I remember someone mentioning last year that long form blogging is dead. During that stage I vehemently defended blogging, saying that of course it had a life. Especially for those who actually have something to say, and have an audience.

I still think that is true but since I’ve hardly anything to say anymore, nor an audience, then blogging might as well be dead for me.

Blogging for the layman has gone the way of the geocities/angelfire website once equipped with starfield wallpapers and scrolling marquees…that is the internet graveyard.

As well as this, This host i’m on is slower than a dialup modem, so come november, I’m hopefully moving my domain to another host, recutting my showreel with all the cool shit i’ve done the past 18 months and maybe starting a new blog just filled with infrequent essays rather than angsty bitchery.

so long folks, thanks for the fish and i’ll see you on the other side.

- Tennis is progressing slowly but with pleasant results, I will never be a federer/nadal but I’m working my game towards Andy Murray :p

- no photography lately, it’s been raining incessantly for the past month.

- writing for this blog takes a little too long, I’m thinking about podcasting instead…

- I can’t believe it’s June already, my slow crawl towards impending mortality scares me.

- It’s been 15 years since Toy Story was released…seems like yesterday.

So what does one do? I have that pile of scripts and “How to write scripts” articles sitting in a folder on my computer waiting to be engulfed in enthusiastic fervour yet my current feeling is shit! I do have ideas…ideas for films, TV shows, stage plays, radio plays, novels, short stories, but in the end my efforts will get me nowhere and if they do I’ll be screwed over by some corporation which will strip the heart and soul from my work leaving it an empty shell which no one will be able to enjoy and be so derided that I will never set foot in a creative world ever again…

So instead I sit here not bothering to actually do anything. Which is exactly the crux of the issue because when we produce nothing how can we predicate the results, the reception and relative future?

Plans I’ve had in my teens, poof, reality got the better of them. Plans I had in university still linger in the back of my mind waiting, lying dormant, waiting for that extra spark of energy which will seemingly never come as each day becomes more linear and predictable as the next.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not unhappy, far from it. I have a job I like, I have a home, I don’t go hungry, I have quite a bit of disposable income. Yet why still this feeling of going nowhere, doing nothing, this cycle of almost false emotions dictating whether today I’ll laugh, be angry, cry or be depressed.

Is this my final acceptance of mortality? Of life which exists for most people in the western world? Perhaps as kids we become so accustomed to the quest for “Fortune & Glory”, the goals of fame, money and celebrity. If we don’t reach any of those goals we feel slightly empty because we take a step back and realise that for the rest of our lives it’ll mostly be:

work 5 days a week, go to the gym 3 nights a week, eat out 2 nights a week, consume an exorbitant amount of media, tutor our kids in life, cook dinner 5 nights a week, play tennis on Sundays, get drunk occasionally, have sex infrequently (if even that lucky), travel 2 weeks a year…

rinse and repeat till you die…

okay maybe this is all cause I’m really bored right now, I’ll go watch some Graham Norton to cheer me up…

So why haven’t I been blogging? Well, there’s nothing really to blog about really, Twitter is taking care of all my tennis needs, work has been brilliant thus far, and I haven’t really had anything to really bitch about.

Of course I say that and by tomorrow something will have gone catastrophically wrong which will make me eat my words.

Life is currently devoid of any long term goals, short term goals are to get fitter, lose some weight so I can lose the joint issues and improve at tennis.

All in all I’m quite content, not resoundingly happy but very comfortable. Currently I’m in my TV rotation, working on a little video game show which is somewhat satiating my creativity and thus I haven’t found the necessary angst to go out and seek some masochistic activity (i.e updating this blog). I adore the people I work with and most of the work I do but knowing that my rotation ends in about 3 weeks will probably kill all this latent joy and send me screaming back to this blog.

But before then, I think I may enjoy what little solace I have left, grab some more sleep and you may not hear from me till mid-year

depending on how my next rotation goes I guess.

Leave you guys with a photo from the Aussie Open:

Practise before 4th Rd AO2010

The crowd at any Federer practise is amazing, amassed 5-7 deep alongside the entire court, with spectators also peering from the top of the stands of nearby courts.  People forget about personal space, courtesy or shame just for a glimpse of a living legend. I’ve been at the back of the throng, I’ve also been lucky to be at the front, leaning into the fence, close enough to lean in and almost feel the whoosh of the racquet.

This shot was taken during a warmup hit before his 4th round encounter with Lleyton Hewitt.  I was sandwiched within the throng, finding a precarious balance behind a young boy who was too short to see anything and in between two tall guys. Because Federer was practising on the other side of the court he usually was on, photos had to be carefully taken between a smattering of head, hair, shoulders and armpits all smushed up against the fence in front. But even under the fading afternoon light, framed by the seething mass of humanity, Roger Federer seemed to look into the soul of my camera, almost as if to ask;

“I mean really? Do you think you have a big enough lens? Yeesh, can you leave me alone to practise?”

If the Olympic motto is “Swifter, Higher, Stronger” than surely the motto for IOC broadcasting standards is “Slower, Lower, Weaker”. If the digital age has taught us anything, it’s that technological freedom has allowed individuals to shun the paternalistic attitudes of global media conglomerates, that is, until Uncle Media decides to enact a totalitarian broadcasting regime worthy of Kim Jung Il upon the masses.

The IOC has a shitload of power, frankly in Olympic sports Jacque Rogge has more control than the Pope over Catholics and only Sepp Blatter can compete. So why am I not surprised that every 4 years, even with the changes in social culture, advancements in digital technology, social networking etc, the IOC still comes out guns a blazing with a policy of CONTAINMENT. Selling geo-protected broadcast rights and bloody well making sure that they are adhered to, under the threat of pain, death and the likelihood that should broadcasters not toe the line, they can say goodbye to ever holding the rights again.

NBC paid $820 million for the Vancouver games, and frankly they are set to lose $250 million, because no matter how much we think the Olympics are still important, professional & amateur sports have evolved to such an extent as to mitigate the absolute importance of this one event every 4 years. Therefore yearly events such as the Super Bowl, US Open etc, have probably far more advertising revenue attached than the Olympics. So NBC, how the fuck do you earn all that money back? Frankly the IOC is ripping you off honey, time to rethink your Olympics strategy.

So all these media broadcasters pay so much yet are reaping less and less rewards. So instead of saying, fuck it, let’s just share everything, they become even MORE protectionist, more concerned about their assets. Basically they’re going about it the wrong way, if no one sees the actual footage, how do you expect to make money?

Which brings me to my actual qualms about the broadcasts themselves: I’m in fulltime work at the moment which means the luxury of staying at home watching sports live across the globe is gone, gone like the health of my and Rafa’s knees. But instead of coming home nightly and sitting through 4 hours of Eddie Maguire talking to me, in between showing me Aussies skiing in the heats of some event and 2 hours of ads, I would like to see highlights or replays of events I actually care about, you know watch the best in the world? Shit, I even want to see the bad stuff as well; I want to see figure skating to ridiculous music choices like an instrumental version of Numb by Linkin Park.

Look I do understand that it’s important to support “our” athletes no matter what level but at least give the rest of us workers a choice to view highlights online, I’m not even asking for full replays (that’s way too much to ask of ninemsn) but instead what do we get? Inane interviews with half drunk Aussies, reviews of après hangouts and 1000 highlight reels of Canadian Dale Begg-Smith winning silver.

Ch9 can’t even be bothered with “real” highlights; it’s sad and indicative of the shite broadcasting we have to deal with in this country. But LJ, some annoying people may ask, why not subscribe to Foxtel? They’re showing everything, they have a significant amount of digital online stuff. Yes indeed, they do, and I can probably pay for a similar thoroughly comprehensive online service as well.

But the argument is, I shouldn’t have to. It’s the Olympics, a huge monolithic event which happens every 4 years. It’s not some random tennis tournament in Dubai. I shouldn’t have to subscribe to watch it; FTA broadcasters should be throwing the material at me, as well as the copious amounts of ads and trying to sell me everything from jeeps to Nike shoes. The question is, why aren’t they?

I can live with ads, shit if you had the online coverage NBC had for the 2008 Olympics, I would gladly sit through 30sec ads for every 10min of footage I watched. I will gladly let you sell me anything, sham wow, Nike, Coca Cola, I’m addicted to the last 2 anyhow.

But what I don’t want and frankly the majority of people, wealthy and smart enough to use the internet (those are the people you’re targeting your ads to) is to be fed random tidbits of events and extended interviews with people we don’t care about.

See back in 2008, online flash streaming was still getting started, but now ubiquitous services such as Justintv & Ustream are in total cohorts with TPTB. The minute a stream is put up, bang, gets taken down. SO much for the internet breaking down geographical barriers, as long as you’re NBC/IOC you’re still allowed to erect the walls.

NBC made a HUGE leap with its Beijing 2008 coverage. Unprecedented live streaming of something like 90% of events. It was revolutionary, extraordinary, and frankly I was lucky enough to be technologically adept enough to experience some of it first-hand.

But now (perhaps with the lack of time difference) NBC has restricted 95% of streaming and full replays to US Cable subscribers. For fucks sakes, it’s hard enough to find a working US VPN, but now you’re asking me to find a username and password for a cable service? Well fuck you very much.

It’s like we’ve taken 10 steps back since 2005 (the year which heralded YouTube) instead of fucking awesome digital broadcasting, watching stuff when we want and choosing how we want it, broadcasters and the IOC in particular still want to tell us what to do and how to do it.

It seems that Europe is still the place to be for good all round sports coverage without the crap and pomp. Frankly I do envy you, Europe but I don’t envy your VAT. Whilst Eurosport gives great online and traditional coverage (In superb HD as well), we in Australia are left with he most dismal excuse for a television broadcaster. You know people actually hoped this time Ch 9 would be slightly better than the often lacklustre Ch 7. No, instead Olympic coverage in this country just got 10 times worse with Eddie the Eagle Maguire spending way too much time talking, crap highlights of even crappier Aussies coming 40th in the downhill, daily live coverage only from 9-2pm. On Sunday, the coverage stopped at 2pm which meant they missed out on the men’s 1500m short track final, which was fucking ace btw, thank god for Sopcast and Eurosport in Czech.

Along similar protectionist media strategies, claiming YouTube videos is another strategy which pisses me off as much as it boggles my logic. Tennis Australia the latest culprit in a myriad of media corporations who don’t have a fucking clue about digital business. Anything remotely related to the Australian Open 2010 has been removed from the Tube. Interviews, matches, ceremonies, every last fucking titbit. And for what? Are they going to sell me all the matches (other than the final) including interviews with Jim Courier? On DVD or on iTunes?

So obviously it’s not to protect their vested material interests, since they’re not selling me any of that material they’re pulling. Okay well, perhaps they are trying to protect Ch7’s broadcast interests. Okay so will ch7 ever repeat any of those matches, interviews or ceremonies? Nup!

Then why the fuck would you be pulling off those videos? Isn’t it more of an incentive to claim ownership and reap the ad revenue instead of ripping everything off the interzwebz and actually making no money off it? Oh and instead of using an outlet such as YouTube to further the cause of Tennis Australia itself and the Australian Open, it takes the hardline of, I’m going to PROTECT ALL my ass(ets), well, that’s your extra revenue going down the drain. People (especially those hardcore fans) will continue downloading and sharing in the crevasses of the internet where you’re too fucking stupid to look.

I just find this entire situation demoralising, as a teen the internet was like the saviour of mankind, finally something to bring us all closer together, the ability to share, to create, an open discussion forum, no longer did I have to wait 8 months for the latest X files season, I can watch and discuss with my fellow fans the day after the episode went to air in the US.

What Facebook, twitter, YouTube had achieved to bring us closer together, a community of humans gathering, watching and discussing and in this case the achievements of some of the best winter sportsmen and women is now frequently overshadowed by a mob of greedy protectionist white middle aged businessmen, keen to protect their own vested interests, to the detriment and development of global culture and in essence the human race.

Shame…real utter, fucking shame.

—

P.S.

Roger Mosey has written a brilliant piece on how the BBC plans to tackle digital broadcasting through creative & innovative measures for the 2012 Olympics. It seems so hopeful on paper, but I can’t help but think in 2 years time we’ll be back again, hands tied by the IOC and sitting through another abysmally broadcasted Olympics.

So we really have 2 choices if we want to watch good coverage for London 2012:

1. Move to the UK
2. Introduce a TV tax in Australia, give all the money to the ABC, let them have 6 channels and give them the broadcasting rights and let the TV Multiplatform people go crazy online.

I’ve come back from 2 weeks at the Australian Open 2010, experiencing many firsts in the process, first time in Melbourne, first time watching live tennis and of course first time watching the GOAT in action.

Just a little over a year ago, I was drowning my sorrows in ethanol as Federer lost another final to Nadal. Little did I believe I would be at a Grand Slam final a year later, watching him actually win it.

I’ll be retrospectively blogging for the next few weeks or so, all my experiences at AO2010. Lam and I podcasted most days so I may actually remember stuff. I’m hoping to also put snippets of the podcasts up (well the non-defamatory parts anyway).  It’s the first time I’ve podcasted and I think it beats writing a diary on my laptop, takes less time and less energy and I can multitask during it. So look for more podcasts in the future i guess.

So the major planned goals accomplished this trip were:

• watch Roger Federer dance across a tennis court
• watch RF practise
• obtain RF’s autograph
• watch a Grand Slam Final
• Watch RF WIN a Grand Slam Final (On my birthday to boot)
• Watch heaps of other awesome players playing the glorious sport of tennis LIVE

Of course there were a few unexpected events which also made the 2 weeks unforgettable:

• Hit For Haiti Charity Event
• Justine Henin’s run to the final
• Prince William’s mid-match visit
• Gasquet vs Youzhny 5 setter
• Feliciano Lopez’s rear end

I will also cover the impact of having the iphone whilst travelling as well as professing my undying love for my Canon 40D + 70-200mm f4/L Combo.

Upon reflection I guess 2009 was this:

In the beginning I was fighting fit, tanned but very broody

unemployment was my game and lack of future prospects made me cruddy

somehow an interview in Jan landed me a job in a place I dreamt

but I quickly went from neat and officey to threadlessly unkempt

frustrations boiled and insomnia plagued my Uni rattled body

I realised fulltime work for the next 40 years will drive me potty

so I lost myself in food that was junk and taboo

in tv shows set in Rome, on Battlestars and  in Cylon goo

got back into photography and unleashed my dormant talent

along with a deep abiding love for all special tennis moments

especially those of Federer, painful loses and sweetest wins

gave me excitement on my boring days and plastered a grin

on my ever widening face.

However my lack of grace,

was personified as i tried to emulate the GOAT on an actual court

as i thought skills for the game could easily be store bought

along the way of corporate restructures and freebie film tickets

in the end my friends and family were still the winning wickets

On the cusp of 2010, a month till I’m twenty-four

I need to get this body back to where it was before

leaner, fitter and fighting for those goals unaccomplished

to keep those creative juices flowing and unblemished.

Happy New Year Everyone and Best Wishes for 2010.

]]> http://ljkong.com/blog/2010/01/happy-new-year-with-a-good-dose-of-catharsis/feed/ 2 http://ljkong.com/blog/2009/12/measuring-your-mortality/ http://ljkong.com/blog/2009/12/measuring-your-mortality/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:17:09 +0000 LJK http://ljkong.com/blog/?p=295 I watched The Godfather trilogy with my posse over the weekend and words still can’t describe how much I love those films. I guess it’s another one of those bi-decade re-obsessions I have. But every time I watch an old film or TV show I get this incredible sense of mortality when I start realising holy shit:

Pacino and De Niro are both hitting 70, Sean Connery is 80 and even fricking Macgyver is 60.

Soon, these people (who I’ve grown up with through the medium of cinema) are going to start carking it, and then…I’m gonna cark it too.

It’s a weird way of looking at things really. I get these major mortality pangs, as I like to call them, about once every year, usually towards the end of the year when I realise the impending doom of my birthday in January and I come to the realisation that I’m another year closer to death.

Speaking of great actors I was looking up Pacino’s filmography and in a span of 5 years in the early 1970s he made:

• The Godfather
  
• Serpico
  
• The Godfather part II
  
• Dog Day Afternoon

And he didn’t win an Oscar for any of them. I mean those films pretty much defined his career and he would probably never reach that pinnacle again but to think people like Gwyneth Paltrow have an Oscar for a role in Shakespeare In Love (even though I like that film, it’s still drivel), the lack of the award for the role of Michael Corleone just defines bafflement.

When one talks about Pacino, you immediately have to insert De Niro (crude imagery: one is the bun and the other the frankfurter in a classic NYC hotdog). As Brando defined post-war method acting on screen and thus changing the nature of cinema forever, Pacino and De Niro were both his natural successors. Coming out of the method schools of the East coast they both inspired generations of wannabe actors, mobsters and Italians with raspy voices and squinty frowns.

Pacino took rise in the early 70s but the latter half of the decade and much of the 80s where squarely in De Niro’s pocket. Perhaps his solid relationship with Scorsese guaranteed him a slew of well developed roles whilst Pacino retreated back to treading the boards after his screen career slipped into a long cold coma (Scarface the one exception).

Although they consistently shared sentences, it was not until Heat in 1995, did they share some screentime, and even then their one major scene together was shot with on separate days with stand-ins. Therefore Righteous Kill (billed as the first collaborative film) was to be a wet dream for all fanboys and girls.

Alas it was a shit film. And really what could be expected? Pacino’s last good film was Any Given Sunday, Oliver Stone’s ensemble homage to pro-football, and De Niro? Probably Frankenheimer’s Ronin in 1998. Of course people would disagree, heaps of people LOVED Meet the Parents, and obviously Pacino’s Roy Cohn was deservedly lauded (even though it veered a little on the shouty scenery gnawing Pacino).

The only good thing to come as a result of Righteous Kill

But as these great actors get older and come closer and closer to shuffling off this mortal coil, we think, shit when will we ever get actors like these two ever again? Actors who DEFINED cinema.

Like every wannabe director I’ve had lucid dreams where I’ve cast both in a movie. Of course in reality if I was ever in the same room as Pacino and De Niro, I’d wet my pants and cry in the corner. However in my imagination, as brilliant as it is, I see, 5 years from now, my smooth awesome confident self directing these two 75 year old geezers in a romantic comedy.

Just think about it…you know you’d want to pay 18 bucks to see it.

A young Agassi found out that his father decided to name him after two of his co-workers from a Vegas casino. No reason was given, it just turned out that way, neither Andre nor Kirk were particularly close friends of Mike Agassi, but their first names were good enough to embroider the birth certificate of his youngest child.

Thus for his existence, Andre’s search for his answers in life, herein laid out in “Open” his autobiography, results in similar lack of reasons given. Sometimes life just is…it’s a journey which we find ourselves on but forget to find out why we started in the first place.

I was too young to really remember the petulant wild Agassi, and too disinterested to really take note of his late career resurgence but if it were a choice between Sampras and Agassi; I was more drawn to the big A.

After reading “Open” I now have a greater understanding of why.

Agassi is the classic anti-hero in the construct of the myth archetype. “Open” catalogues his odyssey. He cuts the figure of the dedicated child, misunderstood teen, wayward young man, tragic burnout and then the resurgent saviour and ultimately the hero, but always shunning his heroic gifts and in his case the ability to play tennis.

I’m attracted to anti-heroes, I love my protagonists flawed and conflicted but ultimately they need to be good and honest people. And as much as I know about Agassi himself, I get the vibe that in light of the mistakes he has made, he is ultimately an honest and good man.

“Open”, though littered with tennis, isn’t actually about tennis. It’s about humanity, love and compassion over a bed of explanation and analysis of the choices and relationships we make in late. Although there is probably enough of the analysis to fill most biographies it’s really the deep emotional resonance which makes the book interminably readable.

I finished the solid 400 pages in a day. I can’t remember the last time I managed to read a book in a day; I gather it was probably the first Harry Potter book when I was 15 or something.

Upon finishing the first chapter on the train heading to work on the morning I received the book, tears welling in my eyes, I knew for a book to elicit such an emotional response from me in the first 20 pages, it must be pretty damn special.

The book is very well ghost-written by J.R Moehringer (a Pulitzer prize winner no less) and I gather a good amount of the structure comes from his end but I wouldn’t discount some of the origins of the literary poetics from Agassi himself, together they form some rare quality for a sports (auto)biography.

I hold a great literary weakness for (auto)biographies, but usually they’re filled with latent facts for the casual reader with some revelationary stories for the hardcore fan but there is something about “Open” which makes it utterly engaging just on a humanistic level. Just look at the cover (above), it’s not pretty, some would say ugly even, but it’s raw and intriguingly human. Also the book, purely on a narrative level, is just a good yarn, a pure form of “Myth” storytelling.

I’m usually not one to re-read books but I can’t help but feel that I’d be thumbing through my paperback copy of “Open” constantly for years to come.

Even if you hate tennis (or any type of sport), or biographies, or Agassi for that matter, I’d still urge you to give “Open” a go, or at least read the couple of chapters telling of his courtship of Steffi Graf, I think even the most coldest and stoniest of hearts will fall fluttering and submit to the coy sweetness and endearment of that relationship.

I used to worship Roland Emmerich; I still do to a certain extent. Of course I’ve been laughed at every time I’ve mentioned this fact in cultural studies classes and that Independence Day is one of my favourite films and is the one that really made me consider filmmaking as a viable career path (no matter how deluded that notion is now).

Emmerich has made some cult masterpieces of genre filmmaking, Universal Soldier, Stargate, the fore mentioned ID4, but ID4 was his magnum opus, it started the entire genre of end of the world blockbuster epics and it will be the film that has and will define his entire career.

It was also the last good film he ever made…unless you count The Patriot as a good film. I haven’t seen it in it’s entirety so I can’t judge but that film was an anomaly amongst The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC and not to mention Godzilla (which I personally thought was the death of his career)

Did 2012 fail like all his other films since 1996? Yup, even though David and Margaret were highly generous and gave it 3.5 stars, 2012 was just another film which drowned narcissistically in its love for VFX.

I can forgive bad writing and a ridiculous plot, elements which form the basis of a disaster blockbuster. But the problem here was the lack of charismatic actors or characters even to carry the bad writing and plot. The 3rd rate cast with the likes of Danny Glover just leave me cold, cold like the frickin’ Antarctic tundra.

Add to the mix, horrible camerawork and cinematography (shit what cinematography anyway, everything was green screened to death) and a forgettable score (David Arnold where were you?) you end up with a general mess of a film. And with a running time of 158min, a much too long mess of a film which became a highly uncomfortable experience for my bladder.

So what was I expecting? I haven’t seen The Day After Tomorrow or 10,000BC so I had no idea how badly Emmerich had lost his mojo. I wanted some sort of tie in to Mayan mythology rather than the blunt objective driven mantra of: “oh man, how much of the earth can be destroy and how many people we can kill?”

In the end the main reason 2012 failed was that as a result of the culmination of all its points of failure, we as an audience just couldn’t connect, not to the characters, not to the situations, nothing, nada. It’s like watching paint dry with a really awesome subwoofer mix.

—

I was lucky enough to get in on the Sydney premiere which meant I enjoyed the screening surrounded by a lot of movie critics (including Margaret & David), and an occasional C-list TV celeb. It reminded me of the time when I actually really wanted to be a film reviewer. I still think it’s a pretty awesome job, and you don’t have to pay to see trash like 2012.