Abbey’s est Charlie
A Sydney bookshop that was firebombed in the 1980s for stocking Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses will sell copies of the special issue of Charlie Hebdo following demands from its customers. The marketing manager for Abbey’s Bookshop, Craig Kirchner, told Guardian Australia customers were so keen to secure a copy of the magazine featuring the prophet Muhammad on the cover he had organised to ship some to Australia through his French contacts.
“There is no official distribution so we are having to make do with getting it through our French contacts,” Kirchner said. “We don’t have any security concerns. Even though in the 1980s we were the only shop to stock Salman Rushdie’s book and we were firebombed. We are a bookseller that champions free speech. In the same way as people bought flowers they are buying it as a tribute.”
After the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Rushdie, Abbey’s was the only bookshop in the Sydney CBD to stock it. The shop ended up selling about 250 copies a day, making it the best-selling book since the family run business opened in 1968.
The 14 January issue of Charlie Hebdo is not expected to go anywhere near that number. Anyone who gets their hands on a copy will be pretty lucky as it is in short supply in Australia. The magazine has no official Australian distribution channels and is not generally sold in newsagents or specialist bookstores here. It is not even available in the media library at Alliance Française in Sydney, although the French cultural centre says its members have been asking for it since the killings in Paris last week.
The attacks on the French magazine have sparked intense interest in the publication and many Australians now want the special issue, to support the magazine’s grieving staff as well as to show their support for free speech. A specialist French bookshop in Perth, Le Forum, said many customers wanted to know how they could help Charlie Hebdo.
“At Le Forum, your French bookshop in Australia, we are trying our best to get the next issue of the weekly magazine which is to be released in France on Wednesday the 14th of January,” its website said. “However due to the situation, there is no guarantee that we will be able to do so.”
Le Forum also offers an annual subscription to Charlie Hebdo for $210, but it takes six to eight weeks to begin so would be unlikely to include the special issue.
Weekly Beast followed on Twitter by 90s American celebrity!!!!!!!
The producers of the Australian version of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! – ITV Australia – say one of the rules of the reality show is that the celebrities don’t know who the other cast members are until they arrive in the South African jungle for the shoot. Apparently it is part of the “magic” of the show for contestants to clap eyes on one another only when it is too late to pull out. Given secrecy is the key to the show’s success, perhaps ITV and broadcaster Channel Ten should have briefed the American celebrity Melissa Joan Hart a little more thoroughly.
The star of the 1990s hit shows Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Nickelodeon’s Clarissa Explains It All appears to have inadvertently given the game away. How do I know? Well this week she followed me on Twitter. Intrigued as to why an American TV star would seek me out I checked her Twitter account and found she had followed a number of local media and TV accounts recently, apparently ahead of her appearance on Australian TV.
Please Like Me ... when you’re voting for the Logies
On the topic of popular TV shows, it is our duty to inform you that voting opened this week for the 2015 TV Week Logie awards. Anyone can vote online for the Popular categories while industry members are recruited to vote for the most outstanding.
The Australian soapie Neighbours, which now screens off-Broadway on Channel Eleven to a small audience, is celebrating 30 years on air and would love to win most popular drama. But it faces strong competition from Home and Away on Seven, which manages about five times its audience with one million viewers every week night. But nostalgia may win out.
Voting is open until 22 February, after which the nominees are announced. The awards night is held at Crown in Melbourne on Sunday 3 May. Keep your eye out for the amount of lobbying that goes on. Networks get behind certain shows and stars (and not others) and advertise regularly for people to vote for them, which has a significant impact on the outcome.
On Twitter the lobbying for the Logies has already started, including from ABC 7.30 host Leigh Sales. Sales didn’t ask people to vote for her but for ABC personality Josh Thomas and for Shaun Micallef’s comedy program Mad as Hell. Not everyone is enthusiastic about the Logies, of course, evidenced by one response to Sales: “Don’t encourage them.”
Last year’s Gold Logie winner was Scott Cam, the host of Nine’s renovation reality show The Block. If Cam is the best of Australian TV you can understand why some people treat the Logies with scorn. But then again the talented Asher Keddie is a consistent winner, as are Adam Hills and Chris Lilley, and last year Redern Now took out most outstanding drama, so it’s not all bad.
Vote Compass (no, we don’t mean vote for it in the Logies)
Following the success of Vote Compass in the 2013 federal election and last year’s Victorian election, the ABC has launched the Queensland election version. Voters go online to answer 30 questions on different policy areas and the application generates a “personal grid” showing them where they stand in that particular election.
ABC election analyst Antony Green says: “Vote Compass doesn’t tell you how to vote. The purpose of the application is to provide an interactive and engaging way for voters to explore policy issues.”
Have no Frere
The New York Times reported this week that the New Yorker’s esteemed music critic Sasha Frere-Jones was leaving the magazine after a stellar 10 years. But it was where he was going that was of greatest interest to the media – not to another legacy media publication but to a $US55m tech startup called Genius.
The cashed-up platform started as a rap annotation website, Rap Genius, but has recently expanded to a website which plans to annotate all text, including news and Shakespeare.
Frere-Jones, 47, told the Times he planned to bring artists and writers onboard for “that Twitter moment when suddenly the smart kids stop holding their noses up in the air and they take part, and it just improves”.
Confused about what a text annotation website does? “Genius breaks down text with line-by-line annotations, added and edited by anyone in the world. It’s your interactive guide to human culture,” explains the website.
Dodgy Downward Dog data
The most pointless media release this week offered this gripping news: “Cheating with the yoga teacher is #1 fantasy for Aussie women.” It came from one of those cheating websites for people in a relationship.
“A recent survey conducted by Victoria Milan – a dating website for married and attached people looking to cheat – delved into the female Aussie psyche revealing that more than 85% have very active imaginations.” Stay classy guys.
