A revolutionary t-shirt and apparel shop has opened. It’s name?

kittenhat.com

Go theree. Now. Buy.

We don’t sell kitten hats yet, but more designs are coming.

Like some other movies starring Will Smith, this movie feels as though 1/3rd of it’s budget, script, cast, or footage was somehow excised before release. Hancock represents two movies, with totally opposing story-lines and genres, which get compressed into about 2hours, resulting in something vaguely satisfying.

The first mvoie is about anti-superhero John Hancock, who protects LA from crime (sometimes), getting the job done the old fashioned way - beating the shit out of criminals, and destroying civic property; resulting, in a rare break with movie tradition, in being largely unappreciated and complained about by LA’s uniformly bitchy, PC, cynical populace.

While not using his own inimitable brand of Will-Smithness to destroy evil, Hancock is destroying his own (immortal and uneventful) life with self-hatred, alcohol, and verbal abuse of non-superhero citizens, trying to fill the yawning blank of his past, identity, and his purpose on Earth as the only one of his kind.

Anyway, you get the idea. Someone thought, superheros are popular - what with Superman and the Batman franchises, and of course, Heroes - let’s make one of those movies, but with a wise-cracking black guy who’s an arsehole. This point of genius is driven home regularly by people calling Hancock an arsehole, which also happens to be his Marty McFly trigger word for smackdown rampage.

All well and good. The second movie on the other hand, which comes in after a story, characters, situation and awesome $50million CGI explosions have all been established - preparing the audience for a fun, keeping it real Will Smith action comedy with subtle depressive undertones - is less interesting, or explicable, and can safely be put into the ‘movies which should have had Angelina Jolie in them as a 5000-year-old vampire assassin or somesuch shit‘ category.

I won’t give it away, because I couldn’t be bothered typing it, and it comes out in cinemas in about 16hours, but let’s just say that WIll Smith kisses some hot white chick (I suppose Americans wouldn’t see that coming) who turns out to be not only another superhuman, but coincidentally his long-lost true love whom he fell in love with thousands of years ago but can’t remember because, despite being able to repell bullets with his flesh, he got a nasty crack on the skull which gave him amnesia that never repaired itself.

Oh well, plot destroyed. Don’t worry, I don’t do any better job of it than the movie.

Nonetheless, if only for the first 48minutes, Hancock is still worth seeing, and buying on limited edition Blueray somewhere down the track for the possibility the movie they intended to make - where there’s enough time for a consistent story, character development and believable emotion - might be included as a special extra.

Highlights include the always mystifying Jason Bateman (which might as well have been credited as Michael Bluth as Himself), Will Smith frowning and being offensive, and things being realistically physically destroyed.

3/5 Arbitrary Units of Excellence

Watching this movie was like having a stroke for 2 hours. What demographic are they aiming for - empty 40yo women who put girlfriends before happiness in an attempt to stave off the realisation they’re boring and will die alone; or 20yo women who put girlfriends before happiness because they’re 20 and dumb as shit?

I mean I guess what I’m saying is, are there really women in their 40’s that are that fucking stupid, or is it all just an attempt to sell cosmetics to young women who idolise fashion?

Also, I think the red head looks a lot like Julia Gillard - elvin, copper-haired, severe and alone. You be the judge:

Gillard	Hobbes

Scary isn’t it? And Cynthia Nixon actually is a lesbian.

Because I don’t care what you think of my articles, and neither does anybody else.

But, if you really want to say something, you are free to make an account and contribute an article yourself.

Got an email today:

“As you may be aware, a number of changes were scheduled to come into effect on eBay.com.au on 17 June 2008.

Most of these changes have been delayed by almost one month and are now scheduled to commence on 15 July 2008.

PayPal Buyer Protection will still increase to $20,000 on 17 June 2008.”

Translation:

“The ACCC fucked our plans to make PayPal the single most powerful internet money transfer system in Australia (test bed for world domination), leveraging massive profits, while offering no protection and giving us the ability to freeze payments to you, fuck your credit rating, or put our hands into your vagina and pull out your unborn child if we wanted to.

As an alternative to following the law, we will continue to bribe and use endless appeals and petitioning to get what we want.

We are still giving ebay members $20k liability, because this is less than what we make in 4hours from sales fees, and like all companies which offer their clients no real legal protection, in the event of an actual claim, demands can always be disputed or emails erased”

In other news, Mazda unveils concept designs for what a car might look like in a parallel universe where cars are vaginas:

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/06/mazda-to-unveil-new-nagare-concept-car/

Bill Henson is an Australian art photographer who is best known for shooting Vermeer-esque studies in light and texture, centred around scenes of contemporary tableau, and also notably artistic nudes.

What that means in non-art-student language (or perhaps real art-student language) is he photographs people standing in front of 4WD’s in suburban driveways, at night, with the lights glaring yellow, looking off into purple meaningless darkness with empty expressions, while standing on wet turf with no shoes on and, perhaps, bloody hands that look like they’ve been digging.

He’s also well known for sordid child sex photography such as these crackers:

Recognise them? Of course you don’t, unless apparently you’re a peadophile or an art student, or both. They’re from aptly named ‘Untitled Series’ from circa 1995, released to the gallery-going public without anyone giving the slightest shit.

But they’re exactly the same as his latest series, displayed in a small gallery, which was then instantly shut down by police for no known reason recently in Sydney, which you’ve probably heard about on the News. In Henson’s 2008 collection, similar ‘child’ (that is to say, 12-18yo) models are shown in half-light with the same prurient, full-lipped, vulnerable dazed expressions of recently recovering stroke victims like the characters in all his photographs, but now with *actual nudity*:

note: text added

Whether or not peadophiles look at Bill Henson images with the same pre-masturbatory glee as they do actual child porn (which, unlike artistic nudes, don’t have the full legal consent of the person involved) I think is beside the point. We all find it objectionable - or at least, being the greatest taboo in all humanity, we say we do, unless we happen to be Bill Henson, a professor of cultural studies or art history, or an outspoken individual who likes stirring up shit.

But it’s art, right? Art nourishes culture, and we shouldn’t interfere with it. Riiiight? Crossing the line into trying to censor and categorise something like artistic expression is surely the last line of demarcation for a free and civilised society, isn’t it? Yet for the protection of our most precious (and coincidentally most ignored and overly-ventriloquised) resource, The Children, does that line not need now to be crossed? For the children?

I mean, come on - say the amateur philosphers (many of them spokespeople of political and other standards-enforcing bodies) - What Is Art Anyway?

And they ask this as though this is a question that has never been asked before. Well people - let me, as a graduate of highschool art-history studies (with a Band 6 score in HSC Visual Art nonetheless), one-time almost-getter-in-er of the Art Express national annual HSC art exhibition, and amateur art-student-posing-as-a-science-student, tell you: Nobody Knows What Art Is, Not Even, And Especially, Artists, And People Who Make Their Actual Living Writing Papers, Theses and Books About Fucking Art.

Nobody can define art. Nobody. It’s like defining ‘what is funny?’. But the best definition so far, both posed as a result of careful and studious research by historians and philosophers over mostly the last 80-100years, since people started thinking art might not be just paintings of rich people and nude European chicks; and also as a product of an overall lack of interest, and actual utility for a definition - since about 600 people globally who aren’t art-school students actually visit art galleries or even give a shit; the best possible definition of art is: anything made by an Artist, that is shown in a Gallery.

The definition of an Artist is, a person, other than they who specifically make and sell Art, who says they are an Artist.

A Gallary is a physical (sorry internet art scene losers) location, usually with walls, where Art is displayed, within or on those walls. Sometimes it’s a park.

Sometime the Art is performance-based, and so can’t be made or displayed - but this is a moot point, since apart from The Happening, nobody has done performance art with any real conviction since the early 1970’s, and consequently, again, nobody gives a shit.

So what is the difference between child pornography - graphic or otherwise depictions of minors engaging in sexual or sexually suggestive behaviour; and Art - possibly also graphic or otherwise depictions of minors engaging in sexual or sexually suggestive behaviour (like being naked and looking vacantly into the camera like someone with agnosia)?

The answer is: one is a set of photographs of real children getting sexually abused, or doing something uncomfortable and weird, without their consent or express desire, that people with psycho-sexual mental illnesses look at pictures and videos of to masturbate to, the making of which causes irreparable psychological damage to the individuals involved for the rest of their lives;

And the other are pictures which look like child porn to white middle-class adults who have no concept of what real child porn looks like because they’ve never seen it (hopefully), which are actually carefully staged photographs with consenting models taken by a famous art photographer who only 0.8% of the Australian population was aware existed up until around two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, you can flick through a Target catalogue and see pages of 8yo girls dolled up like Sunset Blvd whores modelling miniature swimsuits and My First Slut play outfits, but nobody bats a fucking eyelid. Why? Well, because nobody but paedophiles would care, and it makes money - and we all usually accept or ignore anything until some TV news show makes a big deal out of it calling it A Shameful National Outrage or somesuch other truth-distorting bullshit that suggests anyone but the producers of the show and the three or four invisible political figures who engineered the stunt to draw attention from actual issues was involved in bringing it to public attention.

Now, art is different to catalogues and public media. I’m not saying that the sexualisation of youth is a conspiracy of the fashion and cosmetics industries, perpetuated through clothing design and reinforcing perceptions of acceptble beauty and sexuality through magazines designed only to sell products and make mon… well actually, I am saying that exact thing. Like about 4,000 other published essays, but whatever, they’re all written for journals only people who have PhD’s in gender studies read anyway, so you’ll never hear the likes of the above somewhere as important as television anyway, unless in an 8-second soundbyte voiced by some chubby post-feminist who works for a university or government department, once every couple of years when they trot out a piece making it seem like News Limited gives a shit about the women’s rights or whatever.

My point is - who gives a fuck about Bill Henson? Do you really think he got up one morning in 2006 and said, I’m going to spend several years working on a photographic series so I can let everyone know I abuse young girls? Oh yeah, I’m sure he spends 6months working on 8 slides from a shoot with an impoverished young model who spent 4 days in a studio just for bread and shelter, so he can get half a key of it packed away for secret export to the Baltic states where they pay for pure uncut child porn by the gram. That’s how international artistic nude photo art works. And coincidentally, that’s its main source, and innocent childrens’ main threat of sexual violence: recognised photo artists.

Clearly dawn raids on inner-city galleries by state police happen because the Prime Minister has a direct interest in maintaining the thin ethical line between celebration and abuse of the artistic nude, and protecting children. I bet he stays up late at night worrying about the state of child pornography as an emerging art-form in the Sydney and Melbourne scenes. I’m sure this point-scoring exercise would have happened if it hadn’t become apparent everyone hates him now because petrol is expensive and the Labor party is shit on a national scale, and he needed a diversion.

I don’t actually like peadophiles - not that censoring photographic art is going to reduce the number of them in the slightest. And I don’t think parents who sign their aspiring model children for nude shoots, however open-minded they may be to the intriguing themes of youth and sexual expression, should be invited to barbecues. I just think, with the amount of child porn trafficked on the net, do we need to worry about the least publicised and also most sensitive and thought-out public exploration of the topic of youth sexuality by an artist, or, maybe, do we need to worry about our obsession with worrying about fucking paedophiles everywhere lurking in art galleries and behind garbage cans when actually:

95% of all child sex abuse is committed by someone known or immediately related to the child

you have more chance of having your retina detached than having your child snatched from your front yard (invalid if you bungee-jump)

if you have children, one of them is probably under 15 and dressed like a goth Britney Spears already, right now

you’ve already forgotten who the fuck Bill Henson is in the time it took to read this article.

Stop watching the news.

http://www.fugue.com/pics/goodnews.html

Two ads following eachother on channel 7.

Border security is a show about keeping out the darkies. If it was 1976, the show would be called Keeping Out The Darkies. But it’s 2008, so it’s called Border Security instead, to instill a sense of reassurance, anger, and fear simultaneously - I guess it fits the zeitgeist is what I’m saying.

I find Border Security especially repugnant because it doesn’t just rely on the cheap, unscripted documentary surveillance style of so many post-Better-Homes-and-Gardens reality TV shows to suck the humanity out of a taped confrontation and turn it into revenue-generating psychodrama; it also makes several assumptions about the viewer:

1. they hate Asians
2. they hate South-Africans
3. they hate Americans
4. they do not hate officious, hypernasal, authoritarian security attendants

Assumptions like that used to be thought of as racist and red-neck and disgusting, but now that we’re officially living in one of those Robocop future dystopias (but with more natural light and less 80’s fash… with more natural light), I suppose most people buy into the first three even if no Australian I’ve ever met will accept the fouth. Or maybe they will, with that special feeling of nationalistic connection you get watching a reality TV show.

The McDonalds ad was one of the new variety that tries to make the experience of going to McDonalds look more like the experience of going to the Ikea super-centre at Homebush. In that most McDonalds (at least in Sydney) now look like the plasma and couch section of Domain crossed with Gloria Jeanes.

For it’s new Celebrating Cashing In on the Beijing Olympics ad, McDonalds divides it’s burgers into the following georacial categories (to celebrate world culture right?):

McAfrica - 3 beef patties and some other salad stuff to represent the African continent.
McAsian Wrap - this pan-Asian pide bread wrap contains chicken, some other things, and sweet chilli sauce. Just like most food in Asia. Where chicken and sweet chillis come from.
McAmerica (New York?) Bagel - or something. It’s a bagel because America is New York, and New York only has bagels, due to popular demand.
McEurope - no doubt this has mayonnaise. In Paris, the McEurope is called the Royale avec Australie

My guess is that someone in McDonalds Australia Marketing Divsion had 20seconds (or $150,000 worth) of primetime advertising time to play with in order to make a 2008 Olympics tie-in devoid of images of China, or anything officially Olympic (which would be expensive and require all kinds of paperwork), and instead just supplanted the storyboard for the ’summer family with attractive mid-30’s wife and white children excited to approach the counter for a special toy offer’ concept, and changed a couple of captions because they’d had a big weekend and decided to just phone it in.

‘Unbreakable’ was still worth staying up for. Yeah, yeah.