Wyatt Moss-Wellington: Blog

I've been hearing it everywhere, from friends and relations, critics, the blogosphere, newspapers, even the Guardian: TV has surpassed film as a storytelling medium. Everyone from Newsweek to the Encyclopedia Britannica blog has circulated the opinion.

What's going on here? Why are we choosing to value television above film? By what measure?

Usually the discussion is introduced via the dubious assertion that escalated television production values have bolstered its worth. This echoes our assumption that slicker production values correlate with greater work. Not necessarily - as the old adage goes, you can polish a turd, but it's still a turd. No matter how much money you throw at a project, no matter how large a crew you employ to frame its beautiful imagery, you cannot insure against an ineffectual piece of storytelling.

As everyone in the business knows, it starts with the script. Director Ken Loach once said, "The most important person in the whole process is, I would suggest, the writer. The word that appear on that blank sheet of paper are the creative heart of everything that follows. No writer - no film and certainly no director."

So it is subject matter we must be talking about when we compare the value of TV and film, and indeed, the superior scriptwriting is the point that always follows.

When we say we value television more than film, we usually mean we derive more entertainment from it. I read the argument as: we spend more time engaged with television than we do film, it keeps us engrossed for longer, so therefore it is better at doing its job.

This assumes that being engrossed for longer is a good thing. "Wow, I'm so entertained" could in fact be, "Wow, I'm so addicted to this story." Addiction would mean that the TV show has achieved its objective, but to assign value to our televisual dependency assumes that TV programming objectives should be our own, and simultaneously misinterprets the reason for storytelling.

Storytelling exists for societal cohesion. It is likely that the true value of storytelling is to promote empathy for those in different circumstances, a fair reason for us to evolve with such an appetite for it. However, on the flip side, if we stay too long in a ceaseless story, do we mitigate our chances at applying this empathy to reality, possibly even expecting our lives to replicate our small-screen experience?

The TV over film argument is specific to serialised television. Serials are what pro-TVists are invariably talking about - I have yet to hear a claim that sitcoms are the height of media value (although I find a lot more to enjoy in, say, "Roseanne" or "Frasier" than any interminable serial broadcast). Serialised television exists to keep us baited, hooked, but not satiated. By never reaching a conclusion, it is powerless to do anything but hold us aloft from true understanding or revelation. TV is limited in the truths of life it can reveal - the characters must remain as unenlightened as we to continue their torturous journey, so it never gets round to saying anything of value.

Watching slick productions like current highbrow favourites "Mad Men" or "True Blood", we are consuming nothing more than glorified soaps. Many people have done beautiful work on these programs to make them deliciously appealing, but the beauty has one pivotal objective to which all other narrative meanings must bow: serialised television does not exist to teach us anything, challenge us too deeply or offer ideas on how else we could live our lives - indeed, most of the time that would contradict its objective. The aim is merely to keep us wanting more, forever mystified, as if the non-existent answers we sought were only around the corner. Just like advertising.

It is absurd to say TV's value has surpassed film, as we are misjudging our addiction as value. TV can be a great means to play out our very human need for storytelling, but we are misinterpreting its power, too trusting of its inbuilt self-advertising.

Buying into this - the cliffhangers and self-perpetuating dramas - the balance of our real lives to our fantasy lives comes askew. We are still watching way too much television, and submitting our children's developing brains to the potential damage it can do - whatever happened to the anti-TV campaign? It's gone awfully silent.

The internet did not kill our appetite for inactive vegetation in front of television screens. A small amount is healthy, but TV is consistently invested in offering us the opportunity to be stuck there, and thus avoid reality.

Let us not forget the true value of television: it is common ground for communities who may otherwise be strangers. Most of us know about these shows and these characters, so we can chat with strangers about them, or acquaintances - with TV, we are never too far from the village community still lingering in the collective subconscious, an echo of longing from our history together, when we knew every face we would pass in the street. We want to be able to know the same people everyone else knows.

Meanwhile, film offers a different experience. Film is obliged to help us understand the world as it requires conclusion, and if the conclusion yields no revelation, we feel cheated. Film is not obliged to be didactic or prescriptive - this can be equally irksome - but it is obliged to come up with an end which satisfies our longing for meaning. No such pressures are placed on television.

Film by comparison offers a chance to receive our storytelling fix over a couple of hours, after which it often feels unpleasant to remain in a fantasy world (slumber party movie nights aside).

There is still some truth to the inflammatory old saying: TV is the ass end of the film industry.

New Matilda, my favourite news commentary site in Australia, has gone under. Shortly after they announced the impending closure of their online publication, I asked my friend Jane, who is launching a magazine called the IF Project, if it was possible to introduce new media models in the current resource-starved media climate, without subsequently selling them out to the existing – broken – mainstream giants.

She responded here. She also pointed to Crikey’s largely sympathetic opinion piece on the closing of New Matilda. Here is a selection she highlighted: “Opinion is cheap in every sense of the word.”

That’s a scary thought. Here’s a simplification of Margaret Simons’ subtext to this sweeping remark: there’s a market glut in opinion now that anyone can self-publish inexpensively, and thus all opinion is devalued.

There’s a note of alarming acceptance about this.

Looking at opinion writing in isolation misses the point though: all written content has lost value. News reportage has traditionally been rewarded financially at odds with opinion writing, and this has not changed. It does not, however, alter the fact that the monetary value of all writing has reached rock bottom, news or otherwise.

Then again, looking at writing in isolation also misses the point: anything intangible has lost value, because it is distributed for free on the internet. Even a paywall cannot bridle the reverent believers in free content who will redistribute the same content illegally. This legislative impotence has been discovered by most arts industries: the music industry discovered it, for example, and the film industry is undergoing similar growing pains.

It is the contemporary dilemma that all things intangible have lost value, but all things intangible, as we increasingly learn in the consumerist age, are the most valuable things we can have in life; including thoughts, opinions, wisdom and other artistic expressions of our experiences. It can be summed up as: sharing knowledge.

You can download that, though – but you can’t download a sofa, only the Ikea catalog. To me, this spells disaster.

The music industry provides a fine analogy here, as it suffered this uncomfortable transition very publicly and early on in the history of the popularised internet. Indie bands now often make more money selling merchandise than they do selling their music. Once again: you can download their music, but you can’t download their t-shirt. Seeing as money is our mutually upheld system of ascribing value, the value of music itself (rather than musical brand names) has been invariably tarnished.

Here’s another look at what can happen when we don’t value music with money: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a record cost a considerable amount of one’s income, but not so much that it was inaccessible to young people. If anyone bought an LP, the investment was substantial enough that they would be compelled to really try to enjoy it. If at first they were turned off by the music, chances are they would keep trying because an alternative wasn’t readily available. This led to more experimental and adventurous music being viable, which lay the groundwork for a lot of the music we still find appealing today. This was the time when progressive music flourished. Many have questioned why this artistic advancement hasn’t happened in the same way since – money could be the reason.

Now there is so much free music that we are encouraged to click through it and hear as much as we can as fast as possible. We don’t have the time to appreciate the subtlety of longer or more intricate musical statements. We don’t pay for it, so we aren’t as invested in needing to enjoy it.

The same thing has happened with words.

This is a travesty. It may be temporary, but for now we need to understand the gravity of the situation in order to care enough to locate real and lasting changes: our method for determining value – the financial system – has got it wrong.

So what is the future of new publications like the IF Project?

Jane’s post in part reads like a defence of her aspiration to corporate sponsorship. This is fine, it is necessary for her right now, but there are some sobering points to be made here. A new publication doing the same thing as the rest cannot correct the imbalance toward consumer-targeted and sponsor-lenient coverage that has become so damaging to our understanding of the world.

Although it is necessary for new publications like this to continue striving, until we can figure out how to financially maintain publications with integrity, we need a constant stream of new media offering various perspectives, even if they eventually cannot continue publishing. It is also worth noting that journalist entrepreneurs have only cropped up for publicity purposes. Entrepreneurs always populated our media, but they have adopted more and more celebrity status in order to appeal to consumers who ask for celebrities by which they can recognise the attached brand.

It is a misnomer to herald the cessation of New Matilda as “the end of independent media as we know it.” Mungo MacCallum provided a very relevant retrospective of the revolving door of independent media outlets he has worked for. The pretty much systematic opening and closing of alternative media has been in place for a long time. Independent media is used to running on the smell of an oily rag; mainstream media is not – therein lies the difference. We are fast ending up with NO reliable media.

Thus I hope that Jane can break the mould of short-term independent media and I hope that I can help her in some way to make a difference with her new venture.

So what does journalisnt.net offer? I very much appreciate the gesture of calling the site a “media revolution”, but agree with the popular concern: a nation of bloggers does not a media make.

Journalisnt.net never claimed to correct the balance or plug a hole in the news industry – or indeed be viable as a corporate interest at all. In my opening post, I explained, “Journalisnt.net can’t provide what the world really needs right now: a colossal injection of funds for unbiased investigative reporting, in addition to editorial decision-making unbound to audience prejudice.”

I’m more interested in identifying poisonous assumptions and the kind of media negligence continuing to produce the mass urban legends by which many of us make our political decisions – and doing this on a human level, never losing sight of the motivations of people behind the ideas. The ailing media system with its grotesque abuse of our trust needs as many antidotes as it can get.

For now, many of us content providers understand we are doing this for love not money. Nor are we doing this for other markers of value, such as prestige or acknowledgment – at least until we discover the means to direct value back into that which matters.

Simons gets it right when she says, “While some people may do some of this work for free some of the time, if you want it done consistently and well, then ultimately it has to be paid for.” However, she goes on to assert, “The Crikey model suggests people will pay to be told news.” Perhaps they will pay a bit more for news than they will for opinion, but when the news we pay for doesn’t have the resources or inclination to tell the truth, when it is still increasingly beholden to its audience’s own bias just to survive, this is still no answer. Our experiments online have yet to yield a realistic direction.

Having seen David Hare’s latest play, “The Power of Yes” this week, I have decided it is time to get my head around the last global financial crisis and explain it with my pen, in a way I can understand, after some sort of linear fashion.

One of the most fundamental causes attached to the GFC is that the banks thought they had found the answer to risk; investments could be made without risk attached. Many pinned it on a formula. They also prolonged the usual period of economic growth by avoiding the necessary fall: the answer was for the banks to skirt the consequences of debt by subdividing, buying and selling it amongst each other, insuring against it, then buying and selling that too. With each step, each subdivision, each resale, the problem had been poked a little further away. And they thought this was an answer.

The concept of “eliminating risk”, of course, should have been foolish to anyone on the outside looking in, but their reasoning was craftier than that, and the banks were offering us anything we wanted on credit, so we were happy to go along with the ride.

As the economic ebb and flow – while ever unpredictable – usually happens in tides of six to seven years, and this one had gone on nearly two decades, it was hard to resist the idea that the answer to limitless market growth really had been found. The reason? When everyone is making money, you can’t do anything wrong, and if you’re a banker, you feel like it is because of your greatness at predicting the market and capitalising on it. Wrong.

What the banks had actually done, of course, was to stave off the eventual financial collapse for an ever increasing period of time. They staved it off, and inadvertently made the end a whole lot worse.

The banking sector (like every other pack of fallible humans) ignores the fact that regulation exists for the good of everyone including themselves – it is the process of learning from past and trying to predict and avoid the same mistakes in future. They managed to convince all of us, consumers and governments, that because they had found the “answer” to risk, they didn’t need regulation. They would self-regulate. A massive bystander effect happened across the globe. No one wanted to be the one to regulate the banks in fear of being financially left behind.

When you self-regulate, you can do and have whatever you want at the expense of anyone you want. You can live on 20 million dollars a year, with all of the resource exploitation that may involve. Problem is, the more you offer everyone whatever they want, the more you realise it is not possible.

To do this, they had to convince us of a number of things: first, that they had eliminated risk and could do no wrong. They also had to convince us that what they were holding was worth more than anything else. And what they held was debt. This is where one begins to realise that global economics are really no different from playground bartering, and that you can convince yourself and others of the worth of anything, be it a baseball card or trillions of dollars of debt.

Is it not absurd, however, that we believed the absence of money, money in deficit, was worth more than anything? That debt could generate more wealth ad infinitum?

Wealth works on a system of convincing others of worth. Wealth and worth don’t actually exist – they are artificial constructs. Money only has meaning because we mutually decide it represents a certain worth. This leads to all sorts of simple loopholes for those in a position of power to exploit, if they go unregulated: you can say you are worth whatever you like, as long as people believe it.

And, as long as you believe it. We’re all much more convincing when we believe what is coming out our own mouths.

It is not a conspiracy though, it is just ego. The banks, and the shadow bankers, really thought they had found the answer to risk; really, no one should go poor again. That’s how they continued to explain their multi-million dollar salaries. People upset that they are only earning $500K a year actually believe that they deserve more, because they are surrounded by others earning more than $500K a year. Consumers, banks and governments get caught in a process of one-upmanship. The whole world is keeping up with the Joneses to the point where everyone consumes beyond what is available.

Consumers wanted property, and lifestyles beyond the scope of the globe’s exploitable resources. On the face of it, everyone got a good deal before the crisis, because the banks gave us exactly that – whatever we wanted on credit. But it can’t work, because if you can have anything you want, no one stops, we just get into debt we can’t pay off in order to live like the girls from “Sex and the City” who we watch on the screen and wish we could be. We all did it, and the banks did it as well. The money may have existed, but the wealth didn’t. The paper wealth lied. Because we wanted it to, and lied to ourselves. We just weren’t realistic.

So in the end, the banks used the oldest, dirtiest trading trick in the book (all this time thinking it was something different): say you have something you don’t have. If you pretend you can give something wonderful, where your rucksack is actually empty, you can trade for anything you want. Making a promise you can’t keep is a sure-fire way to profit from the aspirations of others. The banking system promised all of us homes and unlivable lifestyles, raked it up on an unfair trade, and when they finally got around to admitting they didn’t have it, cried poor and got the injection to do it all again. Can you believe it? We’re doing it all again.

While a small degree of propping up was necessary after the banking sector fell so far, I don’t think we have stopped to ponder the investment – the seemingly congratulatory investment – that was handed to an utterly flawed system when it collapsed into its own ego.

In Hare’s play, he calls it “socialism for the rich.” That’s what it looks like.  The money goes back into the community alright – but the community it reaches is the wealthiest minority. Within the U.K., banks were bailed to the tune of six trillion pounds – this is the figure Hare quotes. One of his great dramatic tricks is to write out the number, and although it can’t bring our brains near to comprehension of that colossal number, it is helpful for us to try and grasp an understanding and it is worth repeating here:

6000000000000

These trillions have enabled those bankers who were living a life of grossly disproportionate luxury, to go on living a life of grossly disproportionate luxury. It doesn’t work. It will happen again. The opportunity for redefining the system to make sure everyone benefits equally appears lost. It’s what we should have done.

Anyway, all these words and ever-confusing investment structures and explanations may be working in the favour of those who least need the financial help, still. The banking sector took us for a ride and have gone unpunished. If we want an answer to poverty and the financial woes blighting public policy everywhere across the developed world, look no further – regulate the banks.

Let’s get one thing straight – there is no boat crisis. Hardly anyone who arrives in Australia seeking asylum arrives by boat. Of those who do about 2-15% have their refugee applications denied. In 2008, the number of refugees who arrived in Australia by boat was 206. If we were worried about illegal immigrants, we should be worried about British, American and Chinese Downunder enthusiasts overstaying their visas. Even the word “crisis” is as much a media-driven beat-up as the insulation scandal which – later revealed as myth – caused Peter Garrett to be demoted from his Environment post.

The government talks hard on asylum seekers, knowing all the while it is the last of Australia’s problems. A few desperate people are sacrificed via simple, brash lies in a bid for power, setting the scene for Australia’s upcoming Federal elections. For it is always elections that bring up these lies, appealing to the worst in us – this is also why the Obama administration has been so soft on Arizona’s recent immigration policy fiasco.

If there’s one thing the ALP don’t have on their side, it’s honesty, and this could be their downfall. After the week-by-week scandals which concluded the Howard years, we may be getting more successfully irate about being lied to. The polls are punishing Rudd at the moment. Speak to swing voters and ALP defectors anywhere and I suspect the answer you will get will be the same: it’s the backflip on climate change.

But how much of this backflip was the ALP’s fault?

It would be hard to level accusations at Rudd that he didn’t believe what he said when he called climate change “the great challenge of our time.” He obviously wanted to at least take a tentative step towards environmental change, as he enlisted the lion’s share of Penny Wong’s time in parliament to draw up a painstaking ETS deal with the Coalition. It may have been a less-than-perfect system, but after all the negotiations they had been through, at least it was something – the best everyone could agree to.

Then the Coalition old guard freaked out at the changes afoot, and Malcolm Turnbull was soon usurped by absurdly illogical climate change denier Tony Abbott. This gave the Coalition leverage to discard all the hard work, thus setting back the date of any deal even further.

The truth is that Rudd et al probably can’t see any way in the current political climate to introduce any sensible green scheme. To be honest, now that the ETS is off the cards, there is a slim chance it will be possible to put together a better deal than the ETS, one making more sense, like a carbon tax – with a little help from concerned Australians, their pens and their telephones. But we need it sooner rather than later.

Here’s the nub: Rudd’s advisors are obviously cynical enough to think his don’t-tell-the-kids nannying style of leadership will go unpunished by voters. Wouldn’t it work to be honest with us about the process of compromise which nullified their green ambitions? Wouldn’t that make Rudd look like less of a turncoat?

Throwing in the towel until 2013, consigning to the earth and its inhabitants an even more prolonged environmental disturbance, is still unforgivable, and we are right to withdraw our support for another ALP government (by proxy acknowledging we will likely end up with worse – climate change denial in government). But perhaps if Rudd were more transparent about the negotiation, then we the concerned could be more understanding and more empowered to enter ourselves into the negotiating process. At the moment, it looks like once again there is something being hidden – and if there is, perhaps it is the shame of being so influenced by lobbyists.

It's hard to know the exact motivations of the prime minister, and I am willing to accept that, immersed in a world of ceaseless political obligation, surrounded by the powerful and wealthy, a grip on the reality most of us live could start to slide, and along with it compassion for the fate of the populace. The osmosis of values is a well documented psychological occurrence. Perhaps the corruption of power is often just due to those who our leaders are surrounded by.

The first lesson: lies don’t last – they will eventually be uncovered, and potentially, horrendously, pave the way to a government presided over by the ilk of Tony Abbott.

The second: we should look to the UK if we want to avoid a similar economic downturn. For too long the UK has relied on the financial sector for national prosperity. Relying on one source of income is always a dangerous position to be in, and the whole globe has fallen into the trap of thinking of money as value in and of itself. But as most economists should tell you, the decreased value of the pound will just create a different kind of economy relying on different income streams - international bargain hunters will turn to the UK for holidays, products, and resultantly, culture. It could be a wonderful time for Britain. Although the shift is always disquieting.

So much political effort is put into avoiding any kind of discomfort. If we allowed a little discomfort, we would be better able to plan for the future. It's just a hard sell to the electorate. A good statesman is able to take more of the initiative to be unpopular and make us look beyond our homes, our wallets, our immediacy.

Don't lie, look around the globe for other warning signs, and last of all, look back. History can tell us so much. To wit: none of us should trust the media - the mainstream media have failed us in past. Check out the coal lobby. It's all happening in the media right now. The relatively negligible coal tax currently proposed - only affecting resource company profits, which are considerable - is being bashed for all sorts of potential crimes to the electorate in the Australian media.

The coal lobby is using media influence to bluff its way through their latest scare campaign. They have threatened to discontinue their $11 billion iron ore expansion, but as Ben Eltham points out, if they were serious they would have to announce it to the ASX. They have yet to do so.

Looking briefly backwards, just a short way, would also tell us that industry investment will most probably be unaffected by the tax; there is no evidence to support this histrionic claim which has peppered mainstream opinion columns since a coal tax came on the agenda.

The government, along with the rest of us, trusted the mainstream media on the insulation issue. Why should we have any reason to trust them again? It's just dirty PR work.

Western culture doesn't look fondly on anger. It is usually relegated to safer cultural realms, where its power is nullified; loud music, horror movies. Ever wonder why teenagers have such an unparalleled appetite for horror movies? Ever wonder where all that excess anger in teenagers ends up?

There are a lot of reasons to watch horror movies when we're young; to challenge the more irrational fears persisting in us (monsters, anyone?) until they are no longer a threat, to differentiate ourselves from our more placid parents. But most importantly, the excessive human annihilation taps into our anger and abates it, albeit momentarily. Even among adults, some of the most gentle people I know are those most attracted to violent films and hard metal music.

It's important to have these avenues for release - just like a punching bag, to get rid of excess buildup of anger. But they don't get to the source, they just temporarily syphon it out of our brains, while we continue to tread the waters of our underlying ire.

Indeed, what Western culture has a problem with is the productive use of anger. Dealing with the emotion through action is the only way to exorcise the root of the anger. But that means it needs to be communicated, and to be communicated it needs to be seen. No one seems to want anger to be seen.

No one wants it seen because it's scary - it has the power to create massive change, and change is uncomfortable and often involves a lot of painful work, like compromise, sacrifice and self-awareness.

This is why Buddhism finds a natural fit in the Western mindset. The Westernised version of Buddhism often teaches anger as one of the "negative" emotions we can do without. The religion teaches a transcendence - if we get it right, we won't have to deal with the negative emotions as we will rise above them, observe them and let them pass.

Besides the possibility that this endeavour could make a shell of a human - forever avoiding feeling in case they get hurt, avoiding conflict and all the goodness and life it can bring - the concept misses the point of anger entirely. Our propensity for anger doesn't persist in the gene pool for no reason. Anger incites us to act, and action is necessary for survival.

I don't mean violent action - the conflation of anger with violence attempts to dismiss the potential for good change that anger exists to offer us. Instead, it is possible to communicate the anger and locate its resolution. In my experience, anger disappears when the angry party feels they have been properly heard, and this paves the way for diplomatic compromise, and better arrangements for living with fellow humans.

A culture that ignores this shoots itself in the foot. It’s only in the interests of a few people involved in large-scale corruption, who would prefer not to be bothered by angry citizens asking for change. By not acknowledging anger - and using it where necessary - we are doomed not to change. We are also doomed to not recognise the other ways in which we are using our anger: most of the time, turning it in. For what is depression but anger turned inward?

Anger turned inward is still helpful too, and depression can tell us that something must change within ourselves. But once again, to get out of it, the anger often needs to be acknowledged and heard.

Thus, telling people they don't have to deal with anger is counterproductive and damaging. Perhaps we should hold anger in higher esteem.

Yes, I was dragged to "Clash of the Titans" the other day. I have to admit some free will about it - I didn't have to attend, but I have some fondness for producer Ray Harryhausen's labour-of-stop-motion-love 1981 original, and I wanted to be amongst friends.

Aside from the usual dismaying sexual politics and the much-deplored makeshift 3-D art, the resulting movie was just objectionably boring. CGI battle scene fatigue would probably headline the list of reasons not to attend in the first place; I suspect many others must be suffering the same thing.

However, despite the bad press the picture received, it was far from dead on arrival. Audiences failed to reject a film slammed for its inferior visual work, yet still selling itself as escapist eye candy - at the time of writing, it has grossed $321M at the box office internationally.

Is there anything we won't buy, if we're told to? (It has long been pointed out that artists who used to run the major studios of Hollywood have been increasingly bought out by the likes of David Bergstein and branded and sold by the likes of MT Carney, who have no interest in film, only the capital it generates.)

So what is the marketing line for these films, anyway? Obviously they tell us that we will get to enjoy switching off the banality of our reality via symbiosis-like absorption in sensory distraction. They hold the promise of doing what other people are doing, so we get to feel like part of a community of people all doing the same thing (woot). But they also say something about sensory distraction that we fail to question: that it is the best means of escape, and it is thus what audiences most desire as entertainment.

Is it really? Or is it just that we've been told and we've accepted this?

Are we walking away from these awfully similar, unimaginatively storyboarded, broadly cynical pictures more entertained, more engrossed in another world of thought or ingenuity?

Escapism is defined as entertainment- or recreation-induced, temporary, perceived escape from reality. Therefore, escapism in entertainment should be measured by how convinced we are of an internal reality, and how long it resonates within our minds, both during the piece and after the curtains close.

So if escapism is measured by the amount of time we spend engrossed in this other reality, then these films are the palm oil of escapist entertainment, convincing our bodies that they are receiving what it requires, but then solidifying almost immediately in our arteries/brains. A more convincing reality with lasting emotional effects - this would include for starters some surprise and psychological challenge, perhaps even more verisimilitude - should be deemed more escapist, right?

Mike Leigh, a filmmaker I often have problems with but at least a thoughtful and surprising one, explains his reservations thus: "People say, 'Ah, yes, but audiences just want to escape.' I think, that if people see a film like "Secrets and Lies", where the stuff that's going on relates to things that they really care about, then it's more of an escape. Because you become so engaged in it and enthralled by it that you forget those things. They answer 'Well, yes, but then the audience worries about real life things,' but it's fulfilling, it's enriching, it's not like just eating candy for an hour and three quarters. It's actually really communing with something and feeling like you've been through something that comes out making you feel better able to go back and worry about the specific things that are your problems."

I agree, and I still don't think escapism should be our primary measure of entertainment. We've conflated the two. Entertainment can also include the time our brains are really working, not switched off.

Besides which, they all look the same.

3-D still doesn't do it for me. It's the studios' way around having to come up with new ideas - 3-D has been pushed on us so many times in past, I wonder why we are more susceptible to it now? Is the marketing stronger, or are we, incredibly, less marketing-savvy? Maybe it's just our truncated memories.

The greatest benefit for the studios in pushing 3-D again is that after suffering a hard recession, they have been able to charge us more for tickets. By extension, they are still able to market their own "growth" by the consumers' understanding of film value: box office takings. The only reason "Avatar" is the highest grossing film of all time is that they convinced us to pay more for admission than anyone has in past. Studio win. They get to trumpet their growth, and we, convinced that their revenue equals greater audience complicity (it's still "Gone with the Wind", folks), believe that this is the height of entertainment.

It's not. Film can be more powerful than this. Film can be more artful than this, too.

Leigh maintains, "My aim is to entertain, meaning, literally, what the word means. People forget what that word means. It means to make you stay here, to keep you in your seat ... The attention span is dreadful because -- and I submit that this did not happen in the Golden Age of Hollywood when they made movies that made you sit there and really watch the whole time -- it's boring, basically."

What have we bought? An inferior product, that's what. If only there were a way to oust the quality-disinterested executives from their lofty posts in Hollywood.

Pretty much all of the major news outlets and information gathering services worldwide have suffered increasingly severe funding cuts over the past few decades. First at the hands of Murdoch-epitomised corporate logic – the quality of the product comes a far distant second to its responsibility to shareholders and executive staff pay packets – and now with the challenge of the internet, the global media has been brought to its knees. As many have pointed out, the first to go have been investigative reporters. Along with them went our hope for knowing what is going on in our world. News isn’t news; it is sold persuasion masquerading as information, it is advertising. Information is now more than ever tailored to what we want to hear, in order to sell itself.

I’ve been wondering for some time: if information is being so woefully tailored to what its audience wants to hear, what happened to the information a left wing audience wanted to hear? As the morning pages and evening broadcasts fill up with celebrity gossip, murder stories and bigotry, are the once progressive and critically minded dwindling such that they no longer have any consumer pull? In Australia for example, my home country, the news sources which once appealed to progressive audiences, such as the Sydney Morning Herald, have moved to the centre or now bulge with faux-content and fatuous gossip. The other day I finally figured it out: the audience for these news sources got fed up, and they have turned to alternative news gathering sites on the internet.

This begs a few obvious questions, one being: has the internet made it easier to hear only what we want to hear, polarising us further and pushing the truth further away? Another: considering the internet’s ability to conceal the hand of the author, isn’t it easier to get away with lying, for those with a barrow to push who are willing to distort the truth?

Schools of journalism maintain that there is no such thing as news objectivity – the worldly experience and perspective of even the most unbiased journalist will colour every article. There is, however, integrity of the reporter – we must tell the truth we find, even when we don’t like the truth, or it doesn’t agree with our philosophy or politics.

With this most fundamental principle in mind, it is worth looking at why politically motivated news sources are still worthwhile. I have a background in arts and entertainment PR. It is a long acknowledged tactic of the atrocious variety of PR that, if you want to hide an ugly truth, you change the nature of the debate. If you want to conceal sordid facts, disguise them by foregrounding other facts; distract the media with tangential information.

Current media principles have a debate winning back door for publicists and PR agents – news coverage is expected to cover all sides of the debate. Even if “the other side” is cruelly motivated or ludicrous, it will be reported for the appearance of objectivity. It is the story of the coverage of everything from global warming to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lobby groups and PR professionals command the debate by demanding reporters fulfill their duty to include “the other side”, often being simply untrue statements of the perpetrators as victims.

This has happened to political debate as well. We have been pulled back to discussing that which we should have long since accepted. It must be acknowledged that, just because a topic or opinion is much discussed, it doesn’t mean there is any truth to be found in it. We need to be careful about which opinions we engage with, as if we report everything, news can be dumbed down to a point where it tells us nothing about the world we live in.

It is, therefore, a journalistic responsibility to be at least a little politically critical. We must have values to guide us, or we are at the mercy of those who sidestep ethics and truth.

Three principles should still guide us here: first, to understand opposing arguments, even when they appear logically bankrupt (there is no need to include them in our writings if they are logically bankrupt, but we must understand them in order to make this decision). Second, understand people and empathise with even those who seem monstrous against our most ingrained moral codes. We will get nowhere if we don’t understand and empathise with one another. Finally, if a truth displeases us, we cannot reject it.

We also need to grant ourselves more time. If we are uncertain of the evidence we are reporting, we needn’t publish it, merely because we have a certain amount of content we are obliged to publish. Slowing down the process of generating news is essential to getting it right. And this means less content – more considered content.

Journalisnt.net can’t provide what the world really needs right now: a colossal injection of funds for unbiased investigative reporting, in addition to editorial decision-making unbound to audience prejudice. Eventually we need this to return to some semblance of understanding about the world we live in. Unfortunately the few of us just don’t have that kind of cash.

But we have individual voices, and we have critical minds. If enough of us are dedicated to locating mistruths and the abuse of audience trust currently upheld by the mainstream media, if we get together and keep asking for the truth… then perhaps we will have a louder voice in favour of real news; news for understanding our world.

To me, 'spirituality' is one of those words like 'toxins', used to refer to something completely undefined, instead providing a vague idea of a ballpark of a kind of a value judgement. It suggests rather than describes. That suggestion, in the case of spirituality, is a self-condoned lapse in reason; a desire to believe in something we have no evidence of, and therefore allow ourselves to ignore any truth which is convenient for us to deny. What else could that palabra mean?

I'm godless. I tried to believe in God once, because when I was young I lived for a time with my born-again mother's parents, both deeply Christian. But I couldn't do it. It probably has something to do with the fact that, when I prayed to Him under the school library's steps for the bullies to stop bullying me, He chose to ignore me. It seemed like a reasonable request at the time.

I've since come to the conclusion that we don't know if there's a supreme being - we can't, it's 50:50 probability, as we've no evidence for or against to work with. Same goes for purpose; we have no real indication of our life's purpose, so, I say to myself, it's best to work with what we have here, the cause and effect that we actually have some experience with, rather than speculating (for reasons other than entertainment) on that which we cannot ever know or indeed change. But it doesn't stop there.

If we haven't been granted any indication of purpose, then how are we to make decisions?

This whole blog is about encouraging one another to be kinder to each other, to try to minimise suffering and maximise pleasure for the majority of people - in short, to help each other rather than to be selfish.

But ultimately, if you keep asking me the question "why?", I can't provide a good answer other than self interest.

We can do what we are impelled, what we are programmed to do: help the species survive. And that makes us feel alright. But then we rationalise how important this is - apparently not very, considering the boggling vastness of the universe, and the fact that if an asteroid wiped us out it wouldn't really matter. Knowing this, the only reason to help others and be less selfish is that it makes us feel good - and purposeful - and it makes our time on earth a little bit more bearable.

The purpose of helping others is to feel purposeful.

Is that all there is? It's a horrendous piece of self-defeating circular logic: if we are only helping each other to feel good, then what's wrong with feeling good through selfishness, if that's what works for you? It's no better or worse, as there's no higher purpose telling us to look after the interests of others.

Lately we've surrendered to this. Largely non-religious gen y in the West has accepted it with their "live in the moment" philosophy. It's ultimately a variety of Hedonism. It is surrendering to self-interest.

I'm the first to admit that self-interest is the only thing that motivates any life, humans included. But that hurts. Without another purpose, how can I be giving advice on the best thing to do? For all it matters, why don't you go ahead and rape and pillage? Cue existential crisis. I got it bad right now. Condolences/suggestions welcome in the Comments section on the website.

    Everyone keeps talking about how they’re all growing up faster and faster, but it doesn’t seem to me like Carla’s going fast. For one, she’s still scared of so many things. Lately it’s been witches. She still has a snotrag, which she carries around the house. Where most kids might have a blanket they hang onto for years and years, Carla keeps one of my old pyjama shirts and walks around the house with it, every now and then rubbing it across her nose. I spend enough effort just convincing her to let me give it a wash; I don’t know how I’ll get her to throw it away. I made her throw out all Jean’s old shirts she used to use as snotrags when they were nothing more than tatty shreds of alarmingly firm cotton. I have to admit, despite how truly repulsive they were by then, I was also sorry to see them go. They were the last things in the house that smelled like Jean. That’s why Carla liked them too, I know. But that was a while ago now, and Tate has long since planted his own smell in the house – the permanent smell of one of those people who have never touched a cologne or deodorant stick in their life. It’s very different to how the house used to be, which has to be good.
    Tate’s been around almost a year now. He doesn’t live with us yet, and we haven’t talked to Carla about this possibility either. But we should, because it might happen sometime soon. He’s here every other night. I do that classic Hollywood thing when I wake up now, on mornings when he isn’t there: I’m sleeping with my arm out to the side, and when I wake up I realise that there should be someone there who I’m holding, and I’m surprised there’s no one. With Jean, I used to be unable to sleep too close to her. I’ve always been like that. When sleeping with anyone I lie a fair distance away, otherwise I stay awake. But I did like to hold my arm out with my hand on her back, or her torso, so I could feel someone there. But now, with Tate, that’s changed too.
    I’ve been commissioned by Carla’s school to design them a new school hall. It’s been a long time since I’ve really had to focus like this. I used to listen to the radio when I was at the drawing board, but I can’t do that anymore. Sometimes I just get up and walk around for no good reason, but usually there’s no one else here – luckily, I suppose – so I have to go back to working.
    Carla’s school and I are on good rapport. I’ve been going to P&C meetings, which is also something I never used to do. I’ve got just about my only friends there, besides Tate. I do turn up late though. It’s because I like the feeling of walking through the school at night, in between all the dark buildings on stilts, and I’m moving towards the only one where there’s any light, and I can hear people’s voices. At night you can’t see the silly colours those classrooms are painted or the rust on their naff metal windowsills. Sometimes I suppose I need the space to be alone, with nothing tying me down. This is my bit of time where there are no obligations.
    Carla doesn’t usually talk about school, but when we were on the drive home the other day she started telling me about what her teacher said that morning in class. I like Carla’s teacher this year. She’s a bright, curiously intense woman in her early thirties who’s been at the school nearly all her working life. According to Carla, she’d been talking about the Iraq debacle during maths time. So Carla came home very spritely, telling me about this highlight in her day and asking questions about Iraq. I was careful, always thinking how much I should subject her to. She may not have listened to any of my answers, or Tate’s few interjections. But then, kids take in a lot that they don’t seem to be taking in, even if it tends to go off into some wildly different compartment in their imagination. She’s said a few times recently that she’d like to know what it’s like to be shot. If you start really talking to her about it, or asking her why, she says, “No, I’m just kidding, just kidding.” Then she changes the topic or leaves.
    It was Carla’s thirteenth birthday recently. We watched a whole heap of videos. I can’t bring myself to get out those awful teen movies they make these days. They’re vile, and thankfully she hasn’t really shown any interest in them. However I did get a copy of Fast Times At Ridgemont High to test on her. She watched the whole thing silently, while Tate and I laughed. She seemed quietly intrigued to me. She went to the toilet a lot during the movie, though. Don’t know what that meant.
    “Could you shut the toilet door?” Tate kept asking Carla. I knew he was only asking her because it’s what I do. I’ve noticed a lot of that. Sometimes he’ll look over at me, presumably to measure my approval, but then what do you do? I pretend I don’t really notice. I’ve been forced to admit to myself I really don’t know what kind of role I’d want Tate to have with Carla, parenting her and all. But then, maybe it’s not mine to dictate.
    After watching way too many movies, Tate and I ate some leftover food and talked. Carla didn’t want to go to bed yet, and seeing as it was her birthday I let her stay up. Pretty quickly she got bored listening to us talk and lay down on the living room couch, trying to keep her eyes open. Tate started talking about that instance of political fingerpointing at Playschool – the TV show – that happened not long ago, the episode when they showed a ‘child with two mums’ and all the Libs got mighty upset about it.
    “You know I’m sick of all these arguments about whether or not children should be subjected to politics so young,” he was saying. “That’s not what it’s about, it’s just a diversion they’ve thrown in. You know, it’s as if what they’re calling politics is somehow separable from life. Everyone’s always been subjected to politics. Every decision we make is at the same time a political one and a philosophical one, and we can’t pretend it’s anything else.” He paused and picked some wood off the table, thinking. Although I considered asking him not to pick the wood, I knew I probably shouldn’t say anything yet; he was about to start speaking again. He looked up. “And this whole idea of innocence, we should let them have their innocence, let them set the pace – as if they’re asking not to know about diversity, sure guys – I mean, why do we want to hang onto this idea of innocence? See, and this idea of the family as an isolated sphere of influence, as a tiny indestructible unit… this… this romantic notion that the parents should decide when they tell their progeny about certain things, and they’ll create a person that way how they want it. You know? Why do we want to believe in that so much? It’s fiction – it’s a complete fiction. We never used to hold them back. I mean look at, say, Brothers Grimm fairy tales, not that long ago. Now we’re afraid of letting kids know anything that we don’t – it’s so backwards. So they’ve got to do it themselves. Anyway, they’re excuses, all excuses, conservative excuses. But you’ve got to ask, why do we want them?” He finished.
    “I think Carla’s gone to sleep.”
    “Nighthawk Eleven to Wobbly Wombat,” he said, which is just about Tate’s favourite thing to say. “Do you read me?” I still haven’t asked where that expression came from, but I think it’s peculiar to him and him only. I used to find it annoying, but now I’m used to it I think it’s cute.
    “No, I know what you’re saying,” I told him. I tried to reiterate what he’d just said.
    “Yes. Well, not quite, I’ll explain anyway – you have to understand – let me explain myself.”
    Which he did. It was cute.
    Tate has a friend (an ex-boyfriend) called Christopher who was also there earlier that evening. He doesn’t like being called Chris though – you have to call him Christopher. He says he just doesn’t like the name Chris. It took a while for me to stop calling him Chris. At first I couldn’t get the hang of it, but he just laughed at me.
    Christopher’s one of those Mr Amazing guys, capital M, capital A. M for mature and A for artistic. He’s younger than both of us, and more gregarious I suppose you could say. I imagine him to be a bit of a social butterfly, and so sometimes I wonder why he spends his time around us old folks. He’s religious too. When I found that out it turned me off a bit, but then I observed how much he seemed confused about his own Christianity. Sometimes he has a hard time reconciling it with his politics. Still, he can talk anyone into the ground, and I can’t decide if he ever gets boring or not. Despite how interested I am I pretend I’m not, and I don’t ask him anything about his faith. I think he’s Anglican. I also have to admit he and Tate go well together, especially when they really get arguing.
    Another night a couple of weeks ago one of us three had the bright idea to all get drunk, so we gathered at my place and had dinner. Actually we didn’t even touch a drop, we just sat around talking, but Christopher had come over in Tate’s car, thus he didn’t have his own car with him and I had to drive him home. He did most of the talking, but I couldn’t tell if he was just filling the empty air so it wouldn’t be so uncomfortable. He sounded as bubbly and interested as he did most of the time when he opened his mouth. I realised I had no idea what he thought about me, or whether or not I liked him. He started asking me questions just before I reached his house.
    “How’s Tate getting along with Carla?” he tried first.
    “Yeah, fine,” I said. But I felt compelled to say more. I said, “It’s just I’m not sure how Carla’s getting on with other people, especially the other kids at her school.”
    There was a time at the beginning of the relationship when Carla seemed fascinated by Tate, and kept asking him questions. At times I wasn’t sure if she was just using this rather aggressive sociability as some sort of a test for Tate, or a defensive gesture. But after a while she stopped talking to him so much, and now she can be quite short with him, even when he’s being extra nice to her. She still seems, at the moment, especially fascinated with Christopher. She’s started asking him all the questions.
    For some reason I ended up telling Christopher that I wasn’t sure what Tate was doing with me, or why Tate had chosen this grief-stricken single dad to cling onto. Most people would run a mile. Was he thinking of staying? Sitting in the car outside Christopher’s house, he told me he thought Tate liked Carla a lot more than I probably knew, and enjoyed negotiating the responsibility of taking on a parenting role with her. I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting him to say Tate had really fallen for me, and that’s why he’s still around. I watched Christopher run across the road and half jog up the steps to his house – an old, narrow, grey weatherboard affair, packed in tightly against the others on the street. It also had a forbidding steel fence out the front, but the whole thing was kind of quaint in the daytime. All the lights were off inside, and there was darkness coming out of the windows. I wondered if he lived with anyone. He swiftly disappeared inside. I might have seen him wave from the shadows in the landing, perhaps to say everything was all right. I kind of felt obliged to watch and make sure he made it in safely. Then I left.
    When I got home Tate was already asleep, so I drank by myself. I heated up some sake because it was so cold that night, and had to force myself to drink past the second. But I’ve always hated drinking alone. Drinking alone feels directionless.
    I put on one of Tate’s new age music tapes that he kept for late at night. It wasn’t bad, under the circumstances.

    I remember the day the last time Jean went into hospital. I was on the phone about to organise someone to pick Carla up from school when she came in through the front door. It was the middle of a school day. She was in tears. She must have noticed me looking shocked, because straight away she said:
    “I’ve never punched anyone before.” Then she looked at me in anticipation, and gradually she seemed to realise there was something else going on here, or that I’d actually looked shocked before she even walked in. I put down the phone and told her straight away.
    “Mum’s in hospital again. We’ve got to go, right now.” I tried to wipe my mind clean and watch her closely for just one second, but it was so awkward. We stood facing each other completely motionless. It felt a bit like we were cowboys having a showdown; only then I noticed she was looking the other way. We both began moving at the same time, quickly. “Who did you punch?” I asked, replacing the phone on the kitchen counter then picking up my keys, taking my coat off a stool, draping it over my arm. I walked over to Carla who was drawing a school jumper tentatively from her bag. I kissed her on the top of her head and walked out towards the car.
    Carla followed me outside, but didn’t answer my question. Perhaps she knew I wouldn’t be able to listen to any response she gave me – I’d kind of made myself look distracted and absent so she wouldn’t say anything. I had that vague awareness that it was something important, but I had to put it aside and deal with it later. Punching someone? She was home three hours early. Carla pulled the front door closed and we both got into the car.
     Sometimes I get the feeling that I’m excluding Carla from myself and what’s going on in my life. All the real problems I deal with – I shield her too much from real life. But that’s only normal, thinking that. At the time I wondered if she thought there was some private world of feeling I have and don’t share with anyone, except maybe Jean. I started the engine and backed out into the street. I knew I was totally expressionless. She probably thought I was oblivious to my own emotions. In fact, certainly she did. Kids think about these things. I wonder if she even wanted to be a part of my life?
    I stole a glance at Carla while driving. I was relieved to notice she looked just as absent as me. Her cheeks had scarlet spots all over and she looked cold. I turned my eyes back to the road and told her to put her jumper on. She was obviously imagining: Jean must be pretty bad this time. But I pushed that aside too, because just getting to the hospital was enough to deal with.
    I also remember being in the hospital waiting room, sharing this surreal moment with a whole lot of remote strangers, all keeping to themselves. A few of us were watching the television. In my peripheral vision, I could tell Carla had her fists clenched and her jaw locked. She was incredibly tense and a bit shaky. I stroked her back, which seemed to calm her down a bit, but I couldn’t concentrate for long, and turned to watch the TV again. Time stretched itself out real long.
    All of a sudden I could feel Carla’s eyes on my back, the poor girl. But I couldn’t look away from the television. I couldn’t be certain what would happen if I looked away from the TV. I remember what was on. It was in the days after the Bali bombing, and there were still constant updates about who lived and who died, who they were looking for, and elementary background info on possible culprits and extremist Islamic groups. Jemaah Islamiah was slowly becoming a household name. I remember very clearly watching a little snippet of Alexander Downer giving some address, and I was trying to focus on him (I usually don’t) in the middle of the hospital with my daughter’s eyes behind me, and there was this tense energy emanating from us both, and all around in that room people waiting and sucking on their lips and looking worried. It was truly horrible, like in that room you had to take on everyone else’s worries, and them yours. You didn’t want a collective responsibility; you just wanted to calmly deal with the dilemmas that had been allotted to you.
    It was one of those times where all of the things you can’t control in your life, and seemingly in other peoples’ lives, all come to a head, and everything you go through really sticks in your memory. That’s how come I remember it all so clearly. Jean wasn’t gone until a few months later. Plus, these days I’ve been thinking about it a lot, only naturally I suppose. I could at least allow myself that.

    I did find out what Carla meant about punching someone. Apparently she had a scuffle with some boy at school, who was making sure that she couldn’t play any of the games with his ‘group’, and he’d also managed to turn all of his friends against her. He sounded like one of those disturbed bully kids who rule the roost in their playground politics. On that day they were having an argument, and she resorted to punching him in the gut, and then she immediately ran home from school. The school dealt with it really well, I was really very pleased. Instead of punishing either of them, they took part in a whole lot of mediating sessions with the two part-time counsellors there.
    Sometimes I think the pollies need the same treatment, only in reverse: they need to be put back in the playground to remember the effects of their actions.
    This morning I was driving Carla to school. Tate was with me, in the back seat. On the way there Carla said, “Oops – I just locked the door.” The lock on the passenger side gets stiff when you press it down, and she isn’t strong enough yet to unlock it by herself. I told her it was okay.
    I pulled up over the road from the gate at the quiet side of the school. I stopped the car and no one spoke for a while. I realised I had to unlock the door for Carla. I leaned over her and as I brushed past, I noticed her trembling. I was sure she was going to tell me she felt sick. She tried to tell me she was sick every other morning. I unlocked the door and watched her as she looked out my window, over at the school playground where a few lots of kids had started to congregate in groups and spread out over the schoolyard. She stopped trembling, opened the door and got out. Great! Progress was being made.
    In a display of solidarity, I got out of the car and walked her across the road.
    “See ya,” I said as she went in.
    “See you at home,” she said, and I watched her pick a path in amongst the groups of kids, avoiding every one of them, and then she disappeared into the library building.
    I walked back to the car. Tate had gotten into the front seat, and when I climbed in, he wanted to kiss. I just wanted to break down. I held him tight for a while. He was smart enough not to say anything on the drive back home.

Film production company Calibra Pictures is suing Variety for being unable to buy out their impartial content – independent film reviews. Is it expected as a legal right now that anyone with the means should be able to buy not just advertising, but supposedly impartial content in newspapers, or buy its omission? How did we slip so far?

Then Variety showed us how much it cares about its review staff anyway, by firing all its in-house film critics. Likely their legal staff will be able to use this as an argument in court: “reviews mean nothing to us anyway.” It's actually the line they've already taken, asserting that nobody pays attention to reviews.

I’ve been arguing amongst friends about how far we’ve slipped without caring. Not just in the media, but as it’s increasingly unfashionable to point out, in caring about equality for all, and wealth distribution especially.

I’ve often heard it suggested that the baby boomers are at fault, as they've reneged on their communal ideals and settled into the simplest and most personally gratifying catch cry of the flower power epoch: do whatever feels good. And this seems to have translated into greed and hording that which the baby boomers once cared to distribute.

So while they told gen y one thing, did they do another? Was the greater message in their actions than their words: live for your own gain above all else? Is this why we’ve ended up here?

There are so many arguments when one brings up wealth distribution that we drown out the mere idea of caring for all and experimenting with new models for equality. A few: Without competition, what happens to productivity? (Where is the favoured productivity, seemingly the creation of more purchasable stuff, getting us now?) Won’t punishing high-income earners drive away our potential for growth? (What’s so great about growth if it all lands in the pockets of those who least need it?) How will we do it when we haven’t found the perfect system yet?

The fact that the ideal isn’t possible – perfect equality – has become an excuse to stop trying, to not even experiment with new economic models that may refine capitalism. Even reformist socialism is now abortive.

The funny thing is that most socialists don’t ask for much any more – just for a priority shift, so that we begin to correct the current system to look after everyone. This is a far cry from the revolutionary drum-beating of past. But even the best ideal of socialism – not utopian, but that working together rather than against each other is a good idea (and this seems to me the ideal that human civilization is based upon), is met with derision or scepticism now. The socialist begins to look desperate, and is blamed for her or his own inability to convince others, as if this were an argument in itself. Increasingly moderate aspirations are identified as radical.

So: the buying out of media and culture to corporate interests has succeeded. From there it was easy for the powers that be, that top few percentage of people who hang onto almost all the world's wealth – consciously or otherwise – to enlist us in protecting their interests for them, through newfound abuse of trust. And, as we work ever longer hours and complain about being more exhausted and care less about those around us, are we content? The evidence suggests not. And half the world still lives in poverty, which we are more likely to scoff at through cartoons than think seriously about.

We say: “It’s too hard. Why should we have to think about this? We shouldn’t, it’s unfair.” And we refuse to grow up.

So should gen y, my generation, have to struggle for equality, when we are spending so much time already in a personal struggle to earn as much as our parents? We’ve been sold and we’ve bought this as a greater priority. But can we blame gen y? Under these disempowered circumstances, probably not.

The personal struggle is a lonely and disheartening one, ain’t it friends, colleagues, comrades?

Gen y priority fail. Communal wellbeing, mutual benefit, the process of civilization and our chance at contentment through common good = pwned.

A few weeks ago I created a Facebook fan page entitled, “Can this sanitary napkin get more fans than [Australian Federal Opposition Leader] Tony Abbott?” The napkin in question is a homemade reusable pad featuring pictures of fertility deity Kokopelli on its burgundy patterned fabric.

I created the page as an ironic twist on the Facebook trend of “Can this [mundane object] get more fans than [public figure].” What with Abbott’s egregious statements on sex and femininity in the Australian media, as well as his track record of hypocritical and misogynistic policy support, pitting his social appeal against that of a women's hygiene product seemed like my idea of awesome fun. I didn’t think it would get further than a chortle from a few of my friends.

But it took off – more ferociously than I anticipated. Within two weeks the page had cracked the 2000 mark, almost half of Abbott’s fans on Facebook. Before the page gathers any more momentum, it seemed appropriate to air a few concerns here about politics and Facebook trends.

Gen y – and they are the primary audience for this kind of social interaction – often asks for a humorous entry point to any political debate. So herewith, one is provided. But from there, it would be nice to see us embrace a more analytical debate about the need for change.

There is an element of negative campaigning to these pages. It is much easier to identify what you don’t support than to step into the more difficult arena of what you do support – especially in a political landscape as dead for the Left-leaning as contemporary Australia. Yet cynicism is an easy and unfortunately powerful position to take, seductive because it validates our inaction.

Equally, righteous anger is a volatile but important societal function. If we didn’t get upset we wouldn’t make change. People often come together in rage and make great things happen, but we need to look at solutions in order to do that. This means understanding more than just how much you despise your perceived opponent.

Public figures can be an easy channel for anger that may be better used elsewhere. Indeed, politicians, in order to stand for something, must willingly become figureheads for contentious subjects if they are worth their salt. They also need to be assessed in their ability to benefit or damage the wellbeing of the people they look after, but we should be careful when directing our ire away from complex understanding of politics and into human political whipping posts.

I hope we don’t chose this easier path of congratulating our hatred of public figures. It is often employed as an effective distraction from the public’s potential for true engagement with the political process. It hinges on our need for social contact with likeminded others, and gives us an easy way to feel engaged where our actions become ineffectual – great for the politicians’ power to do what they want, bad for us. So rather, let’s look behind their grinning mug to a political system that props up their influence, to the circumstances in which their values flourish, and the real opportunity for pragmatic engagement with their power for change.

So I’m wondering what to do with this page for maximum effect – when and if it surpasses Abbott’s fan base, should it be taken to the media, and if so with what message? Should it be used as a campaigning platform, an aggregator of relevant activist initiatives such as GetUp’s and others, offering policy alternatives to government by way of public support? Or should it just aim to provide information and fortification for those wondering if Tony Abbott is, in fact, wrong about most things he speaks publicly about? I’m open to suggestions.

Stay angry, everyone. But look for alternatives to wayward social policy and try to understand why people think and behave the way they do, so we can appeal with empathy to their understanding of the world. Tony Abbott does have the ability to endorse good policy, as he proved with his support for a six month paid parental leave. Let’s ask for more of that; let’s change the nature of the debate and pull it back toward equality for all.

The amount of weight-related content on TV these days – and “Biggest Loser” is just the start of it – heralds just how far into the public consciousness obesity has been pushed.

It’s gone beyond Hollywood’s ugly yet enduring stereotyping of fat characters as the stupid and hapless ones. Witnessing the now perfectly acceptable vitriol unleashed against those struggling with body identity issues, such as “Biggest Loser” contestants, is also a reminder of how poorly we can deal with our own guilt-ridden struggles in contemporary culture. I may not like it, but there has to be a sociological reason for this weight obsession worth looking into.

The first thing that strikes me about the vitriol is that we’re now presenting weight as a question of ethics: we accept, for example, ex-obesity sufferers telling “Biggest Loser” contestants how pitiable they are, and presenting the challenge to them as a moral imperative to lose weight, indicating how much better a person they are with less weight. This seems absurd – why should there be a moral dimension to one’s own health or self-preservation? It strikes me that this must be a natural extension of the culture of righteous individual gain over collective interests. If we aren’t good enough at looking after ourselves – financially, psychologically, physically – the failure belongs to us, as does the culpability, and by some strange extension the morality. The public shaming of the overweight places this murky moral equation as a sad spectacle.

Once we’ve identified weight as a moral issue, we find the means to reinforce it to ourselves – if we want to believe overweight people are really morally deficient, we need to prove that they are impinging upon us in some way. One justification can be seen clearly in the eruption of the recent Kevin Smith “too fat to fly” debate.

This idea of someone taking up our space is as old as racism. It is a variety of persecution employed to give credence to a baseless moral objection to others: there is not enough space for the two of us here, so get out. Nonetheless, to many it objectifies their moral position on obesity sufferers – that little bit of extra space they take up is enough for us to stimulate their sense of shame.

Increased obesity could be a direct result of the culture of comfort we have established – in developed nations, we feel injustice if our right to security or comfort are taken away. But when we have them, security and comfort, what are we living for? We have traditionally lived to survive – to avoid death and procreate; it’s what we’re programmed for. Thus we now pad ourselves with that which we believe will protect us for as long as possible, usually a quite ineffectual financial barrier between us and death. Eating could be another extension of this. We forget that eating does give us biological comfort, so we cannot avoid “comfort eating” to a certain extent. When it becomes so confusing what else we should be living for, our body could be telling us that eating is the best thing to do. And when we have access to so much food, as our need for comfort and security demands, it has to be even more difficult to stave off that biological pull.

I’m going to play my own Devil’s advocate here. It’s possible that the reason for us working increased hours is not so much that we have been convinced of a need to work to protect ourselves with more cash and more stuff, but rather we may be drifting into longer working hours because absorption in the workplace allows us to avoid the grave discomfort of a question that comes up when we do have time on our hands: what am I living for? Maybe we have chosen stress and more and more anxious work in an attempt to avoid this question. Work, at the very least, offers feelings of purpose in its tribalism – working for the benefit of a tribe, or corporation. Although when we understand our behaviour thus, the purpose comes apart, and many must instinctively know this, and it hurts. How will commercial tribalism help us survive?

It stands to reason that, just like working longer hours, we turn to the biological urges that comfort us when lacking the need to protect ourselves from imminent death: eating. And it is sad, too, that we’ve come up with so many unhealthy ways to trick the tongue into receiving the signals that tell our body we are providing it with the sustenance it needs.

The strange newness of contemporary urban life is all very difficult to navigate, and at the very least we should allow each other that. Having more weight than the guy next to you is not something to be ashamed of. It’s not a moral imperative, and I hope we come to realise persecution is not a helpful way to deal with obesity.

James Cameron has recently appeared in the LA Times' The Envelope publication to tell us we "will be a dying world if we don't make some fundamental changes about how we view ourselves and how we view wealth .... We're going to have to live with less."

I'd agree with him if he weren't one of Hollywood's wealthiest elite, lolling in a Malibu mansion surrounded by luxury sports cars, making movies to the tune of half a billion dollars.

Yet many of my closest friends defend him and his movie, so I have to take their support seriously.

Before I go on, I'll briefly reiterate my objection to his latest B-grader, "Avatar": the film takes everything I care about, and turns it into war.

Setting aside the supreme hypocrisy of the most expensive film ever made (latest sponsor onboard: McDonalds) preaching a return to the ways of the noble savage, here's a distortion of a utilitarian argument that keeps coming up: that in order to appeal to a wider audience with his so-called leftist message, Cameron needed to resort to war, which the plebs apparently can connect with.

Apart from smacking of a superior third-person effect, the fact that war doesn't work and that we need to understand one another to STOP warring IS the point. Or at least it should be. This is ignored by Cameron's script's spiritual fundamentalism and ultimately conservative essentialism, which winds up doing more harm than good. This amounts to selling the progressive cause out in order to sell it.

I also often hear that the movie's spectacle is so great it excuses all the rest of its hokum. Every movie I see imported from Hollywood is great spectacle, however, and this flick no more than most. The money shows, but the imagination is thin - slightly taller, bluer humanoid aliens; animals amalgams of the ones found on earth, maybe with an extra limb, which humans can jab their dreadlocked ponytails into and bend to their righteous whim...

The argument that the beauty of Pandora will invoke some kind of protective feeling towards our own planet is equally ludicrous and suggests we can no longer tell the difference between filmic fabrication, our fantasies, and the world we live in.

This kind of dumbing down - positing that we need more hypocritical movies to get across some greater, less complex message to the great unwashed - just doesn't hold up to any logic. It pulls the wool over eyes so we don't see where our power for change really lies - identifying that billion-dollar James Cameron IS the problem.

I'll have to end by pointing out that dubbing "Avatar" the highest grossing film of all time is marketing misrepresentation. Cinema admission prices have inflated exponentially over the past decade, and the added element of 3D has apparently called for more from moviegoers' pockets. The practical upshot of this is not only that film industry profiteers rake it in, they also get to trumpet their alleged record breaking. So for the record, "Gone with the Wind" still comes a long way out in front of the rest in both box office takings adjusted for inflation and attendees. "Avatar" falls a long way behind.

This video is a step in the right direction. Seeing as I support the gist of it, I'll help it along its intended viral path by posting it to my site.

However, Richard Curtis, what's with that terrible coverage? I just counted, and I think you crossed the line at least four times, arbitrary camera movement and jump cuts... your best subject matter yet and simultaneously your worst filmmaking.

Anyway, everyone's thoughts are welcome at wyattmosswellington.com on the idea of this investment banking tax. I'm full steam ahead.

The best album I heard last year was Dar Williams' "Out There Live", from 2001. When I'm feeling queasy about the state of the world, all I need to do is hear the hordes of young women heckling ecstatically as Williams opens her album, singing "I will not be afraid of women", and I feel ok again. We must be headed somewhere alright, if young people are so excited by this music. And they love every song, supporting the folk singer with the best their lungs can muster, as though she were a pop star singing ceaselessly about beginnings and ends of navel-gazing love affairs - but lo, she's not!

What these fans are screaming for is a complex and forgiving view of the world. It is poetry with purpose, questioning the human condition instead of wallowing in it, as in trendy lyricists' poetry for poetry's sake. Williams' fans are actually rapturous about humanism, if that weren't an oxymoron.

Truth be told, Williams is obviously able to retain such a considerable youth audience by being so in touch with her own experience of growing up - it's where her subject matter is most vivid. Songs such as her classic "The Babysitter's Here" or "When I Was A Boy" are Williams at her best, laying down seminal moments recalled from our collective youth - the support from the crowd stems from enlightened recognition of these experiences, the moments of discovery which opened up the paths to becoming who we are.

"When I Was A Boy" is one of the most gentle and insightful elucidations of gender politics available in the form of a song. Williams recalls a childhood before gender mattered, and mourns the necessary loss of those parts of her which could be called boyish. Through the song she becomes lost in her own mourning, until a male friend reminds her that he was a girl too, picking flowers with his mother and able to cry. He concludes, "And I have lost some kindness, but I was a girl too, and I was just like you."

The words of "Iowa" sum up the best of Williams' songwriting: "But way back where I come from, we never mean to bother / We don't like to make our passions other people's concern / And we walk in the world of safe people, and at night we walk into our houses and burn."

Thought-provoking music provides welcome relief, these days. We've chosen music as a sedative rather than deeply moving experience - or perhaps we've had it chosen for us, as a sedative is easier to produce and entice mass audiences with.

In the world of competitive music-making, where so many flogging identical products must find a way to be more prominent than their doppelgangers, the easiest response is to appeal directly to our instincts. Seeing as beats are our first inroad to a piece of music, they have now almost eclipsed the rest of music's capabilities.

This does not make our instincts any more correct than a more contemplative response to music, or anything else we could have chosen to consume. Instincts, in fact, are rarely good indicators of the best response to any situation, and counter-intuitive forward thinking is what has got this species so far, in direct opposition to feudal pack mentality.

The need for instinctually gratifying music has to be understood, however, and the proliferation of city dance clubs is an obvious place to look. They are a particularly urban phenomenon for a reason - the more we pile on top of each other, with less and less familiar faces as we walk down the street, the more we need to be comforted by being not so distant from each other. The easiest way to do that is by sharing a public demonstration of our safest instincts: response to beats provides this.

But now, music with prominent beats and little else to recommend it is everywhere - in public spaces too. I can't go anywhere outside in the city without having beats blasted at me. This could also be a product of the saturated market. But sometimes I just want relief; I want to be granted some thinking space. The same can be said for all art, for example, films flashing lights and explosions at us ever faster and faster, as well as news media indulging our need to hear stories which directly awaken our basest fears of annihilation.

Much of the "folk" music produced these days is just as navel-gazing and directionless as the rest of the pack, in the "make an acoustic noise here" tradition of response to the connotations of music rather than the music itself. Our affection for evocative sounds rather than music can also be put down to market saturation. We are asked to consume it faster, it is now so cheap it is free, so we don't give it the time we once did. Sounds appealing directly to an instinctual response are, once again, going to be more attractive than that which, by asking for serious time and thought, will impede our chance to get more done.

We have been told that which appeals to our instincts is purer or superior by marketers, and found it impossible to reject due to its omnipresence and sadly attractive promise of having to do less thinking. It would be nice to see through this. It would be nice to walk into a clothing store and not be lulled into an instinctive daze of programmed beats. It would be nice to have more Dar Williams "Out There Live".

In other folk news, rest in peace Kate McGarrigle.

*NB: Yes, I am still calling them CD reviews as I am still purchasing CDs rather than downloads.

At the end of 2009 I wrote an article on the easy retreat many film critics make into assessing visual stimulation as a film’s worth. I’d like to point out that this is not the case with everyone, and it certainly isn’t the case with Armond White, one of the few critics writing today who see film reviewing as a springboard to wider cultural debate, much like Pauline Kael used to (though, arguably, with less aplomb and less success – White’s weakness for the inflammatory above the expository often sees him sending himself up).

White is a a social agitator. I don't always agree with his reviews, but I think they are important. I get frustrated by the consensus reality of criticism, instilled by powerful marketing. Many films take on a holy status before they are even seen, and apparently it is too much for critics to question the marketing and assess films independently. If a film scores 100% on rottentomatoes.com, we should probably be very suspicious.

White casts himself as contrarian often to a fault, but he is close to the only film critic I can think of who is doing it.

However, anyone who reads his writings online for New York Press would have witnessed the barrage of offensive, expletive-laden comments tailing his articles, many imploring White's editors to give him the sack, or complaining of his reviews having a political axe to grind (so?). There is now an online petition set up to remove him from rottentomatoes.com.

This could be dismissed as the work of a handful of fanboy nutters who have found access to internet traffic via the democratic offering of message boards. However, even those leaving comments across the web come to represent a reality which appears woefully interactive.

World-famous reviewer Roger Ebert recently defended Armond White's review of the film "District 9". White was once again under attack for spoiling a perfect rottentomatoes.com score - and this before the film was released or had been seen by any of the irate devotees so enchanted by the experience of being courted by marketers. (It is a curiosity of the human experience that the colossally wealthy have been so good at enlisting the hoi polloi to protect their interests for them.)

However, Ebert received such a negative response for his defense of White that he changed opinion on his blog in a new entry entitled: Not in Defense of Armond White. In the entry, he agrees that White is a "troll", reducing White’s opinion to the product of attention-seeking novelty rather than serious social questioning.

Many bloggers across the spectrum of social debate amend their posts due to negative feedback from trigger-happy armchair commentators. Some even give up for good when the feedback gets too nasty; Twitter is notorious for bringing celebrities to their knees with the reactionary unkindness it has uncovered.

All of this begs the question: should our utopian dream of free speech on the internet be called into question? At the very least, perhaps the “less clicks the better” assumption should be reassessed. What was once a principle for online sales maximisation – the less clicking one has to do, the more opportunity for doubt-impaired impulse buying – has become a principle for all internet traffic, as internet traffic means revenue. But perhaps with the advent of such proliferated online communication – including email – there is a place for demanding extra click-throughs. Maybe when we hit the “send” or “post comment” button, there should be a popup or two, requesting: “have you really thought about what you are about to send; have you considered the psychological impact of what you are about to say?”

But this isn’t likely to happen, so we should consider other, even more serious dilemmas: if utopian free speech just gives voice to less considered opinion, including antisocial, bigoted and offensive slander, should we consider mooting a more selective approach to public comment on the internet? This suggestion is a massive no-no in our current democratic climate, where the right of majority rule is unquestioned. Fair enough – this model of democracy is the best we have come up with so far; if our voices are moderated, who should do the moderating? It hands away too much power.

But it is worth asking: as we see the power of debate transferred to the internet, simultaneously seeing it slip away from a filter which, at the very least, aimed to ensure knowledgeable voices were more prevalent, is there a way to return to a place where an informed (i.e. researched, considered) opinion is given more weight than the reactionary majority? Because I’m pretty sure that not listening to the learned among us, and presenting all consumers as a higher power, will be a recipe for disaster.

My friend's neighbour is from Haiti. She has only recently been able to contact her family by phone; they are unharmed.

Channel Nine News, in their understandable desire to locate all Haiti diaspora now living in Sydney, recently requested to interview her in her home. She agreed, whereupon, she alleges, she was told by the reporter what they wanted her to say: that she has only been able to contact her family by email and Twitter.

No, it didn't matter that it wasn't true.

She declined to do the interview.

Hollywood has been obsessed with condescending its audience with karmic moralism for Lordy knows how long. They have insisted time and again, perhaps to justify their own excesses, that the good will get what they deserve and the bad will suffer as they must - this is the way of the world.

The Coen Brothers, despite a high-handed superiority they flex over all of the parochially self-unaware characters they create, offer a very important antidote to the rest of the Hollywood mainstream. They take apart any notion we may have had of absolutist natural justice beyond the justice that we, often misguidedly, attempt to plaster over our chaotic circumstances.

In "A Serious Man", Joel and Ethan Coen have made their point more accurately than they have been able to before. By encouraging us to laugh at our own flimsy answers to the continuously confounding absurdity of being (their speciality), they acknowledge that good fortune and destructive happenstance blow around randomly. What makes this film different is their vision of a man struggling to be good, finding himself in impossible situations and ultimately bending to the unfairness we prop up by convincing ourselves that the world is naturally fair. And we still care about him, heartbreakingly - and funnily - enough. This is an empathy unparalleled in other Coen Brothers films: empathy with those caught in the unjustness of our attempts at creating a just world.

Unfortunately their existential realities usually court a uselessly abortive dismissal of benevolent aspirations, still trendy for its excusing of our intellectualised inaction. "A Serious Man" does not escape this Coen trope, however it is mitigated by their understanding of the dilemma posed by trying to be good in a world where the only meaning that can be found is whatever equally absurd meaning we apply to our time here.

One more satisfying tidbit: for the first 20 minutes or so you won't know where the film is heading. This being a rare occurrence in the cinema, I will refrain from spoiling it for you.

So it's the end of 2009 and Copenhagen has shown us that people will generally wait until an immediate threat to their mortality emerges before engaging in any foresight or sacrifice.

As upset as I am, it does seem a difficult ask to get the international community to agree to such monumental global transition when the evidence is hypothetical to most. Those who have really felt the effects of a warming globe are a minority. My guess is that we'll have to see China or the United States suffer real fatalities before the domino effect kicks in and we start to change. Which most of us know is very sad.

If the United States can spend trillions bailing out institutionalised greed, surely the country has the wealth and clout to bail out a much more valuable asset: our only habitat? Keep at it Obama et al.

Meanwhile, "Avatar" is the most expensive load of tosh yet endured on the silver screen. It extends the environmentalist cause to a justification for war (who knew this was such a good idea?) and transforms our understanding of environmental politics into condescending Hollywood mysticism. This is not useful. Moreover, it hypocritically ignores the technology and investment which made the film possible.

I'm unconvinced; James Cameron's half-baked Westernised spiritual philosophy does not represent any indigenous culture or environmentalism. Masquerading as anti-development, anti-greed enlightenment (which we could use in some parts of the world), it instead represents a colonial, essentialist view of our biological makeup; the uneducated Everyman (Sam Worthington) is revealed as inherently good by "the spirits", because he has a "strong heart", which seems to mean he is able to be adventurously self-destructive without thinking. The majority of the rest of the human population are just essentially bad, to the extent where we are asked to desire their righteous demise in the sickeningly misguided climax. Folks, hit the 'ignore' button, this is just more goodies and baddies, the worst kind of Hollywood cliche sandwich. Even the pretty tropical palette and creature design aren't worth the price of admission.

Cameron got it right with "The Abyss", so I thought there was a chance of something worthwhile here. I recommend watching "Abyss" instead.

And has anyone else commented that the giant smurfs, apparently ideal blue versions of the ideal amalgam indigenous human, look anorexic? So many offensive ideas, it's hard to know where to start. It's this year's "Slumdog".

On a lighter note, I will leave you, dear reader, over the seasonal break with a review of the Ass Cup Swing:

I ask you to recall the particular humility of childhood known upon arriving at a local park, expecting the freedom of flying joyous through the air and receiving instead the Ass Cup Swing.

You know the kind - the chain-clad black nappy suspended from a pole, staining your playground with the dark aura of generations of babies' valuable playtime misspent in swing purgatory. This is not a piece of play equipment; it is an abomination, a Frankenstein's swing constructed from the broken dreams of swingless adults who obviously planned a targeted negative punishment assault on the emotional development of hapless minors.

Ass Cup Swing does nothing for the pride of a tot.

Observe the baby's face as it is placed in the oubliette: initially surprised, it will look uncomprehendingly down at its captor contraption before glancing around at happier, older children on nearby swings. It tries to jiggle its way to a similar freedom. No response from the Ass Cup. Defeated, the baby will hold its arms aloft, expecting the nearest caregiver to pluck it from the dark rubber clutches of disappointment. If no one arrives in good time, the misery sets in - will I be stuck here, motherless and fatherless, forever? Then the tears come.

So think twice next time you attend the playground with your beloved progeny. Ass Cup Swing gets one out of five stars from this reviewer.

I'll be back in the new year with a new blog. Seasons greetings sundry!

It may be already so distant from my life that it's hard to believe, but a couple of years ago I completed a Master of Arts in Screenwriting in my hometown, Sydney.

My strongest recollections of what I was taught there are enshrined in the mantra: "The more white on the page, the better." There was a strong bias against storytelling through dialogue, at the expense of the kind of interrogation and exposition verbal communication is good at. We watched reel after reel of examples of non-verbal storytelling; we had it drummed into us that this was, indeed, a superior form of communication.

Who began this anti-dialogue campaign? It seems to be working, I'm hearing it all over now, from audiences and critics alike.

Recognition of visual storytelling techniques makes us feel clever. There is something about non-verbal communication that, when recognised, seems to affirm us as perceptive individuals. Unfortunately, although visual storytelling is often necessary, especially in drama seeking to be demonstrative, comparatively it cannot have the depth and nuance of meaning provided by conversation. It's why we created language - to communicate complex ideas. This is what words are good at.

In academe, there are libraries worth of tomes dedicated to the study of movie-going, and the psychological state of being in a cinema. This is fair enough; although there have been countless heralded threats to cinema's survival - TV, video, the internet - our need to consume cinema in public remains healthy, and box office records continue to be broken year after year as cinema-consuming populations grow worldwide.

The consensus seems to be that sitting in the dark, having our senses stimulated without need for action, usually with some manner of junk food satisfying our oral fixation, very much resembles regression to symbiosis. Cinema is like returning to the womb.

While this is an extreme position, I understand the point that we like to feel comfortable in the cinema. Visual stimulation, and its potential to usurp more analytical thought, plays an important part here.

Many critics, for example, will switch off at the first sign that a film isn't going to indulge their need for regular eyeball diversion. As an example, take one of the most progressive and rousing statements on the decade just past: Lions for Lambs.

I can't name many pictures that have the proverbial testicles to stand up to generation y's political inertia. The film industry, recognising business opportunity before cultural fibre, prefers to pander to their fraught disinterest. But Robert Redford's clearly-intoned statement on the times got buried in a poor critical response. Browse the comments on rottentomatoes.com. The majority were annoyed that the dialogue-heavy film didn't contain enough action to keep them satisfied. The word that gets used often is "preachy." Yet most demonstrated that they entirely missed most of the deeper questioning the script attempted (certainly more discussion than diatribe). Perhaps the threat of something too direct reminded them of their own political inertia and scared them off.

What service are critics providing these days? Cinematic analysis or gatekeepers to our need for cultural self-questioning, nannying away the possibilities for deeper thought?

On the other hand, observe a film such as the recent Michael Caine vigilante pic Harry Brown.

The argument that we are all able to recognise fantasy in cinema breaks down when we look at Michael Caine's statements to the press after shooting the film - that we need to do something about the degraded, drug-addled youths of London who are turning to firearms and crime.

Really? Is there an epidemic of gun-related juvenile crime anywhere in Britain?

Although I haven't seen the film, I'm very familiar with the press surrounding the film, and it is the all-too-real political discussion I take issue with.

Once again, fantasy exists because there is something in there we long to believe as real, and in this case we are being encouraged to take a hardline approach to a hypothetical population of rabid hoodies who we have no contact with.

Most critics were able to see through to what the Independent's reviewer, Anthony Quinn, calls "a nasty Daily Mail-ish subtext to this brand of OAP vigilantism, a suggestion that Harry is only doing what everyone secretly would like to, ie blasting the scum from the streets."

The dismaying thing is that, although most recognised this absurdity of subject matter, they promptly dismissed it in favour of their entertainment at seeing these youths blown away by a vengeful Caine. Once again, browse rottentomatoes.com, and here is an example.

This would be fine if their fantasy didn't reach parliament or the minds of the voting populace. But this anti-human fantasy has real effects. Critics are part of this process.

Our value of visual storytelling over expository dialogue is a thinly disguised value of our entertainment over critical thought.

Same goes for news content: its value has been sold to us as entertainment. Is a culture that asks to be entertained before it commits to any interest in reality shooting itself in the foot? Or am I overreacting, as many have warned me? Surely these are questions worth asking.

To many post baby boomer generations, hearing yet more tales of how different and special the swinging 60s were incites yawns laced with envy. It’s a romance we’re locked out of and it’s boring – even if we do reap the rewards of relative equality and artistic freedom. And at least they could let go of their empires, just a little, right? Trust us with the world, before they retire?

Unfortunately for us, there is some truth to the romanticism of their youth – the world came ahead leaps and bounds in the 1960s. Youth action was revolutionary, and we haven’t seen its like since. “We achieved a great deal before the authorities figured out how to capitalize on our self-destructiveness,” is how ‘White Bicycles’ author Joe Boyd puts it. “Right-wing commentators still spit with anger when they contemplate how fundamentally the sixties altered society.”

Although much has been written about the era, the last chapter of Joe Boyd’s book provides a more insightful and succinct, personally mournful yet universally aware catalogue of the achievements and losses of the period than any I’ve read. For those who would prefer, it is possible to read just this chapter and get a lot from it, but you will miss the power of Boyd's nearly imperceptibly cumulative amassing of requiem throughout ‘White Bicycles’. From the losses of Jimi Hendrix to Nick Drake and all the ideology in between, he points out that, "We fuelled ourselves with inspiration from our cultural heritage, and in so doing helped turn it into smoke … The destructiveness that comes with innovation is a process as old as history."

The book can be seen as a springboard to exploring possibilities for our future, as in this final chapter he asks what made the era so different. Like many others, he points to the unprecedented economic prosperity.

Then he points out that, allegedly, we have more money now than we ever did then. But less time.

“People are supposedly wealthier now, yet most feel they haven’t enough money and time is at an even greater premium … In the sixties, we had surpluses of both money and time.” Could this be a key to the revolutionlessness of the last four decades?

What happened? Did the baby boomers’ idealism really pave the way to lasting exploitation? Somewhere along the line we became convinced that we no longer had time or money. We bought what was advertised at us – the fear that if we don’t acquire a very large buffer between us and ever-present, lurking poverty, we will invariably find ourselves miserable and destitute.

“There was a feeling that nothing was nailed down,” writes Boyd, “that an assumption held was one worth challenging.” Would that this were still true!

Now we’re stuck in an unusual situation. If climate change is as bad as most of the global scientific community seems to believe it is, then we are going to need a force much more potent than our current reliance on the mock-democracy of self-defeating, passionless political compromise, favoured because it looks after itself by not actually achieving anything. To deal with this scale of problem, we need a revolution. But we all think we’re too busy to be involved in any such thing. The Western world has a love affair with the process of two-party political compromise because it makes no change; it endeavours to keep the status quo, seemingly so we can keep overworking and generating so-very-necessary wealth.

Same goes for music, the subject of ‘White Bicycles’. Wouldn’t a revolution be nice so we didn’t have to keep hearing slight variations of the same music over and over again?

How did the fear tactics work so well?

I wish we knew that we actually have the time and money to honour our history, and explore the possibilities for our future.

When you're steeped in cultural critique, ethical inquiry and a good dollop of lobbying, you can find yourself spending most of your time in complaint. As a human it's hard to communicate that there are still goings-on in the world worth being cheerful about; as a blogger it's hard to avoid relying on rants.

Moreover, as most activism these days takes place on keyboards rather than on the streets (the impact of gathering in public places and hollering demands has been unfortunately mitigated), it's a lonely thing, complaining. It's probably also why so many remain nostalgic for the political activism of the late 60s, and why we haven't managed the same level of progressive upheaval since: to most, it's just not that attractive making change by yourself on a computer, without the social gratification, comradery, or human results unfolding in front of you. We rely on mavericks to change the world now. Too bad for us.

A friend wrote in the comments section of this website, "I also look forward to you liking something ... ie. I hope this doesn't turn into a rant blog."

True. And it has.

I know how difficult and disheartening it can get when you spend any amount of time monitoring the things that are going wrong with the world. My girlfriend deals with this by writing ten good things about the day when she goes to bed at night. So here are my ten good things about Movember:

1. Spike Jonze et al's feature adaptation of "Where The Wild Things Are"; I finally saw it on Thursday. WTWTA manages to approach painful parts of youth I had forgotten about, with an honesty and an ingenuity to make it unlike any other rite of passage film. Also nice to see a cinematic fantasy with naturalist production values.

2. Revisiting Anne Tyler's best novel "Saint Maybe".

3. That tasty papaya salad what I ate earlier in the week.

4. The Australian federal government getting something right by rejecting a lift on the parallel import restrictions for Australian books. Really, this was just another arm of the free market lobby, disguised as a moral concern for consumers. Contrary to popular belief, an amount of legal protection for the culturally vulnerable is actually ok.

5. Feeling like it is a respectable time of year to start playing "David Grisman's Acoustic Christmas". The music composed in honour of Jesus' Big Day doesn't really blow my skirt up, but something appeals to me about eccentric and genre-twisted Christmas albums. (Not Bob Dylan's.)

6. Learning of an Adult Swim program entitled "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" I haven't seen it, and frankly it doesn't matter as I'm fairly certain no TV show can live up to a name as good as that.

7. Having written another truly progressive folk song called "Coming Down", as well as the first song I've ever written on a piano, "The Suicide Bomber" -- feeling ready to record my new album now.

8. Every year, the silly season is a little easier to digest as split-family struggles recede into the past.

9. Healthily burgeoning visit statistics for this website.

10. Louise, the best thing about my life.

After lobbying ninemsn to take down their fraudulent piece on the cost of refugee benefits in Australia, I received in my inbox today this email:

Wil New
Customer Service
ninemsn"

Brilliant news, and confirmation that consumers who care can make a difference. If you also value trustworthy news, write to ninemsn and congratulate them for taking down this story here. My original story is here.

Last month, Sharon Waxman of TheWrap reported the president and publisher of Variety group, Neil Stiles, as having said, "I'm not optimistic about this habit called journalism."

Coming from one of the globe's most widely circulated entertainment-trade publications, this is not a good sign.

Stiles' creed is that service and customer are the way of the future. This can be read as: we will tailor our reportage and content to what the public wants to hear. But even then, will the projected extra traffic bring back the ol’ rivers of gold? Likely not. Internet advertising revenue isn’t what it used to be either.

Meanwhile, “customers” are finding it hard to take issue with a domain selling them exactly what they want to hear, truth be damned.

Those with any interest in hard news will know that even the most major news reporters are caving in and calling populism the answer. Within Australia, the nation’s highest circulation broadsheet, the Sydney Morning Herald, plasters inconsequential celeb stories across its homepage almost every day.

The difference between reliable journalism, marketing and opinion writing is increasingly spurious. Apparently when evaluating where to downsize, newspapers have turned straight to reporters, who have been identified as the most expendable staff members. The justification? No one is interested in reading hard news content anymore. We have always had to keep an eye on the media, but to this extent? Who, now, is going to fulfill the thankless task of attempting objective reporting?

Many of us have turned to bloggers in search of news content with integrity, upon recognising the mainstream media’s blundering amid economic plight. But is this an answer?

It seems that consumers online are still choosing fantasy over reality, celebrity gossip stories over hard news coverage. Unfortunately Waxman's Hollyblog is no match in net traffic for the likes of trash-gossip peddler Perez Hilton. Similarly, even within the Hollyblogosphere, many are choosing the unreliable flash journalism of Nikki Finke over more reliable sources.

Finke excels in the goodies-and-baddies model of journalism, where each story reads like a pantomime and the truth can be distorted at will, reported without cross-reference; even publication dates are edited without notice to the reader. The blog is attractive because its simplistic and adversarial reporting reminds us of Hollywood artifice. But unfortunately the truth is never as neat as a Pixar screenplay.

The biggest problem here is that bloggers - myself included - don't seem to be entirely liable for the misinformation they publish.

However, many have pointed to the fact that we have never been able to lay our complete faith in the mainstream media either.

I have devoted a gobsmacking amount of time since the publication of my last post on Australian asylum seekers to dismantling lies perpetuated by the Australian press. Here is one example: a ninemsn report (UPDATE Nov 19) on the cost of Australia's relatively meagre refugee intake. It has been slammed by both the national broadcaster's Media Watch and by its own statistical source, Centrelink, who have denied any truth in the figures the story is based on.

Yet those who follow the ninemsn link above will discover the story remains online! How is this possible?

People still read the story, and still quote it as fact. It seems like anyone interested in uncovering the truth has to do a lot more work to get to it.

Unfortunately work is a turn-off to a consumer repeatedly told that their entertainment is more important than locating the truth and the challenges it brings. Studies show that the internet fosters not only shorter attention spans but a "compassion fatigue". It is also within the interests of many high income earners to keep us engaged in fantasy, so that we are too distracted and befuddled to even consider holding them to their accounts.

Our fantasies exist because there is some inclination in us to desire them as reality. Sadly, they can be indulged by us, by market profiteers and by the media, so it is important to hold people up on charges of outrageous fantasy before they leak into real life. How else can we explain Arnold Swartzeneger's Californian election victory? How else do we explain the spike in army enrollments after the release of major war films? How else do we let Nic Cage get away with owning more than a dozen houses and two Bahamian islands, while half the world lives in poverty? When I tell my peers about Cage’s reported finance concerns, the irritated response is often: “don’t say that about Nic Cage, I like Nic Cage.”

If we are choosing these fantasies over reality, it’s a pretty sad indictment on the social pressures of our everyday lives. We must be getting something wrong if so many are so frightened of reality that they would choose to board it up with framed posters of wealth-hording cultural icons.

What do we do about this? It seems like the world relies on a minority of people who value truth enough to engage in the "habit" of real journalism. But when the rivers of gold dry up, and our traditional providers of hard news can't earn what they used to off internet advertising, and their front pages spill with celeb gossip stories, all competing for a few remaining dollars on the same dogged populist and fantasist grounds, what do we do?

Do the largely unregulated blogs hold an answer? Are they making any money, if newspapers aren't, or are they destined to be a community service too, just as the arts are increasingly being reassessed as (free music, free movies anyone)?

Waxman ends her article by saying, "we'll continue to do journalism, even if Variety chooses not to." Now consumers just have to choose journalism as well, even if that means locating its whereabouts.

I was writing a completely different blog entry about the future of journalism, when it dawned on me that I had a duty to be writing about something else. In Australia, the incrimination of asylum seekers has gone on for way too long.

The politicians who claim to represent us are talking big about the threat posed by a handful of asylum seekers, backed up by a hysterical media. We are debating whether or not to be kind to a few desperate humans on a couple of ships.

The sad thing is that we shouldn't even be having this debate. Consider this: the population of Australia is estimated to be 22 million at 2009. Last year, we took in 13, 500 asylum seekers (way behind global average according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR). Of those, 206 came by boat. Yet apparently these people coming by boat constitute a "national crisis"?

Moreover, asylum seekers arriving by boat are more likely to be deemed genuine refugees than those arriving by air. But we are still capable of looking at all of these individuals as "illegals", to borrow one of our prime minister's words, in turn borrowing a linguistic fear campaign from his predecessor.

Time and again I hear the one primary concern bandied about by the media and echoed by my peers: won't these potential immigrants place massive burden on our already limited infrastructure?

First of all, this argument is never leveled at the government when they encourage us to make more Australian babies. It is generally acknowledged that more people is a good thing. The economic growth which parallels population growth could entail resources to build roads and rail lines, improve healthcare and education, if our government has the will and the Australian people have the will to request it.

Wouldn't our intellectual resources be better suited toward chasing down high-income tax evaders, or those who are doing real damage to our infrastructure: greedy and inept politicians and developers? I don't how we can continue to blame immigrant population growth for problems it has nothing to do with.

Blaming asylum seekers is a welcome distraction for politicians and those with the wealth to create change, forever skirting their responsibility to help out. We've been duped. Look in their pockets for the answer to our infrastructure woes, not to a tiny fraction of the population of Australian immigrants.

If we are really that concerned about infrastructure, traveling the globe to just a few other countries will help us realise we don't have it so bad after all. Try traversing Mexico City in peek hour traffic. Congestion especially is a ubiquitous challenge of increased urbanisation - not ours alone.

Additionally, genuine refugees, as the majority of asylum seekers turn out to be, are revealed as good, hard workers; coveted assets in the communities they settle in.

The fact is we are not making many babies in Australia, and we need immigrants. So why not be kind to them? They are not a burden, they are entirely necessary to uphold the way of life we hold so dear.

The other big scare campaign runs like this: if we are soft on border protection, everyone will want to come here. The extension of this argument is implicit, but never vocalised: so we must be cruel to these people and put them through torturous circumstances to discourage others from coming here.

The potential for people to arrive on our shores is not limitless. The amount of asylum seekers processed annually depends on global circumstances - how much conflict, internationally, people are fleeing.

Australian activist organisation GetUp put together this fact sheet, demonstrating that the amount of asylum seekers arriving in Australian territory is not driven by policy change or awareness of a "soft target", but the amount of people who actually need to seek asylum.

The "we don't want to look soft" argument has been used to justify much cruelty in past, including countless failed and useless wars - look no further back than the rhetoric used to justify the invasion of Iraq for examples.

Softness appears to mean treating all people as equal, undeserved of torture; it is entering a dialogue where no one has any more or less rights than anyone else; softness is actually caring about the human cost of our actions. Are these things we really want to avoid?

The bottom line is that kindness is a good thing - whether you choose to denigrate its human impact by calling it "softness" or not. Despite the fact that asylum seekers should be desired by Australia rather than attacked, the argument that kind behaviour leads to those in need taking advantage of our kindness misses the point. There is no "taking advantage". Kindness isn't conditional, we do it because we care about people other than ourselves.

If softness is another word for kindness or generosity, then I, for one, don't mind being soft.