Tintintabulation

..Steven
Spielberg and Peter Jackson. I think it’s my first ‘motion capture’
movie on the big screen, (although I’ve seen bits of Beowulf on
Foxtel) and, while it’s impressively realistic in capturing movement accurately,
it falls a bit flat in nearly every other respect.
Having said that, the backgrounds are stupendously rich and detailed and the
sea in all its moods is impeccably rendered, and the action scenes, when they
eventually arrive, are quite fun too, but still the question lingers as to why
they didn’t opt for either real actors or a real cartoon. Perhaps ‘motion
capture’ has a future and we’re in the boring transitional stage,
but I reckon the sequel must be in doubt, even at this early stage.
Anyway, there’s a Tintin-inspired cartoon in the New
Yorker this week that touches on something banal and universal. The caption
reads ‘It’s no fun wearing my Tintin shirt now that the masses know
who he is.’ Most T-shirt messages are either self-serving or so lame you
unconsciously disown them as you put them on, but occasionally when you slip
on your Dave Matthews or Ross Ryan T-shirt you feel like some sort of proselytising
evangelist and furtively look for hints of approval from likely-looking fellow
aesthetes on the streets.
(Actually, I’m not serious when I say Dave Matthews. Dick is a Dave Matthews
fan, but despite, or even because of his enthusiasm for the band I’ve
not got into it/him/them – and so naturally I don’t own a Dave Matthews
T-shirt. I did used to own a Ross Ryan T-shirt though).

I tuned in to Radio National the other day and heard some of a conversation
recorded at the Brisbane Writers Festival for Paul Barclay’s Summer
Talks with one Wade
Davis, a Canadian ethnographer, anthropologist, ethnobotanist, filmmaker,
photographer and all round wunderkind. Actually, describing it as
a ‘conversation’ is massively understating it. Propelled by his
prodigious enthusiasm, the words simply gush out of Wade Davis, who, despite
his impressive arsenal of qualifications prefers to describe himself as a
‘story-teller who moves broadly around the world’. I used to read
Colin Wilson in the ‘60s (The Outsider) and Wade Davis reminds
me a little of him, although I may be doing him a disservice especially given
that Mr Wilson is so out of favour these days.
I didn’t mention it in the gig report, but Spectrum’s recent trip
to the Alice was extremely confronting and quite depressing on one level.
I think it’s fair to say that most non-indigenous Australians are uneasily
aware that there’s an ongoing racial issue, but because it’s so
localised, and usually localised somewhere else, it’s easy to forget
about and even imagine that it’s not our collective problem.
With the clarity of vision afforded to an outsider, Wade Davis was able to
shed some light, for me at least, on some of the cultural differences from
an indigenous perspective and when it all started – i.e. the
moment Europeans set foot in Australia.
‘(England’s) ethos was progress, optimism, self-improvement..
..and so when the British saw the aboriginal people of Australia, they saw
people that looked strange to them (and) had material technology that was
really simple. But what really offended the British was that the aboriginal
civilisation of Australia had no interest in self-improvement.’
‘There were 10.000 clan territories.. ..but what linked all of Australia
was a single idea and that was of The Dreaming. And The Dreaming wasn’t
a dream. It was the perpetual state of reality in which past, present and
future were all one and the same. In not one of the 670 dialects and languages
of this continent was there a word for past, present or future; there was
not a word for time..’
‘So how do you create a cult of progress in a world that hasn’t
taken shape yet? The Dreaming called for stasis, constancy, and the entire
purpose of life was not to improve on anything, but rather do the ritual gestures
necessary to keep the earth exactly as it was at the time of the Rainbow Serpent.’
The sound of cultures colliding is deafening in Alice Springs. Daryl thought
the Alice, with all its razor wire fences, reminiscent of South Africa. If
the situation here was the same as South Africa and the racial balance reversed,
there might be a great deal more urgency to try and remedy the cultural impasse.

If you don’t believe me, I urge you to go and have a look. Every Australian
should.