Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
The Old Stoic’s Lethargy
POEM FOR THE YEAR (with apologies to W. H. Auden) This earth in 2023 Is not the planet fit for me, A world, I need, to give me hope Opposed to the end of a rope. *** My Eden landscapes and their climes Are great constructs from rational times, When reason meant, at least, induction, Not dogma posed as deduction. *** The plastic bags we gather to be Transformed as if by alchemy: I chose to send them whence they came, The ground, from fossil fuels by name. *** I’m now required to approve Blighted wind farms that rarely move:…
Continue Reading →Amsterdam
(Directed by David O. Russell) (2022) The judgment of eminent film critic David Stratton is, we suspect, affected by seeing everything. TVC perhaps suffers from the reverse circumstance: we don’t see very many films, because life is too short. We do try to guard against the impulse to stick to films we’ve already seen, and remind ourselves that it was ever the case that 90% of films made are rubbish. It is just that now the rubbish is even more nauseating in its freighted agitprop, the production quotas and standards that would make the Hays Office blanch (in a different…
Continue Reading →Breaking History
By Jared Kushner (2022) Kushner is no prose stylist. But this tome is a valuable guide to the tour-of-duty of an outsider in a White House full of outsiders. It shows how a transactional background with amateur oversight, ego, and the Art of the Deal, can actually accomplish something in the Deep Swamp that is American federal executive governance. Take, for example, the Abraham Accords. The conventional wisdom, espoused by the likes of the never-right-but-never-in-doubt John Kerry, was that a Palestinian solution was a necessary pre-cursor to improvement of general Arab-Israeli relations. Yet the Trump administration, at Kushner’s suggestion, flipped…
Continue Reading →Exodus to Labor
And the jealous body politic that had cast upon the Chosen the power, the glory, and the light, did remind itself of those commandments it had required the Chosen to keep…and St. Albo did gather up those fragments and shore them against our ruins, taking a vow of poverty and darkness for ‘Astraya.‘ THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME THOU SHALT NOT MAKE UNTO THEE ANY GRAVEN IMAGE THOU SHALT NOT TAKE OUR NAME IN VAIN REMEMBER THE HOLY DAY HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER THOU SHALT NOT KILL THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY THOU SHALT NOT…
Continue Reading →The Comedians
Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 19 November 2022 Comedy is hard. Stand-up comedy is very hard, and should be left to stand-up comedians. Alas, Mick Molloy, Sam Pang and Marty Sheargold are stand-up comedians like Ricky Gervais is a stand-up comedian: getting by, but not demonstrating a core skill. These three are well known for their amusing work on TV (‘The Front Bar’, ‘Have You Been Paying Attention?,’ ‘Fisk’) and radio. They are all likeable and funny, but somehow, one didn’t take away anything particularly witty or memorable: it seemed a parody of what was promised to be “a night (in…
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