Tag Archive for 'suburbia'

Cities and suburbs and transcending the dichotomy - creatively

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 2 weeks ago
in Australiana, Brisbane, Climate change, Culture, History, Life, Media, Melbourne, Politics, Sociology, Sydney and Urbanism
. 76 Comments

I’m not sure where it came from, but there’s been a bit of praise for the suburbs around the joint lately, and dissing of the dissers of the suburbs.

Age columnist Shaun Carney attracted a bit of ridicule recently in some quarters when he wrote a column making the rather tenuous and certainly debatable claim that the Rudd government faced a delicate balancing act between inner city and suburban voters on climate change.

The article itself was entitled “Leftists who sneer at suburbs betray Labor”.

Carney mentioned that he’d been spending time recently in Carrum Downs “for family reasons”. Writing as if he were an anthropologist in unfamilar territory, he informed his readers:

You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.

Now, the funny thing about this whole “latte left v. suburban real Australians” thing is that I’ve never met any “leftists who sneer at suburbs” and I’ve met a lot of lefties in my life. Having read a really silly column - whose author I’ve fortunately forgotten - in the SMH earlier this year where the writer really did manage to convey the idea that no Fairfax reader had ever stepped foot west of some imaginary line running through, say, Marrickville, I am willing to believe that there are some very urbane snobs around the shop. But I’m not sure they’re actually lefties in any meaningful sense. Small l liberal toffs who vote Labor, perhaps. It might also be the case that I have a different view on all this because I grew up in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, and though I now live in the “inner city”, there really hasn’t been any such thing in this town in the same sense as in Sydney or Melbourne.

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Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex

Published
by
Guest Poster
3 months, 4 weeks ago
in Consumerism, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Food, Foreign policy, Life, Masculinity, Relationships, Religion, Sociology, Terrorism, USA, Urbanism and War
. 193 Comments

Aaron Darc, whose work will be familiar to LPers from his incarnation as Eye on Big Brother, recently interviewed film maker Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock came to prominence with Super Size Me and his new film Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? will be released in Australia next week. You can read more of Aaron’s writing at Pop Psychology for Beautiful People.

MORGAN & THE MULTIPLEX

From fat to fatwah, Murgon Spurlock has lost the pounds he gained for his smash-hit, Super Size Me, and hired himself a camel, for his latest film, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? I caught up with Morgan, this week, on his press tour of Sydney.

My 20 year old brother, Glenn, lives in a distant galaxy from me, on a planet called Regional Suburbia. He likes football, easy girls and fast cars. His favourite film is The Fast & The Furious; he calls it “wicked sh*t.” It would never have dawned on me, it goes without saying, to peruse my brother’s DVD collection. I knew it would be large, and I knew it would have been entirely purchased at JB Hifi; I know probably more than I should about Revolution Plasma and its disturbing power to appeal to the working and middle classes, and replace what would once have been their lives; draining whatever connection to the real world they had, by offering their unconscious longing to escape, a glistening, mostly poisonous, apple. Here, everybody! Plug into this - you’ll find it… easier. You will have a purpose. You will own that 42″ plasma, even if you f*ck yourself up on credit to do it, and you will build thyself a DVD Tower. There, thy shall easily access The Fast & The Furious; it shall keep the company of Face Off, Rush Hour, the Terminator Trilogy and, but of course, the Die Hard Box Set. Got plasma? check. Got plasma tower? Check. Okay, then, you’re all set to waste a good deal of your life plugged right into consumer oblivion. Isn’t modernity just fabulous?!

I only neared my brother’s DVD tower, out of that familiar desperation to escape the reality of my awkward bi-monthly family visit. Somewhere, in between the time your mother has once again implicitly let it be known you’ve not amounted to what you should have, and the moment following eight meaningless remarks about the state of recent weather, you look around the room, and you think, quite simply, “What can I do, here, to pass the time without having to sincerely engage my family?” My brother’s DVD tower seemed like a pretty good idea.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex’