Baz is a Spaz

Can someone please back me up on this: Baz Luhrmann is a total spaz.

Recently in the news - which is mostly consumed with talk of the release of his overblown epic Australia - Luhrmann made claims that Barack Obama would have been "stolen" had he been born in Australia being that he is the offspring of mixed race parents. Well the fact is, Obama was not born in Australia. I think the plight of the indigenous in Australia is not at all comparable with what African Americans have endured. Perhaps the only similarity is that both the US and Australia have shamefully racist legacies when it comes to how "black" people have been treated. Does Luhrmann really care about the stolen generation? His film cost a trillion to make while a significant population of Aboriginals live in abject poverty in Australia. I mean really, his designer wife Catherine Martin flew all around the country sourcing the perfect bush tea cutlery set for the production design. I seriously doubt they were that concerned about righting Australia's wrongs in the process. Moral of the story: if you are after an attempt at quick publicity of the socially responsible kind, espouse shallow generalisations about "blackness" and race relations.

All The Artswipe has to say is this: If Luhrmann had been born in the US, surely someone would have "stolen" that closet from him and outed him by now. 

Eating Crow

The Artswipe

Humble Pie, 2007
Several ingredients outlined below

Thanks to everyone who has invited me to their APEC parties. A blanket apology for not being able to come, I was having my own APEC celebration at home. And what better way to celebrate than to make some humble pie, sit down with a cold beer and watch an Aussie flick. Before I review the film I watched, let me just give you the recipe for my APEC pie.

1 eggplant
2 zucchini
1 large sweet potato
2 cups shredded spinach
1/2 butternut pumpkin
3 cups ricotta cheese
shortcrust pastry base
puff pastry lid
lettering stencil (optional)

Pre-roast the vegetables and configure lovingly in a pasty lined dish. Smear the ricotta throughout the layers of vegetables. Create a pastry lid and cut out the letters APEC and that symbol (use a stencil if you must). Baste pastry with milk. Bake for 45 minutes at 200 C.

You'll have noticed that there is no meat in this pie. I'm not one for vegetarianism. (I tried this for a year or so at art school but only so I could hang out with some of the coolest kids.) The reason for a vegetable pie on APEC weekend is that there are other sources of meat one can indulge in. The meat of Australian screen culture for starters! I went to Video Ezy, paid off my $2.50 late fee for dropping back The Secret DVD late a few months ago and headed straight for the New Release wall. Hurrying myself through the latest titles (as the pie was baking at home and one must not overcook these things) I found a lovely Aussie romantic comedy - a perfect companion to a vegetable pie. "Where's the meat?" I hear you ask. And good question it is. I believe the genre can function like a nice piece of steak when it's a romantic comedy masquerading as a documentary. So that is why I recommend viewing Bra Boys this weekend if you're still looking for ways to spend your Sunday.

Bra Boys (Dir. Sunny Abberton, 2007) calls itself a documentary but it has my vote for best romantic comedy of the year. Assuming it might be about boys who wear either bras or Akubras, my expectations were indeed challenged when I sat down with this little think piece. I won't outline the whole plot as you can read about it at Wikipedia or check out its official website. In short Bra Boys features all these beefy surfer dudes from Maroubra who spend 90 minutes of screen time justifying their beach gang tribalism. These boys have had tough lives - drugs, parental neglect, shit like that. They find freedom in the waves. They find love through the fist. No, they're not into fistin' - that kinda shit is kept off screen! They're into using their fists as an expression of mateship. Or at least that is how I read it. When you live in a community that appears to exclude women (apart from their mothers, none appeared on-screen) I suspect there's a lot of pent up sexual frustration going on. So if you're not bashing each other up over the politics of beach entitlement, you may as well form into gangs and get demonstrative tattoos that read "My Brother's Keeper" with an icon representing a very tight handshake. There's nothing at all gay about this picture when you couch such a tight-fisted homosocial testosterone in familial terms.


So anyway, it must be said that Russell Crowe narrates this journey and can I just say, GOD BLESS HIM for that. Bra Boys begins with the Crib Notes story about white settlement in Australia and how it impacted Maroubra - or something like that. I know that when I am reflecting on my own community formations, it is important to go back in time and paint the scene with some sweeping context. For instance, I recently gave a PowerPoint presentation at the local community centre about the origins of blogging. I started my talk with the Big Bang and subsequent evolution of the species.

Bra Boys gets even more interesting when it responds to the Cronulla Riots of December 2005. It is here the boys affirm their multiculturalism. Prior to this event (acknowledged in the last 10 minutes of the 90 minute film) there'd been no reason to explore the multiculturalism of the beach. But what better opportunity to end it with a message to the world about how tribalism can have a social inclusion policy. One of the guys talks about how non-local visitors to the beach should always remember to acknowledge the culture and tradition that has shaped the beach. I couldn't agree more - it's at the beach that you find really rich culture. As a kid I engaged with beach culture through my metal detector. Finding 50c and some fishing tackle was a day well-spent. Until it was all spoiled when my parents warned us to be careful that you don't step on a syringe. Culture indeed.

After the Cronulla Riots segment, the boys of Bra reveal their racial and ethnic backgrounds just after a poignant scene of two children playing: a black dwarf chasing a white non-dwarf. It's a healing moment. Like all the APEC leaders wearing Akubras and Drizabone coats, this image of the children should go down in Australian history as a definitive moment of all types of difference united.

Rite of Passage

Terry Zwigoff captured the pretensions of art school ennui so vividly in Ghost World (2001) that I expected his more recent feature Art School Confidential (2006) to be a masterpiece. A straight to video affair in Australia, Art School Confidential is about Jerome (Max Minghella) a wannabe Picasso who believes being a famous artist will get him laid. Poor virgin hasn't had a great time convincing the ladies of his worth. Actually no one at art school thinks much of Jerome. Anyone can be a "Picasshole" it seems. And who would give Jerome a second glance – he basically goes to art school because of the supposed "erotics" of life drawing. First myth of art school is that life drawing is the most fucking boring thing you'll ever do, and the skanks who pose in real life usually stink of whatever is leaking from their unattractive junkie stained bodies.

But art school doesn't have a home in real life anymore. (I'm not sure if that has anything to do with the fact that Sydney art schools seem to be either closing down or restructuring themselves out of existence). As Zwigoff's film has it, art school – like a lot of art – is the stuff of cliché. Jerome's art school buddy Bardo (Joel David Moore) rightly point out that the school is littered with human clichés. There's the pretentious art theory idiot, the kiss-ass dork, the angry lesbian, the meditating hippy and the mature age back at school mum. Even Bardo notes that he's the embodiment of art school cliché: the drop out who keeps repeating the first year of different majors until finding an interest that sticks. But here at art school, everyone may as well drop out because as Professor Sandiford (John Malkovich) points out, only one in a hundred will make a living from being an artist. Of course Sandiford is yet another cliché: the art school instructor whose own career is a long-running gag whose punchline no one gets anymore. When Jerome sees Sandiford's geometric paintings, he inquires how long he's been into the "triangle thing". "I was one of the first" is Sandiford's reply.

The rest of the plot's not even worth fleshing out. There's Audrey, the boring blond life model (Sophia Myles) who actually fulfils Jerome's fantasy of idealised erotic muse. There's even a silly subplot about a serial campus strangler. There's a wasted cast of Jim Broadbent as a disillusioned alcoholic artist – perhaps the slurring is enough justification for the weird UK/US hybrid accent. Angelica Huston is sadly extraneous in two brief scenes as a art history professor with great legs. And while the dialogue is not nearly as funny as it thought it was, there's some corkers, the best occurring when Jerome is criticised by a class mate for being "so September 10".

Art school has become a ridiculous place where one goes seeking authenticity but leaves corrupted at best. The basic message of Art School Confidential is that the supposedly good artist (Jerome) will never be noticed, let alone taken seriously. The bad artist – usually naïve "outsider" type – gets the girl and the attention. Phony art "crit" talk is used to talk up the bad art as something that is good precisely because it has "unlearned" representation or some such shit. Phil Morrison's Junebug (2005) and John Waters' Pecker (1998) did much better jobs of depicting art world tryhards getting all wet over "outsider" nowness. Even TV shows like The L Word and Six Feet Under have made better (read entertaining) situations out of stock art school archtypes. In series four of The L Word, Bette Porter (Jennifer Beals) becomes Dean of an LA art college and gets to fuck a student before turning attention to the deaf lesbian artist in residence (Marlee Matlin). In series three of Six Feet Under, Claire Fisher (Lauren Ambrose) "finds herself" after experimenting with collage, chemicals, chicks. Real rite of passage stuff. Come to think of it, where there's a rite of passage, there's bound to be a few overused clichés. And it seems they get no more relentlessly regurgitated than in depictions of that thing we call art school.