The piano has been moved to the kitchen, its likely resting-place for as long as we live in this house.
Now we must learn to play the thing.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
What follows is highly selective.
Ivory Coast 1, Ecuador 0: An even, chaotic contest decided by an 89th-minute goal. Chaos doesn’t favor Ecuador. Our strength is tidy defending.
Piero Hincapié had trouble marking 19-year-old Yan Diomande. The goal came from an attack down that flank.
Thrice we hit woodwork. Our attacking woes continue. I will say, it’s hard when foulers aren’t penalized. The Ivorians were spared a couple of second yellow cards.
Brazil 1, Morocco 1: Has-been vs. emerging superpower. The same is true of their respective continents. The Moroccans were breathtaking in the first half; having established their superiority, they ceded the initiative. Brazil had a single brilliant moment.
Australia 2, Türkiye 0: The most entertaining game so far.
(Some would choose the Netherlands vs. Japan [2–2].)
I love watching the Turks. They attack at breakneck pace, slickly, all game long. But the Australians defended stoutly and landed two counter-punches.
USA 4, Paraguay 1; Germany 7, Curaçao 1; and Sweden 5, Tunisia 1: Three blowouts that tell little about the winners (and not much more about the Tunisians, who fell apart late but weren’t consistently bad).
Mid-half hydration breaks, twice per game: I am sick of them.
Seldom viewed outside of Australia, The Castle (1997) is revered in that country. Wikipedia tells us that this movie
can be seen as a social study [of] the lives and aspirations of the inhabitants of suburban Australia. The central character, Darryl Kerrigan, ties into the stereotypical depiction of an “Aussie battler,” a man who will protect and serve his family through bold and sometimes ruthless assertion.
I’ve not observed Australians in their natural habitat. Doubtless, there’s much about this movie that I don’t understand.
Even so, I love The Castle.
One begins by snickering at the protagonists – Greater Melburnians pursuing the Australian Dream in their dismal, airport-adjacent cul-de-sac. But in the end, one is touched by these people. One wishes they were one’s neighbors.
(It’s gratifying when one well-heeled outsider – a broadminded constitutional lawyer, played by the grave but twinkling Charles “Bud” Tingwell – is admitted into their circle.)
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Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton), patriarch and hero, is lovable because there is so much that he loves: his family, his dogs, his tchotchkes, his boat, his garden, his pre-fab country house on a nondescript lake, and of course his family’s suburban home (his “castle”). Not to mention his neighbors and his lawyers. Having thrown in his lot with X, Darryl loves X proudly and unconditionally. We hear him declare, in a wedding speech, his family’s love for the new son-in-law; and what goes for that adoptee goes for every animal, vegetable, and mineral that Darryl claims as his own (or as his own’s own). It doesn’t matter that Darryl’s wife and children are pitifully ordinary, or that one son – in what I believe to be a reference to Australia’s colonial origin – is in prison. Darryl treats each family member with something approaching veneration. And each of them responds in kind.
Darryl is not a rich man. He earns his living towing cars (i.e., clearing away others’ property). His boat, house, house-extensions, holiday house, and dogs – purebred racing Greyhounds – have been accumulated opportunistically. The Kerrigans scour the trade papers for bargains. Once acquired, each purchase is accorded quasi-heraldic status. Non-purchases too: witness how the household acquires its front gates.
The Kerrigans are consummate appropriators. It is a sly irony. The movie recounts their struggle against appropriation by outsiders.
One day, the Kerrigans receive notice that their house is to be compulsorily acquired by the airport, so that the runway might be extended. The Kerrigans and their neighbors oppose this order in the courts. But their lawyer is out of his depth, and the airport is backed by powerful business interests.
“I’m starting to understand how the Aborigines feel,” mutters Darryl.
(It’s a sign of comedic deftness that this low-key political statement produces one of the movie’s biggest laughs.)
It isn’t hard to guess that the Kerrigans’ misfortunes will be reversed. In time, the lawsuit is heard by Australia’s highest court. The judgment favors the Kerrigans, and the “castle”-dwellers end up better off than before. The legal aspect of the story is, I suspect, sheer fantasy. The movie’s really interesting questions aren’t about law; they’re about value. There are questions about ownership and appropriation, and there are aesthetic questions. Can a life of utter tastelessness be good? How important is the aesthetic component, comparatively speaking?
Proverbs 15:17 says: “Better a vegetable dinner with love than a stall-fattened ox with hate.” The movie illustrates this principle.
For it leaves us in no doubt that the Kerrigans’ aesthetic capacity is very, very poor. Indeed, it’s their utter non-descrimination, their determination to embrace absolutely every piece of kitsch, that enables them to love each other as they do. This is made clear from the beginning, in brilliant faux-naïf voiceover, by Darryl’s youngest son, Dale (Stephen Curry):
I believe the movie is responding to a particular book – a classic Australian work of architectural and social criticism – The Australian Ugliness (1960), by Robin Boyd. (See the book’s Wikipedia article, and its Text Classics webpage.) Images of jet planes, electrical wires, and large TV antennae feature prominently in both works. It can’t just be a coincidence.
Some day, I’ll read the book, and then I’ll understand The Castle better. As funny, touching, and socially observant as it is, it’s an “ideas” movie, really.
Monday’s and Tuesday’s schooling began two hours late, due to snow. Karin delayed her Monday work to sit with Samuel in her heated car while he waited for the bus. Good thing, because otherwise I’d’ve stood by the curb with Samuel and Daniel and Abel, thirty minutes longer than usual, not knowing whether the bus would come at all. (The bus-tracking app was out of order.)
(Time was, people’d wait for buses in the cold, not having apps to reassure them. Ours is a softer time.)
Tuesday – yesterday – was Veterans Day, so Karin didn’t go to work. She put Samuel on the bus again. When he came home, he was carrying a drawing he’d made of a “Veterans Day pup”:
Daniel and Abel played in the snow. Mormon missionaries stood by our yard and invited our family to church. They were so winsome, I hated to say no. I should’ve invited them to church.
They knocked on doors on our street, then drove away in a Texas-plated ute (my preferred term for that car) (pun not intended).
This movie, unfortunately, is less compelling as a story than as grist for speculation about the artists’ offscreen misdeeds. Which, in a way, is fitting, because it depicts the backstage scuzziness of a high-end theatrical production.
(The theatrical process itself is treated affectionately and accurately. This, I gather, is what critics like about the movie.)
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For nearly two decades, British-born Australian director John Duigan helmed acclaimed but smallish productions, including two longtime favorites of mine – wonderful coming-of-age movies – The Year My Voice Broke (1987) and Flirting (1991).
Alas, his relationship with Flirting’s leading actress, Thandie Newton, was … sinister.
(Allegedly. Newton denounced Duigan in several interviews, including this sobering one for Vulture.)
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Duigan gained international note for the fleshy Sirens (1994), which is about an English cleric and his wife whose mores are loosed when they visit a “liberated” artists’ colony in Australia.
Colonials 1, Mother Country 0.
The sides swap home fields but play similar games in Duigan’s The Leading Man (1996). Another colonial libertine – movie star Robin Grange (Jon Bon Jovi) – travels to London to headline a play. The movie’s opening scene shows Robin peering wolfishly across the Thames at the Houses of Parliament. This may not be enough to evoke Guy Fawkes, but soon Robin is talking of “blowing things up.” Hmm.
(I’m probably making too much of this association.)
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Anyway: Robin, with gusto, wreaks havoc on the production’s backstage intrigues.
One intrigue is conducted along typically dreary upper-middle-class British lines. Established playwright Felix (Lambert Wilson) is miserable in his affair with the ingénue lead, Hilary (Newton – at the time, allegedly, still in Duigan’s thrall). Felix spends evenings in the flat that Hilary shares with other young strugglers and returns late to his wife, Elena (Anna Galienna), for tongue-lashings.
Robin sizes things up and makes Felix an indecent proposal. Out of the goodness of his heart, he’ll seduce Elena: to take her off Felix’s hands, or at least to reduce her moral advantage over Felix.
So far, this is like an Iris Murdoch novel (A Fairly Honourable Defeat, perhaps). The difference is that the movie appears to side with the scheming Robin. It’s as if, in Othello, the patsy Roderigo were the tragic victim, Desdemona guilty, Iago worth cheering for.
This moral repulsiveness swamps whatever craftsmanship, style, and comedy the movie offers – which are not inconsiderable.
The movie is still better than what passes for urbane adult drama nowadays: e.g., The Undoing, with Duigan’s former actors, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.
And so it bolsters my claim for 1996.
P.S. Newton went on to become a star. Duigan went on to make the terrible, pointless Lawn Dogs.
This is a tale about an unprejudiced heart, and how it changed our valley forever.
My grandpa liked this movie.
I do, too. I always did.
It was the first movie I ever rooted for at Oscar-time, in 1996. It shoulda won! But since when do “talking animal” movies win? Jim Henson could have made Maus with Roman Polanski or Steven Spielberg and it still wouldn’t have won Best Picture, not even with a lead performance by Adrien Brody (or Tom Hanks, or Daniel Day-Lewis …).
Ah, well. We can bestow humbler laurels upon Babe.
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To begin with: this is the best “talking animal” movie, physically speaking. The sheep, the duck, and Babe the Pig himself are especially convincing. They move their mouths, but they also talk with their bodies. You understand them at a glance, even when they’re silent. They’re always emoting – twitching with nervous energy – like George C. Scott or Toby Jones.
And they’re not always comical; they have range. What is sadder than this sheep?
Then, scenically, there’s what I think of as the “Kennedy Miller” look. KM is the Australian company responsible for the Mad Maxes and John Duigan’s two great pastoral movies, The Year My Voice Broke and its sequel, Flirting. Babe is KM’s most famous export.
The specific visual quality I have in mind has less to do with Babe’s immediate setting – a cutesy farm, the kind on supermarket packaging – than with skies, weather, and natural light. The KM signature shot is of mist rising over hills at dawn, or of clouds hanging over hills in the afternoon.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
Indeed, because this is such a joyful movie – with the feel-good ending of a sports flick, to boot – it’s easy to overlook its harshness. For it is harsh. Harshness is more overt in the sequel, Babe: Pig in the City; but the first movie has plenty.
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Perhaps the clearest way to indicate the harshness of some of the movie’s currents is to trace those same currents elsewhere.
Babe is as non-kosher as can be. Even so, he’s a kindred spirit to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s creation, Gimpel the Fool.
Like Gimpel, Babe is an innocent soul,
reliable, beyond suspicion, and – above all – extremely gullible.
But what really couples Gimpel and Babe is that each of them – gullible from birth – comes to accept rather than overcome this condition. This is a consequence of a deliberate, principled refusal to condemn others.
The pig promised himself that he would never think badly of any creature ever again.
Which is radical. What kind of protagonist would actually live this way? Only a creature ripe for exploitation.
To view the problem a little differently, consider: Does Singer approve of Gimpel?
I’m inclined to think that he does. But then I myself, with my pacifist leanings, am likely to confuse a willingness to be treated as a doormat for a kind of heroism.
Singer’s tale drips with irony. Arguably, much of it lands on Gimpel. Lovable as Gimpel is, just about everything goes wrong for him.
He dies a beggar’s death, pining for the afterlife:
No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world. At the door of the hovel where I lie, there stands the plank on which the dead are taken away. The gravedigger Jew has his spade ready. The grave waits and the worms are hungry; the shrouds are prepared – I carry them in my beggar’s sack. Another schnorrer [beggar, sponger] is waiting to inherit my bed of straw. When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.
Which is paralleled in Babe:
There was a time not so long ago when pigs were afforded no respect, except by other pigs; they lived their whole lives in a cruel and sunless world. In those days pigs believed that the sooner they grew large and fat, the sooner they’d be taken into Pig Paradise, a place so wonderful that no pig had ever thought to come back.
Babe himself, through his good fortune and actions – he learns, by talking to sheep, to herd them – will escape the knife. But pigs generally do not. This is driven home to Babe by a cruel and jealous cat:
[Cat:] “You know, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m not sure if you realize how much the other animals are laughing at you for this sheepdog business.”
[Babe:] “Why would they do that?”
“Well, they say that you’ve forgotten that you’re a pig. Isn’t that silly? And they even said that you don’t know what pigs are for.”
“What do you mean, ‘what pigs are for’?”
“You know, why pigs are here.”
“Why are any of us here?”
“Well, the cow’s here to be milked, the dogs are here to help … with the sheep, and I’m here to be beautiful and affectionate. …”
“Yes?”
“The fact is that pigs don’t have a purpose. Just like, ducks don’t have a purpose. … Why do the Bosses keep ducks? To eat them. So why do the Bosses keep a pig? The fact is that animals that don’t seem to have a purpose really do have a purpose. The Bosses have to eat. It’s probably the most noble purpose of all, when you come to think about it.”
“They eat pigs?”
“Pork, they call it. Or bacon. They only call them pigs when they’re alive.”
“But, uh, I’m a sheep pig.”
“[They’re] just playing a little game with you. Believe me, sooner or later, every pig gets eaten. That’s the way the world works. Oh, I haven’t upset you, have I?”
This plunges Babe into despair. But is he sad for himself, or for his race? Does he really expect to be killed – and, even if he does, is that the main cause of his grief, given the expectation of Pig Paradise?
Or does he grieve that his kind is of no value to his Boss – whom he loves – beyond providing material for the crudest exploitation?
Answering these questions requires attending to what lifts Babe from his depression. The farmer (James Cromwell) – strong, silent, singularly inarticulate – nurses him, and brings himself to sing to him:
If I had words
To make a day for you
I’d sing you a morning golden and true
I would make this day last for all time
And fill the night deep in moonshine
That is: If I could tell you, Pig, I’d tell you that your life is dear to me, that you are dear to me alive, alive forever.
That’ll do, Pig
he tells Babe in the end. Well done, good and faithful servant.
For Babe, words worth living for. Babe, the innocent one, as innocent as a babe, his Boss’s dear babe.
What did your mother call you, dear?
a sheepdog asks him.
She called us all “Babe.”
We are all babes; all others are our parents. Babe obtains two adoptive mothers, natural enemies to one another: this sheepdog; and Ma, a sheep.
This is a tale about an unprejudiced heart, and how it changed our valley forever.
“I pay for all these streaming services, and which do I end up watching? The free one: Tubi.”
Hear, hear. I could go on about Tubi … and Canela, Freevee, Hoopla, Kanopy, Plex, and Pluto (not to mention subscribable services like ViX that provide a surprising amount of free content). But, for now, let me just discuss Tubi.
I’m scrolling through my queue. I’ve added classic cartoons and movies; trashy old TV movies; British TV; Australian TV (Crime Investigation Australia and Crimes That Shook Australia); and a low-budget documentary series, Village of the Damned, about crime in Dryden, NY, some 20 min. east of Ithaca – not a topic of universal interest, but an alluring one for this ex-resident of Tompkins County.
Indeed, to scroll through Tubi’s main page is a revelation. This isn’t Netflix’s conveyor belt of formulaic, in-house content. No, Tubi is still a chocolate box, in the Forrest Gump sense.
Now viewing Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) with Daniel, a.k.a. Toad. He likes movies with “little animals.” We rotate through various David Attenborough productions. The reptiles-and-amphibians series (Life in Cold Blood) has been an especial hit. Hence my search for more toad-content. Cane Toads, dir. by Mark Lewis, is basically what an animal doc would be if helmed by Errol Morris. (I guess Morris has made a couple of near-animal docs: Gates of Heaven, and one-third of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.) The toad movie has talking heads (politicians, scientists), historical “re-enactments,” dramatizations of humans’ encounters with toads, and sentimental old Queenslanders on their back lawns waxing lyrical and tearful about the cane toad’s essential decency.
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The next stop on my fantasy reading tour is The Hobbit, to which I’m returning after some decades. The first 120 pp. have been pretty much as I remember them, almost line-for-line. Disappointing, in a way. But then comes the “Beorn” chapter with quite the wittiest passage so far:
“If you must know more [said Gandalf], his name is Beorn. He is very
strong, and he is a skin-changer.”
“What! a furrier, a man that calls rabbits conies, when
he doesn’t turn their skins into squirrels?” asked Bilbo.
“Good gracious heavens, no, no, NO, NO!” said
Gandalf. “Don’t be a fool Mr. Baggins if you can help it … He is a skin-changer. He changes his
skin: sometimes he is a huge black bear, sometimes he is
a great strong black-haired man with huge arms and a
great beard …
There is a fearful hour – 9:30pm, more or less – when, his brother having dozed off, Daniel – normally so sweet, so docile – a virtual Dr. Henry Jekyll – transforms into someone (or something) more like the wicked Mr. Edward Hyde.
Australian tycoon George needs a project for his spoiled, crisis-prone daughter, Georgina, to supervise. Why not commission a bronze statue? It’d be bulky, costly, valuable (at least, once the right critics have approved it), conspicuously placed in the wing that George built for the Adelaide museum, and therefore indisputably worthy of a tax write-off. As for Georgina, this is her sort of thing; she has trendy artist friends.
Lily, Georgina’s handpicked artist, wants to subvert the male gaze by sculpting a larger-than-life male nude. That’s fine with George as long as his tax write-off goes unchallenged.
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Enter a plebeian married couple, Cecilia and Karl-Heinz. She works in a New Age shop. He is unemployed. They need money. He wants to buy a cottage in a “cultured” suburb. She wants to give money to her cult. They’re at odds in the bedroom, too (he wants more sex, she doesn’t). One night, as they lie in bed, he propositions her. “Do you know what an OBE is?” she retorts. “Order of the British Empire,” he whimpers. “Out-of-body experience,” she explains.
Karl-Heinz submits his photo to the artist, who selects him as her model. The gig pays well. Now Karl-Heinz and Cecilia will have enough money for a down-payment on the cottage. Or to subsidize the cult.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The modeling sessions would be utterly professional were Georgina not lurking in the studio. Cecilia isn’t threatened by her husband’s proximity to lesbian Lily, but she rightly mistrusts Georgina.
She confides in her guru, who has arrived from California to raise funds. The guru, realizing that a tycoon’s money is involved, sniffs a big score.
At this point, I had better stop describing the plot, except to note that (a) Georgina’s shrink prescribes her an SSRI with aphrodisiac effects, (b) other people end up taking the drug, (c) Cecilia is urged, against her conscience, to participate in the sculpting project, and (d) the artwork, for financial reasons and with the artist’s bland acquiescence, is turned into a subversion of a subversion of the male gaze.
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I haven’t seen anything much like Lust and Revenge, except one of the director’s celebrated earlier efforts, Lonely Hearts (1982), a work that is, if anything, stranger because its oddball characters enact a more conventional plot. Both movies hinge on the conflict between barely-suppressed male desire and the integrity of an odd but fiercely conventional woman. Lust and Revenge is particularly inspired in channeling Cecilia’s puritanism through kooky New Age beliefs. (Do these two elements combine in real life? I wouldn’t know.) Cecilia looks, speaks, and behaves rather like Ingrid Bergman in Cactus Flower; imagine that character in a cult.
Paul Cox, the director, is also known for a movie called Man of Flowers, summarized thus by IMDb: “An eccentric elderly man tries to enjoy the three things in life that he considers real beauty: collecting art, collecting flowers, and watching pretty women undress.” I haven’t seen Man of Flowers, but, having seen Lonely Hearts and Lust and Revenge, I’d wager that it, too, is more amusing than salacious.
Another movie of Cox’s, one I have seen, is the devastatingly serious Innocence (2000). In it, also, a woman’s integrity is challenged. That movie purports to be realistic. Lust and Revenge is deliberately cartoonish (and Lonely Hearts is somewhere in between). Tonally, Lust and Revenge is rather like Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One, with its skewering of the commerce in sacred things (art, love, spirituality) and its grotesque concluding image of a human body’s (clandestine) desecration. South Australia may as well be Southern California.
A colleague of Karin’s gave our boys a small, looped racetrack and two battery-powered racecars that look like dinosaur heads. Samuel and Daniel have been fighting over this wonderful gift most of the day. Mercifully, Daniel napped, so Samuel got a long turn by himself, and then I took Samuel to the grocery store and the library, so Daniel got a long turn by himself. Now they’re both playing with the racetrack again. I was going to write that they’ve gotten along better in the evening, but Samuel just shoved Daniel in the face.
“What a beautiful race,” Samuel keeps saying as he watches the dino-head cars tailgate each other around the track.
Each car occupies the full width of the track. So, no passing (or, as they aptly call it in Australia, overtaking).
“I feel this race is rigged,” says Karin.
But occasionally Daniel will pick up one of the cars, waltz around the room, and put the car back down in a random position on the track. So, this race is a bit like Snakes and Ladders.
I forgot to mention, last time, that I turned forty-two, and my parents had me over to eat baked chicken, which is my mother’s specialty (or has been since she found the recipe on the Internet a few months ago). I have been asking people to buy me fonts (which they won’t do) or used bookcases (which they promise to keep their eyes peeled for). My parents brought over a nice bookcase yesterday and I’ve filled it with overflow from other bookcases. I could use at least one more. My mother-in-law sent a birthday greeting by email, remarking on the fine, sunny weather; but I prefer gloom, and anyway it was the wrong day. I sent her a brief thank-you and a thumbs-up.
The Cornell Chronicle has published the best overview so far of Dick’s life and career. I especially like what it says about Dick’s contribution to the philosophy of science, and I like the reminiscences of Cornell PhDs Koltonski and Jezzi.
I also like the word “reminiscences.”
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The screenshot of this month’s body-text font has been chosen with Dick in mind. The passage is not a quotation from one of Dick’s books or articles. Rather, it showcases his patience. It’s the most self-indulgent footnote in the dissertation I wrote for him, which I set in Calisto.
A chicken loitered in neighbors’ front yards this weekend. Then it crossed the road, got into our back yard, and stayed for two days.
Karin posted a notice to an online bulletin board. “No one will claim that bird,” one of her colleagues told her. “It’s a gamecock.”
Karin called the Dept. of Animal Control. She gave our address. The van drove down our street. It didn’t stop. Karin called again. The van came back. This time, it stopped in front of our house.
I went outside. “Are you here for the chicken?” I said.
“No,” said the officer, “I just thought I’d visit.”
Crickets.
“Sorry,” she said. “Yes, I’m here for the chicken.”
We went out back and cornered the chicken. The officer caught it with a net and put it into a pet carrier. “Its wings have been clipped,” she said.
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In honor of this chicken, my typeface of the month is Golden Cockerel, digitized by ITC and originally designed by the brilliant but evil (and ubiquitous) Eric Gill. I don’t think I have any books that use Golden Cockerel for body text rather than display text. It’d have to be a “precious” book indeed. Like this one, or this one:
I take it back: Text Publishing, the Australian company, sets some unglamorous books in Golden Cockerel.
Other typefaces by Gill will be acknowledged in due course.
I’ve begun another Peter Temple novel, The Broken Shore. It has a glossary of Australian terms.
Abo. Abbreviation for “Aboriginal.” The usage is derogatory or racist except in Aboriginal English.
Aggro. “Aggression” or “aggressive.” (Just takes two or three drinks, then he gets aggro.)
Ambo. An ambulance or an ambulance worker. (The following sentence is possible: Mate, the last thing I needed was an ambo with an aggro ambo.)
Bickie. A cookie. Abbreviation of biscuit.
Bloodhouse. A hotel known for its fights.
Blow-in. A term of scorn for a newcomer, particularly one who voices an opinion about local affairs or tries to change anything. (Bloody blow-in, what does she know about this town?) [Is Temple a blow-in? He immigrated from South Africa.]
Bludger. Once, a man living off a prostitute’s earnings; now applied to anyone who shirks work, duty or obligation. A dole bludger is someone who would rather live on unemployment benefits than take a job.
Bluey. A workman’s hard-wearing cotton jacket. It can also be a blanket, a cattle dog, or a red-haired person. [Also, a children’s cartoon series on Disney Plus (in the U.S.), and a character therein – a talking dog.]
And so on. A few more:
Hoon. Once a procurer of prostitutes, but now any badly behaved person, usually a young male. Irresponsible young drivers are hoons who go for a hoon in their cars. Mark Twain uses the expression as drunk as hoons in Sketches Old and New, where it presumably derives from “Huns.”
Macca’s. The popular name for McDonald’s. It is also used for anything eaten at McDonald’s. (We had Macca’s for lunch.)
Pommy. Someone from England. The English are often known as Pommy bastards. This has been known to be said affectionately. The term derives from “pomegranate” as rhyming slang for “immigrant.”
Salvo. A member of the Salvation Army. [“Sally” or, less commonly, “Sally Ann” in Britain, Canada, or the U.S.]
Spaggy bol. Spaghetti bolognese. Also called spag bol. Italian immigrants to Australia were once called spags.
Suckhole. A vulgar term for one who curries favor with others, an obsequious person. A future leader of the Australian Labor Party once described those in the Liberal Party who looked to America for leadership as a conga line of suckholes.
Swaggie. An itinerant, a person of no fixed address who carries all his belongings in a swag. (A celebrated note passed to a speaker in the Australian Federal Parliament advising him to change the subject read: Pull out, digger, the dogs are pissing on your swag [other terms not in glossary].) A distinction was formerly made between swaggies and travellers, the latter being people looking for work. The expression Nice day for travelling means: You’re fired.
Temple’s protagonist wasn’t much of a reader until a period of convalescence. Then he read In Cold Blood in a day and a night and The Executioner’s Song in the same amount of time. I don’t believe the part about reading The Executioner’s Song so quickly.
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The boys are on the up (but Daniel sleeps more than usual); Karin, having caught the bug and missed one workday, is on the up; I now am the sickest person in the house. This will be a Mucinex-and-water day for me. I shall try to do some productive coughs.
A warm welcome to George, my nephew, born yesterday to Ana & David. My mom is in Texas with them. She looks after little Ada and the dog, Russell, while Ana, David, and George are in the hospital.
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A synopsis (not by me) of Rats in the Ranks.
Each year, as part of the democratic process all over Australia, local councillors meet to elect a mayor to lead their council for the next year. Rats in the Ranks tells the story of this process in the Leichhardt council area of Sydney in 1994. Every September, the Leichhardt council meets to elect one of their twelve members as the Mayor and another for Deputy Mayor for the following year. The election is rarely a straightforward affair.
In 1994, the current mayor, Larry Hand, was popular with the local citizens, but they don’t vote for the mayor, the councillors do – and after three years of Larry, some of them were after his job.
In Rats in the Ranks, filmmakers Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson trace the story of the struggle for the mayoralty. They had extraordinary access to the councillors who were willing for the story to be filmed in the lead up to the election.
Arms are twisted, favours are called in, people are double-crossed, damaging stories are leaked to the media and deals are done. But right up to the vote, no one knows how the numbers will stick and who will walk away from the election as mayor.
missed out on a nomination in the “best documentary” category and most other categories at the 1996 [Australian Film Institute] Awards. …
The film’s failure to make it past a pre-selection jury into general membership voting became part of a larger ongoing controversy about the AFI Awards, and eventually led to a change to the AFI’s voting system. This was the year that the AFI Awards reached the level of contempt usually reserved for the Academy Awards.
(The last sentence is a bonus, I guess.)
The documentary is basically C.P. Snow’s The Masters, with this difference: the scheming Cambridge dons of that novel are conscientious and gentle souls next to the professional politicians of Rats in the Ranks. In what follows, I’ll not reveal the outcome of the election, but I shall describe some of its participants. My opinions of these people changed as I viewed the movie. Here I’ll present my final character assessments. I thought hard about whether I could cheer for anyone to win the election, and, in the end, I decided I could; but you might reach a different verdict. I recommend you watch the movie and then read this review.
The accents and slang aren’t always easy to follow. I watched with the captions turned on. Here is a YouTube upload; the movie also can be streamed through Kanopy.
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There is a councilor in Rats in the Ranks who may as well be Satan. (In some scenes, he even wears a cape.)
There is another councilor who is “Satan’s” dupe – in effect, his lackey – even though she belongs to the opposing party. She spends more time with the Satan figure than with her fellow party members. After her meetings with them, she runs over to tell “Satan” everything.
In good bureaucratic fashion, this lackey has a lackey.
Meanwhile, other members of her party conspire to defeat the Satan figure by means fair or foul. (Mostly fair means, but the foul cannot be overlooked.) So, there is a potentially fatal division within that party. This makes for some outrageous caucus meetings. These scenes would be ghastly if they weren’t so entertaining.
It’s fascinating to hear such good talkers make tactical blunders, lose all sight of values, etc.
What’s most disturbing is how little the populace matters in all of this. The residents vote for their councilors, but not for their mayor; which might not matter so much, except for two things.
First, the mayor has considerably more formal and effective power than the other councilors have. (Not even the deputy mayor comes close.)
And second, the councilors choose the mayor on the basis of their personal ambitions and resentments. They give lip-service to their parties’ and constituents’ interests; but, at the end of the day, those interests don’t determine their choices.
How can these people live with themselves? How can they sleep at night?, the Satan figure asks about his fellow councilors – though he himself would betray any of them, should the winds change.
Interestingly, the Satan figure is a very good public official. (At least, he convinces me that he is a good public official.) He gets things done. He listens to the citizens. When they disagree with him, he patiently and candidly explains to them why his way is better. Were I to live in Leichhardt, and were it in my power to vote in this election, I’d be tempted to vote for this candidate.
I also was favorably impressed by his main challenger. He, too, has the makings of a good public official. He is the schlubbiest of all these schlubs (or the second-schlubbiest, after the lackey’s lackey); but he has moments of reasonableness and forthrightness.
Indeed, he may be too forthright to be a very successful politician. The Satan figure runs rings around him, gamesmanship-wise.
The two men can’t stand one another. Perhaps this is because of a class difference. Or perhaps they recognize each other as genuine threats. Or perhaps they sincerely disagree about how to govern.
Another politician, who refuses to appear onscreen, makes a crucial intervention. He is Anthony Albanese; as of May of 2022, he has been serving as the Prime Minister of Australia.
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The other day, I said to Karin: Isn’t it funny that I, who find politics so distasteful, should have written a dissertation about political matters. But the word “political” describes two different inquiries. One inquiry is about how a polis should be run, and the other is about how the polis is run (which boils down to a lot of scheming, backstabbing, etc.). If the gulf between should and is is too great, it’s natural to be interested in one inquiry but not the other.
This movie shows a representative democracy whose representatives aren’t chosen with regard for how it’s best to run the polis. And yet the polis is run competently enough. This suggests that we may as well choose our representatives out of a hat, as some of the more trusting politicians in this movie are inclined to do; or by having each desiring person take a turn, as some of the more self-important and envious politicians insist upon.
Since War and Peace is proving too difficult to read at this time, I am aiming much lower. The book I am trying out is Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab – “the original blockbuster crime novel,” according to the back cover of the Text Classics edition.
Arthur Conan Doyle did not admire the writing of Fergus Hume. I’m not sure I admire it, but I do like it.
“Well,” said Mr Gorby, addressing his reflection in the looking glass, “I’ve been finding out things these last twenty years, but this is a puzzler and no mistake.”
Mr Gorby is the detective. Other important characters – socialites in Victorian Melbourne – spend lots of time drinking tea, casually discussing the murder (which the newspapers have turned into a sensation), and trying to arrange marriages for themselves. The book reminds me of nothing else so much as Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, which she wrote when she was nine.
The murder is done with poison (chloroform) late at night in a hansom cab. This method has the virtue of noiselessness. Writers of the genre’s later “golden” age would have opted for air-bubble injection – also ludicrous – or strangulation.
… is from David Gulpilil’s great movie, The Tracker.
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All Men Choose the Path They Walk
Some men are prone to misadventure / Questions of guilt aren’t always clear / Some men run from a fate they can’t avoid / All men choose the path they walk
Some can’t be faulted for their reasons / Feigning to justly intervene / Some men hide from the memories that haunt / All men choose the path they walk
Some men see everything through duty / Cast off responsibility / Some regret that their courage sometimes fails / All men choose the path they walk
Some men have attitude that’s righteous / Care not about the consequence / Some men fight with the violence inside / All men choose the path they walk
Some men have reached their destination / Finding their own serenity / Some men lead others till they recognize / That all men choose the path they walk
So, the clinic called today. The tests confirm that I have SEVERE sleep apnea. The clerk who relayed the news didn’t know how to pronounce “apnea” – hup-NEE-uh, she said – but I asked her to spell it, and A-P-N-E-A, indeed, is what I have. I was told to buy a CPAP machine at my pharmacy. Would I like to schedule a “titration” at the sleep clinic? Yes, please, I said, but what was I supposed to do first? Buy the CPAP machine, or have the “titration”? After more phone calls it was determined that I’d do nothing further before going in for the “titration” on January 20. (Really, the slowness of this process is baffling.) I’m still not sure I understand what to do; I plan to investigate further.
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Our coffee pot broke a week ago. Karin & I have been keeping awake with sodapop and storebought iced mocha. But by this morning, those supplies had run out; moreover, after two days of relative calm, Samuel decided to shriek and shriek. By the time I’d prepared his bottle and gotten him suckling, I could hardly stay awake. I dozed off watching a TV show about heinous Australian crimes. Samuel slept in my lap. I dreamed I was visiting certain professors in Ithaca – ones under whom I didn’t prosper. My dreams were vivid; my wakefulness, hazy; but, all the while, I was aware of Samuel’s breathing.
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Yesterday, I was more alert (I had two glasses of iced mocha), and I read a terrific essay by Nathan J. Robinson analyzing the memoirs of various staffers of Barack Obama’s White House. Robinson isn’t a columnist I ordinarily seek out. On several occasions, though, I’ve admired his work without realizing he was the author of something I’d admired previously (one piece I’ve highlighted in this blog is his assessment of Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial credentials). Now I’m attending more closely to how Robinson connects his political dots.
Interestingly, his condemnations of Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren (whom he used to esteem more highly) seem to hinge on similarities that he perceives between those candidates and Obama. Robinson really doesn’t like Obama’s political style, and I increasingly agree with him. (I put more stock in reasonableness than Robinson does – I’ve written a dissertation about that governmental virtue – but I also lament the manner in which Obama employed reasonableness as an ideal.)
The best thing about Robinson’s analysis of those fanboys’ memoirs is that it conveys what’s dangerous about the allure of a leader who styles himself as elite. Such a person will likely be a technocrat who considers himself above his electorate and his party, or else a panderer to financial elites who play him for a sucker (or both).
Ecuador has been playing in its second World Cup of this year: the U-17 World Cup. We made it through the group stage with one defeat, against Nigeria, and two victories, against Australia and Hungary. On Thursday, we’ll play our first knockout game, against the Italians; should we progress, our next opponents will be either the Chileans or the Brazilians (the hosts).
This tournament is hardly the most prestigious or the most predictive of long-term success. Still, it matters. It generates some lovely “human interest” stories, such as this one about a man who walked many miles, over mountains, so his son could play.
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Karin will continue staying at home with Samuel all through November. I’ve been learning to care for the boy. Often, when I hold him, he doesn’t cry. He listens when I talk – and sometimes smiles.
Karin has been leaving him with me for short periods. Today she went shopping and then to the zoo to see South Bend’s new rhinoceros. The rhino stayed out of view. At home, I watched Lina Wertmüller’s World War II movie, Seven Beauties; Samuel slept.
Who will seize control in this World Cup? So far, none of the “powers” has seemed capable. Germany has lost to Mexico; Portugal and Spain have drawn against each other (these teams have shown perhaps the best potential); Argentina and Brazil have drawn against Iceland and Switzerland, respectively. Only France has won – against Australia – but hardly in a convincing fashion.
Russia, the host nation, scored five times against the dismal Saudis without playing especially well. I expect the Russians to qualify for the next round, and then to get knocked out.
Only Uruguay – not a “power,” but still a team to be reckoned with – defeated its opponent, Egypt, in its usual manner. It eked out a 1–0 victory in added time, with a goal by a central defender. Uruguay will be very comfortable in games like those that have occurred so far.
Belgium, England, Colombia, and Poland have yet to play any games. It’s too early to say how they will do.
