The day started funnily enough. The media reports from various countries placed various slant on the events of the times, being Paris. Paris, New York, Moscow, Sydney (News Limited) all had different spin. 

 

The Russian boasted that they eliminated some essential ISIS supplies. They had precisely bombed some fuel trucks and fuel depots, shaming the haft-hearted effort by the Americans. The Russians were using old bombers designed in the 1950s showing they were still efficient killing machines. Old. Hurrah. Makes me feel useful again.

And there was a report of a world leader, NZ prime minister, traipsing a hotel lobby barefoot in a bathrobe. Still does not beat our illustrious Fraser appearing in public without pants in a hotel lobby back in the days when cellphones and their intrusive cameras had not been invented.

Meanwhile the Russians were not happy about their jetliner having been blown up by ISIS. This could be a bigger mistake by ISIS than the massacres in Paris. History in hindsight will tell. 

This is why I recycled this toon as "media briefs".

Meanwhile, our esteemed John Pilger writes:

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west — Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and now Russia. The obstacle is Turkey, an "ally" and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian "rebels", including those now calling themselves ISIS.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/from-pol-pot-...

 

There is a video doing the email and twitter rounds by someone claiming that all of this is of course Assad's fault, when his troops started to contain, with live bullets, a peaceful "protest" in Syria. As one who has been in a few "peaceful protests" before, I know they can soon become the domain of extremists and agents provocateurs. In such country as Syria, there is 50/50 chance that the peaceful protests were orchestrated by extremist elements under the thumb of Saudi Arabia. One knows shit.

So nearly five years ago, the Syrian conflict started. It could only go from bad to worse, as the many local forces and vague international interests came in to play with grave pronouncements from the Western pulpits of righteousnesses. The key words in Pilger's analysis, here are "gulf medievalists". It's a modest restrained way for Pilger to name the gulf supporters of the allied religious nutters in Syria and Iraq, being nuts themselves. But these nutters are our allies, including Turkey... 

We're so confused.


So we come to the notion of "democracy"...

It's a number's game. Democracy is a strange silly number's game, when it should all be designed to served communities with the best ideas, the best understandings for best inspired outcomes and the most shared opportunities. But often the numerous dumb and the religious bigots get their hands on the levers. Or the one-handed rich. That's the number's game.

You would be deluded to believe that should Assad be gone, all problems in Syria would be solved. Assad is part of the problem insofar as he holds secular power in a Syria where multi-religious beliefs are accepted. Should he be removed, the case for the majority, the Sunnis, through ISIS, to run the country democratically is strong, with the elimination of all other sects with unconditional submission or death. That would be the way. This the way Saudi Arabia is run, and the Saudis would love Syria to fall in their hands, indirectly. The West would dance in the streets as well, for whatever reason, no-one knows, but democracy in Syria, it would not be. Sure it would be democracy by numbers but who would want this crummy thingster?

So what's wrong with "democracy".

First, democracy can be influenced by too many false premises. Too many people believe that the tooth fairy is real. See Voltaire. Media spruiking opinionators will promote coal mining and denigrate global warming. Straight away, with voting for a chief, the leader who claims to believe in the tooth fairy and coal mining will get more votes because he's got a bigger megaphone sprouting three words attractive yet stupid slogan. And the Tooth Fairy Party wins the power game by 50 cents plus one. Often the Tooth Fairy Party is going to muck it up for some of its supporters because The Tooth Fairy Party starts to believe that if it gets the support of the Leprechaun Party which believes in god's underpants and guns, it can rule with a greater mandates. 

Of course the Tooth Fairy Party gets the "blackmailed" supports from some of Leprechaun voters though some could be a bit weary about this sudden sweetening, and some of the Tooth Fairy voters do not like this softening of their hard pillow. When tallied, The Tooth Fairy Party is in trouble — about to loose control and, not only that, it managed to get the Sweet Tooth Party and the Dentist's Cavity Party as well as the farmers, offside. 

What a mess we weave.  

The art of political arts plods on the same level as well. 

The Annual report of the AGNSW has just been released and according to the journalist it's a mixed bag... . 

I could be wrong but I think I can smell old vaporubed vapours of Edmund Capon whiffing around in the reporter's mind, trying to conjure idealised ideals of the past. There could be room to attack the new "directorship" for whatever. Looking at it in detail such attacks are not really warranted except from those who still mourn the departure of Edmund Capon and may have lost a job in the process. It's not for me to blah-blab but I always found Edmund Capon very "clique-ish". Hey, I am entitle to my slanted opinion. I had the feeling Capon had a coterie of staff and artists to do his art reverie together with. He had his strong likes and powerful dislikes. Mind you, his TV show about art was as inspiring to me as a dishcloth dipped in a valium/thiopentone/pentothal concoction, but that's my crummy cartoonitioning speaking.

The new directorship has broken down a few barriers and installed a new vision designed to promote more young people to the pinnacle of artistic recognition. The art at the AGNSW is not a Ben Quilty nor a John Olsen exclusive-show anymore. It's more of a Nigel Milsom's over exposure. Nigel's new painting "Angel's something" (not the real title) for acquirement by gold coin donations is a bad copy of Bernini's Santa Teresa in rapture. The new AGNSW's venture is thus fraught with pitfall, but the adventure could be worth it, in preparation for the next artistic wave. It's renewing, albeit more challenging.

Let's imagine for a second that Edmund ran the AGNSW like an Abbott/Brandis ticket... Eventually some noses were going to get out of joint, while the same old heads would prop up at the annual, monthly and clubby booze nights. The new management seem to have dismantled this Capon "clique-ishness" to create its own. It's a fresh wind with new characters waiting in the wings... Are the arts better for it? Is the new management team more arty than the previous one? Does it matter? The change has been done and I know a few souls who are not unhappy at Capon's departure.

Who knows... The AGNSW is getting a new extension that will compete with the Museum of Contemporary Arts (MCA) which, I believe, has always been a thorn in Capon's side. Capon was never happy about the MCA's existence. He hated the damn thing.

And in the media report, there always is the ubiquitous comparison with the Victorian Art Gallery in Melbourne which to say the least is a building smack bang in the middle of a city tram-stop complex and is about three times the size of the AGNSW. No-one can compete with this accessibility nor with this surface area, but then the setting of the AGNSW is manicured heaven and the AGNSW has the best-known works of Australian art. So there.

And there are many more distractions in Sydney than in Melbourne, apart from the Aussie Football which the Sydney Swans supporters go through the motions of being there, stunned on a windy cold Saturday at the SCG. In Sydney people tend to be more casually independent of organised festivities, including comedy festivals, even during the best fireworks in the world for the new year. 

Art is a domain of subjectivity with enormous acceptance potential and greater rejection than any other political football. Brandis stuffed up. Fyfield is changing Brandis Stuff of Excellence into a Catalyst of something...  Still very iffy. Not good enough, but reluctance is an acceptance of bad smells when trapped in a lift going down. It's possible some favours have been done and cannot be rescinded. The excellence had been decided by a bigoted minister in charge of being a busybody with the laws, including useless arseholic metadata.

So what does this all means? It means that as usual, arts are in a flux, as they should be.

Peter Jackson tells us he did not know what he was doing when shooting The Hobbit trilogy. Art is a bit like that: I know what I am doing and the result is going to be blah-grey-ish stuff... The lack of adventure kills-off imagination. "I don't know what I am doing but the result is likely to be great" is more like it, though I must say I watched the Hobbit on 3 times fast forward. It felt less of an imposition on my small brains in need of multicolourisation... 

The rejuvenation at the AGNSW is to be welcome and the new management should be kept on its toes. not by the old guard of the Capon favourites but by the new up and coming hungry artists with vision. I believe that Michael Brand is up to the task. He's done it before. But then many old supporters of Capon are going to try and make Brand fail. You can smell the moth-balls being thrown at him.

Meanwhile some of the 1 per cent — the celebs and the "artists" (those of the Hollywood variety with three divorces and private jets — not those who struggle to paint in a garret) — are going to get their exclusive terminal at LAX... 

So who will decide who's a celebrity? The baggage handlers no doubt.

And now let's look at the weather on Fryday 20th November. 

Sydney has been in the grip of a "heatwave". As I mentioned before, we're looking at winter like summers and summers like hell down the barrel. But even the media is quite moderate about it. In its second above 40 degrees November day since record have been kept, the prognostic is an incremental number of warmer days, as a casual remark. One has to go 75 years to find an equivalent... But then is it? The point I have made before is about the amount of energy in the atmosphere stretching the maximum heat for much longer time, while the highs and lows for the day remain similar to the 75 year old recording...

Global warming is real, of course. And more CO2 is going to cook our arse.

Now, how come when we know that hot air rises, we still get bubbles of heat snugging along the ground from the Nullarbor to Sydney overnight? The conventional wisdom would be that hot air rises and this bubble would dissipate upwards like a bad smell in the previously mentioned lift. But things are not as simple as this. The atmosphere is not like water in a kettle on a stove. For example, the atmosphere at 33,000 feet (10 kms) is at minus 50 degrees Celsius, BUT IT IS THINNER and is about 40 per cent the density of that at ground level. What we are looking at is a complex mechanism of hot air at ground level with a higher density than the thin cold air at higher altitude. Convection currents are thus limited by simple gravity. The heavier heated air stays on the ground. In order to get stronger convection currents — up and down — you need clouds that can act like suction pumps. The steam in vertical aspiration disrupts the inversion layers of thinner cold air, but a cloud creates new complex layers of inversion at different levels. up to 40,000 feet in massive cumulonimbus. In general, the inversion levels stop at 33,000 feet, where the commercial aeroplanes choose to fly just above.

All this to say that despite cool high altitude atmosphere, global warming at ground level is going to accelerate at its own pace. Even the cool high altitude atmosphere will warm up as well, by a similar progressive variation. 

And for me, it's a crummy cartoon a day to keep the spin-doctor away... 

And this was the news of the day...

Gus Leonisky
Your local art critic...