Monthly Archive for July, 2008

Today the federal government announced changes to the process of detaining asylum seekers. Under the previous government (who’s abuse of asylum seekers for short term political gain and xenophobic populism has been well documented in a variety of places – the case of sievx is as good a place as any) apart from its absurd ‘pacific solution‘ in general the assumption was if you sought asylum and arrived uninvited then the onus was on you to prove that you were not a risk, had a genuine claim and so on. Until you proved this you were detained, in what was basically a prison, usually somewhere extraordinarily remote (an island, in the desert). The new changes reverse this. The department now has to prove that you are a risk. This is a very good step, and combined with the Prime Minister’s apology to the Stolen Generation (video via YouTube – it really is worth watching) helps remind us of what a government ought to be doing.

The other intriguing news is that Starbucks is closing down a whole swag of their Australian stores. I live in Melbourne. We are parochial coffee snobs. We have an enormous Italian community and have coffee shops opening everywhere. Good coffee. Real coffee. Dark bitter pungent coffee from real espresso machines. We have a coffee cafe culture here. In Lygon Street, a tourist hot spot and full of Italian restaurants (though these days perhaps not where you’d go to sample the best food – though it does have Brunetti’s) a Starbucks opened. All around it you’d see small cafes full of people having a coffee, while this two storey Starbucks has, maybe a dozen customers. Let’s be blunt. Starbucks coffee tastes like dishwater. It can’t cut the mustard against a decent barista. I think it is a pretty cool day when a coffee multinational can’t make a living selling a legal addictive drug in this city. Up there with the time a major fast food chain packed up and left Acland Street because it couldn’t make money. This is a street that you can’t move in on weekends with the crowds, but people go there for the food (and coffee), not to get a generic burger. I feel like shouting a slogan.

On Wednesday morning I was listening to the national news after being up late watching the 16th stage of the tour and the story went something along the lines of “Cadel Evans managed to stay with the leaders during the Tour de France’s sixteenth stage overnight”. Well, that isn’t quite what they said, but the implication was that it hadn’t been a great ride, someone else had won the stage, he was still third overall, and he wasn’t back in yellow. The reporting was better by this evening, back it got me to thinking about sport, or at least reporting and understanding sport, as a sort of literacy.

First of all the report this morning. Evans is third, the sixteenth stage was the second last major mountain stage and CSC have to take time out of Evans because there is a 50K individual time trial and unless Evan’s has a very bad day he will take at least 90 seconds out of the two riders in front of him in the time trial. This is because the current first two are pure climbers, skinny, light, scary strength to weight ratios, so when the road goes up they can really fly. Evan’s can keep with them, more or less, but he’s also got more power so that in a time trial he can be faster. So all Evan’s has to do in the mountains is keep with the major threats, and as he keeps saying, being wary of Menchov who can also climb well and time trial. This means in terms of tactics it is up to CSC to try and ride away from Evan’s, and while they clearly have the über team they can’t just drop Evan’s but need to pull at least 90 seconds out of him. Which is all to say that by keeping with them last night and then driving the descent to the finish and putting over 30 seconds into Menchov Evan’s rode a brilliant race. Depending on what happens tonight, in the last and probably biggest of the mountain stages, it could even have been the ride that guarantees yellow for Paris.

So the report was written by someone who doesn’t understand cycling. Nothing new in that in a country like Australia. But shortly we’ll have the Olympics splashed over our TV screens and the same sorts of things will happen as the TV directors and crews try to cover sports they simply don’t understand. This is what I mean by sporting literacy.

Any game approaches chaos from the point of view of someone who doesn’t understand it. Doesn’t understand what the rules are, what the intent is (how do you win?), what then is important in any individual event and finally what constitutes excellence. What happens in TV broadcasting, including live coverage, is that when the sport is not understood the wrong bits get discussed or end up in the highlights package. For example in track sprint cycling they will always show the rider crossing the line, and if it is live then the action replay will be the finish. However, in track sprint cycling it is when one of the riders jumps that is usually the most important point. Yes, crossing the line ends the race, and determines the winner, but the winning action was when, and why, the rider jumped. In something like the tour it is when and how someone, or a team, attacks during the stage, even sometimes how the sprint is set up from possibly five kilometres out that matters, not crossing the line.

Compare this to the coverage of the sports that everyone understands, for instance your own national sports. Here it might be Australian Rules Football. Now imagine the news story on the TV only showing when the final siren goes as if that is the best vision for what happened in the game. Yes, one team was in front then so they won, but the story will actually show a key moment in perhaps the second quarter, an outstanding passage of play from anywhere in the game that defines the match, or simply as a case of excellence. If it is football then you’ll see the goals as there are not many and they are significant, but it will not just be the goal but will include the build up as this is what has made the goal happen. We know it is often the pass before the scorer scores that is as important as the goal itself. For baseball it would be showing the last pitch at the end of the match rather than that base hit at the bottom of the third and those three pitches at the top of the fourth.

So as the Olympics roll around again I’ll watch less less as the main local broadcaster jumps from event to event (largely chasing Australians) breaking any drama and structure to each event, and then replays the wrong bits of all those sports that aren’t mainstream – which at the Olympics is pretty much most of them. All sport has drama, but it has to be allowed to unfold for, as in all narrative and drama, it has to unfold. The tour is worth watching because it is that effort over the 25 kilometres of the climb that makes an attack in the last kilometre meaningful. During the Sydney Olympics I remember watching live some sort of trap shooting final. An Australian (which was why it got air time) and I don’t even remember who else. They had shot some stupid number of traps and were equal and then, from memory, it went to sudden death. I have never seen or experienced such tension (and golfers reckon putting is hard), trap after trap was successfully hit, each shooter taking a turn. Compelling, adrenaline edging through me, but it only had this authority because I had sat and watched the entire event. The news that night of course showed the last shot. Meaningless and trivial. When you spend tens or even hundreds of millions for the rights to events like this I don’t understand why you then devalue the broadcast so much. And don’t even try to get me started on what the Australian broadcast of the winter Olympics looks like as every winter discipline is completely unknown to most Australians so we end up with the TV candy disciplines only. Now, it’s another late night as I return to watching the seventeenth stage which, after 185 kilometres will be distilled into the 21 hairpin bends of L’Alpe d’Huez.

After a lot of the usual university style debate the University of Technology Sydney have made changes to their BA in Communication. Various staff from our RMIT Media program have been involved, and they have adopted some of our ideas. This is obvious on their new home page, which is good for our reputation in a round about way.

At the same time they have the Centre for Media Arts Innovation, which I think is also a rebranding come redefining. Got the key words in there, Media Arts (at the moment media studies and media arts cross over but are also in disciplinary definitional battles) and innovation which neatly side steps but alludes to QUT’s very successful creative industries juggernaut.