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The world is racing headlong into the wild future with unprecedented growth in technical development and the completion of the human genome - a monentous medical breakthrough of indescrible significance. With the digital age established, there's an inderstable need to get back to basics. Survivor and Shipwrecked are two TV programs that exploit this desire for a return to primitivism, taking ordinary citizens from cosy and cultured environments and putting them to the test. It enables armchair adventurers to view this microcosm in safety and ponder the idea that our integrity could be compromised by a cream wafer biscuit.

These programs, and many fly-on-the-wall documentatries like them, blur the line between reality and fiction. The producers select people who they know will be volatile together. They're like the gods of old controlling destiny with a phone call rather than a tempest, setting tasks of increasing difficulty and orchestrating events to place an even greater strain on the tenuous relationships of these domesticated islanders. Thus far, our adventurers have built shelters together, found food and water, and organised their small societies along democratic lines. They've elected leaders, fought for control, and some have even fallen in love. In short, they've exhibited all the feelings and reactions of a normal society - except one. The one thing that sets us above animals - the ability to maim and kill each other with rocks. And this is precisely what we long to see, the breakdown of society in our televised bug-catcher.

How much more satisfying would it be to witness the ex-American Navy SEAL (hated for his arrogance) and the big-city chemist (hated for her inability to offer help in any situation, and her persistent PMT) slaughter each other with crab shells? How invigorating in episode 12, when everything is going well, if they release the dogs? Or in episode 15, pushed to the brink by a lack of supplies, impossible tasks, internal tensions and rabies, our noble savages practise a little survivor cannibalism? Or spice up the action during the initial selection process by finding a candidate with the emotional responses of Jeffrey Dahmer? "Twenty people marooned on an island; what they don't know is one of them is a serial killer with a hammer drill and an appetite for fresh intestines." And why just dump people on an island when you could recreate the greatest survival stories of all time:

The Fields of Flanders - four years of hell, how would you cope?

Be part of the Donner group from the ill-fated Andes flight 617 - will you make it back alive?

Titanic 2000: they said it couldn't happen again.

We've only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reality TV - there are whole worlds of fun and horror to explore. It comes as no surprise that in the American version, the sole survivor becomes an instant millionaire. That much money is an added incentive to discover your true heroic self or to lie, cheat, cajole and kill. Imagine a show where the contestants are dumped in the desert, and those who make it back to civilisation get a share of the prizemoney. If only one person makes the distance, then he or she alone wins ail the lovely folding stuff. The message is: it pays to survive. Or a contemporary Swiss Family Robinson where a "normal" Australian family is placed on a deserted island (if you took the camera-savvy Sylvania Waters family it'd be unmissable TV - a kind of emotionally violent and monstrously perverse Gilligan's lsland.

It'd be wonderful if these new tribes defied the odds by building dynamic, self-sufficient societies that prosper within loving environments based on a knowledge of law, history and philosophy denied our ancestors. But it wouldn't make good TV. When we sit down in front of the box, we long for Utopia but we desire the spectacle of Sodom and Gomorrah. When our travellers return, will they be enriched by their experiences, born again or damned? As the sun rises on these hellish TV-paradises, will we be greeted by the Lord of the Dance or the Lord of the Flies? Or will all the footprints be washed away?

Smokers are a dying breed: they've been chased out, ostracised, victimised and not so long ago they were the most desired, the toughest, the sexiest. Cigarettes were once an essential part of the propagation of the species. As a non-smoker I watched as eager innocence fell before the aromatic power of the tobacco leaf and was bedded. In my youth, cigarettes were as essential to mating as alcoholic cider and Vat 69. They symbolised a successful coupling. Now smokers have become social pariahs and I, for one, am sad to see them go.

It's just that smokers were always more interesting. They were by far the most interesting people on international flights. And they were easy to spot. You'd just look for a column rising from the relaxed fingers of a suavely dressed socialite.

Sadly, contemporary smokers are shadows of their former selves but, thankfully, they're just as easy to spot. They're the passengers grinding their teeth down to stumps or twisting their fingers into knots or chewing the edge off their inflatable pillows in a desperate attempt to find oral gratification. They're the passengers who can't sleep, who have dark rings around their eyes and a look that could kill a steward if one dared to offer any more over-salted peanuts.

And what has happened to the sharing of cigars at the birth of a child? In days of old, how many self-congratulatory patters accidentally introduced their three-hour-old bouncing bubbles of joy to the wonders of passive smoking? And these days, how many free-thinking power-birthers are going to pop out the mini-them in the womblike warmth of the aquatic centre and then light up Castro's finest? I don't have any recent statistics but it can't be as much fun handing out the Wintermans on the exit ramp to casualty. And it is justifiable for us, and our politically correct, clean-air allies, to so proudly affect the struggling economy of Cuba?

Cigars and babies have always seemed a curious combination to me: fathers, proud to hold the proof of their pushing, standing about and puffing on. And yet, after achieving the perfect birth, what better way to understand the hardships and mysteries of life than by having a tanked-up, overly jolly parent blowing carcinogens into your recently aired lungs?

Why isn't there a backlash? Why haven't smokers banded together and hit the maternity wards? What's happened to their backbones? Where are the daring smokers - the ones who'd race to the end of a meal at a crowded table, spit out a rhetorical "Doyoumind" and immediately light up? Where are the ones who dangled a cigarette from their lips as they picked olives and fetta from the tracheotomy wound? The ones who had no care for anyone else's comfort? The ones who would sneer and say, "It's a free country", thinking they were in America? Where are they now? Well, tragically, most of them are standing outside.

We've defeated them. The army of ashers has been beaten. Restaurants have become "non-smoking" and people politely excuse themselves and step outside for a cigarette. The world has changed. The thin grey cloud that accompanied any social gathering has been dispersed.

It's amazing that as a society we've achieved something so monumental. It's one instance where a concerted effort has been made to change what we were told to accept in order to break the stranglehold that the tobacco giants exercised on governments around the globe. The little Aussie breather has prevailed.

I look with hope towards the developing nations. It's there, away from the harsh scrutiny of the surgeon general and beyond the reach of litigious self-interest groups, that the future of smoking is being born. It's there that babies and cigars are friends and you can still find interesting people on international flights.

Throughout the centuries, art has been realigned, stolen, destroyed and praised. It has elevated and critiqued society, religion and politics.# While all other avenues of expression and entertainment eventually become repetitive and dull, great art continues to inspire. However, the source of this inspiration is not necessarily attributed to aesthetics, but also to the mechanics of animosity. Art is the realm of the creator, the aggressor, the provocateur. It's a world filled with as much violence, intrigue and deceit as cricket. We can talk about painting being all lovey-dovey but, let's face ft, nothing motivates like hate.

It's well known that when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he didn't even like God. Do you lie on your back for 20 hours a day with carcinogenic paint spilling into your eyes and dripping into your mouth because you love God? No - you do it because you hate da Vinci. Gauguin and Van Gogh are often portrayed as two great artists whose mutual respect and love for each other encouraged them to create ever more inspiring works. And yet, if we look closely at their lives, we discover this just isn't true. Tahiti, where Gauguin fled the drudgery of his responsibility, would've been like Prozac for Van Gogh. He could've lived to a ripe old age and died happy, with two ears. But Gauguin wanted Tahiti all for himself. He was over the moon painting nude Tahitian chicks and dying slowly of 237 different strains of syphilis. The last thing he needed on his island paradise was Vincent, with his erratic mood swings, freaking out the locals with a mouthful of cadmium yellow paint. Max Ernst, Magritte and Cezanne (or as we know them in Australia: Max Ernest, Margaret and Suzanne) all hated each other. Picasso, certainly the best-known artist of the 20th century, was also the most hated by his peers. When Pablo went round to Braque's place, it wasn't just for a quick absinthe. He was pinching ideas. Braque, the oft-overlooked co-inventor of Cubism, was forced to hide his work from his Spanish "friend". Otherwise Picasso's eagle-eyed, bowerbird instincts and prodigious talent would have the new work painted, framed and sold before Braque's first layer of damar varnish had dried. It was said of Picasso that he could paint with his eyes closed, a skill that Pollock (who was hated by De Kooning) elevated to an art form. Bacon, Hockey and Freud all despised each other. In fact Bacon hated himself more than anyone else who ever existed on the face of the planet - and this is why his work is so damn good.

As artists continue to struggle and starve in garrets, as dealers line their pockets in ermine, making millions from renting out a wall, it's important to remember Picasso's dismissive response to an indelicate question posed in 1973. When asked why so many people felt bitter towards him, Picasso merely -smiled and said: "Look, mate, if you're gonna be great, there's gonna be hate."

* It's baffling that painting has become so popular in the year 2000 because it's an aesthetically ugly number to place anywhere on a canvas. It's a number that's been stripped of its dignity. Exploited and crassly marketed for so long that it can never be divorced from 'end of millennium' hysteria. Paint that date on a canvas in Australia and you look like you're connected to the Olympics in some way. Artists who have realised the dangers inherent in these digits have chosen another option - two zeroes. While a convenient way of avoiding "2000", it does make you feel like the artist has rejected all of recorded history. It's as if they've swept everything aside and are just waiting for time to begin again (after all, it's doubling nothing, as if nothing wasn't enough). Unless we make it to next year (2001), then we don't really exist - we're trapped in an artistic limbo. Visually, the double zero is quite disturbing, as if someone had ripped out Mickey Mouse's eyes, scooped out the pupils and -shoved them on the canvas, leaving two little ghost retinas peering at you from the corner of the work.

# An understandable fear of art exists in many nations. It's a fear that causes rational societies to depict the artist as mad, a menace, or a bludger, and to claim that conceptual artists are semantics-obsessed wankers.

The very fabric of our male-dominated society is unravelling. It began years ago with seemingly acceptable concessions like equality and the vote, but now it's happening so quickly and subtly we're barely aware of it. Take the penultimate clash on the TV show Survivor. The climax of the series was between a woman and a gay man - not a heterosexual male in sight. We're dinosaurs. We've lost the battle of the sexes. Horrifying as it sounds, there are films being made where women are the lead actors and men play nothing more than tokenistic supporting roles. In the new version of Charlie's Angels, the fawning popinjay Charlie possesses the girls in name only. They're their own angels - strong, defiant women who can take down a "droog" with a well-placed kick to the "yarbells".

TV ads have begun to feature lager lads with middle-age spread in domestic roles. Apparently we can now cook, clean and wash our own clothes. Only five years ago most men didn't know where the laundry was, let alone how to operate the mysterious machinery lurking there. We could lug a washing machine upstairs, but how many of us could comprehend detailed instructions like "Lift and turn dial to 3"?

Women have always been more intelligent than us and clinical tests prove they have a much higher pain threshold. And why not? They've had to put up with uscomplaining for centuries. As further proof, women embrace the agonising miracle of birth, often going back to pump out several new beings in the course of a lifetime. We're not even needed to propagate the species anymore. The best of us can be frozen and stored, racked and stacked like so much cold meat. Two thousand years after the fact and virgin birth is possible again without having to hire a ghost as a go-between.

Not only are we weak and stupid, dear brethren, we've also been objectified. Scantily clad boy-tramps with pumped pecs and lunchboxes as big as Texas fill the pages of classy women's magazines. How can we "mere males" be expected to live up to the physical "perfection" of these body-conscious freaks? On the whole, women are more asthetically pleasing. They live longer. They have a profound connection with all living things, whereas men have traditionally preferred to kill all living things. In short, my brothers, they're superior to us in every respect.

The goddess is not only dancing, she's also involved in corporate takeovers. Madonna is bigger than Elvis, the Spice Girls have beaten The Beatles and Hillary's political career is on the rise while Bill's limps off to be dissected. My brothers, we've been encircled and enclosed.

Some of the brotherhood believe that behind every great man there's a woman - with a knife in her hand. I say be not afraid, welcome this change, allow the lovely ladies to take over the running of the planet. The patriarchy hasn't done such a great job. Let's pull up stumps, take our balls and go home. Let us concede this new century to them. We should do what men have always done best - sit back on the couch and watch. Let us be patient, oh my brothers, for if all goes well, in albOut 50,000 years our time will come again.

* I must confess, dear brothers, I was unable to make these connections myself. My Earth mother/goddess/female companion had the "epiphany". I borrowed it because she has no means of public expression available to her.