Check out the new song by Regina Spektor.

Loving it!

Last night I had my eyes opened to a creative underworld, underbelly maybe and I once more believe in the power of the crazed creative nutter (thanks Hayden and Robin). In my induction I was made to watch….robot chicken. You have not lived until you have watched it

Created by Seth Green and Matthew Senreich, this american stop motion animated comedy is absolutely brilliant!

Stay tuned for more insights into the disturbed creative underworld…I love you guys! I need to go see a psychiatrist.

A music clip filmed on a cell phone recently in South Africa by Lonehill Estate…

I am absolutely fed up with international community turning a blind eye to the situation in Zimbabwe that can now be called nothing short of genocide.

How can the international leaders place trust in Zimbabwe’s neighbouring African countries when they are benefiting from Mugabe’s regime and stand to suffer in his defeat? The Zimbabwean army has had a military and economic presence in the Congo since the late 1990s and has been involved in major diamond trade. You may ask where this wealth has gone. Well it doesn’t take a mathematician to conclude that if inflation rates in Zimbabwe are now in 6 figures and unemployment is at 80% the money must be going into someone’s pocket!

And why has the UN Security Council not stepped in to ensure peace and security? President of the UN Security Council is rotated monthly – maybe you should take a look at who the President is this month!! <click here>

Yesterday in a press release the High Court rejected a petition by the opposition, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) to order the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to publish results from the elections on the 29 March. Mugabe is demanding a recount this Saturday of 23 constituencies, even though according to local journalists in Zimbabwe, as the ZEC has not released the results, Mugabe does not have any knowledge of the election results. Hmmmm. I have been taught that a leopard never changes his spots and Mugabe’s track record is appalling.

According to the Australian today, the MDC have launched a court bid claiming violence and intimidation in 60 constituencies won by the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF). That is just over 28% of the constituencies.

I have been following developments closely in Zimbabwe since my visit in 2000, but the situation is now beyond reason. According to human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch the government of Zimbabwe violates the rights to shelter, food, freedom of movement and residence, freedom of assembly and the protection of the law. There are assaults on the media, the political opposition, civil society activists, and human rights defenders. It also has the lowest life expectancy in the world.

How much more can a land take? A country that has some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world and the most honest charming people that I have ever met is in economic meltdown and unofficial martial law. How much longer can we sit in our cosy developed world lounge rooms and justify our deafness to the screams of injustice, violence and violations of basic human rights?

From 5-12 April young people around Australia converged to discuss issues concerning democracy, media, arts and social change from the comfort of their beanbag at the on-line VibeWire e-Festival. One of the forums was Reworking feminism: What does gender equality mean in the 21st century? 46 discussions were posted with over 350 replies over the eight days. It is so encouraging to see that young people are really concerned about issues in our nation, including gender equity.

Work-family balance, paid maternity leave, equal pay, sexual harassment in the workplace and even more alarmingly the trafficking of women have all been listed as recent issues examined by the Commissioner of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) here in Australia. As I am sure you can imagine, this pales in comparison to the issues concerning gender equity world wide. UNIFEM identifies violence against women, feminized poverty, female representation in democratic governance and basic human rights as serious issues across the globe and supports the MDG as a means to eradicate gender inequity.

In Australia this week we have seen two phenomenal achievements by and for women of our nation. Today, we witness our first female Governor-General, Queenslander Quentin Bryce, who at 67 years of age extinguishes a 107 year male reign <click for article>.

The Anglican Church has also announced that the Venerable Kay Goldsworthy will be consecrated on the 22 May as the nation’s first female Anglican bishop. The way was paved by a decision by the Appellate Tribunal (the Church’s highest legal authority) in September 2007 declaring that there is nothing in the Church’s Constitution that would prevent the consecration of a woman priest as a diocesan bishop in a diocese which by ordinance has adopted the Law of the Church of England Clarification Canon 1992. Interestingly, this doesn’t apply to assistant bishops whom are elected and confirmed under provisions of the Assistant Bishops’ Canon 1966 and seems to retain the requirement for candidates to be male.

<Sigh> We still have a long way to go.

But for today, for this moment in history (or should I say, herstory), I raise my glass of red to women everywhere for their achievements, for their courage, for their vision of a world where men and women are equal.

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so we weave a less arbitrary social fabric, on in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place. Margaret Mead

I have always loved Weird Al….

Too bad it’s set to a Backstreet Boys song!!

Eritrea is yet another African war torn country with over a million refugees living displaced within camps in Eritrea as well as in Sudan and other neighbouring countries. Click here for more information.

A former Italian colony in northeast Africa, Eritrea joined a UN-administered federation with Ethiopia in 1952, with a guarantee of democratic rights. Ten years later the state was annexed by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, touching off decades of bitter warfare. In 1993 Eritrea achieved independence from its dominating neighbor. After independence, Eritrea plunged into a 1995 war over Red Sea islands with Yemen and then a more devastating border war with Ethiopia in 1998, causing an estimated 100,000 casualties. A peace agreement in 2000 established a UN-patrolled buffer zone along the Eritrean-Ethiopian border.

28 Eritrean refugee women in Brisbane got together and with the help of a Federal Governmnent grant have set up the first Eritrean restuarant in Queensland. The restaurant that opened late 2007, is in Moorooka, which is already home to over 250 refugees from the horn of Africa. It started as a catering business in 2004 and after providing food for many functions and festivals has expanded into a restaurant.

The restuarant is called Mu’ooz which means tasty and healthy in Eritrea.

In the company of good friends, I indulged in Eritrean cuisine last night at the restaurant, and I have to say, it is not only a delicious meal but an amazing African experience. Turkish and Moroccan influences were apparent but the culinary experience was truly unique. Traditional Eritrean coffee was also not only served but prepared in a traditional Eritrean coffee ceremony.

I would highly recommend this restaurant, not only for the extraordinary cultural experience, but also to support our new Eritrean friends as they settle into Australia!

Tonight I watched a movie that has left me in sensory overload. It was a movie of creative brilliance, haunting first person narration and a complex blend of past and present memories and vivid imagination. But what really pushed me over the edge into complete mind numbing stupor is the fact that it was a true story.

Jean-Dominique Bauby was a famous French journalist, author and the editor of Elle magazine before he suffered a stroke at the age of 44 and was diagnosed with locked in syndrome. This life changing setback did not deter him as he then proceeded to write a book entitled ‘Le scaphandre et le papillon’, translated into English by Jeremy Leggatt and named ‘The diving bell and butterfly’, by blinking his left eye.

Excerpt:

Through the frayed curtain at my window, a wan glow announces the break of day. My heels hurt, my head weighs a ton, and something like a giant invisible cocoon holds my whole body prisoner. My room emerges slowly from the gloom. I linger over every item: photos of loved ones, my children’s drawings, posters, the little tin cyclist sent by a friend the day before the Paris-Roubaix bike race, and the IV pole hanging over the bed where I have been confined these past six months, like a hermit crab dug into his rock.
No need to wonder very long where I am, or to recall that the life I once knew was snuffed out Friday, the eighth of December, last year.
Up until then I had never even heard of the brain stem. I’ve since learned that it is an essential component of our internal computer, the inseparable link between the brain and the spinal cord. That day I was brutally introduced to this vital piece of anatomy when a cerebrovascular accident took my brain stem out of action. In the past, it was known as a “massive stroke,” and you simply died. But improved resuscitation techniques have now prolonged and refined the agony. You survive, but you survive with what is so aptly known as “locked-in syndrome.” Paralyzed from head to toe, the patient, his mind intact, is imprisoned inside his own body, unable to speak or move. In my case, blinking my left eyelid is my only means of communication.
Of course, the party chiefly concerned is the last to hear the good news. I myself had twenty days of deep coma and several weeks of grogginess and somnolence before I truly appreciated the extent of the damage. I did not fully awake until the end of January. When I finally surfaced, I was in Room 119 of the Naval Hospital at Berck-sur-Mer, on the French Channel coast — the same Room 119, infused now with the first light of day, from which I write.
An ordinary day. At seven the chapel bells begin again to punctuate the passage of time, quarter hour by quarter hour. After their night’s respite, my congested bronchial tubes once more begin their noisy rattle. My hands, lying curled on the yellow sheets, are hurting, although I can’t tell if they are burning hot or ice cold. To fight off stiffness, I instinctively stretch, my arms and legs moving only a fraction of an inch. It is often enough to bring relief to a painful limb.
My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions.
Enough rambling. My main task now is to compose the first of these bedridden travel notes so that I shall be ready when my publisher’s emissary arrives to take my dictation, letter by letter. In my head I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph.
Seven-thirty. The duty nurse interrupts the flow of my thoughts. Following a well-established ritual, she draws the curtain, checks tracheostomy and drip feed, and turns on the TV so I can watch the news. Right now a cartoon celebrates the adventures of the fastest frog in the West. And what if I asked to be changed into a frog? What then?

Released in Australia today, Julian Schnabel brought the story to life in a film which has so far received 25 awards, 4 Oscar nominations, 3 Golden Globe nominations as well as 27 other nominations.

Here is a preview:

The New York Times said of the film:

Julian Schnabel has made three feature films: “Basquiat,” “Before Night Falls” and now “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” All are biographical, examining the lives of real people, and in each case the protagonist struggles with a condition of literal or metaphorical imprisonment. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mr. Schnabel’s younger colleague in the New York art scene of the 1980s, is trapped by addiction and by his outsider status. Reinaldo Arenas, the gay Cuban poet whose memoir was the basis of “Before Night Falls,” is censored, harassed and locked up by successive dictatorships.

The phrase “triumph of the human spirit” hovers over “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” along with a swarm of other empty, uplifting clichés. But Mr. Schnabel and the screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, have other themes in mind. Limitation, constraint, incarceration — these may be, as I’ve suggested, the shared premises of Mr. Schnabel’s films (and also of some of Mr. Harwood’s work, notably his script for “The Pianist”).

Their common subject, however, is freedom, the self-willed liberation of a difficult, defiant individual. But Mr. Schnabel is not content simply to state or to dramatize this idea. Rather, he demonstrates his own imaginative freedom in every frame and sequence, dispensing with narrative and expository conventions in favor of a wild, intuitive honesty.

Condemned to live in an eternal present, Jean-Dominique is also freed from the tyranny of time, and so the film ranges freely into fantasy, speculation and remembrance, given shape not by a plot but by the ecstatic logic of images and associations. Working with the brilliant cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, he uses light and color to convey the world of sensations from which Jean-Dominique is exiled, but which he appreciated all the more acutely for that reason.

And so, curiously enough, a movie about deprivation becomes a celebration of the richness of experience, and a remarkably rich experience in its own right. In his memoir Mr. Bauby performed a heroic feat of alchemy, turning horror into wisdom, and Mr. Schnabel, following his example and paying tribute to his accomplishment, has turned pity into joy.

It has been a number of years since I have seen a film that has had such a profound and haunting effect on me both technically and emotionally. I highly recommend it.

Check out this link……

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

We all need a reality check once in awhile.

Today began like any other day, but I think I can honestly say that for me and many other Australians it ended on a phenomenal high. I experienced today, something extremely foreign to me. I felt a swell of pride for my country, pride for the leaders of my country and pride for my fellow aussies.

Today was the public apology to the Stolen Generation of the indigenous population of our country for the atrocities inflicted upon them, the decimation of family structures and communities and the loss of culture, language and personal identity that occurred as a result of a number of detrimental government policies, enforcing the removal of ‘half caste’ children from their families and placing them in camps, orphanages and institutions.

The heavy burden of guilt and shame that has been carried by many who call Australia their home has been lifted and never have I felt such hope and altruism for the future of our country as an inclusive, embracing and multicultural melting pot.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spoke succintly, powerfully and purposefully, weighted with the responsibility of the decisions our predecessors had made. It is only through honestly and openly discussing these hideous events marring our history that we can begin to heal, and walk forward together: indigenous and non-indigenous. We have a long way to go, but for the first time in my life, I believe in a government that supports all, a government that provides equal access and opportunities and takes responsibility for decisions that affect a nation.

Today, I am proud to say that I am an Australian.