Get out of the bloody way!

Barely a day goes by without Tony Abbott pulling some kind of stunt at a photo opportunity.  So instead of constructive policy announcements, a tame media receives a steady stream of vision of Tony Abbott pulling on a hi-vis jacket, hard hat or hair net and proceeding to make a goose of himself trying to drive a forklift, use a nail gun, gut a fish or whatever they happen to do at the latest workplace that has allowed him to darken their doorstep.

If the businesses he visits are prepared to wear the loss of productivity involved in hosting Abbott’s media circus, then that’s their own lookout.  It becomes something else entirely when the scene of Abbott’s posing is a disaster area.

Photo: The Courier-Mail

The most recent and talked-about of Abbott’s publicity stunts have involved Abbott fighting bushfires and yesterday, filling sandbags for the Queensland floods.  I am even prepared to give Abbott a pass on the fire fighting.  He is, after all, a volunteer RFS fire fighter so for once, he would actually have had some training in what he was being filmed doing.  There have been accusations that Abbott left as soon as they were finished filming but I won’t comment on that until it’s been debunked or confirmed.  What I will say is that if you’re going to volunteer to help out in an emergency, that’s wonderful.  If you bring a camera crew with you, then I begin to question your motives.  When Abbott’s cronies start talking about what a top bloke he is for fighting bushfires while Julia Gillard was off… I don’t know, being the prime minister or something, I would take that as confirmation of my initial suspicions.

The sandbagging though has to rank as the worst of Abbott’s stunts.  As with all his other photo ops, he didn’t just show up on his own.  There was his entourage and the ever-present camera crews.  Getting Abbott and all his photographers in there would have meant getting in the way of several other people who were actually there to do a job.  That is indefensible when there are rapidly rising flood waters and time is clearly of the essence.  He was also wearing a business shirt and dress shoes which doesn’t imply he was there for a hard day’s work.

Sometimes, the most helpful thing you can do is keep out of the way while people do their job.  There were dozens of people there doing some pretty urgent work.  The last thing they needed was to have a politician getting underfoot saying, “Ooh! Ooh! Let me have a go!”  It makes me despair that there will actually be people who think this was Abbott chipping in when he was clearly more hindrance than help.  By pushing in and holding things up, Tony Abbott showed that he cares more about his own political vanity than he does about helping in a time of crisis.

The next time you want to help out, Tony, get out of the bloody way and let people get on with their work.
 

Prediction:

The "fiscal cliff" will become another debt ceiling - a meaningless limit that will be deferred, delayed and extended ad nauseum, invoked only when one or other party finds it politically beneficial to do so.
  
 

A white Christmas

Greetings from Perryville.

Unless we are related by marriage, then there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Perryville, which is fair enough because you probably have no reason to have. Perryville is a rural town in Arkansas, about 45 minutes’ drive from Little Rock. Although it’s small enough to list the exact population on the sign at the town’s entry (1458, if memory serves), it is the largest town in Perry County and presumably serves quite a few outlying areas.  We are here for Christmas because dearest’s mother has family here. I was looking forward to coming here if only for the fact that the town has almost no tourist value. You don’t come here unless you mean to. Therefore, what you see when you visit is a real community going about its business.

From the middle of last week, there was talk of the likelihood of snow here for Christmas. I had only seen snow once before when we visited dearest’s older brother in Kansas early last year, but the snow was already there. I had never seen snow falling before. By the time we got to Arkansas, all the weather reports were talking about the possibility of snow for Christmas day. US weather reports are generally more detailed than Australia’s anyway and there are all kinds of practical reasons for tracking snow but I suspect Christmas meant an additional layer of interest. The local station was showing three disagreeing projections which predicted anywhere between 1 to 3 and 10 to 12 inches. It was getting to the point where I was wondering where Nate Silver was when we needed him.

For Christmas day, we were due to go to dearest’s uncle’s house in Benton for a family Christmas dinner. Dinner had already been moved forward from 6pm to 2pm on account of the weather and by the time we were all up, it was decided that we would make the 1-hour drive as soon as possible before the roads go too dangerous.

However, once we got out to the cars, my brother in law noted that what had looked like large drops of dew on the cars were actually frozen solid and the same applied to the moisture on the road. It was soon decided that it would be too nerve-wracking, if not outright dangerous, to make the drive.

It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes after that decision that sleet began to fall, further vindicating the decision to stay put. It was my first experience of sleet too. It struck me as a slightly more polite hail, where “polite” means not quite as noisy. As we watched the sleet, it gradually became snow, which continued to fall steadily for the rest of the day and into the evening. If we had been able to make it to Benton safely, we would not have been able to get back.

Dearest regarded this as an object lesson in being careful what you wish for. She had hoped that we might be able to share a white Christmas but wasn’t expecting us to get snowed in for a couple of days. Personally, I didn’t mind at all. While it’s a pity we didn’t get to see the uncles, aunts and cousins, I enjoyed improvising Christmas with seasonal television, hot buttered Os and a Christmas dinner of scrambled eggs on waffles. It just took our wintery Christmas to the next level.

So far, I have just about adjusted to the time difference and the season, but the one thing that I haven’t properly acclimatised to is the fact that it’s not daylight saving here. I am used to the sun setting at about 9 o’clock on Christmas night, so 7pm felt like about 10pm to me. Later in the evening, as the snow cover got heavier, we began to lose tv signal and there were several power brown-outs. These were very mild inconveniences but enough for us to make plans for if the power went out completely and remind us that despite being awfully pretty, there’s a whole lot of disadvantage, danger and hard work that comes with snow. Indeed, my father’s only experience of snow was building a television transmitter at the top of a mountain in the dead of winter. It was such a miserable experience for him that the idea of people enjoying snow in any way simply does not compute for him.

We woke to a picture-postcard white blanket. Our own measurements put the fall at 17 inches. We are still snowed in. Perryville is not used to this kind of snowfall, so the highways have been ploughed but the back streets (which is just about everything else here) have not. In fact, it’s being said that this is the most snow the area has ever seen. The local weather had to add an extra colour on the map to indicate blizzard warnings for north-east Arkansas, which had never been needed before.
If you listen to The Weather Channel, then this was Winter Storm Euclid, but you shouldn't listen to The Weather Channel because they're full of shit.  Their idea of naming anything below tropical storms is ridiculous and cheapens official naming.  Before long, we'll be up to A Spot of Drizzle Fernando or Morning Fog Genevieve.

Our plans to meet cousins in Little Rock for beer and pizza tonight will have to be postponed if not cancelled and we will be here at least one night longer than we had planned to be. Again, these are minor inconveniences. The uncle who we were to spend Christmas day with has been without power all day and also had a tree fall through his garage roof. Mercifully there was no injury to people or cars, but another aunt who lives ten miles out of town was without power until this afternoon so in the scheme of things, we have it easy.

The temperature is above freezing now and the snow is slowly melting, but we will not move until the roads are clearer. One thing I noticed on the way over here is that both on the highways and in the towns, there is nothing to stop you driving into a ditch. On roads that would have cables, Armco, or at least white posts around them in Australia, if you go past the rumble strips (which are carved out of the asphalt, rather than painted on), then you’re on your own. In fact, behind the house last night, a pickup truck got stuck in a drain since the snow cover forced the driver to take a guess at where the road was and unfortunately guessed wrong.

As much as I’ve enjoyed this Christmas adventure, I think I would be advising caution to anyone hoping for a white Christmas.  I have nothing but respect for those who have to deal with this kind of weather on a regular basis.

Mid-afternoon, Christmas day

Early morning, Boxing day

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR - The Beatles (1967/2012)

Before The Beatles Anthology, the definitive Beatles video documentary was The Compleat Beatles.  On Magical Mystery Tour, the narration states, “The idea was to travel the English countryside in a bus filled with friends, actors and circus freaks, and to film whatever happened.  Unfortunately, nothing did.”  That pretty much sums it up. 

Magical Mystery Tour is not as bad as you may have heard, but it comes close.  It combines vignettes directed by the Beatles individually, with scenes of everyone on the bus having a day out.  As such, it’s half film school project and half gonzo Carry-On film.  It may have sparked a young Spielberg’s interest, but that doesn’t make it any more entertaining or understandable.

To say it doesn’t make any sense is to miss the point, which is that there is no point and it’s not supposed to make sense.  The main problem is that it just doesn’t flow.  And what is so frustrating about the film is that it’s so easy to see how they could have made it work.  The idea of the four (or five) magicians keeping an eye on everything could easily have been used to explain everything that was going on, but as with most of the scenes, it ends up going nowhere. 

The music is the redeeming feature.  Paul is right to say that it’s the only time you can see John Lennon performing I Am the Walrus and that alone makes it worth watching, and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performing Death Cab for Cutie is pretty good too. 

Although this is the first officially sanctioned release, there have been many bargain-bin editions of Magical Mystery Tour over the years and an old copy shows what an excellent job they have done of the restoration.   The film looks beautiful. The new surround mix is effective but not intrusive.

On the extras side, there’s a commentary from Paul which has flashes of insight among a lot of things we’ve heard before.  There’s the obligatory making-of documentary and a new interview with Ringo as he watches some outtakes.  Two unused scenes are included – Nat’s Dream, which would have worked very well in the film, and Ivor Cutler’s ‘I’m Going in a Field’ which is just baffling.  There’s also a previously unreleased clip for Hello Goodbye, some songs from the film re-cut from outtakes and Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush by Traffic.

Highlight:  I Am the Walrus

Feature:  * * 

Extras: * * * * *

Audio:  Dolby Stereo, Dolby 5.1, DTS

Generic el-cheapo copy

2012 Restoration

HELP! - The Beatles (1965/2007)

So this is the famous Help! eh?

The Beatles’ second film was never going to be able to follow the same formula as the first.  This time, a story (of sorts) was needed and was actually confected around all the places the Beatles wanted to visit for locations.  So what we have is Clang, the leader of an eastern death cult about to perform a human sacrifice when it is pointed out to him that the victim is not wearing the sacrificial ring.  The ring – wouldn’t you know it – is on Ringo’s right hand.  Somehow, the cult knows this and tracks him down to find that the ring isn’t coming off.  The Beatles’ own efforts to remove the ring lead them to a mad scientist who decides, for no reason other than that he’s mad, that the ring will allow him to rule the world.  His own attempts to obtain the ring clash with Clang’s and mayhem, as was the fashion, ensues.  Meanwhile, Clang’s offsider Ahme turns good and tries to help the Beatles escape both sets of pursuers. 

The big problem is that underpinning this whole premise is a big dollop of casual racism and it would be drawing a pretty long bow to suggest that the film is satirising such attitudes.  The best you can say is that things were different back then, but it’s not saying much.

Then again, it was as a result of filming Help! that George was introduced to Indian music, which became a lifelong passion. His work to promote it led to international recognition and greater understanding so the film probably did far more good than harm.  It’s a paradox of cultural sensitivity. 

The musical numbers have even less relevance to the film than they did in A Hard Day’s Night, but it scarcely matters.  In fact, they all make great video clips.  Richard Lester directs again and as with A Hard Day’s Night, the film is peppered with clever camera angles and slightly subversive humour.  The wonderful Leo McKern is wasted on the one-dimensional character of Clang, but he plays it with such gusto that it raises the part above its cartoon nature.  Indeed, it’s the great performances from the supporting cast, which also includes Eleanor Bron, Victor Spinetti and Roy Kinnear, that saves the film from just being unutterably silly.  The natural humour of the Beatles themselves is a given but on the whole, Help! the film is inessential. 

The DVD looks and sounds great.  You will need a DTS decoder if you want the surround mix because they haven’t included a Dolby stream.  The second disc has an hour of short documentaries and interviews about the making of the film and the painstaking restoration, as well as some trailers.  There are radio ads hidden in the menus of both discs. 

Highlight:  You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away

Feature:  * * *

Extras:  * * *

Audio:  LPCM Stereo, DTS 5.1

The Rules: Merry Christmas

If you ever say “Merry Christmas” as an act of belligerence, and not a message of good cheer, then you don’t get Christmas.

   

  

 

An open letter to Paul McCartney

Dear Paul,

You have been a hero to me since I was 13 and I love you like an uncle.  I've defended your honour and your importance on numerous occasions, but dear God, man!

There is a time and a place to express the kind of sentiments contained (however ironically or not) in your song Live and Let Die, and a concert to benefit survivors of a disaster and the families of those who didn't survive IS. NOT. IT!!!

You've beaten the Rolling Stones for the tin-ear award after they sang about crossfire hurricanes.  If you absolutely have to let off fireworks (not the most sensitive thing you can do in such a show either, but still not the most insensitive), then the climax of Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five would have done nicely.

Yeah, I know.  Everyone's a critic, but do you have to make it so bloody easy for them and so hard for us?

Love,
Bill