Famous People

This is a picture by Margaret Olley, one of Sydney's best known and most beloved painters. She has been famous in Australia since 1949, when a portrait of her as a young woman won the Archibald Prize, the country's leading award for portrait painting. When it comes to dates, everything about Margaret is astonishing. She proudly declares, for instance, that she gave up drinking in 1959 and attributes her success to having stayed off the booze ever since. She is not shy about letting everyone know that she attributes her success or at least her sobriety to her involvement in a twelve-step program. While programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous repeatedly claim that anonymity is one of their spiritual corner stones; some of their more famous converts see it as a positive that they can openly parade themselves as examples of recovered alcoholics, thereby providing hope to anyone out there still struggling with the demon drink. Anthony Hopkins - who I last saw in that very endearing film The World's Fastest Indian - is another example. There are so many little giveaways in that movie; as he walks into a bar in America where everyone is sodden with the drink and he proudly declares that he doesn't drink; to the AA pamphlet he throws into his luggage when he is packing to leave New Zealand for his land speed attempt.

One of the advantages of working in the media is meeting famous people; and over time I set out determinedly to meet them. Margaret Olley, who I had never met, put in an appearance when the NSW Art Gallery decided to use her donation of half a million dollar's worth of paintings and drawings - including by Picasso and Cezanne - as an opportunity for a bit of publicity. Now 83 years old, one of the most endearing things about her is her sheer eccentric normality. While the media queued to talk to her and arts writers asked pompous questions about what she thought about this and that, she wanted to know why they couldn't ask her these questions outside so she could have a cigarette. After it was all over I went outside and had one with her; although I keep trying to stay off them I haven't been very successful lately.

I was feeling quite thought disordered that day; not having been able to sleep the previous night, not being an arts writer and not actually knowing much about Australian art. Finally, as I struggled to form questions while she cheerfully inhaled, she patted me on the knee and said: you're struggling, aren't you dear? Well yes, I was. She was completely right, very perceptive. She had that way of looking into you, not at you, and if you're not feeling 100 per cent and are trying to hide it, it can be very unsettling. These old birds who have seen everything, done everything; viewed humanity at its most deceptive, most craven, most dishonest. I left with nothing but admiration.

But better than long off days in the 1980s when I used to do author interviews in London, interviews which were always easy to sell back in Australia. I interviewed many of the giants of world literature, including Paul Bowles in Tangiers, Dirk Bogarde, Joseph Heller; and one I particularly remember, Anthony Burgess.

Being from Australia and low down on the pecking order, the PR woman had slotted me in at 9.30 in the morning - almost nobody genuinely wants to be interviewed at that hour - and I was just the first in a long day of interviews for his recent book on the world's top 100 novels and another of his pointless literary exercises on the ghost of Shakespeare. Picking the world's best novels - a list I had once fantasised about joining - was a controversial exercise designed to promote debate, and I was keen to meet him; having been a fan of Earthly Powers and other works of the period. But also just attracted by the fame of the name. Skeptical, too, of his enormous output. How could anyone be genuinely sincere or genuinely creative over so many hundreds of thousands of words? It was in an upmarket hotel and I had been up all night gallivanting around, an expat in London. I had one of those massive hangovers; pain of historic proportions, alcohol seeping out of the pores; disheveled and sad, a shambolic future written large in the present. We sat in the upmarket hotel's cafe and I spewed forth my ordinary questions over the coffee. He answered as I struggled for some form of coherence; some semblance of reason and normality. He answered; in his entirely professional manner; as the archetypal PR woman sat nearby, watching. And I remember, as I left after my half hour session; I remember their look as I left, disheveled and out of place amidst all that style; and they put their heads together, making some sort of derisory comment as I left, shaking their heads. Well the story was published, in The Bulletin from memory, and I was paid, although money was always an issue for a freelancer, arriving often months later; but it was just that embarrassing moment, that collusion, between the author and the PR woman as I exited that I remember; a complete feeling of hopelessness in a bizarre world. It would be many hours that day, indeed many years really, before I was to feel any great sense of normality, when confidence and sobriety would restore me to sanity.



NEWS:

Here, in largely peaceful Australia, images of war torn Lebanon dominate the TV screens. The sight of thousands of Lebanese Australians trying to flee the country provoke little sympathy in Australia, where most people wonder how come all these people with dual passports can happily live in Lebanon on welfare payments from Australian, living like kings off the sweat of the grotesquely overtaxed Australian workforce - and then claim to be Australian when it suits them.

ABC:

Lebanon PM appeals for urgent aid, cease-fire efforts
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora has called on the international community to send urgent humanitarian aid and to work for a cease-fire, rather than stand by and watch Lebanon "torn to shreds".
"I call upon you to respond immediately without reservation or hesitation to this appeal for an immediate cease-fire and provide urgent international humanitarian assistance to our war-stricken country," he said.
"The country has been torn to shreds. Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted on us?
"Is this what the international community calls self-defence?" he said, referring to US and British statements of support for the Jewish state's right to respond to the capture of two soldiers and the rocketing of northern Israel.
"The toll in terms of human life has reached tragic proportions: over 1,000 injured and 300 killed so far."
He also warned that "over half a million people have been displaced; in some areas, the hospitals have been crippled ... There are shortages of food and medical supplies."
"You want to support the government of Lebanon? Let me tell you ... no government can survive on the ruins of a nation.
"I hope you will not let us down. We, the Lebanese, want life."

*

With more than 550 dead from the latest Indonesian tsunami, at any other time this would be major major news. This time around, with the pictures of the bombings in Lebanon unsettling everybody, another few hundred dead hardly seems to be impacting at all:

ABC:

Earthquake shakes buildings in Indonesian capital
Tall buildings swayed as an earthquake struck the Indonesian capital and nearby parts of Java island, sowing fear two days after an undersea quake triggered a tsunami on the southern coast, witnesses said.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage, but people in several areas fled from office buildings and homes.
The quake's strength was 6.2 at its epicentre in the Indian Ocean off the south-western tip of Java, Fauzi, an official at the national earthquake centre, told Reuters.
A quake of 7.7 magnitude on Monday off the southern Java coast triggered a tsunami that killed at least 550 people.
Asked on Indonesian news radio Elshinta whether the quake on Wednesday could cause a tsunami, Fauzi said: "If there is a tsunami it won't be big."
Indonesia's 17,000 islands sprawl along a belt of intense volcanic and seismic activity, part of what is called the "Pacific Ring of Fire", and is prone to frequent earthquakes.
-Reuters

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1042593

Gagged bloggers fume at ban

NEW DELHI: Having been deprived of their personal space in cyberspace by a government ban on blogs related to Mumbai terror attacks, netizens have slammed the internet censorship through messages expressing outrage in other web forums.
"Government has really gone crazy... is Blogspot the only medium for sending messages? The Internet is flooded with free and paid services... (to carry hate messages)," said blogger Gurpreet Singh Modi, reacting to the ban on 18 websites in a bid to check hate messages following the July 11 blasts.
While messages expressing disgust at the ban flooded almost all general blog sites, some sites that were banned moved to other servers under a different name.
'Mumbaihelp', one of the sites on which the government pulled the plug, moved to a 'Wiki' server under the name mumbaihelp.jot.com.
Bloggers logged on to the new homepage to check if the service was still working fine and after reassuring themselves, started exchanging comments.
Elsewhere on the web, messages spewed pure hatred against the decision-makers with some netizens comparing India with China when it comes to clipping civil rights.
"The government has recently taken a page right out of the Chinese playbook - Internet censorship," an anonymous blogger said in a message on a tech blog.