Subtitles; or how to pad, swell and overexplain a perfectly good title

Gideon Haigh, everyone's favourite cricket writer (He's an Australian writer who supported England in the 95 Ashes. That's got to be worth a beer), has written a great little essay for The Monthly. His subject is the surfeit of subtitles currently disfiguring the non-fiction section of your local bookshop:

Once, of course, books had no need of such otiose elaboration. To stick with American politics, there once existed the cultural literacy that made possible titles like Nixon Agonistes, with its hint of Milton, and All the President’s Men, with its echo of Robert Penn Warren. Critics, for their part, vouchsafed standalone titles of such solemn grandeur as The Death of Tragedy, A Gathering of Fugitives, The Evening Colonnade and Under the Sign of Saturn. Historians bandied around bald provocations like The Decline of the West, The Revolt of the Masses, The Making of the English Working Class and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

Now it's easier to take a few rough swings, and hope that one connects. Actually, there is a parlour game in the making imagining what modern marketing might have made of various classics: say, Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason: Why Space and Time Are A Priori Intuitions, Why We Cannot Meaningfully Conceive of an Object that Exists Outside of Time and Has No Spatial Components, Why We Are Prohibited from Absolute Knowledge of the Thing-In-Itself... And 101 Ways to Save the World (nobody will read long enough to learn that the last part is bogus); or maybe Plato's Republic: The Seven Habits of Highly Successful City-States (always use 'seven': it's publishing magic). T.E. Lawrence was ahead of the curve with Seven Pillars of Wisdom, yet how much better than his original subtitle A Triumph would have been something like How I Rallied Arab Irregulars, Tied Down the Ottoman Empire, Masterminded the Capture of Aqaba and Damascus... And You Can Too.

World's Best Buildings

My latest piece for Orange is a look at the world's 20 best buildings, from the Sydney Opera House to the Sagrada Familia.

Architect Le Corbusier described a building as "a machine for living in” but the buildings on this list are so much more than that. They are great seats of power, majestic places of worship, modern masterworks built to house contemporary treasures and defensive fortresses built to withstand armies and the elements.

Here's Clive James on the Sydney Opera House (he's since changed his mind).

Clinton retrospective

Superb retrospective on Hilary's campaign from the New York Times. It's a better package than I've seen on TV — and quite sad really.

Monday Night Live

A quick shout-out to the lovely folks over at BigPond Music (full disclosure: I used to work there).

After a so-so start, they've really pulled a blinder with the Monday Night Live series of live shows from The Basement in Sydney, featuring such luminaries as Powderfinger, Angus & Julia Stone, Scribe and Kasey Chambers.

Keep up the good work y'all.

The last, best hope on Earth

Politics is not normally my bailiwick, but I've been, along with just about every other sentient being in the universe, captivated by the US primary season, which came to an end last night, at least in the sense of pledged delegates (though, true to form, that particular metric doesn't seem to be swaying the Clinton camp).

Mr Obama sure gives a good speech. True fact: I've read transcripts of his speeches and felt a sudden prickling of the tear-ducts. Transcripts! Posted below is the second half of his victory speech in Iowa last night. A powerful, gracious speech with a rousing peroration. Can this level of oratorical flair win him the election? I guess we're going to find out...



Andrew Sullivan on Obama's speech:

If I needed reassurance that this man is the most formidable force in American politics today, his speech tonight confirmed it. It was shrewd - with an artful positioning on Iraq. It was graceful - with respect for McCain's service and Clinton's tenacity. It was brutal - in turning around McCain's Iraq visit meme to domestic economic woes. It was patriotic - in its evocation of Gettysburg and the Second World War. It was outer-directed: not for Obama the recourse to self-satisfied identity politics of the kind used by the Clintons because they often have nothing else. It was moving. I thought I even saw some suggestions of tears as he remembered his grandmother. It was also rhetorically more powerful than McCain - not by a small amount but by a mile. Put McCain's speech against Obama's - and this was a wipe-out. Not a victory. A wipe-out. Rhetorically, they are simply not in the same league. And if the contrast tonight between McCain and Obama holds for the rest of the campaign, McCain is facing a defeat of historic proportions.

One more thing: with McCain's and Clinton's speeches, you could not forget the politics of it. With Obama, you forgot about that at times. You actually lifted your eyes a little and believed a little and hoped a little.

Yes, he can. And anyone who under-estimates that will regret it.

The pandas are safe

That's not a code phrase, in case you're wondering. I really do mean the pandas are safe. Last November, we were in Chengdu in Szechuan Province where the largest Panda sanctuary in the world is located and where I took this picture (lady, if you don't get out of my way, there's gonna be trouble...) There were quite a number of adults, loads of children and a couple of infants being hand-reared (the latter was, need I add, super-cute). We had a wonderful day there, despite the pretty weak museum — and the fact that my gastric system finally rebelled against the super-spicy food.

So, when we heard about the earthquake, we were naturally pretty worried for the pandas (we were worried for the people too, sure. But, come on: pandas). So it was a relief to read that they're doing well:

The earthquake killed four staff members and left a fifth seriously ill in hospital, officials said yesterday. Other workers risked their lives to fetch the tiniest cubs from the breeding centre and carry them to safety.

"When we saw the rock slides we were really worried," said Lu Yong, who has helped to care for the animals from birth and travelled to Beijing with them. "In a disaster the first thing we think of is the pandas and how to get them to safety. They were very scared and disturbed when the earthquake happened. They needed support from their keepers before they would eat again."

This picture was taking in the People's Park in Chengdu, the capital. It was an immensely beautiful place, incredibly civilised. Desperately sad to think of it in ruins.

Paul Morley on genres

Check out these unmissable docos on Radio 4, as Paul Morley interrogates the major players in some of the margins, hinterlands and outerzones of modern music. Last week, freak-folk. This week, post-punk, with contributions from Simon Reynolds, Robert Wyatt, Tim Friese-Green and Stuart Braithwaite from Mogwai. But why wouldn't Tim talk about Talk Talk?

Update: Radio 4? I meant Radio 2, obviously.

Damn: they found us

There was us thinking we were perfectly safe in our Hanwell redoubt. Little did we know...


More photos here.

Says she's gonna teach me how to swim

I do like this video. Spring magic? Drugged-up pagan psychedelia? It's Duran Duran for the freak-folk generation:

Ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts

News from what has the potential to be an awesome adaptation of one of the best books of the last decade, Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It stars Viggo Mortensen, who's yer basic go-to guy if grizzled intensity is called for . And there's a part for Michael Kenneth Williams, who you might know as the mighty Omar from The Wire. Heavens be praised! Not quite so happy about the idea that there's a "fleshed-out" part for Charlize Theron, who plays the wife. It's being made by the director of The Proposition, which was good but flawed (the voice-overs! The scenery-chewing English villain).

The Road is an absolute classic, a one-sitting read, and there's definitely a cinematic shape to the book — even if it is shockingly bleak. A film version would lose the quasi-biblical rhythm of the prose. On the other hand, the dialogue does a fair amount of the heavy lifting — think the conversation with the blind old man late in the book:

"What if I said that he's a god?" Ely replies: "I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true." Ely suggests that it will be better when everybody has died. "Better for who?" asks the father. For everybody, says Ely, closing the scene with a rather lovely peroration, of the kind that gives this book its clear, deep sound: "When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that?"

I'm rather less confident that Zak Snyder's going to pull off Watchmen, despite the attention to detail as evinced in his production blog. From a narrative point of view, it's just too nested, too self-recursive, and the ending is not exactly Hollywood gold. That said, 300 was vastly better than I'd been led to believe by critics who unaccountably found a movie of cartoonish slaughter and dubious ethnic stereotypes somehow offensive. Whatevs, Granpa:

Moore described the book as “unfilmable,” not least because of its narrative structure, with flashbacks, supplementary “research” and a comic-within-a-comic that serves to counterpoint events. In an interview with Amazon, Moore recounted his reaction to Terry Gilliam’s abortive 1989 attempt to turn “the War and Peace of graphic novels” into a film: “I had to tell [Gilliam] that I didn’t think it was filmable. I didn’t design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which there are, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that literature and cinema couldn’t.” In The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, David Hughes quotes Gibbons making much the same point: “With a comic book the reader can back-track; you can reach page twenty and say, ‘Hey, that’s what that was all about on page three,’ and then nip back and have a look. We wanted to take advantage of that difference… We wanted to make a comic book that read as a straightforward story, but gradually you became aware that it had a symmetrical structure.”