Is this guy a dud or what?
Sorry haven't been on the boards for about 2 months so I don't know if it's already been posted, but just thought I'd show it... from the New York Observer, by Peter Weiss
Thanks, Mates! Down Under, is New Wild West
by Philip Weiss <mailto: pweiss@observer.com>
Australian actors did so well at the Golden Globe Awards that Tom Hanks made
Vegemite jokes and Steven Spielberg compared the talent to the British invasion
of the 40s. The Australian press is now predicting more success at the Oscars
and playing nervous stage mother to the latest offspring from "Aussiewood":
Naomi Watts, the star of Mulholland Drive, and the soon-to-be-released Queen of
the Damned, by Australian director Michael Rymer.
Having just spent a couple of weeks in Australia, I can tell you that the
Australian moment is not going to fade in a hurry. It arises from homegrown
forces that are strong and strange and not entirely appealing, racism
and latent violence. If you think those are generalizations, I've just gotten
started. All Australians should leave the room now, put on their bathing suits,
and go out and play Australian-rules football.
The first thing you notice about Australian culture is that it´s pathetically
thin. It doesnt go back very far: A mere 150 years ago, they were still
sending prisoners here and they have a past that the Australians have mixed feelings about.
And while the Aborigines have been here for thousands of years, aboriginal
culture has been largely scraped off the map and stuck in a back alley.
The thinness means that modern Australia has fallen for American culture in a
way that no one else could. Radio stations play the worst of American music (as
opposed to New Zealand, which has more of a history and identity, and whose
radio stations pick and choose the best alternative stuff); the ballboys at the
Australian Open wear Nike swooshes bigger than boomerangs; and
celebrity-spotting is turned up several notches even above our own. Board a
Qantas flight from Brisbane to Melbourne and they're playing an interview of
Nicole Kidman by some would-be Charlie Rose, and all the Aussies are tuned in
religiously. The leading papers turn out opinion pieces comparing Russell Crowe
to De Niro, and unsnarky stories about stage mothers pushing 11-year-olds who
have just done their first tele-movies, under the headline 'Little Charlie
Hollywood Bound?'
Twenty years back, when Peter Weir and Fred Schepisi came to America, their work
felt very Australian. Today the Australian identity is up for grabs. Consider
the recent art-house hit Lantana, a drama about a womanç—´ disappearance set in
metropolitan Sydney. It is made for American eyes. Barbara Hershey as a
therapist doesnt bother to change or explain her accent, and the film's
structure is adopted rather slavishly from the multi-strand, hour-long episode
of Bochco-style American TV drama.
Mimicry is a point of pride. Some Australian papers have dropped the U in
"colour" and "flavour," and Australian actors boast that their accents can go in
and out at will, and that, in any case, Australian accents are clear to the
American ear. How many Americans knew that Errol Flynn was Australian?
Anybody who has seen a Crocodile Dundee movie, or maybe read Patrick White´s
Voss, will point out that Australia has a rich mythology of its own. That
mythology is the bush, rural rebel legends like Ned Kelly and Breaker Morant.
But the Australian bush is depopulatedé nd Aussies glorify it in much the same
way that America glorified the cowboy 50 or 60 years ago, at a time when cowboys
were fading into daguerreotype.
And this is precisely Australia´s usefulness to Hollywood right now: to serve
as the New West, a wide-open state called Kidmania abutting California, and
fulfilling the same function for Los Angeles as the Old West did, the West that
gave energy to the emerging movie industry. Because Hollywood couldnt have
been an East Coast phenomenon: It fed on American myth and Americans of action,
risk-takers without the civilizing and refinement of the big Eastern cities. It
required rootless people and desperate characters as the raw product. Recall the
themes of that documentary Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust, in which
Nathanael West understood Los Angeles as a fake place mounted on the horizon to
serve the restless itchings of dislocated Midwesterners, who had a violent edge
to them.
Australian culture feels as grotesque as The Day of the Locust. There's no
sense of a high culture anywhere, and extreme characters abound. TV ads are
often leeringly sexual ("These are the only balls you'll see at our health
club," says an ad for a women´s workout center, focusing on some tennis balls),
and on hip radio stations the announcers do Amos Andy accents when
theyre talking about Mike Tyson.
The bush inheritance includes a large share of brutality (which helps to explain
such brutalized transplants as the Post's Steve Dunleavy). Bush ranger Ned
Kelly's hero of endless romances, from Mick Jagger´s film portrait in 1970
to Peter Carey´s novel in 2000 as a cop-killer who baited the law into a
showdown by killing one of his trusted men. But the beatification of Ned Kelly
in Australia is never-ending, and raises a real question about Australian moral
sense.
Lately at the Old Melbourne Gaol (a stupendous stone building in the heart of
Melbourne where Kelly and later Mick Jagger dropped from the scaffold), they
have an exhibit on Kelly called Ned, with Ned jackets and Ned T-shirts and
morally weird language descriptions of a Kelly ambush as a "tragedy."
The best thing about this exhibit is that it also showcases the death masks of
others who were hanged about the same time as Kelly. Often these were
immigrants, like former American slave Fred Jordan and 21-year-old Fatta Chand,
an Indian trader condemned on little evidence. Thousands turned out to protest
the death penalty when it was used against Kelly; no one protested when
dark-skinned immigrants were executed on flimsy circumstantial evidence.
Racism is a great Australian tradition, and one that has been thriving even as
Australian actors make their homes in the States. Once, famously, Australia had
a whites-only immigration policy ("Two Wongs don't make a white" was the
saying), and though that policy has been renounced for 30 years, it lingers on
in subtle ways. Australia is the whitest place I've been in a long time, the
whitest place in the English-speaking world. Even hip districts, like St. Kilda
in Melbourne, are all white. This is in stark contrast to neighbor New Zealand,
which has made a concerted effort to honor Maori place names and Maori
pronunciation, and whose leading city, Auckland, is a city of the world, with
Asians and Maoris everywhere.
The policies that underpin Australia´s whiteness have been showcased lately by
the Woomera detention crisis, which I gather has made it onto American
television. At a camp in the desert of South Australia, illegal Afghan
immigrants have been kept for as long as two years awaiting decisions on their
status. Lately they've staged a hunger strike, and they've resisted
force-feeding by sewing their lips shut and also sewing their children's lips
shut. Then some of the adults drank shampoo to create further havoc.
But the most shocking aspect of the Woomera crisis is the viciousness it has
called on in the tough Australian soul. The Immigration Minister has said that
the Afghans are trying to "bully" their way into Australia. He has denied press
access to the center, browbeating reporters who say they only want to tell the
detainees stories by saying flatly, "Well, what story do you think they're
going to tell?"
Even the opposition Labor Party has tended to support the government's
immigration policy (though it is now stepping softly away). That's because
there is such broad public support among Australians for the Woomera camp that,
when a doctor on the television news said that self-mutilations by the children
there had actually begun months ago, the woman next to me in the TV room of my
Melbourne hotel spat out, "Good." Another Australian woman across the room piped
up to say that one Afghan man had three wives and eight children - what was
Australia to make of a family like that?
The condemnations of Woomera have been limited to a liberal fringe. The big
papers have called on the government to end the fiasco by whatever means
necessary. The author Peter Carey, who now lives in Manhattan, returned to
Melbourne, his home town, on Australia Day to give a speech which said, in
biting moral terms, that Australians had progressed little from their
Anglo-Celtic notions of what a Real Australian is. The horror at Woomera should
force Australians to search their souls, Mr. Carey said.
I didn't hear any of the Australian actors speaking so bravely. Nicole Kidman
was talking about raising her kids in Sydney and London, and "Rusty" Crowe, as
they call him, was hosting a benefit for his favorite rugby team, the Rabbitohs,
outside Sydney. Of course they're not responsible for the terrors of their home
culture; they are only products of it. And so they are useful to us, too, to
flesh out our dreams of eternal and rugged whiteness.
Sorry haven't been on the boards for about 2 months so I don't know if it's already been posted, but just thought I'd show it... from the New York Observer, by Peter Weiss
Thanks, Mates! Down Under, is New Wild West
by Philip Weiss <mailto: pweiss@observer.com>
Australian actors did so well at the Golden Globe Awards that Tom Hanks made
Vegemite jokes and Steven Spielberg compared the talent to the British invasion
of the 40s. The Australian press is now predicting more success at the Oscars
and playing nervous stage mother to the latest offspring from "Aussiewood":
Naomi Watts, the star of Mulholland Drive, and the soon-to-be-released Queen of
the Damned, by Australian director Michael Rymer.
Having just spent a couple of weeks in Australia, I can tell you that the
Australian moment is not going to fade in a hurry. It arises from homegrown
forces that are strong and strange and not entirely appealing, racism
and latent violence. If you think those are generalizations, I've just gotten
started. All Australians should leave the room now, put on their bathing suits,
and go out and play Australian-rules football.
The first thing you notice about Australian culture is that it´s pathetically
thin. It doesnt go back very far: A mere 150 years ago, they were still
sending prisoners here and they have a past that the Australians have mixed feelings about.
And while the Aborigines have been here for thousands of years, aboriginal
culture has been largely scraped off the map and stuck in a back alley.
The thinness means that modern Australia has fallen for American culture in a
way that no one else could. Radio stations play the worst of American music (as
opposed to New Zealand, which has more of a history and identity, and whose
radio stations pick and choose the best alternative stuff); the ballboys at the
Australian Open wear Nike swooshes bigger than boomerangs; and
celebrity-spotting is turned up several notches even above our own. Board a
Qantas flight from Brisbane to Melbourne and they're playing an interview of
Nicole Kidman by some would-be Charlie Rose, and all the Aussies are tuned in
religiously. The leading papers turn out opinion pieces comparing Russell Crowe
to De Niro, and unsnarky stories about stage mothers pushing 11-year-olds who
have just done their first tele-movies, under the headline 'Little Charlie
Hollywood Bound?'
Twenty years back, when Peter Weir and Fred Schepisi came to America, their work
felt very Australian. Today the Australian identity is up for grabs. Consider
the recent art-house hit Lantana, a drama about a womanç—´ disappearance set in
metropolitan Sydney. It is made for American eyes. Barbara Hershey as a
therapist doesnt bother to change or explain her accent, and the film's
structure is adopted rather slavishly from the multi-strand, hour-long episode
of Bochco-style American TV drama.
Mimicry is a point of pride. Some Australian papers have dropped the U in
"colour" and "flavour," and Australian actors boast that their accents can go in
and out at will, and that, in any case, Australian accents are clear to the
American ear. How many Americans knew that Errol Flynn was Australian?
Anybody who has seen a Crocodile Dundee movie, or maybe read Patrick White´s
Voss, will point out that Australia has a rich mythology of its own. That
mythology is the bush, rural rebel legends like Ned Kelly and Breaker Morant.
But the Australian bush is depopulatedé nd Aussies glorify it in much the same
way that America glorified the cowboy 50 or 60 years ago, at a time when cowboys
were fading into daguerreotype.
And this is precisely Australia´s usefulness to Hollywood right now: to serve
as the New West, a wide-open state called Kidmania abutting California, and
fulfilling the same function for Los Angeles as the Old West did, the West that
gave energy to the emerging movie industry. Because Hollywood couldnt have
been an East Coast phenomenon: It fed on American myth and Americans of action,
risk-takers without the civilizing and refinement of the big Eastern cities. It
required rootless people and desperate characters as the raw product. Recall the
themes of that documentary Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust, in which
Nathanael West understood Los Angeles as a fake place mounted on the horizon to
serve the restless itchings of dislocated Midwesterners, who had a violent edge
to them.
Australian culture feels as grotesque as The Day of the Locust. There's no
sense of a high culture anywhere, and extreme characters abound. TV ads are
often leeringly sexual ("These are the only balls you'll see at our health
club," says an ad for a women´s workout center, focusing on some tennis balls),
and on hip radio stations the announcers do Amos Andy accents when
theyre talking about Mike Tyson.
The bush inheritance includes a large share of brutality (which helps to explain
such brutalized transplants as the Post's Steve Dunleavy). Bush ranger Ned
Kelly's hero of endless romances, from Mick Jagger´s film portrait in 1970
to Peter Carey´s novel in 2000 as a cop-killer who baited the law into a
showdown by killing one of his trusted men. But the beatification of Ned Kelly
in Australia is never-ending, and raises a real question about Australian moral
sense.
Lately at the Old Melbourne Gaol (a stupendous stone building in the heart of
Melbourne where Kelly and later Mick Jagger dropped from the scaffold), they
have an exhibit on Kelly called Ned, with Ned jackets and Ned T-shirts and
morally weird language descriptions of a Kelly ambush as a "tragedy."
The best thing about this exhibit is that it also showcases the death masks of
others who were hanged about the same time as Kelly. Often these were
immigrants, like former American slave Fred Jordan and 21-year-old Fatta Chand,
an Indian trader condemned on little evidence. Thousands turned out to protest
the death penalty when it was used against Kelly; no one protested when
dark-skinned immigrants were executed on flimsy circumstantial evidence.
Racism is a great Australian tradition, and one that has been thriving even as
Australian actors make their homes in the States. Once, famously, Australia had
a whites-only immigration policy ("Two Wongs don't make a white" was the
saying), and though that policy has been renounced for 30 years, it lingers on
in subtle ways. Australia is the whitest place I've been in a long time, the
whitest place in the English-speaking world. Even hip districts, like St. Kilda
in Melbourne, are all white. This is in stark contrast to neighbor New Zealand,
which has made a concerted effort to honor Maori place names and Maori
pronunciation, and whose leading city, Auckland, is a city of the world, with
Asians and Maoris everywhere.
The policies that underpin Australia´s whiteness have been showcased lately by
the Woomera detention crisis, which I gather has made it onto American
television. At a camp in the desert of South Australia, illegal Afghan
immigrants have been kept for as long as two years awaiting decisions on their
status. Lately they've staged a hunger strike, and they've resisted
force-feeding by sewing their lips shut and also sewing their children's lips
shut. Then some of the adults drank shampoo to create further havoc.
But the most shocking aspect of the Woomera crisis is the viciousness it has
called on in the tough Australian soul. The Immigration Minister has said that
the Afghans are trying to "bully" their way into Australia. He has denied press
access to the center, browbeating reporters who say they only want to tell the
detainees stories by saying flatly, "Well, what story do you think they're
going to tell?"
Even the opposition Labor Party has tended to support the government's
immigration policy (though it is now stepping softly away). That's because
there is such broad public support among Australians for the Woomera camp that,
when a doctor on the television news said that self-mutilations by the children
there had actually begun months ago, the woman next to me in the TV room of my
Melbourne hotel spat out, "Good." Another Australian woman across the room piped
up to say that one Afghan man had three wives and eight children - what was
Australia to make of a family like that?
The condemnations of Woomera have been limited to a liberal fringe. The big
papers have called on the government to end the fiasco by whatever means
necessary. The author Peter Carey, who now lives in Manhattan, returned to
Melbourne, his home town, on Australia Day to give a speech which said, in
biting moral terms, that Australians had progressed little from their
Anglo-Celtic notions of what a Real Australian is. The horror at Woomera should
force Australians to search their souls, Mr. Carey said.
I didn't hear any of the Australian actors speaking so bravely. Nicole Kidman
was talking about raising her kids in Sydney and London, and "Rusty" Crowe, as
they call him, was hosting a benefit for his favorite rugby team, the Rabbitohs,
outside Sydney. Of course they're not responsible for the terrors of their home
culture; they are only products of it. And so they are useful to us, too, to
flesh out our dreams of eternal and rugged whiteness.
