Newsletter

  • Space/time traveller

    ..Through Road, where I alighted and the wrapper continued on its involuntary travels. I observed that the departed burger-meister had eaten everything but a solitary slice of tomato, but as to whether this was due to time constraints or simply taste preferences I was naturally unable to tell. In fact, there wasn’t much I could…

  • Just a bit player

    Rosemary Jackson had parents like chestnuts roasting by the fire. Rich accents popped out from small round bodies that had emigrated from somewhere in Middle England. Their daughter was their single joy. Rosemary was of grave demeanor with skin that merited the accolade of peaches and cream, and she had dark lustrous long hair with…

  • Tintintabulation

    ..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…

  • December 2011

    ..election campaign characterised by profound shallowness and intellectual mediocrity by both political parties and the media, I wrote …..“Many years ago I recollect seeing in scratchy black and white an interview between Walter Cronkite and an aging Dean Acheson who had been the Secretary of State in the Truman Administration. He had played a central…

  • Non Sequiturs

    .. is no immediate evidence for this assumption. For example, there have been occasions when we’ve been playing to an apparently indifferent crowd, and yet when we’ve finished playing, a selection of those very same people has made a point of letting us know just how thrilled they were with the music. That has a…

  • A short walk

    ..Rock, near the Geelong sewage outflow, to Barwon Heads. On the Saturday we went about half way along so that we could return in time for lunch and wine with friends, but on the Sunday we went the whole way there and back. Two interesting things. On the Saturday Mary had dropped one of her…

  • The first time..

    ..& roll and proudly wearing my legendary brothel creepers (made in Australia). There was a dance on at the local hall. They had a Maori band playing who could play anything and they were pretty good I thought. They must’ve had a talent quest segment because I found myself up on stage and the band…

  • This is serious!

    .. if he’s got a cold when I ring, but he doesn’t want to leave Rotorua as the few friends he has left in the world are there or thereabouts. Maria and I intend to pay him a visit in April when we’re in New Zealand for a short holiday, but we’re not going to…

  • Ai Weiwei and Warhol

    ..winner. I hoped it would get better. But it didn’t. Whatever Weiwei turned his hand was boring. Uninspiring. Bloated. Very big and very pointless. I had gone to the National Gallery of Victoria to see the latest blockbuster of Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei. I went with some trepidation as, whilst I think that Warhol…

  • Talking Trees

    ..and roost there? In the spirit of inquiry I paused under the first talking tree and looked up. Yes, there they all were. I couldn’t really tell what brand they were, and just as I was thinking that they started to get nervous and about half of them fluttered noisily from the canopy in some…

  • Paul Scofield

    .. of not acting, but being. I have only seen Olivier on film, but always, from Othello to the character of Archie Rice in, ‘The Entertainer’, you went away thinking that you had seen a magnificent performance, superb ‘Acting’ but not the quiet revelation that Scofield could give. Most of our generation know him in…

  • Cobblers

    ..hold them up to the light, they’re as transparent as the shroud of Turin. I suspect if Jesus were around today he would be just the sort of bloke to wear corduroys. It seems a long time ago now, but corduroy was once (briefly) a fashion fabric. It was The Beatles of course, but other…

  • Team building

    ..area of expertise whose utility in the context if the universe is on a par with the politicians and the clergy. It justifies its existence through largely demeaning activities designed to engender a sense of feigned happiness, whilst disguising that its role is to extract the maximum amount of work with the minimum amount of…

  • Culture

    .. culture in which process BBC radio and TV played a pivotal role. The preservation of The Arts as a rarefied pleasure reserved for those of noble birth couldn’t be sustained and so the definition of culture had to be broadened, and broadened in such a way as to include and respect the way of…

  • Eats roots and leaves

    ..not generally natural to where wombats delve. Many fragile metres of foil and fibreglass were regarded as a mere inconvenience to its general construction and mining operations and were demolished both rapidly and noisily in the small hours of a winter morning as it waddled and crumped its way under the house to directly underneath…