All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris. Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2006.
No, this isn’t an apologia for Nazis, far from it. It’s a plea to reserve “fascist” for situations which actually warrant the term.
There may (may the gods forbid!) come a time when we need to label a government fascist and be taken seriously. So please, don’t devalue it by calling every little disruption of personal choice “fascist”. It’s a very poor media strategy.
The exhibition Emotional Architecture at Tap Gallery on Tuesday night. Stained glass work by Jeffrey Hamilton (for a preview, check the photos and more words by The Other Andrew), and photography by Jenn Tao. Worth a look.
And several thousand bonus points to Tajine at the Republic for providing excellent food and stunning service to our, erm, boisterous crowd.
The classic Parker Brothers game Monopoly has been “updated” for the 21st Century. In the Monopoly Here & Now limited edition, the familiar player tokens of the top hat, the boot, the old-fashioned sports car and the rest are gone — replaced by a laptop, a mobile phone, trainers, a coffee cup and a bag of fries.
Inflation has struck. No longer do you collect $200 when you pass “Go”. Your salary is $2,000,000 — but then the real estate prices are up in the millions too. The railway stations have been replaced by a cell-phone service and an ISP. Community Chest cards include “You are runner up on a Reality TV show. Collect $100,000,” and in a Chance card you get a tax break for driving a hybrid car.
But in the ultimate concession to the New Century, there’s product placement. The coffee cup token is Starbucks-branded, and the fries are McDonald’s.
Should you wish to try before you buy, there’s an interactive demo.
According to that ever-reliable journal, The Sun, fitness instructor Sam Connell is the Royal Navy‘s first ever male trainer to be accused of a sexual liaison with a male recruit. That’s right, the very first. Ever.
Now it just so happens that Mr Connell is a finalist in Mr Gay UK. And while the prize money is only £5000, it strikes me that having his photo in The Sun won’t harm his post-RN career path. A hunky “I was a sailor” fitness instructor should do quite nicely.
And thank you to Richard Watts for keeping his eye on the tabloids. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.
These three cleverly-designed clocks make the world look nicer… and the gods know we need that on a Monday morning!
Until now I’ve avoided adding to the 11 September outpourings. It’s important, yes, but it takes time to reflect. And I don’t really remember it anyway. Garth Kidd‘s phone call woke me. A plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre, he said. I told him it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t do anything about it — and went back to sleep.
Oops.
Five years on, I’m not mourning. I didn’t know anyone there. There’s only subdued anger. I’m angry that the deaths of 2749 human beings (plus 19 terrorists) have since been used for questionable political ends. Angry that Australia seems to have gone along with everything that’s come out of it, like a faithful little lap-dog. (However even the most cowardly little lap-dog will bark when he’s asked to do something wrong.) And angry that America’s worst ever terrorist attack has such a stupid name.
I’m a fan of Julia Zemiro, host of SBS’s RocKwiz, so it was a sublime pleasure to see her play the “beautiful and beguiling” co-host Bronya, “the face of modern Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in the Eurovision send-up stage show Eürobeat on Thursday night.
Julia is Bronya and, with the delightfully self-conscious Sergei (Jason Geary), brings us the the stilted, tacky presentation we come to know and love from the “real” contest. The rest of the cast captures perfectly the gamut of eurotrash — from the UK’s cheesey duo Rayne & Sheiner’s I Love To Love To Love (Love) and Russian boy-band KGBoys with Ice Queen (“She’s frozen my heart.”) to Iceland’s Björk-esque Gert Grollmersdetter and Love Ballad #3A.
Many good words have already been written about this show, including an article in the Sydney Morning Herald. And I agree, this is all great fun. Yes, plenty of jokes about goats, and turnips. But this is Eurovision: cliché is compulsory.
My good friend and colleague Zern Liew gave me a copy of Cubicle Commando today — not as you might guess from the title some sort of military-themed gay beat sex DVD, but a new book he co-authored with Lisa Messenger.
Inside he thanks…
Stilgherrian for being one of the most perceptive and honourable people I have had the opportunity to learn from.
Am I chuffed or what? Of all the adjectives which could be used to describe me, I think “honourable” is one of the best ever.
“Essential”, says the Macquarie Dictionary (Fourth Edition), means “absolutely necessary; indispensable: discipline is essential in an army“. But the new Thursday supplement in the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled essential: Style + Home + Health (not online), must work to a different definition.
Thanks for joining us. In the centre of the screen, wearing the white spacesuit — sorry, white Extra-Vehicular Mobility Unit — is Heidi Piper. This is her first Extra-Vehicular Activity in her brand new Extra-Vehicular Mobility Unit. Heidi’s current task is “remove aft solar array blanket box restraints”.
Judging by the loud clanging noises, followed by something falling off, Heidi’s task involves bashing something until it falls off.
No-one else seems bothered. I assume it’s OK to bash your space station until bits fall off.
You can’t quite see him, but up on the left is Joe Tanner. This is his sixth Extra-Vehicular Activity — oh, “spacewalk”, dammit! — so he gets to “mate the T5 to the J5″ on the P4 truss segment.
That’s is, Joe plugs in a data cable.
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