Shitney

Even though Britney Spears’ new album is apparently the greatest career resurrection since AD33, she still manages to spend half of the video for Womaniser with her tits splashed all over the screen.

This is because:

(a) she’s so empowered by her own sexuality or motherhood or whatever that she even co-wrote one of the songs on the album – just like a real artist!

(b) sticking the microphone up her snatch and throwing her voice would have been calling a spade a spade, but was probably one step too far for MTV

(c) she has a slightly better grasp of irony than Alanis Morissette and anyway Circus is a much better comeback album than the miscarriage that was Flavours of Entanglement so there

(d) she’s trying to deflect attention from the fact that in the other half of the video it’s obvious she purchased a couple of wigs and at least one outfit from the Tori Amos post-American Doll Posse World Tour Everything Must Go Fire Sale

(e) she’s determined to keep on keeping on despite the fact that somewhere in a darkened cupboard there’s a portrait of Brittney that looks very much like this:

Discuss.

NSW: The parliament that keeps on giving

I have to admit to not paying a whole lot of attention to the scandal-in-only-three-days surely-that’s-a-record Matt Brown affair, but thankfully an article in the Herald on Friday set it out all nice and neatly, and it really does merit quoting at length:

Beleaguered Labor MP Noreen Hay has been dumped as a NSW parliamentary secretary by Premier Nathan Rees.

The move comes after the member for Wollongong was caught up in the scandal surrounding disgraced police minister Matt Brown’s drunken romp at a post-budget party in June.

Mr Brown was sacked for lying to Mr Rees about dancing in his underpants in his office, where he was alleged to have straddled Ms Hay’s chest and called out to her adult daughter: “Look at this, I’m tittie-fucking your mother!”.

Now, I had quite a lot of fun at my election night party, downing three bottles of champagne and screaming “Say it in Mandarin” every time Kevin Rudd appeared on screen, but I’ve clearly got to start getting invited to budget parties because they’re obviously a much wilder affair. Although really, at any kind of politicks related shindig, “I’m tittie-fucking your mother!” has got to be right up there with among things you don’t want to hear, along with “John Howard retains Bennelong” and anything to do with Peter Costello.

I have to say, too, that this is the kind of thing that Noreen Hay could have done with years ago. Having lived for many years in Wollongong, and only now finally discovered what the old bint looks like, I would eagerly have moved the four blocks south that would have placed me in the Wollongong electorate just to vote Our Noreen.

I mean, Australia’s First Ranga might be the one that all the gay boys are ready to turn for, but MP Hay really is one hot piece of representative snatch:

Australasian airspace totally pwned by Qantas

Good to see that despite their recent Whoops There Goes the Oxygen Tank Emergency Landing into Manila Thriller that the latest Skytrax survey still ranks Qantas as the world’s third best airline.

The good news doesn’t stop there. Qantas was also bestowed with the Best Australasian Airline award which speaks volumes to all those naysayers who claim Qantas is putting profit and executive salaries above all else.

This really is no mean feat. The Pacific islands are universally well known for the size and world class-ness of their airlines. Let’s have a look at some of the illustrious competitors they had to beat to win Best Australasian Airline:

Solomon Airlines
After civil war broke out in 1999, UN imposed sanctions severely damaged Solomon Airlines’ international routes, and at one point, the airline was allowed to operate only one interantional route, from Honiara to Brisbane, once a week.

Polynesian Airlines
From its base in Samoa, Polynesian Airlines previously serviced an extensive network including Auckland, Wellington, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Rarotonga, Papeete, Honolulu and Los Angeles. It ambitiously replaced its 737 aircraft with much larger, leased 767s – a move which bankrupted the airline.

Royal Tongan Airlines
Royal Tongan closed after the carrier ran out of cash for repairs. This followed a mechanical failure which grounded the last remaining aircraft in May 2004. It had been facing an uncertain future since April, when its only aircraft serving international routes was repossessed.

Air Nauru
In December 2005 the High Court of Australia upheld an earlier decision to allow the bank to seize VH-RON, Air Nauru’s only aircraft, leaving Nauru and the island nation Kiribati without air services. The airline was rebranded as Our Airline and relaunched on 14 October 2006. Its services are kept on a very loose schedule. Their logo has possibly had the least amount of effort put into it than any airline in aviation history:

Rebranding Sydney

Morris Iemma has apparently decided to give up on actually making Sydney a liveable city, and decided to concentrate his efforts on simply rebranding the collection of multi-lane traffic jams and poor planning decisions currently passing for a global city.

Iemma: “The Sydney brand will deliver a consistent message to international audiences that will define Sydney as a leader in business, culture,tourism, events and education.”

A Brand Sydney Project, to be chaired by the head of Events NSW, John O’Neill, will produce a new logo for the city, which is expected to be launched in the middle of next year.

I, for one, am very excited about this, and would like to offer the following brands for the Project’s contemplation:

• “Communism” (it’s working very well for Beijing at the moment)
• “Singapore Airlines”
• “Pringles”
• “Catholic Paradise”; alternatively combine with Star City Casino for “Catholic Pair-o-dise”
• “You’ll Love Coles”

ABBA Revival Revival

Hot on the heels of the celluloid abortion that was the recent Mamma Mia film comes the delightful news that Kylie and Dannii Minogue are teaming up to duet on a cover of ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All”. Extra points for picking the ABBA song that most sums up their collective careers. Frankly they should retitle the song “The Winner Takes It All… and Dannii gets a TV show”.

Perhaps all the stress of having their fingers firmly on the pulse of five minutes ago as always is getting to them, because they really need to stop whatever sibling rivalry-based botox-off they’ve got going. I mean, honestly:

Kylie’s looking more and more like an overstuffed sausage that’s been scotchguarded from head to toe, and Dannii’s face now has such a high plastic content that that silver halterneck makes her look like a screw top bottle.

Perhaps a more appropriate song choice might have been “SOS”.

Joanna Newsom live

Joanna Newsom, Spiegeltent, Sydney 27.01.07

Bridges and Balloons
Sprout and the Bean
Emily
This Side of the Blue
Only Skin
Book of Right On
Sawdust & Diamonds
Call the Owls
Sadie
Clam Crab Cockle Cowrie

Sawdust and diamonds

According to legend, the mythical Breton city of Ys was the most wonderful city in the world. So wonderful in fact, that it gave its name to Paris, “Par-Ys” meaning “like Ys” in Breton. Built below sea level, it met its demise when Satan got hold of the keys to the damn walls and opened the gates. The reference to the city in the title of Joanna Newsom’s new album is apt because «Ys» is one of the most wonderful musical creations of recent times.

At first listen «Ys» feels a bit meandering and repetitive, the tracks blending into each other. But then you discover that the joy of the album lies in the subtle details: the rise and fall of the sonic tapestry and the delicious epic poetry of the five tracks. At the centre of it all is Newsom’s gorgeous voice, hovering somewhere between a young maiden waking in a meadow and a gnarled old crone shoutings warnings and whispering incantations. After a couple of days of listening you wake up and realise you’ve fallen under the spell of Newsom’s magical world.

It’s a world grounded in the delicate and expressive sounds of Newsom’s harp, and decorated with layers of lush orchestration, the polyphony of the instrumentation reflecting Newsom’s magpie eye for language and fantastic stories.

The standout track «Monkey & Bear» tells the tale of two animals who escape from the circus. At first this comes across as a modern day Aesop’s fable – while the Bear thinks they’ve found freedom, the Monkey intends to keep her dancing for money. By the fourth or fifth listen, the Bear dancing on her hind legs while children shriek and throw coins and the Monkey whispers “come on will you dance my darling”, it’s heartbreaking. The beauty of the music makes the album’s moments of emotional intensity – bodies dumbstruck with the sweetness of being, cities reduced to flickering wastelands – all the more poignant.

The bear’s name is Ursala, a nice play on the animal’s Latin name; and «Ys» is full of these references and word games. Much of the language is arcane, but there are as many aeroplanes as there are hollyhock and heather. Newsom’s Ys isn’t some historical artefact. It’s a fantastic city for our own time, at once mythical and contemporary, a linguistic and musical tapestry threaded from the wonders of the universe: everything from the smell of stone fruit being cut open, to the Pleiades, and doves stuffed with sawdust and diamonds.

Poetry

Two things I have read recently and loved:

   No it is not the true story.

   No you never went on the benched ships.

   No you never came to the towers of Troy.

Anne Carson
‘The Palinode of Stesichoros by Stesichoros’
in The Autobiograhpy of Red, © Anne Carson/Vintage, 1998

   I’m not your totem; I refuse

   to dance in your circuses; you cannot carve

   my soul in stone.

Margaret Atwood
from ‘The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to Their Origins’
in The Tent, © O. W. Toad/Bloomsbury 2006

PandaCam

I just lost days of my life.

Farm of fools

Just when I was starting to doubt John Howard’s environmental credentials, it’s reassuring to see him come out and say that we won’t be paying farmers to close down farms that have been rendered unsustainable by a drought that has nothing to do with global warming. Why? Because farming is “part of the national psyche”.

Yes, just like Gallipoli, it’s part of the Australian mentality to keep stubbornly backing lost causes despite overwhelming evidence that they are indeed lost causes. I couldn’t have put it better myself, and I’d say much of the nation’s head-in-the-sand approach to agricultural policy has about as much chance of success as the Gallipoli landing.

What I don’t understand is why we’re always going to “lose massively from an economic perspective” if we do something about climate change. Let me see if I’ve got this right. It would actually be a better idea not to pay farmers to close down environmentally unsustainable farms, than to pay them to keep trying to get blood out of a stone. Surely it makes more sense to just go and buy water intensive crops like rice from countries where it actually fucking rains once or twice a year?

I know anti-intellectualism is also part of the Australian psyche but really, this is getting a bit much. And I’m really not sure I believe Howard’s argument that “We would lose something of our identification as Australians if we ever allowed the number of farms in our nation to fall below a critical mass.” How does this hold up in a country where 85% of the population lives within 50km of the coast?

And what the hell is a critical mass of farms?

All the animals needed to sing Old MacDonald?

Enough salt-of-the-earth types for the cover of the Terrorgraph for the next 6 months?

Enough small children who have never seen rain (although this has nothing to do with climate change)?

Enough drover types to recite “The Man from Snowy River” in every National Party electorate?

Spare me.