the curious incident of the peel in the night-time

does vcat only sit every now and then? it seems like lately we've seen a spate of decisions from them and i wondered if they save up cases and see them all at once every few months? never mind. i'm thinking about the vcat decision to uphold the right of the peel to refuse entry to heterosexuals and lesbians and i'm in a right state.

what do you think? my thinking brain says yes. i can see the argument that gay men shouldn't feel threatened or menaced or even objectified in what should be a safe space. i've been at gay bars when the hens and bucks have arrived. i've seen some very bad behaviour from contemptuous and homophobic fuckwits in gay clubs. there's also the issue of straight guys being horrified at being chatted up in gay venues [um...hello?] and sometimes reacting violently. this is all fucked. i think alot of this "reverse discrimination" bleating is bullshit. as with arguments about indigenous funding or affirmative action, i suspect that the straight white male doth protest too much. my biggest concern about this ban is not its impact on the straight men who are kept out but rather what it means for the gay men who are sequestered in this way [though i think that the ban on lesbians is inexplicable and evidence of a misogynistic streak in the gay male community...but that's another story].

you see my instinct says no to the peel. no to segregation and no to accepting that gay men need to wall themselves off from the prejudice of society. wasn't that the point of gay liberation? and shouldn't the solution involve committing to more cultural change? i feel like it's regressive to treat homophobia by keeping homosexuality behind closed doors. and won't the gay community suffer too? i've met some gay men who have their heads so far up their arses about women and "breeders" that it's hard to be sympathetic to their claims of marginalisation. these guys need to hang out with some people other than gay men. i know i'm veering dangerously close to 'why can't we all just get along?' territory but i think the only way to break down hostility is through education and exposure.

in the meantime, while that structural change is being further pursued, can't the peel just refuse entry to anyone falling into the category of fucking idiot? after all, there thousands of other venues catering to fucking idiots, aren't there?

brush with fame

do you think it was the real thetis bernard who commented on the last post? if it was, we have been touched by an angel [or rather the third lesbian vampire hottie].

peeling back the layers

as a rule, i don't blog the onion. it's too tempting to link it every week, and i can't tell anymore if i'm chortling away out of habit or if it's really funny.

but after snorting loudly at this little gem, i decided to make an exception.

message from my younger self

my birthday is on the milk.

idiocy...of all shades

it's been a frustrating week. on tuesday and wednesday, i wrote lovely versions of the same post, only to have them eaten by what i thought was blogger/interwebs gremlins. yesterday, i couldn't bear to post after reading audrey's. then my personal i.t. consultant informed me last night that my computer was crashing because the cable was loose. bah.

BUT...today we can celebrate a few things in public life. good riddance to bad rubbish, as covered here by the trickster. so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye...boner. and, um, YEAH!

have a lovely weekend.

douze points

this past weekend was a whirligig of light and colour. the party was a highly charged affair, involving a mostly narrow interpretation of the theme [ie. sleazy - why are people so unimaginative? or is it that they can't resist dabbling in the heterosexual porn aesthetic?], rampant substance abuse, and five visits from the police. fortunately, the police were there to confiscate noise-making equipment and not conduct searches, which kept the arrests to a minimum. weird night.

saturday saw us served an absolutely superb meal at cafe bedda* in northcote, before dashing off to the late showing of the history boys. both delightful, but neither so much as our charming and loquacious companion.

and last night, we laughed, we cried, we booed and hissed during the finale of...eurovision 2007. there were a few discernible trends in evidence - cummerbunds [on men and women], military-esque medals pinned to chests [of both men and women], and the colour red dominated [especially during a particularly memorable number involving fake blood spurting from the chest of a wounded balladeer]. of course, we dug the dirt, uncovering the dirt robbie williams [turkey, accompanied by dirt shakiras], enrique [armenia], girls aloud [russia], evanescence [every second country], michael buble [germany], justin hawkins [sweden], ricky martin [greece], and kd lang [serbia]. though mel pointed out that serbia was more like kd lang as played by chris lilley...







my sentimental favourite of the night was sweden, and the wooden spoon went to ireland, when it quite clearly should've been used to smack some sense into the british. as we sat horrified and stunned at the sheer awfulness of their entry, bonnie turned to me and asked "how do they manage to get it so wrong every year?".







well, they're called scooch for a start. and the soft-porn-inspired slutty-air-hostess routine didn't help. i'd also venture that a song called "flying the flag" [and then literally doing it] would hurt your chances. i'd imagine that such jingoistic nationalism would be unpopular in a contest full of countries that pretty much hate your guts. just a thought.



my two commentators for the night were terry wogan and this lovely man, the second of which would be very upset if i didn't leave you with this - ukraine wuz robbed.




*mere words will do no justice to the quality of the food here. you must try it for yourself.

tonight's the night

the ghetto of hate becomes the ghetto of love tonight, as sexy fever hits town. i will be dressed as a [tenuously] feminist icon [i wonder who it could be?] and my dear husband is threatening to come as a non-human cast member of star wars. we'll celebrate the undisputed sexiness of the baby doc and his beau, before they jet off to the french riviera tomorrow.







...







no, i'm not kidding.







they are going to cannes.







that is, the ACTUAL FILM FESTIVAL.*







i take small comfort in imagining them on a long-haul flight in the aftermath of sexy party.







and they say the gays have got it tough...








*after which they will jaunt around southern france and northern spain. you know, just for kicks.

achtung

always the germans with their cannibalism and their fascism and their self-decapitation.

hallowed halls

i've been thinking lately that universities are like little countries. with all the fussing and cussing over the melbourne model, i'm reminded that while they seek to emulate the profit-margins of corporations, they are still something more. like a little country, a university has levels of government, laws, customs, cultural clashes/unions/diversity, entry requirements, values [tests], sovereignty, and lots of little people, going about their business, not paying attention to much beyond the end of their noses.


people might want them to be businesses, but they're mostly unwilling to let go of the "public" idea. "the public" still has a lot to say about how universities should operate, despite accommodating themselves to the idea of fees. i feel like these ideas are in tension. if unis are a business, then we reconcile ourselves to the fact that corporations [while we wish otherwise] have no responsibility to the public good. if they're more than that, if they're crucial to the development of better societies, intellectual capital, liberal democracy, then they need to be above the fray of the market. they need proper funding to ensure academic freedom and more equitable access.


i've often railed about universities being turned into pre-vocational training units. i reckon that business should be "taught" in commercial colleges, along with hospitality, marketing and other vocations that used to be learned 'on the job'. why should precious university funding [hence public money] be spent on training that used to be the responsibility of industry? there's also a good argument for teaching and nursing to be taught in separate colleges as well [as in nz, where you head there after undergrad]. maybe the academy is buckling under the weight of education that it shouldn't/needn't offer? for instance, should creative writing be taught at uni? can it?


what do you think? is education a commodity? i think some kinds are.

le sigh

je suis désolé.

three things

things have been a little glum round here of late, so i thought i'd share three things that i'm loving right now.





northern exposure: seriously, maggie and joel are adorable. but the beautiful thing about such a tight ensemble cast is that i can never decide who is my favourite. sometimes it's ruth-ann, the salty old mama, or shelly, the unknowingly [but unendingly] wise sexbomb, but holling and maurice's man-love tickles me too. chris and ed make me smile inside and marilyn is a hoot. i've often thought that seachange owes a lot to cicely, alaska. anyway, rent it. it's good.







vanity fair - the 2nd green issue: i used this to teach a class today. we were covering the social movements of the sixties [the wimmin, the gays, the ethnics etc] and i posited that, of the major campaigns, the environmental movement was in the best shape today.* when you've got leonardo dicaprio on the cover of vanity fair with knut the polar bear, i'd say it's part of the zeitgeist. thanks al. anyway, read it. it's good.







the lives of others: a quietly explosive film set in [when else?] 1984, East Berlin, GDR. it observes the stasi observing others and in doing so, tallies some of the human cost of the soviet experiment. showing restraint, the film does not depict the stasi as violent killers or standover men, rather we see the cold efficiency of surveillance; its effect on human relationships, mental stability, trust. i thought about orwell obviously, but mostly about burmese days - like colonialism, communism was as corrosive to the oppressor as the oppressed. anyway, see it. it's good.


ah, i feel so much better. it's awfully twee but i find that no matter how down i am, i can always think of three things.



*this was also to highlight the parlous state of feminism, race relations, and the general backlash against political correctness.