Sorry

So, in half an hour Kevin Rudd will commence proceedings to formally say sorry to the stolen generations of Indigenous Australians - a sorry which should, one presumes, extend to all Indigenous peoples here, for busting in on their lands and declaring terra nullius.
It's not as though this sorry is going to solve the nation's woes or absolve anyone, but for the government to finally see its way clear to making this declaration, well, as I've said earlier, it's a start, and what a relief that the Howard government is no longer speaking on our behalf.
'Sure, it was Kevin Rudd who was man enough to deliver a long-overdue apology, and for that he deserves high praise.
But it was Howard et al whose mean spirits helped inspire a nation (or maybe one half of it). For without them, this event would not be so big.'
-Chris Graham, editor of the National Indigenous Times



"It was also important I think, on a day when thankfully more Australians than usual were actually focused on Aboriginal issues, to actually remind all of us, particularly those of us who frequently have little understanding or contact with remote Aboriginal Australia, of the desperate situation these people find themselves," [Nelson] said.

He also said something about challenging the people who thing Indigenous people get a good deal to visit their communities and say you wish you were born there.
What a thing to say during an official apology!

Opposition Indigenous affairs spokesman Tony Abbott defended Dr Nelson's speech and called some of those who turned their backs "radicalised activists".

Pfft! So we are a nation of "radicalised activists" for turning our backs on Nelson.

'Rudd inspired. Nelson tried to divide. Rudd will be remembered. Nelson won't.'
(Graham again)

I feel a tiny bit sorry for Brendan Nelson. I don't think he was trying to divide. He's just not cut out for this. He's compromising his own values, he's failing the croneys, he's inspiring resentment and disgust in a lot of people around Australia.
As for this:
'At her home in the central Victorian town of Shepparton, Lyman, 57 a Yorta Yorta woman, says the Liberal leader's speech, which angered and distressed many Aboriginal people, was "a toxic speech" and accuses him of misusing her story of removal to undermine the Aboriginal case for compensation.' (from The Australian
Well, you can't pity him for that.

I have been trying to watch So Yo Think You Can Dance Australia, trying to enjoy the brief snippets of actual dancing which they show... of course the standard is going to be different in Australia, drawing from a population of 21 million versus 300 million or so in the US, that doesn't matter, it's still lovely to watch people dancing... what makes it hard to bear is that it is even more despicable in its emotional button-pushing than the US version, as Matthew coined it last night, So You Think You Can Cry, keeping the contestants up all day and all night doing hard physical work and then critiquing them not only about the dancing which they're performing with exhausted bodies and minds, but about their clothes and then drawing their life tragedies out of them just to finish it off like middle-school social worker type of stuff, that judge who is like Mr G with Rod Stewart's hair, ugh, awful. Showing these poorly edited jump-shots of incomplete dance routines and then zooming and holding as each successive contestant breaks down into tears, really there should be laws about this sort of thing being exercised in the name of cheap tv, it's like a particularly cheap and nasty brand of prime-time pornography.

'United Arab Emirates 'green city' to cost $22 bln: State-controlled Abu Dhabi Future Energy Co (Masdar) said it would cost $22 billion to develop a "no-carbon" urban district it is planning in the United Arab Emirates. The district, Masdar City, on the edge of the city of Abu Dhabi, will eventually be home to 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses, Masdar said in a statement. No cars will be allowed.'
(The Guardian)

Double Helping

Our new food blog, established by the luminous Saskia, is here, and well worth regular visits, because it is already filling up with recipes for delicious things, and reports of London food from Bianca and Amsterdam food from Annie, and a backlog of Trondheim food from me.
Yummmmmmmm......

Did the double-opening smackdown on Friday night, a good way to begin the new art-fancying season.
First Elvis Richardson at Utopian Slumps which was an at once cool and heady celebration of incompatibility, the technological dinosaur, new breeds of which are forming faster than you can say anthropocene. This big fat four-stack VHS DNA helix spiralling up to form a pillar hoping to help support the roof-beams as it admits defeat and tests out new sedentary possibilities, it being like a core-sample of the eighties-nineties experience of the box, it sent all sorts of colours and images through my mind as I made my way around that coil reading the spines of these black boxes like 'Diana's funeral 1997', 'Splash', 'Eat Carpet', the ubiquitous 'shit tape', any number of Michael J Fox films... Then the old school animated adoration of the even older school test pattern, mainstay of childhoods, the pulsing, throbbing stillness of it all, then the televisuals anagrams like 'sit level USA', 'Sat eve we ill', 'Salute Elvis', like, what can we do with this thing now? Ought we to listen when told it's defunct, you can't get that any more, they don't make those cords now, but it nonetheless still means...
Flitted in and out of Murray White between a heineken and a cigarette, once again appreciating ipod shuffle choosing an opportune moment to play New Order as I entered the mouth of that industrial yellow and clean-surfaced alleyway which leads to MW, and then everyone seeming extra specially glamorous for first opening of the year. My favourite was one of Pat Foster and Jen Berean's, the one against the back wall which looked like a double-panel photo of galaxies from a great distance and then as you approached it went snap and turned into a hammered surface of broken glass over black lacquer.
Now it is thundering, the sky is fat and turning in on itself, ah...