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> “As recently as November 2006, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting revealed that villagers in Afghanistan's war-torn south were handing over U.S. cash meant for reconstruction projects to Taliban fighters, who then use the money to purchase weapons, cell phones, and explosives.” From Foreign Policy (online) “The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006”
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> Alec Baldwin aims for George W Bush's "enemies list": "Add Gonzales' name to those of Colin Powell and Rice and all the other bright, dedicated public servants who squandered their reputations and trashed their places in history trying to do the bidding of the worst President in US history and his crypto-fascist, hate-filled Vice-President. Cheney....the most un-Amercan man to ever serve in high office in this country's history. Only Oliver North, had he beat Chuck Robb, would have brought us any lower." From the Huffington Post
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> "Beit Hanoun sits close to the border of Gaza, a twenty-five-by-five-mile strip of land that is one of the most densely populated and impoverished regions in the world today. As a meeting point between Asia and Africa, Gaza has been fiercely fought over for centuries. With the dismantling of Israeli settlements on the strip in 2005, this tract of land is now wholly Palestinian. Yet its people have hardly any control over their lives, their movements, or their economy. And so Gaza's troubles have not receded." From Palestinians: The Crisis in Medical Care by Richard Horton
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> Globalisation 101: "In December 2001 China joined the World Tade Organisation...[and] The 'China Play' suddenly became the talk of corporate America, Japan and Europe. The strategy: Locate production capacity in a tax-free zone in China; employ its literate workers at up to one-thirtieth of the cost of workers in the United States or Europe; co-ordinate activity by Information and Communication Technology (ICT); ship the products on a modern container. And sell them in the West for a colossal margin." From The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, by Will Hutton. |
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> How a US blogger sees Saddam Hussein's hanging: "This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur -- phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us." |
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> With tears in his eyes at the emergency Arab League meeting in Beirut, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora rejected the cease-fire resolution until it contained a provision demanding Israel withdraw from Lebanon: "Children, just because they are Lebanese, they are being killed. This is state terrorism, and this is unacceptable. To see what crimes Israel is committing is unacceptable, and we should not tolerate it anymore." |
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> "...the unlimited insanity of the American Administration." An assessment of U.S. foreign policy from Hizbollah official Ali Ammar to visiting French presidential candidate Segolene Royal. |
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> "I can still hear his voice saying, 'The secret to the United States is not only its Constitution but just one phrase in it: due process of law'," recalls Gore Vidal of his grandfather, Sen. Thomas Pryor Gore. "Now we have an Administration which has thrown out due processes of law. The President can arrest anybody he wants to if they're suspected terrorists. He can put them on trial without a lawyer or confidentiality. These are the powers of a dictator and our media is silent because they're afraid." From an interview with Ben Naparstek in Good Reading Magazine. |
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> There is some doubt whether former US deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage actually threatened to "Bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age" after September 11, 2001, as Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf suggests, but if he did he was merely invoking US Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who infamously issued the same threat to North Vietnam in 1965. The Reuters wire service report was headlined Richard Armitage - the undiplomatic diplomat. Too bad that title has already been awarded to the last US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. |
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CULTURE |
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| SHOT IN NEW ZEALAND
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| The art and craft of the Kiwi |
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| cinematographer |
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| by Duncan Petrie |
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| Random House |
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| NZ$50 |
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Duncan Petrie interviewed 12 leading New Zealand cinematographers as a basis for his examination of the clearly identifiable visual style of our national cinema, exemplified by the wide range of films made here over the past 30 years. The concise introductory chapters cover NZ's patchy film production history up until the benchmark Sleeping Dogs (1977) and include a discussion of how art and craft merge in cinematography. Due regard is given to the importance of John O'Shea's attempt to kick-start a feature film industry with Runaway (1964) and Don't Let It Get You (1966), both photographed by a novice Tony Williams. |
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Petrie, a Scot who arrived here in 2004 to head the University of Auckland's Faculty of Film, Television and Media Studies, contends that New Zealand's late 1970s film production renaissance gave rise to "creative cinematographers...like Alun Bollinger, Leon Narbey, Graeme Cowley, Rory OShea, James Bartle, Kevin Hayward, John Toon, Allen Guilford and Waka Attewell." No argument there, and all (except the late Rory O'Shea) reveal, in a mixture of anecdote and technical detail, how they faced the challenges of their (initial) limited experience, basic - often outdated - equipment, low budgets, ambitious projects and the harsh New Zealand light. Almost by accident though, what comes across in the interviews is that these local practitioners have more in common with their international counterparts than Petrie suggests. Australian cinematographers face similar problems shooting exteriors. During the the 60s and 70s cinematographers in the emerging film industries in Australia, Hong Kong, India and Eastern Europe also had to work fast with tight budgets and elementary equipment. |
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This takes nothing away from the contribution of the various cinematographers to key New Zealand films: Vigil and Heavenly Creatures (Alun Bollinger), Utu, Goodbye Pork Pie and Smash Palace (Graeme Cowley), The Quiet Earth (James Bartle), Constance (Kevin Hayward), An Angel at my Table, The Piano and In My Father's Den (Stuart Dryburgh). But among the descriptions of the quintessentially Kiwi DIY approach it's not long before either the cinematographers or Petrie are invoking painters McCahon, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and the Dutch masters; filmmakers Bergman, Visconti, Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Tarantino, and Ray Harryhausen; and other films: The Godfather, Bladerunner, Taxidriver, The Warriors. These influences were all grist to the mill for the creators of the genre-crossing New Zealand films which became known as "cinema of unease." |
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What is clear from the profiled cinematographers' filmographies is their versatility and adaptability. Take Donny Duncan. He began with modest documentaries, graduated to some quirky features, including the disturbing Jack Be Nimble (1992) and the unabashedly Hollywoody road movie Snakeskin (2001), but more notably spent years on the hit TV series Xena:Warrior Princess. In pre-production he established an effective way to light Lucy Lawless giving "real shape and contrast to her face" which he carried through the series. Veteran Leon Narbey's feature credits range from Skin Deep (1978), the self-consciously arty Strata (1983), to my personal favourite, Whale Rider (2003). Perhaps this was too self-effacing; it's one example where despite the international acclaim, Narbey was rarely singled out. Alun Bollinger is such a close collaborator with the director Vincent Ward, when River Queen (2005) ran into problems leading to Ward being fired, he was able to step in and keep the film on the rails until Ward was reinstated. |
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The book is most useful for bringing earlier but now forgotten achievements into focus and I found myself being regularly surprised by the cross-fertilisation in a small industry: was there anyone who hasn't worked with Peter Jackson? Has John Toon really been around since the 1977 landmark TV series The Governor ? Shot in New Zealand is a worthy companion to other books on NZ cinema, like Nicholas Reid's A Decade of New Zealand Film and Helen Martin and Sam Edwards' New Zealand Film 1912-1996 as well as Leonard Maltin's indispensable The Art of the Cinematographer. |
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A few quibbles: the DVD frame reproductions are generally printed too dark and the larger ones reveal their digital origin especially compared with the superb, sometimes rare, set shots from 35mm transparencies. And I have an aversion to photographs printed across the fold. A pity, because the book's design is otherwise top-notch. |
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---Lindsay Amos |
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> Advice from the late Susan Sontag in the the recently published At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches “Serious writers, creators of literature, shouldn't just express themselves differently from the hegemonic discourse of the mass media. They should be in opposition to the communal drone of the newscast and the talk show.” |
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> From the essay "Terry Gilliam: What Brazil tells us about torture today" in Clive James' collection, Cultural Amnesia: "Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the Beyond the Fringe record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured for information he did not possess. The assumption behind the joke was that if he had something to reveal, the agony would stop. He was looking back to a world of polite British fiction, not to a world of brute European fact. In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i.e., they were tortured just for the hell of it." |
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> Women's role in Japan: "[Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe may not have the hair or the flair, but he's got the girl." Commentator in the Japan Times referring to Abe's wife Akie, who the UK Independent describes as "a stylish 44-year-old, a former DJ and devoted blogger with a penchant for drinking, flamenco dancing and wearing jeans...and a love of all things Korean." As for Abe himself, "magazine profiles have been unable to uncover anything odder than his love for ice cream and a miniature dachshund called Roy," deadpans The Independent. |
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> Daphne A Brooks in The Nation, on Beyonce's album B'Day: "On B'Day, Beyonce Knowles is unafraid of complicating and disturbing the image that won her fame. On these newer songs, the über-glam urban diva experiments with a startlingly abrasive persona that feels different from most contemporary pop divas (see, for instance, Christina Aguilera's "virgin-whore-virgin" dance, Britney's "virgin-whore-whore" dissolution or even Madonna's "whore"-to-mother moves)." - reminding us of Dorothy Parker's great line when asked to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence: "You can lead a whore-to-culture but you can't make her think." |
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> "The cultural response to 9/11 is more than just a catalog of items that mention the event; more than, say, John Updike's novel "Terrorist" (2006) or the Oliver Stone film "World Trade Center" (2006) or the ultimate design of the memorial that will rise at ground zero. The response is also a fundamentally altered worldview, a new way of being in, responding to and defining the world." Chicago Tribune columnist Julia Keller in Culture shuffle play in a post-9/11 world
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> Wisdom from King of the Hill: Hank: "Bobby, only jackasses go around saying how much money they make." Bobby: "What are you talking about? Julia Roberts makes 20 million a picture. Are you calling America's Sweetheart a jackass?" |
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> From workaholic New Yorker Editor David Remnick: "There are only 30 hours in the day - and that's if you're lucky enough to change timezones." |
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> Trying to get my money's worth from the Weekend Herald, I came upon a piece from The Observer's Polly Vernon on Prince William's girlfriend, Kate Middleton. Lucky I checked this out, because I discovered, "apart from wearing jeans ever-so-slightly the wrong shade of denim...Middleton will start visiting The Luzmon (gymnasium) off High St, Kensington, where she'll start developing the kind of shoulder and upper arm definition that will complement an LBD* perfectly, thanks to The Luzmon's super-hot work-out system which shoots electrical frequencies through your muscles." Nothing like being zapped by those "electrical frequencies." *Little black dress |
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> Meanwhile, in Australia: "She may decide to be a famous singer or ballerina. She may decide to be a famous heart surgeon. I can't predict where she'll end up. Whatever she puts her talents to, she'll be famous because she's got that X-factor. Not many people have it." John Stainton, eminence grise of Aussie crocodile man Steve Irwin's conglomerate, on daughter Bindi's future, interviewed by Patrick Barkham in the UK Guardian. |
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> And for the last word (not likely!) on Paris Hilton, there is Barry Koltnow (KRT) who says, "In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess I have always wanted to be the heir to a hotel fortune. From the time I was a little boy I had only one dream - to be a trust-fund baby." He continues, "Frankly I don't understand the media's fascination with her, except that she is rich, and the people who write about her are not. Wealth fascinates media types, if for no other reason than it seems so unattainable to them." |
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> Columnist Paul Thomas on the dialogue page of the NZ Herald was reminiscing about a visit to Australia by the US writer James Ellroy. He claimed the Adelaide Writers' Week audience was "shocked" by Ellroy. That was not my recollection; I heard Ellroy via an ABC radio broadcast, and I pulled the tape out of my archive. He had introduced himself in typically straight-talking fashion: "Good afternoon peepers, pederasts, panty sniffers, punks, pimps and kangaroo fuckers. I'm James Ellroy, the death dog with the hog log, the slick trick with the donkey dick, the white knight of the far right and the foul owl with the death growl." He continued in this manner, which was lapped up by the attending literati and punters alike, finishing with: "My novel, American Tabloid, is TIME Magazine's novel of the year, so you know it's fucking good! TIME Magazine would not shit you." Question time began with a feisty Adelaide matron asking: "What makes you think we would do such an awful thing to our kangaroos? If you look at a kangaroo, you might find it's a bit difficult." When the laughter had died down, Ellroy, not to be outdone, responded: "I do have some half-assed liberal impulses and I think that as long as the kangaroo and human are consenting adults, it's OK. By the way, the age of consent for a kangaroo is 'one'." |
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> Australian art critic Robert Hughes claims in his memoir, Things I Didn't Know, he lost for good "a belief in the potency of the avant-garde." He writes: "I have never regained it, and today, looking at the ever-more-feeble efforts on the part of the art world to designate its latest products as 'cutting-edge,' 'edgy,' 'radical,' etcetera, I am not in the least sorry to have lost it. Some new works of art have value of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value." |
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> "The PR people are really such fucking fuckbrains" - a magazine editor complains about celebrity minders to journalist Kurt Anderson in his article "Celebrity Death Watch" in New York magazine. |
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> If you're not feeling depressed enough already, how about this thought from French bad-boy Michel Houellebecq? "In a perfectly liberal economic system, some people accumulate considerable fortunes; others moulder in unemployment and poverty. In a perfectly liberal sexual system, some people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude." |
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MEDIA |
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> Promoting Australia's "Digital Action Plan" in November, 2006, Minister for Communications Helen Coonan introduced it thus: "Conversion to digital television is the most significant change in broadcasting in Australia since colour television was introduced in 1975." "Wrong," says commentator Ric Curnow, in The Digital Action Plan is Wrong, in the current issue of Content+Technology magazine, "The internet is the most significant change...where traditional free-to-air television's core audience of 18-34 year-olds increasingly source their televsion entertainment." |
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> "Nearly a decade ago, (in El Fasher, Sudan) at 14, Awatif Ahmed Isshag started publishing a handwritten community newsletter about local events, arts and religion. Once a month she'd paste decorated pages to a large piece of wood and hang it from a tree outside her family's home for passersby to read. But after western Sudan plunged into bloodshed and suffering in 2003, Isshag's publication took on a decidedly sharper edge, tackling issues such as the plight of refugees, water shortages, government inaction in the face of militia attacks, and sexual violence against women." From Edmund Sanders in The Los Angeles Times
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> University of Auckland Computer Science Dept staffer Peter Gutman urging Microsoft (and Apple) to get their act together: "Windows Vista's DRM (Digital Rights Management) will degrade performance when it comes to playback of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. If I ever do want to play back premium content, I'll wait a few years and then buy a $50 Chinese-made set-top player to do it. It's somewhat bizarre that I have to go to communist China to find vendors who actually understand consumers' needs." |
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Pointed out by NZ Herald IT writer, Peter Griffin. |
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> Reality check from People Who Matter: The 50 most influential New Zealanders, by Denis Welch in the NZ Listener, rating Julie Christie at No. 30. "This year (06) she put her money where her mouth is by fronting up as a panellist on her latest show, Dragons' Den. That's sort of like Peter Jackson starring in King Kong as well as directing it. This woman essentially runs reality TV in New Zealand; and thereby affects our reality." Actually, that's scarier than anything Jackson could come up with, and here's the culprit herself in the Sunday Star-Times in 2001: "New Zealand is incredibly highly regarded as a country. Format television is breaking all boundaries. Really we are seeing television become truly global." Eat your heart out Marshall McLuhan. |
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> Speaking of whom: "Forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan wrote about citizens being 'preconditioned by television commercials to abrupt zooms, elliptical editing, no story lines, flash cuts.' With today's sound bites, or 'sound barks,' the pace of the news shows is the same as the commercials. It is said that TV becomes boring unless a host like Chris Matthews interrupts his guests every seven seconds. Slogans can be shoved into a sound belch: 'Support the Troops,' 'Liberals Hate America.' But no one can explain in a minute or two the failed post-colonial economic relations of the Middle East. What's more, the rapid editing, martial music, blaring graphics, advertising clutter, and 'synergies' with publishing and radio, create a perfect breeding ground for diseases like Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and all the others." Joseph Palermo in the Huffington Post
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> Several years ago David Aaronovitch, columnist for The Independent, wrote a brilliant piece on reality TV shows, which has never been eclipsed. This was about the time Big Brother was the leading cultural phenomenon. The BBC, Aaronovich recorded, was about to shoot a series (suggested by Alan Partridge) where "a group of volunteers are put in a recreation of a First World War trench for the winter. What next?" asked Aaronovich. "How about The Bataan Death March, except that anyone who is tired will, instead of being bayoneted or beheaded by Japanese soldiers, be removed by helicopter. Or Genocide, where volunteers fall backwards naked into a pit with their family. 'What was it like?' they will be asked, as they exit the ghetto to cheering. 'Well,' they may grumble, 'we do think the Feinsteins should have been shot first'." |
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> "We have a responsibility to our shareholders" - this grossly offensive corporate mantra is really another way of saying "this company will do whatever the hell we like, and if you poor suckers (customers) don't like it, go jump". The recent New Zealand Telecom upheaval illustrates the downside of this philosophy, with its revealing display of greed, arrogance, deceit, shortsightedness and sheer incompetence. Those goddam Telecom Broadband ads which slimed their way across Tripod websites (including this one) did not improve my disposition regarding the company either. Almost as insufferable is the other great corporate standby quote, usually invoked when they've been caught out: "We are taking this matter very seriously." Meaning: "We'll file this complaint somewhere where we'll never have to see it again." |
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> "The (Title of Newspaper/Magazine) is the best read in the (territory)". What on earth does "best read" mean? Read most thoroughly, read by the most literate readers, read with the most satisfaction? We may never know. I've a horrible feeling it's the publisher's way of avoiding admitting they came third in a three-horse race; putting the best possible spin on poor circulation figures. |
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CINEMA |
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> More merging of movies and politics: Celebrated Hollywood cinematographer Haskell Wexler is running for president of the (Los Angeles) Local 600 of the International Cinematographers Guild. His recent mass mailout to members included a DVD screener of his documentary Who Needs Sleep? and a letter pointing out: "We are told not to rock the official union boat because those who deal for us with the employers will not like us...Let us not forget, it's our boat. Open discussion, questioning authority, is labeled 'factionalism.' Top-down corporate unionism, even the benevolent kind, has never benefited the workers." From Haskell Wexler runs for union president by Sheigh Crabtree, The Los Angeles Times
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> "The notion that I am a composer who writes a lot of things is true on one hand and not true on the other hand," says prolific film music composer Ennio Morricone, interviewed by Jon Pareles in The New York Times. "Maybe my time is better organised than many other people's. But compared to classical composers like Bach, Frescobaldi, Palestrina or Mozart, I would define myself as unemployed." |
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> Giles Foden, author of the novel The Last King of Scotland on which the current film is based, in a witty account (in the UK Guardian) of the tortuous process of turning his book into the 2006 movie: "They might be fashionable now, but nobody was really interested in films about Africa then (1998), especially not ones with a "passive" hero, as Garrigan (the doctor/protagonist) was proving to be. It's no good telling film people, as I did, that the greatest drama ever (Hamlet) has a passive hero: there is nothing they dislike more." |
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