Heat by Rob O’Neill

The events of 9/11 are now fading. Steadily, the date is being normalized, slowly becoming just another day.

It was always going to happen.

As I suspected, this year it passed unnoticed, totally without remark as far as I can see. But we should not forget the events that make the ninth of November memorable. We should give them passing recognition at least.

Surely.

The ninth of November was, memorably, the day on which Saddam Hussein declared “holy war” against Iran. The Iran/Iraq conflict, one that some claim is the longest conventional war of the last century, has been little documented or studied and is only now becoming the subject of serious analysis.

Still, no one has been able to accurately pinpoint the toll, but the military and civilian dead number in the hundreds of thousands.

9/11 is also the day, or night, the Nazis launched their campaign against Europe’s Jews, a campaign that would account for more than 6 million lives between Kristallnacht 1938 and the eventual Nazi defeat in 1945.

Sophie Yaari was 13 at the time. The Germans came shouting that her, her family and her Jewish neighbours were to be sent to Palestine. Sophie was taken with the others to the local gymnasium where a roll was called. It was all remarkably well organized, she says.

The women and children were sent home, for now, and the men kept. But when Sophie and her family arrived, they weren’t allowed in. They were told their house was theirs no more.

Sophie’s father was released, temporarily, with the help of Christian friends. The rest of the men were sent to Sachsenhausen or Oranienburg. Sophie and her sister escaped to Holland. Her mother took her to the border but wasn’t allowed to cross. She never saw either her mother or her father again.

In 1940 the Germans invaded the Netherlands. Sophie went underground and managed to hide in a series of safe-houses until the end of the war.

Tragedy can’t be measured by a body count, of course, but in the context of the Iran/Iraq and the Holocaust the death of 3,000 seems almost insignificant. But for the little fishing village of Santa Cruz del Sur, on the Gulf of Guacanayabo in Cuba, the 9/11 1932 tidal wave that washed away that many is remembered.

It is still Cuba’s worst natural disaster.

Europe’s Jews were victims on this day more than once. In 624, for instance, the Spanish king Egica accused Jews of helping the Moslems and sentenced them to slavery. On the ninth of November in 1526, the Jews were expelled from Pressburg in Hungary.

It was also the day, in 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant of the union army issued an order forbidding Jews from serving under him in the Civil War.

In 1915 it was the day 272 died aboard the Italian liner Ancona, sunk by German torpedoes. Japan received a triple dose of tragedy on 9/11; in 1973 fire at the Taiyo department store in Kumamoto claimed 101 lives, while in 1963 a train crash accounted for 160 and a mine explosion killed a further 450.

Like any other day, 9/11 was alo a day of joy and triumph. It is day when the human spirit soared, literally. In 1904 the first powered flight of more than five minutes duration was achieved. Women, too, took a big step forward in 1924 when Miriam Ferguson became the first female elected state governor, in liberal Texas.

On this day in 1989 freedom came to East Germany as the Berlin Wall was opened to allow unfettered travel between East and West. Then, in 1976 the UN condemned apartheid in South Africa.

Of course, the ninth of November has had its lighter moments: The Giant Panda was discovered on that day in 1927; and in 1973 former Beatle Ringo Starr released his solo album “Ringo”.

In sport big-hearted Evander Holyfield became the second man to win the World Heavyweight Championship three times, memorably out-scrapping Iron Mike Tyson in 11 rounds in 1996. New Zealand were all out for 70 against Pakistan in 1955, however, Richard Hadlee made good with a memorable 9 for 52 against Australia at the Gabba thirty years to the day later.

Tragedy, triumph and trivia: that is 9/11. Don’t forget it.

Intolerable Cruelty, everywhere.

Seven years on from the inimitable Fargo, the Coen brothers arguably find themselves in the same position as Quentin Tarantino; struggling to live up to the extraordinarily high expectations of their devoted audience. With Intolerable Cruelty they fail, again.

Following an equally poor effort in the Man Who Wasn’t There, this flick stuns in its opening sequences only to fall horribly flat in the middle and lift only slightly towards the end.

The Tarantino comparison goes deep, for both he and the Coens are constantly exploring, or maybe ransacking, film history for genres to “refresh”. While Tarantino this time has gone for the kung fu action movie, the Coens are after romantic comedy a la Preston Sturges. For both, or rather all three of them, the closer they get to being faithful to these models, the greater it seems is their failure. By being faithful they are failing to make their own mark on the material, failing to take ownership, to grab the genre by the scruff and give it a good, hard shake.

This film has been receiving breathless reviews over here, making me wonder if maybe there are two films out there with the same title. Maybe I saw the wrong one. If that’s the case all I can say is the one I saw wasn’t very good. Slate’s been harsher.

In fact I’d say the last film from the Coens that stood up was made way back in 1998, The Big Lebowski, and even that was a comedown from Fargo.

The opening sequence of Intolerable Cruelty is vintage stuff, with the brothers’ current favourite, George Clooney as divorce lawyer Miles Massey, having his impressive teeth polished. Making Clooney’s pearly whites the stars of the first ten minutes of the film is a great self-referential gag. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to back it up. Some good lawyerly set pieces follow and then the humour goes west until the end.

Classic Coen grotesquery does feature; in the head of the law firm, totally wired to life support, gasping and heaving and raging a mere hair’s breadth from death. Also in the asthmatic hired killer, Wheezy Joe, who dispatches himself most bizarrely.

But in the end Intolerable Cruelty just doesn’t do it. Clooney ends up pulling faces rather than acting, overusing the lines on his perfect face. Zeta-Jones does a tolerable job in what is hardly a demanding role. Clooney’s sidekick is plain unfunny.

Sad.

Girlie’s been serving it up to da man. She went on the big protest march yesterday, but reports it was kinda boring. I watched it pass from a comfy chair in a local café. George probably didn’t even know it was happening.

Anyway the good ol' boy flew in last night with an entourage of 656 people in six planes. He’s here for 21 hours in what some wags have dubbed “The Great Sleepover”.

“Mum, can I go to John’s place tonight?”

“Yes, George. But don’t stay up too late, dear.”

Reports indicate the US ambassador here, a mate of George’s from the days he was making a fortune from government favours in the baseball industry, recorded a world series game or two in case he wanted to stay up before hitting the sack. Maybe they played a bit of PS2 while they were at it and dialed-in a pizza.

I’d like to think so.

Protest activity is the order of the day. Everyone is waiting to see what happens in Parliament this morning. Who will turn their back? Yes we know the Greens will, but which Labour MPs will protest and which won’t? Will there be any surprises? I’d be surprised if there weren’t. Keep track of developments here. Some MPs have signed a letter of protest.

Meanwhile in South Sydney the boys from ABC’s CNNNN show are hosting the world’s first protest line-dance.

At the last minute two Aussie journos have been added to a function with the President today to show he is not afraid of the local media. Restrictions on carrying weapons seem to have been waived for his security people.

According to the official schedule Bush will visit the Australian War memorial at 5.20 and fly out at 6.20. Now I’ve written about the memorial before and he really should have allowed himself more time. The dioramas are terrific. And how the hell does he expect to do all that, get to the airport and through check-in in an hour?

He’ll be fucked if there’s a queue.

In the President’s shadow the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, will become, reportedly, the first representative of a one party dictatorship to address the Australian Parliament. A great moment indeed.

But, hey, so what if he's a despot? At least he isn't detaining Australians without charge, trial or access to a lawyer. No doubt while here he will be talking to the gruesome twosome, Tony “Headkicker” Abbot and treasurer Peter Costello.

So its Abbot and Costello, and Hu's on second!

Kill Bill (everywhere) and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, at the Belvoir Theatre, Surrey Hills.

Theatre, at its very best, can deliver an even more engaging and exciting experience than film. However, it rarely does. The film-makers’ toolkit is huge and powerful, their budgets so enormous that film almost always outguns the older medium.

Granted, theatre has the edge in intimacy, but this advantage also limits its audience. And many productions are flawed. You have to be devoted to theatre to experience its rare gems.

This week I have had a theatre experience that humbles our era’s most iconic film director and starkly displays how very poor his latest offering truly is. That The Lieutenant of Inishmore owes Tarantino a huge debt only serves to emphasise his failure. It also leads me, at least, to ask whether Tarantino's many fans now have to look to his legion of followers and imitators for both satisfaction and the continuation of his great and usually enthralling cinema experiment.

Kill Bill sucks.

Yes, I know it is just part one. And yes, there were highlights. But it does not deliver. Far from it.

The film totally lacks the wit that made Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown such joys. Occasionally it peeks through, but lines are too often awkward and badly delivered. This films relies on a totally linear plot based on revenge. This is the simplest of set-ups.

Where in the past Tarantino has extended the genres he references, this time he does not. In fact, I’d rather head down the video shop and hire the originals.

In his previous efforts the plots had complexity and his characters depth. Here we have linearity and a cartoonish quality. While a portion of the story is delivered as a manga cartoon, I’d be tempted to say it all should have been, except that would be an insult to manga.

To make it worse, Tarantino almost seems to recognise these failings. Uma Thurman’s samurai mentor at the end of the film muses that the way of revenge is not a straight line, “it is a forest”.

Not here it ain’t.

Part 2 of Kill Bill really has to do something special to redeem this. Does the maestro have something up his sleeve? We’ll have to wait and see.

But for those readers in Sydney the Tarantino disappointment can be remedied. Go to the Belvoir, and see The Lieutenant of Inishmore for a truly witty, cleverly plotted and beautifully acted Tarantinoesque experience.

Tarantino crossed with Father Ted, that is.

Long story short: A spotty teen runs over a black cat, Wee Thomas, belonging to an IRA splinter terrorist. This guy, Padraic, has splintered so much he’s way out on his own. The cat, whom he entrusted to the care of his dad while he's away bombing fish and chip shops, is his only friend in the world. He loves Wee Thomas sooo bad.

Before Padraic comes home spotty teen Davey has to find a replacement black cat or face certain cruel death. Padraic specialises in torture.

This unlikely scenario serves to introduce a play of unpredictable and well concealed plot twists, sub-plots, great characters and more blood and body parts than Reservoir Dogs. And it’s a comedy. I was pissing myself.

Playwright Martin McDonagh’s work is graced with direction from Australian theatre icon Neil Armfield. Among the performers, Frank Gallacher as Padraic’s dad Donny and Tom Budge as Davey really turn in some great set pieces while Colin Moody as INLA boss Christy, out to eliminate Padraic, delivers an ominous, Michael Madsen-like performance. He even looks like him.

Kudos too to special effects man David Trethaway, who really has a way with blood, explosions of blood. Buckets of the stuff.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is Reservoir Dogs with cats, Pulp Fiction with pussy, Jackie Brown with, well, you get my drift.

My record collection is taking a real battering in the old style. A couple of weekends ago a mate, Dan, came around and I played him all sorts of old NZ stuff. He found it depressing. Yes it was great music, he said, but where are they now? They were great, but they never “made it”.

True enough. But my memory is that “making it” wasn’t a high priority for many of those bands anyway. Never mind. Dan was in an odd place at the time, obsessed with failure - which at least made a change from humiliation.

Anyway, last night I pulled out an old Joe Tex soul album and was reminded of one peculiar musical phase I went through: my sexist pig stage.

Joe launched into a song called A Woman's Hands, which starts off almost like a women’s lib song: “A woman’s hands weren’t meant to work hard, all the time.” But pretty soon you get to the chorus where you find out exactly what a woman’s hands were “may-ay-ay-ade for”.

“To make her man some bread,
fix him a good cup of coffee,
and put his children to bed.
That’s what a woman’s hands,
were may-ay-ay-ade for”

I’d been turned on to sexist music when I came across a total classic from a bluesman called Lightnin' Hopkins. This guy was a slide maestro, and at least on the album I had, Lightnin' Strikes, very smooth, not that rough Chicago style at all. Really laid back. Except for a song called “Shake Your Moneymaker”.

“You gotta roll your money-maker.
Baby you really can shake ‘er.
Move your money-maker.
Baby it feels alright.
You gotta move your money maker,
All night”

For the life of me I can’t find any reference to this track, but the guy appears to have put out several albums by that name. I did come across another track tantalisingly titled “Let me play with your poodle” which you can check out here.

I used to actively collect such songs. There were lots of other examples, but I forget them now. Some are obvious (James Brown's "This is a Man’s World"), but most were pretty obscure. Anyway during this phase, and for quite a long time after, until I was forced to sell key portions of my collection to keep me in beer, I used to give these tracks a spin when we had guests.

Back in the 80s and well into the 90s, you see, NZ crawled with arch PC-type feminists. I’ve got nothing against feminism, it’s the PC stuff I hate. It’s a real downer, you know. And back then the two were pretty inseparable. Everybody was way too serious.

Anyway I used to play these songs because, around ours, it was the only way to get the PC crowd out of the house!

And when you told them the blues was equal opportunity sexist, they wouldn’t listen. Try and tell them about Bessie Smith singing about that good ol’ “Round Steak”? Forget about it. You couldn’t get a word in.

“Sisters don’t need yo' round steak no mo’, brother.”

Feminist baiting, I’ll confess, was one of my favourite activities. Juvenile? Yes. I know. But talk about a laugh!

I came across another relic of those times online the other day. An article about the glass ceiling in the IT industry. Rereading, I think it has some nice turns of phrase, but God did it create a stink.

Email had only just been rolled out in my workplace. Did I get a good flaming? Tell me about it.

In the end it was the use of the word “little” I was found guilty on, by a one woman jury of my peers. That’s what it came down to. But hey, how come there weren’t any salary and employment statistics on what was the fastest growing industry in the country? That, it seems to me still, was the real issue.

I’ve left all that sexism stuff behind me now, of course. It went out with the LPs.

It was just a phase, anyway.

Honest.