Painting Fakes

It being Grand Final week, it's a good time to write that post about football morality that's been going around in my head for months. I'm a regular watcher of Rugby League.  It's a good way to switch the brain off on Friday evenings.  Yet footballers often get bad press.  Whether it's off field incidents involving drugs, alcohol and violence towards women, or onfield violence towards each other, you would be forgiven for thinking sometimes that footballers are a bunch of amoral thugs.  This however, is a long way from the truth, at least for most.  Our story begins in August 2011 and the notorious Round 25 clash between Melbourne and Manly.  This match is infamous for a vicious all-in brawl that erupted in the second half. A bit too much aggression in a tackle led to a few punches and a lot of pushing and shoving near the tryline.  The referees decided to cool things down by sending two of the main offenders, Manly's Glenn Stewart and Melbourne's Adam B

Speaking of love, a while ago I waxed lyrical about Richard and Linda Thompson at the height of their musical and life partnership, and their beautiful song A Heart Needs a Home.   Well lately I've been listening in a similar slightly obsessive fashion to the last album they made together, Shoot Out The Lights , released in 1982. Their marriage was pretty much over by the time it was released, as the cover tells you plainly, yet they were contractually obliged to tour in support of it.  Audiences (not to mention the band) got to see the painful last rites live on stage as the couple struggled and bickered their way across Europe and North America before departing for what must have seemed by comparison the blessed relief of divorce.  Shoot Out The Lights tells the death of their love in seven songs.  Gone are the wide open spaces, tranquil rythms and deep yearning of Dimming of the Day or A Heart Needs a Home.   In their place are insistent broken rhythms, jagged stuttering el

Anyhow, onto something really important - Love.  If you've never heard the story of Tristan and Isolde, you've really missed out on something.  You could start by reading it in a children's version, perhaps one of the ones I read as a child.  Following Thomas Malory's 15th century lead, they wove it in between that more famous love triangle involving Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot.  You could attempt to listen to Wagner's operatic treatment of it, if you understand German and can stand opera.  Or you could read this most beautiful version, written in the 13th century by the German poet Gottfried von Strassburg and translated into English prose by AT Hatto. The heart of the story is simple and well-known.  Yes, there is a love potion, a dragon, a giant, a fairy dog and a magic lovers' cave, but these are just entertaining diversions from the all too recognisable humanity of the tale.  Tristan is commissioned by his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, to travel to

I have noticed that most, if not all, of my fundamentalist Christian acquaintances are also climate change deniers.  I've been wondering whether there is a connection and I've concluded that there is, and that it's young earth creationism. Young earth creationism often goes under the name of Creation Science, but it's not science, it's apologetics.  Science is an open pursuit of knowledge - it seeks explanations for observed phenomena, and tests these against the evidence.  Its hypotheses may be proved or disproved - both proof and disproof are valid scientific outcomes. Apologetics, on the other hand, is the task of defending a particular view or idea.  The truth is already known and the task of the apologist is to bolster belief in that truth by marshalling evidence in its defence.  In this case the faith position is the literal inerrancy of the Bible, and in particular the literal truth of the early chapters of Genesis which are understood to describe a se

If you wanted an insight into the other side of the World Series Cricket saga,  it would be hard to go past Christian Ryan's 2009 biography of Kim Hughes, Golden Boy: Kim Hughes and the bad old days of Australian cricket.   Unlike many of his famous contemporaries, Hughes never wrote his own memoirs, and he didn't cooperate with this bio either.  Nonetheless it's a highly sympathetic account of his career. In 1977 Hughes was a promising young player on the fringes of the Australian test team.  Hughes claims that he turned down an offer to join WSC, while key WSC figures claim no offer was ever made.  Either way, he ended up on the Australian Cricket Board side of the war and with the top players missing he moved instantly from fringe player to mainstay of the batting order.  By 1979, in his 11th test, he found himself captain of the struggling young Board team. What happened from there on shows that the peace between the combatants in the dispute was hardly more than sk

I was a teenage cricket fan in 1977 when World Series Cricket split the cricketing world down the middle.  Kerry Packer, having recently taken over from his father as head of Channel 9, was rebuffed in his attempts to buy the broadcast rights to Australian cricket despite offering vastly more money than the ABC.  Not being one to take no for an answer, he set up his own rival cricket competition, recruiting virtually the entire Australian and West Indies teams (the two strongest in world cricket at the time) and a host of other elite players from around the world.  Rival international competitions were staged for two years, the cricket authorities filling their teams with second string players, before peace was finally made in 1979. I remember it well. So I watched Howzat! Kerry Packer's War  on Channel 9.  I was pretty underwhelmed.  For a start, it's just a poor piece of story-telling.  The cricketers, even those with central roles in the saga like Ian Chappell and To

I spent most of my time at University not studying, and besides it was thirty years ago, so it's not surprising I don't remember much.  However, one thing that has stayed with me is the idea of first and second order change. We were introduced to the idea by Mal McCouat, a long-standing social work lecturer at the University of Queensland, and a 1974 book by Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, and Richard Fisch which went by the rather unpromising title of Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Resolution.   The idea of first and second order change is simple in the way that so many brilliant ideas are.  Most of the changes we make in our lives, or in our society, are first order changes.  These are changes made within the established order or the normal pattern of relationships.  One of Watzlawick et al's examples was in the field of illicit drug supply.  In response to concerns about drug use, authorities bring in new laws which increase the penalties for supply of

So, after months of deadlock and confusion, the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers has provided Julia Gillard and Chris Evans with the fig-leaf they need to adopt large parts of the Coalition's policy on unauthorised boat arrivals. Of course the answer you get from an expert panel will depend very much on the question you ask.  This one was asked a number of questions, but the two pertinent ones were as follows. "....how best to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives by travelling to Australia by boat;" and "...the development of an inter-related set of proposals in support of asylum seeker issues, given Australia’s right to maintain its borders ;"  (with my italics) Their answer is that if you want to stop people coming to Australia by boat, you need to ensure that they get no benefit from doing so.  To acheive this the panel has made 22 recommendations.  The key ones for immediate implementation are: re-opening the detention centres on Nauru and

With the London Olympics winding to their close, it's hard to think anyone can have missed hearing about the woes of Aussie 100m freestyle swimmer James Magnussen and his team-mates, or missed out on seeing the Commonwealth Bank advertisement featuring his hopeful smiling face.  For those who forgot, the ad (which interestingly is now unavailable on the internet) features Magnussen out for a training run, followed by guys wearing the letters "C", "A" and "N".  They start talking him up: "Not long till you bring home gold for Australia." "Hope so," says Magnussen. "Know so!" Then a guy in a "T" joins them and starts to cast doubt on the expected gold medal.  "After all, it's not like you haven't been beaten before."  The ad ends with the "T" bloke tripping over the edge of a cliff and landing in the ocean below. Fortunately for our sometimes tenuous link with reality, Mag

I have suggested that Jesus' miracles are not so much displays of power  as teaching events coded to the worldview of first century Palestine .  If this is the case, what is Jesus teaching through them? In one sense it is not really possible to answer this question, at least not in a blog post although perhaps in a hefty tome.  Each incident has its own meaning, its own message.  Jesus spoke on many subjects and responded to many different people.  Yet much of his message is organised around the central theme of the Kingdom of God or as Matthew calls it the Kingdom of Heaven. Right from the the beginning Matthew has him saying "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near".  Jesus is not a systematic theologian, and he never defines or describes in an orderly way what he means by this term.  Instead he illustrates it in multiple parables, and enacts it in various deeds miraculous and otherwise. So here are some key things I think Jesus' deeds show us about the Kin

I'm not sure how I've managed to get through more than 250 posts on this blog without raving about Ian McDonald .  McDonald is a British science fiction writer based in Belfast in Northern Ireland, but his writing reveals a true world citizen. I've previously commented how much better current speculative fiction writers are than their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s.  Of course there's still plenty of trash, but the sprawling space operas of Iain M Banks and the taut, adventurous cyberpunk of William Gibson are as good as any literary writing you will read.  McDonald is the equal of these and perhaps even superior to them.  He has a lot more in common with Gibson than Banks, his writing set in the near future, and his settings defined by where our current technologies might take us within our own lifetimes.  Yet where Gibson's novels are almost claustrophobic with their small casts of characters, secret rooms and secretive plots, McDonald's palette is

In my first post on Jesus' miracles I summarised my reasons for not seeing the miracles as demonstrations of power, and in the second I commented on the way the miracle stories are bound by the culture and world view of their original authors and hearers.  The starting point for this one is the theory of some New Testament scholars that among the original sources for the gospels were a "sayings gospel" and a "signs gospel".  If they existed (and their existence is merely an hypothesis, no copies exist), then the first was a collection of the sayings or teachings of Jesus, and the second of deeds attributed to him.  Within this framework, Jesus' acts are not defined by whether or not they require supernatural power, but simply by the fact that he did them. No doubt Jesus did many things - getting dressed, washing his hair, going to the toilet, ordinary everyday things of which we have no record because they were not worth recording.  The deeds we have i