Issue 140

..late twenties, early thirties, dark complexion and some variation of Asian ethnicity. There’s a cheerful bespectacled Asian chap who also mans the counter and who converses with her in whatever Asian language whom I suspect could be her father, except for his entirely opposite disposition. Everything is too much trouble for this woman. I’ve tried…

S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M M I K E R U D D B I L L P U T T . C O MM M I K E R U D D B I L…

Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. ..winner taking home both tubes in triumph. There are endless examples of feeble synchronicity that we all experience daily – we just have to keep our senses alert to the possiblities. I’m not sure what it proves, but cumulatively it can have a pretty disconcerting effect, which might have something…

..socio-economic status of the students. Private schools send all their problems to State schools where teachers cope with extraordinary generosity of spirit. Most of the time. But this, perhaps not too tangentially, brings to my attention the absurd amounts that CEOs of large corporations are paid, which is both disproportionate and absurd in relation to…

..Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. I think it’s my first ‘motion capture’ movie on the big screen, (although I’ve seen bits of Beowulf on Foxtel) and, while it’s impressively realistic in capturing movement accurately, it falls a bit flat in nearly every other respect. Having said that, the backgrounds are stupendously rich and detailed and…

.. nylon-string guitar for instance sounds unnervingly ambivalent and jangly as a result, especially in the top three strings. Not to mention that my right ear is so shot to pieces that I prefer to wear an ear plug rather than a hearing aid when I’m playing or listening to even slightly amplified music, as…