Do look up now ... the new year approaches ...

 

 

So the pond is done with travelling for the moment, but still hasn't plucked up the courage to return to the reptiles and its herpetological studies.

The pond did think of becoming a PhD candidate at the University of Facebook, formerly known as Trump University (see Twitter on how to join the study program).

Instead the pond decided to continue the alternative thread of movie reviewing with a Netflix show the pond actually liked - a novelty so rare and exciting that for only the second time ever did the pond give a Netflix show an uptick (the first was for the Coen brothers' Ballad of Buster Scruggs).

The plot for Don't Look Up is very very Brad "we're all going to catch it, we're all going to die" Hazzard …

 

 

What a first class nihilist anarchist gherkin he is, a real waste hazard ... but on with the main feature ...

There's more than a whiff of Dr Strangelove about it, a hint of Mars Attacks!, and a few other Brad haphazard satires.

Speaking of Kubrick, Bernard Keane reached for him when scribbling about Scotty from marketing and saying Australia in 2021 was worthy of Stanley … featuring Iron Pyrites' standard Dom ...the "personal responsibility" man, disinclined to resign though personally responsible for sundry and several disasters ...

...With a prime minister unable to lead when he has no corporate donors to dictate policy, the burden of leadership has fallen on the states — on vaccination, on public health, on climate and energy, on tax reform, even fiscally, with NSW and Queensland heading back to surplus and Victoria to minimal deficit by the middle of the decade, while the Commonwealth balance sheet remains awash in red.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet now talks of a states-led reform agenda in which the Commonwealth is a bit-player, a prominent “wasn’t that X from that show?” cameo. What was once a mostly arcane debate about federalism, centralisation and states’ powers has transformed into a very real shift of power, driven by the principle that nature abhors a vacuum, and particularly a grinning, babbling nullity like Morrison, presiding over a new era of big but pointless government, all cashed up but unable to lead.
Like the good Jungian he was, Kubrick was obsessed with the shadow self, and his films are littered with them, always men, stalked by the parts of themselves they deny and fear, sometimes triumphing over them, though never without compromise and ambivalence, and sometimes succumbing to them, like Jack Torrance, always the caretaker at the Overlook, eternally beaming from the photo on the wall.
Australia ended up governed by our shadow self, with Scott Morrison embodying the laziness, emptiness and small-mindedness we like to pretend we’ve left behind. In this movie, the final, trademark Kubrickian stare is of Morrison smirking out at us forever from our screens, the shadow self triumphant. He’s always been prime minister. No need for a coup when our worst impulses occupy the highest offices in the land.

To back up his Kubrickian despair, the keen Keane went on an extended rant:

…Let’s reel off the greatest hits — led inevitably by a badly botched vaccination rollout predicated on stuffing up both the sourcing and the rollout (privatised, natch) such that state governments had to step in and do the Commonwealth’s work for it.
JobKeeper — a triumph of government waste that added several zeros to the much-heralded “debacle” of the Rudd stimulus program.
The toxic work environment of Parliament — particularly that of the ministerial wing, where an alleged rape victim is a “lying cow” and the cesspit that is the prime minister’s own office badmouths her partner, where anonymous donors are welcome to hand you hundreds of thousands of dollars, and staffers are for kicking out of bed in a rage.
Such was the decline in basic governing skills that Morrison couldn’t even mount his own culture war — the sort of thing John Howard could do in his green-and-gold tracksuited sleep — with a religious discrimination bill grinding to a halt in his own partyroom (rather like how Morrison claimed electric vehicles work?).
For that matter, by the end of the year even legislating the simplest measures became an unachievable feat for Morrison.
There’s only one facet of governing that Morrison can do well, and it’s the easiest one of all — spending money. If the fiscal faucets need opening, plumbers Scott ‘n’ Josh will be there in a trice to get the dollars gushing — usually in the direction of business rather than voters.
In another of those moments that make you double-check what you’re reading because what you’re reading is so absurd, we now have the biggest government since John Curtin was in the Lodge, to the blithe indifference of most of the commentariat. The party that continues to insist it’s all about small government and low taxes is running the biggest operation in three-quarters of a century, and will be for years to come.
Admittedly, even here, the standard level of competence applies — most of the rorted car park money from 2019 remains unspent years later, with a strong chance many of the projects won’t start before Alan Tudge’s ministerial career is over. When you can’t even spend money, you might need to find a different job than pork-barrelling.
As for complex policy issues, well, you don’t even need to ask, do you? Any energy or climate policy not written by the fossil fuel industry was a debacle — witness CoalKeeper, the Angus Taylor jape in which every household would pay an electricity tax to prop up coal-fired power stations to keep burning coal even when no one needed their power. That got a decidedly frosty reception from the states, and the “triumph” (thank you, press gallery) of Morrison’s net zero commitment, which magically needed no policy changes of any kind, just a sunny (though not solar-powered, please) optimism that some techy thing would show up.
Or there was the truly inspired moment of madcap military manoeuvres, when Morrison hit upon the one solitary way to make the Coalition’s own Naval Group submarine contract even worse — cancel it, lying to the French along the way, and vaguely commit to look at nuclear submarines from the Brits or the Americans. One can only imagine the bright spark in the PMO checking off the list of requirements for this exercise: later — check. More expensive — check. Less local content — check. Can’t be serviced here — check. You don’t need to think it’s a terrible decision — you know.

Okay, okay, it's lazy blogging, but the pond couldn't be stuffed doing a survey of 2021. 

Here, have a cartoon showing a keen spirit ...

 

Enough of the keen Keane and SloMo and back to the main feature, and inevitably the show has produced mixed reactions, amidst heaps of coverage of the kind to be expected when the dentist gives exposed nerves a prod ...

 

 

 

 

The pond can't possibly cover all that, and will settle for a response of the fuckwitted kind, as delivered by Charles Bramesco, wherein a deep lack of a sensa huma is on display …

...Fingers point in every direction, only for the blame to boomerang back to the mindset this film embodies. The easy potshots at celebrity culture and our fixation on it – mostly in the form of a bubbleheaded pop star named Riley Bina, played by good sport Ariana Grande – ring hollow in a production packed to bursting with attention-grabbing A-listers. The big bad media proves unhelpful, more interested in salacious clickbait than honest reportage, though the script also relies on the mass communication machine as the one thing capable of turning the tide of public opinion. Most damningly smug of all is McKay’s idea of reg’lar folks, from Dibiasky’s center-right parents (“We’re in favor of the jobs the comet will create,” they inform her before allowing her in the house) to the veteran tapped to pilot the hail-mary mission in space (Ron Perlman as a racist drunkard who addresses “both kinds” of Indians, “the ones with the elephants and the ones with the bow and arrows”).

And so on and on, though the pond can't be bothered to quote more.

Ouch. Clearly that portrait of fuckwitted reporters tracking their clicks clearly hurt …but ain't it grand to know that Bramesco cares deeply for your average Trumpist and their hurt feelings?

Of course the header "Why star-studded comet satire Don't Look Up is a disaster" header shows the sort of monstrous black and white carry on you expect in the age of Twitter, all the more remarkable for appearing in the Graudian. It's the sort of response that invites a snappy Twitter critique: "why the pimple-faced stupidity of Charles Bramesco is a disaster."

Meanwhile, in the Graudian, an actual climate scientist appeared to share a few thoughts, though really the comet satire could just as easily be applied to the Brads and Karens of the world, and their reaction to the virus and masks and ... oh fuck it, the pond just remembered that soon it will be back to reading Killer Creighton … 

The movie Don’t Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen.
The film, from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet – a “planet killer” – that will impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as certain as just about anything in science.
The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Diabasky, on national TV, screams “Are we not being clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.
The two astronomers are given a 20-minute audience with the president (Meryl Streep), who is glad to hear that impact isn’t technically 100% certain. Weighing election strategy above the fate of the planet, she decides to “sit tight and assess”. Desperate, the scientists then go on a national morning show, but the TV hosts make light of their warning (which is also overshadowed by a celebrity breakup story).
By now, the imminent collision with comet Diabasky is confirmed by scientists around the world. After political winds shift, the president initiates a mission to divert the comet, but changes her mind at the last moment when urged to do so by a billionaire donor (Mark Rylance) with his own plan to guide it to a safe landing, using unproven technology, in order to claim its precious metals. A sports magazine’s cover asks, “The end is near. Will there be a Super Bowl?”

And so on … proving that one loon's disaster is another person's rich anarchic satire. 

Writer/director McKay even manages to work in an evangelical Xian who enjoins the doomed family in a prayer, as if that would put the pond off, but it didn't, though it did rescue Chalamet from the doom of Dune and the pond did catch up on the thinking in Variety:

...Randall calls for a prayerful moment, despite their not being religious. Which is when Yule takes over, delivering a blessing, and asking for God to soothe them.
McKay, whose mother was a born-again Christian, said it was that scene that hooked Chalamet.
“I was talking to Chalamet about maybe doing this little part, because we’ve wanted to work together,” he said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if there’s enough there.’” McKay didn’t disagree. But then, McKay said, “Don’t Look Up” co-producer (and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist) Ron Suskind, asked him “Where’s faith in this movie?
“And I was like, ‘Oh, you’re right. You’re right!’” McKay said. “I think we’re so used to thinking of religion as denominations, and now it’s become a political cudgel in this country. I forgot about real faith. And it was just a lightbulb moment where it’s like, ‘I know who Timothée’s character is.’” With the addition of Chalamet’s Yule, McKay said, “the team was complete.”
“And that might be my single favorite moment in the entire movie,” McKay added.

As for the rest, the pond is content to note that in terms of movie-making the film has some richly funny moments. 

Meryl Streep is over the top in her usual way, but then she is playing Donald Trump … and she meets a most satisfying end. So does her chief of staff son (Jonah Hill in fine form), a combination of Don Jr and the emotionally needy Eric, bleating for a hug from his dad … 

Cate Blanchett does a fine impression of a voracious Fox and Friends host, the only implausible element being her racially diverse TV partner. (Perhaps that's why Den of Geeks thinks she and Tyler Perry's Jack Bremmer really belong on MSNBC, and Blanchett took her cues from Morning Joe's Mika).

There's more than a hint of Network here, though this time social media and the University of Facebook also come in for a pummeling. 

There are some tidy cameos - the pond never thought it would enjoy a moment in the company of Ariana Grande-Butera but Don't Look Up shows that it's possible.

No doubt there will be some who get an anxiety attack about Leonardo DiCaprio being in the show - the pond would usually share the anxiety - but he and Jennifer Lawrence are fine, and provide a nice centre for the absurdities that explode around them. 

The pond particularly enjoyed the work of Mark Rylance, sending up the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos shitless (yes there are penis-shaped rockets to see), and his character shares the same happy ending as Meryl Streep's.

As usual, the pond is late to the controversy, and doesn't suggest you take out a Netflix subscription to see two movies, but does note that David Vetter got it about right in Why Sneering Critics Dislike Netflix's 'Don't Look Up,' But Climate Scientists Love It:

Netflix’s Don’t Look Up, which released on Christmas Eve, is not a subtle movie. It is a brash, absurdist satire about the incapability of our political and media classes to respond appropriately to impending, world-ending disaster. Throughout its 2 hour, 25 minute runtime, writers Adam McKay and David Sirota repeatedly and angrily skewer the personalities and the structures that help prevent our status-infatuated, profit-obsessed society from taking climate change seriously. It does this whilst being extremely funny.
You would be forgiven for thinking that a snarky, star-studded comedy about a real-world, manmade crisis would be gobbled up by mainstream movie critics. But you’d be wrong. At the time of writing, Don’t Look Up had a decidedly mixed score of 55% on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.
Why?
Criticisms of Don’t Look Up seem to boil down to two main themes: Firstly, it makes for uncomfortable viewing. The film is “blunt” (according to David Fear in Rolling Stone), “shrill” (Samuel R. Murrian, Parade Magazine) and “self-conscious and unrelaxed” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian). Luke Goodsell of ABC News Australia believes the director, Adam McKay, “just doesn't know how to let people enjoy things—even if it is their own destruction.” In these critics’ views, it’s fine to make movies about the climate crisis—just as long as you do so in a way that soothes and placates the viewer. You must under no account employ “bombastic, shake-you-by-the-shoulders direction” (Simran Hans, The Observer).
Secondly, critics appear to be worried that the film is making fun of people—and that perhaps they might be among the targets.
“McKay has made it inescapably clear that, no matter who you are ... he is serenely confident that he is much smarter than you are,” opines Tim Brayton of Alternate Ending. “Yelling ‘Look at all the dumb-dumbs’ cannot be the basis for successful satire,” cries a pearl-clutching Fletcher Powell of KMUW Wichita Public Radio. Tim Grierson at Screen International says the director takes “a smug, self-satisfied approach [that] proves insufficient at addressing the legitimate woes at the core of this picture.”
It’s unclear which characters these offended writers are identifying with, or which audiences they are being offended on behalf of, but the film has clearly hurt some feelings. Why do the critics—a community famously never given to snobbery or condescension—feel condescended to? Perhaps they believe they would be better climate communicators than the filmmakers. Indeed, Matthew Lucas, on his blog From the Front Row, says, “This isn't just a noble failure, it’s a flat out bad film, an attempt to address a very real planetary crisis in the simplest and most misguided terms.” Don’t Look Up is guilty of “lofty superiority that would drive away any partisans who still need to be won over,” writes Charles Bramesco in The Guardian, with an air of lofty superiority.
The haughty reception for Don’t Look Up from the showbiz media contrasts starkly with the reaction from the community on which the film’s heroes are based: the climate scientists. And if Don’t Look Up is infuriating to watch, it is because it does a pitch-perfect job of channeling climate experts’ weary frustration at being ignored…

Well yes, that damned air of lofty superiority and the inordinately stupid Charles Bramesco scoring yet another mention ...

Let us not speak of Luke Goodsell, who is clearly a totally unique twit, and has copped a pounding from those who enjoyed the movie.

Instead if you want more in the same vein, you can head off to Current Affairs, including this (the original has the typographical lack of subtlety devotees of the movie expect):

...I almost didn’t see Netflix’s satirical asteroid-bound-for-earth movie Don’t Look Up, because the reviews were mixed, and many said it was a heavy-handed political satire that made obvious points and was not clever. Since I find nothing more painful to sit through than bad political comedy, I thought I should give Don’t Look Up a miss. I decided to watch it when I saw that leftist investigative journalist David Sirota (a former Current Affairs podcast guest) had co-written the story. I know that Sirota is not stupid. (His 2006 book Hostile Takeover remains the single best one-volume debunking of pro-corporate talking points that I have found.) If he was involved with writing a Netflix comedy, I thought it would at least be not completely terrible.
In fact, I really enjoyed Don’t Look Up. More importantly, I came away thinking that its critics were not only missing the point of the film in important ways, but that the very way they discussed the film exemplified the problem that the film was trying to draw attention to. Some of the responses to the movie could have appeared in the movie itself.

Well yes, Goodsell and Bramesco could easily have made the cut if McKay hadn't had more interesting things to crack jokes about ...

And so on, and on, and back in the day, the pond can remember being cast into the outer circles of Dante's hell by assorted film buffs for daring to like shows of the Starship Troopers and Mars Attacks! kind.

All the raw nerves on display suggest that that dentist McKay knew how to set a few off.

Even if you're not a climate scientist, at the least it's a great guilty pleasure and a splendid way to enter into the new year with Brad "we're all going to get it and die" Hazard. 

Yes, the pond thinks this is the correct spelling, quite unique* in its own way ...  and takes personal responsibility for it (*ABC24 licensed - they did it again this very bloody morning, in their totally unique way).

Take it away SloMo, give us a quote, and maybe we can have a graph:

 

 

Ah, we're not seeing it in the Covid hospitalisations routine.

If only McKay could see his way to doing a satirical comedy down under. 

Back on topic, Vetter could probably have just said that movie reviewers in general are a bunch of needy wankers and tossers, always scribbling away in the dark, deeply aware of the futility of their meaningless lives, knowing they'll never get to make a movie … and even if they do, the pointlessness of their attempt at a movie satire will underwhelm bitter, resentful, envious reviewers sitting in the dark, keen to pounce and dismiss the efforts of their one-time companions as a waste of screen space. (Okay, okay, confession time, the pond once reviewed movies).

And with that the pond ends its vacation posting, and will take a few days off, before daring to look up, resuming its herpetological studies in the new year, if only to see the Murdochian comet getting closer by the day …

All the best for that new year, and here's a few jolly cartoons to usher it in, beginning with a last seasonal reference …

 

 

In which the pond continues its travel and other studies, with herpetological duties scheduled to resume in the new year ...

 

 

The pond, continuing in its travelogue vein, sans reptiles and herpetological studies, couldn't help but note what a sad and sorry town Gundagai has become over the years ...

The pond always stops in the town, but each year the cafe that always reminded the pond of the glory days of the Greek cafes of Tamworth and Gunnedah sits in sombre silence, a shadow, rather like the few ancient picture palaces that can still be found in odd locations ...

 

 

 

 

Of course there's a sign in the window promising that the glory days will soon return ...

 

 

 

Soooon!?? That sign has been there for yonks, if the pond might drop into its Sloane Ranger argot.

For years, the cafe dined out on having hosted Ben Chifley for a meal, but now the only dining to be done is by way of a sign ...

 

 

 

 

Many other buildings are closed, abandoned, verging on the derelict, as with one very forlorn looking ex-hotel, though the odd curiosity remains, such as the town museum - though it was closed the day the pond visited, and who knows if it's still working ...

 

 

Fifteen bucks for a family, when really that exotic conjunction of  dinkum cottage and ancient civilisation was free for all to see ...

 

 

Was there any need to see more? How could the pond movie past that majestic portico?

The pond can't remember how many bets it has won regarding the distance of the dog on the tucker box from Gundagai - people tend to think the now largely ignored statue out of town was the correct distance - but again the museum gave away the figure featured in the original poem ...

 

 

 

There was also a plaque on view on the front wall ...

 

 

 

That reminded the pond of a discussion, call it an argument if you will, that took place over the seasonal break. 

The pond was advised, in one of the usual gatherings of assorted clans, that the past should be forgotten and forgiven, so we can all move forward together. 

Invasion day, under the patriotic label of Australia day, was cited as an example, with the pond noting that there were still a few people with reason not to celebrate the day, what with dispossession, genocide, terra nullius, a couple of centuries of abuse, degradation, stolen children, and so on and so forth …

The pond pointed out that the obvious day to celebrate Australia was the day of the actual creation of Australia, namely 1st January, but of course there's a big problem right from the get go with that notion. 

We already have an excuse for a public holiday that day, so we'd prefer to allocate another holiday for the celebration ... and so we started out with state colonist day, or if you will, NSW colonist day …

The pond also noted that the day has been contested, though it didn't go so far as to resort to the day's wiki … though as we're here now, why not?

Although it was not known as Australia Day until over a century later, records of celebrations on 26 January date back to 1808, with the first official celebration of the formation of New South Wales held in 1818...

Yes, it was NSW day, cockroach day if you will, which only counts as Australia Day in the minds of people happy to be considered new Welshpersons dwelling in the south... 

And there are other confusions to note ...

On New Year's Day 1901, the British colonies of Australia formed a federation, marking the birth of modern Australia. A national day of unity and celebration was looked for. It was not until 1935 that all Australian states and territories adopted use of the term "Australia Day" to mark the date, and not until 1994 that the date was consistently marked by a public holiday on that day by all states and territories

It has been a moveable feast, as anyone with an interest in history knows, and with historians eager to trot out assorted ironic images ...

 

 

What else?

Well the pond has also been noting the decline and fall of cinemah, but on the occasion of the grave-snatching known as the latest re-boot of The Matrix, the pond will leave it to Kermode and Mayo to have a word on YouTube. 

Kermode is inclined to be a garrulous enthusiast, but the pond shares his taste for Paul Thomas Anderson and is looking forward to Licorice Pizza, and who could argue with Kermode proposing that only one Matrix movie has been made, and the rest are just phantoms of the silver screen, a miasmic mishmash of surfaces? Or words and concepts to that effect ...

As for paying attention to political knaves, the pond has only intermittently glanced at headlines, though it was deeply moved to spot a little example of cancel culture at work ...

 

 

 

Robert is by far the dumbest of the SloMo ministry, only kept in cabinet because he's a clap happy fundie of the SloMo kind.

He's a walking disaster area, but he bounces back time and again, like Cats the movie, or Spielberg somehow getting the money to fuck over West Side Story ...

His wiki has a list of blunders and errors and stupidities, but a nanosecond's googling will produce heaps more ...

For once the pond could breathe a sigh of relief. No need to read stupid reptiles defending a stupid clap happy ...just the irony of the cancel culture clowns doing a little cancelling of culture was more than enough holiday comedy.

There was a particularly nauseating speech made by SloMo, in full here ...

Inter alia ...

And so I want to talk about a topic tonight that is dear to your hearts - community. Community of individuals, we heard it on the video, a nation of individuals.
Now, as some of you may know and as Steven has mentioned, I have been deeply influenced in recent years by the writings of the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and Julian is responsible for that, because he has thrust Jonathan Sacks works into the arms of anyone who he can get a book into the hands of, rightly so and I am very grateful that he did.
On one occasion, he said because I was consuming this, that you’d better be careful, you might become Australia’s first Jewish prime minister. And I said, don’t tell Josh.
But his books Lessons in Leadership, Covenant and Conversation, and Morality, his last work, have given me a more textured understanding of Judaism, my own Christian faith and what unites us all as human beings. I shared some of these learnings with my own church community last week at the Gold Coast with Stuart Robert at their national conference.
In his works, Rabbi Sacks wrestles, a bit like Jacob, wrestles with the practical complexities of our modern pluralistic world and finds, through the tenets of his faith, as he did, a pathway to the common good.
At the heart of our Judeo-Christian heritage are two words.
Human dignity.
Everything else flows from this.
Seeing the inherent dignity of all human beings is the foundation of morality. It makes us more capable of love and compassion, of selflessness and forgiveness.
Because if you see the dignity and worth of another person, another human being, the beating heart in front of you, you’re less likely to disrespect them, insult or show contempt or hatred for them, or seek to cancel them, as is becoming the fashion these days.
You’re less likely to be indifferent to their lives, and callous towards their feelings...
 

All the usual bullshit from a consummate bullshit artist. So here's your human dignity, love, compassion, selflessness and forgiveness, and seeing the dignity and worth of another person, another human being, a beating heart ... waiter, the pond needs a second puke bucket, there's too much puke for one bucket to handle...

 

 

 More from men in search of complimentary women here ...

What else?

Well the pond wasn't deeply moved by Crikey pronouncing Scotty from marketing the arsehat of the year ... the pond would only have been astonished if he'd lost.

But the pond did shed a quiet tear reading Leslie's open letter to the chairman. 

It's outside the paywall here, but for anyone who missed it, this will give the flavour of what happened to her dad after overdosing on the poison called Fox ...

 ...the person he’s become, Rupert, is so unfamiliar and hard to deal with. If he wasn’t my dad I’d be keeping the same distance adopted by his former friends and golf buddies who, my brother says, got so sick of Dad’s constant political aggression — even after they all agreed not to discuss current events any more — they dropped him.
My stepfather almost did the same the other day after yet another pugnacious assertion by my father of a false fact, this time that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
“Why is he even talking about Obama?” I asked when my brother called to tell me about the near implosion of my extended family in Boynton Beach.
“Who knows? But I told him 'Dad, if you don’t stop talking about politics, you’re going to lose what’s left of your friends.’”
But my father can’t stop because he can’t bring himself to stop watching Fox News and compulsively regurgitating its content…
...I've tried everything to return the soul of the man I once knew to the void beneath his skin; ignoring him, reasoning with him and trying to distract. But this holiday season I’ve suddenly accepted I just can’t win. Fox News is more present than I am in his life, and the way it’s taught him to “think” and what he’s come to believe is true has made him a citizen of a planet of resentful unreason where I can’t — and won’t — follow.
No one will, not even my brother who loves him more than anything in the world, which means he’s been left there on his own, destroying his legacy as a person as he stamps his foot and says mean and silly things.
So, here’s to you Rupert. For what your evil disinformation empire has unleashed on the most precious things in this world: the love of family and the freedom guaranteed by democracy. As we head towards the close of another difficult year on Earth One, I hope life in the alternative reality your fact-free infotainment complex has created — and the jangle of coin in your pocket — is worth it.

The pond thinks that chairman Rupert probably prefers the jingle of coins in pocket, in keeping with the Xmas season ...

It made the pond pause. Did the pond really want to get back into the cesspit of the lizard Oz, kissing cousins to Faux Noise?

With a shudder, the pond realised it was likely, and it got the pond to thinking that at some point it would have to abandon its travels and resume herpetological studies. 

There was the weekend of course, prime time for reptiles, but the pond felt a deep, overwhelming sense of fatigue and foreboding, and given the pond's notes on Australia Day, it would be too ironic to start on the Monday, the 3rd being New Year's Day holiday and all ...

That might missing the Major and the gang, but the thought cheered the pond up ... it wouldn't have to think about SloMo, and Iron Pyrites' standard Dom or reptile defences thereof until the Tuesday ...

And with the spring back in the pond's step, a few cartoons to end on ...

A few images to farewell the season ...

 

Now that the Xmas season has gone for another year, the pond would like to celebrate some images of the season.

Even the introduction shows the right spirit: I fucking live for unhinged Victorian Christmas cards. Some years I just share the terror with friends, and others I choose to spread the chaos. This year I pick the latter.

You can find the full collection in cache here, or on Twitter here ...

Victorians - not necessarily the ones the pond visited, more the period ones - had a deeply morbid sense of humour. As the pond spent some time reading the diaries of Beatrice Webb over the break (what a tortured soul), it felt an affinity with the images.

There's something for everyone, starting with neo-Nazi birds on the march, and going from there ...

In which the pond says farewell to travel and film blog, and the citizenry of the south ...

 

The pond realises it should be using its precious holyday seasonal time to celebrate the splendid example set the country by the likes of Iron Pyrites' standard Dom, and dog-nauseating TikTok hypocrite SloMo ...

But this is a travel blog now, at least until the New Year, and so the pond has been scouring rustic regional Victoria for splendid sightings. 

Alas and alack, where the pond has landed only offers examples of the weirdly optimistic ...

... as if the postal service was still a thing ... 

Or even sadder, rusting dreams by the side of abandoned rail lines ...

The pond did have a moment when it thought of beefy boofhead Angus, what with being confronted by the sight of hysterical, wild-eyed cows running about in fear and loathing, trapped beneath a wind farm ...

The pond managed to take a snap of the bewildered, agitated bovine in a deep panic, and wondered if the beefy Angus might turn up to save them ...

CU if you will, maestro, to catch the nostrils dilated by fear and panic ...

Oh the suffering, oh the bovineanity ... and then some crazed local informed the pond that the beefy boofhead was on board for a sea-based wind farm in Gippsland, and the pond finally understood that hypocrisy and stupidity should never be allowed to stand in the way of getting re-elected ...

The pond supposes it should toss in a few snaps showing where a beach once was ... sssh, don't mention climate change ....

And as this is as close as the pond can get to slide night these days ...

What else? 

Well it's the season for rellies to bung on truly awful movies, which the pond refuses to watch, but as they watch terrible movies all year, there's not much point blaming the season. 

Still, speaking of movies the pond refuses to watch, Anthony Lane in The New Yorker provided a good explanation of why the pond wouldn't spit on a Marvel movie if the superhero happened to be on fire ...

…the tally of miscreants is highest, however, in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which trawls the back catalogue of the franchise and comes up with the many-tentacled Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Electro (Jamie Foxx), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), and the Lizard (Rhys Ifans), whom I’m afraid I had forgotten entirely. Most of these fine actors look a mite embarrassed to be dragged back into this high-concept, low-rent palaver, and there’s a telling moment in which Dafoe, despite being punched repeatedly in the head, preserves that wonderful fanged grin of his, as if to show us how little he is dented or fazed by such indignity.

There are two reasons for the presence of these multiple offenders. The first is that they have been accidentally summoned by Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), who is casting a wizardish spell as a favor for Peter Parker (Tom Holland). Peter wants the past rearranged for his benefit, and why? Because, thanks to being unveiled as Spider-Man, he has—wait for it—failed to get into M.I.T. That’s right: universal chaos is unleashed for the sake of college admissions. Nothing in the movie, which is directed by Jon Watts, suggests that we are to treat this narrative development as a joke.

The second reason is cannier and more cynical. The film, which is aimed exclusively at its existing fan base and would be grimly incomprehensible to anyone from outside the fold, is rigged to produce occasional spikes of gratification in the audience. Every returning super-baddie, however meaningless his motive, is greeted with a thrill of recognition; I felt as if the armrests in the movie theatre should be fitted with a row of buttons, labelled “OMG,” “No shit,” “!!!,” and so on, and that we should be hitting these in response to every thrill. The collective result of the hits could then be patched through to Marvel, and the next sequel would be tweaked accordingly.

The spiking peaks in the latter stages of the film, and, if you haven’t yet had the pleasure of watching it, you might want to stop reading now. Traversing a portal of fire, of the sort through which moth-eaten circus tigers used to leap, two other golden oldies join the fray: to wit, two former Spider-Men—Tobey Maguire, who was Peter Parker in 2002, 2004, and 2007, and Andrew Garfield, who was “The Amazing Spider-Man” in 2012 and 2014. (Does that make the other guys officially unamazing, and should they be pissed about it?) For a while, all three Peters team up like witches, in their matching scarlet outfits, the assumption being that we will faint at the existential awesomeness of their cahoots. Please. No offense to the performers, especially Maguire, who has an air of the wistfully lost, like a middle-aged Peter Pan, but all this is pure marketing bullshit: reboots dressed up as revelation.

And why stop here? Since the portal’s open for business, why not use it to introduce other characters once played by Maguire? How about Paul, the child of a wretched marriage, in “The Ice Storm” (1997)? Or the jockey in “Seabiscuit” (2003), together with his trusty nag? As for Garfield, one of his most enjoyable roles was that of the televangelist Jim Bakker, earlier this year, in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” I’d love to see Jim march proudly into “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” clutching his Bible, and ask Green Goblin and Dr. Strange for their generous donations, to sponsor the work of the Lord.

Most alarming of all is the prospect that movie studios besides Marvel might be inspired by the portal gimmick to turn their own franchises into regeneration engines for the retired. Until now, new actors shouldering old roles have contented themselves with queasy in-jokes: “This never happened to the other fellow,” George Lazenby says in the opening scene of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), as a nod to the departure of Sean Connery. But imagine if the other fellows were able to muscle in at will, with or without digital assistance. Imagine, for example, if the dour and unsatisfying finale of “No Time to Die,” the recent James Bond adventure, had been rounded off not by the explosive dismissal of Daniel Craig but by the placid arrival of Roger Moore, wearing a gentleman’s smirk and a snowy tuxedo, and by the excitable voice of Q, saying, “I think he’s attempting reëntry, sir!”

This mania for repetition is nothing new. One person who foresaw it was Samuel Johnson, who was scrupulously wise even about matters of which he could never have dreamed:

"The regard of the public is not to be kept but by tribute, and the remembrance of past service will quickly languish unless successive performances frequently revive it. Yet in every new attempt there is new hazard, and there are few who do not, at some unlucky time, injure their own characters by attempting to enlarge them"...

What else? Well the pond has completely cancelled the reptiles - not once has the pond clicked on the lizard Oz during the holydays - and was overjoyed to see elsewhere that a similar sort of cancel culture was still all the go ...

...in the summer of 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd, Kelly Latimore, a white artist who grew up surrounded by images of a white Jesus, decided to make a course correction. He’d paint the Virgin Mary and Jesus with gold halos encircling their heads — and both would be Black. Also, his image of Jesus would resemble Floyd, a Black man who had been killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

The painting, titled “Mama,” attracted little notice in February after a copy was installed at the law school of the Catholic University of America in Washington. But in November, The Daily Signal, a conservative website, published an article about the work and about the university’s recently published report on diversity and inclusion, and students created a petition calling for its removal. That month, the painting was stolen.The university replaced it in November with a smaller copy — the school’s policy was “not to cancel speakers or prevent speech by members of the community,” the university’s president, John H. Garvey, said in a statement after the theft — but now that copy, too, has been stolen. And the student government has passed a resolution calling for further displays of the work on campus to be banned, citing religious objections.

And so on, and it was cancelled, and then the cancellation was fudged, but still the cancellation turned into cancelled fudge, though the painting didn't arouse any passion in the pond at all ...

Meanwhile, the emperor for life in the Middle Kingdom had his minions attempt to ban memories of past events at assorted Hong Kong universities, but still the images lurk on the full to overflowing inter tubes...

And it turned out that Project Veritas was keen to cancel the truth, as only a veritable exponent of Veritas could do without a shred of irony ...

But the one the pond especially liked came courtesy of Fox News, still waging assorted wars ...

That's got to be worth a poem ...

"Everyone in Leander liked reading a lot/ but some evangelicals in Leader did not," Tyler begins. "These kooks hated reading, the whole reading season./ Please don't ask why, no one quite knows the reason./ It could be perhaps critical thinking causes fright./ It could be their heads aren't screwed on just right./ But whatever the reason, their brains or their fright,/ they can't follow policy in plain black and white."

"These bigots don't get to choose for us, that's clear," Tyler's poem continues. "Then how, I am wondering, did we even get here./ They growl at our meetings, all hawing and humming,/ ‘We must stop this indoctrination from coming!’/ They've come for the books and the bonds and what for?/ Their kids don't even attend Leander schools anymore./ Bring back our books, maintain decorum, good grief./ Wouldn't it be nice to have a meeting in peace?"

Naturally the bigots and kooks, close-bosomed cousins to loons, came out for a growl, but here the pond must stop its travel/film blog to go on the move, eventually to land back in Iron Pyrites' standard Dom's record-breaking state, leaving only a few cartoons as a reminder of its time amongst Comrade Dan's citizenry (yes, the pond has some socks to return, or at least pass on to someone who will find them useful) ...

Did the pond say finally and never? Well, hardly ever ...

 

The pond thought it should continue its travel feature with a few snaps of the desolate wasteland in which it found itself for the holiday season ...

Not a human bean in sight, whichever way you looked, and oh how the wind cut deep into the flesh, scouring whatever Xians imagine is the soul ...

Straight from the Antarctic it came, and not far to travel, and the pond wilted at the notion that you needed a wet suit to have a paddle ...

Not even an arty angle on a local attempt at Ozymandias could relieve the sense of oppressive desolation, the feeling that the pond was at last able to understand Robinson Crusoe's torment ...

That castle was like a footprint in the sand. Someone had actually been there, though all trace would soon be swept away by the incoming tide ...

Moving on to the film review section of the travel blog, the pond should note that it at last made it through the entire 2 hour 53 minute second section of Peter Jackson's absurdly long, if loving, memorial to the Beatles. 

The pond had to take it in two tranches, and paused before tackling the third, even though the rooftop performance will be buried in there somewhere. Sometimes too much is more than enough, and the pond actually had to play the finished tracks, just to remember that all this noodling and doodling actually amounted to something...

Back in the Xmas gulag, the pond did attempt a little light humour when there came the usual attempt to make a viewing of Love Actually compulsory ...

Luckily the pond had caught the keen Keane doing a rant ...

It's in full here, but you can imagine how quoting a slab like this went down ...

1. I hate Hugh Grant in his full-blown, floppy-haired Hugh Grantness. Grant these days is a superb character actor who elevates any material he’s in (witness how he acted Our Nic off the screen in that thing where he murdered that woman… oh, er, spoilers). But this was before he went 10 rounds with Rupert Murdoch (and winning), and he is at his insufferable worst.

2. I hate the heterosexual patriarchal normalisation implicit in it. Half the men are having relationships with women in positions of significantly less power. A prime minister has an affair with a staffer! Hello! On what planet is that OK? In a world where using the wrong pronoun can get you cancelled for life, how is this film still treated as acceptable fare? Billy Bob Thornton is supposed to be an evil lecher, but how is Grant any different just because of his diffident, slightly stammering English charm? They’re both predators. And where are the LGBTI+ relationships? Left on the cutting room floor, apparently, so we could spend some more time with the heterosexuals.

3. Speaking of Billy Bob, I hate the insufferably smug lefty British West Wing-style fantasy world it portrays in which a charming British PM stands up to a boorish US president. Hello — the very PM the Luvvie Left lionised in the UK, Tony “Cool Britannia” Blair, was at the moment this was being made cosying up with George “I’m With Stupid” Bush. Your only response to that is a circle-jerk about Grant standing up to the president?!

4. I deeply despise the way it co-opts 9/11 in a facile point about love. Creepy and evil.

5. Speaking of creepy, what’s with the normalisation of Andrew Lincoln’s weird stalker? That’s not love, that’s bordering on a criminal act. Instead of being pursued by the victim of his obsession for a kiss, he deserves to be pursued by hordes of ravening zombies.

6. I hate that some of my favourite actors — Bill Nighy, Alan “Cancel Christmas” Rickman, Laura Linney, Billy Bob — are defiled by their presence in this offensive dross.

7. I hate the whole cloyingly twee Richard Curtisness of it. How many times do we have to see a film involving Grant in which the entire plot is about people who can’t quite express their emotions but somehow manage to achieve relationship success? There’s a direct line back from this stuff through to the British literature of the ’30s and ’40s, best represented by Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, where too-fey-to-be-bothered-breathing middle-class men, who can barely sustain an erection let alone an entire novel, somehow make their way into the beds of beautiful, aristocratic women purely on the basis of their diffident charm, thereby enacting exactly the male fantasy that the authors themselves aimed to live off — gaining status without either being born to it or working for it. And I hate it!

Love Actually, is in fact a hate crime. It’s a hate crime against Christmas, against women, against LGBTI+ people, against people with any decency and, above all, against anyone with even the most basic taste in films.

Oh, wow. What else could possibly be said? While others retreated upstairs to watch, the pond stayed downstairs to pick fluff from its navel, an intellectually stimulating exercise vastly underrated up against actually watching Love Actually ...

Mind you, the keen Keane confessed he hadn't actually seen the film, but the pond actually has, once, by mistake, and can confirm the analysis. What's more, the pond could write a similar review of the absolute tosh involved in Spielberg fucking over West Side Story, so there's nothing wrong with that approach to film reviewing ...

Speaking of 'oh, wow', and rants, the pond was sad to hear that Joan Didion had picked the silly season to kick the bucket, but she was remembered at The Cut for this ... (amongst other things) ...

Forty-two years ago, Joan Didion — who died today at 87 — delivered one such delectable specimen. “Letter From ‘Manhattan’” was the restrained headline that appeared above her 1979 New York Review of Books essay on Woody Allen’s late-’70s oeuvre. And, if only in a certain sense, the essay that followed was restrained as well. Didion was not unleashing a tirade; tirades were not her style. Rather, she was describing — with exasperated precision — a body of work whose popularity she professed to find “interesting, and rather astonishing.” Allen’s characters possess “the false and desperate knowingness of the smartest kid in the class,” Didion wrote. In their preoccupations and pretensions, they were overgrown teenagers:

These faux adults of Woody Allen’s have dinner at Elaine’s, and argue art versus ethics. They share sodas, and wonder “what love is.” They have “interesting” occupations, none of which intrudes in any serious way on their dating. Many characters in these pictures “write,” usually on tape recorders. In Manhattan, Woody Allen quits his job as a television writer and is later seen dictating an “idea” for a short story, an idea which, I am afraid, is also the “idea” for the picture itself: “People in Manhattan are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves that keep them from dealing with more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe.”

“What love is”: the scare quotes are chilling in their absolute disdain. This gives you the general flavor of the review, which is memorable — but the real coup de grâce, and the reason this essay most often comes to mind for me, was something that arrived only later. A few months after Didion’s review appeared, the NYRB published a selection of responses from readers. These readers were not pleased. Randolph D. Pope of Dartmouth College, no stranger to sarcasm, congratulated Didion on providing “a perfect example of how a mind too full with culture is unable to understand humor.” Roger Hurwitz (MIT) advised that she would “do better to be alarmed by than morally superior to the attitudes, concerns and mores Mr. Allen’s characters reflect.” John Romano (Columbia) spent 647 words chastising her for — among other offenses — treating Allen’s characters’ brand of self-absorption as tiresome and distinctly contemporary, rather than placing them in an intellectual lineage that stretched back centuries.

The NYRB also published Didion’s response to these letters. It reads, in its entirety,  “Oh, wow.”

Reactions like Randolph D. Pope’s or John Romano’s are hardly what any writer hopes for when sending a piece of prose into the world. Nonetheless, such reactions do arrive, and with them the temptation to reply — that is, to defend one’s self somehow. This impulse is not always doomed, but it usually is.

Which is, at least in part, what makes Didion’s response impressive. I think about this (as the Cut’s column would have it) a lot. I think about it whenever I say “Wow.” And I think about it now, looking back over Joan Didion’s career, a career that gave rise to countless lines that in the years since I encountered them have “never been entirely absent from my inner eye” or ear, as Didion once wrote of the Hoover Dam.

“Oh, wow”: unimpressed, unperturbed, over- but also underwhelmed. A “wow” delivered in the same spirit as Didion’s claim to find it “astonishing” that anybody actually liked the characters in Manhattan — as if bearing witness to behavior so pathetic as to be stunning. Roger Hurwitz of MIT is getting himself all worked up about “objective decadence cum subjective meaninglessness.” Didion is watching like he’s a particularly large beetle rolled on its back.

It is a response that distills the Didion persona down to five letters. She was ever the observer, surveying human folly from a deliberate distance, amazed and not amazed by what she saw. This was the posture she adopted when meeting a Haight-Ashbury 5-year-old on acid. “The five-year-old’s name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten,” Didion wrote in the title essay of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words.” Years later, in an interview for his documentary on her life, Griffin Dunne asked his aunt what that moment was like. “Well, it was—” Didion said, and paused. “Let me tell you, it was gold.” (Oh, wow.)

Oh wow, Didion really did bell the Woody cat long before others did, and if you look at Manhattan these days, it seems more than a little creepy ... as well as vacuous, shallow, vapid and pervy.

But enough of endless beaches, and endless movies, what of the loons, shouldn't the pond make at least a gesture at loonery?

Well the reptile sabbatical continues, but there's more than enough loonery to go around, though perhaps the most dearly loved moment came to the pond with this yarn ...

It was in the Daily Beast, via Yahoo, and paywalled and otherwise too pointless to link to, but succulent, like the over-ripe mangoes in the kitchen ...

Oh, wow ... 

...and it went on and on, right down the rabbit hole, past the pool of tears and straight into the kettle at the Mad Hatter's tea party ...

Oh, wow ... zombies.

At some point a fierce argument broke out around the Xmas table as to what point conspiracy theorists might be classified as mentally disturbed ... but then the pond looked at the leadership in NSW and wondered if there was much difference between zombie-fearing loons and the domitable Dom ...

But back to that conspiracy ...

It turns out that the pond could easily fulfil its remit without a hint of reptile in the loon stew ... and yet we do have barking mad clap happies speaking in tongues to imaginary friends in charge of proceedings ...

Meanwhile, the loons were still carrying on ...

But is it all that different from the magical thinking we've seen over the years from our local Illuminati representatives?

Well the pond will soon be back in the middle of that madness, and suddenly feeling deeply alone on a beach just a few miles from Antarctica might seem like a more sensible solution ...

Oh and for all those who still insist Melbourne is woke, a left-over snap of a statue in a Melbourne park celebrating a notorious piece of riff-raff, a royal rascal and ne'er do well ...

Oh Melbourne, Melbourne, what a heart break town you are ...

WaPo here (paywall) ...

The eight Edwards of England have been a decidedly mixed royal bag. Edward I hammered Braveheart's Scots; Edward II was assassinated; Edward III sacked France; Edward IV fought the Wars of the Roses; Edward V was murdered before his coronation; Edward VI died unmarried, of consumption; and Edward VIII abdicated. Which leaves us with the jolly, lusty, drunken, defiantly philistine Prince Bertie, later Edward VII, King of England, Defender of the Faith and Emperor of India.

Despite the magnificent title, which he acquired upon the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Bertie spent all but nine years of his life as Prince of Wales. In this respect, if few others, he resembles his descendant, Prince Charles, the son of another long-lived queen, and similarly doomed to endless heirdom. Stanley Weintraub's chronicle -- the latest in his cycle of 19th-century biographies, which also includes lives of Prince Albert, Victoria and Disraeli -- details how Bertie filled his days (and nights) for some six decades. Desperate to alleviate the tedium of doing nothing while his mother ruled the world, Bertie occupied himself with wenching, boozing, gambling, hunting, shooting, dancing, smoking and general carousing. When it came to learning, however, Bertie took after the 18th-century duke of Gloucester who, upon receiving the second volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, immortally exclaimed to its author: "Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?" Bertie's reading, what there was of it, was confined to newspapers and Punch magazine...

And so Melbourne being Melbourne, they put up a monumental statue to celebrate the wastrel ... 

Oh, wow ... oh, Melbourne, Melbourne, what a heart break town you are ...

What else? Oh has he gone away yet?

Oh, wow ... it's Boxing Day and he's still there? Dear sweet long absent lord, there's a bad omen for the new year ...

Oh well, oh wow ... and large black beetles everywhere on their backs ...