Famous, cute, funny, incredibly talented men. What do they do for a living? They are all celebrity chefs! That’s the new craze it seems! At the moment I’m talking about Curtis Stone. Boy, he’s cute. Before him was Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Tetsuya Wakuda, Geoff Jansz.
Since when did we start making celebrities out of chefs?
I think with the recession, most people find it more economical to prepare gourmet delicacies at home, and use that time as family bonding time, rather than splurge away at a fancy restaurant. This also means that even children are now interested in not only helping in the kitchen but are also keenly interested in grocery shopping, price and quality of ingredients, etc.
Shows like Master Chef, Iron Chef and now Celebrity Master Chef - go a step further in glamorising even mundane dishes like omelettes and soups. It’s no longer just about fancy continental dishes, but about doing your best with the least amount of time, and the available ingredients. After all that was the main thread behind Master Chef, right? Now of course, the winner, Julie Goodwin, is a household name here in Australia and is now endorsing products (like GLAD)! You saw that coming, right?
The last time anyone thought cooking was hot (in an erotic sort of way), was perhaps after Penélope Cruz in Woman on Top. Well, it looks like it’s time the ladies take a back seat (or go down under?) and well, the men get on top!! Yikes. Pardon that!
Anyway, I can’t wait to watch Simon Katich in Celebrity Master Chef!
Monday, October 19, 2009
Think TV
Have you seen the two Think TV campaign ads (on Channel 7 I think) about advertising on Free TV? Simply amazing. They are ads that are advertising - advertising on TV (that too Free TV) versus say Pay TV, or even the Internet! Very clever marketing campaign I thought.
Both simple testimonies, first hand accounts from the head honchos of leading Australian companies - John Symond from Aussie (Australia’s mortgage broker) and Gerry Harvey from Harvey Norman (Australian retailer of electronics and household appliances).
The ads provide simple, but startling statistics:
“TV returns 4.5 times its advertising investment.”
“13 million Australians tune into Free TV every day.”
The testimonies themselves are very convincing:
“Why do we advertise on TV? Simple. It works.”
“We can reach millions of people, with our message, every day of the week.”
Finally, the catchphrase:
“For advertising that works, Think TV.”
“To reach more people, Think TV.”
Did we ever think we’d see a day when TV had to advertise itself over some other medium? When TV first came out, it was the evil child - Video Killed the Radio Star (Radio wireless supposedly had killed the newspaper reporter and caused the death of the author!). All this seems so juvenile and obsolete now, compared to the big Internet monster that’s eating up all the advertising revenues and is threatening to engulf traditional journalism with citizen journalism and what not!
Both simple testimonies, first hand accounts from the head honchos of leading Australian companies - John Symond from Aussie (Australia’s mortgage broker) and Gerry Harvey from Harvey Norman (Australian retailer of electronics and household appliances).
The ads provide simple, but startling statistics:
“TV returns 4.5 times its advertising investment.”
“13 million Australians tune into Free TV every day.”
The testimonies themselves are very convincing:
“Why do we advertise on TV? Simple. It works.”
“We can reach millions of people, with our message, every day of the week.”
Finally, the catchphrase:
“For advertising that works, Think TV.”
“To reach more people, Think TV.”
Did we ever think we’d see a day when TV had to advertise itself over some other medium? When TV first came out, it was the evil child - Video Killed the Radio Star (Radio wireless supposedly had killed the newspaper reporter and caused the death of the author!). All this seems so juvenile and obsolete now, compared to the big Internet monster that’s eating up all the advertising revenues and is threatening to engulf traditional journalism with citizen journalism and what not!
What is a Browser?
This video of google’s market research into its target audience’s awareness and technical knowledge is interesting. It does reveal one thing: most people who use technology know nothing about its idiom or terminology. Yes, it is very funny.
Sarasi has discussed the new Google browser, Chrome, in her blog titled Web Wars. Steph has also discussed another variation of this in her blog titled Web 3.0.
But, really, it comes down to what we call, ‘meta’- something. Whether it is metadiscourse, metalanguage, metafiction or metacognition.
So what does this mean?
Take for example metalanguage: it is language about language. It’s what we learn in a traditional English Grammar class. The technical names of the functions and syntax of the language we use everyday.
For example, what is a relative, subordinate, adjectival, non-restrictive/non-defining clause? We use it in our speech and when we write. Take this sentence:
“Andy, who was last in line, missed out on the food.”
Simply put, the part within the commas is the relative, subordinate, adjectival, non-restrictive/ non-defining clause!
Why?
Relative - because it begins with a relative pronoun, who
Subordinate - because it is inferior to the main clause (Andy missing out on the food).
Adjectival - because it describes the noun/subject, Andy
Non-restrictive/ Non-defining - because if the clause (who was last in line) was removed from the sentence, the sentence will still make sense! The noun/subject (Andy) is not restricted by the clause (who was last in line). It is not critical to the meaning of the sentence!
But really, did we need to know all of that to be able to use that sentence while talking to someone or while writing? Do we need to know metalanguage in order to be practitioners of the language? Do we need to know how digestion takes place in order to eat? Do we need to know how the brain stores information in order to be able to think? Do we need to know how fiction works in order to write a great story? I’m not so sure.
So, why is it so important to really know the technical definitions and terms of the technology that we so heavily rely on and know how to use with great ease? Do we really have to know what a browser is or for that matter what an operating system is, in order to be able to use it effectively as a means to an end? It’s a nice to know, not a must, right?
To be or not to be-cause-less
Something I find most remarkable these days is the number of causes there are out there. Think about it. I’m going to try and list some of them. These are by no means exhaustive and all inclusive and the order has no bearing on their importance or hierarchy in my own life or otherwise.
men, women, children - handicapped, war veterans, refugees, displaced, abused, old age, victims of natural disasters
environmental issues - endangered species, scarcity of natural resources, pollution, climate change, global warming, recycling
socio-cultural-political issues - socialism, civil rights, abortion, euthanasia, breast-feeding, drug abuse, smoking, alcoholism, AIDS, cancer, poverty, prostitution, discrimination, death penalty, violence, war, health, homosexuality, genocide, ethnic cleansing, diabetes
There are tons more. They are all further divided and sub-divided. So what happens when ‘the cause’ or the ‘campaign’ reaches a positive conclusion or even worse begins to look like it will never reach a favourable end? Will it be time to take on a new, more worthy ‘cause’? What if I don’t want to be affiliated to any cause? Is it ok to be totally cause-less?
Here’s a hilarious video of the post-Obama cause!
I like the sub-text of the critique hidden in the comments accompanying the video.
Un-fashioning English
I was just reading Geoffrey Nunberg’s Blogging in the Global Lunchroom, where apart from many things he talks about the new parlance of ‘English’ that is in vogue because of activities like SMS, texting, chatting and blogging.
I thought this literary analogy was rather apt. And that’s when I realized the full circle that ‘English’ has really made. I began re-tracking the origins of the English Language.
Really, the politics of the English Language, and it was politics during its foundation years, was all about making the ‘boorish, savage-like, raw, unsophisticated native dialect’ of Angle-Land come on par and compete with other more ‘cultured, historical, fashionable’ languages of the continent like Italian, Latin, Greek and French. English being a language that originated with the Anglo-Saxon tribe was really no match for the superior elite languages of the continent. This being an impediment to England’s commercial enterprise and bargaining power in matters of overseas trade and negotiations in the colonial project, in essence forced Elizabethan court poets like Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser to ‘re-fashion’ the ‘English tongue’, to create ‘courtesy or court protocol for the English Gentlemen’ based on the knights of the roundtable and a concept of ‘Englishness’ or ‘being English’ as opposed to any other ‘European’ culture.
So how did they accomplish all this? Simple. By borrowing heavily from here, there an everywhere! English and all its literary traditions, as we have come to learn and know it, was customised and created out of the scraps and remains of various European languages. Trace the etymology of any ‘English’ word and it has its origins in Latin, French, Greek or Italian.
Anyway, all their pioneering efforts paid off and this new ‘English’ served their socio-economic-political-cultural interests very well, both within England and in international affairs. The project was a great success and the repertoire of the English vocabulary continued to grow ever since.
But today, centuries after all this effort, when English rules the roost, everyone wants to strip it down to its bare minimum! No excesses, pretence and frills. The move now is back to good ole Anglo-Saxon English and not heavy Latinate prose! With the advent of genres like Technical Writing and Web Writing, where one is specifically taught, “use end not terminate; use before not precedes”, clearly marks a move back to the days before the Norman conquest! The new English—a child of the 21 century, an offspring of SMS, blogs, emails—is bare-naked! How ironic, huh?
And just like we thought Shakespearean verse was ‘queer’ and were traumatised at how John Donne could title his poem The Sunne Rising (when MS Word clearly draws an angry red squiggly under ‘sun’ spelt ‘sunne’!), our great grand children when forced to learn the canons of ‘our century’, like Harper Lee, Joyce, Maugham, Forster, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Ayn Rand, Dan Brown, Rowling, Sonya Hartnett, will think the English very ‘queer’ and would probably be better able to identity with the cryptic Anglo-Saxon dialect in Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales! Not so hard to fathom, considering I have friends who scowl when they have to scroll endlessly to read my 850-characters-long SMS, with all words spelt out and not ‘should’ as ‘shd’!
That informal style recalls the colloquial voice that Addison and Steele
devised when they invented the periodical essay in the early 18th century, even
if few blogs come close to that in artfulness. Then too, those essays were
written in the guise of fictive personae like Isaac Bickerstaff and Sir Roger de
Coverly, who could be the predecessors of pseudonymous bloggers like Wonkette, Atrios, or Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, not to mention the mysterious conservative
blogger who goes by the name of Edward
Boyd. 3
I thought this literary analogy was rather apt. And that’s when I realized the full circle that ‘English’ has really made. I began re-tracking the origins of the English Language.
Really, the politics of the English Language, and it was politics during its foundation years, was all about making the ‘boorish, savage-like, raw, unsophisticated native dialect’ of Angle-Land come on par and compete with other more ‘cultured, historical, fashionable’ languages of the continent like Italian, Latin, Greek and French. English being a language that originated with the Anglo-Saxon tribe was really no match for the superior elite languages of the continent. This being an impediment to England’s commercial enterprise and bargaining power in matters of overseas trade and negotiations in the colonial project, in essence forced Elizabethan court poets like Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser to ‘re-fashion’ the ‘English tongue’, to create ‘courtesy or court protocol for the English Gentlemen’ based on the knights of the roundtable and a concept of ‘Englishness’ or ‘being English’ as opposed to any other ‘European’ culture.
So how did they accomplish all this? Simple. By borrowing heavily from here, there an everywhere! English and all its literary traditions, as we have come to learn and know it, was customised and created out of the scraps and remains of various European languages. Trace the etymology of any ‘English’ word and it has its origins in Latin, French, Greek or Italian.
Anyway, all their pioneering efforts paid off and this new ‘English’ served their socio-economic-political-cultural interests very well, both within England and in international affairs. The project was a great success and the repertoire of the English vocabulary continued to grow ever since.
But today, centuries after all this effort, when English rules the roost, everyone wants to strip it down to its bare minimum! No excesses, pretence and frills. The move now is back to good ole Anglo-Saxon English and not heavy Latinate prose! With the advent of genres like Technical Writing and Web Writing, where one is specifically taught, “use end not terminate; use before not precedes”, clearly marks a move back to the days before the Norman conquest! The new English—a child of the 21 century, an offspring of SMS, blogs, emails—is bare-naked! How ironic, huh?
And just like we thought Shakespearean verse was ‘queer’ and were traumatised at how John Donne could title his poem The Sunne Rising (when MS Word clearly draws an angry red squiggly under ‘sun’ spelt ‘sunne’!), our great grand children when forced to learn the canons of ‘our century’, like Harper Lee, Joyce, Maugham, Forster, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Ayn Rand, Dan Brown, Rowling, Sonya Hartnett, will think the English very ‘queer’ and would probably be better able to identity with the cryptic Anglo-Saxon dialect in Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales! Not so hard to fathom, considering I have friends who scowl when they have to scroll endlessly to read my 850-characters-long SMS, with all words spelt out and not ‘should’ as ‘shd’!
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Picturing Melbourne
Note: This is a memoir-like travelogue blog to be part of a website that introduces aspects of Melbourne that will be easily (in terms of cost, time, effort) accessible to and of interest to prospective overseas students or overseas students who have recently come to Melbourne to undertake some form of university education. The site (like the IDP site) will be maintained by the organization that helps overseas students with the application process, etc. The site can be interactive and help students network with others for accommodation, etc. Hence the site can create a community of overseas students. Article contributions can be made by ‘veteran’ overseas students who may need to be given some form of incentive for contributing.
Graffiti at St Kilda junction
(courtesy melbournegraffiti.com)
One of the most striking features while travelling through Melbourne in its extensive public transport system of trains and trams—is the amazing, innovative graffiti. Blinding colours, cryptic words, the choice of typeface and the execution of design: priceless. The artistic endeavour, immediacy, ephemeral nature and comments on political and social change shape the urban landscape of Melbourne. And to imagine that all of it is actually illegal, from an ‘underground youth writing scene’!
Who funds them? What fuels them? Where do they get the paints from? How do they form their communities? What do they paint and why? What does their art say to the world? Myriad questions.
Graffiti at Burnley railway station
(courtesy melbournegraffiti.com)
There have been some prominent books published that document and discuss this subculture:
- Stencil Graffiti Capital Melbourne by Jake Smallman and Carl Nyman (2005)
- Uncommissioned Art: An A–Z of Australian Graffiti by Christine Dew (2007)
- Kings Way: The Beginnings of Australian Graffiti: Melbourne 1983–93 by Duro Cubrilo, Martin Harvey and Karl Stamer (2009). Recently, the Melbourne Writers Festival 2009 had a session, ‘Old Skool Graffiti’, to discuss the “New York City hip-hop phenomenon [that] left its mark on Australian walls” elaborated in the book.
From the many websites that discuss Melbourne’s graffiti, melbournegraffiti.com is perhaps the most comprehensive and well catalogued. There are archives of almost all the stencil art in Melbourne’s suburbs. They are organized based on the area, the artist, the type of art, etc. Many of the artists have been interviewed. However, they prefer to work behind veils of secrecy, about their inspiration, motivation and techniques. The site also has links to any news article related to Melbourne’s graffiti, appearing in any news publication, recorded from the year 2001.
A cursory glance at the various headlines about Melbourne’s graffiti that made it to any newspaper provides for a very interesting study of the evolution of the journey of Melbourne’s graffiti culture from its inception to the present day. Given the nature of the debates and the topic itself, some of the headlines are rather creative:
12.08.2006 - Drawing on their talents - The Age
10.08.2006 - City lets them spray - Herald Sun
04.07.2006 - If you spray, you pay - Herald Sun
17.02.2006 - Let us spray - Herald Sun
14.02.2006 - Problem brushed aside - Waverley Leader
23.01.2006 - Ugly picture of delays - Herald Sun
12.09.2005 - Police seek powers to answer scrawl of the wild - The Age
27.07.2005 - Good Wall Hunting - Herald Sun (ET)
04.03.2005 - The writing's on the wall for city's graffiti zone - The Age
I love the way this video zooms in to place the graffiti scene in Melbourne!
The graffiti scene has attracted a lot of attention to itself from the general public, the media, politicians, law and order enforcement, policy makers of urban planning and academics of sociology, anthropology, urban culture.
The often-heard debates around this potent art form is about the nature of the art itself—is it freedom of expression through art OR is it degradation and vandalism of public (tax payers’) property in the name of art?
Most municipal councils continue to take a repressive stance towards graffiti. There are a whole range of laws to penalise graffiti artists. So, I’m curious to know the general public’s views about graffiti in Melbourne. Do they appreciate the diversity and complexity of types of graffiti, and their importance as a contemporary cultural practice? I’m still not sure which I swing. But I think I maybe inclined to just revel in the art for now... It does remind me of the graphic satires of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
References:
Old Skool Graffiti in the Melbourne Writers Festival
melbournegraffiti.com
Da’ Hub
Melbourne Stencil Festival
Melbourne Graffiti Walks
Links
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Defining "Australian"
Note: An article with an Australian perspective in a series dealing with neo-realism in cinema, across the world OR as a blog comment for About “Neo-Neo Realism” in The New Yorker
I recently saw two critically acclaimed Australian films, Wake in Fright and Last Ride, at Cinema Nova, in Lygon Street, Melbourne. Just a few hours before my first ever flight to Australia, I happened to watch Wolf Creek.
In totality, these films had a profound effect on me; an effect that made me consciously think about the reasons behind why such films get made and distributed, their overall domestic and international appeal and their impact on national identity as viewed internally and by the outside world.
That's when the connection occured to me - a counter-flow of Edward Said's Orientalism. Put in a nutshell, this theory proposed that the Western world at large, particularly former occidental colonizer nations forged a specific construct of the East that benefitted the colonial project.
However, even now, years after the colonization has officially ended, the problems caused by these artificially fabricated oriental stereotypes continue to haunt and overshadow the experiences of a large number of people from the East. A fairly large number of people from the West continue to assume certain attributes of anyone from the East based on these rather archaic misguided pre-conceived notions.
When I heard accounts of this from others, I always did take it with a large grain of salt. However, having been in the occident for a few months now, I have had similar experiences. My customers where I work listen to me talk and almost immediately glance at my name badge and then look at me and realize that I’m not from "here". They are curious to know where I am "originally" from and how long I’ve been in the "here". I tell them. Upon hearing that I’ve only been "here" for 3 months, their immediate response always, always is, "Oh, but your English is very good". The first time I heard it, I was dumbfounded (I’m very rarely speechless.) It took me a few months and several repetitions of this incident to come to terms with it and now I just laugh it off with, "Thanks, so is yours!" I was not amused at all, however, when a classmate expressed the same doubts in my Publishing and Editing Masters program at University!!
But, then I did some more thinking and realized that it IS actually mutual—the creation and perpetration of cultural stereotypes. No, it’s not just the occident dishing it out to the orient. Counter-flows are plenty.
What do most people who have never been to Australia think of Australia? Sunshine, vegemite, sports, outdoors, wildlife, flora and fauna, beer, bbqs, humour and English accent that is markedly different from British or American sensibilities. That pretty much sums up Australia for the very average person from the orient and perhaps even elsewhere in the world.
These rather one-dimensional, insular ideas are also perpetrated very often by popular media and cinema. While films like Muriel’s Wedding, Crocodile Dundee, The Castle, television shows like Kath and Kim, work together to create a specific idea of the Australian experience and life, films like Wake in Fright, Last Ride and perhaps even Wolf Creek, do exactly the opposite; they create contrasts, add depth and dimension to the populist, broad generalised notion about Australia.
Surreal, neorealist cinema is perhaps the only way out; the only way to strive to achieve a semblance of balance in creating depth and adding a variety of dimensions to singular populist notions one culture has about another.
A glimpse of some of the scenes of each of these films, clearly illustrates this contrast in identity formation.
Digital Restoration of Wake in Fright
Trailer of Last Ride
Trailer of Muriel's Wedding
Scene from The Castle
I recently saw two critically acclaimed Australian films, Wake in Fright and Last Ride, at Cinema Nova, in Lygon Street, Melbourne. Just a few hours before my first ever flight to Australia, I happened to watch Wolf Creek.
In totality, these films had a profound effect on me; an effect that made me consciously think about the reasons behind why such films get made and distributed, their overall domestic and international appeal and their impact on national identity as viewed internally and by the outside world.
That's when the connection occured to me - a counter-flow of Edward Said's Orientalism. Put in a nutshell, this theory proposed that the Western world at large, particularly former occidental colonizer nations forged a specific construct of the East that benefitted the colonial project.
However, even now, years after the colonization has officially ended, the problems caused by these artificially fabricated oriental stereotypes continue to haunt and overshadow the experiences of a large number of people from the East. A fairly large number of people from the West continue to assume certain attributes of anyone from the East based on these rather archaic misguided pre-conceived notions.
When I heard accounts of this from others, I always did take it with a large grain of salt. However, having been in the occident for a few months now, I have had similar experiences. My customers where I work listen to me talk and almost immediately glance at my name badge and then look at me and realize that I’m not from "here". They are curious to know where I am "originally" from and how long I’ve been in the "here". I tell them. Upon hearing that I’ve only been "here" for 3 months, their immediate response always, always is, "Oh, but your English is very good". The first time I heard it, I was dumbfounded (I’m very rarely speechless.) It took me a few months and several repetitions of this incident to come to terms with it and now I just laugh it off with, "Thanks, so is yours!" I was not amused at all, however, when a classmate expressed the same doubts in my Publishing and Editing Masters program at University!!
But, then I did some more thinking and realized that it IS actually mutual—the creation and perpetration of cultural stereotypes. No, it’s not just the occident dishing it out to the orient. Counter-flows are plenty.
What do most people who have never been to Australia think of Australia? Sunshine, vegemite, sports, outdoors, wildlife, flora and fauna, beer, bbqs, humour and English accent that is markedly different from British or American sensibilities. That pretty much sums up Australia for the very average person from the orient and perhaps even elsewhere in the world.
These rather one-dimensional, insular ideas are also perpetrated very often by popular media and cinema. While films like Muriel’s Wedding, Crocodile Dundee, The Castle, television shows like Kath and Kim, work together to create a specific idea of the Australian experience and life, films like Wake in Fright, Last Ride and perhaps even Wolf Creek, do exactly the opposite; they create contrasts, add depth and dimension to the populist, broad generalised notion about Australia.
Surreal, neorealist cinema is perhaps the only way out; the only way to strive to achieve a semblance of balance in creating depth and adding a variety of dimensions to singular populist notions one culture has about another.
A glimpse of some of the scenes of each of these films, clearly illustrates this contrast in identity formation.
Digital Restoration of Wake in Fright
Trailer of Last Ride
Trailer of Muriel's Wedding
Scene from The Castle
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)