America

Went to a Super Bowl once. Hung out afterwards with 160 kilo nude, crying black dudes in the losers’ dressing room. Oh, but you don’t want to hear about that. The Super Bowl is all about the ads, which this year are said to cost $3.5 million for 30 seconds. Some recession they’re having in America.

When the 100 million Americans watching the Super Bowl go to the toilet in the ad breaks, they say city sewerage systems overflow. That’s actually a myth. No one takes a pee during the ad breaks. The ads are too good. The Super Bowl is the opposite of normal telly. That pesky football keeps interrupting some damn fine viewing.

Super Bowl ads are so highly-anticipated that you get teased beforehand. This year we’ve had the (thankfully false) threat of a Ferris Bueller remake and a sneak peak of David Beckham’s undies ad, which to be frank is more torture than tease. Fortunately, there have been some brilliant ads down the years. Let’s go the video(s).

Continue reading "Pass the Doritos… the greatest 13 Super Bowl ads" »

Just looking at him, elderly Miami resident Pedro C. Alvarez is not the type who would be inclined to take in the scenery on Ocean Drive. It’s not his kind of place.

There, on famous South Beach, along the row of deco hotels, including the one where they shot the chainsaw scene for “Scarface”, wild-looking babes endurance test the elastic on their overbrimming bikinis.

Coke dealers, or possibly dentists, or maybe they’re porn stars, drive their black Bentley convertibles at stall speed down the main drag. Miami’s a look-at-me place, until you leave its shiny edges.

Continue reading "Paradise lost, but a pocket of America found" »

Imagine if a dumb trend like planking collided with something much more dangerous than a balcony railing, like say religious fanaticism, and an entire nation caught the bug.

Welcome to contemporary America, where the fad of “Tebowing” is both sweeping and dividing the nation. Tee-what? Tebowing, named after hyper-religious Denver Broncos quarterback, Tim Tebow, is the act of taking a knee in prayer, usually while you’re actually doing something else. Like playing footy.

Tebow has been doing it for months in Broncos games, although he won’t be doing it any more this season, or not onfield anyway, after his team was thumped by the New England Patriots on the weekend. Apparently God prefers a patriot to a believer.

Continue reading "A football field is no place for nutty religious fanaticism" »

Bing Crosby – or maybe it was Bob Hope, or perhaps even Jimmy Stewart – on New York’s Fifth Avenue, stumbling in falling snow outside a department store, weighed down by big boxes of bow-wrapped Christmas presents. It’s an image imprinted in my mind, the quintessential picture of New York.

But this year it didn’t snow in New York. And this year, Christmas didn’t come, except for those who celebrated it like members of a shameful secret society.

I’d heard vaguely about this “War on Christmas” in America, where people don’t say “Merry Christmas” but instead say “Happy Holidays”. I didn’t really believe it, because so much of the culture and imagery of Christmas is American.

Continue reading "New York I love you, but Christmas here is a let-down" »

Sailor’s Lounge caters to the hard-bittenest drinkers in the deep south coastal town of Mobile, Alabama. There’s a woman, maybe 80, who wears her dress unbuttoned to reveal her entire cleavage. Her steady eye contact is unnerving.

Another woman, sitting at the bar, tells the story of how her pretty mother, who worked as a Bunny waitress in a Mississippi club, was found dead under a building from a suspected hot shot. That was decades ago.

And there’s the woman called Mama, who owns the bar. She’s about 70. She came to Mobile five decades ago from Turkey. She worked on a cruise ship where she was also required to double as the ship’s resident belly dancer.

Continue reading "Sweet home Alabama is only sweet for some" »

When the Reverend Seth Kaper-Dale took over the running of the Reformed Church of Highland Park, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he didn’t realise that most of his Indonesian Christian congregation was living illegally in the United States.

Now, after almost a decade of battles, a deadline is pressing hard on 73 members of his church, who are being told to go back to Indonesia.

This may seem like an old story; and one that is happening far from Australia. And it is, on both counts. But these Indonesians, living in fear in New Jersey, still somehow seem to me like Australia’s neighbours.

Continue reading "Our American dream, our American nightmare" »

There’s been a lot of talk this week about how crazy those folks in the Northern Territory are.

Sure, they got a little carried away by President Obama visit. Offering the man croc insurance to the value of $50,000 might seem just a little ridiculous.

Then there’s the fetching paper hat made available to NT News readers’ in yesterday’s morning edition. Um, well that’s just dorky. But can you blame them? As one member of the Punch team put it to me: this Obama visit is the most exciting thing to happen to that town since those two crazy young things went for it on a balcony.

Continue reading "Croc eating marines from another planet" »

When the US Marine Corp establish themselves a new home in Darwin, they will bring some seriously green equipment and ideas to our shores. This is because in the three years of his Presidency, Barack Obama has actively led the US Department of Defense to embrace renewable energy and a strategic awareness of climate change.

The officer in charge of greening the marines is Colonel Bob ‘Brutus’ Charette, a career soldier. As Director of E2O, the Expeditionary Energy Office, Colonel Charette has been on the road in 2011 with a fascinating presentation that shows how seriously America’s defense force is fighting its fatal addiction to oil.

The Colonel jokes that when his commander told him to establish the E2O he said that his only qualification is wasting energy, as a jet pilot and commander.

Continue reading "Mean, green, American fighting machines" »

It never looks quite right. On any sunny afternoon in Manhattan’s wealthy Upper West, there are swarms of black nannies pushing young white children in strollers.

At a glance, it’s a deep south plantation fantasy, minus the tobacco fields, bullwhips and chains. But we’re in the north of America. And the north beat the south because of slavery.

Is it a status symbol to possess a black nanny? Is there a modern mammy conspiracy?

Continue reading "Nannying in New York is a black and white issue" »

It’s the real 9/11 today. At least it’s the Australian one, not the American one, because we’re sensible enough to do our dates in the format day/month/year, which makes all kinds of crazy sense given you’re moving from smallest to biggest.

What else do Americans do that drive you mad? Sticking to the Fahrenheit scale is pretty silly, as is their reluctance to convert to metric distances. And what about the fact that all their banknotes are the same colour?

It’s Wednesday here on The Punch, but only Tuesday at the Huff Post and other US blog sites. Geez, those guys are behind the times. Apart from the carbon tax, what’s on your mind, Australia?

It’s a pretty reasonable guess that, over the coming week, we’re going to hear a LOT more about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Ten years on from that awful event, the media will hammer us remorselessly with commemorative newspaper liftouts and TV specials, and we’ll quickly tire of emotionally-loaded words like “courage”, “tragic” and “heroism” being used ad nauseam.

At times, it will seem like a collective remembrance of tragedy almost completely disproportionate in scale to the nearly three thousand lives lost on that day. (Which, to put that number in perspective, is one fifth of the number of people that died in March this year as a result of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami.)

Continue reading "The day that changed everything" »

Just when you thought the race for the Republican Party nomination for US president could not become more bizarre, Texas governor Rick Perry, 61, throws his hat in the ring.

As they say in Texas, Perry is “all hat and no cattle”. Politically he represents the frontier-style brand of bare-knuckle American conservatism that often surprises and puzzles overseas observers.

One respected Texas political analyst described Perry as “yet another small-minded, right wing, Texas governor” who on August 13 portrayed himself as THE Christian presidential candidate at a ‘Prayer-A-Palooza’ campaign launch at a Houston football stadium.

Continue reading "Presidential wannabe Perry is all hat, no cattle" »

There’s a big event on today awash with celebs, skimpily-dressed WAGs and meatheads who get sweaty for a living.

I speak not of the Allan Border Medal, that self-congratulatory wankfest, aka the poor man’s Brownlow, where Shane Watson will again be recognised as the only bloke in Australia who can play cricket.

I’m talking about the Super Bowl, which starts at 10am today eastern time and goes for, oh, I don’t know, about a day or so.

Continue reading "It ain’t called the Super Bowl ‘cos the portions are small" »

If you’re sick of swallowing all the political chatter from Jules and Tony take a break and chew on something meaningful out of America. And it’s not President Obama’s eloquent speech at the White House Ramadan dinner, where he defended plans for a mosque at Ground Zero. Rather, meet Paula Deen, the self-described ‘Queen of Southern Cooking’.

A woman that makes burgers using donuts as buns, lasagna sandwiches and single handedly butchers food to the point that she induces dry retching. The video above involving frozen cheesecake and a large pot of boiling oil should give you a sufficient introduction to Deen’s world.

As she says: “Just when you thought you couldn’t make cheesecake any better!”

Continue reading "US celebrity chef captures hearts, may also stop them" »

Matthew Clayfield is a freelance journalist, critic and screenwriter travelling through the US and Mexico. He is filing weekly postcards for The Punch.

I am writing this postcard, my first dispatch as a freelance travel writer, from a bar in San Francisco. Arguably, this is the greatest workplace in the world for an alcoholic typist like myself: the gin is cold, the pianist’s songs are old, and the tips are necessarily low. The San Francisco Chronicler’s Charles McCabe, who died in 1983, was once asked:” If San Francisco is such a great place to live, “why does it have the nation’s highest rates of alcoholism and suicide?” McCabe responded almost instantaneously: “Why, for the simple reason it’s the finest place on earth to drink yourself to death.”

It’s also the finest place on earth to throw yourself into the ocean, as cinephiles everywhere are only too aware. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Kim Novak famously throws herself into San Francisco Bay underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, only to be rescued moments later by Jimmy Stewart, who suffers from the film’s titular affliction. Vertigo contains a number of Hitchcock’s most famous scenes, not to mention some of cinema’s, but this one more than any other has always had an indelible effect on me. For many people’s money, Vertigo is the quintessential San Francisco film. For mine, Novak’s leap into the bay is the quintessential San Francisco scene.

Continue reading "Postcard from San Francisco: cocktails and suicide spots" »

America’s late night talk show crisis is almost an end with Conan O’Brien set to get the sack from the Tonight Show at the end of this week for the sooky Jay Leno who has decided he wants his old job back, and apparenlty has some born right to host the Tonight Show.

The whole saga has been covered to the point of exhaustion in the US media, with Conan walking away with a cool $45 million and also likely to go to the FOX network for a brand new show. For his part David Letterman’s joy over NBC’s troubles has bubbled over in to outright self-indulgent schadenfreude in his opening monologues, largely because he was overlooked for the job himself more than a decade ago.

The upside is that someone as funny as Conan O’Brien, fresher and funnier than both Leno and Letterman for many years, has an entire week left to get back at the people giving him the sack. So what do you do? Spend all their money of course.

Continue reading "Conan gets the best ever revenge on a bad boss" »

Barack Obama craves a historic presidency. Witness his pledge to single-handedly rescue the US health system in which millions lack insurance coverage. “I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last,” he announced in September.

Now, following a crucial Christmas Eve vote in the US Senate, the Democratic-controlled Congress is about to approve a major healthcare package.

Hurdles remain: the two houses must still confer to iron out differences. Public financing of abortion remains a flashpoint. But the near-certain outcome, sometime in January, is a bill on the president’s desk.

Continue reading "Is Obama digging his own grave on healthcare?" »

It’s a case of life imitating art or, more precisely, life almost imitating a cult Kiwi musical comedy duo’s US cable TV show.

In the second series of the relentlessly self-deprecating Flight of the Conchords, the New Zealand Prime Minister Brian visits America but is such a non-entity that the closest he comes to meeting Barack Obama is on a public tour of the White House and then later at a party with an Obama impersonator.

In a follow-up episode Brian opens the single dismal exhibit New Zealand Town in New York and insists on providing the commentary while driving the guided tour bus past it himself.

Continue reading "Top ten ways to describe New Zealand to Americans" »

“White underclass” is a term I’ve used often in my writing, and most American readers seem to know what I mean. They’ve got eyes and live in the same nation I do. But in a sudden burst of journalistic responsibility, I decided that if I am going to throw around the word underclass, then I should offer some clearer, perhaps more scientific definition.

So I started writing this with a pile of published research papers before me. Now they a re in the trash can by my side. Looking down on them, I can see the gobbledygook titles, the stuff of which government policy and political platforms are made. They run together in slurry of the language of our society’s commissars: Concerning-Prevalence-Growth-and-Dynamics-Concentrated Urban Poverty Areas- block-level vs. tract-level segregation-800-tract-tables-urban abstracts-Defining-and-Measuring-the-Underclass-from-The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management-s tatistical-summary-of …

What I find is that nobody in social science seems to agree on the term, or, being firmly placed in the true white middle class themselves, even agree if such a thing as a white underclass exists.

Continue reading "An underclass war that is more than just linguistic" »