Sacha Jones's Blog, page 20

The Moose Whisperer

Craftier than I lookYou might not know this, I've been keeping it a pretty good secret for a while now, but by night, and sometimes, increasingly, by day, I am the Moose Whisperer.

It's difficult to explain entirely why this is, though the fact that I'm allergic to horses I think has something to do with it. I'm not allergic to moose.

Also, I married a moose. At least I married Moose, with a capital M, and he prefers me to whisper (especially when I'm calling him Moose).

I'm probably not the world's best moose whisperer, as I do like to shout when the mood (Moose) takes me. But I'm getting better, though I do find the antlers challenging -- they're not ears, you know. I didn't, but I'm learning.

I'll keep you posted on my progress. For now, it's over and out from the Moose Whisperer© (don't get any ideas about challenging me for the title; I'm craftier than I look).

 

Short, but neither nasty nor brutish

Gotcha!Just as much of the man's world we live in reverts more emphatically than ever to a Hobbesian, pre-law state of perpetual warring wherein life is nasty, brutish and short, Pikachu, the short, tubby, perpetually smiling and infinitely non-nasty and brutish king of the Pokemon, is back to lighten and brighten our load, or at least to take our minds off the mean madness of the wider warring world.

And although I can't take part directly in the Pokemon Go craze that has revived enthusiasm for this cutest of cute critters, because I don't have a phone compatible with the app, I don't need to run around looking for virtual Pokemon to enjoy the revival of a thing non nasty and brutish that has come out of the minds of men.

Indeed I have a fluffy, non-virtual Pokemon of my own (actually belongs to my younger son) to remind me of this softer side to the male nature, even if the revival is also, of course, a mega money-making venture which has already turned ugly, though the craze is little more than a month old.

I choose to ignore the ugliness and enjoy the nostalgia for what seems like a less mad mean time, a time when my older boy proudly took his giant fluffy Pokemon to the cinema with him and everyone was smiling. What a pity they have to grow up -- though do they? Pikachu says no, and so, in may ways, does Pokemon Go.

 

Short, but neither nasty or brutish

Gotcha!Just as much of the man's world we live in reverts more emphatically than ever to a Hobbesian, pre-law state of perpetual warring wherein life is nasty, brutish and short, Pikachu, the short, tubby, perpetually smiling and infinitely non-nasty and brutish king of the Pokemon, is back to lighten and brighten our load, or at least to take our minds off the mean madness of the wider warring world.

And although I can't take part directly in the Pokemon Go craze that has revived enthusiasm for this cutest of cute critters, because I don't have a phone compatible with the app, I don't need to run around looking for virtual Pokemon to enjoy the revival of a thing non nasty and brutish that has come out of the minds of men.

Indeed I have a fluffy, non-virtual Pokemon of my own (actually belongs to my younger son) to remind me of this softer side to the male nature, even if the revival is also, of course, a mega money-making venture which has already turned ugly, though the craze is little more than a month old.

I choose to ignore the ugliness and enjoy the nostalgia for what seems like a less mad mean time, a time when my older boy proudly took his giant fluffy Pokemon to the cinema with him and everyone was smiling. What a pity they have to grow up -- though do they? Pikachu says no, and so, in may ways, does Pokemon Go.

 

A woman in white

Hillary's history-making speech at the DNC last night Apologies to all those who thought the 'woman in blue' I was writing about today was this woman, her party's colour being blue, though she's wearing white here.

I can see how that might have been confusing, as I was writing about the other woman (me) on the very day that this woman in white -- the one and only Hillary Clinton -- was accepting the democratic nomination as the first woman ever to be elected by a major party as their candidate for president of the United States -- a fairly big deal.

Indeed my gynaecology appointment and even our midnight visit by the boys in blue, pale into insignificance by comparison. I can see that now and I'm sorry.  It will never happen again -- because one of us is making major history which cannot be repeated. Also, because I'm running out of reasons to visit the gynaecologist.

So please enjoy the speech, as I have done now, and ignore the poem. The woman in white is the far greater woman, and an inspiration to us all who will change the world for the so much better if we let her, and probably even if we don't, but it will be way better if we do.

And on that understatement to end all understatements, I will leave you to watch history in the making. It's poetry in motion, whatever colour it comes in, though if you want blue, there are blue balloons at the end.  

A woman in blue

Greta's birthday
Helen's too
A yachtswoman
A soul counsellor

Swimming at seven

A gynaecology appointment
A man crying on the radio
A stranger's umbrella

A pregnancy test
A difficult birth

Running round corners
Sheltering under leaves

Salmon soup
A urine-wet blanket
Cath's book of bones
Geoffrey Rush
TeaTranquilliserGirl drunk at the doorBoys dressed in blue

Much bigger than it looks

This is how the Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Paul Byrnes describes the 2015 Australian film A Month of Sundays that has just been released in New Zealand. And after watching it this weekend, I couldn't agree more. It is much bigger than it looks, just as the 2008 star-studded epic of a film Australia might be described as much smaller than it looks. And size does matter, just not in the way we tend to imagine it does, at least not with respect to films.

And the Australian film industry used to make these deceptively big films, arguably better than any other country. But for some time now it has been making these deceptively small films, as epitomised by Australia, a film so deceptively small, it couldn't even come up with an original title and just borrowed it from the country instead.

There's nothing borrowed about A Month of Sundays. No country has ever been called that, indeed, nor likely ever will. As film titles go, it's not exactly catchy. But it is clever, playing on the expression meaning an unlikely occurrence, referencing the phone-call from the main character's dead mother that turns his life around, as well as referencing the slow, Sunday pace of the film and the weekend work of the house-selling business that he is in.

To be bigger than you look is to have more on the inside than on the out, a quality that could be said to be roughly the inverse of the ideal of modern masculinity as portrayed in mainstream films in and beyond Australia.

Until now.

A Month of Sundays is a clever and timely (as in better late than never) rethinking of the masculine ideal, not least because it allows women -- the wife and mother-figures in the film -- a constructive, even heroic role in their lives, rather than women always being blamed and punished for men's problems or 'saved' from their own feminine weaknesses by the heroic -- outwardly big -- man.

It's subtly done, rather than any clunky gender-role reversal (aka Mad Maxine), and in that way rings true and shows the sincerity of the writer-director Mathew Saville 's intentions in making a film with brain and heart, rather than with those other body parts more often favoured in films by and about men.

It's also funny, not least because trans-Tasman satirist John Clarke plays a small but pivotal role as the leading man's boss. The sprinkler scene and call from Freud are particularly hilarious. My only criticism is that there's not enough of Clarke, and perhaps not enough humour, in the film, but I guess you can't have everything -- in a film, any more than in a man.

Still, it's five, deceptively small, stars from me.



  

It's much bigger than it looks

This is how the Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Paul Byrnes describes the 2015 Australian film A Month of Sundays that has just been released in New Zealand. And after watching it this weekend, I couldn't agree more. It is much bigger than it looks, just as the 2008 star-studded epic of a film Australia might be described as much smaller than it looks. And size does matter, just not in the way we tend to imagine it does, at least not with respect to films.

And the Australian film industry used to make these deceptively big films, arguably better than any other country. But for some time now it has been making these deceptively small films, as epitomised by Australia, a film so deceptively small, it couldn't even come up with an original title and just borrowed it from the country instead.

There's nothing borrowed about A Month of Sundays. No country has ever been called that, indeed, nor likely ever will. As film titles go, it's not exactly catchy. But it is clever, playing on the expression meaning an unlikely occurrence, referencing the phone-call from the main character's dead mother that turns his life around, as well as referencing the slow, Sunday pace of the film and the weekend work of the house-selling business that he is in.

To be bigger than you look is to have more on the inside than on the out, a quality that could be said to be roughly the inverse of the ideal of modern masculinity as portrayed in mainstream films in and beyond Australia.

Until now.

A Month of Sundays is a clever and timely (as in better late than never) rethinking of the masculine ideal, not least because it allows women -- the wife and mother-figures in the film -- a constructive, even heroic role in their lives, rather than women always being blamed and punished for men's problems or 'saved' from their own feminine weaknesses by the heroic -- outwardly big -- man.

It's subtly done, rather than any clunky gender-role reversal (aka Mad Maxine), and in that way rings true and shows the sincerity of the writer-director Mathew Saville 's intentions in making a film with brain and heart, rather than with those other body parts more often favoured in films by and about men.

It's also funny, not least because trans-Tasman satirist John Clarke plays a small but pivotal role as the leading man's boss. The sprinkler scene and call from Freud are particularly hilarious. My only criticism is that there's not enough of Clarke, and perhaps not enough humour, in the film, but I guess you can't have everything -- in a film, any more than in a man.

Still, it's five, deceptively small, stars from me.



  

Facebook faces

It's not OK                 These two faces were the first to greet me today when I opened up Facebook: a smiling baby giraffe, already with more than 2 million likes, and an unsmiling (if beautiful) Maori woman fronting the 2016 'It's not OK' campaign against family violence in NZ, with about 800 likes.

The 'likes' reflect a somewhat sad if understandable order of priorities in favour of the smiling and innocuous over the unsmiling and challenging, an order of priorities that Facebook undoubtedly embraces and exacerbates. Also, animals, at least giraffes, are global, whereas campaigns against domestic violence are local, even if the violence is global and probably won't be reduced significantly until a global campaign is mounted to expose and prevent it.

Still, I 'liked' the smiling giraffe, partly because I like the woman who shared it, but also, no doubt, because, like most people, I find it easy to smile at the innocuous and cute -- if perhaps not quite as easy as some do. I did hesitate before 'liking' the smiling giraffe.

But unlike most people, I also 'liked' (and shared) the unsmiling face of the anti-domestic violence campaign, after reading the full article attached and appreciating its mission to expose the sexist nature of violence in the home more so, it seems to me, than in previous campaigns of the sort in this country. We are making progress, however slow, and that made me smile too.

Together, these juxtaposed faces that ultimately got me smiling today, also got me thinking about the value of Facebook in our lives, a question Facebook asked us to consider directly some months back. A question I chose not to answer at the time, because I couldn't decide whether it was a positive or a negative force. I was leaning towards the negative.

Today I'm inclined to come out in favour of Facebook overall, though only if it continues to expose, in a constructive way, the most difficult and unsmiling issues of our times, and perhaps does a little less to promote animal and selfie-love at the expense of these issues.

Love is the answer, no doubt, but I think the truth and power of that Lennon lyric is about promoting the essentially hard love -- rather than the easy hate -- between humans, and not so much for giraffes. After all, if we don't learn to love each other better than we have done to date, we're all ultimately stuffed, even the giraffes. Even Facebook.      





  

        

Busting bile

"When word first broke about a female-led reboot of Ivan Reitman’s 1984 fantasy-comedy Ghostbusters, the internet reacted with a stream of sexist bile more foul than the slimy green ectoplasm spewed up by an angry demon."  (Mark Kermode, The Guardian, 17 July, 2016)

One of these days, if you're not careful, and possibly even if you are, I'm going to write a book on this kind of anti-woman bile and my sons, who last night gloated to me, as I was serving them dinner, about what an 'epic fail' the Ghostbusters reboot is, are going to be the first to read it -- though they don't read this blog, at least not often. Perhaps they will read this one.

I love my boys as well as any other keen mother does, I hope, but having raised them to adulthood, or near adulthood in the case of my second son, much of it whilst writing a doctoral thesis on male violence against women and the long history of misogyny that substantially causes and denies it, I feel increasingly torn and tortured by this love, I am sorry to say. Indeed all humour drains out of me when I reflect on this subject, which is why most of the time I pretend the boys are fine and not inclined to side with the sexism deniers and perpetrators.

And I think most of the time they actually are fine and not so inclined, at least not any more than the average young male rather than the minority, if sizeable minority, of mostly young males who have taken such offence to the new Ghostbusters film and to other recent attempts to correct the gender imbalance in art in favour of more positive portrayals of women as heroes and comics -- and ghost busters, indeed -- rather than sex objects and side kicks.

Still, I will not ignore their ridicule of these worthy efforts, however lighthearted. And last night when they strutted their stuff in mockery of the Ghostbusters remake (which I haven't yet seen, nor have they), I abandoned the table and left them to their mockery, making it clear at least that I knew what they were doing and didn't like it.

I think it's tough being a boy, tougher than being a girl in many ways, but I don't think we make it any easier on them, or us, by encouraging them to feel better about being male by mocking females and the efforts made to expose and combat institutionalised male privilege. Indeed I think we compound the problem.

The recent documentary The Mask You Live In about the limits and challenges of modern masculinity, is interesting and illuminating on this most challenging of issues. The woman who wrote, directed and produced it, Jennifer Siebel Newsom , was motivated to do so by the birth of her son. I hope to get my sons to watch it, as there's absolutely no chance of getting them to watch the new Ghostbusters.
















 

Introducing the Incredible Hulkess

I put this recent MEdia appearance on Facebook at the time it came out but didn't think it necessary to blog about it as well, being kind of tired of blowing my own trumpet and, more honestly, not being entirely happy with the giant present-day me positioned alongside the tiny dancer me, giving something of the effect of an Incredible Hulkess, even if it is roughly the truth of the matter. I am about 800 times larger than I was as a teenage dancer.

But it doesn't pay to be too vain in this book-writing and promotion business (if not life in general). Rather, as I'm coming to learn, you have to make the most of any media attention you get and be gracious when they make you look like a hulk or write that you became a Russian ballerina when you didn't, at least not outside of your dreams. I became an Australian ballerina, a slightly smaller achievement. Still, perhaps one distortion compensates for the other and it all irons out in the wash -- unlike my shirt.

And I really shouldn't be grumbling, because one of my oldest friends, who I had hardly seen since primary school, saw the piece published in the local rag, somehow recognised me under my new Russian name, looked up the publishers, found the promotion for the Sydney launch on their website and came to the launch! And it was great to see her, even if she did not quite make it into the book that covers the period in which we were almost best friends.

And on that, slightly cringey note, I feel an Incredible Hulkess moment coming on, induced by shame rather than rage, shame being how you provoke a Hulkess, of course. So I'll leave it there and suggest you stay tuned for the next instalment of the Incredible Hulkess. I think she could be BIG.