Exact an undying revenge on silly, over-written, self-important waffle. All links and extracts welcome at
pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au
For this week's tip-offs, thanks to MH, MJH, SL, BG
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The fulcrum of truth-claims in documentary drama now becomes clear. Rather than lying with the reporting of indisputable ‘facts’, as Weiss imagines, it is the abrasion between known and accepted views on the one hand, and views that have been ignored and suppressed on the other, that constitutes the force and appeal of the approach. Factual accuracy is, as it were,
leveraged in the narrative to instantiate the general truth contained within the conditions of its possibility. But note there has to be a lack of fit in the structure of the drama, on cognitive, emotional and/or physical levels. Badiou says that Truth interrupts History. From a dramaturgical perspective we might say Truth interrupts Pattern. The experience of a drama must overrun its structural predicates and it is in the gaps, elisions and supplements to the action, what elsewhere I call a play’s ‘structural silences’ (Meyrick 2006) that its ontological truth is to be found. (Julian Meyrick, "The Ontology of Dramaturgy")
There have been other cooking shows before, of course, but it's hard not to be impressed by the role
MasterChef has played in boosting the culinary confidence of a nation. - We see pasta being made from scratch. We lean how to shuck oysters and how to make our macaroons sleek and shiny - this all amounts to a better world. . . Tension is created in the usual overwrought style. But there's still a lot of fun to be had with the ridiculous dramatics as long as you know where to look. Keeping one eye on the Twitter news feed and one on the telly is a good way to cope. . . In small ways such as these, the overemotional
MC moments can be skilfully wrangled back to the realm of the pisstakingly bearable. And thank god, because it really is such a splendid show . . . (Lorerlei Vashti reflects on the pisstakingly bearable agonies and ecstasies of MasterChef,
Green Guide)
Through a dramatisation of this man's life, we watch as political idealism turns to doctrinaire ideology and democratic protest becomes a Trojan horse for enabling oppression of the people themselves.
Iran: My Grandfather is an astonishing and cautionary tale. - The author portrays his grandfather in a series of vivid vignettes. As these include scenes of argument with his wife, post-coital argument with his mistress and seditious argument with his best griend, it's clear that the grandson has taken imaginative yet unsentimental liberties with this avatar. However, issues of authenticity are side-lined by the vigour of the writing, which includes some "deft info-dumps" presented as dialogue, and the immense commotion of the political background. Interspersed are cogent historical accounts that fill in the caesuras of the narrative. - Deadpan and yet clenched with outrage, these brief essays recount how Iran, the proud inheritor of Persian culture. . .[continues] (Kate Holden, "Iran and its awful ironies",
The Age)
"People warmed to Rudd quickly," she told me. "But the affection hasn't deepened. He's seen as bright, not beholden to the party warlords, competent, his own man, really keen to have the job, a breath of fresh air. But who is he? The feeling is: we've been on lots of dates, but we haven't got to the next level." First and foremost, Kevin Rudd is the engine that drives him. Every witness to his life since [his Queensland home-town of] Nambour talks about the phenomenal machine inside this man. He turns many faces to the world, but the engine under the hood is the same 5.4-litre V8. What you see of Rudd at any particular moment depends on the destination and the terrain. He is a
sui generis off-road vehicle whose driver is only glimpsed in passing, a shadow through the windscreen. (David Marr talks to Rebecca Huntley of Ipsos Mackay Research about who Kevin Rudd
is,
Quarterly Essay No. 38, "Power Trip)
I’d claim, therefore, that I’m only productive when I possess an arena to write in that is as supple and accommodating as an old, fuzzy, sublime memory. I don’t want to resign myself to having to assemble a new or revised order from the things around me, every time I sit down to unfurl my fists: writing should be like fly-fishing or tossing the ball; surveying your immediate surroundings, you should know the way and wend of the river, you should sink back into your chair with the faultless ease of a hand into a well-oiled baseball glove. - For me, if you’re having to repeatedly grapple with your workspace each time you succumb to your keyboard – as though words are only valid and apparent when chaos has been cast asunder – then your reserve of energy is being channelled into an unnecessary endeavour. Eventually, a desk will clean itself, but the words won’t ever fail to sprawl, to clutter up, to generate their own forms of fungus and dust. Eventually, there comes a time when you have to accept that objects in disarray won’t tell you anything. The words are skulking in the negative space around them, and unless it stinks of week-old pizza a writer has more important concerns to devour. (Kirk Marshall,
"Kirk Marshall's Literary Space", LiteraryMinded)
What Decibel give us is a highly complex, and densely material, negotiation of both the
appeal of these concepts, and the rather clunky but beautiful sounds, warm overlays and microtonal fluctuations of these materials when harnessed in conjunction of [sic] what one might characterise as a
surrealist bazaar of sound reproduction technology. Like the flea-markets and junk shops which Ray and Andre Breton formerly prowled, Decibel's mechanics of performance is rich in the "convulsive beauty" and strangely patinaed dance of objects and sounds which emerges from such a play of thingness within the audiences's perception. Jonathan W. Marshall, “Thingness and Sonic Alchemy: Decibel performs Alvin Lucier”
Liquid Architecture Festival of Sound Art
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