Days 7 to 14 - Italy

Australians like to talk about their laidback nature, but this is contradicted by their working hours and working conditions - the reality I see everyday on public transport is carriage after carriage of tired workers, travelling from the city centre towards the outer west. When I was in high school (1997-2002), these trains would be just about empty by Merrylands (25km west of CBD):


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But by the end of my undergraduate degree (2006), this would not happen until Fairfield (29km west of CBD, 3 stops after Merrylands):


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Nowadays, trains occasionally do not empty until Cabramatta (30km west of CBD, 2 stops after Fairfield):


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People are working for longer and travelling for longer, and I would consider it a grave insult to suggest that this is a laidback existence. This is not even taking into the account the people who are subjected to 'flexible' working hours, without the luxury of a consistent working week or at least flexibility on the employee's terms.

I was forced to consider this while travelling through Tuscany. There is a concept called la passeggiata, which exists in Chinese culture too, but for different reasons. It is the idea of taking a slow night stroll in the town centre after dinner (which is also slow by Australian standards), and people are often well-dressed for this activity. Two things make this difficult to achieve in Australia - suburban sprawl, and road traffic in town centres. It's not quite as relaxing to walk around a CBD when there are cars, buses and trucks chugging past. The boom in housing post WW2, without consideration for infrastructure and local amenities, didn't help, either.

Yes we have our fucking beaches, but you've got to make an effort to go there - for most people it is not something easily accessed for a quick stroll every night. In fact, for suburbanites our only option is to walk to the nearest playground park and get touched up by a huntsman lurking under a spiral slide.



The cities I visited - Siena, Firenze (Florence), Volterra and San Gimigiano - have retained their medieval or Etruscan nature. Of course, it's beautiful, but the smaller towns are entirely reliant on tourism. For instance, Volterra was apparently the setting for a book in the Twilight series, and the tourist information centre was doing its best to capitalise on it. If Renaissance art is your thing, then Siena and Firenze are essential places to visit. For myself, as a non-religious art Philistine, what kept bothering me was how female bodies were often painted with the wrong proportions - breasts just under collarbones, torsos too long, or legs too long - this was rectified in later works, but it just reminded me that I wasn't invited by the painter, or whoever commissioned it, to have a look. They couldn't be bothered working out how the female body works, and I am only looking at this now because they aren't around to stop me. I guess there may be reasons why they couldn't work it out - maybe they couldn't access female cadavers? - nevertheless, the art galleries left me cold.

My most enduring memory of Firenze is panino con lampredotto (sandwich with cow stomach, herbs and chilli sauce), served from a cart, steaming hot on a cold morning. I happen to enjoy a good bit of offal, but I've never had it put in a bread bun, only rice and noodles. Lovely.

Day 3 - EDI

The old name for Edinburgh was Dùn Èideann, or Dunedin in its Anglicized form. This link between Scotland and the Antipodes is not the only commonality - open disdain for the English is also a pastime enjoyed by these nations. The exhibitions at Edinburgh Castle are full of stories about how the Scots are a proud race with its own cultural heritage and royal lineage, but eventually subjugated by those dirty Englishmen, culminating in the union of Scottish and English Kingdoms which reduced the importance of the Scottish Honours to symbolic value only.

Australia, of course, differs to Scotland in that the indigenous population were decimated by four forms of murder - guns, alcoholism, disease, and government policy. New Zealand sits somewhere in between, with the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 - as usual, this document gave the British the right to rule, but acknowledging Maori ownership of the land. Of course, the wording of the document has led to numerous disputes about who is entitled to claim and who isn't - today, it has become more tense as a result of the land valuation jackpot, profits from ecotourism, and multi-cultural/multi-racial tensions which tend to arise when a population isn't living as comfortably as they would like. Yet both Australia and NZ have developed that real sense of wanting to be distinguishable from the Mother Country, and in that regard Edinburgh is familiar to me.

But that is where the similarities end. From the moment I left the guest house until I returned, there was the constant smell of wood fires - usually a bad sign in Australia - and damp cold air, which is a pleasant change from the 37 degrees back home. One thing I do love about being overseas is that I do get to eat a proper breakfast - simply because there is more time in the morning. It is very cold, but that is only more incentive to walk, and walk quickly. Edinburgh Castle is an awesome sight in the morning - but the exhibitions were a little cringe-inducing. I am not one who appreciates dioramas and exaggerated voice acting.

The other highlight was Holyrood Park. From the map it looked like your usual city park with a hill. I wasn't expecting steep and slippery hiking trails. I was genuinely worried when the paths were getting narrow and the wind picked up, but I did eventually reach the top, spent 2-3 minutes, then spent another half an hour getting down. The crags are particularly dramatic, sort of like those film locations used for BBC Regency-era dramas. One thing that's strange is how deathly silent it is at the top, while it is cold and blustery on the way up.

Day 1 and 2 - SYD/SIA/LHR/EDI flight notes

This is the first in a number of rambling posts I will be making while on business/holiday. No coherence intended.

Despite the amount of long haul travel I've done in the last 2 years, air travel is against all human instinct, and as such I am not sure I will ever get used to it. Flying in domestic airplanes, when you can feel every bump in the runway through your feet, and the effects of turbulence, make it somewhat more daunting for someone who already has mild flight anxiety. I definitely know I'll never visit isolated regions in even smaller planes. The old joke goes, "Why do Cessnas have two engines? One engine will fail, the other engine will fly you to the crash site."

Certainly, the advent of the e-ticket has made things easier, meaning that all your boarding passes for international flights are handed to you right from the start, and large airports are arranged such that you only have one option to get where you need to be. But the flipside is the security checks. It's OK when you're 4 hours early for your flight. It's OK when it's at Changi Airport. It's OK if you aren't carrying much. It is NOT OK at all other times. At least this time around I was not asked to remove my shoes. Why? Who knows. Sometimes I get the feeling that there is no global consensus on scanning security, and that even the staff do not have great confidence in the efficacy of their policies.

I had never flown with Singapore Airlines (SIA) before, having flown BA/Qantas for the UK/EU and United/Qantas for the US. I am not sure why, probably because I didn't ask for SIA when requesting a flight quote. It is baffling to observe the gulf in standards between SIA and the other airlines, given the price differential isn't all that great.

I recall the last time I flew Qantas, the 747 was fitted in such a way that a 5'0" (152cm) woman such as myself had her knees in contact with the seat in front. United Airlines do not even have in-flight entertainment (IFE) on their trans-Pacific flights (no, a common screen at the front of the section does not count). Do not talk about the food.

It will come as no surprise to many, but for myself the quality of service from SIA was excellent. The hostesses were very kind and attentive, actual stainless steel cutlery for meals, the food tasted like how it was described, a constant supply of fruit/water/hot towels, the IFE was great, all in all they made the flight as enjoyable as possible. I will try the Singapore Sling on the return flight. I may consider Malaysian Airlines in the future; Emirates is still too expensive at this point.

Movies watched on flight:

• District 9 - Excellent film. The first 20 minutes contained so much that was recognisable, but by using aliens as a metaphor for immigrants and refugees to make the message more palatable to those who would otherwise react adversely to "bleeding-heart politics". Wikus van der Merwe, the naive bureaucrat, is a character I have seen before - one who takes an academic interest in a subject, is so excited about new discoveries relating to that subject, but it is such a cold and clinical interest without a trace of humanity. The second half of the film is an action-oriented "me-against-the-world-I-have-learned-to-love-you-in-this-time-of-crisis-but-there's-a-choice-to-make-I-won't-let-you-go-no-you-must-let-me-go" story but it's very well executed. I rarely have the patience to sit through a film for the sake of it these days (something to do with a stressful job?), and I was riveted to the end of this movie.
• Mary and Max - Very good film. Particular highlights for me were Max's dry sense of humour, and the plot point regarding Mary's betrayal of Max. I did feel somewhat manipulated by the ending; made me cry, for sure, but I didn't feel genuinely sad as I did with the aforementioned betrayal.
• Four Christmases - A promising beginning (the $10 Christmas gift price cap to prevent the flaunting of wealth is something very familiar to me) but boy am I sick to death of this Hollywood trope where the couple who aren't married with children are fucking ogres. Turned off the movie after 30 minutes. But Jon Favreau is as awesome as ever.
  
• 500 Days of Summer - I think if I watched this before Four Christmases I would have enjoyed this more. This whole thing about Hollywood tropes irked me, so the sight of beautiful people falling in and out of love shat me because it's always beautiful people, or if they aren't pretty, they will be transformed by the end of the film, sometimes just by removing their glasses (doesn't work for me). You know what, most people look ordinary, sometimes we look a little better when we've had a good night's sleep, when we replace beer with water for a few days, or wake up with hair that is manageable, or use appropiate makeup and hair product, or wear our "special clothes". We do NOT look like Zooey Deschanel or Joseph Gordon Levitt day after day. I know it's superficial but it really bothered me during the movie, which probably indicates that I wasn't sufficiently distracted by the plot.

Why all this hate for Twilight?

I'll leave it to that most sensible and tolerant of people, Kevin Smith, to explain:




No, stop, come on, come on. That's the next generation! That's the next generation of fans. That's what I love about a comic book convention. People will come to a convention, stand there in a fuckin' Spock costume, look at someone standing in a Chewie costume, and go like, "Look at that fuckin' geek." How dare you pass judgement on those twelve year old girls who like vampires!

Is there really a difference between all this hype over Twilight, and the hype when the new Transformers franchise was going to be revived, with every Harry Potter film, the new Star Trek, Thor, Green Lantern, Nolan-verse Batman, and fucking Watchmen? No, but let's patronise those Twilight fans anyway.

And I'm glad there are people out there who are part of the hype, watch the movie, and leave the theatre still happy, which is something I can't say for those internet fascist geeks who talk up how AWESOME something is going to be, perhaps over 12 months in advance, then come back from the film and say, "Fuck McG. He ruined Terminator Salvation." or "Fuck Bret Ratner. He ruined X3." or " Fuck Bryan Singer. He ruined Superman Returns." And then repeat this sentiment ad nauseum in any forum thread that has the slightest relevance. By all means, be excited, but don't blame anyone when you become a victim of your expectations.

Which brings me back to Twilight. What are people expecting it to be? Julian Morrow's Andrew Olle Media Lecture introduced us to the "primary" and "secondary" audience; where a form of art or entertainment is prepared with the primary audience in mind, but it's the secondary audience who are exposed to it by indirect means, such as talkback radio, newspaper editorials, or tabloid TV, and become offended out of context. There's a reason why Transformers has Megan Fox draped over a motorbike, and why Twilight has teenagers and teenage-looking vampires in love (ish).

Learning to embrace sentimentality

You don't have to be angry and misunderstood to make music.

When you're young, sentimentality is anathema. No one could possibly understand the anger and rage that you're feeling. No one listens to you. You're an outcast. An acceptance of sentimentality in your experiences would be a betrayal to your rebellious ethos. And you want to tell the world that you're special.

These days, the internet allows everyone, from tween fanbois to baby boomers with financial problems, to voice their opinion. Forums are built upon a narrow set of interests, allowing existing prejudices to build with the encouragement of others. There will be discussions that explore differences in opinion, but by and large these are superficial. A lot of chaff abounds from which a tiny bit of wheat can be sorted.

There is an interesting combination of youthful ebullience and insular online communities which breeds a culture of protest against sentimentality. And to that a desire to belong, to something, to anything, and the internet magically produces endless levels of pop culture elitism.

Had I assumed a greater online presence when I was 17, I wonder if I would have been stunted in that young-rage period. I don't pretend to be an island, with opinions set in stone. In fact, I can be very impressionable, and at times I suspect that my thoughts about something or other may be someone else's rather than my own. It is when I reach this thought that I take a self-imposed break from the internet to think for myself.

I talk about this now because I feel that I have grown to embrace sentimentality in music, movies, and TV. I am not bursting with iridescent anger, the diffuse kind of anger which characterises teenage and young adulthood - where you are furious, but don't know about what. I have albums in my collection which I recall being so sympathetic to, but no more. And now, I enjoy music which my younger self would have slapped me for even considering. That is not to say there isn't energy, life or a sense of protest in it - there still is - but it is leavened with reason and focus. You cannot stay angry at nothing forever.

Comedy snobs and wine snobs have more than a thing or two in common

The first few times I tried to drink wine, I couldn't get past the sourness. I went away to learn a bit more about what I was supposed to taste. The dozen or so times afterwards, all I found was that I should have been referring to "acidity" rather than sourness. Now many bottles later, I'm proud to say that I can pick out a few broad descriptors, but I'll be damned if I can detect a slight hint of French oak in five millilitres of fermented grapes.

There is one general guide to wines that I have found more than useful, though. Wines essentially require the right balance between sweetness and acidity. Too sweet, and the wine is sickly and cloying. Too acid, and your mouth will pucker, and you will be unable to taste anything else. In this respect, comedy and wines have more than a thing or two in common.

The American sitcoms of the '80s and early 90's could be paradigms for the sickly sweet category. Shows such as Growing Pains, Full House, and Home Improvement traded on safe stereotypes and morality plays. The excessive sweetness of the characters and plots paradoxically created a sense of blandness; that is to say, after being bombarded with the nice, the show's personality loses all definition. Of course, these criticisms are hardly revolutionary, and many of these shows attempted to redress the balance with what became mandatory "very special" episodes - Webster meets a paedophile, Blossom gets her first period, Balki is put into immigrant detention - well, the last one is untrue but I always wondered how Larry would have responded in such a situation, given how much of a milquetoast he is. Nevertheless, these very special episodes only served to confuse an audience who could not have expected this from TV shows which had never given any indication of perverseness.

None of this is new. But I wonder if we are now suffering from what is at the other end of the spectrum - unrelenting and intolerable acidity.

There is a good deal to be mined from humiliating and embarrassing situations. It is almost impossible for a youngish person like myself to remember a time when mockumentaries weren't part of the comedic landscape. Now they're everywhere and reproducing like the proverbial bunny. From this country alone we have had We Can Be Heroes and Summer Heights High; the most notable examples from overseas have included the Office, Extras, and Larry Sanders Show (+ It's Garry Shandling's Show). There is one other thing that links them all together: I have never been able to complete an entire episode of any of them, not out of boredom or disgust, but due to the amount of skipping I do.

I find the bitter humiliation which engulfs their main characters on a regular basis to be so noxious that I cannot watch it, cannot bear to be in the same room as it, and cannot get past the pain to enjoy the rest because, well, I'm no longer within watching distance of the TV. And if I cannot watch it, how can I enjoy it? The successes of the above listed shows demonstrate that there are many people out there with far thicker skins than I. Personally, I find these shows to fall a bit too much on the sour side.

There are, of course, numerous examples of shows which have successfully mixed the sweet with the sour - Arrested Development, the Simpsons, Futurama, Spaced, Flight of the Conchords, even CNNNN, which combines attacks on political figures with increasingly elaborate Fungry's ads - but sometimes I wonder if the comedy scale had been recalibrated without my knowledge in the mid-90's, enabling meanness, humiliation and insult to pass for comedy and entertainment. How else can I explain the rise of the vindictive reality program, which appears to demand uppity sharp-tongued critics, and harsh unwarranted judgement of contestants from an ignorant and superficial public?

You will not believe me if I told you what brought on all this thinking. I have been listening to Mick Molloy's temporary stint on Nova FM, co-hosting with Dave Hughes and Ed Kavalee. Hughes' comedy appears to centre entirely on being insulting; when he fails in a war of insults, he often trails off and mumbles, with little else to say, certainly not anything positive. Molloy on the other hand, also relies on insults, but is able to switch gears at times to put on his "poor me" act to endear himself to the audience. And is also well capable of being entertaining with just plan wit. So how is it that Dave Hughes is the one with the radio program, the TV program, the DVD? Where's the comedy scale and who's messed with it?

When mediocrity no longer cuts it, and you're found out

If Sydney's tourist attractions were a weapon, it would be Homer's make-up shotgun.

Another day, another marketing piece reporting Sydney's declining tourist popularity. What has always bothered me about Sydney's popularity as a tourist destination is why anyone would want to visit it a second time.

Those destinations steeped in history are well able to exploit its monuments and places of anthropological interest. Those which are relatively young must instead strive to keep changing its face - that is, to continue to generate interest in returning by providing a new experience each time. Often this is in the form of modern art, whether it be theater, music, visual arts or sporting occasions.

That is not to say that Sydney does not have any of these things. But it seems not to be a major point of tourist advertising. Hello, harbour. Hello, Harbour Bridge. Hello, Opera House. Hello, Taronga Zoo. Hello, Circular Quay. Hello, Bondi Beach. Right, let's go home. This can be done in a day. What else is there? What of the city life? You wanna get glassed at 2 in the morning, go ahead.

As a born-and-bred resident of this shithole, I could go on and on about the lack of civil planning, but that is generally of no interest to tourists. Nevertheless, the shameless bragging about Sydney's greatness as a place to visit makes me sick. And it makes me glad that there's less reason for that arrogance as visitors stay away. Keep your hard-earned dollars, dear tourists, and go to Melbourne instead.

profernity's midway report on the ICC World T20

Yeah you read that right. The part of your brain which makes your daily leaps to conclusions has been causing you, like the rest of us, to call this competition the T20 World Cup, when in fact it's not a Cup, who told you it was, not me, not the ICC, no way, it's the ICC World T20, which is a nonsensical title. What is a World T20? Is it a single match of twenty overs, but with 55-a-side? Would India and Pakistan be placed on the same team? Would Ireland and Scotland also be placed with England? I suppose you may as well, seeing as how England has poached so many of their players (zing!)

Stupid name aside, what this tourney does right is that it's only about 2 weeks long. That's how an international tournament is staged, not that abortion of a competition called the ICC World Cup, which seemed to continue on as the seasons shifted from spring to winter. And Australia won that too. Utterly useless.

As for the matches, they've offered some real surprises here and there, sometimes due to the nature of knockout competition, but really due to the way T20s can bring out some unexpected results. I hesitate to use the word lottery, because teams never entirely luck themselves into or out of a win, but it definitely takes less to turn a match around in this format. I can't talk about specific matches really since I've seen less than a handful of them (call it a fingerful, if you like), but I suppose the one conclusion I have is that we don't have an applicable ranking to T20 teams because they're just defeating each other too often.

What are my attitudes to T20's? Fine, get rid of ODIs. For all the 6-fatigue I get from watching a single T20, god forbid I actually get the chance to watch an entire tournament, that would do my head in. Yet I had already grown tired of ODIs before this. It used to be a steady first 15 overs, consolidation during the middle 20-25 overs, then acceleration at the end. Then Sri Lanka came along and changed all that, so we had Australia 0-65 after 10 overs, faster consolidation in the middle overs, then 80-100 off the last 10 overs or so. The totals kept increasing and increasing, grounds got smaller, and really T20 was inevitable.

I curse Powerplays. We had batting powerplays to further assert the batsman's dominance in ODIs, then bowling powerplays were introduced because the ICC realised that maybe that wan't such a good thing, when really they could have just done away with the powerplays altogether, but NO, they'd rather overcomplicate by adding more rubbish to a game with many rules. How about relaxing the wide rule? Fuck if batsmen don't get soft treatment in ODIs and T20s. If it were up to me, get rid of ODIs and replace with T20s, because even after decades of the stuff, I don't think there's one cricket-playing nation who treasures an ODI series trophy, other than as a marker of genaral achievement.

Eu sou aprender a falar Português.

This is too much work. I want to be ferried from place to place without having to think. Am I turning into the "coach tourist"? I would dearly love to just walk around Lisbon for a few days. But learning Portuguese in two weeks is too much.

"Hope I die before I get old"

I am officially over the phenomenon that is Fake IPL Player.

Initially an exciting novelty, interest was furthered with the dawning realisation that this person is someone close enough to provide details. But it has fizzled out, for me at least, and now I wish it to be over and gone before long.

The sheer number of posts per day, and the potentially libellous statements contained within them, are signs of an unsustainable blog. The inevitable amount of media attention was amplified simply because of the Indian focus - IPL, Ganguly v. Shah Rukh Khan, and the gaudy Kolkata Knight Riders franchise. Since the story has "blown up", so to speak, the interest in the blog, and the blog posts themselves, are entirely centred around uncovering the identity of the blogger. In other words, he has achieved what all trolls love to do - to draw attention to themselves, and derail any kind of sane discussion.

The fun for myself, initially, was that the blog provided a sort of portal into how professional teams (or cobbled-together superstar aggregations) operate. For this to be an enjoyable experience, the narrator needs to occupy very little space in the story. He or she is your eyes and ears, not your brains or conscience. As it is a blog and not a thesis, the narrator's thoughts and opinions are welcomed, but when it loses its balance, it becomes impossible to know what is honest, what is dishonest, what are accurate appraisals and what are character assassinations.

This is what the more recent posts have become, and thus I treat them as pure fiction. The writing comes off as paranoid and bipolar - sometimes everyone's against him, at other times he is allied with other players against Buchanan and his entourage; sometimes he shows signs of worry, at other times he displays extraordinary confidence and arrogance. Perhaps it's the work of more than one person. Maybe more. But I am almost 100% certain that I will not care much for whomever they are revealed to be, for they have not been truthful to the audience and as such I have never really known them.