28 May 05
I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life paying rent to landlords—and the last eight or so for both a place to live and a studio in which to work. And once again, I’ve been forced to get on the rental house search merry-go-round. I’ve spent a lot of depressing Saturdays looking at overpriced slums, but this morning has the distinction of being the most depressing of them all.
Sydney is a city obsessed with property and obsessed with money. But even I was surprised at the absolute shitboxes some people are attempting to rent at the moment, and the outrageous amounts of money they are asking for them. For a start, prices seem to have jumped 20% in the last nine months. What most amazes me however, is the complete lack of effort these landlords put in to make a house liveable before trying to get tenants. Houses smell, have plaster flaking from the walls, have shoddy built-ins made of unpainted chipboard and interior windows covered with brown paper. And this crap is described as ‘charming’. I saw a tiny passage which would hardly fit a chair described as a ‘study’. I’ve seen bathrooms that you wouldn’t let a dog use. There was a time that some attempt to make a place liveable was necessary to rent it; that time seems to have gone.
Sydney is trapped between obscenely high prices and the lack of a long-term rental culture. And for a couple trying to find a decent house to live in and unwilling to spend the ridiculously huge sums of money needed to buy a place, it’s a getting to be a hard place to live.
Update: Well, that weekend was the proverbial straw; it’s time to give landlords the finger and buy our own place. We’ve already seen the mortagage broker … and it’s not quite as scary as I’d imagined. Now, in defiance of the Sydney zeitgeist, I’ll try not to mention property again.
Opinions
24 May 05
I recently did business with someone on eBay, and in response to a query of mine I received this email reply:
hi peter,
it may b coz u put it thru ova tha w/e it may take 24hrs 2 process from the next working day. i definetely wil let uno wen it comes thru.
thx mel
I’m all for saving a little time when you’re in a hurry, but what’s going on here? When I sent this to a friend of mine who is equally annoyed with the demise of the English language in these times of email and SMS, and he had this to say:
Christ! Is there any genuine saving of time in the typing of this? There’s certainly a sensible diminution of comprehension in the reader!
My brain hurts… just look at this stuff:
‘ova’ hmmm, huge saving of ONE letter there
‘wil’ ditto
‘wen’ I’m seeing a pattern here
There’s not even any consistency, as we find ourselves lurching from “b coz u put it thru ova the w/e” to almost a phrase of complete words: “process from the next working day”. It’s like a beam of sunlight shining through dark and murky clouds.
As for ‘tha’: this person needs to be tied over a barrel and whipped with wet birch branches until they can show evidence of being able to spell. Mind you, with ‘eBay’ spelt that way, it’s no surprise these people are confused.
Bring back compulsory Latin I say.
” … whipped with wet birch branches …” Now that’s English!
Opinions
23 May 05
To paraphrase a friend, what a complete load of Sith. George Lucas fails utterly to pull a rabbit out of his hat for this, the third and last interminable, overblown, badly acted and scripted—and the worst crime of all, boring—episode in the Star Wars merchandising franchise. If this is the future of cinema, God help us. Have a brief look at the fan sites and you’ll discover such hysterical comments as “the best movie I’ve ever seen!” I can only hope that particular kid gets out and sees a few more movies.
I’m waiting for someone to sit through the last three ‘prequels’ and count how many times there is a scene where several of the actors walk through some endless city corridor, or board a spacecraft, while regurgitating the same old dialogue about senates and republics and votes to set up the next video-game-like action sequence. There are so many bad decisions being made here, but let’s start at the place where Lucas should have started, and stayed for a lot longer—the script. Rumour has it Tom Stoppard was drafted in this time around to help with the leaden dialogue; but if so then Tom was having several off days in a row, for there is little improvement. Some scenes, such as when Skywalker goes over to the Dark Side, are frankly laughable; bad writing, wooden acting and even cheesy special effects blending into something that looks like a first year high school film project. Proven professionals—McGregor, Portman, Jackson—are here forced to chew on hackneyed dialogue and work in front of blue screens, and come out looking like friends drafted in as the actors (only Ian McDiarmid manages to inject some much needed ham into his role). I’m not exaggerating that much; the recent fan film Star Wars: Revelations is on par in acting and script quality.
I think one of Lucas’ mistakes is to assume that we like these characters because of their relation to those in the original films. Skywalker, (the young) Kenobi and Padme are cardboard cutouts going through the motions. Unlike the vivid characters of Han Solo, Luke and Leia, with their chemistry, their verbal sparring, their triumphs and tragedies, there is no one here we care about.
But the action, you say, what about the action? Well, there’s plenty of it—plenty of sound and fury, to paraphrase the Bard, signifying nothing. Lucas paints his screen canvas so thickly with frantic detail that the eye isn’t given a moment’s rest. There is no light and shade, no focus or subject, to what is happening on screen. Lucas is like an spoilt kid showing us all his expensive toys; but what happened to the role of a director? A director should expertly control our eye and our emotions. What we here is nothing but a multi-million dollar headache.
I’m giving Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith one star in recognition of all the hard work that so many people lavished on the film, but this last episode is ultimately doomed by its creator’s overweening hubris. Go watch the A New Hope or The Empire Strikes Back again; and dream of what could have been.
One faulty breathing apparatus out of five.
PS Give me the gritty, smartly written, well-acted sci-fi of the new Battlestar Galactica, or Firefly, anyday.
Movies and TV
20 May 05
Saying hello to a turtle. Tortugas Reef, Playa del Carmen, Yucatán, Mexico.
Travel Mexico
20 May 05
Car hood ornament, Puerto Morelos, Yucatán, Mexico.
Travel Mexico
16 May 05
I imagine living with Tori Amos would be an exhausting experience; she comes across as 100% intense, involved, creative—almost not of this earth. I just can’t see her sitting in front of the TV eating takeway in track pants. Which is a shame, as a little more of a human connection would have been just the thing on Saturday night at the Sydney Opera House, where I saw her perform. The concert was intense, but emotional in a detached, ethereal, slightly scary kind of way. And that kind of experience ratcheted up to the top level of intensity for almost two hours can be exhausting, even draining.
As my girlfriend, who is not really a fan, pointed out, one of the best parts of the concert was ‘Tori’s Piano Bar’, where she played a couple of requests previously sent in by fans—in this case Suzanne by Leonard Cohen and Don McLean’s Vincent (Starry Starry Night). Unlike Tori’s songs, these two had room to breathe, and she played them beautifully, her strong voice filling the concert hall and complemented by a restrained but lovely light show.
Her own songs sometimes didn’t fare quite so well, and I missed the grounding prescence that a band usually gives to her sometimes self-indulgent pauses and phrasings. An example was Tear in Your Hand, from her first album Little Earthquakes, which was too drawn out and lost the strength of the original. The new songs from her most recent album The Beekeeper were more effective, perhaps because I have yet to hear the album versions. The eponymous song, in particular, had a wonderful repetitive organ line, which she played in a spotlight like a supplicant at an altar (an impression reinforced by the long flowing white dress and red hair).
There was not an empty seat in the house, and the audience were obviously ecstatic fans—mostly groups of women in their early twenties, I noticed. In fact we must have been one of the rare incidents of a male fan accompanied by a female non-fan. Oh well, I’m a Kate Bush fan too.
Tori’s voice was powerful to the last, hanging in the air at the end of each song; and her playing was amazingly assured and strong. But there was an imaginary wall hanging in the air between performer and audience. That word ‘intense’ keeps coming back to mind. Intensity is a wonderful thing when tempered by contrast, but alone as here, it can drown out the possibility of a real emotional connection.
Four earth mothers out of five (PS Thanks for the tickets babe!).
Music
14 May 05
Gladiator Mark II. Ridley Scott on autopilot. Orlando Bloom commercial. Can you tell I was disappointed with Kingdom of Heaven? After a spectacular trailor I held high hopes for this film, but with the possible exception of some impressive battle scenes, Scott’s new by-the-numbers historical Mills & Boon is a disappointing cinema experience. Sure, as we’ve come to expect from Scott, it looks great. But the casting of wooden Bloom as front-and-centre hero is only one of many flaws.
Orlando Bloom (Balian of Ibelin), whom Peter Jackson had the sense to give very little screentime to in Lord of the Rings, seems to sleepwalk almost every scene in Kingdom of Heaven, like a good-looking extra accidently finding himself promoted to leading actor. Around him old hands like Jeremy Irons (Tiberias) and Liam Neeson (Godfrey of Ibelin) casually chew the scenery, but baby-faced Bloom stares impassively at everyone and everything. No doubt there’s a lot of drama playing out behind those big eyes, but virtually none of it is finding its way to his face. Watching him stirring the defenders of Jerusalem with a rousing speech is nothing short of cringeworthy—not that he is helped by such Shakespearian script nuggets as “Come on! Come on!” “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” this ain’t.
From scene to scene we follow Bloom through virtually the same plotline as Gladiator, tossing aside historical accuracy left and right as he does so, miraculously transforming himself from village blacksmith to engineer, scholar and leader of men in a few months. Of course this isn’t meant to be a documentary, but the history of the Crusades is so full of drama on a personal and epic scale, why did this story have to be dumbed down to such an extent? I suppose we can only be thankful that Scott gives a reasonably accurate depiction of the largely thuggish behaviour of the Christian invaders, and the honourable Saracen leader Saladin (well, at least until he finally got so sick of the Christians continually invading that he was eventually forced to be as brutal as they were).
Kingdom of Heaven is far less than we should expect from a film-maker of Scott’s calibre. Let’s hope he turns off the autopilot next time around and doesn’t churn out Gladiator Mark III.
Two and a half seige towers out of five.
Movies and TV
05 May 05
I haven’t played a game like this in a while—cardboard counters and attack/defense ratios no less! This ol’-fashioned wargame was brought out by Games Workshop in 1993, and it’s been sitting unplayed on my shelf ever since. A friend and I finally gave it a run last night and it turned out to be a lot of fun. For those of you who remember the style, you ‘stack’ cardboard counters with attack, defense and movement numbers on them, and move on a board divided into areas, in a bid to outgun and outwit your opponent. Combat is worked out on a table where you cross-index the attack/defense ratio with a d6 roll. In this case, the whole thing is wrapped up in the atmosphere of a Chaos invasion of a planet and the attempt of the Chaos leader Horus to thow down the Emperor. Goodies versus baddies, in a nutshell.
What makes the game interesting is the way the waves of Chaos attackers land from orbit to batter the Imperial defensive positions. The Horus player has to secure a spaceport or two early on in order to ensure the bad guys keep coming. The Imperials can shelter behind walls and try to wait it out— walls decrease your odds of successfully attacking considerably, and the game is only five turns long—but eventually those waves of attackers are going to topple the walls, so it’s not much of a strategy. The atmosphere is thick, and it’s easy to imagine huge Titan robots battering at the fortifications, and hordes of gibbering creatures pouring through the breaches.
Inevitably a dice-heavy game like this has a high random element, but this was never a game for ‘realistic’ wargamers, just a fun, atmospheric return to those days before miniatures; and to me there’s nothing more enjoyable than a hard-fought game boiling down to a few crucial dice rolls! You may want to institute a few house rules though, especially since the rules are not the clearest. We decided to allow players to set up the order they would receive Special Cards, which give players special abilities, rather than draw them randomly, for example. This means that if Horus gets a lucky hit on the Emperor with a bombardment, the Imperial player could play a Heroic Sacrifice card, throw some poor lackey in to take the bullet, and your game isn’t over before it’s started.
The companion game to Horus Heresy, with similar rules, was called Battle for Armageddon, and rather generously on the part of Games Workshop, it’s available as a free download. So there’s no excuse for not trying it out!
Four Daemon Hordes out of five.
Don’t forget to check out my Horus Heresy Rules Summary and Reference Sheet here.
Board & Miniatures Games
02 May 05
Well, I suppose it’s traditional for every self-respecting Mac-using blogger to make a little post about the OS 10.4 Tiger upgrade, so here’s mine. It didn’t start well—something was wrong with my hard drive, according to Disk Utility, so I had to spend hours backing up my stuff to the other drive and my Powerbook before doing the big Erase. The Tiger installer wasn’t very helpful in working this out of course, simply telling me several times that there was an ‘error’ and to ‘try installing again’. Lucky I know roughly what I’m doing. Now that everything’s shiny clean and fresh though, and my programs are re-installed, I’m impressed. Spotlight is nice (though not quite as responsive as Quicksilver), my G4 starts up twice as fast, and things feel a little snappier (though that could have something to do with the clean install).
Nothing mind-blowing—hey, I already had Dashboard with Konfabulator (damn those guys got ripped off)—but a tasty upgrade nonetheless.
Oh and by the way, you can hear the collective sigh of satisfaction from web designers worldwide—Internet Explorer for the Mac is no longer bundled with the system (though thankfully Microsoft web fonts such as Verdana and Georgia still are). Yippee! To the nethermost pit of damnation with you, damn browser! If you’re using it now, what the hell are you thinking—get rid of it!
Tech Macs
01 May 05
How do you make a comedy funny when everybody knows the jokes? I suppose this was just one of the many challenges faced by the makers of a film version of Douglas Adams’ classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If Adams was still alive, I imagine the solution would be to write a lot of new material in the spirit of the original. There are a few new concepts in this film, but with the possible exception of the creatures that slap you in the face when you have an idea on the Vogon planet, they fall flat.
Adams spent many years trying to make a film version of his hugely popular story, a process he apparently likened to “trying to cook a steak by having a succession of people come into the room and breathe on it”. After seeing this very flat and lifeless film, the steak is still way underdone. The film has a lot of problems: amateurish and uninspired TV-style direction, hammy acting (Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox is especially annoying, and Zooey Deshanel’s Trillian is just—nothing), cheap sets and low production values. The biggest mistake was the desperate attempt to squeeze the original, wandering plotline of the book into a movie-like framework, complete with neat romance arc and ‘watch out for the sequel’ closing dialogue. Instead of plunging head-first into the chaotic madness of the book’s language, the English team try to do an ‘American-style’ film, with predictably tired results—surely past failures like the terrible Mr Bean should have warned them off this approach.
I wanted to like this film, I really did. But Hitchhiker’s is lacking in real inspiration, and ends up only a small cut above the low-budget TV series version. I suggest reading the books again.
One and a half bowls of petunias out of five.
Movies and TV
Recent Comments