Painting Fakes

It can take me a long time to get around to reading a book.  There are so many of them in the world.  Sometimes it takes something extra to prompt me to pick up something.  Hence, the current moral panic about Islam, and my various bits of reading on the subject, finally got me to reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses . Salman Rushdie was born in Mumbai into a culturally Muslim but not particularly devout  Kashmiri family, and describes himself as an atheist.  He was educated in the UK and has spent most of his adult life there, working as an advertising copywriter before his second novel, Midnight's Children,  won the Booker Prize and allowed him to become a full-time novelist.   The Satanic Verses  is his fourth novel, published in 1988. Its publication set off a storm of protest from Islamic fundamentalists around the world.  Copies of the book were burned in the streets in various countries including the UK and US, bookstores that stocked it were picketed and even

Amidst last year's retirements of numerous high-profile Australian cricketers, not to mention today's announcement from West Indies great Shivnarine Chanderpaul, it would be easy to miss Nathan Hauritz's retirement anouncement. Hauritz could well have a productive second career as part of the answer to one of Australia's most difficult sports trivia questions: name the spin bowlers who have played Test cricket for Australia since Shane Warne's 2007 retirement. Any casual cricket watcher would get Nathan Lyon, who recently became Australia's most prolific Test offspinner.  Most would also get Stuart MacGill, the world class leg-spinner who spent his whole career in Warne's shadow.  How would you go with the rest?  Brad Hogg, Beau Casson, Cameron White, Jason Krezja, Bryce McGain, Xavier Doherty, Michael Beer, Steven Smith, Glenn Maxwell, Ashton Agar, Steven O'Keeffe.  And Nathan Hauritz. It is hardly a roll-call of glory.  Why is that a country whi

One of the mistakes we make as Westerners is that if we want to know what Muslims think, we go and read the Q'uran.  Not that I think we shouldn't read it - we really should - but we shouldn't assume that once we have read it we know how Muslims think.  What's to say they interpret it the same way we do?  What's to say they emphasise the bits that stand out to us? Of course the question "what do Muslims think?" is highly simplistic.  There are over 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, of all ages, a wide variety of nationalities, languages and cultures and widely differing levels of education.  Naturally they don't all think the same thing.  Still the obvious way to find out what Muslims think is to ask them. That's why I am surprised that in all the media I have been seeing on Islamic issues in the past few years, and the various bits of reading I've done, no-one has yet referred to Riaz Hassan's Inside Muslim Minds. Hassan is a South A

Cricket commentators around the world are asking, "can Test cricket survive?" They're particularly asking it here in Australia because we have just witnessed a soggy and depressing end to one of the least interesting Test series in history, played between Australia and a team of young men impersonating the West Indies.  Not many people turned up to watch, TV ratings were lukewarm and as one wit put it, by the third test even Mother Nature got bored and decided it was better to spend the time watering the grass. Meanwhile Australia's domestic cricketers, along with a fair number of actual West Indians and a smattering from other countries, have been playing T20 cricket in the Big Bash League in front of packed stadia and large TV audiences.  Even the women's version of the competition, in its very first year, is attracting enough interest for Channel 10 to increase its coverage. Of course threats to Test Cricket are not new.  In 1960, long before TV covera

When I was looking for Christmas songs for church earlier this month, I came across my words and chords for this little gospel music gem we used to sing way back in the early 1980s. It's got a pretty, catchy tune and simple words, and it's easy for a ham guitarist like me to play.  Plus back in the day we were heavily into trying to convert people (not very successfully) and this song really tried hard to do that. Here's the thing though.  It never struck me as odd that although it calls itself 'A Christmas Song for All Year Round' it's actually an Easter song.  Look at the words. I wonder if this Christmas they'll begin to understand The Jesus that they celebrate was much more than a man. Cos the way the world is I don't see how people can deny The only way to save us was for Jesus Christ to die. And I know that if St Nicholas was here he would agree That Jesus gave the greatest gift of all to you and me They led him to the slaughter on

As you know I like a good music memoir.  I don't even mind a bad one.  Being a music obsessive I like the insight a memoir can give me into the songs and the times, the way you can get a little way into the head of the person who wrote the songs or performed them and see the process of their creation.  Many of my favourite musicians are getting on in years and are not as prolific as they once were and are turning to writing as way to fill their time, boost their income or secure their legacy, so I have plenty to choose from. Of course the down side is that the skill of writing a book is very different to that of writing a song.  A song is pithy, allusive, with a compactness that disciplines the composer to say what they need to say in a few short verses.  A memoir stretches out over thousands of words and lots of years.  It needs good (or at least adequate) writing to keep the reader engaged, characters with depth and resonance and a story that keeps you reading. The most obvio

If you've been reading, you'll know that I'm on the hunt for simple diagrams that can explain the entire world at a glance. Here's another one A couple of years ago I did a piece of research for Shelter NSW on the redevelopment of public housing estates.  If you're a real nerd you can read it here , but unless you're especially interested in the literature on public housing renewal you'll find it very tedious. One of the many reports I read involved the researchers interviewing residents who had lived in the midst of a redevelopment project in Minto, Sydney.  They suggested that a large part of the reason for the disconnect between the plans made by the redevelopment authority and its contractors, and the preferences of the tenants, was that they view the neighbourhood very differently. Redevelopment professionals - architects, planners, project managers and so forth - see the suburb as a grid, as if viewed from the air, and for them all parts of the g