Throwing stones from the glasshouse

Last week, the late Heath Ledger was only the second actor in just over thirty years to win a posthumous Academy award, the other being the late Peter Finch. It is ironic that both posthumous awards have gone to Australian actors. It is also a testament to just how talented Heath Ledger was, receiving an award that has escaped some of the greatest actors to grace the screen, among them Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton.

What always struck me about Heath Ledger was not so much his acting talent, but his speaking voice. He had one of the finest speaking voices of his generation, up there with the likes of James Earl Jones and Orson Welles. But with every movie, his pure acting talent shone through, and he was getting better all the time. His portayal of the Joker was twisted and stylish, like no one had ever done the Joker before. This was not a comic book character, but a real life sociopath that any of us could encounter in our lives. His ’smile’ was not just ‘part of the act’, but had its roots in abuse he suffered as a child.

You wanna know how I got these scars? My father was a drinker and a fiend. And one night, he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn’t like that. Not…one…bit. So, me watching, he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it. He turns to me and he says, “Why so serious? He comes at me with the knife. “Why so serious? Sticks the blade in my mouth…Let’s put a smile on that face!

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Ledger made the comic book joker incredibly real, and like all crazed psychopathic killers, we saw what caused him to be the way he was. It was an acting triumph of the highest order.

I remember as a kid watching Stevie Wonder get awards, and being very cynical even then about whether they just gave him the award because he was blind. I now don’t think that way at all, and believe Stevie Wonder is one of the greats, and deserves every accolade he receives. Many may think  Ledger received the sympathy Oscar. Watch either Brokeback Mountain or The Dark Knight and then say truthfully that he didn’t deserve it.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is not driven by pity. If Ledger was not that good, he would not have even been nominated. They have no time for meloncholy nonsense. Clint Eastwood was snubbed at this years awards for his movie Gran Torino, and Martin Scorcese has only received one award in all the years he has been directing.

Ledger was good; very good. I believe he deserved the Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, but it wasn’t to be. To see tears in the eyes of Hollywood heavyweights was not contrived. They genuinely and wholeheartedly believed that his performance deserved that Oscar, and were saddened that yet another up and coming great was cut down in his prime. It serves them no purpose to overdo the sympathy. Ledger is dead. He is not at the top of anyone’s ‘A’ List now. None of them will be invited to a party at Heath’s house.

Hollwood, for all its bullshit, and scheming, is a network of people who live on the left side of the social and political landscape. If there is a cause to fight for, it will be one of them who fights for it. If there is a right wing idiot to be canned, the Hollywood elite will can them. To them, Ledger was a young, incredibly gifted man who was very quickly mastering this craft called acting.

When I was growing up, my father used to say to me, “Aussie’s couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag”, and they couldn’t. We were, at one stage, embarrassingly bad actors. But with the likes of Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Mel Gibson, Toni Collette and Rachael Griffiths taking centre stage, we seem to have thrown that paper bag well and truly away. Heath Ledger was in that category. Hollywood has not only saluted him, but the hard work and determination that all Australian actors have put in to take it up to the plethora of fine American actors and hold their own with the likes of Freeman, Nicholson, Streep and Hoffman. Heath has made us proud in more ways than one.

Ledger’s daughter Matilda will grow up not knowing her father, like so many before her. But she will know just how talented he was, and will be able to display the tangible tributes his colleagues bestowed on him. Even though she won’t have any personal memories of her Dad, she will know that he rose to the heights of his career.

Don’t ever let anyone make you feel like you don’t deserve what you want.

(Heath Ledger, “10 Things I hate About You.”)

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Enjoy your day

This is the way gay activist and San Francisco politician Harvey Milk  began every public speech he ever made. Gay rights and gay equality was his mantra and the only way he was ever going to get those rights or gain that equality was to recruit every man woman and child to care about his cause.

When I started this blog, I said that the purpose of it was not to bore you with private details of my life ad nauseum and tell you what I did from day to day, and that included what movies I saw and how they affected me. I intend to stick to that, even though I am about to tell you about a movie I saw. However, it was not the movie that I want to talk about. It was what effect that movie will have on the countless millions of heterosexual people that go and see it, and especially the hundred or so that sat with me last night and watched it.

Milk is not a great film. It’s a good film, but not a great film. But it is an important film. We hear the words ‘gay rights’, and ‘equal rights for all’ bantied about, and we kind of take them for granted. We have seen over the years fights for freedom, whether that be the American War of Independence, or the various battles countries and their peoples have had over colonial rulers for a chance to be a nation in their own right. We have seen the fight women have had to just be able to vote, and the struggles women still have today to be free from oppression and be paid the same as everyone else. We know the gay community have fought hard to win some of the freedoms that they enjoy today, but never have we seen the struggles displayed so vividly as in the movie Milk.

Harvey Milk was a boy from New York, who, on reaching 40, realised that he had done nothing that he could be proud of. A closeted gay man, he decided to up and move to San Francisco and begin his kind of revolution. Just like in the ABC documentary Dancing In The Dark that was made to mark the 20th Anniversary of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Milk was a movie that screamed out to the heterosexual community how tough the struggle has been, and that gay and lesbian people are not ‘perverts’, deviants’, and other forms of degenerate beings, but are normal everyday people with the same ups and the same downs. So many times during the movie when something blatantly wrong was being said, the audience would breathe back quickly in shock or disgust. The sound of ‘tsk’ was audible. They saw the horror of it. They felt the pain. They were disgusted. It was wonderful to hear it, and to see people even crying at times. For the first time, some people saw just how bad and tough the struggle was. Hopefully it has changed them forever.

It has always amazed me how it is totally acceptable to see a man and a woman holding hands and window shopping, or having a quick kiss at a coffee shop. If gay men or lesbians do it, it is seen as perverted, sick ,or just plain wrong. Holding hands is holding hands. Kissing is kissing. It fascinates me how the connotation varies so much depending on who is involved.

I say Milk is not a great film, because it isn’t. I don’t think it is meant to be a great film. The main characters were real, and each and every one of them instigated many of the organisations that we know so well now e.g AIDS Quilt Project. Without these immensely courageous people, gay men would still be at the bottom of the pile in more ways than one. Sean Penn’s portrayal was nothing short of sensational. It was so good, I hardly recognised him. I tried to see the character he played in Mystic River which was a tough working class Irishmen, but for the life of me I couldn’t. Harvey Milk himself would have been proud.

I knew very little about Harvey Milk before I saw this film. But after seeing it, I believe that Harvey Milk deserves to go down as a great American. He was the true earthquake that rocked San Fransisco to its core, and he was well ahead of Barack Obama. Obama says ‘Yes We Can’. Harvey Milk not only said it, he made it happen.

Many people would have left that theatre last night with much to think about. Let’s hope they turn that thought into action and at least smile and feel proud when two men or two women nervously try and show affection for each other in public. You may even hear them whisper over their coffee cup, “I’m Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you.”

Enjoy your day

Over the last year, especially in the last few months, we have heard the phrases ‘unity government’, ‘government of national unity’ and the ever popular ‘bi-partisanship’, which also has attached to it the feel good mantra of ‘reaching across the aisle.’ Let’s just hope they all say excuse me as they reach in front of each other. One must remember one’s manners.

This week saw Barack Obama failing to get his third Republican on board, with the withdrawal of Senator Judd Greg as his Commerce Secretary pick. They just couldn’t see eye to eye. Funny about that. One is a Republican while the other is a Democrat. Should they see eye to eye? This week also saw the Kadima and Likud parties of Israel locked in a post election battle over who will lead the next Israeli government. Talk is now of the prospect of a party of national unity encompassing Tzipi Livni’s Kadima party, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and the ultra right nationalist party, Yisrael Beiteinu, led by Avigdor Leiberman. Now come on. That really is stretching the happy political family thing a little bit far to think all three leaders are going to sit down, shake hands and say,”Let’s get on with things.” It is more likely that Netanyahu and Leiberman will shake hands and form government. However, that will not be a happy marriage either, because even though Netanyahu is right wing, Leiberman is even more right, and has been quoted as saying he will not join a party in coalition unless all his demands are met and his platform is the platform of the next government. Oh yes, ‘bipartisanship’ is alive and well. (Insert wink here)

Then we move across to merry old Zimbabwe, where Morgan Tsvangirai has accepted and has been sworn in as Prime Minister in Robert Mugabe’s sham government. God bless Tsvangirai. He’s trying, but it just won’t work. No one trusts Mugabe as far as they can spit, and the post of Prime Minister has had to be dusted off and sent out to be dry cleaned, as it has not been in place since 1987, when Mugabe became President and abolished the office. Tsvangirai better watch his back, if the last person to work that closely with Mugabe is anything to go by. Canaan Banana was the first President of Zimbabwe when they achieved independence in 1980. He was later charged with sodomy. Most likely one of Mugabe’s corrupt ways of getting rid of someone he doesn’t like. But Tsvangirai knows only too well what a hideous dictator Mugabe is. He himself has been beaten at the hands of Mugabe’s henchmen, and even this position of PM comes with very little power and very little of anything. Unity government? Not a chance. All this is, is Tsvangirai keeping his foot in the door, and Mugabe turning around to the world with a big fake smile on his face and letting the world know that he is doing something, albeit a pathetic token gesture that will do nothing to benefit the people of his collapsed country.

Governments of national unity can work, but very rarely. Every political system in the world is based on two sides, the right wing and the left. You lean either way, or you swing both ways depending on the issue. To start touting governments with no real ’sides’ is to put an end to elections, an end to political competition, and an end to ego and powermongering. That my friends, will never happen.

There are certain times when ‘both sides of the aisle’ come together, that is true enough. But it isn’t any fun when we go to a dinner party and everyone agrees with everyone else. The political process is great sport when we can cheer for one team and boo for another. Having everyone jump into bed together like some policy driven orgy is nothing short of scary. We don’t want our politicians to all get along. That’s just not how it goes.

On major issues, such as Middle East peace, our disastrous world economy, and issues such as health care and education, we should all think as one. But other issues are what we enjoy fighting over, like we enjoy the tug of war with the dog on a Sunday afternoon. It’s fun, and it keeps us thinking and alive.

Barack Obama blew in on the winds of change, and I kind of think he thought that spirit of ‘Yes we can’ would sweep around the world. Well, with Netanyahu at the helm in Israel, ‘yes we can’ is going to very quickly become ‘no we won’t.’ Hillary Clinton knows Netanyahu all too well from the peace deal days of the late 1990’s, and she can see Middle East peace slide through her fingers before she even sits down at the table.

Breathe Hillary….repeat the mantra…”unity, unity, unity”. Feel better? Didn’t think you would.

Enjoy your day

During this most devastating time for those affected by the Victorian bushfires, those of us who were not affected think about what we can do. Money? Clothes? Essentials? What? We struggle to come up with clear thought or a way in which we can be truly useful and not hopelessly useless.

So many times over the last few days, I have heard of people donating more money than they can realistically afford, or giving more than they humanly can. That is the Australian spirit and I commend it. We help our fellow Australians when they are down. But we also have to look after ourselves and remember that we still have to keep food on our table, clothe our kids and pay our bills. It is hugely heroic to give everything you have to those who have nothing, but then all that will do is make you one of those that needs help, which in turn creates a vicious circle.

As I said to the children I teach,  if everyone gives just one dollar, then our school of 250 will raise a fairly decent amount. This is not a competition. This is about pulling together as a nation and helping. Making ourselves broke by donating hundreds of dollars we don’t have in cash and goods will not help you and it will not help those affected. I just think we need to say, “I can donate this much, maybe more later.” Please be sensible. We don’t want any more financial casualties to walk alongside those we are trying to be there for.

Also, one of the arsonists has been caught and arrested over the fires in Churchill, in the south-east of the state. I wrote a blog a while ago on the ways which we react to the pertpetrator of a crime when they are found. We want to inflict the worse punishment on them that we can. We want them dead. But what good will that do to the people of the most ravaged areas? Will it bring their loved ones back? Will it bring their homes back? No. All we can do, as civilised human beings, is lock that person up for the term of his or her natural life. They will cop enough shit in prison over this. They will get their punishment. And they will wish they were dead.

But this tragedy has not only brought to our attention the problem of arsonists in on our community, and on the great Australian spirit, it has also made us aware that recommendations that should have been put in place after the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983 have not been implemented. This tragedy could have been averted, or at the very least, not as severe as it has been. Premier of Victoria, John Brumby, has ordered a Royal Commission into the fires, but one of those was done back in the early ’80’s. Very few of the recommendations were ever followed through.

I have worked in a high fire risk area. I know something of the plans you have to have in place. People who live in those bushland communities know exactly what the risk is. A former colleague of mine sold her house in the Dandenong Ranges because the fear of bushfire was too big. It is stunningly beautiful, but it is also ferociously dangerous living there. Things happen for a reason, and maybe this was meant to be the wake up call for bush communities all around the world. There needs to be serious questions about building houses in densely wooded areas, the types of homes built, safety plans, and many other such issues. My heart goes out to everyone who lives in these communities, but they have to seriously take a look at how they can avoid this happening ever again. Remember, this fire broke all the rules of ‘fire etiquette’. It did not behave as it should have. As the climate changes dramatically, this is likely to happen more often than once every twenty or so years.

Please keep donating. Essentials such as toothpaste, toothbrushes, soap, shampoo, toilet paper, tissues are urgently needed. The people DO NOT need clothing or other items. Cash and essential items only. Please donate within your means. You are doing your bit, as am I.

Donations to www.redcross.org.au   Victorian Bushfire Appeal.

Enjoy your day

The latest bushfires in the Australian state of Victoria have been the worst natural disaster in Australia’s history. Close to 200 people are dead, and the death toll continues to rise. Entire communities no longer exist on the map and the prospect of rebuilding seems impossible and overwhelming. With all that sadness and tragedy, it gives the media a chance to score a big story.

Journalists have got the words down pat; ‘tragedy strikes’, ‘hell on earth’, ’state inferno’, just to name a few. Yes, they need to be there to cover these stories and let us know what is happening, but it is when they purposefully drive a couple to the ashes of their former home, and film every last bit of emotion, tears and heartbreak, that you have to wonder if they really care, or is this the biggest scoop they have seen all year.

If I hear another journalist ask someone who has lost everything, ” What are you feeling now?”, I will throw up. How do you think they feel? What answer do you possibly think you will get? It’s almost like they ask the question that will guarantee a tear or two, or if they are lucky, complete emotional breakdown.

These television presenters, news anchors and roving reporters come dressed in appropriate ‘gear’ for the event. In this case, we see them in Akubra hats, Drizabone coats, fireproof suits, as well as the ever so casual open necked shirt and jeans. They have to look like the locals. They can’t be accused of looking like a reporter or a member of the media. Looking like one of the locals gives them more of a chance to ‘connect’ with the locals, and with any luck, get inside stories of survival. The best story gets the best ratings, and when the next journalism awards presentation comes around, it may very well be their network that scores big for their coverage of the worst natural disaster ever to hit the country.

I have stopped watching the news now. The media sicken me, as they don’t really care. The only time I think it truly rocked them was when they were talking about a fellow colleague, former longtime Melbourne newsreader Brian Naylor, who perished in the fire in the small town of Kinglake along with his wife. It was only then did we see hard nosed, unemotional journalists truly realise the extent of this tragedy.

The worst thing about this is that half, yes half, of the fires were deliberately lit. It is unfathomable to think that someone could do this knowing what it would do. We all knew that last Saturday was going to be the hottest day in Victoria’s history; it tuned out to be the hottest day an Australian capital city has ever experienced at 46.4 degrees celsius. The hot northerly winds were vicious. To think that someone on Friday was preparing to set the state ablaze is one of the most horrific things I can think of. They are serial killers who have a compulsion, but their compulsion is fire. What should be their punishment? Send them to the Antarctic where they will never see fire or warmth of any kind again. Nothing will burn there. They love fire so much, deprive them of it for the rest of their lives. Torture them with pictures of ice, cold, and not a clue that warmth of any kind exists. Do that for the term of their natural lives.

There are many bushfire appeals happening all over the country. The Red Cross in Australia would be the best way to donate should you feel the need to. Whole communities have nothing, absolutely nothing. No schools, homes, hospitals, supermarkets…nothing. Anything you can give will help. Remember that there are fires still burning, and more tragedy will surely come of it.

Let us all pray that we never see this day repeated ever again.

Enjoy your day…donate now and at least make somebody’s day enjoyable too, at least for a little while.

On the 16th January 2009, a great man passed from this world. He was my father. I know that everyone thinks that their parent, whether that be a father or a mother, is the best. My Dad was no greater than any other loving hardworking Dad. He was just my Dad, and I thought he was great, simple as that.

Being a very private person, I don’t intend to walk you through my Dad’s life and my memories of him. You didn’t know him and it wouldn’t resonate with you. But over the last three weeks as I have farewelled my Dad and come to terms with the fact that he is no longer with us, I came to understand how incredibly complex grief is, and how one can never prepare for it.

As my family and I were working through the funeral arrangements, we were all struck by how clear our decisions were and how quickly they were made. We all knew Dad so well, that putting together a funeral service, whether or not to have flowers, and even the music, basically looked after itself. I cannot profess to having ‘felt my father with me’ in that ’standing right beside me’ way, but in a way I did. Every choice I made regarding his final farewell felt good deep in my gut, as if Dad was there approving.

We all grieve so differently, and it shows in how demonstrative or undemonstrative we are. As we were choosing Dad’s gravesite a few days before his burial, we noticed all the ostentatious European graves, mainly Greek, Italian, or Eastern European. Grief to these cultures is to be shouted from the rooftops, and it is expected that a headstone is one step away from a full on mausoleum. But we as a family put a simple notice in the newspaper, organised a simple Catholic Mass for Dad, and had a simple floral arrangement on his coffin. The ‘gut’ reaction guided us through. That ‘gut’ was Dad.

Another friend has just this week lost his grandmother at the grand age of 102, and he, his mother and his sister wrote obituaries in the paper. They were beautiful, and I know his grandmother would have loved seeing them, and been proud of both her daughter and her grandchildren.  For me, I would rather stand in a rainforest, look up to the heavens and say my thoughts directly to Dad. But that’s the beauty of individuality. Some people need to put a  poem or a meaningful dedication in the paper. It is how they grieve.

My grieving so far has consisted of tears, numbness, loss of reality, plain stupidity, complete mental and physical exhaustion, too much booze and way too many cigarettes. For others it’s anger, denial, hatred, leading to complete and utter breakdown. What I am saying is you have no idea how you are going to react until the time comes. You just hope and pray you can pull it together and keep it together until the last of the mourning visitors leave the house after the funeral. Luckily I did.

Thank you to all those who have offered your love and support to me and my family at this time. We couldn’t have done it without you. Dad is now where he always knew he would be when he died. Whether I believe the same thing, or you do is immaterial. I am happy in the knowledge that he believed it. Only he knows now whether it was true or not. I hope for his sake it is.

Enjoy your day

Darcy John O’Bree            25.3.1927 – 16.1.2009

Requiscat In Pace