I’ve been critical in the past of the widespread trashing of Heather Mills-McCartney, while admitting that she’s probably her own worst enemy. A recent marketing survey found she was at the top of the list of the most hated celebs in the UK. Not surprising, probably. But what’s interesting is the top five loved celebs are all male and four of the top most hated celebs are female (Simon Cowell is on both lists). This raises the question Finlo Rohrer poses - why are the celebrities most often vilified disprortionately female? I think it’s a very interesting question. A range of answers are given in the article, including one which is not quite an answer but perhaps more of an observation - that a lot of this vilification is related to the policing of femininity (disposition, motherhood, personal appearance, weight, etc.) What do LP-ers think?
Archive for May, 2008
Bill Henson image from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
This post starts a thread which continues general discussion of the Bill Henson controversy, and replaces what had become a very long thread. Please note that there is now a specific post on the politics of the Bill Henson brouhaha, and comments on that aspect should be made on that thread. This one is for the broader issues canvassed by my previous post.
Update: Brian has a new post up on the issue of the age of consent.
Elsewhere: Very interesting posts from Jason Wilson at gatewatching and Rachel at Mentalization-Positive.
Further update: This thread is now closed, and discussion on the general aspects of the Henson controversy can be continued here.
Bill Henson image from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
A vigorous discussion of various aspects of the controversy about Bill Henson’s photography (and particularly about the images of naked adolescents now at the centre of a media and legal storm) continues on this thread. I think it might be useful if we tried to separate out some of the issues - I think that discussion shows that a lot of us are agreed that an incredible number of different topics are collapsed together in the framing of the Henson “debate” in the media. So on this thread, I’d like to discuss the politics of the Henson controversy. Please restrict responses to that specific aspect - others can be discussed here on the continuation of the previous thread.
It’s pretty clear to me that the only political winners from the brouhaha over Henson’s photographs are the culture warriors themselves. Whether or not Miranda Devine knew what she was setting off is perhaps a moot question, but it seems obvious that the culture warriors are rejoicing in being able to find an issue that positions what they normally bang on about as much more central to public debate than their usual fare. I doubt their own triumphalism is warranted - they still face the problem that ranting and raving about Islamism and the enemy within and global warming denialism fails to cut through in a changed landscape of public opinion - not every issue will allow them to position all their enemies - “luvvies”, “the left” - in such a neat row with the highly emotive issues of child sexual abuse and internet pr0n as a hook to draw attention to their opinionating. This thing has moved at the speed of light in the media cycle, but conversely its centrality to the media cycle has already ended - we’re back to all things petrol.
So what about Kevin Rudd? Continue reading ‘The politics of the Bill Henson controversy’
[Via Crikey]
This is a couple of weeks old now, but significant - a proposal to build Australia’s first “clean coal” power plant at Kwinana, in the far south of the Perth suburban sprawl :
A London-based spokesman at BP, David Nicholas, said on Monday that the proposed reservoir was not understood “as fully as other formations”. “Particularly considering this would be one of the first projects of its kind, we would want some very high level of certainty of the long-term storage of carbon dioxide,” he said.
Mr Cobban said Hydrogen Energy, based in Weybridge, England, would still work on projects in California and Abu Dhabi.
Marn must be very disappointed…
*NO PLOT SPOILERS FOR SEASON 4*
(cryptic allusions amongst the cognoscenti are encouraged, but take care!)
Image Source: BBC
Who else is becoming impatient for Auntie ABC to show us more of the scrumptious David Tennant and his charmingly ruthless ways? They haven’t even shown us the last Christmas special yet!
Continue reading ‘Open Whoverse Thread’
Our security services - ASIO, ASIS, and the AFP - have expanded a great deal recently, and we essentially have to take it on trust that this is a) a good use of money, b) being used to perform the intended goal - no more and no less, and c) being done in such a way that it doesn’t impede everybody else’s rights to be left alone.
In this context, an insight into how the intelligence agencies functioned over 30 years ago is still worth thinking deeply about, and the insights from the just-released reports of the Hope Royal Commission of the mid-70’s remain disturbing today:
During a three-year inquiry, conducted largely in secret from 1974, Justice Robert Hope identified a litany of problems in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, leading him to conclude that it “may be, or may have been, penetrated by a hostile intelligence service”.
The fresh volumes of classified material released yesterday paint a damning picture of ASIO, from its formation in 1949 by Labor prime minister Ben Chifley, through to the mid-1970s.
According to Justice Hope, record-keeping at ASIO was shambolic, staff morale was low and agents spent more time digging dirt on left-wing sympathisers than looking into the greater threat posed by Soviet bloc spies operating in Australia.
“ASIO could not be taken seriously as an efficient organisation, still less an effective security organisation,” he wrote.
Photo credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Continue reading ‘Just saw you passing through’
[Via Sydney Arts Journo]
No comments on this post please - they can be made at this thread.
In other Henson news, Art World has pulped its forthcoming issue according to the Fin Review today, at a cost the magazine estimates at $100 000. The issue, written and laid out in April, was to have featured Henson on its cover and included the image that’s been the centre of the “debate”. And The Age has just one of many reports of cops visiting galleries and Henson photos coming off walls across Australia, despite no complaints having been made.
John Quiggin thinks that Labor’s descent into the petrol pricing abyss - with all sorts of speculation about GST changes - is the Labor party’s first big public policy disaster of the term. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s also led to the first big damaging leak of the term - Martin Ferguson’s letter opposing Labor’s Fuelwatch scheme.
Trevor Cook speculates on the motivations of both Ferguson and the leaker. The other point I’d add to his analysis is that it wouldn’t be drawing too long a bow to suggest that Ferguson is the one spectacular example in the Ministry of “interest group capture” - a Minister who sees his role as being to represent industry to Cabinet rather than to make public policy in the public interest. If anyone had been running a book around election time on frontbenchers most likely to kick own goals for the Rudd government, I suspect Ferguson would be right up there with Peter Garrett - though for somewhat different reasons.
Cross-posted at PollieGraph.
In this piece about a new book on the Death of the [literary] Critic, Salon’s sub-editor is doing what sub-editors do, I guess, posing questions which are more loaded than the ones its writers choose to answer:
In the age of blogging, great critics appear to be on life support. Salon’s book reviewers discuss snobbery, how to make criticism fun and the need for cultural gatekeepers.
Has the role of the professional critic become obsolete in an age of book clubs, celebrity endorsements and blogs?
And Salon’s own critics - Louis Bayard and Laura Miller - dispose of the blogosphere question in quick order:
The problem with arguing for cultural gatekeepers is that, if you’re a professional critic, you inevitably look self-serving — “Hey, that’s my job!” — and yes, elitist — “Don’t try this at home, guys.” I myself don’t have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn’t qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I’ve learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism.
Speaking personally, I’ve really enjoyed the recent book threads on LP, and I don’t think anyone writing them or on them thinks we’re trying to usurp the professional skills of criticism or trying to act as “cultural gatekeepers”.
The rest of the discussion is really interesting, and I’d rather you read it than I summarised it, but I do have a couple of observations about transposing these discussions to the Australian scene, and a suggestion.
A lot of the debate about inflation targeting has been obscured by the Libs’ petrol bowser politics (and as well as it being dumb potential policy, I think it’s been dumb politics for Labor to start playing this game - however tentatively - as Mr Denmore said in comments, there’s a very simple political answer to the bowser tax wars the ALP should be employing). But I still think there’s a valuable point to make about the dissonance between elite discourses about the economy and perceptions about lived experience of the economy. The ALP, in government if not in opposition, has to keep both the policy wonks and the punters happy. And they were trying to with their claims about the budget being anti-inflationary in its fiscal impact and that much of inflation’s causes were from factors quite extraneous to influence by government policy. Even if they shot themselves in the foot by joining Brendan Nelson at the petrol pump. And I think it’s a direct result of an own goal from Kevin Rudd, when he said that he’d done “everything… possible” to address the price of petrol, and this was instantly characterised as being “complacency”, being “out of touch” and so on in the hyper-media cycle we all now deal with, including very clever Prime Ministers.
But what I wanted to raise was a thought inspired by this guest post at John Quiggin’s blog, where his guest poster Bruce Bradbury examines the much higher rate of inflation in staples rather than consumer durables:
This gap perhaps explains some of the divergence between the expressed concerns of consumers and the complacency of economists. Though consumers know that their next TV will be much better than their last one for much the same price, they are still struggling to meet their weekly supermarket and petrol station bills.
[Via steve in comments] Just as it appears that The Borg has finally got his way and Liberals at all levels are happy to enable the formation of the Pineapple Party (that’s if rank and file Liberal members accept the Nationals’ takeover offer), it appears that the hurdles the new Liberal National Party will have to cross have been set higher than anyone had been anticipating. Anna Bligh’s been busy talking up how the state redistribution map proposed for comment by the Queensland Electoral Commission will make Labor’s task of winning a fifth term more difficult. But Antony Green has finalised his calculations and reported at The Poll Bludger that Labor would have 63 nominal seats on the redrawn boundaries as opposed to their current 59 of 89.
The LNP may or may not put paid to the problem of three cornered contests (and if it forces Liberal and National candidates to fight it out within one party structure, or if it spawns breakaway parties on either side, it won’t). But that was never the real problem electorally it’s been built up to be - it was more about the squabbling exacerbating perceptions of coalition disunity. Continue reading ‘Pineapple party pulped?’
Thanks to Iain in comments on another thread for this link. I was in the mall today having a puff on my way home from returning some library books when a Brisbane Times reporter asked me some questions about Campbell Newman’s new plan to have specific “smoking zones” in the CBD. So I have a new media persona - as a “Queen Street mall smoker”! It was the journo’s idea that I should hold up the cigarette for the photo, incidentally.
Image by Bill Henson - sourced from DailyServing.com
I’ve made my interpretation of Bill Henson’s images of adolescents clear in a previous post, and I want to talk here about some of the issues raised by and about the “debate” on Henson’s photography and the subsequent charges laid against him and the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery owners.
The first point to make is that whatever the “debate” is now about, it’s not about Henson’s images as such. They literally disappeared from view on Thursday afternoon, and the interpretation of the image that’s attracted the most angst has been heavily slanted by its reproduction in numerous tabloid media outlets, with black bars over the subject’s breasts which have made it a sexualised image no matter what Henson’s (or the subject’s) intentions or its original context might have suggested. For what it’s worth, you can see the photo here at Junk for Code. The interpretive context for this image has been shifted, and violently reinscribed as the invisible or altered focus of a media circus where the battle lines have been drawn between “the arts community” (some of whose spokespeople have been doing the debate and themselves no favours, incidentally) and “society” - as represented in part by agents of vigilance such as Hetty Johnson and in part by the instigators of the talkback outrage, the Miranda Devines of this world. As soon as they get up and running, you’ve got zero chance in the so-called public sphere of making any sort of nuanced point, as nuance is immediately equated with “condoning pedophilia” or whatever heights of absurdity we’ve reached.
Continue reading ‘Questions on the Bill Henson “sexualisation of children” debate’
Recent comments
dj, mike, Paul Burns, Helen, Lefty E, Debbieanne [...]
danny, danny, Graham Bell, Kim, Kim, joe2 [...]
RobWindt, aussieoskar, rpg, David Rubie, joe2, Julie [...]
MsLaurie, Robert Merkel, wizofaus, danny, TimT, wilful [...]
Patrick B, Lefty E, adrian, Patrick B, Patrick B, Ambigulous [...]
Fine, Kevin Rennie, Megan, paul walter, Mark, Fine [...]
Paul Burns, Ambigulous, Paul Norton, Lefty E, Ambigulous, Lefty E [...]
Nancy, MarkL, Graham Bell, Katz, Nabakov, MarkL [...]
patrickg, Kim, OldSkeptic, Lefty E, Kim, Ambigulous [...]
Kim, Helen, Stephen Hill, Graham Bell, Paul Burns, Mark [...]
Mercurius, silkworm, Adrien, Ambigulous, Adrien, Adrien [...]
Chris (a different one), FDB, Chris, ken, Lefty E, ken [...]