While we're on the subject of John Safran, just in case you missed his great article in the SMH Good Weekend recently. I particularly enjoyed this as Tahmoor is a little town in my region. Although John has done many out-there things in his career, it's interesting that Tahmoor takes him into the most frightened state of mind he's yet experienced. Jill has been reading his book Murder in Mississippi, and she's really enjoying it. It's fascinating to go back to clips of John from the Race Around the World days, on Youtube. Hosted by a much younger Richard Fidler! RATW kind of reminds me of a prototype Open. Although, I reckon the weirdest thing John ever did was in his Music Jamboree (?) series from the early 2000s, confronting his ex-girlfriend and her successful current boyfriend that she left John for, the director of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival. They are really shocked and disturbed by his behaviour, and John experiences true abject humiliation. I'll never forget it. His series for RN was excellent, and although he and Fr. Bob are good on 2JJJ on Sunday nights, I wish John would do more RN type radio. I think he has the ability to be something like Australia's Ira Glass.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-town-called-malice-20140317-34waw.html
That was a great article, and totally chilling even though you hinted at what was to come. I haven't read much of Safran's writing but really enjoyed this. How can he be so good at so many different things?? I am occasionally irked by his work but most people probably are at some point - the race relations show was a particular turn off, it made me really mad in parts!
ReplyDeleteRace Around The World was very popular with my family - we used to all sit down and watch it together. It's a shame they stopped making it. I auditioned for the kids version - Race Around The Corner when I was 14 with a really silly video about sneaking into my high school library to have a picnic. The librarian was particularly mean, so we interviewed her talking about the importance of library's rules (the whole thing shot as an ECU) and then snuck in. The producers came round to my house to interview me, my friend and our parents but we didn't make the final cut! I will always be a bit sad about that.
I reckon this article fits into a small collection of small town/rural/regional murder mysteries that the GW has published, like this one from last year: http://www.smh.com.au/world/guilty-by-suspicion-20130114-2co9j.html
Totally different context, it's very much a family story and the victim wasn't widely hated, but reading the Safran one reminded me a little of this one.
I need to see the video of your audition for Race Around the Corner!
ReplyDeleteMy archiving skills aren't quite as good as yours. It would've been a VHS audition tape with the 'edit' being done by recording snippets onto the tape using a VHS recorder and the video camera hooked up to the telly. Real-time amateur editing done in the loungeroom!
DeleteInterestingly, I didn't get much from this story at all, and I'm usually impressed with
ReplyDeleteJohn Safran's stuff. To me, this piece was unrelentingly bleak, and didn't really go anywhere. It was heavily reliant on you imagining Safran in his naive role going into a situation he wasn't equipped to deal with, but you really had to build that picture yourself, I felt like he didn't work himself into the story as well as he usually does. Without this element, the story doesn't have enough to it, it's just a really ugly portrait of a handful of people in a small town, without arriving at any new understanding or perspective.