Monte Won't Be A Guest

An invite to the Public Storage Blues Party in Manhattan lands on our desk and after perusing the guest list we note another Sydney-sider has been invited to the same event.

Frank Monte & Anthony Hayden Guest in New York

 It's the noted private eye and sometime LA & New York resident Frank Monte. The invitation is to a fund raiser for the British, New York based writer Anthony Hayden Guest

Readers may re-call that Hayden Guest was the inspiration for Peter Fallow, the hard-drinking hack in The Bonfire of the Vanities by author Tom Wolfe. Others claimed that the late writer Christopher Hitchens was Fallow but Hitchens said Hayden Guest fit the bill far better then he.

 It appears Hayden Guest has a dilemma : his personal art collection valued at $650,000 has gone astray from a storage firm. Anthony had forgotten to pay a bill of $1350 and the firm sold the collection for a paltry $650.

Now Hayden Guest is suing Public Storage and friends have rallied around to raise money to hire a top notch New York brief.

Jamie Lee Curtis & Christopher Guest

Hayden Guest says he keeps in touch with Monte on a regular basis :"I'm very fond of Frank and we exchange Christmas cards every year. We shared digs for a few months on the Upper West Side "

Monte says he won't be able to make the party in New York but will send a donation : "Anthony is a great pal and we went to dozens of parties in New York together. He can't stay home and is quite exhausting at times. He also looked after me once when I was very ill so I owe him a favour".

Guest wrote a book  The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night about his New York exploits. He contributes to a number of US publications like Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.

His older brother (Baron) Christopher Guest is a Hollywood script writer and is married to the movie star Jamie Lee Curtis and both will be at the Public Storage Blues Party next month.

God Save Us From Pompous Gits : Dawkins, Hitchens, Fry

A regular reader has forwarded a YouTube piece (below) in which the increasingly tiresome Stephen Fry interviews nutter Richard Dawkins who (the reader) believes decimates the concept of 'respect' and believes we should publish it. We have. It's real thigh slapping stuff.

There is a madness that encapsulates the navel gazing stuff being churned out by the disciples of New Atheism who are threatening to descend upon Melbourne in 2012 en masse to flog more books encourage enlightened discussion in their crusade against organised religion.

Recently Dawkins, author of one of the dreariest tomes in recent years The God Delusion refused to debate Christian theologian William Lane Craig (probably a pointless task) and explained his reasons in this nonsensical spirited piece in The Guardian.

One of Dawkins oddest reasons was that Craig apparently supported God's (whoever that is) decision to slaughter the Canaanites, a tale from the Bible, that may or may not be true, (or a fable as Dawkins would call it) but which Dawkins quotes from ad infinitum. Dawkins declares Craig an "apologist for genocide".

Oddly, Dawkins is more than happy to share a stage with bore writer Christopher Hitchens who openly supported via numerous editorials, the invasion of Iraq- an atrocity he called "a war to be proud of" in which at least 113000 have died with official figures (according to Wikileaks) of civilian deaths at 1300 but possibly far more and with over one million Iraqis displaced. That was a war that George Bush Jr claimed : "God Told me to end tyranny in Iraq". Maybe some genocides are more equal than others.

Confused ?. So am I.

'A Celebration Of Reason' will take place in Melbourne on 13th to 15th April 2012. You can book tickets here but hurry, the ranks of Atheists are already splitting into different religious factions.

Ghastly Right Wing Think Tank Attacks Writer

Let us introduce you to the Institute of Public Affairs.

David Hicks & wife Aloys

Just as the USA has been plagued by 'think tanks' Australia is beset by these well funded groups who usually sing from the same song sheet : the free market will be our saviour and we should still (despite the GFC) be worshipping at the feet of Hayek and that old phony Milton Friedman.

There's the usual guff about privatised medicine being a god send and currently on it's website, a homage to that nutty historian Geoffrey Blainey who coined the term "black armband of history'.

That's a  re-visionist view of the decimation of the Aboriginal people that basically says the disappearance of the Tasmanian Aboriginals was of their own doing and not a result of hundreds of colonists using them for target practice- that the 'Stolen Generation; is a myth despite it being written into government policy in the early 1900's and anyway, all those little half caste kiddies looked much nicer in their Mission Home smocks and being wrenched from their wailing mother's arms was for their own good.

Blainey all wild-eyed collared the Shuttle one night a few years ago at a party and gave your scribe a potted history of Aboriginal self administered negligence in failing to stay alive and mistook the fact that he was standing by the Champagne Bar from whence we re-filled our flute as a concerned interest in his crack pot ideas. Thankfully the old bugger has retired now,.

If this was the USA no doubt the IPA  too would have elevated that fruit loop Ayn Rand to Goddess like status as the loopy right have recently. Needless to say, they are Climate Sceptics.

Writing as a fellow of the IPA Ted Lapkin in a piece titled "Audience On their Feet For a Fraud " has berated the entire audience who watched former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks talk about his autobiography at the Sydney Writer's Week on Sunda

Hicks plead guilty ( after 6 years confined in a tiny cell) to 'providing material support for terrorism' (apparently guarding a burned out tank). He was sentenced to time served  plus another 9 months in Australia. His defending counsel including US Army Major Michael Mori said the guilty plea was in sheer desperation to get out of Gitmo.

Despite the Pentagon's  former Chief Prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis saying that the Hicks should never have been prosecuted and his case was replete with political interference from the George W. Bush and John Howard governments, Lapin knows far better.

There was no evidence against Hicks but Lapkin surmises by cobbling together a series of un-related events and throws in a quote from Martin Amis to condemn Hicks in an odd case of 'guilty by association' that somehow proves that Hicks was basically in cahoots with the former Pakistan resident O.bin Laden.

Lapkin isn't too sure if Hicks was an "enemy combatant" or an enemy soldier in the perpetual ( but never legally declared ) War On Terror.

Despite the Bush administration attempts to legalise 'enemy combatant' status  the US Supreme Court has rejected it and Barack Obama has finally abandoned the wording.

Martin Amis

He clutches at straws in his convected outrage that Hicks should be afforded an audience at a writer's forum (despite the concept that it will be an exchange of ideas) and gets to the nitty gritty: the taxpayers funded the event IE : a room and some chairs.

Lapkin has plunged the depths of quotes to justify his hate piece, from former ASIO  director Denis Richardson who during his tenure provided the false claim that Iraq was replete with WMDs to the diminutive writer Martin Amis. who apparently said (long before his embarrassing love letter to Christopher Hitchens)  : "People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead."

So there. Amis said that so it confirms all our fears about lefties and Hicks as well.

Lapkin promotes a right wing agenda via something as simple as distorting the tale of the hapless Hicks who was caught up in events way beyond his control.

But why is this tosh being published in an august organ like the Sydney Morning Herald ?.
Probably because they provide free copy yet a few weeks ago Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood said on the ABC's  Media Watch " What I'll be saying is that we'll be investing in creative journalism, the journalism that people read".

Lapkin's piece was certainly creative. He uses a couple of bravado boasting letters Hicks penned years ago as proof. He says we must believe what Hicks wrote then but not what he writes now.
 
Two weeks later Hywood said 300 staff including 80 sub-editors had to accept 'voluntary redundancy'.

At this rate, is it any wonder Fairfax's Canberra Times ran an Trivia Quiz last week put together by Pagemasters-the outfit who will replace the sub-editors and journalists (and 40% owned by Rupert Murdoch) where every answer ended up with a nickname for penis !

Former Foes Love-In & Germaine Greer Speaks Out

From a political standpoint they are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

 Bob Ellis, poetic writer, darling of the left and a speech writer for the Australian Labor Party and the conservative Catholic politician and Federal Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott.

In Ellis's new book  Suddenly Last Winter-An Election Diary Bob gets stuck into a few Labor Party heavies while announcing his admiration for Abbott.

On Prime Minister Julia Gillard  he says she is  "not well informed". He says Gillard is part of a Melbourne clique called the Mouse Pack, a reference to the size of their intellect.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald  Ellis said : 

" She hasn't I think read a novel or seen a film that has subtitles and I doubt if she has read Encounter or The New Statesmen or Vanity Fair or The London Review of Books or The New York Review of Books and therefore she doesn't have a hinterland. She has not much except a kindergarten sandpit response to things-'Nyah Nyah you're just jealous because I'm Prime Minister and you're not' "

" Civilised people already have their hands over their faces when she speaks!"

Ellis has form in courting those from the right. Often spotted lunching with Christopher Hitchers when in town or the famed right leaning poet Les Murray. And he has expressed an odd admiration for the xenophobic Pauline Hanson who Ellis swears attempted to pick him in a Surfer's Paradise bar long before her political career took off

But it's the astonishing turn around in his relationship with the political love-child  of the strange Catholic theologian and political fixer B.A.Santamaria and Margaret Thatcher-Tony 'Mad Monk'Abbot that is raising eyebrows.

Several years ago Tony Abbot and his wife along with a  fellow cabinet minister Peter Costello and his wife sued Ellis and Random House over Bob's new book Goodbye  Jerusalem and Ellis was badly bruised to the tune of a $277,000 libel payout that came right upon his uninsured Palm Beach home burning to the ground in a bush fire.

Ellis says he has just about forgiven Tony Abbot  over that episode and invited Abbot to launch one of his books a year ago which Abbot did.

The Opposition Leader who once studied to be a priest openly admires  the philosophies of the late B.A.Santamaria who railed against Communism and socialism in the 1960's, split the Labor Party and  in the 1930s supported Mussolini and Franco.

"resembles F.Scott Fitzgerald"

But Ellis reckons Tony Abbott  may be a closet socialist :

"He is no more a Liberal than I am . Liberal is the name of the suit he is wearing. He is actually a Catholic socialist. He's DLP [Democratic Labor Party] and always has been."

Ellis goes further in his SMH interview : "The person he most resembles, I've just decided, is F.Scott Fitzgerald. The classic good looks, big flashing smile, easy Irish eloquence, angelic writing style, self-doubt, Catholic guilt, hot temper, Gatsby-like yearnings for past relationships long gone and luminous in remembrance, fondness for football and self-flagellation and his need for a son, all bespeak a literary genius drawn by life and lesser pursuits into spiritual shallows and drunken remorse like Scott, poor Scott."

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Writing in the UK Guardian newspaper Germaine Greer has slammed American architect Frank Gehy's plans for the new University of Technology describing the building as "five scrunched up brown bags"

The building (pictured) is to replace the ugly concrete bunker that stands on the proposed site and when the model was release the UTS Vice Chancellor Ross Milbourne said "We've got the Opera House, and it's hard to say we are going to beat that, but from what I've seen we'll have an equally outstanding icon at this end of Sydney." 

Responds Greer:" The Sydney Opera House may be one of the best known structures in the world, but it is also a worse building than anything Gehry would want to put his name to. The original design by Danish architect Jorn Utzon was rejected by the Australian judges in 1956, only to be reinstated. By the time the opera house opened in 1973, it was more than 10 times over budget. Utzon struggled to protect his vision of a building made of sails until 1966, when he was obliged to close his Sydney office and return to Denmark, because the New South Wales state government would not meet his fees. Government architects took over the project.

 The full story is here.

More God awful talk!

If you are at a loose end this long weekend there's always the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Opera House to be opened by journalist and God hater Christopher Hitchens who will be in conversation with ABC Nightline host Tony Jones on the topic 'Religion Poisons Everything'.

Taking an opposing stance on Sunday is Catholic Archbishop Cardinal George Pell, the man who was nearly Pope last time around who argues 'Without God We Are Nothing' and Muslim leader Keysar Trad who argues that 'Polygamy and Other Islamic Values are Good for Australia'.

If you aren't slashing your wrists by this stage-wait, there's more. Aboriginal activist Gary Foley will argue that 'The Aboriginal Genocide will be complete' and Germaine Greer will be asking "do people really want Freedom ?".

Have a nice weekend.

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## there is a God after all....or did Krishna do it! Relief is in sight according to the British blogger Madame Arcati who reports the most unpopular TV series ever foisted upon the Australian viewing public will be no more.' Mumbai Calling' , is to be axed. Amen to that.