Ulalume
The Course of Empire
Met, NYC, April 2018 Thomas Cole’s famous 5-painting warning against hubris (1833-1836) becomes ever more relevant: The Savage State (there is a worse fate); Arcadia (post-Rousseau, not the way to go); Consummation of Empire (tipping point, trip wire); Destruction (build and lose escutcheon); Desolation (it comes to every nation). Thomas Cole was not a fun guy, but he knew a thing or two about declination, like Spengler…
Continue Reading →“My Job is My Number One Priority”
Actually, to be fair, the Premier didn’t say that – his campaign ad launch stated SA jobs were his number-one priority. We guess that’s right. Only – do you feel better off than you did 16 years ago, when a ‘paedophile-hunter’ and self-confessed murderer decided, after having ‘searched his soul,’ to throw the keys of government to the Labor party? They tinkered with the market and feather-bedded it to death. They sand-bagged to weak levies till we all are fit to drown. Now this, “jobs, jobs jobs” after 16 years of “mass misery, mass tedium, mass impotence, mass lifelessness…Cathedrals to…
Continue Reading →Shame
On 13 February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made the following statement in the House of Representatives, Canberra: “I move: That today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations—this blemished chapter in our nation’s history. The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies…
Continue Reading →Hylas and the Nymphs – BBQ Stopper
The Manchester Art Gallery has recently removed the superb John William Waterhouse painting, Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) from display. Depicting a moment from the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, when Hylas, sent to fetch water for the crew, stared into a pool of limpid water and beheld a gathering of lovely nymphs, never to be seen again, its great fusion of neo-classical romanticism is deemed inappropriate for its pandering to “Victorian fantasy” and the canvas requires extensive indoctrination and tuition before it can ever return, hopefully “contextualised quite differently.” Ah yes, let us by all means mock the…
Continue Reading →Maybe we should Bring Back the Noose?
Capital Punishment On 3 February 1967, serial robber Ronald Ryan, convicted of the felony murder of a gaol warder at Pentridge Prison, was hanged in Victoria. 50 years after Ryan, the last man in Australia to swing, new calls for abolition of the death penalty abound. Some 141 countries have either abolished or suspended indefinitely the penalty, or limit it to war crimes, the remaining 57 still applying it to serious crimes. 10 October 2017 was the 15th “World Day Against the Death Penalty.” (In Reversal of Fortune, the Alan Dershowitz character says of the death penalty, “that’s no penalty,…
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