I feel like I can't be bothered to mention this, but I suppose I should. Perhaps it's anticipatory hysteria at the thrashing the neo-cons received in the US mid-term elections, but in yesterday's
Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt takes uncertain aim yet again at all those black-clad "extremist" artists - like Muslims, we're now divided between "extremists" and "moderates" - who live in their "
ghettos of hate". In Brunswick, apparently. I'm in some pretty distinguished company - Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, Andrew McGahan, Phillip Adams, Liz Jones...
Andrew is up to his usual standards of accuracy: poor old Brunswick seems to be unfairly smeared here. Flanagan lives in the wilds of Tasmania. Isn't Carey based in New York? Liz Jones and myself live on the other side of the river. That's only the ones I know about. Not one Brunswick resident among them. Although, like that well-known extremist
Coco Chanel, I
do wear a lot of black.
HATEFUL: A Brunswick arts extremist (right) plots the violent overthrow of the government. Picture: Man Ray
Andrew is up to his usual standards of accuracy: poor old Brunswick seems to be unfairly smeared here. Flanagan lives in the wilds of Tasmania. Isn't Carey based in New York? Liz Jones and myself live on the other side of the river. That's only the ones I know about. Not one Brunswick resident among them. Although, like that well-known extremist Coco Chanel, I do wear a lot of black.
Yup, looks like Andrew's head finally exploded.
ReplyDeleteWell, if we can't be agreeable, we should at least be stylish.
ReplyDeleteBlack, the colour of your nicotine-stained lungs. You're all bloody smokers, you arty types. :)
ReplyDeleteI wondered about Brunswick too. Maybe AB lights on that particular 'burb cos it's the site of the muslim ghetto that Andrew McGahan creates in his new novel Underground (in which a nuclear device has been detonated over Canberra...) (One Sunday, walking through Kingston, I imagined that a neutron device had already been used... leaving only the buildings!)
Well, I guess he was attempting, with heavy-handed witlessness, to be satirical. He's no Swift, to be sure. Or even, as I hear he describes himself, a modern-day Orwell...to think that Andrew Bolt is like George Orwell is, well, like thinking Andrew Bolt is like George Orwell. Either it shows that one hasn't read Orwell, who is a stylist of the highest degree, or it's a sign of the imminent decline of the West...
ReplyDeleteNow, be fair. Surely it needn't be one or the other. Perhaps it's both.
ReplyDeleteI thought people in Brunswick looked like this.
ReplyDeleteI live in Coburg. Here's what it looks like in my neighbourhood.
Andrew Bolt?
Seems like the American public agree that "the US was led by a "coward" and "creep" in charge of a "criminal government"," and have had the sense, at last, to make the gangstas pay. Who knows? Maybe Andrew Bolt will be next.
ReplyDeleteIs this a kind of Rake's Progress, TimT? I'm off to Brunswick this instant. Once I am a properly fallen woman, I guess it's Coburg next...and then, perhaps, I'll join Mr Bolt...
ReplyDeleteYes, it goes Brunswick, Coburg, and then you end up in an insane asylum in St Kilda.
ReplyDeleteI'll call you Alison Croggon Rakewell, shall I? (I can just hear the Stravinsky score in the backgeround ...)