A column about being cool
I was sitting with friends at the pub last week, celebrating someone’s 30th birthday with a few quiet, contemplative ales. But just as I was queuing at the bar, somebody drew a gun. Fortunately, though, was made out of pink plastic, and attached to a video game machine, Time Crisis III. It’s a fantastic game, actually – it lets you arbitrarily shoot a lot of terrorists dead, while accidentally slaying a few civilians along the waay. John Howard would like it.
There’s nothing new about the irritating bleeps of electronic machines interrupting your evening’s drinking, of course. And people staring mindlessly into a screen is now a given in any venue with a liquor licence. But I’ve never seen videogames instead of pokies in a pub before. The refitted, renamed Darlington Hotel in Cleveland St, Chippendale, though, has created a mini-Timezone, with pinball, arcade games, and best of all, one of those wacky Japanese photo-booth machines that lets you print your intoxicated, bleary-eyed image on a little sticker, alongside a cartoon kitten.
This discovery made me nerdishly excited, because I am very much of the gaming generation – Princess Peach from Super Mario Bros was my first serious adolescent crush. And although I managed to resist their siren song for most of the evening, and actually talk to humans, I found myself constantly casting longing glances in the direction of the pinball machine.
Most of the trendy pubs I’ve been to would rather redecorate with RSL Club carpet than allow tacky, noisy videogames into their swanky bars. So why has a popular, newly-renovated inner-city pub brought them in? I decided it can only mean one thing: they must be becoming cool. Because it seems that this year, irony is the most fashionable thing of all. Uncool is becoming the new cool.
When you think of ‘uncool’, one name comes to mind: David Hasselhoff. The guy who enjoyed running around with an oiled torso so much that he bought Baywatch when it was about to be axed. The guy who’s a famous pop star – but only in Germany.
But Hasselhoff – or at least, making fun of him – has become the internet’s biggest phenomenon this year. Countless people have Photoshopped him into famous images and emailed them everywhere – it’s become known as “Hoffing”. Only a few hours after the story broke, for example, I got emailed a picture of a shirtless Hasselhoff as a “safety inspector” protecting the entrance the Lane Cove Tunnel hole. Well, it’s better that most spam.
On the crest of his own ridiculousness, the Hoff hosted the ARIAs, and is now even making a Knight Rider movie. So while people are laughing at Hasselhoff, he’s laughing all the way to the bank. I’ll bet Vanilla Ice wishes more people were poking fun at him.
The coolness of uncool is also behind the success of one of Sydney’s hottest new bands, The Presets, who play catchy pop songs constructed from daggy 80s bleeps and dodgy drum machines straight off a cheap Casio. At their live shows, they self-consciously parody early ‘90s rave culture, yelling “go hard or go home!”, and getting the audience to bat giant, Madchester-esque balloons around. And, in a nod to the likes of myself, the videoclip for the album’s first single, ‘Are You The One,’ even has footage of a dodgy 1980s Nintendo boxing game on it. I was so impressed.
I’m delighted by the idea that things that are silly and fun are becoming cool, because I was never very good at the more elegant varieties of fashion. So I’m relieved to learn that we no longer have to pose on stainless steel stools in bars and try to look elegant, but are allowed to go and shoot plastic guns or play pinball in the corner. But it seems that the only thing that’s uncool in this new, ironic, sensibility is to not be laughing at yourself. And if even the hilariously vain David Hasselhoff can do it, anyone can. Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I’ve got an urgent appointment with some digitally-generated terrorists. And I’m no longer ashamed to admit it.
A column about iTunes
At the time of going to press, rumours were flying furiously around about the iTunes Music Store finally making it to Australia on Tuesday of next week. If the rumours are true, by the time you read this, the Inner West’s phalanx of white headphone-toting iPodders will finally be able to legally download music through the software that comes with their stainless steel status symbols. This is momentous news for both the inner-city trendies and the computer nerd community. How momentous? Well, it’s almost as good as if your computer could make you a latte and play Red Dwarf trivia with you at the same time.
If you’re neither one of the Coke-bottle-glasses brigade nor a black skivvy-wearing iPoseur who hangs tough at the Glebe Pt Rd AppleCentre, though, you could be forgiven for wondering what the fuss is about. The iTunes Music Store is the world’s most popular way of legally buying music for your computer. In America, songs cost 99c, and over 500 million of them have been purchased since the service started two and a half years ago. Albums cost only $9.99, which, at current exchange rates, is less than half the $30 we pay for CDs. The songs are automatically copied to your iPod, and can be burnt onto blank CDs. In short, it’s the best way to prevent stealing music. Or at least it would have been if those telltale white headphones didn’t make it so easy for would-be music thieves to just mug iPod owners instead.
It’s been a long time coming, and fans have been disappointed before. There were apparently plans to launch it midyear, and Sony/BMG’s disagreement with Apple was cited as the reason for the delay. I think they should have pressed on regardless – the store’s potential lack of Shannon Noll and Anthony Callea songs is actually a feature.
Why’s it taken so long? Sweden, Austria, Japan and even Luxembourg now have their own iTunes stores. So I can’t understand why Australian record companies have been so narky about all this. On the one hand they constantly complain about how piracy’s hit CD sales, and on the other they make things impossible for the company that’s doing most to promote legal downloading. Sure, Sony’s got its own far more unpopular range of music players, and is probably trying to lock its music into them. But they need to look at the big picture. Because piracy is absolutely rife. It doesn’t just happen through the high-profile offenders like Napster and Kazaa. These days, you can borrow a CD off a mate and burn a perfect copy in a couple of minutes – or just let software like iTunes digitise it for you. Entire TV series can now be downloaded from the internet, and while it’s mostly smut and Star Trek for now, it can’t be long before this starts eating into DVD sales of good programmes.
But the iTunes store is priced so low that it may just save the industry – and not just the music industry. The American store now sells TV shows for a mere $2 shortly after they go to air. And while it seems more humane to force Desperate Housewives addicts to go cold turkey than to allow them to download their fix the next day, the bottom line is that people are paying for content that, whether by downloading or swapping videotapes, they previously got for free. Selling downloadable feature films – the most popular content for illegal downloads as people get faster internet connections – is surely not far away.
Even after years of the industry lecturing us on how it’s wrong to copy things, it’s safe to say that most Australians aren’t too fussed if it’s “just for a mate.” So another way must be found of extracting value from this content. The answer lies in making it more pleasant and convenient to buy legal content. Which is exactly what the iTunes music store does. So when it finally arrives, let’s applaud a victory for common sense. It will lead to the spread of legal, paid-for content in place of the pirated. It may also lead to the dangerous proliferation of Desperate Housewives video clips. But that’s a price I’m prepared to pay.
A columns about Wests Tigers
In case you’ve been avoiding all news sources for weeks because of the clear and present danger of reading about Australian Princess, and have somehow missed the 18,492 other references to it elsewhere in recent editions of The Glebe, the Wests Tigers – or as they are more correctly known, the Balmain Tigers – overcame odds of 150 to 1 to win their first premiership since 1969. Or 1952 if you’re from the wrong half of the joint venture. So it was quite a big deal, with the game on the big screen at Leichhardt Oval a party at the leagues club on Victoria Rd raging on until well into the night – and hangovers raging on for far longer than that.
Sydneysiders love a good sporting bandwagon, usually joining well after it becomes embarrassingly obvious that they’re only interested because a team’s winning. Take the Swans, whom most of us care about only to rub it into our mates from Melbourne. After their premiership, Sydney might actually give the team its attention in 2006, at least until their first loss.
Balmain’s triumph has also started a massive bandwagon of its own, so I’m not going to pretend I’ve been a fan since birth, whose first words were “Wayne Pearce”. Embarrassingly, I grew up supporting the not-exactly-mighty North Sydney Bears, and since they were shafted by the Sea Eagles, I haven’t paid much attention to the game other than at Origin time. All the fuss about a joint-venture club winning made me think every Tigers fan should be grateful they didn’t have to merge with those silvertail scum from Manly.
I did go to a Tigers game a few years ago with a friend who’s usually the loudest person yelling abuse at Leichhardt Oval. (And is yet to utter the word “Wests” when talking about his beloved team.) Remembering the game – and just as importantly the pub crammed full of black and gold afterwards – makes me think that the reason so many people got behind the Tiges this year is because they’ve reminded us what’s best about rugby league. Particularly after the Bulldogs have done so much in recent year to showcase what’s worst.
The game is a tribal, suburban one. It’s about the ground down the road from your house where you grew up, the local leagues club where you learnt to play the pokies, and coming together with your mates to support your team and hate Manly. And that’s why Super League was such a disaster. It took the game to a bunch of people who didn’t give a stuff about it at the expense of people who did. Really, the Adelaide Rams? Western Reds? They actually paid someone to think up that strategy?
But we are talking about a game with so little understanding of its fans or its own nature that the Rabbitohs had to go to the Federal Court before the team with one of its proudest histories and biggest fanbases was actually allowed back into the competition. It still hasn’t entirely recovered from the people who half-killed it in order to save it. You can’t tell me people in the Illawarra like having to support the Dragons. And even today, I’ll bet more people care about the Newtown Jets than the Melbourne Storm.
With all the mucking around by its administrators, it’s taken a long time for the code to win its way back into the hearts of Sydneysiders. Balmain’s win may be the turning point. The team that still means something in its own community, and plays the majority of its games in the suburbs it came from. They won over the whole of Sydney, reminding us all why we fell in love with the game in the first place. So congratulations, Tigers, for the against-the-odds success story of the year. And who knows? If they can keep thrilling Sydney like this, the game may actually survive. Let’s just hope Manly doesn’t.
A column about the Valhalla cinema
Sydney’s film community has taken a body blow in the past month, with two of the already small number of inner-city independent cinemas closing their doors. The owners of Glebe’s Valhalla cinema and the Chauvel in Paddington have found that the challenges of DVD and an ever-increasing number of multiplex screens have made things too difficult. And with DVD-quality pay-per-view movies now available on Foxtel Digital, and even higher-quality home viewing options like HD-DVD and BluRay on the way, you can see why they’ve decided that the odds for smaller cinemas managing to bring in audiences would be roughly the same for a new Police Academy sequel.
Like many people in the area, I suspect, this news made me feel guilty, because while I was a regular visitor to the Valhalla in the 1990s, I haven’t been there for years. And it’s not like we didn’t have any notice it was in trouble – it’s closed several times before. So why did we all abandon a neighbourhood icon in its times of need? While DVD’s an easy villain to point to, I suspect that the answer’s actually more complicated.
The anaemic state of Australian film is another obvious culprit. Cinemas like the Valhalla have traditionally been the industry’s main venues, and now they’re suffering from its inability to turn its subsidies into a half-decent film. And you can’t blame audiences for declining to trust Australian filmmakers again after so many years of abuse. The audience are once bitten, twice shy – and badly bitten if they’ve been to recent flops like Nick Giannopoulos’ The Wannabes, or Strange Bedfellows, in which Paul Hogan and Michael Caton pretending to be gay for tax purposes was apparently as bad an idea as it sounds.
There’s also been a convergence between mainstream and arthouse cinema. Nowadays even a movie about wine snobbery like Sideways can get wide release. This is partly due to the increase in screens – with 12, Hoyts Broadway has plenty to devote to smaller films – but also a broadening of mainstream taste. Even subtitles aren’t the disincentive they once were. Take the Hong Kong screwball martial arts comedy Kung Fu Hustle. In years past, its Chinese language and scenes of dancing, axe-wielding, dinner suit-wearing triads would have seen it relegated to cinemas like the Valhalla. But it had quite a wide release last month, and is still playing at George St and Broadway.
Conversely, Palace Cinema’s screens in Leichhardt and Paddington now show Hollywood films, which would have been anathema to arthouse proprietors in the past. Their Norton St cinema is currently screening Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, and I seem to remember that Paddington even showed a Star Wars prequel. But the great thing is that because it’s a multiplex, it’s also currently hosting the 2005 Greek Film Festival. Although it may not be necessary (the French Film Festival, for instance, sells out), the commercial films can subsidise the indie films. Which is why it’s such great news that Norton St is planning to add four more arthouse screens. And if they have to take some of Hoyts’ revenue to make a profit, Kerry Packer will cope – he owns a casino.
I don’t mourn the arthouse films that once screened at the Valhalla so much, because they’ll find a home elsewhere. What I miss is its heyday as a repertory cinema, screening classic and cult films. More specifically, I miss the amazing posters they used to print with the upcoming months’ schedule. My parents used to wallpaper our house with them, and their programme used to be brilliantly diverse, from the highbrow French pretention of Godard all the way to the schlock horror puppets of Peter Jackson. And you could always get a cheap combo ticket with “Jaffas to roll down the aisle”.
Melbourne has the Astor cinema, which still prints a programme like the old Valhalla’s, right down to the wonderful posters. They’re screening an old Valhalla favourite, 2001, this month, and it’s tragic that Sydneysiders – and kids in particular – can no longer see these kinds of movies on a proper screen. Because the experience is very different – it’s the difference between seeing a painting and its postcard. A big screen completely immerses the viewer, allowing you to enter another world. Whereas no matter how fancy your new-fangled plasma is, you’re still in your boring old lounge room.
So let’s hope that the consortium that’s currently trying to buy the Valhalla and turn it into the Sydney Screen Centre succeeds (retaining the old name, given the blandness of the new one) and succeed in once again making the old Val a showcase for the best cinema history has to offer. The programme needs to be interesting enough to get us out of the house, sure, but if the success of DVD proves anything, it’s that people like watching old movies. So let’s hope audiences actually remember the joy of seeing old movies at the cinema, and support it. Because rolling Jaffas along my lounge room floor just isn’t quite the same.
A column about VSU
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Sydney Uni’s Manning Bar to watch a local hero lose $836,000. Tim Brunero, the Newtown journalist, went down in the finale of Big Brother 2005 to the muscly Logan twins of Wagga. I’d been predicting his eventual defeat by the forces of blokiness for most of the series, but on that night, fuelled by the Centrebet odds, the general buzz, and some very dull interviews with Logan Greg, I’d foolishly convinced myself that the public would get behind Tim. Serves me right for believing the Sydney Morning Herald.
The room was full of people who’d been friends with Tim at uni. Through his time on the Union Board, he’d become known across the campus as a lovable, hilarious eccentric – and bizarrely, the whole nation now seemed to feel the same way. Tim’s flatmates were there to cheer on both him and another flatmate, James, who’d been given a trip to Dreamworld as compensation for having to endure a 30 second interview with Gretel.
As we watched the broadcast on a screen so big that we could actually see Tim’s new muscles, we downed a special ‘Kiss Me Kate’ cocktail (pleasant, a bit conservative, and ultimately fairly forgettable, rather like the woman herself) and Tiny Tims, which was what they were calling the enormous sausages they were giving out – “Big Deans” might have been a better label.
Manning Bar is where all the lefties on campus drown their sorrows after they’re walloped in student elections, so it seemed a fitting place to celebrate Tim’s defeat with a few themed drinks. Being a dyed-in-the-wool leftie himself, Tim spent a lot of his time on the show talking about the threat to unions, both student ones and the trade unions he’s been working with in recent years. And although Sandra Sully’s bizarre news update for Tim and Greg didn’t cover the proposed voluntary student unionism legislation, it’s certainly the big story at Sydney Uni.
The uni bar isn’t the relaxed place for avoiding afternoon lectures that it used to be. There is something of a sense of siege. The building’s festooned with signs warning of the threat VSU would pose by gutting the funding of our hosts for that evening, the University of Sydney Union. And the legislation threatens more than a sausage sizzle.
The party for Tim was a fantastic example of the kind of thing that student unions do well. It’s these events that make universities about more than just lectures, essays and exams, and build a sense of community, and student unions fund dozens of them every single week. On this quiet, chilly Monday night, hundreds of students (and some washed-up hacks like myself) came to celebrate one of their own’s almost-triumph on a national stage. And it’s exactly these kind of events that will be threatened if VSU comes in.
Last week, I came across a student protest marching down George St in an attempt to take the VSU struggle to the Liberal Party’s offices. This has happened constantly since 1996 – the students march through the city to John Howard’s offices in Phillip St, or the Liberal Party headquarters in William St, occasionally even occupying the building, and it makes no difference whatsoever. Huge increases in HECS, full-fee paying students and the changes to Austudy all arrived despite enormous student opposition. (So you have to admire their sense of optimism.) Tim may well have been marching with them, if his dizzying schedule of celebrity visits to Shooters Nightclub and the Rooty Hill RSL permitted.
The VSU legislation is aimed at stopping the use of student funds for political aims. (This is clear because of the proposal for compromise legislation that would ban only that.) But the new laws won’t kill angry protests like the one on Thursday. What it will kill are nights like the Tim party, when student unions subsidise events that build a rich, vibrant campus community. And all in the name of a totally anti-community user-pays principle. It’s as if local councils had to stop charging rates, but instead charge a fee to every resident who attended a street fair, because some ratepayers weren’t able to make it.
As we learned from Big Brother, it’s not often in life that the little guy wins, even when he’s been desperately pumping iron for three whole months. But I hope that this time, the scrawny lefties will triumph over the bulging muscles of a Coalition that now controls the Senate. Because, as I’m sure Tim would agree, the loss of the vibrant student life on our campuses would be even more painful than losing $800 grand on national television.
A column about Grand Theft Auto
A few weeks ago, the Office of Film and Literature Classification took the extreme step of refusing the classification of a videogame, forcing it to be withdrawn from sale. And not just any videogame – they banned Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a best-seller which is widely viewed as the greatest game ever made, with the possible exception of Hungry Hungry Hippos.
The reason was a hidden ‘feature’ nicknamed ‘Hot Coffee’ which allows players to simulate sex with a naked woman. The usually progressive Hillary Clinton was the first to jump on the bandwagon, presumably to redefine herself as family-friendly ahead of a possible tilt at the White House. She was soon joined by virtually every politician in the US, spawning an inquiry in the Federal Trade Commission. As a result, publisher Rockstar Games has seen its share price plummet. In Australia, Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock went after it with the fervour he usually reserves for malnourished asylum seekers. All in all, the world hasn’t suffered such a scurrilous attack on its very moral foundations since it briefly glimpsed Janet Jackson’s nipple.
I downloaded a video of this outrageousness – purely in the interests of warning The Glebe’s readership about this threat to their families, of course. And I’ve got to say, of all the raunchy videos circulating on the internet, this must be just about the tamest – the main character doesn’t even take his clothes off. I’ve seen more graphic action on Big Brother Uncut.
That said, children definitely shouldn’t be playing this game. But that’s not because of the poorly-animated woman with whom you can have consensual relations if you – ahem – push the right buttons, so much as everything else in Grand Theft Auto. If the wowsers want to fuss about inappropriate content, why not the scenes where the game gets you to commit drive-by shootings, blow up FBI agents, and even start a massive gang war? I’ve been playing GTA for a few months, and while it’s incredibly entertaining, the criminal action makes Scarface and Goodfellas look restrained, sometimes shocking even my thoroughly corrupted mind. But for our moral guardians, the one thing that crosses the line is clumsily-simulated sex? Now that’s twisted.
The GTA fuss highlights the massive double standard between the censors’ treatment of sex and violence. You’ll never see anything close to full-frontal nudity in a Hollywood film, but there’s no end of bodies being full-frontally riddled with bullets. And even the slightest hint of sexuality is enough to restrict films to ‘mature’ audiences. So when a film is given an ‘R’ rating, 16- and 17-year-olds aren’t allowed to watch on the screen acts they can legally perform in private.
The selective censorship of GTA teaches young people that it’s fine to go on a virtual killing spree for their own entertainment, but the moment you spend a little quality time with your digital girlfriend, there’s trouble. Shouldn’t we be encouraging young men who are interested in guns and violence to instead develop healthy relationships with the opposite sex?
But no. In the Bush era of abstinence education, the US Government will happily interfere with the moral choices made by near-adults, but refuses on principle to interfere with anyone who wants to own a gun. It seems to me far more appropriate for governments to direct their efforts away from forcing moral judgements onto teenagers, and onto interfering pretty darn extensively with anyone who wants to own a gun. After all, becoming sexually active is a normal part of growing up – whereas very few people go through the rite of passage of spraying innocent bystanders with bullets.
I’m not going to defend ‘Hot Coffee’. The whole idea of a simulated sex game is pathetically frat-boyish, really, and it was irresponsible of the game’s developers to include it as a hidden feature, rather than allowing parents to make their own decision. But I simply cannot understand why the OFLC views a bit of simulated slap and tickle as so appalling an evil that it won’t risk the game being sold to anyone, even adults. (And you know something’s really immoral when the politicians won’t even let you buy it in the ACT.) The fuss over ‘Hot Coffee’ is just a storm in a teacup.
A column about pokies
This newspaper has recently reported on the decline of the live music scene in the Inner West. Dwindling crowds and increased council regulation have made it hard for local venues to survive. This is a blow not only to the area’s residents, but also to the entire Australian music scene, because the Inner West has always fostered new talent. Strange as it may seem, Woollahra and Bellevue Hill haven’t made quite as distinguished a contribution to the history of Australian music.
The scene was particularly vibrant in the 1990s, when bands like You Am I, The Whitlams and The Cruel Sea were cutting their teeth in the area’s pubs. Inner West references even appeared in their lyrics – I’ve always particularly liked the couplet “Had a scratch only you could itch, underneath the Glebe Pt bridge” in You Am I’s Purple Sneakers, and that band also have the distinction of being the only group ever to namecheck the “470 to Circular Quay.” A little further south is Tim Freedman, who is more or less the Poet Laureate of Newtown, and once wrote a song called ‘God Drinks At The Sando’. It’s not known whether he was referring to himself.
I don’t go to many gigs these days, not so much as a result of the scene’s decline as my own into stay-at-home boringness. But I had a great experience a few months ago at a great pub that still has free bands, the Rose of Australia in Erskineville, where I stumbled on a brilliant gig by Jodi Phillis and Trish Young from another much-missed Inner West band, The Clouds.
They aren’t the only ones keeping the flag flying. Venues such as the Annandale Hotel and Balmain’s Cat and Fiddle are persisting with live music, and so is Sydney Uni’s Manning Bar, at least until voluntary student unionism comes in.
Another problem reported in The Glebe recently has been the vexatious issue of people vomiting on the pavement, as opposed to the place most patrons choose, the pub bathroom floor. I was disappointed to read that there have been complaints from local residents. As far as I’m concerned, if you decide to move next door to a pub, you are voluntarily agreeing to step in the evidence of someone’s youthful exuberance. You are also consenting to being kept awake by loud music, knock-and-runs and the dulcet tones of inebriated hoons kicking your fence in. And in return, the pub supplies you with convenient access to pokies. What a bargain.
While we’re on the subject of pokies, it’s fairly clear that the main reason for the decline of live music has not been draconian council restrictions, but publicans focussing their efforts on getting a different kind of punter through the doors. A report found that in 2004, publicans made a staggering $60,000 profit per machine, so it’s hardly surprising that our publicans are installing them more quickly than 19-year-olds can scull Bacardi Breezers.
You can hardly blame landlords for taking advantage of their license to print money, though. (To be precise, their second license to print money on top of their near-monopoly on selling alcoholic drinks.) I’d rather blame the government that decided the most socially responsible place to put gambling machines was in places where people consume drinks that cloud their judgement.
While it seems reasonable to allow responsible adults to choose how they waste their money, the problem with putting pokies in pubs is that their patrons make that choice when they’ve drunk enough to temporarily reduce themselves to the decision-making level of a toddler. The pokies tempt us with their alluring flashing lights and little dancing Egyptian pyramids right when we are at our most vulnerable, unable to remember anything clearly except our PIN numbers.
If the government was serious about stopping people from getting hurt when inebriated, they’d augment the drink-driving laws with a ban on drink-doubling up. Pub pokies are a far greater social ill than a few kids being sick on the pavement.
A column about Big Brother
This year’s Big Brother housemates have become infamous for not wearing clothes much. But as The Glebe recently reported, housemate Tim has been wearing a Newtown Jets t-shirt. Channel 10 refused to say whether Tim lived locally when The Glebe’s reporter called, but because I know him personally, I can reveal that he is indeed is a proud Chippendale resident. It’ll soon become obvious, anyway – he’ll no doubt make guest appearances at every RSL bingo night in the area.
Not that it’s hard to pick him as a local. For one thing, he’s a journalist, billed as the ‘intelligent’ housemate. For another, he looks like he spends most of his time hiding from the sun in activist bookshops. But the biggest giveaway, of course, is that he’s a rabid fan of trade unions. Now, I know the revolution is alive and well within a 2km radius of Gould’s Book Arcade on King St, but really, where else but the Inner West can real-life lefties still be found in the wild?
Given his vocal political stance, I thought Tim would be about as popular with the voters as his beloved Labor Party. But since being nominated in the first week, Tim has become strangely popular. Not only have the bigger boys stopped hogtying him and dumping him in the diary room, but he hasn’t come anywhere near being nominated again. But the real shock came last week when I learned that Centrebet was rating him as favourite to win.
So how has a pale-skinned politico become the strongest contender in Australia’s biggest popularity contest? Well, it all comes back to his Inner West heritage, which has given him one huge advantage over all the other housemates: Tim has done his time in the trenches – or more accurately, the terraces – and has become an expert in sharehousing. And surviving Big Brother is child’s play after years of surviving quirky flatmates, mung beans and antique plumbing.
Sure, the TV house is not quite the same as your typical Inner West terrace. The housemates’ main contact with moisture comes via the pool and spa, not rising damp, and the BB house seems to have some strange design of garden that doesn’t involve weeds, empty longnecks and cigarette butts.
But ths same skills apply. Share houses teach you to get along with an extraordinary diversity of people. And while there are personality differences in the Big Brother house, it’s nothing compared to your average Newtown terrace – after all, there isn’t a single hippie, Goth, or pretentious philosophy student.
As a result, the tensions are kept relatively low. No-one has commandeered the lounge room to form an indie band or experimental theatre troupe. No-one has stuck up aggressive signs in the bathroom insisting that housemates not flush the toilet to save water. And no-one’s bringing home bizarre bedmates that force other housemates to make awkward conversation the following morning, or at least try not to stare at their piercings.
The communal food situation is also much easier for the Big Brother contestants. There aren’t any vegans, which means no-one has to pretend tofu isn’t inedible. And while the housemates are occasionally forced to survive on ‘staples’, a meal of rice and tinned tomatoes would be a luxury to many of this area’s tertiary students, who would kill for any meal that isn’t two-minute noodles.
There are some hygiene issues in the BB house. Some housemates regularly refuse to clean up, and they’re constantly running out of toilet paper. For Tim, though, this situation would be normal. Most share houses in the area are only just starting to wash up after Christmas dinner.
The other strains of the Big Brother house – the heated arguments, bitching and constant sexual tension – would be a walk in the park for Tim after years spent living in Chippendale terraces. So it’s no wonder that the housemates and viewers alike have warmed to his relaxed, humorous approach. With this much popularity, Tim may not only win Big Brother, but could easily be drafted into the ALP leadership. He’d certainly win more votes than Kim Beazley.
A column about Twenty20
Last Monday’s 20-over international between Australia and South Africa, the first to be held in this country, was nothing short of magnificent. The largest-ever cricket crowd at the Gabba was thrilled by the batting pyrotechnics, and so were the punters in the pub I watched it in. The excitement level was so high that, for the first time ever, the bar staff actually turned down the crappy dance music so we could hear the commentary.
As far as I’m concerned, we can abandon 50-over cricket, because Twenty20 matches deliver on its promise better. They’re like VB Series highlights packages – all sixes and wickets, and minimal dour blocking.
Best of all, they only go for 3 hours, which is the perfect length for a television audience – when was the last time anyone actually got to see all seven-odd hours of a one-dayer from the sofa at home, without the inconvenient intrusion of work, family and the rest of everyday life?
The only problem is the nickname situation. It’s not a bad idea, but someone desperately needs to supply some wittier options. Especially for Damian ‘Marto’ Martyn, Simon ‘Kat’ Katich and Nathan ‘Bracks’ Bracken, who deserves to be kept on the sidelines by the selectors until they can come up with better nicknames. They should look to the captain – Ricky ‘Punter’ Ponting’s moniker references not only his surname but also his gambling problems as a younger man. It’s brilliantly embarrassing.
And if we’re going to put cricketers’ humiliating personal problems on the back of their shirts, it’s a real pity Shane Warne’s retired from that form of the game. Although they might not have been able to get him a big enough shirt.
You can take the nickname thing too far, though. Michael ‘Mr Cricket’ Hussey’s nickname is not only far too flamboyant for a player who’s not even really a regular yet, but dares to usurp Richie Benaud’s rightful title. Perhaps it was meant ironically?
If Twenty20 has cut out all the boring bits of one-day limited overs cricket, perhaps other dull sports should to adopt the same approach? Most of us who endured all 200-plus minutes of the Socceroos’ World Cup qualifier would probably agree that we could have skipped straight to the ten minutes each way of extra time, and then the penalty shootout.
Similarly, basketball matches could be decided entirely by a slam dunk competition followed by one of those competitions they hold at half-time where you have to shoot from halfway.
Other sports may need to introduce physical changes to increase the excitement level. Aussie Rules is brilliant on a smaller ground, as we see when Essendon play the Swans at North Sydney Oval in the pre-season each year – it’s only about two kicks from one goal square to another. And how exciting would if it was only one?
But the sport that would really benefit from a smaller ground is rugby league, which is only really interesting when one team’s pressing against another’s tryline, so perhaps the ground should be reduced to in length? That way one team would always be about to score a try. And if we made the try-lines much wider, they’d cross far more often.
Come to think of it, all you’d need to do to improve league would be to play across the width of the field instead of its length. The crowds would flood in.
And imagine how much more exciting one of those 15-minute long 1500 metre swimming races would be if they started at the 1400 metre mark? Or the marathon started just outside the stadium?
There are some who may argue that these changes would ruin tradition. But if those people had to endure days and days of dour South African batting varied only by rain delays, as those who attended the recent Sydney Test did, they’d be entirely convinced.
I say that the future of sport is here, and its name is Twenty20. Or, as the Aussie team have probably nicknamed it with their usual level of wit, Twentoes.
A little Asiavision could do a lot of healing
The credit for today's united Europe should go, above all, to the Eurovision Song Contest. Just a decade after World War II, it brought the people of that continent together to celebrate their belief in love, hope and appalling pop songs.
French and German alike put aside their differences on that historic first Eurovision night in 1956.
When they voted for the Swiss entrant, Refrain, ahead of the morbid Belgian runner-up, The Drowned People of the River Seine, they were really voting for a brighter future. And once the power of music had joined the people of Europe, today's all-encompassing European Union was but a small step away.
This year's broadcast reaffirmed the song contest's status as Europe's most important political forum. Sertab Erener's win has boosted Turkey's chances of EU accession immeasurably, while the zero points score by Britain's Jemini has been viewed as a condemnation of that nation's stance on Iraq, rather than the deserved shellacking of a dreadful performance it actually was.
Again, Australians were left to jealously watch as the Europeans congratulated themselves on their shocking musical taste. (And hats off to SBS for Des Mangan's dignified "no humour" approach to the commentary, which really showed up that sarcastic Terry Wogan.)
Sadly, the closest an Australian has been to Eurovision glory was Gina G's appearance for Britain in 1996. And those few who remember Ooh Ah Just a Little Bit will agree that it wasn't close at all.
With SARS and Bali, we in the Asia-Pacific have had a tough 12 months. So it's time we, too, came together as a region and healed. We need our own Asiavision Song Contest.
After all, thanks to the karaoke craze, singing tunelessly has become the region's preferred way to make friends. And as strange as our very own song contest would doubtless sound, there is no way it could be more unbearable than an intoxicated Japanese businessman murdering My Way.
Eurovision may have brought us such icons of kitsch as ABBA, Nana Mouskouri and Riverdance, but I believe they are nothing compared with what Asia could offer. The weird Japanese punk bands, the glamorous Bollywood dancers and the hilariously earnest Singaporean bureaucrats-to-be would blow Eurovision out of the water, while the massive sugar overload that is Hong Kong Canto-pop would make even the most bubblegummy Scandinavian popstar seem downright sour.
We'd outdo Eurovision for weirdness too - the accordion player who represented Austria this year would hardly seem bizarre at all next to a solemn Vietnamese hymn to Ho Chi Minh. And faux lesbians Tatu would be seen for the limp marketing ploy they are next to a real Aussie drag queen.
My dream may sound fanciful, but it could be realised with a snap of Rupert Murdoch's fingers - he already owns all the pay TV in the region.
I'm thinking of Pyongyang, North Korea, for the inaugural event. Our agents could surreptitiously dismantle their nuclear program during the dress rehearsal, and the leftovers from the opulent banquets would stave off the country's famine for months. I wouldn't be surprised if dippy dictator Kim Jong Il himself represented the host nation - I hear he does an excellent Elvis.
An Asiavision Song Contest would substantially improve the region's political and economic ties. It would remind us of the American culture that, thanks to Hollywood, we all share.
More importantly, it would give us a chance to all come together and celebrate a lot of hilariously awful music. After all, we gave Asia Savage Garden. It's time they got their own back.