral really, tho she felt it might be in bad taste to blog about it, because it involved other people's sadness and misfortune.  She also felt particularly sorry for people like Terri Irwin and Mr Irwin, having to be in the public spotlight at a time like this.

But nevertheless she was quite fascinated by the Funeral.  She enjoyed it more than what she'd seen of the Other Funeral, the perfect one, with its racing car number plates donated to Tobin's and its Wurundjuree smoking ceremony.  It was probably the convergence of so many bizarre elements that she enjoyed.  The Crocoseum. The khaki. The stars.  The blue wiggle as MC. 'Crikey' in yellow flowers.  Feeding time at the zoo (as she foretold in an earlier post, the animals were in attendance.  She imagined a meeting with Harriet the Tortoise at the Pearly Gates was on the cards). The fact that the PM would attend the non-State Funeral of an entrepreneur -- and manage to get in a speech about family values. The way that telecast grief, especially by link-up, didn't seem to work so well. The stars looked like they were rehearsing for their Oscar speeches. And Little Bindi... (wasn't the wobble board man's daughter also called Bindi? ) Well, she couldn't help but be impressed by the girl's composure and that someone from the immediate family had had enough sang-froid or chutz-pah or whatever to say something, but somehow it all seemed so terribly American.

But nevertheless she was quite fascinated by the Funeral, how it seemed to throw some of the worst aspects of Australian and American culture together.  At one stage, they interviewed a BBC journalist who said how they'd just had to be there and film it all, the BBC, because the British loved everything about Australia.  Of course the Poms would love the Funeral; they might even watch it with the same cringing fascination as she had, in their case because it was the kind of Heightened Australiana they mistook for Australia.

So, now she was blogging about it, in a cowardly third person kind of way. She was blogging in the seminar room as she didn't want to use a terminal in Admin, because of the endless war of attrition between academic and admin staff, neither of whom believed the other ever did any work.  And because it would mean sitting opposite the woman called Pru who really did talk like 'Pru and Trude' and who externalised all her thoughts, like a bad performance poet doing a Stream-of-Consciousness piece.

It was scary, sitting near the Stream-of-Consciousness woman and being reminded that yes, those Ugly Australians, so beloved by the British and other television audiences, really did exist.  And it was amazing, really, how blogging immediately made her feel a little less viral, whereas timetabling (which she was meant to be doing) didn't.

But now she knew of at least one person who liked 'True Blue'.  And that person was dead.

* N.B. Not the Guesthouse.

pure maths

According to a Boomer quoted today in Crikey, '60 is the new 40.'

A brief simultaneous equation (still hanging onto Year 8 maths here) reveals therefore that 40 must be roughly the new 27.

Ok, I can live with that, tho I am beginning to wonder if 40 mightn't be the new 60 when I have as much trouble as my 64-year-old student in trying to remember things.

the Castle

This fine edifice stands behind the tidy town sign at the crossroad that takes you into the town centre of Bumbledore(what town?  I'm still looking for it).  Locals refer to it nonchalantly as 'the Castle'.

On sighting 'the Castle', one's natural reaction is 'what the...?', as it is to many things in the Territory.  But is it really so startling to find a castle in the middle of the wetlands, you might ask?  After all Queenslanders have their big banana, there are urban dwellings with turrets and dragons, etc.

The thing is that Queenslanders having their big banana (tho they're not eating it at the moment) kinda makes sense.  There is a corollary.  But castles at Bumbledore and the nation's UFO centre at Wycliffe Well don't (ok, well, maybe there is marginally more sense in the latter.  And we do have the Man of Aileron now -- a giant reconstruction of one of those Aboriginal garden gnomes at a town just up the road from Alice).  Things like the Castle and the UFO centre seem like an expression of the indepdendent Territorian frontier spirit gone strangely awry.

What could possibly be the story behind the Castle, I wondered?  (Much wondering here but no reading of the accompanying plaque, mind you).  I envisaged a lonely dungeons and dragons enthusiast, one of the 'Bumbledores of Bumbledore', coming home late from his shifts at the meatworks or the local uranium mine (until recently, Bumbledore's main industries) to work on this solitary expression of his creativity.

But no -- the plaque tells another story, of refugee nostalgia and das unheimliche.  Click on the photo below for the larger pop-up version to read the plaque.  I hope you are touched by the detail about the location of the water wheel (and also the mention of the need for tidiness).