The Australian Index

Extract: I went to the Prime Minister’s Literary Award bestowal. The winners were flabbergasted. And very happy. Well, why wouldn’t you be, getting a tax-free bundle of $100,000 notes plopped into your lap?

“Welcome to the house of non-fiction,” said Kev. “This is the House of Representative side of Parliament House. Over there, on the Senate side, is the House of Fiction. Oooh, that’ll get me into trouble next week.”

Extract: Some see the slow motion train wreck in motion ever since Sarah Palin stepped into the spotlight. Advising any politician in any country or at any time to stand on principle is probably expecting too much and should not be offered gratuitiously.

Extract: A new biography of Florence Nightingale is reported as portraying her as “not so saintly”, on the grounds that she didn’t do much sitting by bedsides proffering personal care, rather she excelled as an administrator. Apparently revolutionising the care of the wounded and started a whole profession of disciplined medical care that could be reproduced en masse to improve the survival rates of people post surgery and post infection doesn’t qualify as “saintly”: oh no, only giving men her direct, full, attention by sitting by to wipe a fevered brow would do that.

Extract: If there’s one way to know you have made it in the music industry it’s when you get a call from the ABC to be a guest programmer on rage. It’s the television equivalent of being on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Not only is it the ultimate “desert island discs” wishlist, but you are following in the footsteps of legendary musos before you.

Extract: Death Cab For Cutie has received recognition for their music video, “I Will Possess Your Heart”, for Best Editing in a Music Video, at the MTV Music Video Awards held on Sunday September 8.

The music video features the Washington based band performing in an industrial freezer room, interspersed with footage of a young woman traveling around the world alone. There are two versions of the video. The first, 8 minutes 30 seconds, was designed to accompany the single, with its long introduction. A shortened video was put together to go with the 4 minutes long radio edit.

Extract: SOMETIMES language can obscure as much as it reveals, particularly when the world changes faster than our ability to create new vocabulary.

I think we have reached this situation with “blogging.” Never the most beautiful sound, the word “blog” is now manifestly inadequate to allow us to talk in sensible ways about the many different things that are happening in internet based publication by individuals and groups.

Extract: I owe a debt to Mike Lynch for letting me/us all know that the National Library’s digitised, searchable Australian Newspapers are now on line (and have been beta since late July).

I do a lot of my historical work through newspapers, on the (hopefully not totally erroneous) assumption that newspapers are more likely to give us at very least an only slightly revised version of events and, more importantly, relatively unconsidered yet utterly contextualised (within contemporary thought/opinion, anyway) reportage.

Extract: I was asked by the AFI to contribute a small piece about how I judge one film from another, in the context of voting for the AFI Awards. I'm more than a little chuffed that they included me along with a number of reviewers and critics, and you'll find the full article on their website.

Extract: J.K. Rowling has succeeded at first instance in her copyright infringement case against RDR publishers and Stephen Vander Ark for their proposed Harry Potter Lexicon. I have mentioned this case earlier. Obviously the trial judge managed to get his head around the plotlines which he initially described as “gibberish”, as the judgment shows quite a knowledge of the books.

Extract: This morning, quite accidentally, I stumbled across a TV show. I shouldn’t say TV show, is should maybe just say show, because the box in the corner of the lounge didn’t help me watch it.

I know, I know, I will chew the ear of anyone who will listen about the wonders of the digital revolution and how it will ultimately leave broadcast TV behind. Currently the internet TV we’re seeing that is viable is also broadcast on TV and cable and is either available on multiple platforms, or a copy made and distributed of a TV show. Basically: TV on a smaller screen, or piracy. There are lots of online TV services (the previuously discussed and excellent WasabiTV for example), but we are still at the thin end of curve.

Extract: We fought over the television tonight, and that relates to the series that I haven't really developed a liking for, "The Secret Diary of a Call Girl." They air it on the Nine Network at half ten at night, and I haven't really read anything about it being a ratings winner. We're up to the second show and the opening had me less interested.

Extract: The recent Fairfax announcement of significant job cuts at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald is another indication of the steady shift in the centre of gravity in the media world.

Traditional media are gradually giving way to online media. I used to do a newspaper column. I now do this blog.

Extract: The video links below are oh so very Not Safe For Work. If you’ve got headphones the vision is safe, but if other people can hear the sound, definitely not.

Extract: After their first single in approximately 58 years, Rock'n'Roll Train was "leaked" - via excitable fans who offered their finest a cappella versions of the riff, or creating po-mo performance art akin to Borat playing Andy Capp in a teenager's bedroom - anticipation for AC/DC's new record (which has spent a similarly long time coming) Black Ice was, it's safe to say, rating around the "ridiculously" mark on the 'Just How Anticipated Is This Highly Anticipated Release?'-O-Meter

Extract: Prodded, we will say that TV was invented by John Logie Baird, whose ultimately unsuccessful system was unveiled in 1926; the technoids among us will remember the horrid story of Philo T. Farnsworth, who designed the first truly effective system for RCA.

But in fact the first mass, practical use of television did not occur in English at all - it was developed by the Nazis, who rushed to transmit the first regular broadcast before the BBC, which in turn had arguably already been gazumped by experiments in the US.

Extract: A couple of physicists and a computer modeller have studied abstract models of traffic congestion in real world situations to measure the cost of selfish driving behaviour. I have banged on about the myth of the ‘open road’ for a while now. In my TV interview on the Sunday show I located the problem of ‘hoons’ (media label for people, mostly young men, who partake in spectacular subcultural practices and rituals) with the moment of selfishness where drivers understand the road not as a shared resource but as a personal resource determined by their own journey.

Extract: Even though there's still a fair whack of the year left to go, it's probably safe to say that 2008 hasn't been as "two-thousand-and-great" as Channel Nine would've hoped; between bonings, cancellations, court orders and Sam Newman, it's been an annus horribilis that even the battle scarred Queen Liz would've shuddered at. Thus, I don't want to jinx things for our "friends" over at Nine HQ, but the latest whisperings in this godforsaken world could well point towards one of the best ideas the network has come up with in a while: bringing back Hey Hey, It's Saturday!

Extract: In 2005, an American implicit association test revealed  my views about black American males. These computer tests infer your ‘implicit’ attitudes by how quickly you link positive or negative concepts with photographs of persons of particular ethnic groups, or ethnic names where these are easily linked to particular groups.

Extract: I was surprisingly entertained by Matthew Bourne's big-budget dance interpretation - or 'dance-ical' - of Tim Burton's almost perfectly-realised (unlike most of his films) 1990 gothic fable, Edward Scissorhands.

The set was spectacular, the staging clever (the little houses! the fake snow which fell over the audience at the dramatic conclusion of the show!) and the narrative (which film purists may have felt Bourne took some liberties with, especially in the prologue) was abunduntly clear: so much so that my companion for the night, who'd never seen the movie, had no touble working out what was going on, even though he missed the first half of the show.

Extract: Australia is millions of years old. You can tell by its flatness. White Australia is just over 200 years old. This Church, South Melbourne, is over 150 years old.

I notice that several churches around Melbourne are going through metamorphosis. Another one, Pascoe Vale, faces closure of the local school after much less than 100 years.