Labour Day
In honour of the stonemasons and building workers of Melbourne, who brought the world the 8-hour day in 1856, we've got a three-day weekend. (Think about joining a union.)

Ace Low
I recall reading some time back that Annie Proulx had decided to quit novel-writing in favor of short stories. The first Proulx novel I read was The Shipping News, which was wonderful (if a terrible movie), and while Accordion Crimes didn’t live down to the reviews, it didn’t live up to the expectations its predecessor set. Postcards was good, but no more. That Old Ace in the Hole, Proulx’s last (or latest) novel turned up in a second hand bookstore clearance sale, where I picked up a nice hardback edition for about five dollars, and it falls someplace in between the others. It’s not as good as Shipping News, but sometimes rises to that level, sparkling in particular when some of the locals get to telling stories to Bob Dollar, the rather ill-defined central character, whose main purpose seems to be to record impressions and listen to other peoples tales of the past. Minor characters pop up, sometimes with entire chapters devoted to them, for no purpose whatsoever, leaving the impression that the reason Proulx has abandoned novels for short stories is because her novels have become a string of stories she struggles to connect with somewhat less-than-deathless prose. While I have no objection to indeterminate endings, this novel’s conclusion seems to wind itself up against everything that’s gone before it, if largely because the protagonist is such a nonentity. Even the denouement is perplexing, a rationale for the book’s title more than anything else. Clearly Proulx loves the old stories, loves the lost people and cultures and land, and if nothing else Ace establishes that love and does a fair job at making a record where one might not otherwise have existed of the sounds and sights of a part of the America that is smothered in corporate agriculture, losing its character to the facelessness of modern, urban society. Proulx has an ear for dialect and dialog and an eye for telling details and sweeping vistas alike, but as good as the writing often is that’s not enough in the end. Maybe her stories are better. I’ll have to try those next.

We’ll Miss Him by that Much
Don Adams, 82. Get Smart was one of the funniest shoes shows (yes, the shoe, too) I’ve ever seen, and if the comic genius of Buck Henry and Mel Brooks was the driving force, Don Adams’ delivery was its essential delivery vehicle. Tennessee Tuxedo, too.

Welcome Back, Carter
Now he recommends conservation? While Jimmy Carter had his oil policy imposed upon him, Bush’s troubles are a compound of natural disaster and disastrous management of Middle East policy, the latter a significant point of difference between the two presidencies. While Bush fancies himself a latter-day Reagan, with the fiscal extremism to prove it, he shows none of the subtlety, such as it was, of that administration, let alone even an iota of the compassion of the preceding incumbent. Is this how it has to go in American politics: soft followed by hard, peace followed by war, Carter-Reagan/Clinton-Bush? It still comes down to selfishness: the economic prosperity of the 1990’s led to not just complacency but a level of get-it-while-you-can greed readily exploitable by the sons of privilege who’d been living that lifestyle all along. There’d have been no suspect rebuilding contracts and a solid reconstruction plan under Carter – or Clinton, for that matter. If you insist on talking about moral values, I’d suggest looking at your own behavior first: mote vs. beam, and all that.

Erosion
With Howard convening a national anti-terrorism summit between himself and the state leaders, it looks like the new powers recently granted in Victoria, the broad powers already in place in NSW, and the sweeping draconian changes proposed by the opposition in the federal parliament are poised to become our new reality. Lots of people are very happy about this, but when you listen to what they’re saying, the return to the 1930’s parallels are frightening. Morris Iemma, Premier of NSW, openly acknowledges that the proposals represent a permanent elimination of civil liberties. Howard isn’t so honest, proposing only that sunset clauses are “unnecessary” because noone can tell him when the threat of terrorism will end. Well, that’s true enough: it won’t end. Certainly not under any existing policy in force today. But the ability for police to lock down a suburb or to enter your home in force without a warrant or any other mechanism to ensure reasonable suspicion, to arrest and hole you without charge or access to a lawyer, to act without any requirement that you ever learn why or have any recourse for redress, these are laws that won’t make us any safer than the laws we have but send us heading pell-mell towards a full police state anyway. This is how fascism occurs. Head-in-the-sand pundits will say there’s no parallel - and they’re right; there isn’t – but there doesn’t have to be. I don’t believe Bush or Howard or Blair want to be the next Axis triumvirate, but without the controls developed over the last two centuries to ensure democracy’s survival, the potential for its destruction is easily achieved despite best intentions. Checks and balances – an executive matched against a legislature with both accountable to an interpretive standard managed by a strong judiciary – keep us safe. Every time we circumvent those controls, we make the future a dark place to contemplate. No wonder nobody much bothers about human rights in China anymore. We’re becoming more like them every day.

Canon Fire
Catholic Archbishop George Pell has weighed in on the literature debate, advocating the books and methods he is most comfortable with, in opposition to the use of modern critical methods and texts. While “road signs” and “advertisements” may not meet the standards of a large number of people as literature, there needs to be more in the analysis of the curriculum than whether or not schools are teaching enough Shakespeare, by my reckoning. Critical analysis isn’t simple. Learning to read isn’t hard. Putting the two together, however, is the biggest trick of all. How many children have been turned off from reading anything, let alone anything more difficult than a supermarket circular? While many will be quick to accuse literary criticism tools as the precipitating factor, there’s more involved. I was lucky to grow up in a household that valued reading, even just for its own sake, but that didn’t fail in its efforts to engage in analysis. Other children aren’t so lucky, and they perpetuate the attitude for generations. How many times have you heard the argument “I don’t like novels because they’re not true”? “Art for art’s sake” isn’t going to help these people much. And how many people do you know who don’t read the weekend edition let alone a daily newspaper, relying instead entirely on television for information, news, and entertainment? How many of them are swallowing the Fox line without being able to restate it in their own words? I meet them every day, and if they had learned to analyze what they read, they might now be able to question what they’re told, rejecting or accepting it as the content deserves. Introducting them to substantive reading through movies, television shows, advertisements, or cereal packets, might allow them to attain the ability to move beyond simple forms of communication to more grand and substantial texts. I assume Pell is a smart enough man to know all this. That being the case, his argument with the literature curriculum isn’t Shakespeare vs. a tin of tomatoes, but with the ideological content some literature may have, or – worse – the ideology of the analysis. This is fearful thinking and leads to book bans and other demonizing practices. It’s unworthy of an educated person.

Underground
The cross-city tunnel may or may not work to alleviate inner-city traffic congestion. Until people start using it, we’ll never know. However, there should be little doubt that people will use it. Anecdotally, those who avail themselves of the underground roads network appreciate the ease with which they navigate great swathes of the city they’re not otherwise interested in. What is normally a relatively dense area of backed-up traffic is for these few merely minutes of car-free cruising. M. and I, riding with our friend Kris out to Rushcutters Bay and a nice Japanese lunch in Paddington (Wasavie, very nice, too), stuck to surface streets and could see the effect the tunnel’s had: traffic jams up and down William Street and nobody much using the tunnels. For our jaunt, it wouldn’t make sense to pay the high toll. At $4 just for the cross-city, then, potentially another $4 for an outward-bound stretch beyond that, there’s little point unless you’re going to make use of the whole thing. And let’s not mention the e-tag-only requirement, which adds the burden of being perpetually out-of-pocket by at least $80. Still, people will use it in the end. Word will get around of the minutes-from-Darling-Harbour-to-the-Sydney-Cricket-Ground ease and so forth, and motorists will head in. The harbour tunnel, plus cross-city, plus eastern distributor combination will bring the traffic in over time, after which it will be “as above, so below”: everyone stuck in traffic.

Now That’s Leadership
What I love about the Labor party in its role of opposition is it’s always delightful tendency towards one-upmanship. Not content with Howard’s incremental approach to the removal of civil liberties, Kim Beazley is proposing vast new police powers, near martial-law levels of detention and investigation. (Maybe we really should pay attention to Mark Latham’s criticisms, before there’s no difference at all between the parties.)

Champions [Over] the West
Just stealing another Big Ten song: the Swans have their first Grand Final win in 72 years. (You'd think they'd sold Babe Ruth or something.) Cheer, cheer the red & the white.

Sung to the Tune of Notre Dame's Fight Song
Cheer cheer the red and the white
Honour the name by day and by night
Lift that noble banner high
Shake down the thunder from the sky
What though the odds be great or small
Swans will go in and win overall
While her loyal sons are marching
Onwards to victory

Some of the lines don't seem to quite scan, but so what? Go the Swanies!

Premiership Chances
The Swans had their chance to take their first premiership since moving to Sydney improve dramatically last night, when mainstay Barry Hall’s suspension was lifted, letting him play on Saturday in the Grand Final. Perhaps I’m too accustomed to a different standard of athletic violence. Watching the various football codes here has been a bit of an eye-opener. In both rugby and Aussie Rules, there’s no padding, no helmet more elaborate than’s needed to keep your ears attached, and a penchant for tripping and shoving just short of clotheslining your opponent that’s only just shy of pure mayhem. For all the talk of “king hits” and so forth, it’s a wonder there aren’t more paralyzing incidents, let alone career-ending injuries. So when Hall rabbit-punched St. Kilda’s Matt Maguire in the opening quarter of last week’s semi, it was an obvious tactical move. No official saw it happen at the time, and videotape review is rarely clear enough to make a substantive finding, as in this case. While I thought at the time that Maguire was bunging it on a bit, Hall’s punch was swift and deliberate and straight into the diaphragm. While it’s useful to have a policy of reducing the penalty for an early admission of guilt, and the offense occurred early enough in the match that you could say it made little difference to the outcome of the game, Hall’s excuse is an obvious lie (except for the line: “I wanted to make a physical impact on the game”), and he got off because this is sports-mad Australia and Sydney’s best shot at a Grand Final in decades. I’ll still barrack for the Swans, but this is no way to clean up the game.

Child Labor
With the industrial relations legislation changes yet to be announced in any detail, John Howard has commenced his war on labor with a drive against apprentices and trainees, setting a new federal-level commission in power over their wages, cutting them out from the awards system. While the commission won’t go into operation straight away, the government will in the meantime set the wages. Tightwad Howard can’t be expected to actually pay fairly, but this will surely allow lots more plumbers to hire school kids and welfare moms for dirt-floor prices. The university drop-out rate is not a valid argument for this move; it’s all about cheap labor in an increasingly struggling economy. But someone’s got to pay for those rising petrol prices, especially if Howard can’t get that rise in the excise he wanted.

Up or Down
Senator Harry Reid’s made his decision on John Roberts: he’s not getting Reid’s vote. As the leader of the minority party, this is bound to have an effect, but it’s not likely to block Robert’s ascension to the Supreme Court, a position he doesn’t deserve by anything I’ve read about the man. While he’s an experienced lawyer before the court, he’s not an experienced judge, having been knocked back once from an appointment to the federal judiciary, and only attaining a position there in the last couple of years. He may be relatively innocuous, but his arguments before the court have been suspect and his answers to many key questions during the confirmation hearings were, ultimately, dishonest. He won’t comment on cases he thinks he’ll have to decide during his tenure, but he will comment on others – but nearly all are as likely as not to come up, except Roe vs. Wade. His explanation is a dodge, and therefore a lie, and a judge who’ll lie isn’t worth the paper his law degree’s printed on. While Reid won’t mount a filibuster, we can still hope for a substantial “no” vote. Little enough consolation for having to live with another Clarence Thomas on the highest court in the land.

Cops
I’ve been a fan of the police procedural mystery novel over the hard-boiled detective ever since I first read one of the Martin Beck stories, The Laughing Policeman, perhaps the most famous of their 10-book series, having been made into a movie with Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern (hey, and Louis Gossett Jr, too; amazing the things you find out). Years later, after the Counsellor travelled to Sweden or anyway became friends with some Swedes, I found that locally Martin Beck’s pretty passé. Yes, the books are dated, but that doesn’t mean they’re not good. Just as mysteries they’re excellent, and the characters are marvellously drawn. Turns out, however, there’s another Swedish series, written by Henning Mankell, following police detective Kurt Wallender. A review of his latest, The Man Who Smiled (not yet published in the States or UK), has piqued my interest. The latest back home is Firewall, which I’ll be on the lookout for in the library.

Festivalia
Having enjoyed Little Fish so much, we took in an early session of the other notable current Australian release, Look Both Ways, which has won a prize in Toronto. M. and I both came away with serious reservations, yet somehow agree that in the end this is indeed a good movie. Neither of us thought the acting was particularly good, and even when it was, the lines given to the characters would be cliched. The animation and photo montage segments were only intrusive in the first fifteen to thirty minutes or so, when the director seemed incapable of letting them go long enough to let the story progress of its own, but were otherwise visually interesting, even stunning, and a nice device into the characters’ minds. The supporting characters, however, were generally briefly drawn and one dimensional or unlikable. As is the fashion lately, it’s a movie with intersecting story lines, like Grand Canyon and Magnolia and . . . I forget the other, more recent examples, but you get the ones I mean. Like those, it relies on artifice and is only as successful as its devices can make it. Yet somehow it ends up feeling bigger than the sum of its badly fitting parts. Maybe that’s the appeal of these kinds of movies: the synergy they create. The narrow field of play never feels small, and even the small-minded characters have their focus on larger things. I don’t expect this to do well in America, but it will likely, as in Toronto, do well enough overseas in general. While I think it leaves out a lot it would have done well to include, for a small budget production, it’s worth seeing.

NZ
I only started watching the New Zealand election this last week, and the tactics of the National Party there have been appallingly personal, attacking incumbent PM Helen Clark’s looks more than her policies. Under Clark, New Zealand has been independent and progressive, forging a path quite distinct from that of other western nations, notably Australia, so for all their troubles, they’ve also been quite admirable. The rise of a separate Maori Party was surprising, since Clark’s New Zealand has done much to support the rights of the indigenous population, rights very obviously under threat from the Don Brash’s Nationals (along with other things). That Brash has managed to secure what looks at this time to be 49 seats to Labor’s 50 (out of a total 120) is not surprising in this age, when so many are opting for a new, selfish conservatism, most successfully until these latter weeks under George W. Bush, if only because of his taking the Presidency of the world’s “last superpower.” In fact, Brash’s success looks even less anomalous purely in its antipodean context, where John Howard has held sway beyond Bush’s tenure, but with no less devastating effect on society’s commitments to its underprivileged members, and with similar “moral’ underpinning. A coalition appears likely with the Maoris, Greens, and Progressives, but they’re no less apt to opt for selfishness of their own than what the right wingers evince in their policies.

The Next Catalytic Converter
Joe Williams has a device that improves the burn rate in your car from 35% to 97%. It’s a hydrogen-generator that feeds into the engine and allows more fuel to be converted into energy, reducing emissions and corrosion, improving mileage by 10% to 40%. Is it the best of both worlds, good for the oil companies and for the environment? If nothing else, it could be the first positive step toward getting off the crude. (Via Metafilter.)

Union Now
I'm becoming less impressed than I was - and it was little enough to begin with - by new Senator Barnaby Joyce. He's talking deal on voluntary student unionism", but after the deal he caved in on over selling Telstra, he's starting to sound like his ambition has more to do with being the hammer his party uses to beat out noise than an independent force within the Nationals trying to get a good deal for his constituents, that is, no ambition at all: he's just a tool. Well, that's pretty much politics as usual here, isn't it? Only the party leader gets to make any substantial noise, usually, with everyone else just singing harmony. Until they're forced from the leadership, of course, after which they can say what they like.

Mutants Among Us
Man, this guy could be one of the X-Men, couldn’t he? I mean 30,000 volts of electricity. If he could control the discharge, he’d be all set for superhero stardom.

(Yes, technically, he’d be Electro, and have to become a villain, but them’s the breaks.)

Nobody Walks in Parramatta
Car culture begins in the Outer West, and Parramatta is the big-suburb demarcation point. This is where “auto alley” is, the strip along Parramatta Road – the main drag from the city out to the west – with what seems to be every car dealership in greater metropolitan Sydney. And car culture is typified by “hoons” – drivers with no skill but an aptitude for speed and noise and generally rather badly behaved. However, here in hoon heaven, the police have decided that the Church Street pedestrian mall is danger to itself and others and recommend that it be opened to automobile traffic. The council says that at night the mall is given over to derelicts, junkies (and let’s add the homeless, who are otherwise unspecified – but I’ve been there at night and can testify to who else is present) and is therefore unsafe and unattractive to – let’s face it – shoppers. The police are evidently helpless, since they’re recommending the change, and if there’s nowhere for these unattractive elements to be, the only people who’ll go there are patrons of the various retail stores and restaurants. Harold Scruby, pedestrian advocate and council gadfly, is actually recommending a “shared use” area, but I think he must be getting tired of always being knocked back. No, says I, keep the mall. If the winos and junkies are the problem, deal with them, address their problems effectively. Eliminating the mall only pushes the problem someplace else for someone else to address. Greenways and pedestrian precincts should be part of the social fabric of a municipality, not simply handed over for increased spending and taxation opportunities. What’s really driving this change? Given that Parramatta has just instituted metered parking up and down the main drags, could it be parking revenue? It wouldn’t surprise me.