09.27.06
Posted in Society & Politics at 5.20 pm by niltiac
When I moved to Britain the archaic drinking laws meant the pubs had to close at 11pm. I found this enormously frustrating because it meant I couldn’t go out for a quiet drink until midnight or one o’clock as I was wont to do in Sydney. I either had to go out early or I had to make a night of it and go to a club.
This was finally changed last year. The law now is that there is no universal restriction on opening hours but that each pub can apply to the local authority for a late licence. My local is now open until midnight for example, something that has improved my quality of life. Some councils are more liberal than others – the word is that Westminster has been particularly bolshie in refusing applications and according to Time Out this week is making life difficult for proprietors through ultra-enforcement of noise laws.
This whole change was billed by the popular press, particularly the Daily Mail, as “24 hour drinking”. It never was and it isn’t now. They mounted a huge campaign against it, citing so-called experts who claimed it would lead to more binge drinking. Even the police got in on the act, warning about an upsurge in street violence as a result. People were mocked for suggesting that Brits might suddenly start behaving like Italians and go out later.
I always said this would have the opposite effect. With the 11pm closing time, people were going out early (possibly before drinner) and drinking against the clock. Then they all piled onto the streets at the same time, with nowhere else to go unless they want to make a night of it in a club. Because there were only a select few places that opened late, people wouldn’t go to their local joint but congregate in the town centres. All this led to queues for ATMs and taxis and inevitable fights. (The other problem is serving size – I’ve grown accustomed to it now but objectively speaking a pint of beer is just too big).
What I hoped the new licence laws would achieve was not only later opening times but also staggered closing times, so there wasn’t a mass exodus of drunk people at 11pm. I believed that if a good spread of establishments could stay open later, the weekend going out crowds would be more spread out and less likely to get aggro. I thought it would mean that people would go out later, like they do in Australia and on the Continent, and they would be more relaxed about the pace they drank. I was sceptical about the claims of “experts” (there seemed to be a certain amount of rent-a-quote going on) and particularly of the police, who clearly have a vested interest in being able to end the majority of shifts at 11pm instead of having to work all night.
I thought I’d blogged about this at the time but I can’t find the post. I may have avoided the topic because I was job hunting at the time and I did actually see the Daily Mail about a job on their website.
I’m delighted now to see this report from Reuters showing that the new drink laws have not meant the end of western civilisation but that actually, violence and binge drinking are down and that people are going out later and behaving entirely differently. I’m delighted not just because I’ve been proved right, which is always nice, but also because I like the fact that I can go out later and live in a less violent society.
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09.26.06
Posted in Arts & Culture at 4.10 pm by niltiac
An art teacher in Dallas is about to lose her job after a parent complained because a fifth grade student saw a nude sculpture on a school trip to a museum.
Oh please! This is madness. Firstly, the educational value of going to see art of all kinds, nude or otherwise, is unquestionable. Anyone who fails to see this obviously has no imagination or understanding. Frankly, it’s hard to see how a democratic society can function when such close-mindedness is so prevalent – it’s the sort of thing that allows all sorts of negative ‘isms’ to flourish. It’s not just the fact that an idiot parent complained, it’s also the fact that the teacher was then admonished by the principal for allowing it to happen, and then the school board voted not to renew her contract.
Secondly, the teacher is a scapegoat since the principal and the parents were fully aware of the museum trip. The teacher took them there at the principal’s request. If the principal didn’t realise there might be a chance of seeing a nude painting or sculpture at a public art gallery, they probably shouldn’t be working in education. Likewise, the parents gave permission for their children to go on the trip. They are grown adults and should know what to expect and if they were uncomfortable with the idea, they could have arranged for their child to stay home or in school. I don’t expect that these people would go to museums and galleries all the time and maybe many of them haven’t been to one for, oh maybe a decade. I understand that. But I can’t belive they have never been to an art museum at least once in their lives – even if it was only on a school trip in the fifth grade.
Nudes have been part of western art for a good few thousand years now; it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
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09.25.06
Posted in London, Skating at 6.53 am by niltiac
I’ve missed almost the entire summer skating season, mostly due to my travels to various far-flung places. But yesterday I joined the Sunday Stroll for the first time in ages. I don’t think I’ve been since the one-way stroll to Wimbledon back in July. We are enjoying an Indian summer in London and it was a gorgeous day.
Fortunately it was a very easy skate. The course was only seven miles and the pace was slow. Even I didn’t have any trouble keeping in the middle, if not the front half, of the pack and I wasn’t trying particularly hard. I think that’s great – it shows to me how much I’ve improved since my first street skate back in February and it also means the marshals are succeeding at making it a beginner skate. I heard some people complain that it wasn’t fast enough but there’s the Wednesday and Friday night skates for speed, the Sunday Stroll is meant to do as the name suggests and be accessible for someone’s first street skate. It does speed up over winter though so it was probably going quite fast (by Sunday Stroll standards) when I started in February.
We skated down through Westminster and over the Vauxhall Bridge and stopped for half time at Vauxhall Park. I didn’t even know there was a Vauxhall Park! Vauxhall is not far from where I live but I never go there because it’s just a big intersection, a bus interchange and a train station. The park is small and pretty and boasts London’s only model village – a rather lame set of miniature houses in the garden gnome style. I think Fitzroy Gardens in Melbourne has one just like it, although possibly the Melbourne one is actually better. After half time, we skated through Battersea, Chelsea and up through Knightsbridge.
There was a Time Out photographer at the skate so there might be something in the mag this week or next.
Over a few pints at the two skater pubs, the Wilton and then the Vic, Bren showed me how to rotate my wheels – thanks Bren! Wheel rotation is necessary maintenance since they tend to wear down on the inside. We were also talking about upcoming events and I might be able to help out with some of the publicity.
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09.24.06
Posted in Society & Politics at 11.40 am by niltiac
My fashion reporting debut – the Armani show during London Fashion Week – is tame compared with the shenanigans at New York Fashion Week. This blog post from Sydney Morning Herald fashion writer Patty Huntington hilariously reveals how she fell afoul of one megalomaniac PR. You’ve simply got to get down to the bit about the poster – keep scrolling!
Yes, it’s self absorbed, but it’s also a fascinating insight into the inner workings of PR and the media, in a fashion context.
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09.23.06
Posted in Arts & Culture, London at 10.31 pm by niltiac
After my travel workshop, I felt like stretching my legs so I walked down to the river and found myself at the Tate Modern. I decided to go and see the Kandinsky exhibition since I’ve been meaning to for months and it’s finishing in about a week. It was crowded but I still had a good view of the paintings, which ranged from his early representational paintings to his later, more abstract, art. The colours were beautiful and I could see how he was influenced and inspired by music. Some of the paintings evoked an emotional response in me – the one based on The Flood for example was tumultuous and unsettling – but many of them were simply beautiful to look at. It was interesting though and quite inspiring that he started life as a lawyer and didn’t become an artist until he was thirty. It’s never too late!
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Posted in Society & Politics, Travel, Writing at 10.26 pm by niltiac
I have done a bit of travel writing and it’s something I’ve been meaning to pursue more seriously for a long time. A few months ago I read about travel writing workshops run by travel writer Dea Birkett in Time Out. The workshops sounded really great – inspirational and useful – and I thought they would help focus my mind and get me out there pitching work.
So today I found myself in the Guardian offices in Farringdon along with twenty to thirty other hopefuls ready to learn the craft and the trade. Dea is energetic and enthusiastic so it was motivating just being there. She promises to follow up the workshop with persistent reminders and questions to make sure we are writing and pitching. She ran a tight ship, managing to squeeze in not one but two guest presenters on top of her own stuff between 10.30am and 4pm.
We had Ed Grenby, editor of Sunday Times Travel magazine (a stand-alone publication to the newspaper) who told us his list of eighteen things he wants from a freelancer (the writing is not until about number eleven or twelve). We then had about thirty seconds each to pitch him a story – unfortunately for me, he ruled out my Arctic proposal immediately. “This is completely beyond your control but I’ve always wanted to go to Spitsbergen so there’s no way I’m commissioning it out,” he said. I’m not too worried since I have in fact sold an article to another magazine, Anyway, but it would be nice if I could place another article with a different angle somewhere else.
In the afternoon we had Rory Maclean, author of several travel memoir books, most recently The Magic Bus about the hippie trail from Istanbul to India. He led us through a discussion and some exercises in writing and his line is more the literary travel writing rather than travel journalism (though he does do a bit of that too). We had to write about a traumatic experience, firstly in first person from our own point of view and then from the point of view of someone else in the story. I wrote about my grandfather dying, something that happened ten years ago, yet the exercise took me by surprise and I became very emotional when I read it out. I think I should do more of that kind of writing.
The workshop was definitely worthwhile. It was inspirational and motivational and I picked up useful insights on how editors (or at least one editor in particular) work and how to go about the actual writing process. Travel writing is quite different to other forms of journalism because the sense of self is present and the best travel writing is not just about place but the relationship between self and place and character is very important. Many of the techniques are similar to those used in fiction.
My only quibble is that I had expected a little more on the business side. We did have a brief opportunity for questions and this came up then but the burning questions I came with were all about commissions and syndications and copyright and who the best markets are and so on. It was touched on but not really explored in any kind of depth and I think I knew most of what was discussed already. On the other hand, you can’t cover everything in a day and this is probably readily available in writers guides and online forums and so on, so I understand why it was not a focus. Also, many of the participants had not been published before and learning the craft is obviously the most important thing.
I do differ with Dea on two points. Big respect to her: she is a successful writer, she knows her markets and her trade very well and she has written and edited books (her latest is Serpent in Paradise). I’m not setting myself up to say I know better. But she was adamant that it is okay to blur the lines of objective truth in journalism and not only is it okay but that everyone does it. She advocates that you write down fragments of dialogue and use them wherever you want, even if it means putting the character in Iceland rather than Greece or merging several characters into one. Granted, we’re not talking about named characters and it’s not news reportage but coming from a journalistic background as I do, I am a little uncomfortable with this. It might be okay for books where there will probably be a disclaimer that certain elements are fictionalised and general facts have been changed. But for work that appears in a newspaper or magazine, I think there is a contract with the reader that the story is true. I agree with Dea that the most important thing is to evoke a place and to be true to the sense of a place but I also think that each detail should be true as well. I’ve certainly never made anything up in my travel writing. Yes, things are made up in the sense that the writing process involves recreating scenes and selecting images but not in the sense that things aren’t objectively true. Everything I’ve ever written in a travel piece, I could probably prove in a court of law. Maybe that’s a shortcoming in that if I’m too shackled to fact, it might hamper my creativity and expression and perhaps I’m being either naive or anal. I’d be interested to know what others think.
The other small point of difference was on image rights. When I was in the Arctic, I dived in the ocean wearing a bikini (crazy, I know). This is a potential story and a picture of me in the bikini would obviously be a good accompaniment. I do have photos but the only problem is that I’m in the photo but I didn’t take the photo, so I don’t own the copyright. Dea said that if it’s on my camera, then I own the pic and there’s no problem. I’m not sure this is true. In my case, my friends / travel companions might very well let me use the picture but I believe they retain copyright so legally and morally I should clear this with them first.
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09.22.06
Posted in London, Society & Politics at 8.30 am by niltiac
Last night I joined the Beautiful People at the Armani fashion show in Earls Court. Who was there? Well, Giorgio Armani of course, and Bono, Bobby Shriver, Elle Macpherson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ashley Judd, Kim Cattrall, Lily Cole, Oliver Martinez… We had performances from Beyonce, Bryan Ferry, Razorlight and Andrea Bocelli. And that was just on stage. The audience was packed with celebs of all kinds, including loads of the footballer variety.
In fact, I had the privilege of meeting and sitting with Tim Cahill, the Socceroo who scored Australia’s first ever World Cup goal (the equaliser in the game against Japan in this year’s World Cup). Tim was lovely: very friendly and down to earth and very gentlemanly and polite. We spoke about living away from Australia (he plays for Everton and lives in Liverpool) and how we both knew we would move back there some day. He has two little boys, aged three and one, and seems like a very proud and happy dad. Also at my table were a couple of other journalists, staff from Giorgio Armani Australia and representatives from some of their major clients like David Jones.
Wandering around the crowd, I bumped into Lily Cole and Bryan Ferry. I didn’t talk to them as I didn’t have anything to say and it was cooler just to watch. Someone came up to me and told me I looked like Nicole Kidman – sadly it wasn’t Leonardo. That was nice as I was feeling a little frumpy amid all the glamour. I’d only been asked to attend on the morning of the event so hardly enough time to plan a fabulous outfit. I wore a brown suit with my new turquoise shoes and some diamante jewellery.
The event was enormous. They had transformed a rather cavernous hall in the Earls Court Exhibition Centre with beautiful carpets, low sofas, mood lighting, loads of vodka and champagne. The stage was 60 metres long and more than 80 models sashayed their way along the catwalk. The clothes were fabulous with geometric designs and bold colours – black, white and red. It was the launch of the 2007 spring/summer women’s collection but also the RED range, which is part of the initiative led by Bono and Bobby Shriver to sell commercial products and donate part of the proceeds to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
We heard a lot about RED over the course of the evening. It was the cause – or the association with the cause – that drew many of the celebs out in such numbers. Bono was in a lyrical mood, starting a great number of sentences with the words “I prophesy…”, with his prophesies anything from the fact that he would drink too much vodka this very evening to that one day there would be no more HIV/AIDS. Ashley Judd reminded us of the plight of women in Africa and the number of AIDS orphans. We were told to “shop until it stops” – buying a pair of Armani sunglasses would allow us to save the world.
It’s easy to be cynical and I don’t intend to be. I think this is a good initiative and if it’s money that would otherwise be spent anyway, then it’s as well to ensure that some of the profits help some of the world’s poorest people. I don’t know much about how the funds are to be spent but I would hope and imagine that they are setting up rigorous systems to do this properly. But the marketing machine is in overdrive and there is a lot of hype for the project to live up to. I’m also not convinced by the implication that if you buy a RED product you’ve done your bit and don’t need to feel guilty that you have a pair of Armani sunglasses while people in Africa have nothing.
I’ve written about this for The Australian – the link is here.
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09.21.06
Posted in Life, Media & Internet at 7.38 am by niltiac
I’ve been thinking about blogging this week rather than actually doing it. There have been a few articles that have caught my eye that I’ve wanted to comment on and I’ve also been thinking about updating about my Arctic trip and also Italy, way back in May.
The priority, however, has been flat hunting. My boyfriend and I gave notice on our flat with the intention of moving north of the river. All well and good, except that we were starting to worry about finding somewhere reasonable in time for the move. Now I think I’ve found a very nice flat (I won’t say publicly where) – I’ve handed over the holding deposit, just need to go through reference checks and so on. It’s a private rental so no agent fees, which is nice. (In the UK, it’s standard for tenants to pay anything from £100 to £300 when they sign a new lease).
One of the podcasts I listen to, I Should Be Writing, had links to some productivity tools recently. Joe’s Goals lets you have goals of both things you are trying to do and things you are trying not to do so you can rate how “good” you are in any given day. So you might score points for exercise, writing fiction and taking your lunch to work but lose points for biting your nails and checking email incessantly, for example. Meanwhile, Lifehacker has lots of useful stuff about life, both tech and non-tech related, from ‘how to make an iPod dock for poor people’ to ‘decrease your cat allergies’.
Another site I enjoy is 43 Things where you can list goals, update your progress, cheer other people’s goals and start teams. It’s fun and useful and can be inspiring too, but everything you write is publicly visible so privacy might be a concern.
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09.16.06
Posted in Media & Internet, Society & Politics at 5.56 pm by niltiac
Guardian Newspapers has appointed Emily Bell, editor-in-chief of the Guardian Unlimited websites, to the board of directors in the new role of director of digital content.
This is significant for two reasons. Firstly, Bell is a senior journalist and it is unusual for journalists to be appointed to board positions. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Observer editor Roger Alton and managing editor Chris Elliott also have board positions, but it’s not common and this means there are now four journalists on the board. It’s testament to how highly they think of Bell and how the insight gleaned from writing and editing can be valuable in a business context too.
Secondly, it really shows how important the company believes its digital strategy to be. With falling circulations and print advertising revenues, newspapers need to become multi-media brands to survive in the 21st century. Other newspapers talk the talk but The Guardian has truly walked the walk when it comes to building a digital brand and has not shied away from decisions that could affect their print product, like breaking exclusive stories online. Guardian Unlimited is an innovator and was one of the first to introduce services like blogs, podcasts, user forums and so on and the huge audiences it commands both domestically and globally is testament to that. Bell has been a driving force behind all this and it makes perfect sense to appoint her to the board to advise on digital strategy.
I can’t find a link for the press release, so I have pasted it below (sans contact details).
*****
For Immediate Release – Friday 15 September
EMILY BELL TO JOIN BOARD OF GUARDIAN NEWSPAPERS
Emily Bell, Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian Unlimited websites, has been appointed to the Board of Guardian Newspapers Limited (GNL) in the new role of Director of Digital Content.
Bell will have Board responsibility for digital content development across all platforms and will spearhead the expansion of GNL’s web, audio and video services as part of GNL’s global digital strategy.
Carolyn McCall, Chief Executive of the Guardian Media Group, said: “Emily has an unparalleled grasp of the digital challenges and opportunities media companies are facing, and a clear vision for the multimedia development of Guardian, Observer and GU content. She is widely regarded as one of the UK’s leading digital thinkers and will be a major asset to the GNL Board.”
Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Guardian, said: “The Guardian is already the
most innovative of newspaper brands with a website twice voted best newspaper site in the world, the most talked-about comment blog around, podcast activity which earned us a place in the Guinness Book of World Records last year, G24 pdf downloads updated every 15 minutes, and our own award-winning television production unit. Emily will be a key driver of our accelerating digital ambition.”
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Posted in Books at 4.50 pm by niltiac
UPDATE: I don’t know how I missed this fact but I have listed below SIX rather than five continents, making a total of 30 rather than 25 books. I don’t want to make it any harder on myself, especially when there is only three months left. The person who set up the challenge just had North and South America as one. I have decided to keep them separate but drop Australia & Oceania. This is purely personal since, as an Australian, I already read plenty of Australian books and I also don’t think there is an overwhelming abundance of literature from elsewhere in Oceania. Perhaps I will re-include it if I do this again next year.
ORIGINAL POST: I’ve just discovered a cool reading challenge on BookCrossing. It’s called Five books, Five countries, Five continents and the idea is to read 25 books in 2006 from all over the world. So you would read five books per continent where each book came from a different country within that continent.
I love reading but I don’t read a lot of books written outside North America, the UK and Australia and I think it would be fun to read more international literature. So although it’s already September, I’ve decided to take part. I’ve been keeping a record of my reading in 2006 already anyway so it was easy to see how close I was to this goal. I’ve taken country of birth for the nationality of the author.
So far in 2006, I’ve read books by authors from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Russia, Guyana, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Zimbabwe. I need to read four more books from Africa, three from Asia, three from Australia & Oceania, two from Europe, three from North & Central America and the Caribbean and four from South America.
I’ve read multiple books by authors in Australia, the US and the UK so I’ve recorded the FIRST book that I read from these countries in 2006 as that seems to be the most objective criteria.
I’m currently trying to think of books to add to my reading list for the rest of the year. Since I also have a project to read the one hundred top books of the twentieth century (see my progress at Century of Books), I have looked for overlap wherever possible. However, there is not a huge amount of overlap since my list was English language only and excluded translations. Some books have been chosen because I’ve got them on my shelves already – that’s why Anchee Min’s Empress Orchid won over the Nobel Prize winning Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian, for example.
I’m open to suggestions on how to fill the gaps – please leave public comments rather than email so everyone can join in the discussion.
AFRICA
READ: Mara and Dann by Doris Lessing ZIMBABWE (RHODESIA)
PLANNED: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe NIGERIA *
The Life and Times of Michael K. by J.M.Coetzee SOUTH AFRICA
?
?
ASIA
READ: Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi IRAN
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini AFGHANISTAN
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth INDIA *
PLANNED: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro JAPAN *
(or maybe something by Haruki Marukami)
Empress Orchid by Anchee Min CHINA
AUSTRALIA & OCEANIA
READ: An Accidental Terrorist by Steven Lang AUSTRALIA
Mantras and Misdemeanours by Vanessa Walker NEW ZEALAND
PLANNED: ?
?
?
EUROPE
READ: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce IRELAND *
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov RUSSIA *
Not on the Label by Felicity Lawrence UK
PLANNED: Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco ITALY
Grimm’s Fairy Tales, folk tradition collected by Brothers Grimm
NORTH & CENTRAL AMERICA & THE CARIBBEAN
READ: The Birthday of the World by Ursula Le Guin USA
Unless by Carol Shields CANADA
PLANNED: ?
?
?
SOUTH AMERICA
READ: Paid Servant by E.R.Braithwaite GUYANA
PLANNED: The Infinite Plan by Isabel Allende CHILE
Either Love in the Time of Cholera or One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez COLUMBIA
The Zahir by Paulo Coehlo BRAZIL
?
* Books on Century of Books list of one hundred top books of the twentieth century.
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