There’s an article in the latest edition of TheWeekendAustralian Magazine about people who are called beggars, bums, hobos, vagrants, tramps and no doubt other labels too offensive to mention.
One of the beggars discussed in the item is a man many Melburnians would’ve seen sitting in various locations in the CBD.
Readers are told that his name is Wayne and that he has found begging to be a wretched experience, which would be unsurprising to anyone who has glimpsed his despondent face.
Just witnessed the Victoria Police Showband doing a rather nice performance of “What’s Going On”, which was made famous by the late Marvin Gaye. Thought this event was rather amusing, but also wondered whether the choice of song might confirm to some of Christine Nixon’s opponents that coppers these days are a bunch of flaccid appendages:
Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what’s going on
What’s going on
Ya, what’s going on
Ah, what’s going on
Of course, Nixon’s opponents are mostly individuals whose willies get bigger when a burly uniformed bloke hits an offender on the noggin with a telephone book. Ahhh, for the good old days of policing when there was no women, gays, disables, accountability and models of policing that depend on the brain rather than brawn.
ThirteenTonneTheory: LifeInsideHuntersandCollectors is the title of Mark Seymour’s book about the Hunters and Collectors, one of Australia’s most interesting, if never as successful as they should’ve been, rock bands. Seymour appeared before a packed bookshop in Carlton last night to discuss the book, and to perform a superb acoustic version of “Say Goodbye”. Seymour provided an interesting insight into internal band politics and the way record company executives sometimes shoot you down just when you think you’re about to hit it big. The former lead singer of the “Hunters” still looks the part of an Aussie rock god, and he also still possesses that strong masculine presence which played such an important role in the image of the group. When asked whether he would do the music thing again but just for fun and not a career, Seymour replied that he never does anything just for fun. Incidentally, Seymour was interviewed by the amiable Mick Thomas, who used to front the band Weddings, Parties, Anything (they’re touring again, by the way).
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) starts in a week, but already the sound of chuckles can be heard throughout this laughable city. Like every other year, MICF promises to be everything from execrable to excellent to exciting to execrable. Acts appearing include Ross Noble, Arj Barker, Dave Thornton and Daniel Kitson. It should be noted that performers don’t have to audition to appear at MICF, so if you can tell a joke (gags about Irishmen and Englishmen walking into bars are particularly popular) or you’ve composed some searing political satire about John Howard (ouch, topical), you might like to present your own show. Anyway, with MICF almost upon us, it seemed like a good time to ask readers what their favourite comedy moments are. Also, one of LarvatusProdeo’s regular readers (let’s call him “X”) lets us know when we aren’t providing enough opportunities to produce lists, haikus or whatever. One of my favourite comedy moments features Tony Hancock failing to understand Bertrand Russell and LadyDon’tFallBackwards in the classic episode of Hancock, “The Bedsitter”.
Tomorrow is the day we commemorate the actions of a group of brave working-class women who protested against dreadful working conditions in the garment industry. It’s also the day we celebrate and think about the gains women have made in areas like income equality and reproductive rights. Of course, there’s still a long way to go for women - especially for women living in nations dominated by extreme schools of thought - but we do have a lot to celebrate. In honour of International Women’s Day (IWD), here’s a video clip of “Oh Bondage, Up Yours” by the legendary English punk band X-Ray Spex. The clip comes from a somewhat interesting documentary called Punk in London. Unsurprisingly, the film is dominated by male artists and male points of view. Thanks heavens for the adorable Poly Styrene.
So Kev’s gabfest aka “Let’s have a barbie and discuss important stuff, mate” is going to be mostly led by blokes. Of course, it should be mentioned that Aussie “everywoman” Cate Blanchett is also going to be one of the leaders, and she’ll probably ensure the event makes it into the pages of Woman’s Day (”Shock! Cate cheats on husband with bunch of blokes”). Anyway, Kev might’ve had the following quotes in mind when it was decided who’d be the “2020″ leaders:
Now, I know you’re a feminist, and I think that’s adorable, but this is grown-up time and I’m the man. - Peter Griffin (Family Guy)
Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn’t, it’s that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such and such. - Homer Simpson (The Simpsons)
“Steve, this comes from years of experience: Women are never right.” - Stan Smith (American Dad)
Tonight the charismatic and chatty Maxine McKew paid a visit to Melbourne as part of the promotional activities for TheBattlefor Bennelong: The Adventures of Maxine McKew, Aged 50something by Margot Saville. McKew regaled the audience with a variety of anecdotes, including to do with the resident of Bennelong who believed the former Prime Minister didn’t like his people that much (the man was an Asian Australian), the Liberal who won enough money to buy a Lexus thanks to McKew’s win, and the reason why her partner Bob Hogg looked grumpy on election night. Continue reading ‘Maxine in Melbourne’
RollingStone, the magazine that’s known for treating female performers, ahem, seriously, is currently featuring an article about the travails of Britney Spears on its website (my print-out of the article has the by-line saying, “Ho lost it all” rather than “How she lost it all”). In charting the rise and fall of Britney, the piece seems to be suggesting that she is suffering from a severe case of arrested development and a desperate need to rebel against the image of wholesomeness others forced her to adopt. Britney apparently also needs to surround herself with folks who won’t challenge her take on her plight, which reminds of another famous singer from the South who was equally ill-equipped to deal with fame, or at least the unhealthy aspects of it.
There was an article in The Age on the weekend which raised some sensible points about the obesity epidemic, why anorexia has been discussed much more than obesity (those rich - presumably white - skeletal females are just so much more interesting than poor fat folks), and reasons for obesity:
In his book, Fat Land, (Greg Critser) writes that as well as genes and environment, obesity also results from personal choices and behaviour. “Behaviour is really the way that we mitigate environmental risk, but no one likes to talk about that because it throws responsibility back on the individual and that makes everybody uncomfortable.”
Critser’s views have earned him the wrath of some fat rights activists, one of whom dragged out that frequently misused political slur “Nazi” to express her displeasure. Continue reading ‘Fat rights and responsibilities’
The documentary JoyDivision is flawed in many ways, including in its annoying insistence on freezing images in an attempt to create a dramatic or expository effect. The thesis about the role the band Joy Division played in the evolution of Manchester is stated and then frustratingly left alone until the end of the production when it’s mentioned again without much being said in the movie to back it up. Nevertheless, it’s an engrossing work featuring some great music and amusing and touching interviews with the surviving members of the group, as well as associates such as Tony Wilson. When one of the participants reflects on the anger he felt when learning that Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, had killed himself it’s honest to the point of being uncomfortable. After all, these days a person who suggests that somebody who has taken their own life is a bastard who should’ve stuck it out like the rest of us isn’t looked upon kindly (even if that anger is a result of a mixture of grief, shock, sadness and a genuine belief that what the deceased has done is wrong). The doco claims that Curtis, who was only 23-years-old when he died, was conflicted, talented, emotionally and physically sick, emotionally erratic and sad, which isn’t a surprise. The rest of the band are a wonderfully motley bunch of middle-age blokes with varying degrees of articulateness and emotional stability. Given the thousands of romanticised accounts of the 1960s, it’s a real treat to finally see movies being made about the importance of the punk and post-punk eras.
Incidentally, my home country (Queensland) gave women the vote in 1905, three years before the Victorians. Here’s what some male politicians from Queensland thought about the issue at the time:
Another argument is that women will vote in a body and a number of my friends have a great horror of that.
If they get the franchise, they will be saying to their husbands, “Look here, I am going to a meeting. You can stop home and mind the children”…That is how the women’s franchise will work. By and by there will be no children at all.
At the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, you can watch any number of short films from a variety of Australian writers and directors in these booths that seat three people. Yesterday, seated in one of those booths, I pressed play on a Gillian Armstrong short from 1973 about a woman who used the services of a backyard abortionist in the 1930s. On the screen giving details of the movies on show, viewers are warned that the Armstrong film might cause offence. Was ACMI worried that people might become upset by a movie about abortion, or perhaps were they concerned that someone might get the grumps because the lead character expresses sorrow about the loss of what she describes as a baby? Later that day in one of the ACMI cinemas, I watched a documentary called Darling!ThePieterDirk-UysStory. The documentary was a stylistically flawed but very interesting look at the South African satirist and AIDS educator, Pieter Dirk-Uys. I wondered to myself, “Why no warning that viewers are sure to be offended by the South African Government’s response to the AIDS crisis (what Dirk-Uys provocatively describes as “genocide”)?” Back at home last night, I put Ken Loach’s devastatingly sad Kes into the DVD player. Looking at the DVD case, I wondered why there was no warning on it that the bullying, classism, limited opportunities for working-class kids and abusive authority figures in Kes would surely cause offence. I’m still wondering why ACMI deemed it necessary to put a warning on Armstrong’s work.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
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