Breaking news: film made

In what may prove to be a cultural turning point of the century, an affluent middle-class heterosexual male from an English-speaking background and Anglo-Celtic ancestry has successfully directed and brought to the screens his fourteenth film.

Media across the world have hailed this as a breakthrough fourteenth film for affluent middle-class heterosexual males from an English-speaking background and Anglo-Celtic ancestry of all types. A press statement from PM Kevin Rudd’s office reads: ‘Hopefully, this will encourage other affluent middle-class heterosexual males from an English speaking background and an Anglo-Celtic ancestry to go out there and make that fourteenth film at last, the one that comes right after their thirteenth film!‘

Meanwhile, the film has been released aross the country. It has received widespread acclaim from many important industry associations, including the South-Wyong Association of Gay and Lesbian First-Time Filmmakers from an Asiatic Background, who describe the achievement as ‘Amazing’ an ‘Significant’. They say: ‘Our heart goes out to all those aspiring fourteenth film directors who are also male, Anglo-Celtic, English speaking, heterosexual, and from an affluent middle-class background. Hopefully, that will inspire them to turn their drams of a fourteenth film into a reality!”

However, the Cooperative of Disabled Transexual Vegan Afro-Australian Lower-Class Independent Initial Filmmakers (south Geelong), and the Coalition of Narcotic-Addicted Third-World-Lower-Middle-Class-Bisexuals-with-a-mental-problem-first-time-filmmakers (West Wyalong), have teamed up with a loose affiliation of Jewish, Indigenous Australian, Indigenous American, Iranian, Islamic, Sumerian, Pacific Island, and south-west-south-east Asian first-time filmmakers (Shire of Bogan River) have released a joint statement saying, ‘It wasn’t a bad film. We had a good time. The popcorn was a bit expensive, though.’

Agreeing to disagree over your similarities

That sound you hear is hundreds of Australian radio presenters agreeing with one another. The louder and the angrier they sound, the more unanimous their opinions are likely to be. Some presenters, indeed, are so similar in their similarities, that even their differences are similar. It's like two same sides of the same coin, if that coin happens to be similar to itself.

And look, just look at these two. They're the worst of the worst - Abraham (on the right) and Bevan (on the left). Abraham is the worst of the pair, and Bevan is the same. That's how bad they are. How can you tell them apart? It's like distinguishing between B1 and B2. 'Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Abraham? I think I am, Bevan.'

Still, with my transcriber's ear, I am able to tell you some infallible ways of distinguishing between the two. Abraham, he's the one that sounds like Bevan; and so does Bevan. Sometimes, too, they take it in turns, and swap, so that Abraham, who normally sounds like Bevan, sounds like himself; and Bevan sounds like Abraham too. Also, Abraham occasionally sounds like Bevan sounding like Abraham, and Bevan imitates Abraham imitating Bevan, or vice versa, not to mention vice vice versa versa, and vice versa versa vice versa, too. There. Does that makes sense?

Still, if all else fails, there is one foolproof way of telling them apart (it really is foolproof because it was devised by a fool, and even he couldn't work out what it meant). Bevan is the scrawny looking runt on the left with the glasses. Abraham, the measly putz on the right with the thinning hair. So there you go. Next time you tune into ABC Adelaide, just listen for the sound of glasses (Bevan), and the voice with the thinning hair (Abraham). Simple.

Abraham and Bevan: the two Janus-faces made for radio. God knows what they'd do if they ever disagreed with one another.

'Abhors' are 'Leasers, Oh'!

Anyone who plays Scrabble on Facebook has one of two choices - either the official Hasbro version, Livescrabble, or the alternative Lexulous. Both seemed to appear after the Great Legal Dispute of 2008-2009, initated by Hasbro (who whined that the Agarwalla brothers were stealing their software).

Anyway, the original Scrabulous disappeared, and shortly afterwards the Livescrabble software seemed to appear on Facebook, and some folks joined up with that. Some time afterwards, Lexulous reppared, and some folks joined up with that, too. Because I couldn't make up my mind I joined up with both of them... and I still can't make up my mind.

Check it out: Livescrabble is clunky software that takes a bloody long time to load and clogs up your computer while you do it, and frequently crashes before you make a single move; but as a bonus it also makes infuriating loud noises every time you make a move. Lexulous, on the other hand, is made from simple software that takes a short time to load and doesn't slow down your computer; however, it doesn't make annoying noises every time you make a move. Lexulous is the software you use if you don't mind pressing the refresh button every now and again (and how exhausting it is) to see the state of the game; Livescrabble, the sort of software that automatically refreshes - even when you don't want it to. Livescrabble is the sort of software you use because your friends use it; Lexulous, on the other hand, is the sort of software that you invite your friends to use. What a choice! Yet again, fierce competition between rapacious companies in this consumer-capitalist society of ours has left me in an agony of indecision!

(This post will make no sense to anyone who doesn't use facebook, but anyway... )

Famous penultimate words

(Or, from light verse to trite verse in one easy step)

1.
Here is the grave of Norman Ned -
This man is born, but not yet dead.
His life goes by from day to day
In (more or less) a normal way.

2.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league backward!
Out of the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Backward, the Light Brigade!
"Watch out for guns!" he said:
Out of the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.


3.
Jan stood upon the jagged cliff and cried
"I can't go on! This is the end of me!"
The clouds grew dark. The wind was cold. So Jan
Drove into town and had a cup of tea.

4.
The boy jumped off the burning deck...

Slicing and dicing, with extra Jung

I wonder if you know the myth of Baucis and Philemon? It's quite weird, basically a story about a nice old couple who get turned by the Gods into a tree. It's the sort of story that, elsewhere, you might treat as a creation myth, or a tale of divine wrath (two old farts get turned into a piece of foliage for their sins, happens all the time). Only, perhaps at some point, the Ancient Greeks or Romans or whoever was responsible for the writing of the myth in its current form, tacked on an explanation that explained nothing: Baucis and Philemon get turned into a tree because they have been good, and kind, and generous (whereas everyone else in the village they live in have been inhospitable to the gods.)

It's weird, it's illogical, it doesn't make sense physically or emotionally, and it's one of my favourite myths ever.

I feel the same way about my favourite movie, John Boorman's Excalibur. I was rewatching it last night for perhaps the tenth time, and had an opportunity to remind myself just how ridiculous it is. In essence it's a retelling of the Arthurian romances, starting with the back-story about Arthur's dad, bringing in his twisted family relations, and building up to the war between Mordred and the Arthurian court after a complicated and somewhat silly search for the Holy Grail.

All these plots twists and turns were quite enough to keep me interested in the film the first two times that I saw it, but after repeated watchings, one can't help but notice a fundamental silliness to the whole thing. For one thing, you couldn't really say that the film has a script, so much: certainly not a script in the sense of lines of dialogue which act as expositions for characters feelings and reactions throughout the film. Instead, they're forever stomping through scenes (the wearing of armour actively facilitates their ponderous stomping) uttering phrases about their place in history: "It's not for you, Uther, hearth and home, wife and child." Or: "Arthur - that's you!" Or: "I will build a - round table! And a hall around the table! And a castle around the hall!" Or again: "Now, once again, I must ride with my knights, and defend what once was - and could be again."

Sometimes, when they're not pompously expostulating about whatever tragic and disastrous fate is forever in the process of befalling them, they wax and wane with bizarre eloquence about whatever preposterous new-agey idea Boorman had in his head when he was preparing the script. "A king without a sword? A land without a king!" Or: "You have broken what could not be broken. Hope is broken." Or again: "Merlin! What is the dragon?" "It is everywhere! It is everything!" "Is Excalibur part of the dragon too?" "Oh, yes. I like that. You learn fast!" (George Lucas's Force has nothing on Boorman's dragon.)

All this is not to say that the film does not have a certain tragic grandeur of its own. This tragic grandeur is largely borrowed from other tragic and grand works of art, and tends to make sense only when taken completely out of its original context. When Arthur first meets Guenevere, he asks Merlin if he can make her love him, and Merlin replies with a Shakespeare quote: "This mad distemper which strikes down both beggar and king!" Shakespeare - in the dark ages! Then again, the music is literally Wagnerian: the film is prefaced by Siegfried's funeral music; Lancelot and Guenevere's forbidden, and long unfufilled passion, is described withy the Tristan and Isolde overture; at least Perceval (the guy who finds the grail) gets the overture to Parsifal. Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, on the other hand, is deployed when the knights are in action. Arthur's adoptive father is even played by Richard Bucket, or in his real life persona, Clive Swift. Oh, and though I still don't know what samite is, I'm still pretty sure that the arm that grabs Excalibur at the end of the film, out of the middle of a lake, is wearing it.

When he's not doing stuff like taking obscure fashion tips from the poems of nineteenth century English poet laureates, Boorman is a great director. The scenes where Morgana gives birth to Mordred, or where a child Mordred rides laughing through a forest hung with the bodies of dead knights, or several other scenes throughout the film are absolutely arresting. If you accustom yourself to the perpetual habit Boorman has of borrowing grandeur from other films, you'll find that the results are quite fascinating (if not entirely coherent). The whole film is visually, quite beautiful, and the special effects really rather impressive for what must have been a small budget.

I still remember when I watched the whole thing all the way through, at about two o'clock one night in Newcastle at my parents house - which is probably the perfect time to put all your worries about coherence and Jungian references aside - and how impressed I was by those final scenes, in which Arthur and Mordred slug it out besides a red setting sun while Wagner's music from Gotterdammerung burbles away in the background; and how, for no obvious reason, the final words of dialogue spoken are by Perceval, who wanders up and back on the shore of a blood-drenched lake and hollers, "Arthur! Arthur!" at the top of his voice.

Coherence! Who needs it anyway?

Epyotr

(This is a true story! Hope you're all having a great long weekend.)

I live in a flat near St Georges Road –

A nice little place; a humble abode;
The neighbours are friendly, the rent isn’t dear:
The shops are quite close, and the transport is near -
So cosily comfortably calming and quiet -
But did I say quiet? The place is a RIOT,
With –

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

- by night and by day and by day and by night,
And

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

All night, every night, ‘til just before light;
As the trains hurry by, and the eager bells cry
The train crossing, train crossing lullaby.

Well they say location, location, location -
In my case in between two FREAKING TRAIN STATIONS!
A masochist’s dream! A sadist’s delight!
Each hour, you get a guaranteed fright!
Perhaps your demeanour is naturally calm?
We’re sure that these bells will cause you alarm!
Bored? Apathetic? Just can’t give a toss?
Our train crossing bells will soon make you cross!
You DON’T care, you WON’T care, but soon you WILL care
When you hear

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

and you hear

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

and you’ll wish you weren’t there,
As the crashing trains rush by, and the happy bells cry
The train crossing, train crossing lullaby.

But since we’re all friends, let’s look at our leisure,
Let’s coldly examine this source of displeasure;
Let’s deconstruct, analyse, probe and expoud
On all the neurosis in this simple sound.
Perhaps it’s the way, when you talk to a friend,
It hollers before

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

before you get to the END,
How, when you’ are talking and meeting and greeting
And –

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

And your -

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

(Silently: Fuck!) And your conversation turns into expleting.
Or sometimes, the way it will throw in a

BONG!

You tense up, expecting the

BONG!

to go on.
But no! Not one single

BONG!

can be heard.
At last, you relax and think they’ve just erred,
But then –

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

- the bells sing out in a tone that’s capricious,
Or possibly maybe just plain malicious.
Or sometimes, the way they will loudly rejoice,
And holler for ages in their loudest voice –

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

Not to mention –

And while the bells ring and you can’t hear a thing, Not one single thing that someone is saying, And they ring and they ring and your ears start to sting, And you can’t hear a thing, not one bloody thing,

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

You say, “WHAT WAS THAT? THOSE BLOODY TRAIN BELLS!”
Your friend simply says, “Hey man, there’s no need to yell.”
Or sometimes, again, you’re sleeping in bed,
A curious dream going on in your head:
You’re eating a meal of Bongers and Mash,
With bongcakes for supper, and bongbeer to match,
And bongoing bongoists bonging the bongo,
And old ladies playing Bing-Bong or Bongo,
And BONG!ers and BONG!bing and BONG!ishly BONG!some,
And BONG! BONG! and BONG! BONG! and BONG! BONG! and then some.
You sit up in bed as

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!
BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

rings out in the night,
(And you know by the sound that it’s almost first light.)
So trains madly rush by, and the bells louder cry
The train crossing, train crossing lullaby.

So that, in a nutshell, dear ladies and gents –

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

That, ladies and gents, is my argument –

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

My argument, folks, is simple and clear –

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

It’s clearly the case that sometime this year -

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

I said, sometime this year, or sooner, no doubt –

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

Quite shortly, in fact, I plan to move out –

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

Or the BONGS! will BONG! on while I’m tossing and turning, My ears will be ringing, my brain will be burning, My stomach will flip flop, my gut will be churning, My lower intestine ceaselessly gurning, I’ll be sickly and ailing, my health will be failing, I’ll be sobbing and moaning and weeping and wailing, And howling and yowling and growling and moaning, And pitifully wretchedly gnashing and groaning,

BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG!

As the trains hurry by and the crossing bells cry
The train crossing, train crossing lullaby -
The train crossing, train crossing lullaby.

Fudged if I know

Do the figures at the fudge shop fudge the fudge figures, and make the other fudge figures at the fudge shop figure the fudged fudge figures out? Also, what does the figured fudge do to the fudge figures' figures?

It's true

If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say 'Four purple herpetologists flying in a rectangular ornithopter breaking the latititudinal records for the umpteenth time', then I'd have zero dollars.

Splitting a difference of hairs

Woke up early this morning with this thought: what's the difference between a 'mizzle' and a 'drizzle'? At what point, precisely, does a mizzle become a drizzle? Is it at all comparable with the point at which something 'musty' becomes something 'dusty'? And if rain can either 'mizzle' or 'drizzle', can dogs noses' either be 'muzzles' or 'druzzles'?

Having had this series of ludicrous and pointless thoughts, I decided to go right back to sleep again. So I did, and stayed that way, right up until the point at which the train bells screamed at me, one minute later.

This post was brought to you by the letter C and the number 5

Well, over the long years that I've had it (two), I've managed to drop it on its head, swing it around in my bag, spill milk, coffee, water, coffee, water, milk, and breadcrumbs on it; it's sat insouciantly on the top of my bookshelf sneering at burglars as they've broken into my flat; and it's kept on working, losing nothing in the process but a little dignity and the '8' key. But I think my laptop has finally given up the ghost. I spilled coffee on it - again - yesterday morning, and gave it until afternoon to dry out. Half the keys on the keyboard are not working, and the other half are not working like they should. Pretty much the only things I can do on it now are

1) Switch it on.

2) Visit websites I've already visited.

3) Switch it off.

Oh, yeah, and I can also compose a letter that consists solely of the letter 'c', and the number '5'.

I'm the second Ozblogger in the past few days that this sort of thing has happened to. I wonder if there's something in the water? (Coffee, perhaps...)

Anyone want to sell me a laptop?

Words that start with O: ordinary, oligopoly...

If you like your incisive political analysis to come complete with glitz and glamour and flare and without incisive political analysis, why not dip into the pages of Obama Magazine? Graced with front-cover pictures of Obama, centre-fold pictures of Obama, and back-page pictures of Obama, the magazine offers you plenty of opportunities to subject rigorous political scrutiny and economic analysis to his clothes, his hair, the clothes Michelle Obama is wearing and her hair.

But you would be wrong if you thought that Obama Magazine was just an exercise in political narcicissm, the Great Man theory of history as presented by celebrity journalism. No, there's more! You'll also get bizarre photo spreads of Obama's heads of staff, and chunks from his speeches (included purely as light pictoral relief to be set aside from the pictures of Obama).

Is this not, you might be moved to ask, utterly frivolous stuff, the sort of political propaganda that has resulted from a mainstream media that is disinterested in truth, and is solely focused on ratings? Is it not politics for the Oprah generation? Actually, Oprah graces the third page of one of the issues that I picked up in Readings, but clearly, no: the magazine has a clear purpose for the Democratic Party (ie, making thousands of dollars worth of money for themselves), which will allow them to continue to work hard on behalf of their fellow Americans (ie, spending tens of billions of dollars of other people's money).

Obama Magazine! You pay for it either way!

Random comments of a chaotic nature

I'm not sure why it is, but every time I get into a work of a Monday, I feel incredibly tired. It doesn't matter how wakeful and chipper I am before arriving - the minute those doors close behind my back, I start yawning like crazy. The clattering of the keyboards and the sound of telephones ringing has an amazing soporific effect on me; they're like some kind of lunatic lullaby. I want nothing more than to lay my head down on my keyboard and sleep. You'd think that, refreshed and relaxed after the weekend's rest, I'd be roaring like a young lion, going hither and yon and killing people to improve workplace productivity, but no - quite the contrary. As a matter of fact, just thinking about work a few minutes ago, a second round of yawning was set off. It's only because my attention was diverted at the last moment by a banana that I was able to ward off sleep.

And look! Here! Cadbury seriously think that less chocolate is better than more chocolate, and that they can turn purple into green. I mean, this is ludicrous. If they can turn more into less, and purple into green, then they'll also be able to find a round white peg that is black and hammer it into a square hole one fine day in the middle of the night, with the job performed by two dead men who happened to have been the daughters of a flying pig's monkey's uncle. Cadbury needs help. Perhaps they should eat some of these.

Brown Dog has been lolloping and loping happily around his yard every time I go past it, but apparently he's been receiving several other guests than me. One old chap stopped to pat Brown Dog just as I was giving him my attentions, said several things to him in Greek, then said to me that he called Brown Dog 'Bludger'. He does seem to do a bit of bludging. I wonder if you bludge long and hard enough, you can become a bludgeon?

This has been a random post from Tim.

From the gigantic book of generalisations for every occasion

If you're still wearing socks, then you're not officially naked.

Forgetfullness Day

Unmemorial service held for politicians

Politicians across the country have today attended unmemorial services commemorating opinions and positions held today, and obscuring opinions and positions held yesterday.

The gathered politicians heard readings from religious leaders, and murmured the collective refrain 'Lest We Remember' at a series of dawn services.

"This event will remind us not to be reminded of things we don't want to be reminded of, not that we remembered to remember them in the first place," said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in a characteristically pithy statement of leadership intent.

For his part, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull said: "It is important that we move on from yesterday's position and accept today's position so that we will be in a position to move on from today's position when the time comes," says Turnbull.

The leaders plan to put up a series of unmemorials around the country in order to commemorate their changeable positions of the day, and obscure their changeable positions of the past. "It will help us to forget our firm, unwavering commitments of yesterday, and make another round of firm, unwavering commitments today, as the need arises," says Mr Rudd.

Hard to believe

If the next musical step down from a flute is a lute, what's the one after that? A ute?

Doesn't sound very musical if you ask me.

UPDATE! - Also, come to think of it:

Violincello > Violin > Viol, which is pretty vile, if you ask me.
Cornet > Corn

Not sure about Saxophones, Vibraphones, and Telephones, though.

Contradictorily contradistinction

So apparently Clare Werbeloff ain't P J O'Rourke. Well, I could have told you that. It's not just that Clare Werbeloff is first and foremost, well, Clare Werbeloff, it's also that just about every person in the media has, from time to time, been referred to as an 'imitation P J O'Rourke' or a 'wannabee P J O'Rourke' or 'no P J O'Rourke'. Actually, just look at any person in the street, and I can pretty much guarantee you that they won't be P J O'Rourke either. Just about every person, anywhere in the world, is not P J O'Rourke; the world is practically teeming with non-P J O'Rourke's; we have a substantial overpopulation of non P J O'Rourke's where I live. It should be written on their driving licenses: not P J O'Rourke. Maybe it is.

Even P J O'Rourke may not be P J O'Rourke. The man could be suffering from a non-identity crisis, for all I know. I don't know how he manages it, but the alternative - actually being P J O'Rourke - is just too impossible to imagine, a contradictory contradiction in contradistinction to itself. Does he buckle under the strain from not being himself, one wonders? Or does he simply keep on keeping on with the business of not being the person who his name says he is, quietly writing away under the name of P J O'Rourke, who he isn't? It's a mystery that perhaps we'll never know the answer to.

He's good, but he ain't no P J O'Rourke.

Cultural corner

Is it possible for a person to be a 'wog' and a 'bogan' at the same time? Clearly it is. The combination wog-bogan - or Wogan, in the colloquial - can be found in increasing numbers in our suburbs.

A typical wogan.

This distinctive cultural type can be identified by their habits of driving at high speed down suburban streets, hanging out at the train station while smoking pot, and commenting in an acerbic manner on the latest Eurovision final on television.

Interestingly, the wogan skips the process of birth, and simply exists in larger and larger amounts, in a state of late middle-agedness for decades, possibly centuries.

While the reproductive cycle of the wogan is still little known, it is postulated that their spread in recent years is due to a kind of process of mitosis. However, more anthropological and sociological research should be done into the culture of the wogan before this can be known for certain.

"Perfectly hellish weather!" Ralph said.

So anyway, I finished off that Charles Williams book I was reading today (The Greater Trumps). It did flag a bit at the end, but that is typical of the Williams' style - the real pay off in his books doesn't come in the resolution of a plot, but in the utterly insane chaos that precedes it.

Charles Williams, as you may or may not know, was a member of the Inklings, the C S Lewis literary circle that included, well, Lewis, Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers. Williams shared plenty of Lewis and Tolkien's ideas, and added some of his own bizarre enthusiasms. He was also a member of the Golden Dawn, with the result that a lot of his writing, even at its most Christian, had more than a little of the influence of the occult.

Williams wrote with vigour and imagination in popular literary styles about spiritual and mystical ideas. Many of the ideas he was articulating probably hadn't been attempted in a popular fictional style before; some probably hadn't even been thought of before Williams. Others he may have picked up from the obscure, even obscurantist, theology of his colleagues in the Golden Dawn. The result is that Williams usually goes a little crazy, throwing several different styles into each of his books, and usually based the plot around a kind of supernatural occurence, or, even more typically, an object with mystical powers. In War in Heaven, we get a lot of stuff about the Holy Grail; in Many Dimensions, a sort of magical dice that was owned by King Solomon. Pastiche, followed by mysticism. At his most distinctive, Williams managed somehow to sound like the more lurid horror thrillers or dark fantasies of the 1970s - in the 1940s. This is not an insult; I think there is something quite special and riveting about his style, and his ideas - Williams attempted to popularise difficult ideas.

The Greater Trumps has Williams writing at his best. It's part English country comedy, part ghost story, about a family who take a holiday in the English countryside during Christmas. They have with them some old tarot cards who one of their number - Henry, the fiancee of Nancy, whose house they are going to - has expressed interest in seeing. Henry subsequently uses the cards to call up a storm in an attempt to murder one of the others, Mr Coningsby, and loses the tarots - with the results that the storm never stops. And then - things get more and more insane.

Like every good English ghost story, it is absolutely and utterly essential that there be an old chap who bursts in on strange scenes and exclaims, 'Just what the devil is this?' That function is fulfilled in this book by Mr Coningsby, :

he tried to defy the human race with a plaintive antagonism - even the elder sons of the younger sons of peers might (he seemed to suggest) outrage his decencies by treading too closely on his heels.

There are a pair of young lovers - Nancy and Henry; there is an older maid, Sibyl, who is given over to odd notions about spirits and the like; and there are wicked older characters who plan to thwart the younger ones and steal their cards off them (Henry's relatives Aaron and Joanna).

The idea of a whole family at the centre of a vast, supernatural storm which has got out of control really appeals as the central metaphor of this sort of novel. It allows all the action to become wonderfully focused, and Williams' typically melodramatic style takes on a new kind of vivid intensity in this context. Besides which, the book can be ridiculously funny; the dialogue is full of corny sentences like:

Names had for him a horrid attraction, largely owing to his own, which was Lothair.

Is she still as mad as ever? Is she still crying out on the names of the old dead gods?

"Perfectly hellish weather!" Ralph said.

There's a lot more that's worth saying about this book, including the way it neatly subverts the pop-fiction stereotype about the man of action (actions by characters in this book may have consequences for other people, and frequently have consequences for themselves, but they have absolutely no control over the unfolding of the plot - the novel falls on the side of fate, and not free will); the interesting way Williams uses his characters stream of consciousness, and so on. But that's enough for now. If you can find this book (and I only did by accident, on the second top shelf of an obscure poetry bookshop hidden away on the second floor in a building off Swanston Street) then it's well worth reading.

Tedium unmedium

When I started uni, I had a bad habit, originally acquired at English classes in high school, of watching films and reading a deep and meaningful significance into every film that I saw. 'Oh look,' my film-watching mind would say. 'She's making salad. Clearly, her use of the knife is symbolic of an internalised savagery, and the greenness of the salad compares with the greenness of the walls, thus creating a strong internalised dynamic of powerful greenness, which in turn becomes associated with her act of barbarous barbarity! What a powerful and significant scene.' Though, in fact, the scene was probably, in actuality, an unremarkable scene about a person making salad, and nothing more.

What I really loved were huge, Peter Greenaway-style spectacles, where a whole bunch of ugly and obtuse images and ideas were farted onto the big screen, and I could just pick and choose some specific stupidities according to my whims. Give me a scene of a bloodied woman making a salad with a meat axe in a grim, war-laden landscape, while fighting off Morlocks, and I would be happy. (Yes, it's true, though I was a pretentious dolt, I think I subconsciously longed for the innocent simplicities of dark fantasy.) But actually, I could find meaning and significance in anything (see discussion, above, about salad). By the time I finished uni, I think I'd pretty much realised my own stupidity, and was able to laugh at myself - I remember jokingly challenging my mate Aaron, when we went to 'The Phantom Menace', to see who could find the most Jungian references - but things had gotten pretty bad there for a while.

I mention this now because a few weeks ago, I saw an unremarkable film that was a little too boring, a little too amateur, and too long by far to really amount to much. And everyone else is raving about it: I wonder if they haven't, unconsciously, got into the habit of making a lot of significance from nothing, like I had at uni.

The film is Samson and Delilah. My local home-delivered Melbourne Times magazine said it was a must-see film. David Stratton gave it five stars, saying something like it was the most important Australian film ever. His colleague Margaret Pomeranz said it was one of the most wonderful films this country has ever produced. At New Matilda they were more level-headed, saying it had 'a rare authenticity' and signalled 'a powerful new voice'. Though maybe that was just an excuse for going off on one of their political rants. The film went to Cannes, though considering the state of the Australian film industry on most years, that's hardly a ringing endorsement. I remember the Oz even gave it several feature articles on its release - if they didn't think it was a great film, they were certainly doing a good impression of faking it.

Wonderful? Important? The film is deadly dull, a story about two kids who live in a town settlement a couple of hundred k's outside of Alice Springs. One of the kids has a bad habit of sniffing petrol. They get bored and move to Alice Springs. Nothing good happens to them in Alice Springs. They come back. The end. And that, in a nutshell, is it. There's nothing more too it, certainly no substantial character development. The film isn't a love story, as some have described it - the only real sign of courtship between the two lead roles is the scene where the boy Samson shoves his mattress over Delilah's fence, and she shoves it back. By the end of the film Samson is too zonked out on petrol to show any real emotion.

The main achievement of the film is length. Somehow, it's managed to fit the simple - even obvious - storyline into one and three quarter hours. It does this, mostly, by having long camera shots of Samson sniffing out of an old petrol can, and, well, long shots of Samson sniffing out of an old petrol can. To see this sort of thing once is horrifying, to see it twice is confronting. Three times, it seems pointless. The film makes a basic mistake: it tries to bore people in order to get them to feel what the boredom of the characters is like. I'm not sure to what extent this was the intention of the director Warwick Thornton, who seems like a smart guy; but that is what happens. Why do so many films do this? You wouldn't kill an audience to make a point about murder, and you wouldn't cut off their legs to make a point about amputation. So why is it all right to deliberately and repeatedly bore an audience to make a point about boredom?

I am wondering now if the entire critical community has gone nuts. Or maybe I so stuffed up my critical faculties at university by finding meaning and significance where there weren't any that I am now missing what other people find obvious.

Apologies for the rant; I'm reading a Charles Williams book at the moment that I quite like, and I might do a more appreciative review of that later tonight.

UPDATE! - It won the Camera d'Or. It feels kind of good to disagree with the entire world. Thanks Steve.

Fog you!

Fog! From one corner of the city to the other.

Also, a yellow cat rubbed its back upon the windowpanes this morning, and I think I just saw a megalosaurus wandering down Bell Street.