Newsletter

  • Tears for fears

    Anyway, the moment I shed a tear in Ricki and the Flash happened to be a line from Rick Springfield’s character (Greg) when he was putting the word on Meryl Streep’s character, (Ricki aka Linda) which, coincidentally is one of the lines featured in the trailer (that I fortunately didn’t see beforehand) so it must…

  • Persona non grata

    ..he was as funny as another stand-up comedian he despised. I can see how that might be considered as fundamentally shallow, but if Seinfeld the stand-up comedian is actually Seinfeld the man’s complementary personality, you can see how it can become a very personal issue. Then there’s the (locally) celebrated example of The Vines’ singer,…

  • Manifesto

    ..version, which is to music what the hydrogen bomb is to a fart. I can understand completely that to discover me sitting on a stool in the corner of a café with a guitar playing a bunch of never before heard songs can be a confronting or even annoying experience if not seen and heard…

  • The Sommelier

    ..when the relatively youthful and decidedly hip Sommelier appeared and, with gay abandon, she led the decision to place the nights drinking menu in his capable hands. And why not? It is not called a wine room for nothing. He knew the list intimately, having selected them personally, and given the criteria of an approximate…

  • Reality show

    ..be registered, I imagine it’s not as easy to get away with it these days. Musicians are big on moonlighting. Well, with musos it’s not so much moonlighting as multi-tasking. I sometimes wonder what that does to the more sensitive audience members. I remember feeling quite disturbed when Ringo had to take some time off…

  • Caravan parks

    ..sign of Proust or a bottle of Pinot Noir, not a barbecued artichoke heart to be seen, just accents that could break glass at a hundred metres. I felt surrounded by stereotypes from the Bulletin and Billy Butlin holiday camps. But, with the exception of the on-going lack of Proust and the super strength strine…

  • Some Good Advice

    ..month stint bashing out covers in three states non-stop. Actually, it seems we couldn’t resist adding a few new songs of our own to the list of covers, written by myself and by former Ariel keyboardist Tony Slavich, because at some point we must’ve gone into a studio and recorded a bunch of them to…

  • The father’s speech

    .. deliver words of wisdom, affection and good humour. I don’t know the BM but the MoH, Una, will be sure to be formidably entertaining as she is, like Elizabeth, a lawyer. Elizabeth specialises in contract law, which may mean that the marriage Act will need to be rewritten, but Una usually appears for the…

  • The Beatles

    .. environment. I suppose that means they’ve dated. Beatles’ songs not only define an era, (‘60s and early ‘70s), but they are in turn defined by that era, as well as by their geographical and cultural location. As a schoolboy I can remember practising Beatles’ songs at Compton Tothill’s place and Compton’s father querying why…

  • I remember it well (2)

    ..shared it is apparent from the other descriptions that we were really in different places at what may well have been different times. Occasionally I find that people have appropriated my life and memories as their own which seems to cruelly deny my existence. If someone else was leading my life what was I doing…

  • The Prodigal Son

    ..linguistic refuge for the poor sermoniser. He, (it was always ‘he’ in those days), might start off with a quotation from the Bible, but then he was on his own, unless he was guilty of plagiarising from the book of 500 Great Sermons – (Guaranteed to Rock your Congregation in the Bosom of Abraham), which,…

  • It rains in NZ

    Let me say that it can rain in New Zealand. But, by prior arrangement with Elizabeth, not where we were. Whilst we were in Auckland in rained in the South Island – one place had Melbourne’s average annual rainfall in one day – and when were in the South Island it rained in Auckland. However…

  • Noam Chomsky

    ..on FaceBook and Twitter and the room sold out in hours apparently. While we awaited for the appearance on stage of the gentle professor the screens were promoting the advantages of taking up a course at the various arms of Deakin University. The VC gave a short introductory speech – and then the old man…

  • The bleeding obvious

    ..more people that need to be fed and watered. This is not surprising. It might, however, fill one with a general sense of foreboding for the health of the planet After a while this becomes background noise, ever present unpleasant facts that become a steady drone of something which we sensibly decide we can’t do…