Showing all posts about legacy
Gilligan’s Island conspiracy theory alternative synopsis
18 April 2008
The story about a seemingly random group of people setting off together on a three-hour cruise somewhere around the Hawaiian Islands, has, if you’ll excuse the pun, never held much water.
It’s quite clear some people expected the “cruise” to last a little longer than three hours.
First there’s Ginger, the movie star, who was carrying more luggage than any sane person would take on a three-year voyage.
Then there’s Mr Howell, the millionaire, and his brief case stuffed with “thousand dollar bills”. And what about the professor and his stash of scientific paraphernalia?
What possible utility could any of this have had during what was meant to be a three-hour cruise?
Gilligan’s Island fan Adam-Troy Castro has written an interesting dissection of the (still) popular TV show, and he may have unearthed the actual purpose of the “three-hour cruise”.
Mr Howell, rather than Gilligan, was in fact the pivotal player here.
One of the glaring questions that’s bothered us for a quarter of a century is: Since the snobbish Howell can presumably afford to buy his own yachts, why would he be interested in a “three-hour tour” aboard a dinky little charter vessel owned by two ex-navy men? And why would he take along a briefcase filled with thousand dollar bills, when one of the perks associated with great wealth is unlimited credit?
To be shipwrecked on an (apparently) unchartered and unknown island, means the Minnow, the cruise boat, had to be a long way from the main group of Hawaiian Islands, so what had they gone out to look at in the first place?
Certainly not the local reefs, since there’s no scuba equipment aboard. And certainly not the local shoreline, since when the weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was not only unable to make it to port, but was blown outside Hawaiian territory. It must have been an unusual distance from shore to begin with. And still, no normal tourist site, let alone one miles from shore, can possibly explain the amount of money Howell brought with him.
It’s obvious something incredibly below board was planned, and cash stashes and superfluous scientific equipment, don’t really leave too much to the imagination.
Howell chartered the Minnow to make a multi-million-dollar drug buy. He’d paid off Gilligan, and the Skipper too. He’d brought along the necessary cash. He even brought along an extensive wardrobe, just in case the coast guard showed up and he had to leave U.S. territory in a hurry. And just to make sure he wasn’t ripped off, he brought along an expert to evaluate the merchandise he was getting.
So who was in cahoots with who though? Apart from Mary Anne, it seems everyone else was in on the drug buy.
Mary Anne appeared to be a bona fide tourist intent on some sightseeing, and the “gang” felt that not allowing her to board the Minnow, which to all intents and purposes was a tour vessel, would have looked suspicious.
Mary Anne, a Kansas farm girl … had won a Hawaiian vacation in a contest. Howell and his cronies must have let her on board because failing to do so would have raised undue suspicion among harbor authorities; they probably intended to dump her body at sea.
In a twist to proceedings however, Mary Anne was not exactly who she appeared to be either…
Vacations given away in contests are always for two people, not one! And Mary Anne, who claimed to have a fiance back home, had no real reason to be travelling alone. Therefore, she must have been maintaining a false identity as well – and since everybody else on the Minnow was frantically putting on a show for her benefit, she must have been putting on a show for theirs. The conclusion is inescapable. Mary Anne was a Fed.
The producers of Gilligan’s Island didn’t follow through with the planned fourth series, thus leaving the story… unresolved. Therefore the alternative synopsis advanced by Mr Castro may be quite plausible.
Originally published Friday 18 April 2008.
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Del Kathryn Barton wins Archibald Prize 2008
7 March 2008
Sydney based Australian artist Del Kathryn Barton has been named winner of the 2008 Archibald Prize, with a self-portrait featuring her children: You are what is most beautiful about me, a self-portrait with Kell and Arella.
Born in Sydney in 1972, Barton has a Bachelor of Fine Art from the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW, where she taught for three years until 2003. She has had regular solo exhibitions since 2000 and has participated in national and international group shows including the Helen Lempiere Travelling Art Scholarship, the Blake Prize for Religious Art and the Sulman Prize. She was a finalist in the 2007 Dobell Prize for Drawing.
The Archibald Prize Exhibition opens to the public tomorrow, Friday 8 March 2008, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney.
Update: for those interested, the portrait measures 180 centimetres (cm) wide x 280 cm high, and as far as I can tell the work is a combination of illustration and painting.
Originally published Friday 7 March 2008.
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Archibald Prize, art, Australian art, Del Kathryn Barton, legacy
The Aussie Bloggers Forum launches
1 January 2008
A brand new discussion forum for Australian bloggers — which I was invited to help setup — goes into soft launch (I hope: this is the timestamp speaking again…) today: Aussie Bloggers Forum (update: no longer online).
Of course it’s not just for Australians, and everyone, where ever you are, is welcome.
So whether blogging is your major or minor, head along and say hello, network, and strut your stuff.
How’s that for an easy, not too demanding way, to spend New Year’s Day?
Originally published Tuesday 1 January 2008.
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Grow your DVD movie collection each time you visit the supermarket
9 December 2007
Going to the supermarket is increasingly becoming a one-stop-shopping experience. In addition to sourcing groceries, some stores now offer not-half bad coffee, which you can enjoy as you pace the aisles. And for movie fans, a visit to the supermarket is only going to get better, with news that DVD vending machines are being rolled out across Australia:
Instant DVD has installed vending machines in 12 supermarkets throughout Melbourne and Sydney and intends to expand to 500 throughout the country, creating yet more competition for the traditional video shop.
The hire prices are too bad either, and the “late fee” for not returning the title by the due date may not — depending how much you like the film in question — be so terrible either:
All movies cost $2.99 a night to hire and can be returned to any of the service’s vending machines. If you fail to return a movie within two weeks its price is charged to your credit card and it becomes yours to keep.
I’m not really up on the state-of-play when it comes to late fines on hire movies, since returning hires is about the only thing I actually do promptly, but it seems to me someone who’s a little more casual in this regard could end up with quite an impressive DVD collection.
If nothing else it makes for a good way to try before you buy. If you like the movie enough simply keep it, and two weeks later it’s yours. I wonder how the price of the “to keep” hires compares with those on weekly special at the supermarket though?
Originally published Sunday 9 December 2007, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
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The changing political landscape in Australia, and the world
30 November 2007
The defeat of the Liberal/National coalition Government in last Saturday’s federal election in Australia could herald an upheaval in the political landscape, not only locally, but globally, says Steve Biddulph, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald:
We are so conditioned to the idea that two main parties define politics, we even call them left and right as if they were parts of our body. But parties spring up in response to the primary tensions in a certain time and place. In the 20th century that polarisation was capital versus labour.
A century earlier, before even the idea of power among the working poor, politics was aristocrats versus tradesmen, the growing middle class of shopkeepers and artisans that formed the basis of the Tories.
It’s no longer the workers against the bosses though.
The issue of the future, coming down on us now like a steam train, is of course the environment, the double hammer blows of climate change and peak oil. Energy, weather and human misery are the factors that will define our lives for decades to come. You can cancel your newspaper, those are the only four words you need to know.
But that’s not the end of it.
For two years now the best predictions have been that the subprime meltdown would act as merely the detonator of a much larger explosive charge created long ago by US consumer debt, concealed by Chinese and Arab investment in keeping that great hungry maw that is America sucking in what it could not begin to pay for.
The avalanche-like fall of US house prices will be closely followed by the same in linked economies worldwide, and presage a harsh and very different world than the one we have lived in.
In a nutshell then:
In short, the party is over. We are a civilisation in collapse.
Earlier this year, former Labor leader, Kim Beazley, who incidentally has just been appointed professor of politics and international relations at the University of Western Australia, predicted the party that lost last weekend’s federal election faced political oblivion in Australia.
“If the Labor Party is not able to get in there and change [the current] industrial laws, the whole character of working Australia will change substantially, and to the Labor Party’s detriment.”
The Liberal party’s position being equally as serious.
If Mr Howard lost, “there is a serious question mark over the future of the Liberal Party”. Labor would win the NSW election in March and Mr Howard would remain the only governing Liberal. “After some years of Labor state governments, Liberal oppositions are still struggling to get a third of the seats in state parliaments.”
Mr Beazley noted the state Liberal branches were already in poor shape and if Mr Howard lost the election, the Liberals would not govern anywhere.
The next few years stand to keep political observers on their toes.
Originally published Friday 30 November 2007.
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A late evening visit to the Sacred Heart Monastery, Kensington, Sydney
26 September 2007
Skulking around the darkened grounds of monasteries isn’t exactly my idea of living it up on a Saturday evening, but there I was last weekend, up at the Sacred Heart Monastery in the Sydney suburb of Kensington, armed with my camera, looking for photo opportunities.
I’ve been intrigued for some time by a floodlit building I can see across the racecourse from my living room window, so finally decided to trace the spectacle to its source.
The jaunt had the hallmarks of a c-grade horror movie though. The overly quiet tree lined street the monastery is located on. The ground’s wrought iron gate complete with squeaky hinges. The dark, foreboding, stairs leading up to the front of the building. Who knew what might be lurking there in the deep, gloomy, shadows.
It’s in the name of art, I kept telling myself as I apprehensively ascended the stairs. Yet, I lived to blog about the experience…
Originally published Wednesday 26 September 2007, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
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Australia, legacy, photography, Sydney
Five Questions: Duncan Macleod, TV advert blogger
10 September 2007
Five Questions is where I talk to bloggers about their projects and some of the other things they are doing. I ask {Q}uestions, and hopefully get some {A}nswers.
TV ads: are they a necessary evil, an outright distraction, or do they make for useful intermission breaks? Not all TV ads are forgettable though, and some are almost an art form says Duncan Macleod who reviews TV ads for his blog TV Ad Land.
{Q} What prompted you to become a TV ad reviewer of all things?!
{A} I started Duncan’s TV Ad Land back in 2003 in response to requests at conferences for copies of TV ads I’d been using as illustrations. I was aware that passing around digital copies of the ads could be breaking copyright law and so undertook to show people where to find the ads on the internet for themselves.
I was already working on a blog focusing on my research on generational change and thought it might be an interesting side line. What started out as an occasional post on Blogger has turned into a domain name duncans.tv with five blogs, read by approximately 5000 people each day.
{Q} How much time a week would you spend doing research, and watching TV, for the blog?
{A} I do my research and writing for TV Ad Land in the evenings and the weekends. Ironically I don’t get to sit down and watch TV much — it’s going on in the background.
Most of my information comes from press releases, emails and other web sites. All up, counting the posts I write on TV ads, print ads, music videos, popular culture and faith, I spend between 10 and 20 hours a week blogging.
I maintain a few blogs in my work with the Uniting Church during work hours.
{Q} In your opinion what makes for an effective TV ad?
{A} I’m interested in the ads that tell a story, providing plot and characters, like the Ikea Tidy Up series. Even better are the campaigns that show some kind of character development, like the Geico Cavemen series that morphed into a television series.
And then there’s humour — the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously — like the Big Ad from Carlton Draught. Just like at the movies, music makes all the difference to the way we engage with the ad.
The recent Tooheys HarvesTed ad, in which a guy grows clones from his hair, puzzled a lot of people. But people were drawn back to the ad time and time again by the Yama Yama track.
{Q} What sort of things do you think ad makers should avoid doing when producing commercials?
{A} Effective creative teams have to work out how much information is required in the thirty seconds. Is the ad about developing interest, curiosity, loyalty, pride or love? Or is it about giving people facts and figures that they must remember?
There’s been a bit of debate over this question in relation to a recent ad for the Honda CRV in which a guy constantly changes clothes as he walks through a Sydney street. More and more we’re seeing TV ads that attract viewers to online sites that can provide the details required.
Another tension faced by advertising teams relates to irreverence. The Nandos Fix Patch and Gum ads struggled to win wide support when they showed a working mum using the fictitious nandos-fix patch and gum in a strip club before taking her family to Nandos.
The ads are funny, but have left a bad taste in the mouths of many parents I’ve spoken to. Very few people get the joke.
{Q} So are TV ads underrated creative genius, or merely a distraction TV viewers must tolerate?
{A} Some TV ads are appalling and deserve to be muted. They’re loud, hard sell and unimaginative. But we’re seeing the growth of the television commercial as an art form, a short form of the short film.
The only problem for the people behind the scenes is that they go uncredited. In most cases we’re not sure who the actors are.
As I research for Duncan’s TV Ad Land I try to tell the story of the people behind the scenes: creative directors, art directors, copywriters, film directors, producers, editors, directors of photography, visual and special effects teams, colourists, sound designers, composers and of course the actors.
Many of these people are involved in long form film work. The director of the movie Halo, (coming out in 2009) is Neill Blomkamp, known mostly for his TV ads for Nike (Evolution and Crab), Citroen Transformer, Gatorade Rain and Adidas Adicolor Yellow.
My challenge now is how to connect the popular culture angle back into my original work on generational values and spirituality.
When I talk to groups about Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y I find the TV ads, print advertisements and music video are great illustrations, texts for discussion. The Virgin Blue Get What You Want in Todd’s Life provides a way to talk about the dominant culture of choice, change and variety.
My brief with the Uniting Church in Australia has included helping people explore what faith might mean in an environment driven by consumerism. Do we ignore the lessons of the advertising world and settle for poor marketing? I suggest not.
But at the same time it’s important not to be sucked into the danger of continually presenting faith as a product that can be bought now and discarded later.
Thanks Duncan!
Originally published Monday 10 September 2007.
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entertainment, legacy, television
Going offline: a guerrilla marketing campaign for my website
16 August 2007
A few days ago I wrote about how I had been trying out a little bit of guerrilla marketing, as mentioned at ProBlogger.
As Darren says, guerrilla marketing campaigns may not result in great floods of traffic, but it can be fun having a bit of a dabble nonetheless.
For my part mounting such a “campaign” required very little “real” work, just a redeployment of some existing resources, and taking advantage of my close proximity to UNSW, one of Australia’s largest universities.
Here’s what I did.
First up I created some A4 flyers. The “hardest” part was preparing the flyer to print specifications… that is using CMYK colours (instead of RGB colours), and a resolution of 300 dpi instead of 72 dpi, the usual resolution of images served to the web.
This meant I had to draw a new heart shape from scratch, since nothing else I had would scale properly. While the bigger version turned out just a slight tad wonky, I was otherwise very happy with the flyer.
As you can see the flyers have convenient “tear off” tabs, so the thousands of interested flyer viewers can look up disassociated.com as soon as they reach a computer.
The next step was to arrange some business cards. I needed these anyway, but realised they could also play a part in my guerrilla marketing.
There are a few shops that allow you to design your own cards and then send them the artwork as a “pre press” file in PDF format, all for a relatively modest outlay.
The shrewd (ha, if I say so myself) design of these cards allows me to cut off my contact details while leaving the logo and truncated URL intact, which then forms a handy calling card.
If you happen to visit UNSW you may have already noticed some of these babies around the place…
As well as of course the flyer, which I placed on a couple of boards around the campus. When I checked back a day later, a number of the tear tabs had been torn off, so there had been some interest.
While it is difficult to gauge exactly what sort of response, in terms of traffic, this campaign had (I was checking my web stats for visitors from Sydney and/or UNSW servers arriving via “no referring link”), it was by no means overwhelming.
Still it was relatively simple to pull off, didn’t require huge resources of time or money, got me out of the house and away from the blog for awhile, plus gave me the chance to get back to UNSW and check out the campus again.
For some edgier examples of guerrilla marketing check out Web Urbanist, and if you’ve tried out any guerrilla, or off-line, marketing yourself please leave a comment and tell me what you did, and how it went.
Originally published Thursday 16 August 2007, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
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Spider-Man 3, a film by Sam Raimi, with Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst
28 May 2007
I’d heard a lot about the third Spider-Man movie before I saw it, and not all of it was good. Terms such as “spider cheese”, and the like.
But this is the third and final instalment of the franchise as directed by Raimi Smith, and given he needed to tie up a few loose threads that have run through the series, I suppose some cheesiness can be forgiven.
Some things seemed a little rushed though (such as Harry’s turnaround). I still liked it. I don’t really like to say a movie was crap, but Spider-Man 3 wasn’t quite as fun as the previous two.
Originally published Monday 28 May 2007.
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film, Kirsten Dunst, legacy, Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire
The History Boys, a film by Nicholas Hytner, with Richard Griffiths
21 May 2007
While I enjoyed The History Boys, it wasn’t quite the hilt at the British class system, or epic struggle against the odds, sort of tale I had expected. It was more or less a fly-on-the-wall look at the lives of a group of gifted students who had the opportunity to gain places at two of England’s oldest, and most prestigious universities, Oxford and Cambridge.
I actually thought the epilogue like ending was the best part, a scene which kind of melded onto the end of a teacher’s funeral. Given the story was set in 1983— just fourteen years ago — this is one of the best “where are they now” sequences I have seen in a movie so far.
Originally published Monday 21 May 2007.
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Clive Merrison, film, Frances de la Tour, legacy, Nicholas Hytner, Richard Griffiths