And so the World Cup ended, not with a bang, but a whimper.

Spain vs Netherlands was probably one of the worse games that I saw during the Cup, though it was probably beaten out by that hideously boring Portugal vs Brazil match early in the group matches. But at least that match was just boring, and not containing one side deliberately kicking the other to disrupt their flow as a valid tactic. I seriously lost count of the amount of deliberate fouls that the Netherlands committed to stop Spain’s passing game, but I kept waiting for the entire side to be red carded for wasting my time. Certainly there should have been one red card in the opening half for a boot to the chest, but the game instead saw nine yellow cards given out to the Netherlands. Any game that has over half a team yellow carded can’t be a particularly good one and this was it.

It’s a shame, since otherwise I enjoyed this World Cup in Africa. Though many people complained about the vuvuzela noise, I actually found it added to the atmosphere, and occasionally obscured the voices of commentators who weren’t doing anything worth while. However, this is kinda funny:

Off to run my usual holiday workshop over the next couple of days. Despite the early times I have to get up at (earlier, because tomorrow morning has Germany playing Spain) and despite the awful morning traffic I have to drive through, I quite enjoying running this workshop. It’s good fun, and more often than not, the students all dig the fiction that they are exposed too. There really is nothing like watching a classroom full of kids dig William Burroughs’ Nova Express and Antony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.

Of course, it would be cool if I could working Cookin’ with Coolio, if only so I could play his one hit wonder song from Dangerous Minds, and we could hassle the hair he has in that film clip.

How it is that I don’t win awards for teaching, I’ll never know.

I turned on the TV tonight, and people were discussing the new Prime Minister’s clothing, even as she decided to create a detention centre for refugees in another country.

Of course, that boat people are even an issue in our media once again is disgusting. As a political football, it’s disgusting and racist, and we all ought to bare in mind that ‘illegal’ boat people made up the tiniest fraction of Australia’s intake every year. In other countries, it’s much higher. It’s use around election time–and remember, this is not the first time it’s been used, though an election has yet to be called–is nothing short of a manipulation of image to pray upon the fears and ignorance of the population of the country. I don’t actually know what those fears are–most people have not even met an illegal refugee, don’t come into contact with anyone riding an old fisherman boat, and have certainly not been held up, robbed, beaten, or lost millions of dollars in a giant corporate scam that resulted in your family having to live in their car while selling crack to school chil… Ah. Excuse me. Off the track there towards the end. Whatever would I do without a corporate democracy to rail against?

Below is a post on the subject that is worth your time from Steve D:

Australia’s population goes up about half a million every year. About 200,000 of these are legal immigrants. Every year, we also have 20,000 illegal immigrants in the country, of which 90% of those are Brits or Europeans overstaying their visas and such like. 10% of those, or 1% of all immigrants, or just 2000 people a year, are boat people. This is not something which is a major issue. (For comparison, Tanzania, a developing nation with a population much smaller than Australia, takes in more than 200,000 boat people a year, mostly from the same areas. Tanzania should not be doing so much better than us.)

Of course, when people found this out, Abbot started counting in boats because a boat sounds like a lot, and a big scary thing that could attack us. Again, the truth is that most of these boats are dilapidated fishing craft holding about a dozen or so people. Indeed, a lot of the demonized people-smugglers are in fact Indonesian fisherman who are less trying to make a quick buck and more trying to get people out of Indonesia where it is even worse to be a refugee.

So. We have a tiny amount of people trying to get to Australia in an unconventional and desperate manner. Remember there’s nothing illegal or inappropriate about their manner of arrival. Australia is a signee of the UN charter on refugees which makes it legal for refugees to seek refuge in our country by however means they can. They are only “illegal” in the sense that they are in Australian waters without an international shipping licence. And they aren’t queue jumpers either, as there is no queue to jump.

My friend, L, who lives in Darwin and has too much food knowledge and power, has been telling me about Coolio’s cookbook, Cooking with Coolio. That was pretty weird, I thought, but then it turned out that he had a catering business, and his own show titled the same as the book.

In fact, here’s an episode, where Coolio makes some ugly food.

Seriously, I can’t be the only one here who thinks that that is some ugly, ugly food?

L, who owns the Coolio Cookbook, is planning to have a Coolio Dinner Party. I may have to return to Darwin if this is the case. I may have to send out invitations to many people. You’d travel to the top of the country for a Coolio Dinner Party, wouldn’t you?

I know you would.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the second film of director Andrew Dominik, whose first feature length film was Chopper, a film about Australian stand over man turned b grade celebrity, Mark ‘Chopper’ Read.

As with Chopper, Dominik’s film is shaped around its central character, though unlike Chopper, Dominik leaves a modern Australia behind to centre on America at the end of the 19th Century, and the death of the mythical figure, Jesse James, played by Brad Pitt. Throughout the film, the two create an imagine of a moody, paranoid and fatalistic figure, touched slightly with a paganism that proves, for the film’s length, to be quite interesting. It was only after the film that I wondered how correct such a portrayal was? The film makes no mention of the marriage between Jesse and his first cousin, just as the relationship between Jesse and Frank is fleeting, and Dominik only briefly touches on the concept of Jesse James being a warrior in a civil war that was no longer taking place. In addition, the film, having rumoured to be originally four hours in length before studios requested it cut down, has a lot of moments and relationships where that editing is felt: the shooting in the opening train robbery is never explored, the relationship between Hite and Liddle feels cut down, and at times, the voice over (which I must admit to quite enjoying–a rarity in voice overs) was used to cover information that was surely in the original version of the film.

Yet, still, I did greatly enjoy it. The pacing of the film, even cut, is nicely done, and the performances, especially Casey Affleck’s Robert Ford, who goes from a whiny, annoyance, to a resigned regret by the end of the film, are across the board good. Even the presence of Sam Rockwell, an actor that I’ve only ever liked in one film, didn’t bother me. The film is, also, beautiful to watch, despite the obvious influence of Terrance Malik. But it’s hard not to look at the empty winter, or the drying out of the fall in the film, and be captured by the look of it, or to read the metaphor of James’ emotional state being reflected in it as well. It is hard not to enjoy the building paranoia and emptiness inside Pitt’s James as he rides across the cold, dead winter land to visit his old gang members and read into the pairing of the land and figure a knowledge that James, embarked on his journey and away from his family, away from rationality, is out of touch of his emotions, and only death will result.

In the end, however, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is not an entirely successful film. The intent of Dominik is to give a good amount of time to Ford and the remains of James’ gang as much of James, but the cut down running time really does mean that it should have just been about Ford and James, which the film’s narrative simply doesn’t allow. You, the viewer, cannot escape the sensation that you’ve missed something, that characterisation and plot has been hidden from you. It’s unfortunate, given what Dominik was capable of putting into the hour and a half of Chopper that he didn’t just craft a smaller film, but how and why these decisions are reached, I do not know. Either way, it’s still a good film, and one that I enjoyed watching from beginning to end.

Yes, in a moment of weakness I saw The A Team.

Yes, I enjoyed it utterly as a b-grade action flick in which someone flies a tank.

Yes, I’ll see you in Hell.

(I also saw The Assassination of Jesse James by that Coward Robert Ford, which I really enjoyed, and have more intelligent things to say, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.)

At the Guardian, I came across an article about the division of literary and genre fiction. It’s the old argument, of course, and here’s a quote from it:

What Gaiman alludes to and Chabon tackles directly is the genre which we now know as “literary”: the fictional worlds inhabited by people who think a lot and say a lot and feel a lot, but don’t actually do very much over the course of the narrative - they might be caught up in the swell of an emotional riptide, perhaps, until Chabon’s “moment-of-truth” revelation brings the story, such as it is, to a close.

The ongoing, endless war between “literary” fiction and “genre” fiction has well-defined lines in the sand. Genre’s foot soldiers think that literary fiction is a collection of meaningless but prettily drawn pictures of the human condition. The literary guard consider genre fiction to be crass, commercial, whizz-bang potboilers. Or so it goes.

…

Maybe my tastes are overly simple, but if there really is a war between genre and literary fiction then, on balance, I’m with Neil Gaiman: while I want the technical accomplishment of a well laid-out meal, I also want to feel stuffed and satisfied afterwards. Good writing? Of course. Story? Why else bother writing, or reading?

Of course, the real problem with this war between literary and genre, is that it’s stupid.

The divide between the two is based on a misconception of story. A story may indeed involve finding the forgotten key for a box that may unlock miniature dinosaurs. Or it may involve simply walking down a path. Both have narratives that begin, which rise, crest, and end in a moment of truth, to use the term that was nicked from Chabon’s introduction to the very uninspiring McSweeney’s. Be it the story about the miniature dinosaurs that can talk and offer car repair advice, or the man who checks the mail for the one letter he receives once a month, both stories require the reader to invest into the character and the events that are transpiring, be they internal or external events.

The problem with this argument is that it values one kind of story over the other. You’ll not I’m not talking about the quality of writing, because good quality writing is always desired, though this comes in many forms as well–but just as there is good genre writing and good literary writing, there’s shit on both sides. You’ll all be able to name your favourites and hates on that, so I’ll leave you to it, except to say anyone who lists Frank Herbert’s Dune as an example of good genre writing is just wrong. But, as I was saying, this debate that exists is one that is based on putting a false value on a type of narrative, and claiming that either of them is somehow more fulfilling than the other, or that they function fundamentally different from the other.

The very cool blog of artist Wendy Macnaughton is here.

So, yes, we have a female Prime Minister now. Our first female Prime Minister, which is cool, but would certainly be cooler if she was different to all the other political beasts out there. Still, it’s good to see on a number of levels.

However, like Lynda Hawryluk, I await this:

Every time PM Julia Gillard does something wrong, it will be because she’s a woman and too emotional or irrational, and the first putdown when she does something wrong it will be because she doesn’t have any kids so what could she know about running a country.

And anytime she does something right, it will be because she’s a woman and that’s about it.

There’s a bit of talk going round that some time later today, Julia Gillard might usurp Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, which is, I suspect, a response to the mining campaign against Rudd’s tax hike, and negative press in general.

Honestly, I’m not much fussed. Gillard, Rudd: different face, same shit. It will, I think, be a shame if Gillard walks into power and steps back in the mining tax, if for nothing than it will demonstrate that it’s big business that holds all the power in the country (a shocking assumption, I’m sure). No doubt people will disagree, but I don’t think you could ignore the fact that the mining companies removed a Prime Minister, if it does indeed happen. There will–as always–be other reasons, but that will be the main one in my mind. The fear of a Tony Abbott led coalition is, frankly, ridiculous. Overlooking the current approval or disapproval, Abbott is a mostly hated figure, someone that by and large the female population of this country cannot stomach the sight of, and while he’s the current caretaker, the Labor party are pretty safe. But, you know, politics–it’s all middle of the road bullshit in which a country is run like a company, and apathy is king in the people.

For a lot of countries, democracy is something to strive for, the given right to vote, to take a stance, and for them, it is of supreme importance, but what happens after that? How do you–how does anyone–continue to justify a set of politics that presents almost indistinguishable parties, men and women who speak not in grey, emotionless words that resonate with corporate empires, and a complete and utter belief in the public that the people who represent them are liars, cheats, and have only their personal interests at stake? It strikes me as the most amazing thing that anyone can sit around in this day and age and claim that democracy is functional, much less important, and that we have not yet gravitated towards a new political system, or perhaps that we have always been existing in a political system, in which the red and black, the obstruction and conservatism, the religion and the heterosexuality, are pushed forward as not just political ideals, but morals, for which we should aspire, and raise our children in.

Ah, but being awake at two thirty in the morning and blogging can only lead to trouble.