Author Archive: Lesley Jakobsen
Eurovision 2023
Ah Eurovision! How we love you – always oozing zeitgeist. As the fashion of 2023 is virtue-signalling, so Eurovision 2023 is all woke and everything. But not even the po-faced killjoys of intersectionality politics can strip the time-honoured Eurovision Song Contest of its retro, delusional charm and Martian qualities. No! Though it nods to the real world, Eurovision will never be mainstream or proper. It is…Eurovision… So the 2023 Grand Final (in Liverpool, England because the 2022 winner Ukraine is at war) started true to form with an inexplicable number featuring Cousin-It ‘dancers’ in ghillie-suit-womble ensembles, a bit like those…
Continue Reading →Triangle of Sadness
(writer and director Ruben Östlund) (2022, Foxtel) In the 1988 movie Funny Farm, hapless writer Andy Farmer (Chevy Chase) is asked whether his novel in progress is comedy, action or adventure. He replies, gleefully: “It’s all three”. Triangle of Sadness is a dreadful melange too and there’s nothing to be gleeful about. It’s a bore. Östlund didn’t know if he was making a gross-out, social satire, or survival movie. It is, in fact, a poorly executed scramble of all three, mixed with a bit of luxury yacht-and-model-porn. Östlund puts a stereotypical bunch of wealthy cruise-goers on board the SS Minnow…
Continue Reading →Living
(Directed by Oliver Hermanus, 2022) Well, this is a new idea for a story! A reserved and disciplined person of a certain age gets a terminal diagnosis and decides to LIVE before he shuffles off. Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy) is a decent enough chap but frosty (and is in fact referred to as ‘Mr. Zombie’) in a middle management civil service position*. The table of junior civil servants over which he presides (stiffly and politely, of course) is piled ridiculously high, with towers of aged paper and nothing ever gets done. After the appropriately stiff upper-lipped scene with the specialist,…
Continue Reading →Dark Side of Parkside
Walking Tour (Adelaide Fringe Festival, 2 March 2023) Parkside, an old suburb just to the south of the Parklands which encircle the Adelaide CBD, is famous for one of the most well-known of all Adelaide’s infamous homicides – the one known as “the body-in-the-freezer murder”. But, while those of us who knew someone involved in this macabre crime, or who worked in the odd building which housed the freezer, are familiar indeed with the gory details, there are some – particularly people born this century – who must have only a vague notion of the events, if any notion at…
Continue Reading →STONEHENGE STATS
Here are Druidic spatial data, which is leadenly prosaic in both tone and content. ***************************** But three trilithons abide Seven metres high, five metres wide Sarcens – mortise and tenon joints Aligned to Bronze Age sistral points After digging an earthen bank, Fifty-six Aubrey holes the Britons sank Outer circles, a central horseshoe arc In total, seven times one Central Park Ninety-three stones remain at Salisbury Plain Once purchased by Chubb – but not for gain! (Cecil paid six thousand, six hundred pounds, Did that include the funeral mounds?) The bluestones came from Wales by boat (At about three tons…
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