Prick With A Fork

Queensland Premier Campbell Newman is being cyber-bullied. Surely a Facebook page dedicated to throwing rocks at an elected premier’s head is at least as offensive as being mean to a C-list ‘sleb on Twitter?

Good art sheds light on the human condition. Great art shows that the human condition never really changes. It’s why Sophocles’ dramas, when they’re still taught and performed, still make sense to audiences thousands of years later, and why in Melbourne later this year an Aboriginal drama company will stage an adaptation of King Lear: across culture, across time, human nature never changes. It’s also why a film like Paddy Chayefsky’s Network is required viewing, or re-viewing, for anyone shaking their head at the current and utterly depressing state of America’s politics, economy, and so-called mainstream media.

Network was made in 1976 with the action taking place against the background of a corrupt and decadent media; a disaffected, down-in-the-dumps America; cynicism about corporate control of just about everything; and a general fear that things were going to get lot worse before they got any better.

Which, from the perspective of this American abroad, sounds a lot like the US of 2012.

I was thinking about this in the hours after a lunch at Masuya, a nondescript Japanese diner in O’Connell Street in the CBD. Several years ago I worked just around the corner from the place, but had little idea it was there. The entrance is discrete, and diners have to descend a flight of stairs that’s tucked around a corner. From the outside it looks like the currency of the realm might just be “Dancer Dollars”. Never mind, it’s worth a visit – indeed, becoming a regular. The sushi is fresh, luscious, and diverse; my companion’s tempura chicken bento box almost gave me a case of menu envy.  Service was friendly, brisk, and efficient with an eye towards keeping tables turning over and getting the Salarymen back to work.

That’s the other thing: it’s a great place for a business lunch, because the acoustics are such that while there’s a substantial ambient rumble of voices that makes it all but impossible to eavesdrop, the placement of pillars means you can always hear the person across the table.

The taste of freedom…

Would that the conversation, with an Australian deeply concerned about the state of the US and indeed the state of the world, was so cheery. Over the course of the hour we dissected in minute detail all the things that could happen between now and November – at this point the news that the US Ambassador to Libya was killed by Islamist nutters had not yet broken, though the storming of the Cairo embassy was front-of-mind  – and just what Obama’s people might do to keep power in a close race. We talked a lot about how similar things felt to the ‘70s: the Oil Crisis, the Tehran embassy siege, the feckless, apologetic foreign policy, the bankrupt cities (back then it was New York, not Chicago), the comparisons went on and on.

It was sobering, and not just because the only tipple was green tea.

But on reflection, life goes on. Human nature goes on. America went through the 1970s and survived. In fact, out of that slummy miasma of a decade, of which Network provides a damn fine time capsule, emerged Ronald Reagan.

Back then the news was deeply corrupt: as Faye Dunaway’s anti-hero character, network executive Diane Christensen put it, “I watched your 6 o’clock news today; it’s straight tabloid. You had a minute and a half of that lady riding a bike naked in Central Park; on the other hand, you had less than a minute of hard national and international news. It was all sex, scandal, brutal crime, sports, children with incurable diseases, and lost puppies. So, I don’t think I’ll listen to any protestations of high standards of journalism when you’re right down on the streets soliciting audiences like the rest of us.”

All Christensen missed were the journalists who coordinate their questions to cover for the president and she’d have a pretty good picture of the news media today. (Christensen, in one hilarious scene, introduces herself to a group of black liberation separatists with whom she’s trying to ink a reality TV deal – in the days before anyone had invented the phrase, “reality TV” – as “a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.” Replace “black liberation separatists” with “Muslim brotherhood Islamists” and, well, you see the parallels.)

Culturally, we’ve been here before. The train wreck that is Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is exactly the sort of program that would have gotten the green light from Christiansen, who muses at one point in the film, ‘I’m thinking of doing a homosexual soap opera, “The Dykes”: The heart-rending saga of a woman hopelessly in love with her husband’s mistress.’

And of course there’s Howard Beale’s famous mad-as-hell speech:

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy …

Back then, there was little to do but yell out your window. There was no internet, there were no blogs or alternatives to the MSM. There was no Tea Party. Four more years of Obama is not inevitable, nor is American decline. The world came out of the torpor of the Seventies and a decade later the Soviets, who were supposed to bury as all, were finished. China, in its present form, is likely headed for a similar fate as its own bubbles unwind: freer societies, on balance and over time, prevail, even if there may be a lot of chaos and structural adjustment in the meantime.

But just because the same damn battles have to be fought over and over again doesn’t mean they’re not worth fighting.

The emerging Baptists-and-bootleggers coalition of Nicola Roxon on one side and a bunch of ‘slebs, thugby leaguers and their publicists on the other is depressing enough, even more so as it is being publicly backed by the Daily Telegraph, an organisation that has some stake in preserving free and controversial speech:

Attorney-General Nicola Roxon is also behind the campaign: “Cyber bullying is reprehensible and has no place in our society.

“What we need is strong co-operation from governments, law enforcement and the community. But we also need the assistance of US-based social networks.” …

Police have confirmed they have limited ability to seek the identities or IP addresses of anonymous abusers from the US-based Twitter, which has fought subpoenas in America when asked for information about users.

It is allowing anonymous trolls to break the law and abuse their victims without fear of being prosecuted by Australian authorities.

What’s worse is that according to the Tele’s website, there’s now only one legitimate opinion on the matter:

In Soviet Russia, opinion poll take you!

One of the odder media moves in recent months has been News Ltd’s poaching of former Fairfax up-talker Jessica Irvine, whose Kath & Kim economics (“look at MOI!”) are such an exercise in the obvious and banal (she recently discovered that people with degrees, like, totally earn more money!) that people inside and outside the organisation are scratching their heads hard as to the wisdom of this latest hire. Her latest effort is a good example of why:

Struggling to get a handle on where the economy is heading? Don’t beat yourself up about it. You’re facing an uphill battle. Nobody tells the truth about the economy.

That’s one way to put it, and it’s true, everyone has their own barrow to push. The “dismal science” is, these days, more the former than the latter, and economics is famous for being the only field of endeavour where individuals can win the Nobel Prize for saying completely opposite and contradictory things. Though when it comes to real economics, Jessica Irvine probably thinks a Greek equation is figuring out how many spin classes it will take to work off a plate of baklava.

But then this:

But maybe you think we can rely on journalists to always tell the truth? Well, sorry to disappoint, but we’re human too. Reporters face what economists call a “perverse incentive” when it comes to reporting economic data in that a bad news stories can often win a front page position; good news stories are relegated to down page 16.

Indeed, the entire media industry, with its heavy reliance on advertising from the retail and property sectors – both in structural decline thanks to lower household debt appetite – seem to have a glass-half-empty view of the economy at present. It is a mark of the editorial independence of our major newspapers that they run so many bad news stories when it would actually be in the newspaper industry’s commercial interests to tell a more upbeat story.

While the courageous speaking of truth to power is always to be applauded, with the Greens and Labor putting pressure on News Ltd and indeed the entire newspaper business via the Finkelstein inquiry (among other avenues), and with the Government consistently complaining that the Opposition is supposedly “talking down the economy”, blanket declarations that journalists are caught in a market failure when it comes to reporting on the subject might be a bit, well, hasty and incautious. It is also not true, as surprisingly good numbers on unemployment have lately gotten very good treatment in the broadsheets.

The bigger issue is that Jessica wants to have her cake and call for a fat tax too: newspapers can’t be simultaneously addicted to bad news and good news stories at the same time. But neither can we rely on News’s latest hire to show us the way. As Homer Simpson once said about Unitarianism, “If that’s the one true faith, I’ll eat my hat.”

Without giving the impression that this site is obsessed with Sydney Morning Herald restaurant critic Terry Durack, one suspects the man was so annoyed at having been forced by his editors to leave his usual Potts Point-Crown Street comfort zone to travel to the far reaches of the upper-Lower North Shore that he gave The Italian a 12/20 simply out of pique. With a trendier post code and an extra $10 tacked on to every menu item, with its Italian wines, wood-fired pizzas, caponata and all-but-mandatory salumi misti, The Italian would have been a dead-set 13.

Well, well, well, what have we here?

That’s right, an honest-to-God black truffle, sourced from somewhere in NSW and provided to the Pricks courtesy of very generous commenter and friend of the site Dr Duck, just proving that Prick With a Fork readers are the greatest, smartest, loveliest blog readers in the world. It’s every bit as redolent as you would expect, and more: Even after just a 25-minute drive home, the Prickmobile is now infused with the aroma of truffle, which beats even new car smell in my book.

The only question is, what to do with it (besides kick myself for not picking up that gorgeous truffle slicer we almost bought in Sarlat a couple of years ago)? It’s gone in a container with the carnaroli and a few eggs, and I’m thinking something simple, shaved over some beautiful egg pasta, perhaps with one of those aforementioned eggs cracked over. Anyone else got a bright idea or three? Precocious kid-friendly dishes especially appreciated.

Much thanks to the generous donor, and we will have all the fun with this it deserves.

Granted, it’s not mining rare earth minerals at gunpoint in the Congo for two bucks a day, but sometimes a Prick reckons there must be an easier way to make a buck. Today’s task: briefing and entertaining a delegation of dignitaries – OK, functionaries – from South-East Asia, complete with eight hours of simultaneous translation. Heavy going, with a break for lunch. I had thought about taking the crew down to La Rosa, Pendolino’s sister restaurant at the end of the Strand Arcade, but a co-worker from the same part of the world advised, play it safe, go Asian. And thus we found ourselves at Palace Chinese, a yum cha (or “dim sum”, as they say back in the US) hall upstairs in the otherwise unprepossessing Piccadilly Arcade running between Pitt and Castlereagh.

A year or so ago, this was a regular once-a-week lunchtime haunt, but for whatever reason Palace Chinese and I went our separate ways. But like old friends, we were able to pick up where we left off. Is this the most incredible yum cha in town? Probably not. But despite being more shabby than chic, it beats the very corporate Sky Phoenix nearby in the Westfield, which in its new incarnation is all play-it-safe corporate gweilo food. It’s reasonably friendly, as friendly as it can be when you all but have to resort to violence to keep more steamers and plates  from hitting your table. And the food is fresh and good, with dumplings of all kind: prawn, spinach and garlic, scallop (particularly tasty) to name a few. Steamed pork buns, fried gyoza, it’s all there. It’s not pricey, either, if one doesn’t go crazy with the very yummy and more-ish barbeque dishes. The functionaries were happy, I was happy, the people paying the bill were happy, and I even managed a discrete happy snap:

Is organic food healthier, safer, better? Turns out, not so much:

[Stanford University scientists] concluded that fruits and vegetables labeled organic were, on average, no more nutritious than their conventional counterparts, which tend to be far less expensive. Nor were they any less likely to be contaminated by dangerous bacteria like E. coli.

The researchers also found no obvious health advantages to organic meats.

The Prick has never found so-called “organic” produce to taste any better than the regular stuff; it’s better to buy what’s raised well and in season rather than pay the extra price for some dubious certificate of indulgence, though I suspect that for many purchasers, it’s not so much about the taste as the warm inner glow of superiority. Which still doesn’t answer the question, why is it that everyone in the organic food shop always looks so damn grumpy?

So Mark Best’s Crown Street “fine diner” Marque has once again retained its coveted “three hat” status. Mrs Prick and I had an anniversary dinner there a few years ago (it was the traditional “pay a fortune to be treated like unwanted relatives and go home hungry” anniversary) and ever since we have wondered how Best holds his own against the far better experiences offered by Quay, Sepia, and the like.

I wasn’t blogging at the time but I was so appalled by the frowny service, the lack of atmosphere, and the gouging at every turn that I did set down some notes the next day:

Too clever by half, and then some: “Look at me! I can make a foam!” the spanner crab course seemed to announce on the kitchen’s behalf. The chaud-froid egg was really just a gussied-up egg custard as it was served at an ambient temperature (along with just about everything else, giving us the hopefully inaccurate sense that dishes were assembled long before they were due to arrive at the table). There was no discernable warm/cold differential, which my high school-level French tells me should be the defining character of a “chaud-froid” dish.

 Likewise presentations were overly precious, but the tiny little bits and bobs of each dish’s components either lacked punch, individually or collectively, or fought terribly against one another. Thus the scampi over-powered its delicate accompaniments, while those little Campari cubes were an absolute punch in the mouth –what were they doing there? Overpowering, tasting of bile – just wrong. What was that oyster doing with the pork? And the desire to chop up or emulsify everything made us feel like toddlers not trusted to use a knife.

 Finally, would it kill them to pour a glass of sparkling or something with the egg, for those paying for the matching wines? Additionally, the comment that the “matching wine was in the desert” was pretty cheeky with regard to the sauternes custard (which was quite nice, by the way). Does the individual not paying the $75 for matching wines get a custard sans sauternes?

Hopefully they have lifted their game since.