Don't hate me because I'm beautiful
I admit it - we love Big Brother (the tv show). Not that we schedule our lives around it. But if the tv is on, and we're home, we're watching it. (I figure if I disclose the embarrassing bits now, they can't be used as blackmail later.) It's on everyday, at least once. And every so often, they have a late night version where they show all the times the housemates are running around nekkid. Our innocent, virginal, American eyes had their jaws on the floor to see this on tv. Meanwhile, they bleep out the word "ass" during the day. But at night? Born freeeeee, free as the wind blowwwwwws.......Also, we heard a newscaster use the phrase "rat-bag" -- as in, "Watch out, all you ratbag drivers..." or something to that effect. They want to start an H plate for "hoon" drivers. (They have L for learners and P for provisional if they've screwed up. So, basically if you drive like a jackass, speeding hundreds of kms faster than the people around you, drag race, and make a general annoyance of yourself, in addition to the ticket, you get branded with the scarlet letter - H. (It's not law yet...)
We started yesterday in a lovely movie theatre, for an early screening of "Darwin's Nightmare," a film at the Melbourne International Film Festival going on right now. (They dragged me out of bed at the ungdly hour of 10 am.) The theatre was enormous on the inside, with 3 large tiers of seats. It looked like the inside walls and ceiling were origami, kind of like a vietnamese temple turned inside out in structure. It was all angles and shapes and levels.
The film was a documentary about Lake Victoria in Tanzania, and a foreign fish that has taken over the lake, killing everything else, and now all the coastal towns are dependent on this fish for survival, which makes huge bucks for the EU that exports it, while the people in the area are poor and starving and want a war so that there would be jobs. The local officials see the fish as good and don't want to say anything that will stop the EU from buying. The Russian transport planes bring in weapons for the wars in Angola and Rwanda, before bringing out fish from Tanzania or grapes from the vineyards of South Africa. Line: "For Christmas, the children of Angola get guns, and the children of Europe get grapes." It uses some of the common visual tropes of poor, starving brown people who are all unhappy, and makes it look like all life is misery. While the negative parts are certianly true, and the film was well-done, Christine points out that the Tanzanians are some of the happiest people she's ever met, and and being poor is just a fact of life. They are still happy. It might be different in the lake region, but it's just one area that kinda got shut out of the film. There was a great shot of a bright red "Life is Great. Drink Coke." sign on a shut down store. But other than that, there were very few American indictments. So that's new.
Then last night we went to see Margaret Cho and laughed to exhaustion. "This is not the salad of my people." Go see her. Go. Now. Really. There were a couple of "Australian" jokes she put in that we were all like, uh, I don't get it... But with drinks allowed in the theatres (go aussies) and surrounded by all of melbourne's gay men, what could be bad, right? One of the surreal moments of the evening came after the show, when Eric, Christine, and I had found a cheapie Chinese food restaurant with a great balcony and view (all the downtown streets were still full of people)--- and Eric starts singing along to the Chinese songs. Eric doesn't speak Chinese. Nor did he know the songs. But he sang along very well, giving it the ol' Eagle Scout try. And somehow we ended up with a series of photos with him as the Evil Genius, and me as his cuddle bitch. Don't ask; we're not sure either.
The class I'm auditing starts Tuesday afternoon - something theatre and community. not sure, but it sounded good when I was offered the audit.
Rough life. Oh, and on that topic, we'll be taking off for the northeast coast for about a month, starting probably at the end of november, so for all y'all thinking about hopping down here... We'll be starting in Brisbane, driving up the coast, stopping in the Whitsunday Islands ( http://www.whitsundaytourism.com/ ) for our jaunt around the islands on the sailboat/yacht for a few days, then making our way up to Cairns for some more scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef and some adventure travel with the animals and rainforests there, then hopping over to Fiji, which is just to the north, then spending days and days, just laying on beaches. Eventually, we might find a flight back from Fiji to Melbourne. You may start hating us now.
posted by Halley @ 11:13 PM
3 Comments:
Oooooo, I hate you already! Cho, gay Melbourne boys, and original documentaries?!?!? That being said, I do think that just because Tanzanians accept being poor doesn't mean that they don't want better - kinda like the way poor black folk of the '20s were subjected to Jim Crow South but knew and wanted out - which led to the amazing Harlem Renaissance and other movements north.
yes, I agree with what you're saying. I suppose what I was trying to say (but didn't express well) was that a lot of people there are really happy. Really. They don't confuse money with happiness, and don't see there happiness (or lack thereof) as related to money to the same extent that many "developed" western nations do. There are also plenty of people there who see the sort of American rushrushrush and all the crap that goes with it and ask, why would anyone want that? :)
That's of course not to say that people who are truly suffering don't want to be out of those bad situations. Of course not. My point basically was the way that a lot of films just show poor, sad, Africans who "we" should feel bad for. y'know? (We can try to define "we" another time...) :)
(that's also not to say there aren't greedy, unhappy people in Tanzania, too, just like anywhere...)
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