The View from Elsewhere

trash tv

While in retreat on the couch (i.e. behaving like a sick person for a week in lieu of not having done so the previous week), I've  been sampling an array of trash TV.  I don't know what you've been getting on the southern and eastern coasts (I definitely don't know anything beyond that), but we've been treated to Ladette to Lady and Trinny and Susannah Undress the Nation.

If you haven't seen Ladette to Lady, this show is similar in vein to Australian Princess.  A bunch of young hoydens with all sorts of 'issues', alcoholism being at the top of the list, get taken to a finishing school instead of a rehab unit. It's presided over by some truly scary women -- one of those frosty, toothy upper crust sorts and someone who seems like a leftover 'fat lady' from the TV cookery show.  The Pygmalion-like goal is to become a 'lady' who no longer burts, farts, chunders, etc, and who can arrange flowers, build a tiered cake and manage not to gold-dig too obviously in the company of gentry.  (Mind you, some of the gentry's commentary has to be heard to be believed, like: 'it's all in the blood'.) In the style of many reality shows, a contestant gets voted off each week, here by the judges. As far as I can tell, the winner is most likely to be a hearty, sturdy British lass, the sort who will look good in tweeds and wellies later on, but just needs a bit of, er, guidance to get there. 

I'll admit, it does get a bit repetitive.  There is only so much vomitting and mooning you can take. But I'm fascinated by the idea of the 'ladette': as far as I know, we don't have an equivalent here. The closest equivalents I can think of are football groupies.   It's not that such 'laddish' behaviour doesn't exist amongst the female population; it just hasn't been stigmatised in such a gendered way. Maybe it's not such a coincidence that Australian Princess, produced around the same time as the first season of Ladette to Lady, acc to Wikipedia, followed a similar trajectory of gentrification: perhaps we're all ladettes here in the Antipodes.  As far as I can tell, overcoming the scourge of ladettism seems to be about cultivating gender-appropriate behaviour in the 'lower classes'.  (Lulu is definitely a ladette: ladies do not leap from the top of the bookshelf onto the clothes horse in front of the heater.)

As for Trinny and Susannah Undress...this show is, somehow, better than the relentless makeovers these two habitually dish out (I can never remember who's who; they're a bit like Bill and Ben.  I think Susannah's the more buxom one...not totally sure).  Anyway, more scary stuff from authoritarian British women.  Last week T and S went down a mine to find out what working class blokes wear beneath their fleeces.  They used the information they gathered to develop a list of do's and don't's for men's dressing, based on six body types.  Some blokes were prevailed upon to model this information for passers-by in Marks & Sparks.

This week, the whole thing got totally out-of-hand when T & S decided that (a) one woman's size 16 is not another woman's size 16, and (b) the traditional Women's Weekly-type understanding that there are four basic body types (Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, J-Lo and Salma Hayek) was all wrong and that in fact there are twelve, a bit like the Myers Briggs indicator or something.  They went from this somehow (perhaps I was distracted by Lulu) to a still-life exhibition of bells, cellos, bricks, goblets, etc, representing British women's bodies, which included a vase that was supposed to look but looked nothing like Trinny or Susannah or whoever it was. 

Unlucky representative specimens were then prevailed upon to model their body shape beside a bell, cello or goblet in a pale blue body stocking evocative of those body suits worn by the flames on the Natural Gas ad twenty years ago...which look good on no one, let alone members of the British general public, except the flames on the Natural Gas ad, who were svelte dancers.  To add injury to insult, these women had stand on plinths in the main street of Guildford, dispensing advice to passers-by about horizontal stripes, A-line skirts, etc.  The show climaxed with women in white overalls being grouped in different formations to represent the main British body types around the Long Man of Wilmington, amid a protest from the local Pagans (a untapped niche market for makeovers, if ever there was one).

I came away from the show totally confused.  As far as I can tell, I have a wholly undesirable yet 'normal female' body type in the Trinny and Susannah pantheon, with an uncompromising name like 'brick' or 'pillar'.  The only remedy for me, and indeed anyone else it appears, is to wear lots of floral, diaphanous clothing to accentuate or create curves that may or may not be there, in the manner of the most desirable body type, the hourglass, possibly with a wide belt or a cinched-in jacket to help.

So there is a revival of femininity in Britain, it would seem.  No more chundering or burping, and get out your frilly and floral stuff.

separatism & its discontents

The other day I was listening to Philip Adams interview Nancy Friday(?) and she commented what a change there was in Australia since she'd last visited in the early 80s,  and how she had always thought of the place as a bastion of the progressive left on the basis of that visit.

I presume she meant in ‘Australian public life’, really.  Nancy Friday wouldn’t be my favouritist of feminists, but her comments made me think how we’ve 'come a long way, baby’, largely in the wrong direction (in my opinion). How times have changed and how cautious people are of running the kinds of debates these days that they used to, often for fear of being branded 'politically correct'. In fact, there's a new version of of political correctness that dominates today, the Prime Minister's version.

Sigh!  I kind of miss the good old days when we were the hot issue (before queer and post-colonial theory took over -- ah, those other others!)  Philip and Nancy got very nostalgic indeed about the days of iconic feminists like Gloria Steinem and all that (when things moved on to Naomi Woolf, she was really a bit of wee wee, despite all her talk about 'power feminism'.)

I've actually been editing a men's report over the last few months.  I don't begrudge the men their report at all, in fact I think it's a Good Thing, but it's made me wonder, am I now in the position of the original SNAG who wanted to support feminists?  I should feel privileged in a way, as women aren't allowed in the men's centre.  This is partly a cultural thing and I respect it as such, tho I've never been a great fan of separatism in any form (and it does have a vague ring of the ‘girls keep out’ male cubby about it). When one of my bosses heard that I was editing the report, she said: 'Typical!   A woman ends up cleaning up after the men!'

When I rang the writer of the report today, I could hear guitars strumming in the background at the men's centre as men reclaimed whatever (sorry, this is getting a bit Nick-Hornby-in-the-desert).  I said to himm, 'Things are sounding rather 70s in there.'  I tried to explain how to perform a certain editorial function in Word, but it didn't seem to be working so I said, 'Well, you'll just have to ring IT support, wont you, because I can't come in.'  Hmmm, separatism and its discontents.  Still, things would be a lot worse in Saudi, I guess.  I wouldn't even be allowed to edit the report.

where are the lesbians?

<the 'baa-bar', whose existence in Alice was so unlikely it had to be created>

And now, it's time for another acid review from moi...last night, D put on a pot of minestrone and invited everyone round for the screening of, you guessed it, the start of the mini-series of The Alice. I missed the original premiere tele-movie; I believe it's been shown on the east coast and that its success inspired the making of the full-length mini-series which began last night on Imparja television.

We gathered round the teev with our Woolies cleanskins and other assorted cheap wines at the ready, expecting an evening of guffawing.  And guffaw we did, as cars drove repeatedly towards the Gap without ever coming out the other side, one of the characters seemed to always get stuck at a roundabout on her way to the airport driving in the opposite direction to it, people held conversations standing in the middle of Todd River bed (as you do), male actors bared tanned, muscular hairy chests and female actors walked round in tight-fitting sundresses soaking up the UV rays.  There was also a very odd scene early in the program where a man is trying to 'whisper' a camel on a dune somewhere out of town.  He's shirtless, and for some incomprehensible reason, decides to rub red dust all over his chest.  In some memorable scenes, one of the actresses wore a slinky LBD of the type you'd wear clubbing, except there isn't much in the way of clubs in Alice and even if there was, you'd be unlikely to see someone dressed that well inside.  When the male actors decided to cover up, they frequently wore long-sleeved floral-patterned shirts.  There's only one man I can think of in Alice who does that.  And if anyone bares a chest, it's usually podgy and pasty with a house-brick red V at the neck and equally red arms.  People are more realistically dressed in flowing faded cheesecloth and tatty Kmart specials in the Alice.  And shorts -- where were the shorts? (the bottom half is the one less likely to be well-covered).

More realistically, there was a hint of the town's obsession with 'sport', with some joggers sighted, and an out-of-towner who has a fatal accident involving heat prostration, jogging and rock climbing.  But apart from this moment of relative realism, and the clothes and the traffic issues, I found myself asking, where are the lesbians?  Where are the Gappies (actually, they did show Pine Gap and a piece of space junk landing outside the Baa-Bah)?  Where are the spas? Where are the feudal local community organisations? Where are the Aboriginal teenagers pushing strollers?  Where are the moth-eaten campdogs?  And then there's the matter of the Baa-Bar itself -- I've been riding past this empty block on the Ilparpa Rd for months, knowing it was the set for the Alice, and hearing all the complaints in the local rags about the fact that most of the Alice had not been filmed in Alice at all (but Sydney?). No bar exists in Alice like the Baa-Bar (ho ho, such a witty name): maybe Darwin, at a pinch and I've certainly never seen a sheep (the Baa-Bar's mascot) in my time here either.

There are some token Aboriginals in the Alice, including poor old Deborah Mailman playing the part of a solicitor, but they're very east coast in presentation like the rest of the cast and seem to be grappling with more urban-style identity issues. There's no one in this series who looks like they've been cooking roo tail over a camp-fire recently, no one camping in the Todd because they've brought a relative into town for dialysis and no wily grannies trying to humbug you into doing what they want. In fact, really The Alice looks like an excuse just to set an east coast style soap against the exotic backdrop of Centralia.  On top of this, none of the characters are particularly engaging or compelling or even likeable.  At one point, the girl who keeps on getting caught at the Hartley St roundabout going the opposite direction from the airport says that she's decided to stay and someone says something like 'yeh, the Alice does that to you'.  Which is something that people do say here, tho the characters were all so unattractive and so un-Alice it was difficult to see what the appeal was.

It was also quite weird to see a show made about the place where you live and finding it so unlike it -- talk about das unheimliche.  It may be that the sense of disjuncture was so great it was too hard for us to identify with it as a story at all.  It's all a bit of a shame, really; Alice would be a great subject for a Northern Exposure-style series, full of local do-gooders, sport-heads, traditional owners,lesbians, policemen, Americans, dogs and all the rest  (tho definitely minus Sigrid Thornton and her new blow-up lips).

So, my overall rating for The Alice is: a real stinker.  It makes both The Secret life of Us and A Lot of Croc look shit-hot (which they aint). I think that on the whole, Australia does some simply appalling television -- good docos and some good film, but terrible TV drama. I'm trying to think of some Australian mini-series that I've actually thought were good but all that comes to mind is Come in Spinner (n.b. based on a novel).  (I'm sure Division 4 and other things were good, but they were before my time.)  It's something to do with the fixation on quirky but pasteboard gothic characters (a la Sea Change) and the commitment to 'issues' based drama (a la all hospital- and police-based dramas) tho there seems to a problem with the pacing of issues in dramas like The Alice -- too many and the wrong ones.

P.S. And it's just 'Alice' not 'The Alice' -- what wanker says that these days?!

Harry Potter and the death of culture

I read a review of the 'Harry' phenomenon by Peter Craven a couple of weeks back in the Weekend Australian.  I kind of warm to Craven; he seems like a likeable enough fart.

Craven states, 'Some critics deride Harry Potter as the death of culture', namely Bloom and Byatt, and notes various concerns such as whether HP 'does represent the triumph of marketing values over any other' and the problem (if it is one) that J K R is 'not a distinguished stylist.'  Then back to the main fear:

The fear with Harry Potter is that the fuss about the books is a symptom of the death of culture.  We are starting to live in a world where even professors of literature and cultural studies are ceasing to be able to tell the difference between serious writing and the kind of writing tht happens to sell, however modest its literary attainments.

I'm no great champion of cultural studies myself (too much Radio National-listening and ABC Friday Night of Crime-viewing going on for that), but I don't get this line of argument (coming from Bloom and Byatt) about the HP and the death of culture via cultural studies at all.  Since when have professors of literature and cultural studies had enough power to channel market forces?  They wish!  Maybe I'm out of the loop with cultural studies but I can't imagine they have had any but the most tendentious influence on this marketing phenomenon.

Craven goes on to make various other interesting points about Dickens being a Victorian vulgarian and maybe Dr Who being a better analogy for J K R than C S Lewis or J R R Tolkien.  He also makes the same apologies for J K R that were made for Blyton -- that her books might lead kids on to reading other books.

I wonder if Enid Blyton had been writing in these times with the same mass marketing machinery available whether she would have become the same phenomenal success.  Personally, I think J K R is a cut above Blyton, but not as good a YA writer as those I remember from my youth such as Ursula le Guin, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner.  But what J K R really does have going for her is a highly accessible conceit which draws on many popular, tried-and-true elements from past elements of children's fiction.

I had hopes of writing some serious reviews from my holiday reading.  I would have liked to have finished reading the Strehlow book (Barry's Hill) but it was too heavy for me to lug around.  So you're just some piecemeal reviews here, like the Gail Bell one.

And ...MDA: there's heavy shit going down at MDA -- two simply incredulous plot lines at once (maybe it's time to put this show to bed).  I caught an episode of this show last week.  Sigrid Thornton is a wonder professor trialling a new wonder and possibly dangerous drug on a 17 yo girl with some kind of illness.  However, it seems she's falsified the trial results after a lab break-in in order to keep the show on the road.  Meanwhile, the girl's mother is revealed to be an inappropriate kidney donor (she's stuffed up her kidneys)...and then so is the father, because he's not her biological father at all.  In fact, their daughter has be born of a one-night stand with the lead singer of a band now turned builder.  So MDA must in the nick of time (I'm not even sure why it needed to be them) pacify the non-biological father, get him to track down the builder and persuade the latter to donate a kidney...all I can say is that it was lucky the 17 yo asleep when the builder saw her because she’s a thoroughly obnoxious and precocious child and would definitely have put me off kidney donorship (apart from the fact that it's probably an incredibly painful procedure that wouldn't mix well with labouring).

Totally incredulous plot-line 2 -- Sigrid Thornton and Shane Bourne (has he lost weight?) seem to be having an affair (even showed them kissing -- errrk!)  I guess all the characters on MDA have had a bit of a fling so there was nowhere else to turn but to Shane.  It seems his character's on-a-harley-therefore-he’s-having-a-midlife-crisis: not particularly subtle, but subtlety’s never been Australian drama’s strong point.  Shane does a lot of padding after Sigrid like a hungry dog, but while his character's quite tightly zipped in general I thought he could have given things a bit more oomph -- some more attempts at suaveness, more besottedness, maybe, just a bit of something.

As for Siggy: a friend of mine once described her as having the most annoying face on Australian television.  I’ve been trying to work out what it is about her, as I think she’s quite good-looking, but there is something about the set of her mouth that’s intensely irritating – it's like a petulant duck's bill. Anyway, I daresay Shane is going to get his come-uppances when he realises what a vixen she is.

So fruity melodrama contiues at MDA these days and overall, I'm not sure about all this ABC drama incest (esp between MDA and Sea Change) that's been going on: couldn't they broaden their drawing pool?  Though doubtless I will be tuning in again once Vince Colosimo graces the screen...

And -- I've been very slack lately about reading and commenting and linking other blogs etc (I spend enough time reading the dozen or so blogs I do read; I'm not sure what my life would be about if I read any more.)  It has also come to my attention that one of my former rivals from Troppo Armadillo has linked me to his new(ish?) blog, lavartus prodeo...thanks, and welcome Mark, if you're reading this: I like cats too.  And blogging.

Which leads me to another point...

Zigzaggery

Saw ZigZag Street last night. I was kind of interested to see how a Nick Earls’ novel (I’ve only read one, back at Xmas time) would pan out into theatre; I would have thought film would be the more appropriate medium. It was also something of a relief to see some light-hearted, easygoing theatre in Alice as much that comes here is theatre with a capital ‘T’ (i.e. Shakespeare) or opera with a capital ‘O’: nothing too light-hearted or experimental for the provinces. (Probably only larger, well-established companies can afford to travel.)

Mr Earls’ book panned out quite well into theatre, actually, with the cast of four athletically playing double and triple parts (except for the male lead, who’s on stage all the time). There were no dud performances; all these actors were quite capable (especially the lead woman) in switching personas.

ZigZag Street follows what seems to be the usual trajectory of Mr Earls' work (‘seems’, I say, on the slim pretext of having consume two of Mr Earls’ texts). The hero battles through the squallor and carnage of twenty-something life, including the filth of shared household or his own accommodation, misguided passes or bonks to find Miss Right, who seems to be a professional or an arty girl of some kind (but definitely not a nurse). Ok, so it’s genre fiction, and it’s amusing -- it amused me, for example.

I found Rick, the hero of ZigZag Street a lot more appealing than the ambitious young nurse-slaying registrar of Bachelor Kisses, probably because Rick is self-deprecatory and down on his luck (my suspicion is that the hero of BKisses is pretty close to Mr Earls himself, actually; not totally sure why, perhaps it's the level of childhood detail fed into the hero's characterisation). And we Australians like self-deprecation, tho I have to say that I did find myself thinking, what exactly is attractive about this guy other than that he has a job (which he’s barely just holding down), and yes, a sense of humour, and his grandmother’s house rent-free. (That’s how harsh we women can be.) Evidently his boss doesn‘t share these opinions tho, as they end up in bed together, which I thought was going to happen as soon as he mentioned he thought she was a babe…

One of the things that was preferable about the theatre version of an Earls’ book is that the murky spermy guy world of thoughts (which Mr Mulgrew does oh so well over at Everything is Wrong with Me) is pared back somewhat…Yeah, I know I’m a prude and this stuff is funny but I felt sometimes with BKisses there was maybe be ‘too much information’ from this internal world, and that it could have been leavened by a little more growing insight (as in Birmingham’s He Died with a Felafel) or by some humility and self-deprecation, as in ZZ Street.

The other thing I felt about this play was: drama about human relations is always going to have some appeal, because we’re all interested in that, n’est-ce pas, but this seems to be drawn from very much the weird twenty-something parallel universe (of which I’ve of course only ‘just’ escaped from) where the worst thing that could possibly happen in life is being dumped by someone. Whereas once you get into the jaded 30s, it’s more like: oh, yawn, another relationship break-up, I didn’t think that was ever going to work out anyway, glad he/she has seen the light, etc etc. So I found the central tragic motif of this play (that the main character’s struggling to get over a live-in relationship that ended 6 months ago & that he has to ‘move on’) maybe a bit yawnsome tho it is of course being played for laughs.

Also a little credulous at the conclusion of the play, where the main character finds love in the form of a depressed semi-employed artist. They bond over their mutual misfortunes (i.e.being unlucky in love) -- and their whacky senses of humour. But found myself sending thought-waves to female character: Eeeek, don’t tell him you’ve been depressed, dear, I’d leave that one till a few months’ into the relationship, when you knew you had him hooked (n.b. I’m banking on the guy being too imperceptive even to notice that she's a bit down). Always a mistake to admit to any ‘issues’, sadnesses, difficulties, etc, indeed anything of emotional content, much less to cry, too early on. Anything like that will make a man run a million miles.

So yeah, I didn’t find the climactic ‘bonding point’ of the play particularly credible; in real life, I thought the hero would probably have shot out the door at the first sight of tears or, at very best, acted in a gentlemanly way for the rest of the evening, but never returned. (Actor playing main character did not seem particularly comfortable comforting crying woman either.) Anyway, ZigZag Street was a-musing. Go and see it if you want to have a good laugh; it will appeal particularly if you like that Qld-style Andrew McGahan, John Birmingham school of abject spermy shared household ‘why are there stale sandwiches rather than babes at the bottom of my bed' sense of humour.

Wee wee'd out

We at The View here have collapsed on the couch in a fit of exhaustion, overcome by a surfeit of wee wees (tho it was relatively mild here today, peaking at only 34 C).  We have attempted to encapsulate the best of the Wee Wee Girl A-list by presenting the Wee Wee Girl Awards in a typelist in the right-hand side-bar.  Please, feel free to kick up a stink if you think anyone has been unfairly represented or unrepresented.

In cyberspace, no one can hear you scream?  Not true, I fear (I'm waiting for the libel suit.)  But -- a couple of wee wee quibbles we seem to have overlooked: what about the Jennifer's, i.e. Anniston and Lopez?  And, yes, Geoffrey and Johnny.  Some interesting fundamental epistemological questions there.

Well, yes, Geoffrey can be slightly nauseous, especially in his posturing as a national treasure. He is such a pleaser and there is something cheesy about his role in Shine and something excreable in every wrong sense of the word about his performance in Quills, but all the same...

Johnny Depp -- I saw a really bad photo of JD in Who Weekly at age 21 with bouffy hair...and there is the matter of Edward Scissorhands, but all the same, I think there is an understandable hesitation about classifying him as an outright Wee Wee...even in Finding Neverland, he had me captivated despite totally inappropriate casting as sinister munchkin Scottish playwright, J M Barrie.  Is it really just the power of those cheekbones?

So could we have the redeemed or perhaps reformed Wee Wee category, maybe for the likes of Jason Donovan and Naomi Watts as well?  And yeah, no I don't think so about Shannon Noll (yet to be convinced, anyway).

Okay, more Wee Wee Boys: Craig McLachlan, Doug and Larry Anthony, Alexander Downer, Christopher Pyne, Quieran Perkins, Spencer McLaren on SOLUS, Christian the epileptic on SOLUS, Aaron Beiby [sic?] on CrashBurn,  MacKenzie Wark (king of pomo academic boy wee wees), Elliott Perlman (Aust Lit Wee Wee Boy), Matt Day...sigh, the lists are endless!

Give it to me, big boy! Make me laugh

Watching The Glasshouse last night, I had yet another of those moments when I thought ‘Why am I watching this program?’ (about yet another ABC program). In fact, a couple of moments. For a start, there was an obnoxious American comedian on the program who managed to insinuate that he’d rather not kiss Corinne Grant on the cheek though he’d be happy to kiss Mia Friedman, because she was prettier. (We’re only talking social kissing here.) Then Will Smith read out a survey (of the genre ‘confirming things women would rather not believe are true of men’) which revealed that when men advertise in personals for GSOH, what they really mean is ‘someone who’ll laugh at my jokes’ rather than ‘someone who makes up their own jokes’. (This survey is probably also of the genre ‘not to be taken seriously’, mind you.)

Loathsome toad-like American comedian with strange sense of seething arrogance/superiority that visiting American men often have, even when they’re trying to make all the right small ‘l’ left-liberal noises about American defence policy, decided to take things further by asserting that women don’t have a real sense of humour at all, and that only men are truly funny. Then nice little Mia Friedman (editor of Cosmo, et al) with her oh-so-flippy hair made valiant attempts to Keep It All Nice by discussing genres of Blokesome humour, while Strange Seething American Comedian and Corinne Grant descended into mutual seething mass. (Side-swipe: how did Mia Friedman manage to toss her head and oh-so-flippy hair every time she turned her head? I’ve had hair that length and all I can conclude is that must be a great product she’s using; I would have thought so many head tosses were otherwise aerodynamically impossible. Indeed, it seems she might be an Australian equivalent of the genus Strange British Cyberwomen with flippy (usually blonde) layered hair as seen on Coupling.)

I found this conversation totally weird and spent much of it seething at Strange Toad-like American Comedian myself, thinking, ‘Yeah, right, sure you get laid!’ And wondering if the subtext here, as in other instances where I’ve heard this opinion expressed, is: basically I really enjoy men’s locker room humour and I don’t feel comfortable at all with women. I also wonder if the objection from the survey re: women making jokes is that humour suggests intelligence, as in the original use of the word ‘wit’ – e.g. it can suggest capacity to make social comment. I would have thought the more interesting question might be more rather which genres of humour (e.g. slapstick, irony, etc) the sexes tend to utilise more, and how, and why, etc (but that’s way too serious and anthropological of me.) And: what’s the point of a relationship if you can’t both have a bit of a laugh – at each other’s jokes?

The other thing was is that being a woman, none of this really tallied with my experience. I can think of loads of hilarious women of my acquaintance and lots of humorous gatherings, often in which joke-making women have predominated, if anything – and the men have laughed too. And if there’s one thing that any men who’ve gone out with me have all said is that I have a great sense of fun or GSOH. In fact, I thought it might be my one redeeming feature. So find survey results hard to believe, personally, (tho have also been advised, usually by women it has to be said, that men might find my sense of humour a little intimidating, esp in its more acid incarnations – but then, this seems to come from the school of thought that men find almost any attribute a woman might have intimidating -- I’ve even heard that big tits can be intimidating -- so tone it down, tread softly on their egos, etc etc etc.)

All I can say is: well sorry if you don’t find this blog funny enough because it’s only written by a woman!

Summer frivolity

Had lunch today with two former colleagues from the Titanic. They were hot on the subject of how to 'teach black people to think black again' (albeit in a '70s Black Panther/Fidel Castro kind of way) and how to overthrow shared participation agreements, mutual obligation and white civilisation in general.

One of them has a novel 'make love, not war' idea for outbreeding the white population by making mass deposits at IVF donor banks. I said: But isn't there an issue of selection involved? Him: I wont put down my race. Me: Hmmm, lots of people are closet racists and go for the old Aryan blue eyes, blond hair at those sperm banks, anyway. And what about cultural transmission? Wont you be creating a new stolen, or implanted, generation? Him: By the time they're adult, we'll have the technology to implant a silicon chip in them with all language and culture on it they need. (He tells me one of his pick-up lines for tourists is: 'You can't leave Australia without an intimate experience of the world's oldest living culture.')

They plan to set up a website ('what we need is a website and a bus') to rally the troops. The idea is that people from all over the world will stumble across the website and start offering donations, and so a new political movement will be born. I said, 'What if people only give you scabby amounts like $2.00?' Them: 'Well, if one million people give $2.00 each, that'll be $2 million.' None of this really accords with my experience of maintaining a blog. Actually, I've been invited by one of these guys to write a joint-blog on Indig affairs, but I've side-stepped this exciting, potentially libellous offer thus far.

In other news: packing up, cleaning up for my grande tour of Sydney (next 2 weeks) and Melbourne, where I'll be minding le chateau de whitebait from 29 Dec to 6 Jan. So if I haven't told you I'm coming, I am, and you know how to contact me. (And if anyone isn't working tomorrow afternoon and feels like catching up with me in Melbourne CBD, send me an email or an SMS, because I've got a long stopover in Melbourne, due to the strangeness of frequent flyer point tickets.)

Oh, and Radio National Breakfast: have to say something about that. What has happened to Radio National Breakfast? It has become frivolous -- 'summertime breakfast' with Gerald Tooth, whom I like, but it's not the same. I feel as though the strange intimacy I used to share with Peter Thompson  and Michelle Grattan has been disturbed: theirs are usually the first voices I wake to, apart from Leonard's. Also, Dear Jools revealed the other day that Dr Norman is into body sculpting -- erk! That's definitely put me off him.

So, my own summertime of frivolity is about to begin now. Who knows when I'll blog again? (Probably tomorrow at Tullamarine.)

Sensis, public enemy #1234

Ok, two pieces of valuable public information -- I'm not revealing my sources on either, but they're good ones:

FYI -- for anyone contemplating using the Sensis directory service number, 1234, Sensis, as you may or may not know, is a subsidiary of Telstra. The 1234 number is replacing the Telstra 12456 directory assistance number, but this time with outrageous costs attached: 40c to call the number, then 4c A SECOND! With this sort of pricing structure in place, it's no wonder so many Australians hold Telstra in the same regard as the major banks. By law, Telstra have to provide a FREE directory assistance number, because they are still majority owned by the government. They choose however not to pass this number on to the public. What's the number? 1223. Thumbs up to Telstra for finding a way to charge for a service that is supposed to be provided for free. Of course, feel free to forward this on.

And: A little bit of civilization for those who can't get to the shops this Christmas...(i.e. me, tho I'm suffering from a surfeit of arts & crafts at present)

Pass this link on to anyone you think who might find it useful:

Art gallery Christmas catalogue

Otherwise -- still just reeling over the Tara girls school thing...including lines such as:

The Herald understands that the teenager's parents had been isolated from the school community since the incident and had no support from other parents, who apparently feared Tara's reputation would be tarnished by the scandal.

And:

The school would not comment on the settlement, except to deny its reputation had been damaged. [The school principal stated:] "I'm looking forward to going back to Tara this afternoon. The school's reputation hasn't been damaged."

And the headmistress's initial response to the father:

"I said you know my daughter ... and she just sort of nodded her head and there was no real response," he said. "She said that [the girl] would have to be disciplined ... because of all the hassles she created, and the teachers would need an apology."

Just goes to show where some people's priorities are (i.e. not with those under their care).  Even if the schoolgirl was a well-known young fabulist, the teachers should have at least filed a police report immediately with the Italian cops, as after all she was only fifteen and in their care on a school excursion in a foreign country.

All this stuff just makes me seethe about the way in which Helen Garner has renewed acceptance of the 'she was asking for it' discourse amongst middle-brow liberal humanist wombats of the babyboomer literati and intelligentsia type such as Phillip Adams (many of whom undoubtedly can no longer wear short skirts -- tho hey, come to the NT and you can wear whatever short things you like). I can just imagine Aunty Helen scrambling for photos of the young Tara girl (such as the footage of her in a short skirt at the Lansdowne) for evidence that she was appealing in deep-rooted Jungian stereotypical ways to men's psyches to rape her...I can see it all: 'Didn't she realise what a potent, age-old symbol of youth and fertility she was to that young Italian man as he dragged her down an unknown dark narrow side alley in Sorrento to let his friends rape her on the bonnet of a Ferrari?' blah blah blah de dah

P.S.  I've been in Alice exactly one year now.

SJP's head

Well, Sex and the City is finally over -- that is, it's just come to an end on Imparja a couple of weeks after it ended on the east coast.  Problem is, I knew what was going to happen in the last episode as I read it somewhere in a crappy women's mag or maybe in that Ruth Ritchie woman's column.  But this is still a much better scenario than living in Darwin where they don't get Imparja to keep them up with some of TV's most crapulent programs, and I think, don't even have a fourth channel.

I would like to say, for the record, that I wasn't a major fan of S&tC: this will probably sound like disingenuous pap, but I was perhaps a minor fan or a major minor fan or perhaps even a minor major fan.  So no, I haven't seen absolutely every episode (which is a good thing, for when it's repeated) and I was never galled about missing an episode in the way I am with Queer as Folk.

I wouldn't say either, that S&tC was JUST LIKE MY LIFE (manolo blahniks aren't a winner in the desert).  In fact, QAF is much more like my life, given the years spent clubbing and coffeeing with gayboys.  I really love that episode of the Simpsons, when Marge and her firends are sitting round saying that S&TC -- a 'show where women sit round talking like gay men' -- is just like their lives...

One of the main sources of fascination for me about S&tC whenever I've watched it is Sarah Jessica Parker's head: what is it about her head that makes her such a weird looking woman?  She has the right body for TV: small, bony yet curvaceous, but what's with the head?  Ruth Ritchie commented on the strangeness of SJP's looks in last week's column, calling her a woman 'with a head as big as Mr Ed.'  I always thought more of an Afghan hound, myself.

At a superficial level, part of the problem with SJP's head seems to be: terrible smoker's skin showing early signs of ageing caked with heavy make up to detract attention away from this (both of these factors increase as the series gets older: check out some of the earlier episodes).  But more fundamentally: she has a very long face with long hair (usually) and a centre parting.  So when she has short hair, she briefly looks better as it breaks up some of the length around her face.  But a centre parting ... I can't get over them letting her doing several series with this.  Centre partings, if I remember rightly, were always one of Julian Clary's objects of scorn. To back this up: there was a 'finale' on S&TC shown, with interviews with all the main actors, in which SJP was shown with a side parting... she looked relatively normal.

There used to be a woman on the Balmain bus with long blonde corkscrew and a centre parting a la SJP -- and I used to think, a centre parting doesn't suit you either, darling. And you've got a round face.  In fact, it doesn't suit anyone.  (I'm saying all this as someone who's always trying to conceal the fact their hair falls naturally in a centre parting.)

And then there was the closure of S&tC; what were we meant to think of that: American is better?

The other thing about the finale was that apparently Big's name gets used once in the last episode...I read this today in NW.  I missed it; maybe I thought SJP was addressing someone else.  Did anyone pick this up?