Each week the spectator asks someone famous to be their guest "blogger" for a section simply called "Diary". I very rarely read something that makes me laugh out loud, so I felt I had to share these two little gems.
The first is from the Jan 8 edition, the guest diarist was Jeremy Paxman (a TV presenter), he wrote:
On a programme I worked on several years ago, a catastrophe hit the town of Darwin, Australia. The lonely producer on holiday night duty telephoned the graphics department, requesting an illustration for the news bulletin. ‘I’d like a map of Australia, animated to show Darwin, please.’ As Moira Stuart reached the middle of the story, he watched in horror as a bearded face exploded from the heart of Australia.
Read the spectator, it's worth it!If I had not been told by a medium at a spiritualist meeting in Melbourne in 1953 that I would be living in the United States, I would have never believed it. Australians have always had ambivalent feelings towards the Seppos (septic tanks: Yanks) since we had so many rich and randy Americans in our midst during the second world war and Vietnam. Secretly, however, we rather touchingly want to be like Americans. There’s always a bit of excitement, especially in Adelaide, when they think they’ve found a serial killer, or a Serbian runs amok with a weapon in a supermarket. That feels sort of American, and when we gave up pounds and pennies for decimal currency we loved talking about ‘bucks’ and driving ‘Ks’ instead of miles. It made us feel we were in the movies, though more travelled Australians were dismayed to visit the United States and find they still measure distances in antiquated miles. We now call men, even women and children ‘guys’, but then so do the Poms these days, and railway stations in Australia are now annoyingly called ‘train stations’, if you will. Fortunately two weeks in Australia is still a fortnight, but Americans don’t understand the word, and though actors like me do shows twice on Saturdays, the word ‘twice’ is absolutely unknown in the United States and if recognised at all is thought of as a puzzling archaism. It’s ‘two times’ over here, and I don’t get off the train at the train station in America either - I get ‘off of the train’, a silly and inexplicable usage.
I haven’t been to the new Moma yet. I hope it’s possible to dodge the restaurants and boutiques and get to the pictures. That would also mean dodging the very large spaces devoted to ‘contemporary art’. On museum binges in the States I have seen enough neon tubes at 45-degree angles, piles of rocks and minimalist installations significantly called ‘untitled’ (meaning without ideas) to last a lifetime. There’s a thing that crops up all the time in the ‘contemporary’ wasteland of these museums which is a blob of white Styrofoam on a tripod on to which a little projector beams the flickering face of the lezzo or pooftah who created it. Unfortunately the film is not silent, for this installation usually screams things like, ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t, you’re hurting!’ or ‘Harder harder’ or some other equivocal injunction to his or her tormentor.
