LA to San Diego to LAX

Now in Washington DC; arrived around midnight last night after a fairly average flight from Los Angeles. Staying at Donovan House (a Thompson hotel). It seems to be the DC place to be at the moment - various American Idol people were wandering around last night when we arrived.

LAX has not improved since last time I flew from there in 2002 - still a very painful airport to leave. Our carry-on bags excited some interest, and for some reason they ran my bag through 4 times. And then let it through without actually going through anything inside it. Anyway, we almost missed our plane. V stressful.

A late start on Monday... M went to a work meeting in an LA outer suburb then was very late back - I was pretty irritated. After another Gordon Ramsay restaurant breakfast (very good again) headed off for a quick cruise down Hollywood Boulevard (we didn't stop or get out, but I did see a few stars on the boulevard while driving - and felt no compulsion to see more. Oh and there was some guy dressed up as batman). Headed on to the freeways and drove towards San Diego. My first US proper freeway experience for some years - it was actually quite fun once I settled into it. The Mustang was made for freeway driving.

Arrived in San Diego and headed to S and R's house - they live in suburbia about 20 minutes from downtown. Fascinating to spend some time in an American suburb, rather than the inner-city life we normally see on holiday. We headed down to meet R after work in La Jolla - a really nice seaside suburb. Had some great Mexican food, then a walk around La Jolla. After that, S took M and I on a mega-tourist spree. In a few hours we wandered around Balboa Park (beautiful museums and nice gardens - a great place to be on a summer evening), then a drive to Coronado Island - a cute area with great views (including over to Mexico) and the amazing-looking old Hotel del Coronado. Followed by ice-cream and tequila with S and R. In the morning, S made a great breakfast then we hung out for a while, then hit the road back towards LA. Was great to see S and R and the kids (I and B) - they've been back in the USA for a few months now. The kids are adorable and I taught me hopscotch. She's starting to get an American accent on some words!

Making good time on the way back to LAX, so dropped by Newport Beach to relive my memories of the OC (particularly Season One). Parked near the Newport Beach Yacht Club and went for a wander. Very upmarket and glamorous - and self-contained - it reminded me of Brighton. And also of Rachel Bilson.

Then a mad rush to make our plane for DC.

LA Day #3

It is now 12.50am - the end of another fun day in LA.

We had a late start this morning after the wedding... when we eventually got up, the gym for me and a swim for M then a late (and good) breakfast poolside on the roof.

Then headed down Sunset to the Getty Museum via Beverly Hills and Bel Air - lots of mansions, high hedges and little stands selling star maps. The Getty is awesome - you park at the bottom of the hill, then head up the hill in an electric tram to the museum. The museum consists of a number of pavilions surrounding a beautiful garden. Great architecture. A fairly good selection of c15th-c18th religious art - including a spectacular El Greco - plus some excellent impressionists and an amazing sculpture collection (including an incredible Magritte). A huge photography exhibit. And a temporary exhibition of French bronzes from c16th - c18th was pretty impressive.

After the Getty, headed down to Santa Monica Beach. Traffic was bad - unsurprising for a perfect Summer Sunday afternoon. We (eventually) parked at a parking lot on Santa Monica pier, after dodging thousands of people and much traffic. The beach is amazing - very white and very wide. And the crowd was multicultural and happy. It is a weird setup - there is a road by the beach, then a grassed section, then a HUGE parking lot right by the beach. After parking, we headed to the 3rd Street Promenade - a mall of huge stores (all the big chains), thousands of people and extremely polished street performers / buskers. I bought perhaps the two biggest coffees I've ever seen (I'm still in shock that they were regular-sized) and burned myself carrying them. We headed up the pier past lots of crappy amusement parlors and etc, then back to the car and drove back to the hotel via Venice Beach and Culver City (we drove right past the Sony Pictures / Columbia studio lot).

We are still working on tipping culture - M lost her watch and bracelet by the pool earlier today, and retrieved them this evening. A nice guy from security brought them back after we asked at the front desk. Given our (admittedly limited) understanding of US tipping culture, we had thought it was appropriate to give him some money as a thank you. He refused it. We do not understand why, and probably never will.

A quick change, then headed down Sunset to dinner at Le Petit Four - it is claimed to be LA's best restaurant for people-watching and, though I have little to compare it to, it seems possible. We had a great outside table, and there was definitely lots of people-watching going on, along with really good French food. The cars parked outside were largely Ferraris, with an occasional Audi R8 or 7 series BMW - rather pedestrian after the Bugatti last night.

After a late dinner, a drink at the bar at the Sunset Marquis... very dark, very intimate and very cool. I felt very much at home there, and M had to drag me away.

After another day of observation, it is clear that the dress code in LA this summer is either
(a) short and tight; or
(b) see-through and billowing.

LA day #2

Today... Breakfast at the Gordon Ramsay restaurant at The London West Hollywood - a beautiful room with distressed floorboards, eclectic furnishings, delicious food and great service.  I experienced Turkey Bacon for the first time and it deserves the capitalisation accorded it.  Next, Beverly Centre.  An American mall, Beverly Hills - style.  It didn't feel that much different to Chadstone, which is meant neither as a compliment to the Beverly centre or chadstone.  Picked up some pretty good trainers.

Spent the afternoon at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).  Amazing contemporary art collection in the Broad building.  Jeff Koons 'Michael Jackson and Bubbles' and the huge metal egg and balloon dog.  Lots of Jasper Johns, Rauschenbergs.  In the general collection some great Rothkos, many Picasso... an awesome exhibition of contemporary Korean art (irreverent, funny, meaningful and basically really good).  Probably the best stuff were the two massively gigantic rusted steel sculptures / installations by Richard Serra.  One of them, particularly, was an experience not soon forgotten - it was sort of a massive-room-sized rusted-steel maze - but even better.

Then back to the hotel - I'm getting more used to valet parking - then a quick change and off to Burbank for M's cousin's wedding.

The wedding was an experience. 

Met up at M's cousin's house and travelled to the wedding with the family in a stretch Hummer.  The wedding was at a weird and intensely uncool reception venue and restaurant in the Burbank hills called 'Castaway'.  Good views over LA, but otherwise almost unbelievably crap.  M's cousin (his mother is Australian and his dad is English - and he grew up in LA and is all-American complete with his own gun collection and pick-up truck) was marrying an Argentinian girl.  So the wedding comprised English cousins, Australian cousins, an Argentinian delegation and many young Angelenos.  There are few certainties in life, but I can confidently say that the fashion this summer in Burbank is for very very short, tight dresses which show as much cleavage as possible.  One (definitely underage) girl's dress was so short that her ass was on view.  Her parents were also at the wedding.  Her mother was among the many tattooed ladies, and had particularly prominent and ugly tattooes across her left breast and left upper back.  Her dress was just marginally longer than her daughters'.

M's dad was there and was definitely the life of the party.  There was a family get-together on Thursday night which we missed, and apparently he had made many friends there, so that on entry he was roundly high-fived and later in the evening was pulled onto the dancefloor by the bride.  And he was definitely a required participant in the garter-throwing (a bizarre tradition i've never previously experienced involving the groom removing the bride's garter and then throwing it over his head like a bouquet to be caught by one 'lucky' unmarried man).

The wedding ceremony lasted between 4 and 5 minutes, and was conducted by the groom's father (M's cousin's husband).  It was,  I understand, his second wedding as a marriage celebrant.  He is a bit-part actor (apparently his career highlight is a one-line part in Titanic) and struggled to give across the microphone to the bride and groom, but he managed to ensure his jokes were definitely picked up by the mic.
The groom's brother gave probably the worst wedding speech ever (and that includes E's speech at his brother's wedding where he described the bride as a fungus that had grown on the family).  The speech consisted of a long, rambling anecdote about the fact that he met his brother's bride first, as they had worked at Burger King together as teenagers.  There did not appear to be any particular point, although I wondered if he was insinuating that he'd been there first.  It was not clear.  He did, however, swear every few words and - sitting next to the groom's parents (ie. his parents) - it was fairly amusing watching them sink lower into their chairs and bury their heads deeper and deeper into their hands.  He also, for reasons which remained unclear, frequently made a farting noise into the mic.  I think he did this either before or after each time he mentioned the bride's name, but I could be mistaken.  Eventually, someone grabbed the mic off him and started another speech. 

The dancing was also interesting.  AC-DC mixed into 'Baby Got Back' mixed into Argentinian pop.  The tall, blond girl dancing next to me in the second-shortest dress of the evening somehow lost her balance and fell on her ass.  This was not particularly graceful and afforded an interesting to those who cared to look.

Overall, the wedding was an experience not to be missed.  The happy couple looked very happy and (on meeting them for the first time at their wedding) seemed very warm and full of love for each other.

Veyron

Got back to The London West Hollywood from the wedding tonight, and there was a Bugatti Veyron parked outside... according to Wikipedia there are only 200 in existence and they cost US$1.4m each. Never thought I'd see one in the metal... makes my Ford Mustang look more like a piece of crap than it actually is.

M&T: LA #1

It is now 5.20pm Friday LA time; arrived at about 8am today, after an incredibly stress-free journey from Melbourne. Very happy we upgraded our flight. I even had a good conversation with the customs guy at LAX about the differences between barristers and solicitors !?!

Ended up hiring a black Ford Mustang for $7/day more than the (crap) car we were going to hire. It is an American muscle car - 2 door, very low-slung, big bonnet, short tail, fairly ugly and (I suspect) a suburban hoon's car; it is certainly not in abundance in West Hollywood, which appears to be dominated by European sports cars, Hummers and Range Rovers.

The London West Hollywood is fantastic so far. Our room is huge and extremely tastefully funished [no kidding, the bathroom is bigger than I expect my room to be at The Standard NYC and the double shower inexplicably has 3 separate shower heads], the staff are friendly (and have so far complimented both my car and my t-shirt), the pool and surround are really nice and they let us check in at about 9am - very welcome after the long flight.
The location is also great - basically on the corner of San Vicente and Sunset Boulevard. The Whisky A Go Go is pretty much within spitting distance, and the Viper Room is a couple of doors down on Sunsset. About 5 minutes drive to Beverly Centre (a huge shopping mall).

Have had a great day so far... determined to try and stay awake until bedtime tonight.
Went to the gym this morning, then a wander down Sunset.
Ended up getting lunch on Santa Monica Boulevard, then grabbed the car [still getting used to valet parking and the whens,hows and whys of tipping] and found Samy's Cameras to buy a Canon G10 - much cheaper than in Australia, and (apparently) the best camera store in LA. It was huge and fantastic (and had valet parking!!), and we got talking to a couple of people working there. Bizarrely, one had spent a year living in Bundoora studying at Latrobe and the other was an older European guy who's son was leaving for Australia today.
Then a coffee at Urth Cafe on Melrose in West Hollywood - good coffee, and great people watching. The people at the next table were having what appeared to be a script development meeting, and the girl sitting at the table 2 away directly in my line of sight was whatever is beyond beautiful.
A drive through the hills of Beverly Hills and Bel Air - lots of amazing modernist architecture (and etc) and huge mansions, most of which are hidden behind hedges and fences so all that can be seen is glimpses and gates. A very wind-y drive along Mulholland Drive and we somehow ended up in Sherman Oaks thanks to M's directions. After finding our way out of the Valley, we drove back up Sunset and are now back at the hotel relaxing.

Tonight, dinner with M's friend Tanya who lives in LA. Tomorrow, M's cousin's wedding somewhere in the wilds of Burbank.

No pressure, but if you're interested in further instalments check them out at www.samizdat7.blogspot.com - i won't be sending further group emails.

Megan Fox and I have much in common

I was amazed, yesterday, when reading some random article to find the following:

The Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen star loves body art, and insists prospective lovers have an inking before she will consider getting serious with them.

The 23-year-old said: "I have eight tattoos. All my boyfriends are required to have one and if they don't have one yet, I make them get a tattoo of my name or my face."

I feel exactly the same in relation to clients. I insist that all my clients get a tattoo of my name or my face. Preferably my face. Preferably on or near their genitals.

Afghan Star

Review in the New York Times of Afghan Star, a documentary about the Afghani television show 'Afghan Star' produced for Tolo-TV.

The documentary is excellent (especially its first three-quarters) and deserves an audience. It won a couple of prizes at Sundance earlier in 2009.

Afghan Star” subverts the cliché image of Afghanistan as a nation of intractably primitive, superstitious tribespeople who have little in common with Westerners. Most of the Afghans in the film speak decent English, and the kind of hysteria kicked up by the show is identical to the hoopla surrounding “American Idol.” The popularity of “Afghan Star” among the country’s youth is presented as a hopeful sign that Afghanistan is ready to exchange “guns for music,” to quote one talking head.

...

Daoud Sediqi, the show’s presenter and director, is as gung-ho a television personality as Ryan Seacrest. Near the end of the film he declares, “The Taliban is finished.” But what does it say that after attending the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where “Afghan Star” won the directing and audience awards in the world documentary competition, he didn’t return to his native country and is thought to be seeking asylum in the United States?

Cretinous

Very funny review of Transformers 2 in the New York Times.

The creative people behind the cretinous “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” the second blockbuster inspired by the popular Hasbro toys, have segmented their demographic into four discrete categories:

1. Young teenage boys who still play with Transformer toys (or keep them under the bed).

2. Older teenage boys who identify with the professional doofus Shia LaBeouf.

3. Somewhat older teenage boys who would like to play with the professional hottie Megan Fox.

4. Boys of all ages who think it would be cool to go to war and run around the desert shooting guns.

and

Of course, viewers can embrace several categories at once; say, those who collect toys and liked Mr. LaBeouf in the last “Indiana Jones” movie. Or those who fantasize about having sex with Ms. Fox while shooting guns, a vision that distills the auteurist ambitions and popular appeal of the movie’s director, Michael Bay.

Is it even possible to have liked Shia LaBeouf in the last Indiana Jones movie? I guess almost anything is theoretically possible - but it never occurred to me, having seen the film.

and

There’s a serious disconnect in the movie between the image of power that those GM brands are meant to convey and the bankrupt car industry they now signify. That disconnect only deepens with the introduction of two new Autobot characters, the illiterate, bickering twins Skids (Tom Kenny) and Mudflap (Reno Wilson), both of which take the shape of Chevrolet concept cars. The characters have been given conspicuously cartoonish, so-called black voices that indicate that minstrelsy remains as much in fashion in Hollywood as when, well, Jar Jar Binks was set loose by George Lucas. For what it’s worth, the script, by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, also includes a crack about Simmons, who’s coded as Jewish, and his “pubic-fro head.”

Towelhead

Recently saw Towelhead (AKA Nothing is Private) , an awesome but extremely difficult film about a confused half-Lebanese teenage girl growing up in Texas and - particularly- her sexual confusion and distant parents.

It had a cinema release in the USA in 2008 and did miniscule business - unsurprising given the subject matter - but great performances by (inter alia) Aaron Eckhart, the teenage girl (Summer Bishil) and Toni Collette. It was written for the screen (adapted from a novel) and directed by Alan Ball (6 Feet Under, True Blood, American Beauty, etc).

Aaron Eckart has an absolute lock on playing seemingly all-American but rotten-on-the-inside characters (In the Company of Men, Thank You for Smoking) and he is perfect in Towelhead.

I recommend it next time you're in the mood for something malignant but sort-of-beautiful-and-hopeful.

People suck

From The Age

More from Cannes and the world of celebrity irony, brought to you by blonde actress Hayden Panettiere - a woman described by some as a less attractive Miley Cyrus, which presumably means more genes from Billy Ray.

She has spent the past few days on the French Riviera, cuddling Pamela Anderson's former lover, Steve Jones, on a boat owned by Elton John and David Furnish.

But the names are not the news - it's the tattoo spilt down her left flank.

The Heroes starlet and sometime singer has no doubt spent a lifetime spelling out the preponderance of vowels in her last name, but she seems to have been less careful in directing her tattooist.

Panettiere, 19, got inked late last year but it was not until she lay out on the yacht that we could read the elaborate script. Vivere senza rimipianti, it reads, with an extra 'i' in rimpianti. The phrase is Italian for "live without regret", but one cannot help imagining she would be feeliing a liittle of the stuuff.

USVI

Pretty excited to be heading to the US Virgin Islands in a couple of months as part of our July/August American trip.

According to the official USVI website:

Our long standing, enviable international reputation is not solely based on our pristine beaches, warm weather, and crystal-clear waters -- we're also the most culturally diverse, ethnically rich, and artistically vibrant society in the tropics.

If you're an American it's probably like going to Bali - but not that many Aussies make it to Saint John et al.

How heavily retouched does this picture look?

The queen of dogs

Firepower

A surprisingly emotional outburst from Paul Sheehan in the SMH about the Firepower debacle:

It is difficult to exaggerate the scale of the lies, the extent of the damage, the trail of destructive bastardry left behind by Timothy Francis Johnston, who lied to everyone, cheated everyone, and, as you read this, lives in luxury overseas because the Australian authorities are too stupid to charge him with fraud and thus be able to seek his extradition.

...

Since Johnston graduated from St Laurence's College, a Christian Brothers school in Brisbane, he has become an increasingly deluded, reckless, pathological and criminal predator. His exaggerations accumulated until they became a pyramid of lies which became a pyramid of frauds, built on pyramid selling. Almost nobody checked the detail, and there were so many details which would have exposed the lies.

He could never have wreaked the damage he did without the active support of the Australian government, and the passivity of regulators and police.

Johnston had no patents. No intellectual property rights. No scientific evidence. No factories. No prospectus. No audited accounts.

No large export orders. In fact, he had almost no sales. He spoke of a global company but in reality it was a handful of people in an industrial estate in Perth. The unprecedented scale of this horror story has never been fully understood, and never been available to the public, until today.

Because today is the publication date of a book, Firepower, which lays out the magnitude of this fraud and the depth of its implications. It has to be mandatory reading for the Trade Minister, Simon Crean, and his senior departmental officials. Crean will enjoy the discomfort it brings to his Liberal predecessors in government, but not for long, because Johnston is now his problem.

...

It is the missing due diligence, the prosecutorial zeal, the big picture. It presents the events that should have animated every agency that came into contact with Johnston and his idiotic narcissism. Instead, the job has been done by Gerard Ryle, a journalist.

Firepower groans with a mass of damning detail, the work of someone who has won 15 awards for investigative journalism, including four Walkley Awards. Ryle has been a Walkley finalist 11 times. He is the news editor of this newspaper.

Given that I haven't read it, of course it may be true that Ryle has written the greatest book of all time - somehow displacing Infinite Jest from the top of the list - but the above is fairly heavy praise!! And it even manages to include flattering details about Ryle's career. And amazingly the greatest investigative journalist of all time is the news editor of the SMH, the paper which published Sheehan's story. Admittedly, this fact is fully disclosed about half-way through the article - but for my money this is not enough. If the SMH wants to run an article so strongly praising a book and the man who wrote it - and that man is a senior editor of the SMH - then the disclosure should be upfront in big bold letters.

Having said all that, I do want to read the book.

Aghan Idol

An open letter to my many loyal readers.

Everyone should watch SBS at 7:30pm tonight for the Australian premiere of Afghan Star, a documentary about the television show Afghan Star shown on Tolo TV. It won an award at Sundance earlier this year and is meant to be v good. Plus one of the Mohsenis is a close friend.

Tolo is an Afghani TV station owned and run by the Melbourne/Afghan Mohseni family.

SEE this article from The Age.

Still on Koh Phangan

Still having a great time here on Koh Phangan. 
Lots of swimming in the pool, massages, great Thai food, frisbee on the beach and not that much else.

Yesterday a fun snorkelling trip on the 'No Woman No Cry' boat (?)  Great snorkelling, lunch at the very beautiful Bottle Beach and a very rocky hike to some waterfalls.  Lots of anenomes, multi-coloured fish, hard and soft coral and much more.

One more day at Salad Beach, then we head to Thong Nai Pan for our last couple of days.

Koh Phangan

Today arrived in Koh Phangan via ferry from Koh Samui.  Fairly stress-free logistics, although the trip was (enjoyably) delayed by Songkran (New Year) festivities.  Lots of water being thrown and/or splashed on cars driving past (and from cars driving past onto the many revellers on the street).  Simultaneously, Bangkok is in crisis - the country looks to be in the midst of revolution and/or military coup. 
Luckily we have a TV in our room at Cookies at Salad beach.  Unfortunately, the English-langugage channels consist of an english-langugage German general-interest channel, and an english-language Russian news and sport channel which is headlining its latest bulletin with a story on possible voter fraud in Moldavia (Moldova? who knows and/or cares).  Events in the pacific are a fairly low priority for the Russians and Germans.  We also have HBO - which also gives events in the Pacific a low priority.
Otherwise, all is good.  M is having fun.  Very hot.  Chang is still a good beer.  Thai massages remain great.  Our hammock is comfortable.  View from our deck is incredible.

timing

good timing by M and I - we managed to time our visit to Thailand with the (now cancelled) ASEAN summit, massive protests and the declaration of a state of emergency.  All calm in Koh Samui as far as we can tell...

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/04/12/world/AP-AS-Thailand-Politics.html?_r=1&hp

 

In happier news, just had an amazing massage. 

Having a great time and managing to endure the soothing music which seems to play constantly.

Thailand part 2

Still having a great time - Zazen is fantastic - www.samuizazen.com - and yesterday we watched a buddhist wedding for 2 middle-aged heavily-tattooed Germans with heads shaved at the sides and long on top.  The tattoos on the sides of her shaved scalp were very fetching and spoke of a deep inner serenity.  Otherwise - good food, massages, heat, humidity, backgammon, the Bangkok Post (a really good paper), wandering along the beach.

Singapore

Had a great day in Singapore as day 1 of our Thailand trip.  Enjoyed the qantas Melbourne first class lounge (nice work Marc Newsom) (sp?) and its excellent restaurant, then the upgraded premium economy seats (the benefits of being married to a platinum frequent flyer).  a good flight (loved the Wrestler), then a day in Singapore.  Ate 3 amazing meals at hawker centres.  I'm yet to discover food better than Singaporean hawker centre food.  It's just incredibly good.  Wandered around Singapore.  Sweated.  Some beautiful old buildings and some interesting new ones.  Now at the airport for our flight to Koh Samui.

M.I.A. goes huge at the Grammys

U2 was upstaged by one of the most unusual spectacles in the history of the awards, as M.I.A., the outspoken Sri Lankan-British rapper, performed while nine months pregnant — indeed, she had been due to give birth on Sunday. She joined the rap dream team of Jay-Z, T. I., Kanye West and Lil Wayne, whose song “Swagga Like Us” samples M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” which itself had been up for record of the year.

Gyrating across the stage in a sheer black costume with her protruding belly wrapped in black and white polka dots, she shared the stage with four of the most popular rappers in music, although most eyes in the arena were surely on her for much of the performance.

New Lily Allen

Looking forward to picking up the new Lily Allen album, It’s Not Me, It’s You - she is so good at being a pop star that I really want to like it.


Great article in today's NYT. She really gives great interview:

At the restaurant Ms. Allen rejected the maitre’d’s offer of a discreet corner table; we were seated in the middle of the room, facing the door. She walked in as if she would turn a few heads, and she did.

Dinner was lavish and fun. Ms. Allen is the right kind of girl to drink wine and talk about boys with. There is, especially in her case, a lot to say. “I don’t really go for hot guys,” she said. “I go for old men, as you may have noticed.” In the car on the way over, she’d devoured a Look magazine her driver bought because she was on the cover. “Agony over married lover!” read the headline, detailing her latest holiday fling, with Jay Jopling, 45, a recently separated gallery owner and buddy of her father’s. (Yes, she acknowledged, she has some daddy issues.) Does she mind that her relationships are so gossiped about?

“It’s ironic because I’m not very good at them,” she said. “I’m good at having sex.”

She had more to say, but nothing that could be printed here. This is the kind of irresistible frankness that has gotten her, time and again, in trouble. But as she grows up and builds her creative niche, Ms. Allen seems unlikely to manage being buttoned up. (At the end of the meal she went over to greet Lucian Freud, the 86-year-old artist, sitting nearby. What did he say? “He said he wants to. ...” Ah, unprintable.)

King Abdullah

Was at the Wye River pub this Australia day long weekend when I was mistaken for King Abdullah of Jordan. Harsh but not totally unfair. M was, however, not mistaken for Queen Rania.

Devastating review of 'The Man Who Owns the News'

Have recently read The Man Who Owns the News, Michael Wolff's new biography of Rupert Murdoch. It is definitely a gripping read, though far from a definitive biography.

As is standard for Wolff, much of the book is a reflection of Wolff and his 'big picture' views rather than a reflection on Murdoch and News Corp.

The New York Times published a fairly devastating review of the book here.
Excerpts below. I agree with many of the criticisms, but the author of the review (David Carr of the NYT) has missed a key point: the book is a triumph in the sense that it is a biography of a business figure which is fun to read and which has a clear and unambigious point of view.

Wolff makes no pretence that his biography is an objective, disinterested piece of writing. His views and prejudices are all over it - which means that it is no Shawcross (the definitive - but very dated Murdoch biography) but it is a fun read with lots of interesting (and presumably mostly accurate) anecdotes and snippets about Rupert and the Murdoch clan.

The book is a strangely alluring artifact, with huge gaps in execution and stylistic tics that border on parody; it will nonetheless provide a deeply satisfying experience for the ­media-interested.

...

They are a pair, these two. Both adore gossip and revel in their unpleasantness, and neither gives a rip what anyone else thinks of him. Murdoch has achieved improbable business success, and Wolff has made no secret that he covets same. In a hybrid career that continues to this day — Wolff is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a founder of a news aggregator called Newser — he has somehow managed to both float above a demimonde of wealthy titans and seek to enter at every opportunity.

...

“The Man Who Owns the News” attacks its subject with casual delight, but contains shockingly few actual quotations from Murdoch himself: a snippet here and there, nothing more. He remains disconcertingly spectral, even though Wolff spoke with him for many hours over many months.

...

But the moment the reader is tempted to leave Wolff to marvel at his own de­vices, the author steps in and reminds us that his primary value is to speak the unspeakable. As he did in his delicious and prescient “Burn Rate,” an early book about the dot-com fantasia, he often just says it: “Every second working for Murdoch is a second spent thinking about what Murdoch wants. He inhabits you.”

...

Much was made of Wolff’s alliance with Murdoch, that it would lead to complicity and sycophancy, but Wolff remains true to his nature, which is joyously nasty. It is a baked-in reflex of a kind that Trollope described: “His satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.”

Wolff takes no specific offense at Murdoch’s willingness to use his media properties to cold business ends, but depicts him as a cranky, monomaniacal newspaper hack, a con man with bad hearing, no interest in new media paradigms and no real friends to speak of. It is also pointed out that he is “a good family man — even if he has three of them.” Like the man he writes about, Wolff is a gossip who is very skilled at extracting information and sensing weakness.

...

Obsessed by newsprint and digitally clueless, Murdoch is depicted as a remarkable modern figure. The issue of succession is dealt with in the book as it is at the company: people either put their fingers in their ears or cross them in hopes that Murdoch, who was born in Australia in 1931, will live forever. His unusual relationship with a crew of very talented, able children — pull them close in business matters and then humiliate them — is artfully described in the book, as is his somewhat henpecked relationship with his third wife, who reads his e-mail messages after business hours because he doesn’t use a computer.

Should I/we/you feel dirty for enjoying a little quality time with a man who believes that giving the impression of morals is better than actually having them and whose atavistic corporate impulses are put to contemporary, acquisitive ends? Probably not. Many before us have covered their eyes and waited for Rupert Murdoch to go away. Rupert Murdoch does not go away.

shaped

Shaped for the first time ever on my home broadband and hating it (thanks Internode!). Much sympathy for Ben Barren, for whom it seems to be a permanent condition.

Internet is still usable - probably still quicker than dial-up - but there won't be any streaming going on in my house until the month ticks over.

Murdoch miscellanea

Cruden Farm last Sunday - looking beautiful in early Summer ... a picnic by the lake was a pretty good way to spend a Sunday lunchtime. And Dame Elisabeth, Australia's only true royalty, was there signing autographs and generally spreading good cheer.

Just picked up a copy of The Man Who Owns the News, the new Michael Wolff biography of Rupert Murdoch. A Rupert biography by the author of Burn Rate - I'm expecting good things - and a very different tone to the 1997 Shawcross biography and to Chenoweth's Virtual Murdoch from early in the millenia.