May Day, May Day or Mayday

Shane in May

G'day Possums,

What a confusing time. Should we be celebrating a May-Pole Dance with the Olde Worlde May Queen, the marching May Day Socialist Workers or because we're in dire straits, pleading for assistance, mayday?

All three probably.

The dancing pics are not only to illustrate but lighten the mood.....some-what.

 May pole dancing certainly suits the Nationals as it involves a lot of tripping about and weaving in and out in circles; a very similar action to their voting decision to "preference" The Red Terror's Noe Notion Party at the May 18 election. Their leader, Mc What-His-Name, justified this rank judgment on the basis that they had similar interests.

Now given the recent publicity for two Noe Notion candidates, this would indicate the Nats not only have an interest in bullshit but sleaze as well...apart from Barnyard Joyce's antics, that is.

Arabesque and piano

Steve Dickbrain, Noe Notion Leader in the Deep North, self proclaimed "family man"

 as well as second place on the Senate "ticket," fresh from attempting to woo the woeful NRA to become involved in Aussie politics so gun laws could be watered down, has been seen during the same trip to the Un-United States cavorting with a stripper, fondling her breasts, placing money into her briefs and making sexist and lewd comments about the strippers.

Dickbrain has resigned but his name will still appear on the Senate ballot paper, so like-minded lewdies, misogynists, and gutter brains with no respect for women can now find a candidate to match their immaturity.

His apology note requested in a gloriously funny Freudian manner that "...the pubic  leave him alone..." 

Noe Notion Candidate for Leichhardt, Randy Ross Mac.... who didn't "front" for the voting ticket ballot draw, was also  missing from a candidates’ debate and whose election corflutes haven't yet appeared, has probably been too busy..... posting captioned selfie images of himself groping strippers in Thailand to his FB page. 
You really have to ask , what was Mc What's-His -Name thinking?

Single foot.

 These genuine expositions of quality have upset The Red Terror, as watering down gun laws was a vote-winner with the "boy-o" morons but groping strippers and bad mouthing them although certain to appeal as well, could well make the women's vote problematical and give a "tone" to the party, which is well, as grubby, tasteless and as shabby as it actually is.

Publicly "tearing-up" as a "victim" at the frustration of losing her 21st candidate in unusual circumstances, she vented her anger at the media who "had unfairly targeted Noe Notion where others had been let-off-the-hook in similar circumstances" but made no mention of the unfortunate criteria she has for vetting the low-lives, bankrupts, ning-nongs, fruit-cakes and possible serial killers she consistently selects for candidature.

Could Jimmie The Sleaze, Ashby slither into being the next leader or will that role be mangled by ex-Labor Rat and the seemingly cross-eyed, Loopy Latham?

Oh, the fetid sordidness of Noe Notion..... and although bitch-labelling the putrid cabal is easy, it's worth remembering that she was once a Ruling Rabble candidate!

Jump

And they haven't been too flash on their pre-selections either Petals, losing three candidates to Sec: 44 of the Constitution and another to anti-Islamic, anti-Jewish fantasy/conspiracy rants. There are others earning the wrong sort of publicity, too which puts them "in-the-gun". One for views linking same-sex marriage to paedophilia that are just, rank: another whose views on Safe-Schools Program are viciously partisan and plain wrong: and a third who has spouted the bullshit that private schools are much better than public schools. Whereas in fact , the reverse is true.

Well may they call the Ruling Rabble a broad church. But it is a crumbling one, an irrelevant ruin.

 

Pas de Deux

As Handie Andy Hastie found out when trying to make the churches in WA support his right-wing notions that religious freedoms are somehow under attack for them being constrained by good manners in not being allowed to discriminate against those not to their taste, at least one priest told this RWNJ with an "interesting" military past, to bugger-off.

But then, Handie Andy is in another bit of bother, shooting himself in the foot by lying to the press about a meeting at a racist rally he had with Ultra RWNJ  and fascist, Neil "Thick-Skull" Erickson,  who's also claiming by-the-way, that the Ruling Rabble not only put him up to, but paid for his harassment of then Labor senator Sam Dastyari in public.

A broad church, indeed!

I think that calls for a Mayday. And then a May Day March,

Hoo-roo, comrades,

Shane.

Tying-up

...Facing the Music

Much of life is happenstance but there are the odd synchronicity of moments which this Wombat finds quite delightful.

Shane with Image Archive

Recently working on a dance video and shooting some stills for it, my attention went to the faces of the dancers rather than the general class or movement shot. 

There seemed to be in the dancer's concentration the essence of the theatrical or performing experience. 

Facing the Music. 



Although the "Music" we face in “Wombat Droppings” is of an entirely different and more nation altering order.

Ballet Theatre Australia

The synchronicity was an acquaintance contacting to alert me that there was to be a “get-together” of those who were either taught by or worked with the legendary Betty Pounder in theatre productions she choreographed for JC Williamson's theatres over many years.

Betty Pounder

On going to the FB site where the details were, I saw there were many images from a variety of productions and thought, well, I could probably add a few, too.

Pounder Class

"Funny Girl"

"Fiddler-on-the-Roof"

My Fair Lady

Robin Bailey

My Fair Lady

Fiddler on the Roof

Hayes Gordon-"Tevye"

Jill Perryman- "Funny girl"

MFL

Pounder Class

Some 260 images later I was a little surprised by the extent of my early productivity and very gratified by the responses of those seeing the images and who commented and seemed to appreciate the effort of scanning all these now quite vintage negs, prints and transparency’s.

As I replied to one comment, It‘s only when there is a filter of time in the works that you finally see them in the context of their own experience and see value.

It was interesting looking back to my beginnings of "facing the music" photographically and appreciating its visual development, too.

Wombat Droppings or Foetid News from Oz Politics.

Joe “Cereal–Toyota-Holden-SPC-Killer” Hockey is clamping down on debate by suing Fairfax Media over a story about his fundraising efforts on behalf of the NSW Liberal party. Having nothing to hide except free speech, Hockey doesn't want any public distraction whilst  going about perpetrating possibly the biggest defrauding of Oz politics when he hands down in conjunction with the Business Council of Australia’s and “The-Coots-With-Queer-Ideas-From-a-Parallel-Universe” (IPA), his single budget.

Unprecedented in the selective leaking, spin, lying, dissimulation, obfuscations and kite-flying over the past month this “Ugly American” mandated rabble (Liarbril Party) is about to fundamentally alter and cement into the national ethos for once and for all their conceptually dessicated idea of this country. The shambles they dishonestly but successfully projected in persuading the electorate to believe that all was Labor's fault, is now to be tipped over all of us in its full and total vileness.

No longer just a projection their foetid values will be fully manifest as they are about to swamp this land with legislation so that every vile notion of free market capitalism can be given free rein without restraint.

The Reign of the Reactionary Aspirational Bogan is here.

Gone, will be any pretence of the notion of fair play and egalitarianism.

Gone, will be universal healthcare.

Gone, will be access to education for all.
Gone, will be the effectiveness of our only public broadcaster.

These unimaginative Liarbrils have for years have been chipping away at these pillars which have made Australia a noted leader and by drawing closer to the right–wing of American “Tea-Party” politics they now see their opportunity to smash any of the remaining social contracts in preference for the “Free-Market"  insanity that in the main caused the Global Financial Crisis.

They will relentlessly bullshit the public through the right-wing, main-stream media and swamp the ABC with mendacious IPA clones (similar to the unbalanced coverage of Mandy “Il Patrone” Vanstone’s 10 minute free kick t’other night on “7.30” with Sarah “Rapportfurerin” Ferguson) and those other paragons of truth and civility, “Blot-on-the-Landscape”, Alan ”Bondi” and “London Toilet Fame” Jones and other similar shock-jock low-lives.

“We all have to do the Heavy Lifting,” says the man who has doubled the deficit by himself in six months, whilst single-handedly obliterating much of the country’s manufacturing.

“The Age of Entitlement is Over,” says the man whose party it seems is the biggest, most dishonest, slush-fund, paper-bag-wielding bunch of spivs we have ever seen whilst preparing at the same time to rip payments away from young people with disabilities…a man who thinks wind-farms are unattractive and coal mines, cool.

We are entering the abyss of a new Dark Age.

John Donne wrote,

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

 If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were:

any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,

and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls;

it tolls for thee."

The Liarbrils and their moronic IPA lickspittles have yet to get up to speed with this C17th social lesson.

It strikes me that when a Government rules for a plutocracy and not the people then its promulgations have validity only for the plutocracy and can be ignored by the people.

Cheers Possums,

Shane

...to the gutter.

 G'day Petals,

 Once upon a time being in the gutter meant that you were young, on your way home from school, that there had been heavy rain; and that you and your mate were racing twigs or leaves along in the rushing water to see which one would win by being the first down the drain at the corner.

Today it has other meanings

Rue Louis Blanc, 10e, Paris 

It was expected but the reality was a bit more confronting than expected

Rue St Maur 10e, Paris

Rue J. Dodu 10e Paris

Which, being said, is in no way a criticism, just an observation.

graffiti 10e, Paris

derelict building, Paris 11e

 Graffitti has its visual fascination as does the ruin and the arbitary nature of multiple torn posters

Poster site Paris Metro

Paris 10e

 But the street as pissoir is not art; only unhealthy and smelly.

Which leads to .......

Politics

It has also been an interesting fortnight in the Antipodean political gutter.

Starting from the minute Leigh Sales, (ABC 7.30, Report) having done her research on the topic of BHP and the Olympic Dam mine, savaged Tony “the rabbit” Abbott for his pathetic jingoistic “one-liner” answers and exposed not only his tenuous grasp of the truth but also his party’s lack of credible policy.

Flowing from this was Liarbril, Grahame Morris’ (“….one of Australia's most respected political commentators and government relations professionals……” (His words not mine) defence response on public radio, “Leigh can be a bit of a cow at times…” to be followed up by what was allegedly an apology next day, “Oh, perhaps I should have said hard-hitting”.

Sales’ rejoinder was a delight , “I’d rather be a cow than a Dinosaur”!

Why is it that Liabrils and good manners can never intersect?

Then there was Peter “Rottweiler” Reith exposing his humanitarianism on the SBS’s Reality/Doco “Go back to Where You Came From” maliciously supported by Angry “Bogan” Anderson.

They verbally wrapped themselves in the Aussie flag and defecated in it!

Reith’s comment on 774 “…you can run a laundry in a mining site and get $400,000.00 a year….” went unchallenged ‘til a small torrent of mine workers poured in to wash the record clean.

Could you trust a person who claimed that refugee parents were throwing their children into the sea or loaned out his government and taxpayer funded phone for his son’s use… as Reith did? 

Virginia Triroli’s commentary, “Reith re-writes history….” (The Age, Saturday Sept.1^st )  finished up with the paragraph: “If an untruth like this is deliberately left uncorrected, does that make it a lie? I’ll leave that to the ethicist to decide.  Etc”.

As it seems the Liabril’s have few ethics; I reckon if it walks like a Duck and quacks like a Duck …… ergo: Peter Reith is a Duck!

Anne Summers’ extract in the same paper from her 2012 Human Rights and Social Justice Lecture: “Her rights at work: The political persecution of Australia’s first female prime minister”, is worth reading as it coolly lays out the vile, malicious and sexist misogyny Gillard has been constantly subjected to by the tories and their bogan supporters.

Watch the Senate and see how Penny Wong (Labor) is treated by the Liabrils during question time.  Apparently they see no distinction between policy argument, policy effect and the person.

But I must admit to enjoying Senator Brandis’ apoplectic, pursed lip rage when Wong retorted with either a, “His” or “Her Majesty….” as part of a reply.

For the Liabrils, there is no intellectual level that can’t be lowered far enough to satisfy the “aspirational” bogans who Pavlovian-like, respond best to knee-jerk fear stimuli and ½ truths.

Howard deliberately let the “Race” genie out of the bottle and it’s since been fanned along by right-wing radio mouths (like Alan Jones with his infamous provocations to riot at Bondi) ever since. 

Bogan mentality has been empowered by the born-to-rule and consequently a race to the lowest level of the gutter.

Perhaps it was always mythical but Vale, Australian fair play and egalitarianism.

There’s an aphorism that when you’re young you're idealistic and “left” thinking and only become conservative with experience and age … well my local far right scribe has been his rollicking best of late, castigating teachers by penning an article where he starts with what was possibly meant to be a heart-warming identification anecdote of how he was suspended as a middle school student for not apologising to a teacher whom he had called “.. a left wing commie bastard”.

If I had been the Principal, I would have suspended him just for the tautology.

Seems the lad started as a repressed bogan and has just expanded to a repressed far-right one… hardly seems progressive.
And his scribblings suggest that better prose may have produced later by humbly and earlier, studying more.

Cheers Possums,

Shane.