Random acts of Ranting

A Post in Four Parts

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1) There’s is nothing quite so pleasant as heading out to one of your favorite bookstores on a rainy night and having someone read to you, but it’s doubly awesome when the topic du-jour is the Art of the Reading. The irony is that this totally wasn’t my idea – my sister e-mailed a few days back and asked if I’d be interested, and I was all “sick now, whatever, yeah? Put me down as a yes and leave me alone.” And so I was put down for a yes and Tuesday night rolled around and after I remembered I needed to be somewhere at somewhen there was much confused flailing and wondering what the hell I’d gotten into and then…then…then there was a pleasant night of awesomeness. And Nando’s chicken for afters, ’cause nothing says “pleasant night of literary discussion” like following things up with fast food.

2) I’m finally starting to find my routine again after nearly two weeks of being knocked about by allergies and the flu. The Spokesbear is pleased, although that may have more to do with the fact that my first resposne to bad news ceases to be curling up in ball and whimpering pitiously. The Spokebear has no pity.

3) Due to the pharmaceutical-induced cold-and-flu insomnia I happened to be up late enough to see episodes of Brad Garrett’s dire post-Everybody-Loves-Raymond sitcom, ‘Til Death. And it’s truly dire, not least of which because it’s falling back on the increasingly familiar trope of portraying married men as perpetual adolescents who need to be mothered by their wives. This shit makes me mad. Throwing stuff at the TV mad angry, actually. There is a rant brewing in the back of my brain about the need for male-oriented narratives that find a response to the rise of feminism beyond “act like children”, but ranting with lingering flu-brain is not the best idea.

4) Every time I use du jour in a blog post, I keep thinking about this scene from Josie in the Pussycats and giggling. If you haven’t seen the Josie and the Pussycat’s movie, you really should. It’s awesome. And Du Jour means crash positions!

People Must Die For This

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Over the weekend I spotted a billboard that delivered some very bad news: Hey, Hey It’s Saturday is coming back. Online research reveals they’ve been given a run of twenty episode based on the strength of last year’s revival shows, and that they’ll be aired on Wednesday nights in an act of true cognitive dissonance. Darryl Summers is still going to be at the helm, although there’s no news as to which female co-host he’s planning on denigrating this time around.

I’ve only got three words in response to this: What. The. Fuck?

I’m not entirely sure there’s a good way to explain the lurking evil of Hey, Hey It’s Saturday to non-Australians, but suffice to say that it’s got a fine history of being hosted by a malignant, misogynist gnome who simply refuses to die no matter how many fucking gaffs he makes over the course of his career. It’s a show that routinely built its humor out of the humiliation of others and the othered, and I actually celebrated the first time it got cancelled (and wailed in despair when they announced Summers as the host of whatever Celebrity dancing show he hosted a few years back, for in that moment I saw Hey Hey’s return and trembled). Worse, it’s evil is kind of insidious, because it cloaks itself in a defense of nostalgic Australiana and normalises its behaviour. When Harry Connick Junior protested the inclusions of a blackface skit of the Jackson Five during last years nostalgia showcase the tide of public opinion quickly turned towards some bullshit defence of the skit under patriotic grounds.

It’s rare that I get seriously mad, but come on: fuck that shit. Hey Hey It’s Saturday is fucking evil and it deserves to die without it’s passing being lamented.

I’m quietly hoping that this return is a temporary abnormality, or that they’ll fuck-up early on and get their slot pulled. If that doesn’t happen I’m going to swear a lot and try and genetically engineer a deadly virus that only attacks people based on their AC Neilson figures. ‘Cause I swear to god, if there’s anything that’d convince me to sink the next ten years into unrealistic micro-biological research despite my complete lack of aptitude for the sciences, it’s the continued existence of this fucking show.

What *is* the appeal of Avatar?

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Possibly a dangerous question to ask, given that I am the energizer bunny of Avatar-hate, but the movie came up at one of the regular games last week and everyone else at the table seemed to like the film (except the one person yet to see it, who isn’t likely too) and I realised that where I see stunted story that doesn’t do anything after the set-up* a bunch of other folks are seeing unmitigated awesome.

And I continue to not get it, just as I never got the appeal of the Transformers film and the Matrix and a bunch of other things, and while I’m normally okay with that given that everyone reads a film differently it’s starting to bug me a little this time around. I find myself wondering whether the expectations of films have shifted so far into the boundary of spectacle that story ceases to be important, or if there’s been some kind of fundamental shift in the genre of film-making that I just haven’t figured out yet.

So I turn the question over to people who did like the film: what’s the appeal?

*Incidentally, there’s an interesting article on the Avatar-that-might-have-been if it’d followed the original treatment of the film. It seems to answer every major problem I have with Avatar and reads like a film I would have been gushing over if it’d actually made it to the screen (hell, if even a fragment of it made it to the screen *besides* the pretty FX)