So many of the actors in Number 96, the series were English – and the co-producer Don Cash and the principal writer Johnny Whyte also English – that its many-faceted resemblance to Cleese, Cooney, Ayckborne, Hitchcock, Hancock, the Carry On films and Are You Being Served is partly explained.
In the cut-down movie version this is even more so. Extinct piss-elegant Anglo-Oz accents afflict Lyn Rainbow, Bettina Welch and James Condon (the imminent Whitlamesque Australian Prime Minister), Rebecca Gilling’s breasts, pubic bush and smiling ease in the love scenes are very Swinging London… but the rest of it, the Australian stuff, the trademen’s entrance, is, well, what Wayne Swan might call ‘patchwork’.
Ron Shand’s Herb, playing vaudleville straight-man to Pat McDonald’s shrill malapropistic blithering Dorrie, is very good and meek and calm indeed. But Pat is beyond ghastly, beyond Christian tolerance, not to be borne, vocally worse than even Julia Gillard. She throws the whole thing off kilter.
Every other character has tones and mannerisms – and sometimes even dialogue – that approaches the human. Condon and Elaine Lee, Gordon MacDougall and Sheila Keneally, Joe Hasham and John Orczik, Liz Kirkby and James Elliot stand up as plausible couples, and Bunney Brooke is very, very good as vulgar, matey, ash-stained Flo. Philippa Baker and Johnny Lockwood as Roma and Aldo tiptoe round caricature, but it’s probable that the dialogue does it to them rather than they to the dialogue, which is cloying, ill-marmaladed wog.
And the whole shebang, the whole catastrophe, well…
There are gay men, Don and Simon (Hasham and Orczik) who come out. There’s a film buff, Dudley Butterfield (Chard Hayward) and a prissy assistant, Arnold Feather (Jeff Kevin) who seem gay but are merely sissies. There’s a rape in the first minute of a woman, Vera Collins (Lee), who is later in love with the rapist’s father (Condon). There’s a Hitchcockian plot of a former lunatic (Rainbow) encouraged to suicide by drugs, choreographed sadomasochistic seeming nightmares (an African mask, a naked whipping). There’s a comical ramshackle sauna bath, falling down and frequently invaded, with sagging male buttocks running in and out. And there’s a plot that may have tempted Geoffrey Chaucer for a minute or two in which Dorrie proves not to have married Herb but a drooling, leering, ugly wino (played, as always, by Harry Lawrence) who turns up forty years late quite keen, unlike all other humans, to strip and swive poor Dorrie. Herb is very good in these scenes, acutely and humbly aware the law must prevail, and thankful his cuckolding will rid him of that dread shrieky voice forever.
Declaring my interest, I wrote some episodes and my wife did too and my perpetual collaborator Denny Lawrence provided the first nude bum of the series. I befriended some of the actors, and found them genial, professional, articulate, reliable and underpaid. I detected none of my lines in the movie, which astoundingly omits Abigail, its voluptuous virgin superstar, whose famous, glorious breasts were never seen.
Moral questions do arise however, over nudity (Gilling, a potential world superstar, was diminished, demeaned and cheapened by it and may thus have lost her chance), intellectual vacuity (a black man’s mocking in a bar is utterly unbelievable) and, well, parsimony. Two and a half hours were shot each week in only two small sets with ever-changing furniture and actors paid pittances for enthralling the nation with their buttocks, nipples and bad English, and the producers engorged with sheaves of money. Where Charlie Sheen gets five million dollars an episode, they got, probably, a hundred and ten, and Cash and Harmon, Cash and Carry, as they were known, a good bit more.
On the other hand, though, it unshackled homosexuality and dignified, with shrewd casting, acts that in some Australian states in those days got you twenty years in the slammer. Justice Michael Kirby has praised 96 for taking the heat off his generation, and this is no small thing. I would have been happier, though, if Dudley Butterfield were less of a trizzy, blithering queen.
The direction got better throughout the run, as the cameras drew closer than a proscenium-arch five-shot and the actors relaxed more with each other in the shower scenes and over morning tea. Hasham, Orczik, Gilling, Kirkby, Brooke, MacDougall, Elliot and Elaine Lee are always very convincing and Ron Shand a small ridiculous one-off miracle of chirpy stoic obedient subversiveness and wily cock-sparrow good manners.
The lighting is excellent when it needs to be (in the Hitchcocky sequences), the sets lifelike, the writing intermittently atrocious (though not always), the jokes nearly always clunky (as in vaudeville, or McCacky Mansions, or Ada and Elsie), the theme tune a straighforward theft of The Odd Couple’s, and the editing so jumpy and fractious it came close to indictable war crime.
But it had a good, big, generous heart, and, though it was simultaneously primitive and revolutionary, conservative and radical, old-fashioned and morally daring, truehearted and smutty, it spoke to some huge part of the Australian soul, which is gossipy, snoopy, unjudgmental and warm, somehow, in the end.
And, of course, it changed the world.
Name:
I liked it, and I used to watch it with my grandmother every night. And later The Box (was that a naughty pun, I now wonder). There were characters in No. 96 that I still remember fondly, and the writers were surprisingly knowledgeable. It was an intelligent show in its way.
I liked Arnold Feather and his prissiness never seemed gay or sissy, just very “junior executive”. And he married that funny blonde who died in a bomb attack, if I recall.
All very silly I suppose.
“But Pat is beyond ghastly, beyond Christian tolerance, not to be borne, vocally worse than even Julia Gillard”.
Cracking line Bob. And great article. I wasn’t allowed to watch 96 given my strict Islamic upbringing but I have managed to watch a few episodes.
I was overseas during the 2010 election debacle – new paradigm my arse.
It was only then, watching BBC news in Sienna, that the truly horrible reality of the Red Barren’s voice was borne out. She manages to reinstil every stereotype about the Australian tongue (and also set off any canine with the misfortune to hearing her). Do you think it has contributed to the fact she is disliked generally or not taken seriously?
Where is the musical or opera based on No.96, or better still the musical or opera about the making of No.96?
Thank you Bob. Elaine Lee is a personal friend of mine, and still going strong.
I liked ’96′ when the world was a simpler place, and it was certainly a ground breaker here in Australia.
PS Elaine is an ex-yarpie, not a pom.
By the by, Bob please read Jennifer Wilson’s latest essay “What is Objectification Anyway?” on noplaceforsheep.
I think it is excellent.
Interesting enough article and perhaps some from here will also read it. Interesting, to me, though, for the challenges it poses whenever “Judeo-Christian” is exchanged for something else (we dare not speak its name here I presume,) as infamous Sydney gang-rapist MSK pointed out in his own case. I agree that education is the key. Education for all.
We live in a society, a civilisation derived, for better or for worse, from Judeo-Christian heritage.
If we lived in a society derived from Islam we would be discussing that. We do not, so we do not.
There was a serious point to be made, but you don’t make it. In Sydney there was a series of gang rapes in the 60’s and early 70’s which had to be ruthlessly suppressed. They, like the later ‘we are going to f%%% you Leb style’ gang rape series were probably based on the same principles the article was seemingly exploring. Now that would have been interesting as they both applied to this society – and probably still do. Maybe they were like you and missed that completely.
Or maybe it was just a chance to highlight more ‘aren’t we terrible’/’don’t mention the War’ guff
Has this person never heard of Wikipedia?
Instrumentality – if the thing is treated as a tool for one’s own purposes
Denial of autonomy – if the thing is treated as if lacking in agency or self-determination
Inertness – if the thing is treated as if lacking in agency
Ownership – if the thing is treated as if owned by another
Fungibility – if the thing is treated as if interchangeable
Violability – if the thing is treated as if permissible to damage or destroy
Denial of subjectivity – if the thing is treated as if there is no need to show concern for the ‘object’s’ feelings and experiences.
It’s just a word, or concept if you will. Get rid of it and what are you left with? One less word.
That sounds like a description of the working class.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/casual-workers-forced-to-wear-barcodes-20120607-1zz2c.html
I think it is sad that your view of an excellent essay is coloured by your personal antipathy for the writer.
Give credit where it is due, just this once.
She’s abusive. I’m not clicking on her link.
Nice post Reader1. It looks like you found a shoulder for that chip you been carrying.
“It seems to me that the entire objectification movement is an attempt to impose a particular set of moral values on society. Notions of propriety, largely middle class, are disturbed for example, by the spectacle of women playing football in lingerie. This discomfort is pathologised as objectification, and extrapolated as threatening to all women and girls, who as a consequence of the LFL will be regarded as nothing more than sex objects for male gratification. While there certainly are males who act as if this is their opinion of women, the majority do not. The majority of people understand there is a difference between personal encounters, and imagery.
The charge of objectification is a serious one. It should not be trivialized to serve a moral agenda.
It seems obvious to me that the key to accepting the human right of others not to be treated as a means to an end, lies in education and not censorship. Attempting to build a society on the assumption that all its members are possessed of an objectifying consciousness and everything possible must be done to prevent them indulging that consciousness seems to me insane, and asking for trouble. Respect and value for others as equals is an acquired skill, and we depend on caregivers to instruct our young in acquisition and practice. It’s a work in progress for the human race. Concerned citizens would do better to apply themselves to encouraging and assisting this work, rather than attempting to impose a moral code that adds nothing at all to the civilizing project. An attempt that in its practice commits the very offences it claims to vehemently oppose.”
Says it all : the bacwa (banning and censoring wowser agenda) takes us nowhere but into repression, and all to impose their miserable morality on anyone so benighted as to believe it.
Are you trying to say that lingerie football isn’t in fact sexist and that anyone who thinks otherwise deserves moral approbation? Waiting twenty years for the next generation to be raised in the mould of having no objection to lingerie football is not a plan for the world’s betterment. Analysing the historical context of culture to provide a firmer grasp of the roots and meaning of present day cultural values is. The feminist movement has amply demonstrated this over the decades. The anti-feminist movement, on the other hand, has amply demonstrated what happens when semiotics go bad and start to attack reality itself. When womens’ subjectivity holds less weight than their superficial appraisal by others, then Houston we have a society wide political problem.
I can’t believe the sheep people are coming up with their own acronyms. PLM. Pretty lame, Millhouse.
This is the second time I agree with R1, McDonald’s muck has replaced our Aussie hamburger, now we have the Baby Beauty Pageants and Lingerie footballers marching in, let’s be vigilant… like..
I just put its excitement into its era Bob, not wanting to bang on about the quality I don’t see it as a personal favourite on those grounds, it was just fun and plenty of bare breasts! Maybe under-finessing this a bit, but it was still a show of the times. With contraception for the asking just roaring in, it was another sexual breakthrough (Australian TV in this case) prior to the re-closing of the prude/wowser iron curtain by early 80’s when GRID – HIV – burst on us and the crackdown began. A very small window for most, just think of it: pregnancy and people ‘having to get married’, ‘a shotgun wedding’ was an actual term in use and often finding a virgin was the one thing you were never bloody well looking for (I am talking about 1972 you know). For gays it was worse, I presume as The Quilt (film), plus And The Band Played On (book only, NEVER the film) and Tales of the City (TV) show.
To look back now I only see a good entertainment; to each his own. No academy awards for it, just great entertainment for its time. As usual with film and TV flogged to death by later copyists.
And at least I know now I have seen or read some of the Ellis work other than O’Malley.
There is a creature that frequents these blogs; it has never had a positive contribution to make about anything.
It is the very definition of a troll and a parasite wherever it appears, and its multiple personalities are without exception unpleasant; some appear sane and lucid at times.
It has never had an original thought, it has never done anything other than criticise.
I invite anyone – anyone other than its many alter egos that is – to mention one genuine comment that it has made, one original thought, one comment that is not a criticism of some other post.
It sits back and raises questions, often many questions, usually designed to assert some sort of semantic superiority, asserting its own perfection and purity of argument, decrying fallacy decrying poor arguments : all the time never making any of its own. If it says nothing it can’t be criticised, it may think.
But that is only in its lucid moments; at times it descends into what can only be described as madness, and at these times it looses invective, especially if challenged.
If someone out there knows this creature personally, please, please get help for it.
Aye, we meet finally Cole.
I don’t know why you bother with him man, he nothing but a gowl.
Sláinte. See ya again.
I briefly considered changing factions but Patrick Dignam has toppled me back over onto Doug’s side again. Propaganda should be as art. It should have breadth and width. It should breathe a life of its own and not be manhandled into submission.
Aye, it was just as I thought – all chip and no shoulder.
shame really. I never like to see a woman take a beating from those she sides with.
But ya make your own bed…
Nice imagery in the context. Real sensitive. I’m taking a “beating” am I? What a pathetic victim I must be. I blame myself.
You are taking a beating. You just don’t want to see it, or you see it and don’t want to acknowledge it. Either way, you taking the beating and your friend Doug giving it.
Yes, you also a “pathetic victim” – not even the irony you got going there will spare you from that charge.
Yes again, you should blame yourself. There’s no-one else.
My partner read this 6 months ago Reader1, and we talked about it a lot. I mean a lot. Give it a go – SL Bartky: Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression.
Good on you, Dignam. That’s great.
What have Baby Pageants and Lingerie Footballers got to do with
DQ and Cole? If one is against that sort of rubbish, one is against it…nothing to do with who’s side you are on or not.
It’s to do with what YOU believe in…
I don’t particularly want to wade into this one H, but objectification has more sinister implications, depending on which group is being objectified, life and death implications.
Propoganda does not have the luxury of being an “art” as it is joined at the hip with objectification and can succeed as the dominant or submissive partner when done propely, come to think of it even when done totally inadequately. Propoganda has much more urgent and definite needs and usually on a much smaller time scale than art, I disagree with R1 that it needs depth and breadth, I believe the opposite, it needs a narrow, claustrophobic, symbiotic existence like a parasite to feel complete.
When you start throwing words around like “society” objectification gets aroused, gets all hot and flustered, it feels right at home with a word like society.
We don’t have to give time and breathing space for every silliness coming our way from USA,but let’s accept the good and valuable and lasting where ever it comes from..
I’m afraid Helvityni there is now more at stake than the durability of a woman’s delicates to withstand taking a pass in the end zone, so to speak.
If a Lingerie Grid-Iron match had been organized by a pro-feminist collective, with free entry, we would have a statement, a thrown down gauntlet full of irony and, and, stuff, maybe a short film and great photos by Annie Leibovitz. If one side had been a true male fully kitted, helmeted and padded football team, we could have shown the vulnerability and fragility of women to the physical brutality of men, we could have objectified two groups at once, economically wise with artistic bona fides, see?
Countless women lead diminished existences by being societally and politically beholden to others. No pro-feminist collective would organise a lingerie football competition of any gender. They would be the very last people to do this for historically sensitive reasons.
I think the prosecution rests.
Doug, now that Bob has gotten rid of Cole, you feel safe to come out and answer his questions?
Or does even the thought of a question from Cole send a fucking chill up ya?
Eleanor was bang on the money, you a nasty old gowl if ever I seen one.
Which questions do you have in mind?
They are mainly intended to assert its own superiority, whilst saying nothing.
They have no legitimate purpose.
I haven’t changed my mind on lingerie football, you fucking idiot. Women’s subjectivity has never held all that much of a lofty position, which is why we see these cardboard cutout cultural remnants. But the moment you start Doug bashing or Reader1 shame hurling, the fact of lingerie football gets lost. That’s the only point I was making.
Fuck everyone. I am on no one’s team. Bob’s socially conservative value espousal is also starting to shit me. Doesn’t believe in divorce??? Surely it all depends on who you’re married to.
But all is propaganda in a general sense, it is a condition of language. JG and troupe should learn to wield it, not deny it.
Above all, fuck Patrick Dignam.
I have no brief for lingerie football, I won’t watch it and it is not an issue for me. Live and let live.
You are very definitely taking a political position with the “live and let live”. Lingerie football is a gender defined event. It wouldn’t exist but for sexism.
What about Olympic standard Women’s Beach Volleyball?
Would a blind man be less susceptible of developing an objectifying consciousness?
If Lingerie football was not televised but broadcast on radio only..
It’s not about the object, in this case underwear sporting events, it’s about the living, breathing cultural dynamic. Just off the top of my head though, if someone was organising a beach volleyball event for an audience of only blind people, I imagine the attire would be a lot less relevant. But maybe not. Maybe they would want to know the reality to conformed to their imagination. Maybe they would take satisfaction from just the thought that the match was an underwear driven event. In fact, you’re right, it’s more than possible. The politics are played out in the idea alone.
I’ll not dance with you or with Quixote anymore Reader, you both too stupid and clumsy.
No i dont want to fuck you. I like my woman intelligent and proud. You neither.
I wouldn’t root you, Dignam, no matter how intelligent and proud you like “your women”. I can sense from your dancing style that you would make a shithouse root.
By the way, the latest inquest into Azaria Chamberlain will hand down its results on Tuesday.
Malcolm Brown writing in the SMH expects it to be an exoneration of Lindy. And it might well be : Malcolm has been a partisan of Lindy for at least 25 years and so has Bob Ellis (?)
I have always considered that she was probably guilty; but the evidence has been so botched and so patchy that any sensible lawyer would say that the conviction was “unsafe” – that is, not beyond a reasonable doubt.
The Scots have a verdict “Not Proved” which would probably be the best verdict here.
On that basis she should be found not guilty. But:
Save the Dingo.
R1, down here, this objectification thing, isn’t something I have given a lot of thought to, apart from the very superficial arguments against it which are obvious and do not require repeating here.
The Sheep person says “An image can invite us to objectify, but it can’t cause an objectifying consciousness to develop where it previously did not exist.”
That seems to me to be a simply stupid thing to say, and there are enough examples, Fagin comes to mind, or the cigar chewing stubble shadowed big nosed fur collared coat wearing Jew so fondly caricatured in 1930′s Germany comes to mind. Enough to frighten the children and produce an objectifying consciousness where it didn’t exist before. Let’s all be anti-semites, and then educate our children as to why it was we were anti-semitic, and why they shouldn’t be. Ever looked at a contemporary German high school curriculum?
The Porn and advertising industry depend on that capability.
If there were normally naked, black African women running around playing a ball game in their native surrounds would that still be objectifying? I wonder. Eyes of the beholder sort of thing I guess.
What is a healthy response to this kind of sexual tittilation? Poirot would need to team up with Holmes and spend the rest of their lives investigating that case,it has become or always has been so complicated.
What is required, is a change of heart, to address those societal and political concerns you make mention of, not legislation, not education, not philosophising, not politics, not semiotics, whatever the fuck they are, sounds like a cereal, not propaganda. A change of heart, now how do we go about that?
Propaganda is the answer.
It’s the dance, it can be deep, there is no floor or ceiling. Murdoch is distasteful because his tricks are dirty, not because he has a few tricks. Poirot himself had a million of them, his author was churning them out by rote at one point, but because the methodology was so flawless those rote mysteries still make for a diverting read, just not as much as say “Curtain – Poirot’s Last Case”, which was actually written early on and only published much later. He dies in it. It is sadder than Bambi.
Interpretation colours everything and to be able to chop and change freely to one’s own advantage would surely put one in the “Lord of the Dance” category. Political beliefs correspond only with beliefs regarding the most effective way of being in the world, morality doesn’t enter into it. A dirty trick is an impediment, a blockage, a diversion. An impediment to what exactly is either a systematic issue or a metaphysical one depending on who you listen to. But there is definitely some force floating around, in and between entities, be it power or whatever you want to call it. Remove the impediments to the flow and everyone is already a lot better off solely on account of the movement itself.
Objectification is a great word because it lends weight to its opposite. That which exists outside all subjective experience is a sap to energy and power as focus and intent gets drawn into the non existent, and agency is thereby lost.
Political beliefs are consolation door prizes that correspond with the least effective way of “being” in the world. Politics, are an impediment, a dirty trick, a blockage, a diversion. “Yes we can” is an admission of failure thus far, thousands of years of failure. Propaganda. Yes we can what?
Lingerie Football? How fucked up is that?
My perceiving of my own values as the most effective way of being in the world is a result of natural brain function. Because I like the bush, I am a conservationist. I would only need to cobble together some argument if that particular value were to come under attack. And I no doubt could but it would nevertheless amount to no more than “I like the bush”. Politics is the scope of manoevre between value systems, where the only evidence is subjective but the subjective is very real. Which is why the process of objectification, whereby the idealised image holds political dominion over the mind that perceives it, lies in it’s presentation of evidence. It’s also why lying presents a blockage. It denies the only grounds for truth that exist in the subjective. Power isn’t flowing to one’s own groin as it should, as is being believed, but instead winding up in the hands of the Russian mafia.
As Dirk Gently said, it’s all interconnected.
My entire existence is mediated by politics, sociology, philosophy, science, economics, to the extent that they substitute for life, they make up the pasteboard mask (hey hey EofA? you would know the quote)that Ahab wants to strike through to the real essence, the life abundant. I can no longer vouch that the perception of my own values are actually the result of my natural brain function, you may need to take a cross section slice to verify that. I’ve opted for a value system, to some extent it has been imposed upon me, formed me, and I have added to it, built upon it, renovated it, decorated it, borrowed against it, gone into hock for it, it has stood me in good stead, it has let me down without compunction. It passes for a life, and yet, and yet…….
The idealised image holds sway,over the political dominion? It has to, despite the tarnishing it takes day in and day out, century after century, but imagine when it no longer does, and that time inches ever closer, Greece and Spain are harbingers tovarisch.
“The Dreaming” is a really, really profound concept. I don’t profess to understand it, I just know it’s profound.
I saw it JGC
I didn’t say there was only interpretation. I said that interpretation both colours things and is malleable and can thereby be enlisted as a practical component to one’s methode.
To Reader & allthumbs,
Just to finish this…properly.
Reader, my take on “interpretation”: I am becoming increasingly suspicious of our desire and demand for ‘narrative”. From my readings on literature, art, theory, and architecture, from Melville, Joyce, Beckett, Barth, – Duchamp, Mondrian, Pollock, Judd – Habermas, Ricoeur, Derrida, Fish, Frye, Marcuse, Foucault, Gadamer and Delueze, – Mies, Meier, Ando, Eisenman – it appears to me to be characterised by an innate instability. In turn this instability is defined by the absence of some primal privilege. Here, to paraphrase both Derrida and Rorty, I would add that nothing enjoys an absolute privilege – no interface no boundary line, no marker nor site can be fixed as a “meaning” epicentre – nothing is guaranteed, not even the base binary “in-out”.
Is that the end of it?
Well, no. Here I return to allthumbs, who yesterday moved me most profoundly, again, with his “and yet, and yet”.
This is where I am Reader. In answer to your question.
I am off tomorrow to LA for 5 days and plan to sneak some time away for a quick jaunt to the Getty. I shall the current exhibition with that thought in mind; i shall see if allthumbs’ “and yet” can turn on the axis of “Images of Death in the Middle Ages”.
We shall see.
To the old; Reader, goodbye.
And to the new; allthumbs, I can bequeath you no more than this,
“I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. No fearless fool now fronts me…
The drama’s done….Why then here does any one step forth?
Because one did survive the wreck.”
Now to Other Business.
Some here reference Leavis, others the complexities of cultural theory, while others still the wonders of Dostoyevski and the Romantic Poets…also present are those that marvel at the majesty of Melville and the wondrous hieroglyphs that adorn both man and beast…Some are poets themselves…allowing us a peek into private portals where lives and histories unfurl….some here speak frankly and earnestly, passionately, of their politics, whilst others reveal themselves but a post a(t an infrequent)time…and there are others who reply with honour and with humility….some with wit and jocularity and ribald buffoonery…
And One that responds to a suggestion of both acuity and gravitas with a “we do not, so we do not”.
(Number 96 Revisited June 8, 2012 at 10:04 pm)
And I am asked to choose?!?
I cannot side with those that support Reader’s “horse rooters”.
They don’t even realise that the moment they refute that outrage will signal the moment the real argument begins.
They cannot even imagine the scope of this argument.
How can they?
The habit of simplicity has dulled their minds and they are like Beckett’s dog, “chained to its bowl of vomit”.
No Reader, I shall not make peace with the Dull.
I cannot.
Do you know what Quixote’s contribution, his coup de grace argument, is on this theological/morality question?
Do you know his “lawyers” summation on this cosmic question?
Do you know it?
I have seen it countless times.
It is this, and I quote:
“you cant argue with the
God botherers, they always fall back on God, and say, ”
God says so, so there”.
What must be the central argument of Man…is now reduced to the lunatic and the infantile – ‘so there!”
Seneca and Pascal, Augustine and Hobbes, Bacon, Husserl, Burke, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Locke, Fichte, Aristotle and Erasmus, Nietzsche, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Kant, Hume and Bergson……
….all waiting for their cumulative meditations in history’s unceasing dialogue, to reach its meridian in…..
Quixote’s ‘so there’.
I am utterly speechless.
For the first time in my life….I am speechless.
So no, Reader, I shall make no peace with the Dull.
I don’t have the time to waste…..on our Sancho.
None of us do.
And so finally to our Billy Budd’s – Eleanor, Glinda , Mary Ellen, and now Patrick.
I would like to apologise to you for having the misfortune to be thought of as me – only ever two on this site – J.G.Cole and StaggerLee.
You were all ensnared in the web of Quixote’s paranoia and intellectual insecurities…and so suffered accordingly.
It appears Ellis had no inclination to remove Quixote’s tongue from his wrinkled bum.
To Bob Ellis, I say this, I will follow the counsel of the Old Testament and Nick Cave; “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
I will charge you $1000 per innocent you have extinguished erroneously.
Although Gerard Henderson is a political foe, a foe I have battled for just on 5 years now, I will donate upon my return, or perhaps sooner, $4000 to him to advance his case against…..the Palm Beach Fool.
His cause is justified.
“Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?”
Salut the Fool!!
JGC.
SL.
Ben + Amanda
“Patrick Dignam”,”Eleanor etc” and others too multitudinous to bother with are probably just other manifestations of the Uited States of Tara thing which is sometimes known as “JG Cole” “Stagger Lee”, “Glinda”, “Mary Ellen” and probably a few others.
You really do need a better protocol system, Bob Ellis.
It is very tiring fielding the shit thrown by rock apes and the wankings of bonobos.
Gotta admit that Patrick Dignam is an inspired name for an avatar. But hand on heart Doug, swear you are not Reader2, Macabre, and Frank (don’t cross your fingers why you do it either).
It’s just another wank, R1.
Only one bit of him in me, Reader. Hands off.
Where are you?
Bahrain
I’m not at all sure I would root Doug. I’d root allsy, but just a casual all nighter.
In your dreams.
I want to be perfectly clear about this. I most definitely would root William Hurt. Just to say that I had.
Hey Bob, you noticing the pattern here?
Everyone who gets in a carry-on with Doug here suddenly becomes Cole and Eleanor and Glinda and MaryEllen and probably a few others.
Doug, you fucking tosser. I dont need to be anyone else to know that.
Gowl.
You can fuck off too.
I’m alright eleanor, thanks anyway.
looks like we in the same boat.
How are you, my name is Patrick and I like Henry James and long walks on the beach and i wish I could chew tobacco, just for a day.
How about you?
n what way is it stupid? How can an image cause an objectifying consciousness to develop? An image is simply an image – its interpretation depends upon the person perceiving it, does it not?
An image of a naked cherub or a naked angel can be seen by the prurient imagination of a bacwa person as pornography, can it not?
Is all art depicting a naked person pornography?
I say it is not. What say you?
Reply was to allthumbs; damn this protocol, Ellis.
PLM.
All art Doug? No, but I can think of a couple of instances such as Courbet’s “origin of the world” is and was meant to be, and Goya’s “woman reclining” that he painted in two versions, one with and one without clothes, would have been considered porn, in his time and place. Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus might make it into the category,certainly in the time of Inquisition Spain, it would have been in a brown paper wrapping under the Tapas bar.
Are we to accept ALL such art is to be banned therefore, to suit the bacwa?
Well I wouldn’t want to confuse or compare a voluptuous scantily clad quarterback moving gracefully back to deliver a precise pass to another scantily clad wide receiver open all the way to the touch down
line with the static beauty of the Rokeby Venus.
Perhaps you could quote Romans XIV at half time, between the missing kiddy calls, and misparked cars “I Know and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself, but to him that esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean”
These lawyer questions of yours are not the best way to conduct a conversation, but lets soldier on.
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
That abouts sums it up : it is in the mind of the person who perceives it.
The said bacwa types then project their own prurient minds forth and seek to ban everything they don’t approve of.
Shut up, Doug. Get back to your porn.
What do you mean?
This IS about porn – porn is in the mind of the beholder.
Porn isn’t the most mindful activity. It is no different to advertising, it’s a fixed image, not an imaginitive journey. The question is what is being advertised and the symbolism being used to entice. And why that symbolism is enticing and to whom. Any industry that required workers to root horses would ordinarily require regulation to the nines but how do you regulate against profiteering off the rooting of horses? The problem, as Germaine said on Q&A once, is capitalism, and the economy of harm. When the big bucks earn the respect but the paycheck is earned by being willing to be demeaned.
You are asked to pick from two photos the best candidate to fill the position of say, a lawyer for Chambers. They are equal in qualifications and experience. They are in fact unidentical twins separated at birth.
Photo 1, is of a well dressed man, middle aged, resembles William Hurt but with more hair (blushes), he stands before the British Houses of Parliament.
Photo 2, is of a less well dressed man, he stands before a Souvlaki stand before the Houses of Parliament in Athens.
Vote.
Who is Chambers? Are he/she/they rich?
Most of us subscribe to some sort of censorship. We don’t endorse alphabet books saying A is for atom bomb, B is for bestiality, C is for cunt, and so on.
That the prurient – those with an inordinate or lascivious interest in sex: and who judges that? – are those promoting censorship seems to me to be a peculiar argument, rather like saying that drunks promote prohibition. I would think that the prurient are the least likely to promote censorship, and are out there relishing their interest.
Those promoting this point of view always remind me of the Egyptians cry to Ra: “I am pure! I am pure!”
They are of course hypocrites. They see evil sexual perversion everywhere; they see it in their own perverted minds and project it onto everyone else.
And the fools who try to criticise me at every turn are the greatest hypocrites.
They would like to silence me, fearing the exposure of their hypocrisy.
The creature who has never had an original thought and parasitises this blog seeking for relevance is a prime example. LOL
Shut up Doug – you couldn’t expose your own todger!
Fuck off you fool.
Shut up!
You had your chance to “expose” Cole but you hid yourself and only surfaced when bob did his culling!
laugh at that one funny boy!
Seeing the sexuality in something is hardly a perversion: perhaps it’s a gift. Think Brett Whiteley’s sexualised landscapes, with hills as bums and breasts.
Not seeing the sexuality in something seems more like a deficit.
I will agree with you FI, it is a great shame and a great perversion that the bacwa types see everything through the pathological prism of their own minds.
There is no point in replying directly to one who has been banned; the comments will be erased in the fullness of time, and a reply will be left hanging.
There is even less point in replying to a troll which only wants to malign its target. Discuss.