This film, Farewell (dir Christian Carion, 2009) is an ambitious but suitably low-key affair; 'suitably' because of the depressing nature of the situation in play at the time - we're in the early 1980s just before Gorbachev's perestroika program of reform which changed Russia's attitude toward the West and led to the Berlin Wall being dismantled. The film purports to chronicle the events on the Russian side, in the catastrophic failure of its espionage program due to the activities of a lone person, that directly caused the policy change.

Sergei Gregoriev (Emir Kusturica, in pic at right) is a Soviet agent who has decided to dismantle his country's network of foreign sources of information, and so contacts Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet, in pic at left), a French engineering contractor working in Moscow who somehow gets 'turned' so that he starts funnelling intelligence from Gregoriev to France. As the operation gets more sophisticated with the use of micro-cameras and other paraphernalia of the trade, more national spy agencies get wind of what's happening, notably America's CIA.

While there is a lot of tension between the different characters - such as Sergei's son, Igor (Evgeniy Kharlanov), who finds out about Sergei's mistress, Natasha (Ingeborga Dapkunaite); or Froment's wife (Alexandra Maria Lara), who starts to get cold feet as the fiction of her husband's status in Moscow is drawn out in time - there is no reliance by the filmmakers on abrupt expressions of emotion or overwrought physical action. It all takes place in the film where it would realistically take place in life: within. This makes the viewer watch the main characters closely, and as a result they become multi-dimensional and complex.

Sergei, especially, is a person with complex motivations. Dismantling the secrecy system in Soviet Russia is a personal matter for him. He loves his son. He doesn't want his son to grow up in the same atmosphere of distrust and fear that he grew up in. So we see him, on the couch late at night, watching old home movies from a time when Igor was a small child. Sergei lies in the darkness smoking a cigarette and reflecting on a happier time in his family's life together.

Froment's motivations are less clear but he acknowledges Sergei's disquiet and attends to his needs. There is a fair amount of personal interaction between the two when they meet in parks or fields to exchange items of importance to the drama: a book of French poetry and a Queen tape for Sergei, a sheaf of papers for Froment. As Sergei has noone else to confide in he tends to muse aloud on his current state of mind at these meetings, which adds interest to the script.

Igor is not the only secondary character to be realised through the addition of depth and colour. Sergei's wife Alina (Dina Korzun) is also made active in the plot as she hovers around the periphery of Sergei's complicated existence within the country's spy system. Igor is in his teens, and while Alina is still attractive there is the little matter of Natasha to consider when weighing up one's opinion of Sergei. Infidelity itself is one thing, but ignoring a woman who is your wife and who is past her prime, is another thing entirely.

But that's the thing about this movie. People's motivations, the reasons they do things, are important. Achieving this level of engagement by the audience is no easy thing to do, and the filmmakers should be congratulated for spending little (it's not a 'big' production) to achieve a lot.

Review: Shakespeare's Wife, Germaine Greer (2007)

The number of scholars who can get their monographs situated on the biography shelf of a middle-high-brow independent bookshop is probably calculable using the fingers of one hand. Simon Schama springs to mind (so that's two). Hmm ... Let's see ... Nope, there ain't nuthun' that's springing forth in my dismal mind right now, friends. Which makes Greer an oddity, but we should not dismiss her new book on that account, even though she takes on a long string of (what she calls, hilariously) "bardolators", or stubbornly refuse to unpack the coinage: it refers to those scholars and historians who, in order to praise their favourite Renaissance author (and probably the most famous author of all time in any country), must disparage his wife.

Greer, who made her name as a feminist polemicist, undoubtedly sees a form of elite-level sexism at work in the equation. She may be right. What is disturbing is that noone has ever publicly attempted to systematically dissect the bardolators' biases by doggedly returning to the records of Stratford and nearby towns, and of London, in search of any proof. That's the problem, she thinks. These middle-aged white guys just built on an assumption made early in the history of Shakespeare writing (and it's got a long history, starting in the early 17th century), and elaborated on it in the absence of any information to the contrary. It's a clear case of how a monoculture (white, middle-aged guys) can distort the record and bring forth deformed progeny.

Many people will find Greer's book puzzling, if not overwhelming. This is due to its density. The sheer volume of facts plucked, like live eels, and stuffed into the literary confection one holds in one's hands, will make some readers squirm. Many will plug on out of solidarity with the author. Others will simply revel in the copious trove of new information that gives substance to a far-off time, and pocket Greer's stated conclusions as viable coin to be used in the marketplace of ideas we all inhabit.

For myself, the book has additional usefulness as my earliest-known ancestor (a certain Thomas Caldicott) had a son, Thomas, who became a husbandman and was buried in Warwickshire, the county in which Ann and William were brought up and where Ann lived. There is an estate named Caldicott in Greer's book which was owned by one of the powerful Greville clan. The Grevilles don't come out of the book looking very wise or very nice at all. As a husbandman, however, Thomas Caldicott (fils) may have been well-off, and Greer's book tells me much about what was happening in the mid-Renaissance in England in terms of the economy which was, of course, still largely based on agriculture. Thomas may even have been involved in the extensive "enclosures" of land that took place at the time, when profit-hungry landowning gentry fenced off areas traditionally used by the wider community for pasturage, a practice that sometimes led to bloodshed, if not at least civil conflict.

Ann Shakespeare would have led a productive and useful life in her household, regardless of what her husband's post-mortal groupies inferred from the slim file of reliable records that still exist. Greer does a lot of hard work by combing through a wide array of records from the time and performing a type of literary triangulation, in some cases where nothing concrete still exists, in order to prove her points. Ann was clearly beloved and may have been the subject of some of Shakespeare's sonnets. She was faithful and diligent in her homemaking, raising two children to adulthood at a time when so many children died, as her son Hamnet did, before puberty. She kept the home fires burning while William was away in London or else touring around the countryside with the Kings Men, his theatrical troupe. She deserves our esteem.

You get the feeling that the bardolators have simply dropped the ball. That Greer has been equal to the task, one that to most would be utterly daunting, of assembling convincing evidence to support Ann Shakespeare's claim on our regard is proof, is any were needed, of the depth of feeling involved in the case. Greer must have gnashed her teeth often, over the half-century or so during which she has studied the works of William Shakespeare, as she discovered each case of the intellectual crime of bardolatry. Why, one is forced to ask, is it necessary to seek to raise one person up by putting another down? Surely William would have disapproved?

Walls come in all shapes and sizes and possess a wide range of meanings; a single wall may even mean different things to different people. But news that News Limited will, next year, place at least part of its online content behind pay walls reminds us that journalism is an endangered craft and that while journalists should be paid - certainly more - for what they do, consumers are not always cooperative.

The big news coming from Richard Freudenstein, CEO of News Digital, is that not all of the news sites' content will go behind the wall (the major centres in Australia each have a News tabloid - The Mercury in Hobart, The Advertiser in Adelaide, The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, the Herald-Sun in Melbourne, The Courier-Mail in Brisbane and NT News in the Northern Territory - with the exception of Perth, and then of course there's The Australian, the country's only general-interest national broadsheet).

Freudenstein's revelation is anchored to a mention of the Wall Street Journal (another News vehicle, owned by US-based News Corp), which charges for some content. But it is, like Fairfax's Australian Financial Review (which charges for all content online), a special-interest daily, not a general-interest one. Financial news properties have done well everywhere they are charged for online. It is the general-interest vehicles that should worry about their readership simply dropping away. For this reason, a better comparison would have been to the New York Times, which is planning to place a lot of its own content behind a pay wall, probably also next year.

Falling readership in terms of very soft page view figures is what has happened in the UK, where the News vehicle The Times lost 97 percent of its online readership when a pay wall went up earlier this year, an eventuality that prompted media commentator Clay Shirky to label the site the "online newsletter of the Tories", according to the Guardian.

"The Times has stopped being a newspaper, in the sense of a generally available and omnibus account of the news of the day, broadly read in the community. Instead, it is becoming a newsletter, an outlet supported by, and speaking to, a specific and relatively coherent and compact audience," writes Shirky.

News Corp head Rupert Murdoch will have taken the same message away from the UK experiment, and his Australian editors will be keen to ensure that their mastheads are not similarly neutered. After all, Murdoch has never made any bones about his willingness to control editorial direction, tone, and political bias. Placing The Australian completely behind a pay wall would render it a toothless tiger. With his other media interests in Australia subject to forms of government control, Murdoch will want to retain all of his options when the time comes to attack the administration at either the state or federal level.

The question remains: which elements of content will be placed out of general view? It has happened, in the UK in one case I am aware of, that an opinion-piece writer has quit a news vehicle in order to prevent his work from being hidden from the widest possible audience. If you were a journalist working at The Australian you would be very concerned, right now, about where your work would appear once the wall is erected. Would it be in front of the wall, visible to all Australians, or would it be relegated to the obscurity of Australia's very own "online newsletter for the conservatives"?

Extraordinary news from India as microcredit borrowers have refused to repay loans from for-profit lenders. The New York Times story notes that politicians in Andhra Pradesh, the Indian state where the financial crisis is placing pressure on microcredit lenders, have told residents not to repay their loans because the companies are "earning outsize profits on the backs of the poor". It's a compelling narrative in India, clearly, just as the narrative driving the reknown of the first microlender, Bangladesh's Grameen Bank (est. 1977), was so compelling that others decided to start doing a similar kind of business next door.

It seems that their desire for a financial return made them cut corners, however, leading them to make loans without also providing financial management advice (which Grameen does). This oversight has led to some people not being able to repay their loans. Some of these people then took out other loans to help service the original loan, with a vicious debt spiral taking hold in a number of cases. There have been suicides and abscondings. These led to the politicians getting involved, urging borrowers not to service their loans.

There also seems to be a problem with the interest rates charged. I'm not a complete expert on Grameen Bank and its levels of interest, but this story mentions that SKS Microfinance - which is India's largest microlender and which in August listed on the Indian stock exchange, raising $350 million - has "reduced its interest rate by six percentage points, to 24 percent". Seems a little high, akin to what Westerners pay on their credit cards and hardly an indication that the lender keeps the borrower's best interests in mind when giving out loans.

The whole scenario is just extraordinary. Grameen Bank was established by teacher Muhammad Yunus as an alternative to village loan sharks, who are in the present case expected to retake the initiative.

The collapse of the industry could have severe consequences for borrowers, who may be forced to resort to money lenders once again. It is tough to find a household in this village in an impoverished district of Andhra Pradesh that is not deeply in debt to a for-profit microfinance company.

Grameen Bank's repayment rate is in the order of 97 percent and, as far as I know, it has never been singled out for comment on the basis of the kinds of spectacular non-performance that are emerging in India now. No suicides. No abscondings. But also it's a not-for-profit enterprise, and was established in order to provide a service, on humanitarian grounds, to those unable to viably raise capital in any other way. It was designed to break the cycle of poverty in Bangladesh. The new Indian microfinance companies appear, rather, to have been established in order to generate a return for shareholders. Corners have been cut and the whole house of cards is now threatening to collapse.

Grameen was a true "social enterprise" and it's extremely telling that the reporter, when using this label alongside the new types of companies operating in India, places it in inverted commas.

The "crisis has been building for weeks, but has now reached a critical stage" and "is likely to reverberate around the globe" causing disruption in other financial markets, most of which are just now recovering from the global financial crisis of 2008.

"From little things, big things grow." This Aussie adage cuts both ways, it seems.

This is Liberal National Party Senator Ron Boswell. Who wants this bulk-serve middle-aged white dude determining policy that affects the wellbeing of Australian children who are same-sex attracted (SSA)? The Queensland senator has come out against same-sex marriage, most recently in a Sydney Morning Herald story, where he nastily predicts the type of negative reception a Labor Party MP who had decided to campaign for same-sex marriage might receive in "the front bar of any working class pub":

''I will happily take any Labor (MP) to the front bar of any working class pub. He can advocate gay marriage and I will happily stand back and hold his coat.''

Yes, senator. And we don't want to help those idiots in the front bar to change their misguided views, do we?

The children of idiots who are against same-sex marriage are the ones who persecute SSA kids at school, on the bus, and walking home afterward. Teenage suicide is an epidemic in Australia but it is a silent one because of the compact made by newspapers to not report such events when they occur. This compact lets the likes of Ron Boswell off the hook when they vociferate publicly about things that materially and detrimentally affect the lives of millions of honest and hard-working citizens.

The Labor Party actually has a pretty good track record in terms of progressive policy implementation, most notably via the abolition of racial aspects of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which had prevented non-whites from entering the country and had been the first piece of legislation passed in the new Parliament of Australia. The Whitlam government, which took office after the December 1972 election, won by Labor, made those important changes. The Racial Discrimination Act 1975, which made discrimination on the basis of race unlawful, was also a Whitlam initiative, arising out of his government's ratification of all international agreements relating to immigration and race.

There is no question that the White Australia Policy, enshrined as it was in federal law, caused suffering to millions. My father's memoir vividly describes how non-Anglo kids were treated in the street by kids from the dominant ethnic group and even before he handed the CD-ROM to me he had for as long as I can remember made his feelings clear through the bitter and ironic tone of voice used when recollecting his childhood. And this policy was furthermore responsible, at least in part, for his disappointment with his father, who came here in 1924 from the Portuguese African colony he grew up in. The man simply sought a better life; a visionary, he struggled with language and with discrimination for decades.

The push for tolerance that has suggested to Julia Gillard the wisdom of rescheduling the Labor Party's national conference, is a virtuous one. Tony Abbott, the Opposition leader, might accuse the Labor leader on the floor of Parliament of giving in to the Greens. But she should remember that the large Green vote of the September election was due mostly to disaffected Labor voters changing their ballot preferences. The Left faction of the Labor Party knows this. The push for tolerance on the basis of SSA is coming from within Labor as much as from the current government's junior partner.

It's time for the Labor Party to return to its progressive roots and stake another claim on the future's fond regard by making gay marriage part of the Party platform. It's definitely time, Julia.

It's been 30 years since the last large-scale British royal event: the fabulous marriage ceremony that joined together the futures of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, and which took place at St Paul's Cathedral in London. I was studying at university at the time and was living in a residential college with a common room and a large TV and I remember the approval of the exclusively male watchers as they lounged around that small concrete room. Before that it's necessary to travel back in time another 28 years to reach the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. My mother remembers even today the procession the young queen made through Melbourne, and has told me how beautiful she thought Elizabeth was, especially her skin (!).

Last night after dinner (about 9.30pm here in Australia) news of the engagement of Kate Middleton and Prince William hit the interwebz with an official announcement and it was quickly echoed by people in this country and, presumably, elsewhere too. Groans mingled with applause as each of them reacted to the news in their own way. In Australia, the memory of the republic referendum of 1999 is still vivid for many and the language of royalty tends to grate on their ears (one person said she would leave Australia unless the British media stopped referring to Middleton as a "commoner"). Regardless how people feel, the reality is that William is likely to be King of Australia (William V, in fact, following Charles III) at some point in the future, so we should take notice of who his wife will be when that happens.

In Britain, there has been, almost exclusively, a positive reaction, at least in the public sphere, led (if you choose) by the prime minister's prediction of "a great day of national celebration". British workers have seen their economy struggle hardily to cope in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and the announcement could probably not have been better-timed, as it will become a lightening rod for public commentary in the months leading up to the nuptials, which are likely to be held in the northern summer.

Talk of Australia's political settlement has not flourished wildly in recent years, but the wedding will no doubt catalyse both monarchists and republicans to public debate. Some have said that it might be timely for Australia to transition to a new status when Elizabeth steps down. At 84, Elizabeth has been queen for 58 years. Charles has been waiting patiently but he's not going to have to wait much longer, and the Middleton-Windsor marriage will probably delay the succession until at least 2013, after the Olympics that will be held in London. Regardless of the vagaries of queenly plans for the immediate future, expect discussion in Australia to echo in a distorted way what's going to be said publicly in the UK, where this event will matter more than it does here.

Strangely, the momentous event anticipated in Sudan - separation, and the formation of a new country - is hardly present in the media yet, even though Sudanese in the south of the country are already preparing to vote for or against secession by registering at designated locations in that part of the country, which is Africa's largest. The south is oil-rich but the north has the majority of citizens, so observers are asking how smooth any transition from a one-state settlement to a two-state one will be. It is difficult to imagine that the poll, which was first mooted as part of a 2005 peace plan that brought an end to fighting between the north and the south, will be welcomed in the north.

For many, the country is best-known from depictions in a type of memoir, What is the What?, a 2006 book written by San Francisco writer Dave Eggers. The trials of Valentino Achak Deng that were rendered in the book have made the man famous in the West, and he has been involved in humanitarian ventures in his native country in recent times, even appearing on TV here. In the book, the Deng character recalls events that took place when he was a boy escaping the fighting.

Natalie Tran deliberately avoids playing up her success. This edgy lack of, what the world deems to be, seriousness is at the core of her appeal, even if it's not the whole story. So when she encounters traditional media there's always a disconnect between what she aspires to (making "friends I haven't met yet") and what she's supposed to do with her fame: exploit it for all the cash she can get. As a result the reporter is constantly wrong-footed by Natalie. It has happened before. This time she spoke at length with Neil McMahon and his article was published yesterday on the website of the Sydney Morning Herald, a respected broadsheet. The story has much new material but it's a bit disappointing because McMahon struggles with the demands of an invisible public and those of his own intellect as he comes to terms with a new phenomenon: a bona-fide reluctant star.

The signs of this struggle are everywhere in the first half of the article. Natalie enjoys "global recognition of a rarefied kind" but she "ticks none of the boxes" that normlly fit with notoriety in the entertainment world, McMahon tells us. Natalie, he insists, you're "a rich, famous celebrity"! When McMahon suggests that a major entertainment personality would be happy with the scale of the public reaction she garners online, she gives him a "riddle of an answer". Natalie "wants it known" (he states glibly) that she doesn't take her success too seriously. Does he get it? "So what is Natalie Tran about?" he asks. Yes, he does get it if he's being honest (which eventually happens): "she really finds the whole thing a little absurd," he writes. (He should have asked her what records she listened to when she was 17. Maybe there are some clues hidden there.)

"Absurdity," McMahon tells us, is what Natalie is about, as he attempts to segue as effortlessly as possible into a brief run-down of the type of humour the comedian specialises in. But he's still stumped as he tries to shoe-horn Natalie's qualities into categories readers might be familiar with:

They are hard to describe. She is no Justin Bieber, the Canadian sensation who used YouTube exposure as a springboard to global fame as a singer. And she's not entertaining bored office workers with laugh-for-a-second grabs of dogs on skateboards or dancing babies.

Helplessly, McMahon then reaches for a metaphor he deems suitable for his audience, calling Natalie's videos "Seinfeldian". Not screamingly funny or irreverent or a little dark, but comparable to an American comic we all know is funny at least by reputation if not from direct experience. He's funny but for many it's because they're told he is, not because they think he is. However Natalie's fans were never told she was funny, at least not at first. And they don't need the commentariat to tell them it's OK to like her because, well, they all agree that she's funny. Fans watch her because she makes them giggle.

Then there's the Asian angle to explore, and McMahon dives in: "her family background ... provides clues to be explored." He still can't get his head around the fact that a raging success of the type Natalie has built is not being milked economically for all it's worth, so he reaches for a recognisable prop. We then get some useful history of how it all started (as a response to the videos of Lonelygirl15, a vlog hit in 2006, which is like saying: in the pre-Cambrian era).

McMahon tries hard in the second half, when he gets his mind around some of the real issues that Natalie has (not yet) explored in her videos, such as sexism and racism. Dealing with these issues is a public service, but it's a little sad that the journalist couldn't deal with Natalie's attitude to money with the same aplomb. When he later attempts to label Natalie a "role model" she again begs off the honour, as she is wont to do in such circumstances. It's all a bit embarrassing to be pigeon-holed by journalists eager for a big story with extra heavy-duty suction and three separate snap-on attachments for those hard-to-reach places.

I first wrote about Natalie's contra-rational financial predilections almost two years ago and a few months later I wrote about her collaboration with the Sydney Morning Herald on a series of video podcasts.

Pic credit: Marco del Grande.

The two tweets dealing with SBS reporter Karen Middleton's visit to Japan to cover the APEC meeting that appeared yesterday afternoon around 1.40pm show how social media has started to change the tone of debate in the public sphere.

In the first tweet - which has been retweeted in the image below - SBS rather unnecessarily tells us that Middleton is in Japan. It also tells us that US President Barack Obama was meeting Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Nothing exceptional about that. News services are constantly spruiking their awareness of "important" events such as this "historic" meeting.

Then something strange happens when we get a new tweet a few minutes later from Middleton herself. Obama and Gillard are engaged in "mutual admiration"? Odd. No breathless recount of a handshake. No frenzied account of an air-kiss as the two leaders come together for the first time. Just an ironic reminder that reporters, too, have a sense of the ridiculous. Instead of puffing up the encounter, Middleton shrinks it down to a human, manageable size.

This kind of dealing with information would have been impossible without Twitter. It might have been caught on a microphone if the reporter had thought the mic had been turned off when in fact it wasn't. But it's not the very existence of the tweet, alone, that is significant. The tone of discussion in social media is qualitatively different from what we're used to on the (oh-so-polite) airwaves.

The meeting between the two leaders wasn't merely put into perspective, from the point of view of the average media consumer back in Australia. It wasn't just "mutual admiration" but, in fact, "the usual mutual admiration", so becoming completely un-newsworthy in an instant of critical reflection by the reporter. It's critical of the type of expression of solidarity we were habituated to watching take place between Obama's and Gillard's predecessors, Bush and Howard.

After all, Obama had the chance to visit Australia during this trip and had cancelled an earlier scheduled trip to Australia due to the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill crisis. This time, he went to Indonesia as well as Japan. But not Australia. So Middleton is seen here doing some of the critical thinking the average person does whenever they are subjected to the media's take on such an insignificant event as a brief meeting between two national leaders.

For a feel-good experience that is replete with fast one-liners and almost bereft of plot, Sex and the City 2 (dir Michael Patrick King, 2010) is a stand-out performer to safely bring into your lounge room and enjoy unencumbered by difficult story-lines and hard-to-read aesthetics. I never saw the first movie in the series, but from the way this one proceeds I assume it had something to do with how Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) got married to handsome, debonaire John James Preston (Chris Noth). So it's now two years down the track and the glamour has started to wear off with the close of the nuptials and the end of the honeymoon. John has turned into a kind of big dog who drops onto the couch at every opportunity, where he automaticlly switches on the TV. He even gets a TV installed in a desk in the bedroom so that viewing is never far away from the pair's intimacy. Carrie wonders if the "sparkle" he promised at the outset has been extinguished.

Charlotte (Kristin Davis) has two children in her care and is stressing out in a major way. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) gets the chop at work because one of the senior partners is targeting her. So when Samantha (Kim Cattrall) is invited to visit Abu Dhabi for a couple of weeks' restorative holidaying, the four friends pack and head for the airport.

That's about all the plot we need to understand the movie. One more thing will happen to draw all the separate parts together, however, and of course it relates directly to Carrie's marriage problem. While in the bazaar Carrie meets an old flame and they make a dinner date, after which they kiss. Carrie flees, mortified with her cavalier attitude to her marriage (pic) and makes a point of phoning John in New York to confess.

And naturally Samantha gets in trouble with the local authorities when on a beach she kisses a Danish architect she met while riding camels in the desert. As you do.

But apart from these structural elements the viewer is largely free of any constraint and can focus attention on the zippy repartee that accompanies the four women as they negotiate sexual politics in two time zones.

A highlight for me was seeing the four do a karaoke number in an Abu Dhabi nightclub, where they sing the classic Helen Reddy feminist anthem I Am Woman and elements of the audience join in with them to celebrate some sort of coming-of-age. It's a largely symbolic gesture though due to the film's distinct lack of plot, and it depends on received ideas for much of its authenticity, which is a lazy way to score points. The film is full of such unambiguous nods at big ideas, such as the opening scenes which take in a glitzy marriage between two men and which features a breathless-looking Lisa Minelli in signature black jacket-and-tights.

A more topical acknowledgement of sexual politics occurs near the end of the movie when the girls, caught exposed in the bazaar, are succoured by a group of Arab women wearing full burqa. Their saviours take them aside into a niche behind a shop and reveal the Western high fashion they keep hidden underneath their normal clothing. It's a nice moment, too, when these women hold up copies of a book they're reading for their book club, and it turns out to be a book Samantha had recommended to her friends when they were still in the US. But, again, such scenes are mostly driven but stuff happening outside the movie, in the wider public sphere.

The Middle East setting also allows the girls to examine whether there is true equality between the sexes in the US. There is grumbling assent that not everything is as good as it could be, especially by lawyer Miranda.

For me the best moment at the end came when John admitted to Carrie, once she has returned to their stylish apartment, that he had been "killing time" walking around the city. It's an authentic moment in an otherwise fairly insubstantial line of the story, and it gives his masculinity a filip since he risks turning into a cypher dependent for essential agency on Carrie's moods and preferences. A walk around New York to clear your head? I can relate to that.

Review: The Masque of Africa, VS Naipaul (2010)

One thing I hear from time to time is how Africa is fruitlessly and frustratingly homogenised by Western commentators and the media. Under the label 'Africa' lie hundreds of millions of souls and dozens of countries in a broad range of climatic regions, some landlocked, some small, some polarised by religion, others simply invisible. How, then, can Naipaul, the Nobel Prize winner (in 2001), honestly sit down at the launch's presentation table and diligently sign copies of this book for Ulrike and Sarah and Gianna and still keep a straight face? How can he honestly think it possible to encapsulate truths about that enormous continent and all of its peoples, in one small volume that purports to say something useful about "African belief" as the subtitle advises us it deals with? Thankfully, Naipaul adhered the modest "glimpses" to that compendious rubric, and thereby saved himself a whole load of embarrassment.

I think the honest reader will not be disappointed with the book, despite this failure of courage by the author. Why, after all, didn't he visit all African countries instead of just six? Is he too frail of body to attempt such a task or was he simply overcome by it? But it will have to be enough that he accompanies the reader to Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Gabon, Ivory Coast and South Africa. There's no more time, unfortunately. It's getting late and we're tired of all this hobbling about in fields of grass as thick as an Afghan hound's pelt. Hush and be still. Let's see what we can find.

Quite a lot, as it turns out, and all of it elaborated in Naipaul's beautiful, concise prose, as simple and unadorned as a spoon. This implement is, of course, fashioned out of the best Sterling silver and not rough wood. So we're shown around by an educated Westerner, one who, to all intents and purposes, shares at least a majority of our prejudices and desires. Prejudices against cruelty to animals, children, women and the weak. Desires for fair-dealing, wisdom, intelligent conversation, and healthy food and sleep as restorative interludes between exotic encounters with village headmen and shamans. A desire for ordered, stimulating life. Fear of being hoodwinked. Or worse.

Belief is a tricky subject. It's what we instinctively rely on to negotiate everyday life. For a Ghanian or a Gabonese or a South African black, the pressing urgency of modernity can be a threat inasmuch as it clashes with the old ways, the ways of the ancestors. Naipaul ventures into contested territory that lies between the demands of the global economy and those of the forefathers. It's a location every African appears to be coming to terms with in his or her own way. For Naipaul, the contrarian liberal, it's a fascinating place to write about. Hence the book.

And of course, Naipaul is aware of his incipient failure. The journalistic style enables him to point to the specific when challenged on the grounds of the general. "I didn't go there," he can say. "I was too tired to continue that day," he might add. "I left a pair of sunglasses in the car in Abuja and then the sun made my eyes water so I didn't really see what happened after that." It's OK. We understand, Vidia. It's really not a problem.

The devastatingly abysmal national reputation tolerated by most African leaders and citizens on almost any modern scale of reckoning may be a contributing factor in terms of the homogenising influence of the media and Western commentary generally. Naipaul attempts to get behind the sad tales of corruption, inefficiency and quotidian tragedy by bringing his intellect to bear on the minutiae of African belief systems. These often clash with imports such as Christianity and Islam but, as Naipaul finds, the imports are also changed by the encounter. They become Africanised, which is something that seems not to occur for the author himself.

For those interested in witch doctors, magic charms and potions, voodoo and bloody rituals, this book is going to be a dud. What it shows, rather, is another way of dealing with the world, a world that is qualitatively different from that found in the West, which of course is a place where the state has taken precedence over the ancients, and the law has been long codified in writing rather than being handed down along lines of descent from father to son and from mother to daughter. And the writing is so good that you will need to concentrate. If you start dreaming because of a particular image you stumble across, it may take several paragraphs before you realise that you have completely lost the plot. Never mind. With Naipaul it's always a pleasure to do a quick recap before venturing on, again, into the shadowy core of the continent.

Costa made a no-dig garden at the Sustainable Living Expo held a couple of weeks back and it was an energetic performance taking over an hour to complete. That might seem like a long time when you consider that everything needed to put the garden together was prepared in advance and on-hand. But with Costa on stage we certainly got more than just a simple demonstration in practical horticulture, regardless of how effective it was; we also got a beginner's course in sustainable gardening and tips on managing biodiversity in the backyard.

The biosphere is singular, he began. If the person living on the hill (pointing north-westward in the heat of mid-morning) sprays their garden with pesticide (squirting the assembled onlookers with water from a plastic bottle labelled with a skull-and-bones) it will filter down to the creek (which flows west-to-east through the municipal park where the expo took place) and affect the organisms living in it. Everything we do in our garden is public. There is a disjoint between notions of private property and the way the biosphere operates, he told us as we listened to his vigorous talk on things some had come to the expo specifically to listen to.

In fact, the talk took up most of the allotted time. A minder circled around the outskirts of the gathered crowd occasionally shouting out the number of minutes remaining before time would be up. His name is Nick and he's from the UK. He told me after the crowd had dispersed that working with Costa was stimulating but I got the impression that it was also quite challenging.

At large, Costa began to assemble the no-dig garden, starting with slabs of hay taken from one of three bales positioned at the back of the open auditorium near the loudspeakers. On top of the base layer he added soil from a nearby trailer, fertiliser in the form of rock, and more layers of hay until the mound stood about 30cm high. At this point he threw himself on top of the mound while telling us how much he loved no-dig gardens. Later he added a range of plants from a number of black, plastic containers.

Costa didn't forget the small people, either, and invited them to help him assemble the no-dig garden by assigning simple tasks to two boys who had been infected by his dynamic delivery. They ran about fetching and throwing, caught up in the spirit of fun that overtook the whole crowd. The sun beat down but nobody minded or took a break to visit one of the drinks stands located nearby. There was too much to see right in front of them.

With the performance ended, Costa began to hand out seedlings to a number of children who had hung around waiting for a chance to secure an autograph or just to say 'hi'. I waited a good 30 minutes before the interview I had set up through an Armidale council employee, could take place. Eventually Costa and I sat down together in the shade - I had worn no hat and was visibly burnt - and chatted for about 10 minutes about biodiversity. It was rewarding, and now I will write a story for a magazine about the experience.

Ivanhoe Girl's Grammar School in Melbourne's leafy north a good destination for your child? Possibly, as I shall explore. But one same-sex attracted young person found that the school did everything possible to thwart her natural inclinations earlier this year when it prevented her from bringing her partner to the school formal because the partner was also female, as we learn from a story by The Age. Sixteen-year-old Hannah Williams subsequently left the school so that she could be with her girlfriend, 15-year-old Savannah Supski. They both now attend a state school.

While this disturbing scenario enhances one's faith in the public school system while also engendering in one a deep suspicion of the underlying ethics of a school, like Ivanhoe, which advertises its Christian bias, at least in part Ivanhoe has lived up to its goals, among which are the following choice items:

• enables girls to practise independent, critical thought ...
• enables each girl to explore and develop her own spirituality ... while affirming tolerance and appreciation of other beliefs
• fosters responsibility ...
• develops leadership ...
• fosters healthy attitudes which enable girls to respect one another, develop resilience, enjoy school life and approach the future as responsible, caring citizens

Hannah's choice in this case was to stop pursuing her complaint with the state's Equal Opportunity Commission. She did this because the process was too upsetting for her, and she didn't want the issue to interfere with her studies.

The school's principal, Heather Schnagl, says she is "very upset" that Hannah feels discriminated against. There's something deeply complacent and unaware in Schnagl's stance vis-a-vis Hannah Williams and her case. Hannah says that she "had meetings with principals" to try to resolve the impasse and that her friends out of solidarity with her put up posters around the school protesting the decision but that "the teachers ripped them down". Hannah's perception is that the school was intransigent: "They kept on making up excuses," she says.

Christian organisations have recently been granted exemptions under EEO laws in Australia and it appears, from reviewing the Hannah Williams case, that Christian schools are prepared to weather further criticism in the public sphere in order to maintain the purity of their vision regarding the life choices their students make.

On the one hand, you have to applaud Ivanhoe Girl's Grammar for having produced a student with as much determination and such strong convictions as Hannah Williams. On the other, it is easy to condemn the school for being small-minded and unbending in the face of the earnest wishes of one of its own.

On last night's Q and A, the ABC's ever-more-popular panel show which has finished screening for the year (worse luck), right-wing journalist Janet Albrechtsen appeared crisp and up-to-the-minute in a pair of rarefied eyeglasses but I couldn't help thinking that her beef against the Greens - they're "wolves in koala suits" - was, like, so three-years-ago. George Brandis, the Liberal senator, was also on the panel but he seemed more interested in scoring points against the Labor Party's Bill Shorten, who sat the the other end of the counter.

But while Albrechtsen's poised posture and unruffled demeanour is generally quite effective on shows like this and she has appeared from time to time on the panel, her little rant about how "dangerous" the Greens are seemed utterly out-of-date. It's the type of over-hyped scare-mongering we got used to during John Howard's prime minstership when the Greens were a minor party holding about seven percent of the vote. Now that they're scoring up to 14 percent and are currently sharing power in a finely-balanced Parliament, the wind has decidedly shifted. Albrechtsen is still trying-on the old line the Libs used to peddle back in the day. Let's move on, shall we?

Review: Faces in the Water, Janet Frame (1961)

Although it opens with a disclaimer that the work "is a work of fiction" the joke's on us if we give any credence to the thundering disavowal because clearly the events described in the book must be based on Frame's sojourns in mental institutions in New Zealand in the 1940s and 1950s.

It is a frightening scenario. By situating a moral component within the frame of a person's mental illness the state medical authorities opened up the door to innumerable abuses of patients, whose conditions were estimated to be, somehow, self-willed rather than pathological. To do so is to enable the custodians of the realm they find themselves in, to consign patients to punishing routines and deplorable conditions, even unnecessary brain surgery that strips them of their humanity, simply on the grounds of deeming their behaviour unseemly or "naughty". A naughty girl gets a lobotomy. To "teach you a lesson". A patient is "bad", rather than merely sick. This moral component has to be removed from all discussions of mental illness in order to adequately address the needs of people with a mental illness. If there is a moral component, there is shame attached to it. If there is shame attached to it, we cannot speak about it in a way that will enable us to appropriately deal with it as a social issue.

Frame's prose is sensationally detailed and articulate, and it indicates without question that her illness was other than what the doctors and nurses were accustomed to seeing in their charges. She remembered everything said to her and everything done to her, and only changed the names of people to suit the style of a novel. The author has a facility with prose that enables her to explore motivations in a way that makes sense of an otherwise apparently senseless world of systematic abuse and arbitrary punishments.

We are taken along with Istina Mavet, Frame's alter-ego, as she is shunted from one delapidated and unhealthy ward to an even more delapidated and unhealthy one. We feel anger when Istina's aggressive behaviour, which is sparked by her fear of the electroconvulsive therapy she is subject to, leads to her being assigned, "to teach her a lesson", to more and more unsanitary and unpalatable quarters. With each step down the ladder within the institution, Istina becomes more unstable but she never becomes resigned to her imagined fate: that she will never go home. Finally, she baulks at having a lobotomy. She retains her senses in a world of soul-destroying routines and the angry jailers that impose them.

The final pages of the book are devoted to her salvation by a number of the doctors, and the mood of the book lifts. This is the author's novelistic structure taking hold, and we go along with it, relieved that finally sanity has prevailed in a world of unspeakable degradation, a place where the rights of the individual are routinely sacrificed to the convenience of the nurses. The nurses don't come out of the book looking at all respectable, although Frame does at one point refer to how they, themselves, are treated badly by the system. But the book shows how it is the things that individuals do that make all the difference, despite their being subject to a dysfunctional system of punishments and rewards.

It's not an unmanageable stretch of the imagination to apply the lessons contained in Frame's story to a broader context to take in society in general, and all of us living in it.

How has the COP10 biodiversity summit, that has just finished meeting in Nagoya, fared in the press? It appears that Japanese news media organisations continue to be upbeat while the reality presented by the meeting's outcomes is quite stark indeed. Many media organisations - and not just Japanese ones, although they have been particularly vocal in spruiking the conference - trumpeted the pledge by the parties to the convention to increase the amount of land and sea area given over to sanctuaries: 17 percent of land and 10 percent of sea by 2020. But the truth appears less encouraging for keen observer and Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who has written a column criticising the Convention on Biological Diversity for not releasing the final agreement. The Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP10) is chaired by Japan.

Monbiot says that the draft agreement of a month ago "contained no binding obligations" and suspects that the final agreement will deliver a similar outcome for governments to act on, if they wish. "No government, if the draft has been approved, is obliged to change its policies," Monbiot writes.

But the lack of binding obligations has not stopped Japan's media from continually trumpeting the importance of COP10, even in the most tangential and dishonest fashion, as is evident from a particularly disturbing story written by Asahi Shimbun reporter Akemi Kanda. It's probably not entirely warranted to dismiss the whole of the Japanese press corps on the basis of one article, but this one deeply fails to impress and suggests that they've resorted to whitewashing the grim reality that the meeting has failed to actually deliver anything of substance to the globe's ecospheres.

Ms Kanda has got approval to visit a fish market in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, and to talk to some of the locals involved in the industry. 'COP10/ Port thrives on sustainable fishing' blares the headline but the story tells us a very different story. The fishermen here once caught tuna but the size of the catch was so badly depleted they began to target blue sharks, Kanda writes. And longlines?

It is said that longline fishing--unlike round haul net fishing and other methods which use nets to catch whole schools of fish in one haul--can reduce overfishing.

So longline fishing is not as bad for fish stocks as "round haul net" (purse seine) fishing? That's news to me, but Kanda is betting that her readers will know no better. The rest of the article is dedicated to conveying the impression that by using everything from the sharks' bodies, local authorities are ensuring that fishermen and food processors are behaving "sustainably".

Fisheries industry officials here are trying to ensure the sustainable use of the species under increasing international pressure demanding shark resources be protected.

Movements to regulate shark fishing could emerge if numbers begin to decline or wasteful usage is seen.

As such, industry officials are trying not to catch immature fish, overfish or waste any part of the sharks caught.

Officials are "trying" to make sure fishermen are operating sustainably. Regulations "could emerge" under some conditions. And "industry officials are trying not to catch immature fish" (industry officials catching fish? Interesting thought, that).

The "sustainability" quotient in Kanda's story hinges simply on the matters of whether longlines are used to catch the sharks and whether the whole fish is processed or not. This latter caveat has nothing, in fact, to do with sustainability but that doesn't prevent Kanda from making hay while the COP10 sun shines. She also takes a gratuitous swipe at foreigners some of whom, she says, just take the fin and discard the rest of the shark's body:

It is said that illegal shark fishing occurs overseas and that only the shark's fin, which is sought as a luxury food item, is cut off and brought back to port.

The implication being that Japanese processing companies are better in sustainability terms than those foreigners who just cut off the fin and leave the shark to die in the water. This is a red herring. There is also absolutely no reference to COP10 in the story other than the lone mention in the headline, and the story singularly fails to address sustainability, with the notion of fish sanctuaries - apparently the most important outcome of the convention - being a most striking omission by the journalist.

Review: Londonstani, Gautam Malkani (2006)

This engrossing novel is largely written in a patois, along lines firmly established by American author Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) but which have in fact been employed by fiction writers for centuries for comic effect in their works. The novels of Walter Scott come readily to mind on this point. In the acid vein of humour those great writers established, this novel gives the reader a satirical peep behind the ethnic lines demarcated through British society in London following the 7 July 2005 bombings, which were carried out by four young men - three of Pakistani descent and one of Jamaican descent - and which resulted in 52 deaths.

A wave of xenophobia followed the attacks and blossomed in the media. Gautam Malkani is a Financial Times journalist with a background in political sciences, so he had a bird's-eye view of the public spectacle and the qualifications to understand the social underpinnings of the terrorists' motivations. He understands the problems that beset young British men of non-Anglo descent, and he leverages the prejudices of their parents in the book to illustrate how globalisation and policies such as multiculturalism - a cultural pluralism where equal value is ostensibly granted to the values of each component of the city's ethnic matrix - lead people living in society to behave in distinctive ways.

At one point the book's hero, Jas, is seen giving advice to Arun, his mate's brother, who is in the process of organising his own wedding. The demands made by the Indian culture of Arun's parents - respect your elders, the bride's parents should give especial consideration to the groom's parents - harken back to a day when different social realities prevailed. Reena, the bride, is actually a surgeon, which makes the assumption that she will become a burden on the groom's family a nonsense, and the dowry a sham. And the two young people are marrying for love, not according to the wishes of their parents, which makes a mockery of the superior airs of Arun's parents, who are of the Brahmin caste. Jas, Amit, Ravi and Harjit watch these dramas unfold and wonder how the values that so disturbingly energise the sometimes violent struggle between Arun and his mother should apply to them. So they make their own values, based on the rules of the street and those of conspicuous consumption.

At the beginning of the book the four are just failed high-school drop-outs who have been forced to retake their exams in order to matriculate. They hoon around the streets of an outer-London suburb in Ravi's mother's BMW looking for action. Their main business prospect involves unlocking stolen mobile phones, but when they try to steal the phone of Mr Atwood - a teacher in their old school - they find themselves bailed up in his office listening to a lecture about their dissipated ways. Mr Atwood is especially disappointed in Jas. He decides to hook them up with a successful ex-student, Sanjay, in order to help them understand what can be achieved in life without crime and through education.

Sanjay, it turns out, just wants more of the stolen phones, and pays handsomely for them, so the boys' business continues apace. The older man also helps Jas in his romantic quest for the attention of Samira, a Muslim girl, by loaning him his Porsche and instructing him in the secrets of London's tony nightlife. Suddenly, Jas has everything that he covets: the esteem of his mates, a pretty girlfriend and money.

It can't last, though. In the tradition of 18th- and 19th-Century novels the hero must suffer. Several things happen at once. Arun is blamed for a tragedy in Arun and Amit's family, leading to his mates ostracising him. Then he is seen by someone in an intimate moment with Samira and rumours race around the district that he is thick with a Muslim girl. Their supplier of stolen phones subsequently stops doing business with them, angering Sanjay, who turns out to be less illustrious and more corrupt than Mr Atwood could ever have imagined. Finally, Jas has a serious run-in with the law due to what he carries out at Sanjay's urging. Bereft of all his friends, Jas is forced to turn to the people he likes least for company: his parents. The final, hilarious secret is revealed at the end of the book but even without it - and it's very, very funny - the novel is a great read.

I've never been to a pineapple farm before and I've never seen Caboolture before. Caboolture is a satellite of Brisbane in northerly Moreton Bay Shire where many people live who commute to the big smoke on a daily basis. Pineapples are those delicious yellow fruits that make you need a shower after eating one.

It was an hour's drive to get there, omitting the slight detour required by my terrible navigation, and when I arrived half-an-hour early for the appointment I made early this morning there was a large black dog in possession of the property. I've never really clicked with dogs so I stayed in the car. I've always had strange relations with dogs and this specimen was so large and ferocious-looking that I even made sure the windows were mostly raised as I waited for 2pm to roll by.

The dog didn't like it that I stayed inside the car. He athletically approached the car window and glared at me quizzically with his big, brown eyes. He sniffed the car's panels. He prowled around to the back of the car and barked. He barked several times near the front of the car. Even when he retreated to the house, I stayed in the car.

I left the property and came back five minutes later, having verified that this was, in fact, the right address. I stayed in the car. The dog stayed by the front door. He didn't bark any more but I knew that he was still there, waiting to attack me should I dare to open the car door and alight. He looked as though he could easily disembowel an ox in about thirteen seconds flat. My 2pm appointment arrived and waved me out of the car. "He's alright," he said as we approached the house. I remained on the alert as the dog - 'Rock' the Rottweiler - sniffed my groin in a friendly manner reminiscent of a supermarket shopper assessing the ripeness of a pineapple, say, before putting it in his basket. We went inside and discussed pineapples.

Outside, 30 minutes later, we quickly gauged the best place from which to take photos and decided to include the Glasshouse Mountains - visible in the distance here - as well as the tilled and populated fields comprising Tony Polsoni's property. The sun glared down as I snapped a few frames of my squinting subjects. The dog dropped comfortably to the terrazo floor of the patio as we made small-talk before I got back in the car and headed home on the Bruce Highway.

Today was a lost day when I felt a bit like this bloke in this picture taken at the Armidale show my mother and I went to on Saturday and Sunday. In the final analysis you'd have to say that we just did too much driving in too small a portion of time. Friday we drove about 500km arriving in the late aftrnoon at Glen Innes. Up early Saturday, we snacked on pies and pasties in the centre of town and hit the road for an hour or so before having a cuppa at Inverell. From there we drove further out west and south to the Myall Creek Memorial Hall where we stayed for two hours or so. Then, back on the road again, we went east to Inverell and then south through Tingha and east to Guyra and, back on the New England Highway again, south to Armidale. That morning's trip covered about 300km mostly on a fairly good country back road. Overnight in Armidale with sojourns at the Sustainable Living Expo on both days for me, the second in the hot sun dressed in shorts and short sleeves - I was touched by the sun a fair bit - then back on the blacktop for a 600km drive north homeward arriving after darkness fell.

I didn't sleep well last night and then spent the rest of today moping around getting over a headache and general lethargy, with a trip to the dentist to complete the picture of utter decrepitude. I'm hoping tomorrow will be better, having slept off the drowsiness and the natural high that derives from interstate driving. To maintain a heightened sense of awareness for such long periods of time - driving on country roads is a challenge at the best of times, and so especially is negotiating the high-traffic expressways to the south and west of Brisbane that took us eventually home - can mean your body's producing chemicals that can unbalance the natural equilibrium suitable for day-to-day existence. So I had a case of landlubber's jet-lag, where the jet was a late-model 3.5-litre V-6 sedan and I was the sole pilot for a period of three days. An endurance test, sure enough!

After three days on the road visiting Glen Innes, Inverell, Tenterfield and Armidale - four jewels of New England, the tablelands region of NSW - it's great to be back home, safe from driving on two-lane country roads and the multi-lane expressways that circle Brisbane and where urban commuters mix it with long-haul drivers like my mother and I. For her the trip was a challenge. She probably thought at times that the road would never end and, for sure, she was knackered by the time we reached our daily destination. So tired, in fact, that I would go out alone to eat and bring back a portion for her to have in the hotel room.

Brilliant weather for most of the time made driving easier. The only rain came on Friday as we negotiated the New England Highway near the Queensland-NSW border. But everywhere we went in the Aurion - a masterful auto on good roads and indifferent alike - it is now green on pasture and on wooded hillside, proving for real that the 10-year drought Australian farmers have endured has finally ended.

A highlight of the trip was the Sustainable Living Expo in Armidale where this photo of a Sydney Opera House-shaped chicken coop was taken. The show gave retailers a chance to engage with potential customers. It also allowed local residents to experience a number of different approaches to sustainable living, including demonstrations by Costa (the SBS TV personality) on how to build a chicken coop out of old, unused furniture and, this morning, how to build a no-dig garden using only hay, soil, compost and minerals. I spoke with Costa briefly and will write a couple of stories based on materials assembled during the expo.

I hope this is not an adverse sign delivered by the higher powers in the universe. Do bad things always happen in multiples? The thing is that my wireless card has stopped functioning. I called the internet provider earlier this morning and they said there are no problems in my area with connections. The modem manufacturer, who I called next, said the modem is functioning correctly (glad I had a long cable handy so that this check could be done). And the computer, an HP Pavilion p6020a, was purchased in July 2009, which means that it's out of warranty.

And I'm driving interstate today. Which makes me wish this mishap had happened either earlier or later. A jinx? We'll have to take it easy on the road today: keep within the speed limit, watch for morons overtaking on the stretches. I made a point of checking the tyres last night and found they're fine. Petrol is also at capacity in the tank. I furthermore washed the inside of the windscreen because there might be some night driving on the way back from New England.

In the final analysis there's no logical reason to worry but you cannot help feeling let down by the world in a case like this one. Additionally, the computer maker is not contactable by phone for this type of problem during hours convenient for me this morning so I will just have to knuckle down and make the best of it until I get back next Monday. Until then, enjoy your weekend!

Fancy abseiling down the side of an office tower in Frankfurt? How about dropping off the roof of a German building and swooping through a window shattered moments before by your point man across the glass canyon with his trusty mortar gun? Do you need to get your hands on a suitcase containing a set of US treasury plates that were stolen years before by a black-ops team in Iraq? Is this all just a bit over the top? A tad far-fetched? No, don't say so!

It's evidently not for director Joe Carnahan. His movie, The A-Team (2010) is a grade-A action thriller with a heavy dose of inter-agency rivalry added for extra intrigue. On the one hand the boys (Liam Neeson as Colonel Hannibal Smith, Bradley Cooper as Lt. 'Faceman' Peck, Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson as B.A. Baracus and Sharlto Copley as the occasional mental patient and pilot-of-all-aircraft Captain H.M. Murdock) are always on the job. In their second appearance they nab the plates from a speeding semi-trailer as it rockets through the dark Baghdad streets. Then there's Pike (Brian Bloom) who heads up a rival special force under the command of Gen. Russell Morrison (Gerald McRaney) whose Humvee gets blasted just as the boys return to base with the truck full of banknotes and the plates. The third element in the headspace drama is Captain Charissa Sosa (Jessica Biel) who wants to find the plates and the people responsible for the apparent killing of Morrison. Finally there's Lynch (Patrick Wilson), the CIA dude with attitude who turns out to be as bent as Pike and Morrison.

Hmmm ... Treasury plates. Yup. I can see the appeal. There's also plenty of appeal for the average viewer in the expressions of distrust and limitless hatred that flare like burning phosphorous in the spaces between the agencies responsible for the action that takes place everywhere you turn.

For the moviegoer, there's unquestionable pleasure in watching the four undaunted and scrappy-mouthed members of the A-Team survive endless trials. In one, they parachute down over Germany having been shot out of the sky by armed supersonic drones. When the parachute the tank they're caught inside depends on gets shredded there's nothing left but to fire your shells into the breathless, rushing air and steer the hurtling contraption so that it falls into a convenient lake. Splash! It's a lot softer than the earth and you can also drive out of it inside the sturdy beast, head to Berlin where the plates are kept in a bank, and apply yourself to the task of retreiving them from the hands of the hated Pike. Lots of abseiling here and, victorious once again, our beloved quartet flees into the rain-drenched Teutonic countryside. It wouldn't be interesting if Lynch weren't able to bomb the hideaway at this point but the pyrotechnics truly only kick in once the team has docked at Los Angeles port onboard a container vessel. Their plans are almost unravelled when Pike turns a handy bazooka onto the stationery vessel. The containers rain down like dominoes at a New Year's celebration. As for Lynch, he will get his just deserts: to be spirited away in a black helicopter by a posse of faceless functionaries attached to noone knows which government agency.

The fugitives? They are granted a repreive when the slim, dreamy Sosa passes a key that will fit the handcuffs they are bound in during a lingering kiss on ex-lover Peck and ... POOF! ... they disappear once more into the mists shrouding the global village, truly a band of brothers as noble and deadly as a wild Sumatran tiger.

There's a new film about "West Papua" - a nominal country that many hope, despite the media blackout imposed by the Indonesian government, would combine the Indonesian provinces of West Papua and Papua into a sovereign nation - has been screened in Melbourne, Sydney, The Netherlands, New Zealand and Tahiti. Charlie Hill-Smith's Strange Birds in Paradise is now due to screen in Canberra, Brisbane and San Fransisco as well, beginning with today's viewing scheduled to take place at the United Nations Association Film Festival in SF.

It's about the Papuan separatists who are resisting Indonesian claims of sovereignty and, to capture images of the Papuan freedom fighters, Hill-Smith visited Papua province via the Papua New Guinea-Indonesia border at Wutang on the north coast with a tourist visa, he told me in an email. The crew had to shoot secretly as journalists and film makers have been banned from entering either province for many years.

Footage includes material shot in Australia of Papuan songwriters and performers and old footage Hill-Smith shot during a tour of the country years prior to completing the more recent work.

In the coming days the film will be screened in Canberra at the Canberra International Film Festival and in Brisbane at the Brisbane International Film Festival.

John Howard's ability to polarise Australia has not been mitigated by his retiring from federal politics, as we saw last night on the ABC's Q and A program, where an audience member, telling host Tony Jones to "Take this as a comment" - a now-humorous line that was made famous by the same host on the same program - stood up from his seat in the audience and threw his two shoes at the the former conservative government leader, who was the only guest on the panel. "That's for the Iraqi dead and this is for the Iraqi living," he shouted.

Howard's decision to follow George W Bush to war in Iraq in 2003 is the screaming subtext for the act, and more specifically an event that took place in Baghdad during a press conference in 2008. From Wikipedia:

During a December 14, 2008 press conference at the Prime Minister's Palace in Baghdad, Iraq, [Iraqi broadcast journalist Muntadhar] al-Zaidi threw both of his shoes at then-United States President George W. Bush. The throwing of shoes is an act of extreme disrespect in the Arab culture. "This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog," yelled al-Zaidi in Arabic as he threw his first shoe towards the U.S. president. "This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq," he shouted as he threw his second shoe.

In Sydney, where the most recent abuse of footwear took place, Tony Jones was deeply embarrassed by the disrespect shown to his guest, and stood with a hand raised as though to ward off injury as you can see in this screen-shot from the video which this morning has been posted on the websites of Australia's leading mastheads.

The shoe-thrower has been identifed as Peter Gray from Newcastle. It was reported last night that he asked ABC staff if he could retreive his shoes later. He was refused. A young woman accompanying him also left the auditorium, shouting "You've got blood on your hands!" The audience snarled at the two young people as they left the space.

I didn't watch the program and instead took, again, to reading Gautam Malkani's Londonstani, a 2006 novel about young South Asian men living on the outskirts of London. The book is written entirely in a patois based on the ideosynchratic way the young men have of speaking and on the vocabulary of text messages. Despite this encumbrance it's an engaging and entertaining book that paints a picture of dislocation and resentment among an important component of the community. On the one hand, the kids take every opportunity to get back at white Londoners out of a sense of grievance at the racial discrimination they perceive everywhere. On the other hand they are embarrassed by their upwardly-mobile first-generation parents, with their strange accents and strict rules of propriety. It's the story of a potentially lost generation of youths with tremendous potential for societal contribution who feel alienated by the community and who draw their own rulebook for conduct that appears likely to set them on a collision course with normative social standards.

On Friday my mother and I will drive out of Queensland and up into the ranges heading for New England to attend a public meeting at the memorial hall - a jaunty little timber structure with two rooms and the lavatory block out the back next to an overgrown tennis court - near the Myall Creek Memorial site. It's a seven-hour drive and my mother says she will be able to handle it. I don't doubt it despite the fact that she has been slowing down a bit over the past couple of weeks and the nana naps are getting longer and arriving earlier. She thinks it might be psychosomatic because the antibiotics the doctors prescribed for her had no effect.

She hasn't been to Glen Innes before. I planned to stay at the New England Motor Lodge on the main street opposite the incredible heritage-listed former Catholic convent building that was sold, I believe, to private interests about a year ago. But they're not answering their phone and there's a sign on the website saying it's up for sale. So I booked in elsewhere. There are plenty of restaurants in the vicinity where dinner can be purchased at a reasonable cost.

The reason for the public meeting at this time is to enable discussions surrounding the planned educational and cultural centre at Myall Creek. The memorial rock was built in 2000 but the committee in charge of the now heritage-listed site have harboured more sophisticated plans for several years. The building they're looking at constructing now on the south east corner of the intersection of the Whitlow and Bingara/Delungra Roads will be permanently staffed and contain facilities suitable to accommodate tourist groups.

The Centre will be equipped with the latest interactive technology to portray visually and aurally the history of contact between Aboriginal people and early settlers across Australia. It is also intended to house artifacts and other cultural materials of local Aboriginal people, and provide space where groups of students and other visitors may watch video materials, hear presentations and participate in discussions. The plans include a manager’s residence, a kiosk, and large parking area capable of accommodating tourist coaches.

The meeting was called because the committee is "keen to learn the views of the local community". This consultative approach has characterised proceedings from the beginning, even before the memorial site was developed, starting with meetings held in late 1998 that were advertised locally and attended by people from both black and white communities.

So we two will take in the views while driving south, stay Friday night in Glen Innes and then get to the memorial hall on Saturday, mid-morning. These meetings usually take a few hours only and we are likely to be eating lunch on the road back home.

Review, The Global Soul, Pico Iyer (2001)

In the beginning of this book the strange - protean, chameleonic - cultural outcast who is writing it attempts to find something to redeem the situation that faces the mixed-race citizen, the purposefully displaced economic refugee, the expatriate consultant with hundreds of thousands of air-miles to his credit, the child of the diaspora (such as himself) whether raised in comfort or in penury. But wherever he looks and whatever he writes, the exercise always makes him look further, as though the lack of an immediately obvious explanation for the kind of life he's examining just spurs him to find a more satisfying analogue among the other non-standard options available at the margins of the comfortable, settled existence that is the province of the mainstream.

He seeks out the alternate mainstream of the marginal individual (the Global Soul) and, like a child sorting through stamps in preparation for the major task of inserting them into an album - those that belong in the same series are put together, the triangular ones go together, the ones showing artworks are placed together - he carefully examines the narrative and subject-matter options he has taken in during his travels throughout the world. At the end of the day, the child will have to close the album and place it on a shelf out of harm's way. Iyer's problem is that, having assembled so many stories of transient, displaced, non-standard lifestyles in a single location he doesn't seem to know what to do with them.

Of course, he's aware of the problem. "Philosophy is really homesickness: the wish to be everywhere at home," writes Friedrich Nietzsche in the quote plucked out of Iyer's (no doubt) extensive library for use at the head of the first chapter. It's as though, reading the book, you were faced with the work of an over-stimulated bower-bird: everything must have a place in the cosmic plan that is the book to be written. Nothing can be left out. Something will be omitted, of course, but the dazzling array of examples Iyer conjures up from his memory (there must have been a plan for this book long before he started writing it, you think) manifests itself in a surfeit of stories. And the emotionally positive ones that appear in the first chapter, tellingly, do not last.

This is because Iyer is a thoughtful person. The tone soon becomes scratchy and critical as when Iyer writes about Los Angeles Airport (LAX) or in the best parts of the book: those that deal with the Atlanta Olympics of 1996.

The writing is good but not outstanding, and the long sentences frequently collapse, exhausted, into commonplaces that would not appear out-of-place in any journalistic feature story. There's a good reason for the occasional mediocrities and the flat lines. It's because that's what Iyer is: a journalist. The imagery and structure sometimes allows novel ideas to poke through the array of his ideas, such as when he considers that new forms of extreme nationalism have appeared in response to the homogenisation of cultural and economic experience in an increasingly globalised world. But these good bits are not followed up. What usually follows is another "case" (he's ever the journalist) as the author trots about the globe racking up air-miles while on the payroll of a major American news organisation.

The eye sees and, being Iyer, the eye is assisted by being placed in locations and at times that will provide views of things that are not normally subject to scrutiny. The eye sees the way Coca-Cola, for example, places itself in close proximity to the International Olympic Committee. The eye is taken on a drive through the gaudy, or run-down, or crassly-consumeristic streets of Atlanta and the hand dutifully writes what has been observed. It's not hard. It takes time (and therefore money) and a modicum of stylistic competence. Iyer is a writer. That's what he does. You can feel that he enjoys it. And he's pretty good at it, too.

But to reach beyond the surfaces that Iyer intently concentrates his gaze on you would need more information about politics, or economics, or you would need some stories told in detail (not just by a fellow walking around an airport terminal at all hours of the day and night) of how people got themselves in the situation they find themselves in. You need investigative skills that Iyer, I believe, does not excel at. You would need a book about Philippina maids working in Hong Kong (one of the topics he touches on briefly), or one about how global corporations do business (he writes about a friend who travels a lot on business).

The book ends with a meditation on quotidian life: Iyer's own life in a small town near Nara, the ancient capital the Americans agreed not to bomb to smithereens when they were busy destroying three other Japanese cities while ending WWII. By cataloguing his daily life and the points of contact between himself and his adopted society, Iyer manages, in his own, pacific and resolution-seeking way, to put away the album he started making with the description of the events of the day his house in California burnt down 200 pages earlier. Ultimately, Iyer is writing about himself, trying to find a sense of community among people whose situations resemble his, or who are, like him, removed from a solid community of belonging. He does this, finally, by recounting a dream he had one night in Japan.

He has a sense of being at home in the dream. But as a writer, he is probably going to be doomed to living on the outside of regular places, such as suburbs that are filled with people going about their business behind closed doors, or cities with the same people busy engaging with one another on the street. Ultimately, he seeks out himself, and fashions stories out of his experiences. It's the place where he feels most comfortable. There are fewer modalities for conflict there. On a critical plane, Iyer the writer shows himself to be a dedicated observer and an adept chronicler of a world too busy to stop moving.