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Homer's odyssey

CHRIS TURNER WRITES about subversives who bounce themselves off the walls of the mainstream media, creating popping noises that echo within culture. He's an information vector connector, tying threads that lead us to alternative points of view.

Working for the Canadian magazine Shift - a Petri dish for geek culture - Turner has reported on hackers, writers, rock stars, religions and restaurants that sabotage conventions or need subverting.

His book, Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era and Defined a Generation, spends 470 pages spelling out how a family animated by Matt Groening helped establish Rupert Murdoch's Fox network - by undermining the corporate ethos and America with irony to become the kind of cultural force for the 1990s that The Beatles were to the world in the 60s.

Yet, here Turner is at the Foreign Correspondents' Club appearing on an international book tour as part of his deal with Ebury Press, an imprint of the publishing giant Random House, itself a wing of the corporate monolith Bertelsman AG.

When journalists start recording, the Canadian writer answers politely while thinking of the people he admires for dragging their feet on the media treadmill - people such as Kurt Cobain, the late Nirvana frontman whom Turner remembers coming onstage wearing a flea-market wedding dress in 1993 during an MTV Headbangers' Ball in Germany.

'He was clearly thinking that the people in the audience were just like the people in the shitty town he grew up in - they're rednecks, they hate queers, they hate having anything of their world view challenged. He got up and opposed the macho rock'n'roll thing as much as he could.'

Turner, 31, says his subversion of the norms of a book tour is limited to ordering beers on reporters' tabs. 'Stuff happens so quickly,' he says of his tour through Hong Kong and Australia. 'I'm a little amazed, now that I've gone through the process, that anyone has the presence of mind to do the subverting when it's so constant. I don't really know who I'm talking to until the interview is over. My approach is more to play along and realise that sometimes I'm the idiot savant Simpsons trivia geek and sometimes [the journalists] have read the book and say they didn't realise how much The Simpsons has shaped their world view.'

Where most pop culture magazines rate a decade with a list of the best songs or movies, Shift asked Turner to write a piece for its 10th anniversary in 2002 on cultural phenomena that defined the decade. His commentary moved from September 11 to the The Onion website, into the dot-com boom, on to Nirvana's Nevermind album and Radiohead's OK Computer before noting the film American Beauty and festivals such as Lemonwheel and Burning Man.

The disparate events were linked by references to The Simpsons.

'Somewhat organically out of that process I realised there had not been a book that had looked at the show that way,' Turner says. 'There were trivia guides and academic books by people who had condescended to come down from the ivory tower and talk about a cartoon, but nothing about the show in and of itself - what it had done, how broad a canvas it is for discussing almost anything.'

It might seem odd to promote a book about a comic that captured the mindset of a strand of American youth in the 90s. Turner says The Simpsons doesn't always translate outside the west, adding that the show often reduces other cultures. But the makers of the show can even subvert that criticism, he says.

'In part intentionally, but also by accident, the show always gets the rest of the world wrong. In a way, it's this really good document of how Americans sees the world. So, Australia, for example, is where people talk funny, drink a lot of beer, live with weird animals and occasionally produce a movie, and that's it.

'It shows how Americans think. Your average American's world view is probably not much more sophisticated than that.'

The genius of the show is twofold, he says. On screen, it's a densely populated photograph of its culture. Behind the scenes, it dictates terms to Murdoch's lieutenants at News Corporation.

'The most subversive thing in television comes to us from the people who bring us Fox News, the broadcasters of the new American imperialism or whatever. It's like the famous [Vladimir Lenin] quote that a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.

'The Simpsons made Fox an enormous amount of money. It built the Fox Network in the US, built the Sky satellite stations in Britain, it built the Star network in Asia. It is, in a lot of ways, the flagship of their entertainment.

'It's a really good example that with a bit of luck, if you can get into the halls of power, you can do whatever the hell you want. It's getting past the gate-keepers that's the tough part. Michael Moore's a really good example of that. A lot of people who control film distribution probably don't like him very much. But it's hard to ignore that kind of revenue.'

Groening is believed to have created the concept in 1987 when he was summoned to Fox to discuss an animated version of his cartoon strip Life In Hell. Fearing that Fox would end up owning the Life in Hell characters, he quickly created the story of an American family. The Simpsons moved from a segment on The Tracey Ullman Show to a series in January 1990. It's now the longest-running US sitcom on the air. Homer's 'Doh!' is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary. Despite its huge success, The Simpsons has maintained standards and its own vision.

'It's something that the creators of the show seem to debate a lot,' says Turner. 'They're very self-critical of television as a media. They recognise that they are ultimately like any other television show - a vehicle for selling advertising.'

Turner was unable to confirm the legend that Groening invented The Simpsons minutes before his meeting with Fox.

'The creators [of The Simpsons] were initially very enthusiastic about my book. Matt Groening had personally requested copies of the essay that this book grew out of. Then at some point, at a corporate level, they decided they were not going to co-operate. They were very friendly about it. They wished me well and said all the information was online for me to find, but officially they would not co-operate with people writing books about The Simpsons. They'd helped out on other books and it had been a lot of hassle. My hunch is that News Corp owns HarperCollins. HarperCollins makes a lot of money out of official Simpsons guides. Maybe, they didn't want to actively encourage erosion of their market share.'

But Random House, of course, was willing to bite into a piece of Harper Collins' pie. Turner says he's moved away from Cobain as a model and towards the likes of U2's Bono or REM's Michael Stipe - rock stars who maintain good work over a long period while fighting corporate culture from within.

'That idea of 'selling out' looks less and less like it makes any sense...From my own personal experiences, working in magazines and writing my own book, it really depends on whom you are dealing with. The editorial people from Random House Canada have been fantastic with this book. They are really good folks, and I don't care that they work for Bertelsman. I don't feel that I was compromised at all.

'You shouldn't be naive about that and kid yourself that you are any more than an employee of an enormous media conglomerate that only exists to expand its own profit.

'That guy you're dealing with on a one-to-one level might be your friend, but the corporation couldn't give a shit unless you're making money for them.

'But at the same time, they're the ones who have the reach. They're the ones who can get my book onto a shelf in Hong Kong,' Turner says, before taking a sip of the South China Morning Post's beer.

Chris Turner will speak and sign copies of his book today from 6.30pm in Veda's Backroom, 8 Arbuthnot Rd, Central. Tickets $120 (includes one drink). Bookings: 2511 4224. For more details go to www.paddyfield.com

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