blowing against the wind

normal service will be resumed shortly

romanceatshortnotice — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 19:20:00 +1100

Dear readers (or, hi Ma),

There’s a federal election coming up in Kuala Lumpur and anything that smells subversive has been shut down for the time being. I’ll continue to post columns once we’re up and running again.

Cheers,

enter the dragon

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 13:42:00 +1100

Malaysia, like many scions of the Commonwealth, likes its football. Unlike other well-behaved former colonies, however, Malaysia’s affection for and aspiration to this most British of institutions manifests itself with the haphazard zeal of a dog with a full bladder.

Territory could best be marked with a player in the Premier League, but Titus James Palani seems to have disappeared. Instead, we shall have to make do with other forms of financial incontinence: AirAsia patches on referees’ uniforms, SP Setia popping up on electronic hoardings around the UK, and Tan Sri Tony Fernandes issuing cheques with the same wanton abandon as his tweets.

Tan Sri Vincent Tan – the common prefix doing a fine job of hammering home the post-gentrification appeal of football clubs as billionaires’ playthings – is well aware that Malaysians are watching. But the Berjaya head honcho’s footballing ambitions are more simmering interest than fiery passion, and his pace is deliberate.

Buying into an established Premier League club is expensive and difficult, so his solution was to shop a division lower, in the Championship. English clubs, like players, aren’t terribly cheap either – as Fernandes has proved with London-based Queens Park Rangers – so a Welsh outfit made sense. And thus Cardiff City Football Club was purchased in 2010.

But Tan’s investment was conditional. Cardiff, nicknamed the Bluebirds, had played in a kit of the corresponding colour for more than a century. Tan put his foot down – rumours of a stamp remain unconfirmed – and demanded a change in the team’s colours, failing which he would take his toys back and play elsewhere. Last week, he had to issue a denial after raising the possibility of a name change to the Cardiff Dragons.

Cardiff now sports a red kit, and received a spiffy new training ground and other shiny baubles in return. Their crest has been redesigned; it still features a bluebird, but one that now looks forlornly up at a great honking big dragon. The dragon is a Welsh institution, but the best theory doing the rounds is that the change was based on the Hokkien translation of “Bluebirds”. This is a family newspaper, however, so there shall be no further elaboration.

The best part of the new badge isn’t even the completely arbitrary motto of “Fire and Passion”. It’s the bit that says “EST 1899”, the first three letters managing to make the club seem like a shop on Old Klang Road trying desperately to convince potential customers of its pedigree – for pedigree is a fluid notion.

Cardiff is an old club. It has history, even if much of that history has been spent in the lower leagues. A revival of sorts in the past decade plateaued in the second tier of English football, where the club has remained since 2003. They were on the brink of insolvency before Tan stepped in, and continue to bleed cash – last season the club recorded a £13.6 million loss, and are in debt to the tune of more than £83 million.

Tan knows this. “Have they achieved any success under this Bluebirds brand?” he asked the BBC recently. “So why do we hold on to something that hasn’t achieved much success?”

It’s a good question, and it has much to do with the masochism inherent in following football. There are 72 clubs in the English league, and only a handful of those have a realistic shot at silverware. For fans of the others, support is a Sisyphean ritual; pleasure comes from repetition, with hope as the occasional seasoning. The only way to break the cycle, to compete with the elite, are cash injections.

This financial doping is hardly new to football – nor are changes in strip, ground or location, with vitriol to match – but something different is happening in Wales. This is an effort to make Cardiff more commercially viable, the distillation of a club into a brand that can be tweaked before the global marketing offensive begins.

It must be pointed out that Cardiff, losers at the playoff stage in each of the past three seasons, is now on course for automatic promotion to the Premier League. To some fans, top-flight football is worth any change. To many, however, it is too much to ask, tradition and identity too steep a cost for a shot at success.

new year's fray

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 13:29:00 +1100

Spring Festival in Beijing is loud and quiet all at once. The fireworks start at 6 in the morning and don’t stop until – actually, I’m not sure if they stop at all, so that’s one more thing they have in common with the interminable Katy Perry confection.

It can be quite disconcerting at night, when you hear explosions of uncertain origin. The sounds reverberate off clusters of buildings tall and taller, echo down the dark alleys and endless apartment blocks, and suddenly it seems a bit less like Chinese New Year and more like a full-scale invasion.

But then you look up to see the marvellous pyrotechnical flora unfurling above your head, and all is as right as it is bright. For the past week midnight in the capital has been as vividly lit as midday. More so, perhaps, because gunpowder and phosphorus lift the veil of night far more effectively than the sun can overcome the seemingly permanent blanket of smog shrouding the city.

Maybe this is part of the reason why people are so scarce. For a city so clogged with people that getting on and off the subway involves moves more commonly seen in a UFC cage, Beijing’s streets are eerily empty. Debris from the fireworks is everywhere, but those who lit their fuses are not. Shops are barricaded, restaurants are shut, and occasionally a camera-crew of laowais will excitedly remark upon a sighting of that rarest of species in its natural habitat – the lesser-spotted Beijing taxi.

Venture to any of the major public transport hubs, however, and you will see more than a few signs of life. This phrase “world’s largest annual migration” gets bandied about like alcohol in the bar district, but one of those things is not fake. The queues snake around blocks and out of buildings, on those occasions when there is a queue and not a mass of people doing their best impression of piranhas making their acquaintance with livestock.

This sounds horrible, but it isn’t. People save for the whole year to a buy a ticket back to their hometown, or to make a trip into the big cities. It can be wearying, but there is sweetness to it, the rigours of travel softened with liberal doses of excitement and anticipation.

This is certainly the case for those who flock to Beijing’s tourist sites. Most are from out of town, and their happiness and pride are infectious. Wandering around palaces and temples that existed thousands of years before you and will continue to do so thousands of years after you are gone is humbling and wonderful, particularly in the company of those who have come a long, long way to be there.

It is still cold, and as the day decays the crowds disperse. The smog and neon flirt prettily in the gathering dusk, and for a time all is quiet. Then it is dark enough for the fireworks to start again.

it is written

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 17:49:00 +1100

Our high school did this thing where kids were clumped into different groups for BM, English and mathematics based on their aptitude. I’m sure this was meant to be so the bright lights could shine on without suffering those whose aptitude merely flickered, but it sat about as well as a rhinoceros on a bicycle. Nevertheless, Introduction to Segregation had one unexpected benefit.

Shuffling seats around meant that for one class a day, five times a week, I sat behind a girl who shall remain nameless. She had a lovely smile that she would bestow upon me when I cracked wise, neat handwriting that made it a pleasure to copy her homework, and curly hair that she wore short and could never quite tame.

We’d talk a bit, and have the occasional meal at recess together, and we spent time together outside of school exactly once. It was one of those mass outings in which everyone looks strange bereft of uniforms, away from the hermetically sealed environment of the classroom. I don’t even think we spoke on that day, but when we finished high school we started writing letters to each other.

I don’t know who sent the first one, but this became a regular occurrence. We were both in Kuala Lumpur, but we had different groups of friends, and our only contact was through the postbox. Her envelopes were always ridiculously cute, my name written in her precise script in a rainbow of ink that was never the same consecutive colour.

She did the last two years of her degree in Australia, in a country town called Gippsland, and I would read her letters on the bus to university in Puchong. I would sit in the back row and stretch out on the seats, where I would read about how twice a month she would trek into town to the supermarket, past the rows of corn and sheep, and check at the post office to see if a letter had arrived.

She started work, and she met a guy, and she told me about him, and now and again I’d receive pictures of the two of them. They bought a house together, and then they broke up, and she told me about the cold, quiet nights in a letter I read in the middle of a blazing hot summer in Melbourne. By this time we had switched countries; I was stuck in Australia, crying with frustration because I couldn’t find a job, and she was in KL, crying from having her heart and her dreams shattered.

We stopped writing for a while, then started again, then stopped. There has been one letter in the past two or three years; I have seen her once in the past 13, more than a decade ago now.

She got married last month. We’re Facebook friends, and there was a wonderful photograph of her grinning from under a veil, hair now straight and long. Liking a picture, however, seemed grossly insufficient. So I wrote her one of those weird email-message hybrids that Zuckerberg has decided to pimp, gently kidded her about her missing curls, and waited. There was no reply. Not for a few weeks, at least, until the letter arrived.

The envelope was plain, the ink was blue, and her handwriting was exactly the same. Thank you for dropping me a message, she wrote. It made me feel remembered and important. And I shall stop here, because I need to pick up some stationery.

the “D” is silent, the squibs are not

romanceatshortnotice — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:36:00 +1100

Irritation is the warmest of blankets, and no one should be denied the right to wrap themselves in it. Those who are unamused by Quentin Tarantino’s new joint, Django Unchained, are no exception. So you can understand the stance of director Spike Lee, who is refusing to watch the film on principle – here is a white man, one with a mouth as smart as it is loud, turning his camera on one of the most shameful periods in the US’ history.

Implicit is the criticism that this is not Tarantino’s film to make. But slavery is a difficult sell; it’s hard to argue with Samuel L. Jackson when he says there may have been ideas and attempts at scripts from black filmmakers, but nobody financed them until Tarantino came along.

Django Unchained is an exploitation film about the exploitation of human beings; the message is the medium, if you will. It is violent to the point of caricature, but that is an extension of its director’s wicked wit. The cartoonish gunplay sits at the same bar as much of the outlandish treatment of slaves, until the slow, horrifying realisation that one of these things is exaggerated and the other is very real. It is uncomfortable. That is the point.

What’s remarkable is that this does not the sully the comic and dramatic impact of the film. It’s a tricky tonal tightrope, and Tarantino doesn’t just walk it – he rides it, bareback, wielding six-shooters and dynamite. Art doesn’t have to be provocative, but it can be, and make no mistake, this is art.

Rare is the film that knocks on the door of a three-hour running time while leaving viewers feeling like they could have spent more time in this world, with these characters. Every performance is remarkable; Jamie Foxx’s restraint, Christophe Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio’s duelling showmanship, and the way Kerry Washington is a glass of cool water whenever she is on screen. Sam Jackson’s Stephen deserves special mention – his is the fig tree taking nourishment from the poisoned grounds it can never leave, spreading roots that choke everything they touch.

The original Django was a 1966 spaghetti western that spawned one official sequel and more than 30 unofficial reprisals, including 2007’s insane Sukiyaki Western Django from the prolific Takashi Miike. Tarantino is as steeped in the history of slavery as he is in the Django films. He’s essentially doing what fans of the Bond franchise have been clamouring for for ages – the casting of the perfect actor for the role, regardless of skin colour. Idris Elba and Colin Salmon remain by the phone.

There are other examples of Tarantino’s brand of carefully curated chaos on display. The fates of the film’s white characters are deliberate, as is that of Sam Jackson’s, a symbolic overcoming of the worst parts of the self. And any director who makes a film about slavery with a German protagonist called Dr. King has other things to worry about than good taste. The finery of his taste is better demonstrated in other areas; the rock-star costume design, for example, or the magnificent soundtrack.

Late on, there is a scene in which Django begins a shootout to music that consists of a heady mash-up of James Brown, 2Pac, and his own dialogue sampled from earlier in the film. Like the film itself, the song is quintessential Quentin, the line between referential and reverential snorted with a hundred-dollar bill’s worth of impertinence. Like the film itself, it cannot work. It should not. And yet it does.

arbitrary denominations of chronology

romanceatshortnotice — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 19:23:00 +1100

So it’s New Year’s Eve in Beijing, which has been enjoying the frosty kisses of snowfall on numerous occasions this past month. I have been very seriously assured by a very serious editor that it is the coldest winter the capital has endured in at least a decade, and it feels like it: Any breath outside that isn’t taken through the veil of a scarf feels like a hit of liquid nitrogen delivered straight to the tonsils. This has the effect of making every Beijinger affect a curiously guttural tone, which is particularly noteworthy when you buy dumplings from a nice lady who speaks to you in a voice exactly like Christian Bale doing that thing he thinks sounds like Batman.

Growling all the way, we don armour against the cold. Goodbyes always take forever this time of year – you wave, and then you spend three to four weeks putting on hats and scarves and coats and gloves and, occasionally, those surgical masks with drawn-on whiskers that you can buy on certain street corners.

My newest and most favourite investment is a trapper hat. I am not sure if the lining is real, but it feels like having hair. Those of you who still have hair do not understand what it is like to not have it and then suddenly feel something miraculously floating about your scalp, even if it is wrapped up in a red-and-green, bear-and-moose encrusted hat that looks like the neglected offspring of a string of Christmas lights and an overly amorous timberwolf. I do not care if I now convey the appearance of one who hunts elk in his spare time. I am warm.

Where were we? New Year’s Eve. The holiday season in China is a shaggy, peculiar creature – Christmas dinner was at a Korean restaurant that does amazing Taiwanese sausages. In this grand tradition, we convene for the last meal of the year at a Japanese barbecue joint. Now the plum wine is cold and the sake is hot and I am surrounded by faces grown savagely familiar over the past five months. In theory, spending the holiday season away from home means being freed from tradition and therefore free to create your own traditions. In practice, it means scrabbling for kernels of familiarity in a frozen tundra of indifference.

Still, home is what you make of it, more so than where, which means the end of year serves as a particularly vivid reminder of what the rest of the year should be. Why isn’t it this cheerful when we try to tame the great gray beasts that are February and March? Why do people hardly kick up a fuss when we cancel plans during the rest of the year, but stage operatic heartbreak if the idea of a starting a new year by your lonesome is mooted?

This actually gets discussed a bit after the food, until attention turns to the careful selection of a venue for the festivities. Frostbite and fatigue make proximity attractive, so we end up in a pleasantly dodgy Irish pub down the block to which we give our custom worryingly often. The proprietor, in fact, upon spotting me taking a shortcut through a wasteland of ultra-luxury stores inhabited solely by mannequins and elegantly bored salespeople, confides that there will be a private party to usher in 2013 but “regulars should ignore the sign and just come in”. So we do.

Now the Guinness is cold and the chips are hot and Auld Lang Syne is being crucified at 20 decibels above the human hearing limit. Someone has brought a Polaroid camera and we are documenting the evening in those moments when we can tear ourselves away from our phones, where frantic texts remind us, over and over, that it is a fresh slate, a new start, a blank canvas to be adorned with scrawls and sobs and sweetness. Someone else asks for resolutions; I give none, a conscious omission that serves as the most bountiful of offerings on an altar commemorating lack of resolve. How utterly dependent we are on arbitrary denominations of chronology. How easy it is not to care where you are, as long as someone else still cares that you’re there.

never again, for at least until tomorrow

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 19:23:00 +1100

The island state of Tasmania sits at the southernmost tip of Australia. It is home to vistas of retina-searing beauty, ongoing environmental brouhahas that gave rise to the world’s first Greens party, and a number of ancient penal colonies.

One of these, Port Arthur, is among Tasmania’s biggest tourist draws. It is sleepy and peaceful, the bones of old buildings in stately repose among vivid green hillocks. In amongst these, hidden by a curve in the shrubbery, is a more modern structure. This was once the Broken Arrow Café. Now it is clean, quiet, abandoned.

On 28 April, 1996, a man from the Tasmanian capital of Hobart finished a large meal at the café, then pulled a semiautomatic rifle out of his bag and opened fire. He killed 12 people and injured 10 in just 15 seconds. By the time he was captured the next morning, he had killed 35 people and injured 23 more.

Barely two weeks later, the Australian government responded. Just-elected conservative Prime Minister John Howard helped broker a deal that saw ministers across all Australian states, territories and political allegiances agree to tight controls on the ownership of rifles and shotguns.

On top of this, the government implemented a gun buyback scheme that saw it purchase and destroy 643,000 firearms, at a cost of AU$350 million. Support for Australia’s gun controls has been overwhelmingly positive, with gun deaths and suicides by firearm falling dramatically in the years since the ban.

Even those pointing out that these rates were falling before the controls took effect, in a study that has since had serious doubts raised about it, must highlight one incontrovertible fact. There had been 11 mass shootings in Australia – taking the lives of 112 people – in the decade before 1996. There has not been a single one since.

Coverage of the Newtown killings, by contrast, has taken on an air of dreadful inevitability. The scenes and the words, the debates and the dodging of responsibility, have become terrible in their familiarity.

US President Barack Obama’s assertion that he will make gun control a central issue of his second term is a welcome one, but he is set for a difficult slog in overcoming the part of the American psyche that gets up in arms about the possibility of not being able to get up in arms. As usual, more people are buying guns to protect themselves from more people buying guns – it’s an insipid, internalised parody of the Cold War, played out on a smaller scale and with hugely tragic consequences.

The Australian government hardly has a blemish-free track record, but 16 years ago it acted swiftly and sensibly. Guns are still used, but they are rare, and they are respected. Australia was as wild as the USA once was, but once the tools required to tame the land were no longer required, they were put away – even if it took an act of violence to make this happen. The question isn’t how many tragedies will happen before the USA takes similar action. It is how many more.

the generation gab

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:30:00 +1100

Hipsters, hippies, hippopotami. Trying to squeeze a period’s subculture into an all-encompassing label is like trying to squeeze toothpaste back into a tube – it’s incredibly messy, and invariably unsuccessful.

Of course, that doesn’t stop people from trying, as evinced by this New York Times op-ed from earlier this month. In it, Christy Wampole asserts that the prevailing disease of our times is irony, and its most potent vector is the group of people known as hipsters. She defines this group as trying to complete the eternal quest for individuality not by concepts, but by material things; she says that irony contributes to a generational and societal aversion for directness, and this ethos infects everything from politics to television.

The success of a countercultural movement, as ever, is directly proportionate to the amount of attention (or vitriol) it receives. But listing the attributes of a movement is problematic because of how fashionably frayed its edges can get, and how easy it then becomes to discover those traits in other places.

To pick just one, “manifesting a nostalgia for times he never lived himself” is a decent plot summary for Midnight in Paris, the most-feted Woody Allen film of recent times. Allen, of course, manages the very Woody Allen trick of spending the whole film ruminating on a choice between a) the past and b) the present and eventually picking c) the most impossibly beautiful woman available at the most impossibly convenient time, but that is neither here nor there.

Also illustrating the flaws in broad brushstrokes is the Times’ section on the “diligent apathy” of the 1990s, when those squirming uncomfortably in the toothpaste tube labeled Generation X “actively did not care”. This, with unintentionally magnificent irony, is the sort of revisionist claptrap peddled by anyone old enough to hate what’s on the radio – things were so much harder in my day! We had to work at being unsatisfied, when it clearly comes so easily to you!

Still, Wampole’s piece is a victory for discourse if nothing else, having sparked a slew of discussions and rebuttals, including a piece in the Atlantic that sees Jonathan Fitzgerald offering an intriguing counterpoint – that the ethos of our age is actually sincerity.

He says that cultural output is a more reliable indicator of these things, and points to the success of Judd Apatow and Wes Anderson in film, Arcade Fire in music and Modern Family in television. But more interesting is his link to a 2006 essay by PRI presenter Jesse Thorn, who wrote that “Irony and sincerity combined like Voltron, to form a new movement of astonishing power”.

Fitzgerald spends the rest of his piece explaining his stance, but it is Thorn’s assertion (and, I’ll admit, the Voltron reference) that rings most true to me. Whether it’s an advertisement or a song, a self-referential, self-aware, self-deprecating quality is not ironic, nor does it make its wielder impervious to criticism. But irony can deflate pomposity, and temper sincerity – and, in the metallurgic sense of the word, what is tempered is often stronger for it.

Perhaps the best example of this effect this year is The Avengers, Marvel’s wonderfully satisfying piece of summer fluff. The film is a loving embrace of old-fashioned superheroics, one that is able to take itself very seriously and not at all. A big part of why it works comes from being able to pit Captain America against Iron Man – the former the personification of gee-whiz gosh-darn apple-pie nostalgia, the latter a motor-mouthed narcissist whose barbs go as deep as his pockets. This might be smacking nails with Mjolnir, but it serves the point: their squabbling is great fun, and their alliance is alchemy.

Also noteworthy is the way sincerity can curdle from an irony deficiency. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, somehow now more than a decade old, provided a snark-free fix of righteous anger and perilous questing to a world reeling from the events of September 11. The huge cost and unusual production schedule of the films made them risky business, but audiences couldn’t get enough.

This December, the first chapter of The Hobbit is set to open. It is a gentler book than its more famous sequel, almost more fancy than fantasy. Imaginations were captured when the endlessly inventive Guillermo del Toro was chosen as director, but a steady rancour has crept into coverage of the film – LotR director Peter Jackson is now back in charge, the slim novel has expanded into a trilogy of films, the sense of excitement has been replaced with a sense of safe, inevitable profitability. Put simply, this bloating and the success of its predecessor means there is precious little that is countercultural about the film now, and whether it will succeed purely by dint of its sincerity remains to be seen.

These are specific examples, because part of the reason why I stand by this thesis is another sweeping statement about the times, albeit one that is broad and messy enough to work: to appropriate an excellent headline, the geeks have inherited the earth. “Geek” is another word with a million interpretations, but it works for many religions, for those with a passion about certain properties or programs or proficiencies that may be considered unusual in its intensity.

It is marvelous to see industry cater to the sheer blunt force of this passion, even if it is because a suit or seven decided it was profitable. But I can understand how there might be people who might require a spoonful of irony, invented or otherwise, to make the swords and sandals and sorcery go down.

You see, if the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, then the greatest trick pulled by each new generation is convincing their predecessors that they didn’t care. That’s the thing about irony – it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. To embrace it, you first kind of have to like it.

la cour des grands

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 19:21:00 +1100

In 1998, when I was busy pretending to study for the SPM examinations, my father came home one day and announced he had tickets to the World Cup. This caused mass delirium in the Raj household, the solitary exception being my brother, who decided that he was going to be too occupied with PMR to go to France.

Inspired by his sensible outlook, and demonstrating the foresight and sound judgment that has led to more than one of these columns being hurriedly completed on the back of a napkin three minutes before deadline, I declared my candidacy for the spare ticket with some measure of aplomb. And that is how, in the middle of the year, we found ourselves on our way to Paris.

I will never forget my first meal in France, not because of its contents but because of the tablemat. It was disposable, and featured a garishly coloured tableaux of the conflict between “footiphiles” and “footiphobes”. This was utterly astonishing to my 17-year-old brain: there were people who didn’t like football? Madness, sheer madness.

Of course, that wasn’t the only divergence of opinion in the country, where Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front party – which ran on a platform that called for strict immigration restrictions – was gaining in power and influence. Then there was Michel Platini, the former midfield maestro of the French national team, whose successful organisation of the event was being drowned out by the usual rumblings: no one knew how the team would perform, not having had to qualify for the competition, and surely the money spent on constructing the massive Stade de France could have been spent on other things.

Anyway, my father and I get splendidly lost on the Paris subway, and emerge in this strange neighbourhood close to the city’s centre. We try asking a couple of people for directions, but one guy just keeps walking past and another favours us with a very Gallic shrug. And then we see him – a hairy chap, chomping an enormous cigar, leaning against the door of his cab.

“He looks like he’s Indian,” my father says.

“Maybe he’s lost too,” I say, delighted by my wit.

My father smacks me affectionately and saunters over to Cigar Man. While they talk I look around at the shops, and grow ever more perplexed. There are sarees in the windows, a grocery store wallpapered with faded posters of Bollywood stars, and from the open door of a nearby restaurant wafts hints of spices and sitars. By now my father is beckoning me over, so I shake the hand of Cigar Man and we chuck our luggage into the boot.

“Are we going to the hotel?” I ask.

“No,” my father says, deathly serious. “We’re going to dinner.”

It turns out that we’ve stumbled into a Tamil Tiger community in the middle of Paris. Our first meal in the city is an authentic French meal of fish curry and dhal, with some delicious homemade bread. We eat at a long table with about eight other people. I ask Cigar Man if these are his relatives. “No,” he says, “but we are all family.” I stop asking questions.

After dinner he lights a cigarette, smaller but somehow even more noxious. He and my father talk for what seems like ages. The community has been here for two generations. His children speak more French than Tamil, and don’t want to go back to Sri Lanka. They only watch French movies. My father laughs at this and tells Cigarette Man that I’ve never seen a Tamil movie in my life and spend far too much time watching Chinese movies. I blush prettily. They talk about Le Pen, they talk about Platini, they talk about Arsène Wenger, the French manager in charge of my father’s beloved Arsenal. Then our host stubs out his cigarette, reaches for a cup of cordial so potent it would give a hummingbird diabetes, and issues a remarkable proclamation.

“France is going to win the World Cup,” he says. “3-0 in the final.”

I laugh, politely. My father slaps Cordial Man on the back and grins the grin that has sold a thousand encyclopedias. The conversation peters out, and we are ferried to our hotel, where my father initiates a mortifying conversation with the pretty young receptionist and convinces her to give me her number. Her name is Christelle Vautier, and I call a week or so later but there is no answer.

That’s not how the story ends; the crescendo is French talisman Zinedine Zidane getting sent off in the early stages of the World Cup, France grinding their way to the finals with an unlikely golden goal against Paraguay from ageing captain Laurent Blanc, then beating Croatia 2-1 in the semifinal in the Stade de France, my father and I watching, with two even more unlikely goals from fullback Lilian Thuram.

We’re not even meant to be there, because France isn’t either, and someone had offered my father a huge sum of money for the tickets, but by the time he’d gone back to the hotel to pick them up the would-be buyer had disappeared. Instead we bump into, of all people, Wenger and Platini. Platini is stockier than he is in the old tapes I have, and Wenger looks taller. My father shakes the Arsenal man’s hand and says “Good job”. I shake Platini’s but am too shy to meet his eyes.

During the final, when Zidane, back from suspension, scores his first goal, he vaults over the advertising hoardings and runs to the crowd, ten or so feet below where we are sitting. Then he looks up at the VIP box, where Platini sits, blue French jersey under his suit jacket. Zidane scores another, Brazil is punch-drunk, and late in the game Emmanuel Petit, he of the flowing blond locks, gets a third.

A marvelously multicultural French team lifts the trophy, and the spectre of Le Pen abates for a while, but he and his daughter cast a shadow over French politics for years afterwards. But I only read these things in dispassionate print; far more vivid is the memory of my father, turning to me with eyes as wide as his smile after Petit’s strike arcs into the net.

“3-0!” he exults. I beam and nod. We’re both thinking of our friend, waving cheerfully as his cab pulls away.

on the enduring genius of Slam Dunk

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 02:20:00 +1100

There was a period in the late ’80s to the mid-’90s when the South-east Asian obsession with all things Japanese crystallised into something close to perfection: local reprints of manga. I cannot recall what I was studying in the lead-up to UPSR, but I cannot forget running down to the newsagent’s to buy the latest edition of Doraemon or Slam Dunk.

These were reprints of Japanese comics that would run for years and hundreds of issues in their native country, serialised chapter by chapter in anthologies. New volumes would beckon tantalisingly from the display table at Syarikat Desa, where the auntie would fix you with a stare that would curdle milk at a hundred paces if you looked but didn’t buy. Some had their pages reversed so you could read them from left to right, some didn’t, but all of them had one wonderful thing in common – they were in Bahasa Malaysia.

There is a charming pomposity to Bahasa Malaysia, a grandeur sharpened into something lovely and regal by the knowledge of its steady decay. Nowhere has this been put to better use than in the pages of these manga; BM lent gravitas to exasperation and steeped sketches in mostly undeserving wisdom.

One panel featuring a boy chasing a ghost while Doraemon, hand to forehead, sighed “Tengok pun sudah tahu mereka pakat” has grown to mythic status among those who used to haunt the fields and mamaks of my youth. Think of the alternative: “They’re in cahoots!” No. Just no. And then there are the various bons mot of Sakuragi Hanamichi, the flame-haired protagonist of Slam Dunk, magnificent in their sweet idiocy.

This is an opportune moment to stop and make one of those well-researched, balanced statements that are the foundation of modern journalism. Here it is – Slam Dunk is one of the very best fictional representations of sport in any medium. It’s well worth tracking down, even if all you can find is an English translation; this being a respectable publication, I am unable to mention that it is available online, so I shall refrain.

Sports fiction is a broad church, a long temple, any combination of size and denomination that fits. Slam Dunk uses a particularly Japanese convention – the gifted athlete who doesn’t have a bleeding clue about his chosen sport, or the sport that has chosen him – but is one step removed from this.

Indeed, when we first meet him, Sakuragi doesn’t even know he’s an athlete. He’s lovelorn and violent; the early chapters have a fun but distracting gangster flavour that falls away once the basketball gets going. Hanamichi, in fact, only gets into basketball to impress a girl, the latest in a long line of failed pursuits. Her name is Akagi Haruko, and she has a connection to the basketball team that is too delicious to reveal here.

Even at this early stage, Slam Dunk’s Simpsons-esque cast generously allows each other a shot at centre court. Sakuragi’s entourage, the captain of the basketball team, his nemesis Rukawa Kaede – each of these characters has a background, a motive, a unique style of play. There are no real villains; the manga dallies for a while with fans and coaches and other players. You still cheer for your heroes, but you understand where even the most difficult adversaries are coming from, and it’s wonderful.

Rukawa, in particular, is one of Slam Dunk’s highlights. He’s a rookie too, but a sublimely talented one, and his moves are just believable enough to have inspired much sweat under a backboard. Creator Inoue Takehiko is credited with popularising basketball in Japan, and it’s easy to see why – readers grow with Sakuragi, learning moves and techniques as he does, aspiring all the while to Rukawa’s gifts. The rivalry between the two is seldom less than hilarious, lending itself to the whip-sudden transition into caricature that manga does so well.

There’s a bit of a love triangle, but this isn’t a romance, and the high-school setting keeps everything chaste. Still, Inoue manages a delicate balancing act that perfectly captures the throb of high school – the contrast between the challenges and victories that swell to fill the whole world and the knowledge that there is a whole world out there waiting to be explored.

Slam Dunk also has the best grasp of relativity since some bloke by the name of Albert. This is why the manga works so much better than the anime – in Inoue’s skillful hands, time stretches or congeals from panel to panel, and the extremes are equally addictive. The ball might move from one end of the court in a flash, but lifetimes can pass in agony as a three-pointer arcs towards the basket.

This contributes to great pacing and some truly amazing build-ups. Sometimes all you’ll get is a face drowned in sweat and emotion, or a flicker of shadow – and then you plunge forward to discover a gloriously rendered splash page. Inoue’s clean lines deliver moments so perfect you’ll feel a chill, but he’s not afraid to spend time and effort setting up a punchline so ridiculous that its memory will make you chortle quietly at entirely inappropriate moments.

Sakuragi Hanamichi is the perfect straight man. He’s complicated – intelligent but not bright, dedicated only when the right motivation is applied, hungry for personal glory but the consummate team player. The combination of all these things means that the most satisfying parts of Slam Dunk come down to one emotion: pride.

Inoue has gone on to create other manga; his most recent, Real, is a darker, more mature work that focuses on the world of wheelchair basketball. But Slam Dunk, his very first, is a story of growth. When Sakuragi succeeds, it is impossible not to be proud at how hard he has fought, how much he has learned, how far he has come. By the end of the series, he has grown tall indeed, but his goals are higher still. Whether he gets there or not doesn’t matter – it’s much more fun to think of Sakuragi eternally in flight, somewhere between the court and the rim.

paper dragons

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 02:14:00 +1100

It was very hot on Monday. Half a decade in Melbourne has taught me to enquire politely as to the weather, in the manner of one asking after the health of a mostly unloved aunt. “Does she still like chocolates? Great, I’ll bring an umbrella.”

Beijing, however, is charmingly stubborn in its resistance to this sort of scrutiny. Sure, you can go online and attempt to interpret anthropomorphic representations of suns or clouds, but you’ve got no chance until you step outside and immerse yourself in the city’s mood.

Sometimes it is as clear as inspiration. Sometimes it is so soupy you can taste it in your sinuses. In between are a thousand variations of humidity. What this all means is that on Monday I didn’t carry my bag to work, because the strap would have left an elegant diagonal sash of sweat across my chest. This wasn’t a problem until I received a strange and mysterious phone call at about 2pm.

“Hi Hari.” Long pause.

“Hi, who is this?”

“Shelly.” Longer pause.

“Er, hi. I’m really sorry, but I can’t recall where I know you from.”

“It’s Ya Hooi, from the Foreign Liaison Office.”

“Oh hi, Ya Hooi. Why didn’t you just say it was you?”

“Not important. Can you come to my office now?”

“I’m in the middle of a story. Can I come in 15 minutes?”

“No, you come NOW. We go to the finance department.”

This was exciting news. In an insipid parable of an O. Henry story, I still didn’t have a bank account, because my passport had been sequestered so some certification could be attached to it, which meant I couldn’t apply for an account as a passport was the only accepted form of identification, which meant I’d been living off the dregs of savings made considerably svelte by going-away festivities. So when Ya Hooi called and mentioned the finance department, I took the stairs two at a time.

When I get there, I’m handed a bag – brown paper, naturally – containing something that looks like a very sturdy brick. Oh god. I don’t have a bank account, so the only way to pay me is with a dirty great block of cash. I start to wonder about how much the other people in the room are on, whether they resent the barbarians that wobble into their country, about how swiftly I can make an exit and still be polite.

“Count,” Ya Hooi says. She sits down to wait. No chance of escape.

So I’m standing there, mouth agape even more than normal, when one of the guys behind the counter takes pity on me. He rips his sweaty back from his plastic-covered chair with a sound reminiscent of amorous hippopotami, conjures a key, and opens a safe under his desk to reveal a money-counting machine. He puts this next to me, then sits back down and picks up a battered copy of Sons and Lovers. I haven’t moved.

“You count,” Ya Hooi says again.

Like most people, the closest I have come to one of these machines are movies that feature money laundering as a plot point. Still holding the brick, I fumble around for a few minutes, until my ally behind the counter looks up, sighs, and turns on the machine with one well-aimed finger. I decide that it would be best to get this over with as swiftly as possible, so I open the package and insert the entire wad into the appropriate orifice. (A wad of cash, I have time to think.) Then I press the blinking red button.

Apparently you’re only meant to put in 10 or so notes at a time. Who knew? Probably D.H. Lawrence, whose eyes widen ever so slightly. The machine coughs, politely. We reach for the money at the same time, and end up knocking a healthy amount into the air – there aren’t that many, but our frantic flapping helps spread them all over the room. Ya Hooi is slapping her knee in appreciation. I realise this is the closest I will ever come to being Scrooge McDuck, and start grinning until I realise that D.H. is fixing me with a look that is murderous in its tranquility. I start to pick up the notes. He doesn’t offer to help.

I haven’t brought my bag. The package is too big to fit in a pocket. I carry it past the news desk. They start clapping. Someone with a Scottish accent roars “HE’S GOT A BUNG!”. I carry it outside. The soldiers marching past don’t deviate from their course, but their eyes do. I walk by the smokers, who have other things to talk about. I carry it past the guard at the gate, the one who stands on a two-foot concrete plinth all day, no matter if the weather is clear or soupy. He salutes. I nod. And when I get back to my apartment, I have a nap, because it’s very hot.

overcoming ouroboros

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 01:47:00 +1000

This isn’t a review of Looper.

This is a review of Looper: it’s fantastic. Go watch it.

***

This is an excuse to use spam as a verb, and to spam you with links. First is Rian Johnson’s Tumblr for the film. Next is Zachary Johnson’s lovely animated trailer and accompanying stills. Third is Film Crit Hulk’s delightful, sprawling, spoiler-free 27,000-word essay about the Looper gang at Comic-Con and the film industry in general. Yes, it is twenty-seven thousand words long, but it is joyous and a joy to read.

***

This is a discussion of Looper, and you can read this safely if you have not yet seen the film.

Rian Johnson plays with genre the way most of us play with building blocks – if you’re good enough, at some point the medium of delivery ceases to matter and you’re left with art.

His debut, Brick, was a neo-noir film that avoids the unintentional buffoonery of noir because it is set in and during high school, which is when the most trivial of matters becomes deadly serious, so it is a charmingly neat twist to make a serious matter all too deadly. His follow-up, The Brothers Bloom, is a con film, one that understands the delicate balance between the fun of a suave caper and the need for stakes high enough to generate thrills – and exactly how far the latter can take precedence over the former until it stops being a con film and becomes something else entirely.

And then you have Looper. Sure, it’s a time-travel film. Sure, it’s science fiction. But those are just the vectors – this is a film about choice, and the consequence of those choices. It is fun, and it is at times funny, but it is also bleak. It is set it in a world that is rusting around the edges and populated by characters with hollow centres. The world-building on play here is marvelously subtle; you are occasionally shown clever examples of future tech, like a droid crop-duster or commentary about fuel that is as elegant (and as unremarked-on) as solar cells bolted onto the hoods of cars.

The weaponry on display is considerably more blunt. Looper is violent and shocking and sometimes shockingly violent. There are guns fired, and they sound like cannons. Not for nothing are loopers’ weapons called blunderbusses. At no point do you become inured to the violence, and no point is it gratuitous, and that is a narrower tightrope than you may think. There is a heft, a weight, to the actions taken on screen – they are not frivolous. They have ramifications. And some scars are not visible from the outside.

This isn’t a film in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis team up to fight crime. There is a scene in a diner that plays like the one Robert de Niro and Al Pacino shared in Heat, but this is neither buddy movie nor one about rivals. This has more to do with family – how the loss of a family would affect you, and what you would do to get it back.

***

Here there be spoilers.

The unexpected gift Looper offers in its second half is the taut delivery of two questions – the first a riff on the old would-you-kill-Hitler debate, the latter a variation on nature versus nurture.

The first of these is something that couldn’t fit in the earlier section – the steady realisation that this a terrifying film. Paul Dano’s telekinesis is Chekov’s gun writ small and invisible; the form it takes by film’s end is vast and frightening, with echoes of the juvenile malevolence of Tetsuo from Akira. The child actor playing this role, Pierce Gagnon, goes from charmingly precocious to completely dangerous in the drop of an eyelid and the jut of a jaw.

Emily Blunt, playing his mother, is typically brilliant. So much of the film depends on her, and her character knows it – hers is a sadness that lurks behind her eyes, behind the façade of steely competence she has so painstakingly built. But this isn’t a woman with blustery strength and a fragile interior; this is that rarest of on-screen creatures, a fully realised person with pragmatism as mighty as her affection.

For the second question, both versions of Joe are a product of their environment. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Young Joe) and Bruce Willis (Old Joe) play the same character, but different people – the same person, but a lifetime apart.

The film’s final puzzle piece, the moment when it all slots into place, is when Young Joe realises the only way he can stop Old Joe. The difference between the two is that while they are both ready to kill, only Old Joe knows what it is like to kill to protect someone you love. This is the jagged beauty of Willis’ arc, and one he endures mostly in silence. Sure, no one fires automatic weaponry like Bruce Willis, but Johnson aims a sly jab at just about every action film ever made by asking us to consider the psyche behind a trigger finger. Old Joe believes that if he slaughters children he will guarantee his beloved a few more years of life. The audience is primed to accept righteous murder, but visiting it on children is deeply unsettling, and a lesser director than Johnson would have baulked. Instead, we understand that what Old Joe does is not avenging his wife, it is protecting her future.

And in the film’s final standoff, Young Joe knows he can’t reach his older self in time. He sees what will happen to a young boy not too different from himself, how the path of hate and pain he will go down will beget more hate and pain, and he makes his decision.

That decision is not redemption. It is growth.

In that moment, when he sees the loop and realises what he must do to break it, Young Joe grows up. He grows into the man standing in front of him, too far away to reach with his inaccurate weapon. Young Joe is finally ready to kill, not for profit or vengeance, but for love. And, more than that, for the promise of future love. For the possibilities it holds. For the precious, fleeting, beautiful uncertainty of hope for a future he will never live to see.

This is the column that got told the world “phallic”...

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 01:27:00 +1000

This is the column that got told the world “phallic” was too direct.

ogos 31

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 01:18:00 +1000

I am Assunta Hospital, where I came squalling into the world, where years later my mother would be held up at knifepoint while I staggered out after an asthma attack. I am Manila, where I grew up down the road from a dairy factory and developed a corresponding appetite that would take decades to accommodate spice. I am the holes on the beach in Queensland that my brother and I would dig to lie in and watch my mother in the ocean. I am Taman Desa, where we graduated from kicking a ball around unused tennis courts to playing with the big boys and the gangsters in the balding field, which was composed of so much sand that I could come home and blow my nose and it would turn a tissue orange. I am Jay’s, where I would get my hair cut by a tattooed man who drove a powder-blue Harley, loved his wife very much and introduced me to the wonders of betting on football. I am Bukit Bintang Boys’ School, with or without the apostrophe, where I would read quietly during assembly and investigate the hundreds and thousands of red saga seeds that would fall like hard rain from impossibly tall trees. I am the caning I received for larking in class, the compendium of Transformers that was confiscated and returned three years later on the very last day of school, the art project that was stolen and claimed as someone else’s. I am the discoverer of this injustice, who stood, three feet of defiance, as another boy cried. I am the prefect who only wore shorts. I am the farm in Warwick where I was read poetry and discovered snakes, swam in an inconsistent creek and posed for far too many photographs wearing t-shirts tucked into denim shorts. I am Methodist College, where I met my family. I am geography projects and cybercafés and tuition and conversations when the lights are out and bonds so strong that they draw me back to Kuala Lumpur years after I left. I am the summer of 1999. I am Petaling Street, where the gangsters speak more languages than I ever will, the faded neon left behind when a city pushes out in other directions. I am the university where I would sit at the back of class and wait for my friends to return from colder climes. I am the newspaper that hired the boy who remembered to remove his earrings but forgot he was wearing shorts. I am the editor who took a gamble on her sister’s friend, the finance reporter who thought a bear market was strong and powerful, the calculator of unhatched poultry. I am Chinese New Year, when the sun is high and the cards are good and all is right with the world. I am Melbourne, sight unseen, frustrating and rewarding in its insularity. I am the long drives north, when the concrete turns to wood under a sky so much bigger than I have ever seen. I am Beijing, never at rest, attempting osmosis on the hugest of scales. I am durian, strong and sweet and creamy. I am the mountains I keep climbing. I am the knees that protest long into the night. I am the coconut shell on a beach with a Hans Zimmer score. I am my father, polished shoes and mellifluence. I am my mother, who wandered, and wondered, and learned. I am my grandmother’s curiosity and the caress of the rubber hose. I am my brother, secure in his insecurities. I am the child of all worlds and none.

on armstrongs

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 18:56:00 +1000

Cycling’s most frenetic chase is over, but there is no winner. Lance Armstrong’s decision to stop contesting the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s charges against him is somewhere between a loss for the athlete and a victory for the agency – there is an abundance of defiant posturing, an utter deficit of grace, another frayed thread in the sport’s tattered reputation.

Armstrong has the same effect on opinion that Moses had on liquid. His was a valiant struggle against first his own body, then a voracious media pack and increasingly rabid cycling authorities. Or he is dishonest and selfish, merrily jaunting up the garden path with the world in tow.

These narratives are inextricably intertwined. The first volume of his autobiography documents a brash young man humbled not by competitors or competition, but by disease. The raw Armstrong would bash away at his bicycle, head down, bullish and belligerent. Cancer took much, but gave him opportunity; its treatment stripped away his muscles and his bulk, allowing him to reconstruct his wasted torso into the most efficient of machines.

But, start the whispers, this means he understood his body. He was intimate with its limits in a way few human beings, let alone fellow cyclists, could ever match. He had never failed a drug test – but there are ways to beat any test, they continue, and Armstrong is composed of little other than willpower.

Here is the frustration that pedals resolutely in the slipstream of his surrender. Here is one last battle, one last red rag for the man so often clad in yellow. But it is easy to understand why this would have been one time trial too far – legal proceedings would have dragged on for too long. There had been too many tests over too many years. So Armstrong said what he couldn’t quite bring himself to say, not even after victory upon victory, retirement after retirement: “Enough.”

It is too soon to say how this will affect a sport riddled with cheating the way Armstrong was once riddled with errant cells. The very messiness of this ending means that the theories, malignant and benign, will circulate for decades. Their presence will cause many to doubt if cycling can ever rebuild the way its most successful, most controversial figure once did. There will be doubts as to whether anyone who raced with or against him was ever truly clean. But, for those seven years in France, there was no doubt as to whether anyone could catch him.

And now – for better or for worse – they never will.

***

Seven years ago, I had the privilege of watching Neil Armstrong deliver a talk. I stood in the crowd at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, rapt, and later dazedly walked to the entrance – and there he came, around a corner, tall and beaming. I shook his hand and squeaked something insignificant, and then he was gone.

Some 25 years ago, I wanted to be Neil Armstrong. I devoured book after book, deified NASA, and announced my ambition to everyone within hearing range. Of course, being outfitted with a ridiculously large pair of spectacles on the second day of primary school soon put paid to those dreams, but some of those images – the perfectly still flag, his almost comical, bouncing gait – I, and the rest of the world, will never forget.

Neil Armstrong was 75 when I saw him, but the only sign of his advancing years was a slight rattle in his voice when he got excited. And he was often excited, brimming with vitality his poise could not conceal. At one point, a member of the audience posed a rather undignified question about the authenticity of the moon landing, and received a consummately composed response.

“The only thing harder than doing what Apollo 11 did,” Armstrong calmly said, “would be faking it.”

Some heroes fall. Some take their place in the firmament.

Many thanks to @Aflanagan for cycling-related commentary and this week’s link.

the streisand amendment

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 18:51:00 +1000

The internet can be ugly, as anyone who has ever fallen foul of an anonymous comments board can attest. But no one really takes those ranting, venomous posts seriously, right? Wrong.

The cloak of invisibility easily available online is the root of a recent bit of fiddling with the Evidence Act, an amendment that seemed to prompt the airing of well-preserved arguments about privacy and free speech. But Section 114A is a very different, very juvenile piece of legislation. It’s the electronic equivalent of pointing a finger at someone and howling the way the pod people do in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or the way five-year-olds do at the supermarket when they spot a particularly shiny new toy.

I haven’t been that age for a couple of years now, so I don’t know if the Children of Today can rip their fingers away from touchscreens long enough to point at anything. But those responsible for Section 114A are certainly crusty enough to have had toys, because it is a particularly public way of throwing them out of a pram. The amendment basically ensures that someone, anyone, will be held responsible for online content that is arbitrarily found objectionable – as long as they’re administrating a website, signed up to a network or owning a computer.

Malaysia has long been in the habit of permanently borrowing some of the cultural oddities of seafaring nations that traipsed down the Strait of Malacca in pursuit of spice and adventure. The delicate tactics of the Spanish Inquisition probably shouldn’t be one of them, nor should the concept of justice endemic to 17^th-century Salem. Under Section 114A, if you want a witch, you’ll find a witch, no matter which.

Identity theft, it has been pointed out, now becomes an even more serious concern, but so does its more literal cousin. This serves as a reminder of a rather more useful focus for enforcement agencies, but by most accounts smartphone penetration in Malaysia is increasing rapidly. So, by even more accounts, are snatched bags.

Of particularly entertainment value is the hopeful little caveat at the end of the amendment: “This Bill will not involve the Government in any extra financial expenditure.” Well, if hunting every wit that posts “Msia govt suxx LOL” as a status update is its end result, and unless there’s a clause wrangling pro bono prosecution (and persecution), in terms of administrative costs it’s set to be the most expensive Bill since Clinton.

But I don’t believe this is the point of Section 114A. There is simply too much vitriol online to track down each of its sources, even for those who have skins so thin that they should really move to Singapore and live in a sun-shaded air-conditioned bubble. It’s more likely that it is there to ferret out those propagating the sort of information that doesn’t make it into newspapers. Information about, say, legal proceedings abroad, or almost-provable skullduggery. And this is where the beauty of the Streisand Effect comes in.

In 2003, Barbra Streisand attempted to block photographs of her house from appearing in an online photographic project. Before she kicked up a fuss, few people knew that the house was hers; once she did, however, the hits kept coming. As marvelous proof of its longevity, typing “Streisand” into Google now has the effect listed above the entertainer.

Put simply, the act of trying to suppress information online draws massive, marching-band, street-parade, trained-elephant style attention to both the act and the information itself. You want to know the best way to ensure an anonymous claim is repeated and broadcast ad infinitum? Find the person responsible for it and sue them. Appear in public to discuss the specifics of what was said online, what was correct and what was not.

Quite apart from the fact that this would legitimise arguments that are much better ignored, some of the wildest conspiracy theories online may contain the occasional fact. It is these kernels that Section 114A wants to grind into submission. It is a law designed to use fear as a prophylactic. But if you speak the truth, do not be dissuaded by unfounded accusations, no matter how loud they might be.

The official word from the Prime Minister’s Department is that freedom of speech is no excuse for slander or libel. Then again, neither is Section 114A.

Many thanks to @tashny, the best research assistant ever.

do yourself a favour and pack your bags

romanceatshortnotice — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 18:39:00 +1000

I’m moving again, for the fourth time in five years since arriving in Melbourne. This time it’s to the capital-E East, with the promise of adventure and a white Christmas. I shall miss this city, and the Yarra, the river that lazily divides it into cunningly named preserves of North and South. The former likes to pretend there is some sort of pioneer spirit attached to gentrification; the latter is comfortable in a kingdom of wide, leafy streets. Countless, equally reductive stories have been written exploring this dichotomy, and every time I see one I think it’s a good thing that newspapers are dying.

Still, having moved from up to down, I find I miss the former. The hub near which I lived was brimming with activity, so full that it occasionally slopped over into violence; older residents would refer to Coburg as Jo’burg, because generalisations are quick and easy, and because the appetite for irony is not the preserve of youth. And to turn to the old Australian shorthand of food as the most palatable form of multiculturalism, Coburg was marvellous – restaurants everywhere, Chinese and Lebanese and Egyptian and Indian. It is difficult to protest immigration policy on a full belly.

Armadale, in the south-east, is quite different. The three closest establishments to me dispense antiques and paintings, a rather different sort of sustenance. It is one of Melbourne’s most liveable suburbs, according to a lavishly produced magazine article that comes out each year and dominates conversation in the correct coffee shops, and it wears this title like a fur-lined tiara. I don’t feel like I belong. I walk to the market and imagine property prices plummeting in my wake. I am not used to increasing the ethnic diversity of a suburb.

But there is one thing about living south-side I very much enjoy. I drive to work via a circuitous track that is used for the Formula 1 race, and once a year it reverberates with growling engines and grumbling residents. The track wraps around the Albert Park lake, which is home to a sizeable population of black swans. They are as curious as they are beautiful, a delicious inky inversion of the snowy purity you might expect. I like this almost as much as I enjoy their propensity to terrorise tourists bearing picnic baskets. I like that they are nomadic creatures, moving erratically from habitat to habitat; I can identify.

But, most of all, I like the moments when a swan, or a family of swans, crosses the road separating the lake from the grasslands around it. One will go first, inserting an exploratory bill into incoming traffic. The cars stop, a stagnant river of red lights. The swans then cross, one by one, in no particular hurry – this is their lake. Their park. One or two will unfurl a curious neck to survey their surveyors. There is time for this; their passage is slow. On land, the swans waddle and plod and meander, but even in this state they are stately – and all the watching eyes, all the glaring headlights, only serve to prove that dignity does not have to be elegant.

sleight of mind

romanceatshortnotice — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 18:16:00 +1000

True story – the only time I have been in Malaysia to vote, I registered, rocked up to the relevant primary school on voting day and handed in an empty ballot. Then I walked home, chest inflated with the pride at my small act of protest. I slept well that night.

I know. I want to slap me too.

In my defence, it was 2004, and I had a lot more hair and apparently a lot more faith in the electoral process. Perhaps it was some lingering vestige of this misguided belief, some barely postpubescent naivety, that allowed me to believe what I had done was sensible. That someone wouldn’t notice the invitingly blank ballot, quickly check a box and abuse my trust.

You want to know what I wish I had done? I wish I’d made sure that my vote was well and truly spoiled.

Most of you have probably registered to vote by now. Most of you probably know for whom you’re going to vote. And for all that your presence at certain Rallies That Cannot Be Named was incredibly important, turning up on voting day is much, much more so. But there are other options than those neatly laid out in front of you, waiting to be ticked. The mechanics of it have been discussed before – go here and here – but what you need to know is simple: spoiling your vote is legal and legitimate.

There are going to be times when you don’t want to vote for the incumbent, just because they belong to a particular political party. This is all well and good, but the last time someone ran a campaign based purely on this notion, George W. Bush won a second term in office.

The point is that being forced to choose between two candidates you might not particularly believe in is not a choice at all. For my next trick, I would like to bring in an unlikely guest witness: Teller, of Penn and Teller, no stranger to misdirection.

“If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely,” he says. “This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets.”

It’s a very satisfying illusion – that we have power. That we have control. But, to use an obscenely simplistic example, what if you were suddenly told you had to pick which parent lived, and which died? Suddenly, “none of the above” becomes a rather appealing response.

Now, in casting about for comment before I wrote this piece, I encountered rather passionate disagreement. This is the text of one email, verbatim: “Spoiling your vote equals to voting for the tyrants. That’s all. It deeply saddens me that not only are we up against a vastly resourceful and desperate regime, we are also being destroyed from within by its very victims, all because of some misguided and immature ideals.”

It’s well put. I read it over and over, and fixated on the final word: ideals. Sure, a spoilt vote is idealistic, but so is any vote. We need ideals. We need the belief that there can be something or somewhere better. As for how we get there, you have the democratic right to choose the road you think works best, just as you have the right to decide that road has not yet been built.

So be informed. Research the candidates. Learn about their platforms, their stances, their promises. Maybe you think that any change is good. Or maybe you’d rather vote for someone than against someone.

and now for something completely different

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 14:57:00 +1000

It is little wonder that so many still casually divide the globe into creaky hegemonies of West and East; the USA is still riven by them, never mind the philosophical fault line of North and South, and what the USA does we tend to follow. I have never been to New York; the river of mongrel blood that flows in these veins has tributaries in Seattle and the state of Washington, overlooking the Pacific, that do not extend across the Plains. I have never been to New York, but it feels like home.

Better yet, it feels like it could become home, in the same way that Melbourne opened its arms to a perfect stranger five years ago. So many have come this way before. So many writers. There is a temptation to borrow those words, for spice or for a crutch, or to add a scrawl of crayon to those who have worked in ink and paint. I am not immune.

The USA’s greatest export has been its culture, decades of television and films and food and merchandise congealing into familiarity. How else to explain this feeling of easy fluency? It is like love, when you gaze into evening windows lit up like starry eyes and the feel the warmth of belonging. I laugh at a friend who wants to go to the Museum of Natural History because that’s where Ross worked, he of the dinosaur cheques; barely half an hour later I get unreasonably excited about traipsing around the same part of Brooklyn as the cast of Girls.

But then, it is impossible to judge the rest of the country by New York. There are no uncluttered horizons here, no concept of the automobile as shorthand for freedom. If Bruce Springsteen had grown up on Manhattan he would never have written Thunder Road – a car would have been a useless extravagance. There would have been no freewheeling compass, opportunity in every direction; the island still worships acceleration, but elevation is a higher priority.

The ants milling about in canyons of shadow and stone and steel crane their heads skyward on occasion, looking forward to the day they too can look down. Perhaps they should turn their gaze lower still, to the city’s belly, where the banks and publishing houses and studios act as enzymes for talent. New York grows tall on this constant stream of nutrition; it stretches and yawns and spreads its influence ever further, and the detritus of those who were almost good enough is washed away into the uncaring Atlantic.

All the lines about sleep and the lack thereof are true. There are stimuli and stimulants in abundance. There is always something to do that you do not yet know about. There are always people to meet. They come from everywhere, and if you cannot tell where from, no matter – in all the best ways, a trip down these streets is a walk through the woods of diversity and into the jungles of eclecticism. The air can be close. The crowds can be daunting. But there are paths that can be hewn with the most delicate of machetes, and even the most travelled of these still gleam with the promise of adventure.

old adventures in public transportation

romanceatshortnotice — Mon, 28 May 2012 15:52:00 +1000

My life is buses. I wait for them in fierce heat and monsoon rain, ears pricking at the sound of their arrival. I run after them, yelling and waving. I sit in the long seat at their rear, where I can stretch my achy legs and stare out the grimy window, or into the yellowing pages of whichever novel I have deemed hardy enough for the rigours of travel. The buses are pink and red and yellow and invariably wreathed in smoke. Sometimes I can tell that I’ve missed one by the fading sounds of an engine and a trail of swiftly vanishing white clouds.

Even now I feel a strange sense of belonging when I’m on a bus. The trains are oh so fast, the trams convenient enough, but put me on a bus and I am safe.

My so-called university is in the heart of the old city, still beating but ignored by the shinier, taller structures around it. Outside the Popular bookstore an old man sells rock candy, a family recipe that he tells me his daughter has no interest in learning. Further down are the stalls selling fake merchandise of every grade, from the lowest, where there are obvious spelling mistakes in brands even I know, to the highest, which probably fell off the back of a lorry somewhere near the Thai border. Then there are the restaurants, where the tow-truck operators sit in jovial circles around their walkie-talkies, and the gangsters sip weak tea and happily flit between Malay and Mandarin, Cantonese and Tamil, more languages than I and all my textbooks will ever know.

On one side of the building that claims to be my university there is a sundry shop, run by a worried-looking man with a great deal of children. On the other there is a bakery, suspiciously new and shiny, with a lot of chrome and glass and sugar. The block of buildings is old and uncomfortable in its dotage. Stairs squeak ominously under carpets that may have had a colour, once. I climb them and think of my friends, who are mostly overseas, returning with horizons freshly broadened and developing terribly exotic summer accents. The few left in the country study far away, an hour and a half on an irregular bus. I make that trip almost four days a week. Sometimes I miss the bus and I am stranded across town, and then I sleep on couches or pay for taxis and skip meals as a result. But the bus is usually there, waiting, the driver reluctant to move until it’s nicely full, the people on it narcoleptic or restless. I can’t remember anyone talking on the bus, but that’s probably because I was more interested in my book than in conversation.

My classmates seem terribly young in my recollections, but then I was terribly young too. I can’t remember any of their names. One was called Samantha, I think, or Sam, which means something completely different in her dialect. She was two years older than me and she looked good in white T-shirts. One time she asked me out. I thought she was joking, so I laughed and changed the subject. Years later I saw her selling perfume and let her spray me with something sweet and cloying that evaporated as quickly as my recollections.

We studied management and marketing and subjects that didn’t seem to have any practical application. Accounting did, and that’s probably why I was so bad at it. I had a good management teacher, who would smile at my idiocy from my seat right at the back of class, and an atrocious economics teacher, who made the subject interesting despite himself. I don’t think I have ever used anything I learned as an undergraduate in my working life.

Every day I walk past the shell of a building, inhabited only by junkies and memories, and the pet shop, with its bright colours and brighter stenches. There’s the arcade, where I play on the old Virtua Striker machine with the office workers in their too-new ties, and the food stalls, with their cakes and keropok and that chili sauce you really can’t get anywhere else. Just before the terminus there are the stalls selling snacks and sweets and cigarettes and the racks upon racks of magazines in every language but English, so many that I cannot countenance who could ever read them all. There are the lights, coming on at dusk just as the smog and neon coalesce into something harsh and beautiful. And there’s the bus, come to take me home.