Category Archive: LIFE
Onward!
Onward...(photo, South side of Chicago, by John H. White)
Muse upon the Muses! Track the progress of the arts and sciences here! Comedy Groucho Marx → Bob Hope → Woody Allen → Adam Sandler Dance Hindu Classical Dance → Formal Court Ballet → Nijinsky → Nureyev → Baryshnikov → Free Form Frog-leg Elegiac Poetry Tristia (Ovid) → ‘O Captain! My Captain!‘ (Whitman) → Duino Elegies (Rilke) → ? Epic Poetry The Odyssey by Homer → The Aeneid by Virgil → The Comedy by Dante → ? The Cantos by Ezra Pound → ? Historical writing The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) → Annals (Tacitus) → The Twelve Caesars (Suetonius) → Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed…
Continue Reading →Rampage at Port Arthur
28 April 1996 TVC has friends who were honeymooning in Tasmania on the above date. That morning, they had a lovers’ tiff: she wanted to go to Port Arthur, the pretty but desolate and spine-tingling remnants of early convict settlement, vividly recounted in Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (although that is set elsewhere in Tasmania). Her beau, however, thought they should take advantage of the mild weather to climb picturesque Cradle Mountain, and his argument prevailed. It’s the kind of argument where you can never say ‘I told you so.’ For that day, a young (28 year old), well-to-do,…
Continue Reading →The Lyin’, the Pitch, and the Allodoxaphobe
Tim Robbins listens to an uncomfortably realistic pitch in Robert Altman's "The Player"
I watched the 2016 Academy Award ceremony recently, that horde of virtue signallers, with their silly names, silly hair, silly clothes and sanctimony, barely able to read the teleprompters, and it occurred to me that here I am, beavering away in obscurity, when I could be writing award-winning scripts. I mean, I’ve not seen enough films to know what the people want, but I have sat through enough to know what they deserve. Since they’ve done Batman vs Superman, what about James Bond vs Obi-Wan Kenobi? So I’m sitting in one of those Potemkin cabins on the lot (of my mind), facing three illiterate…
Continue Reading →Hannah Gadsby
Hannah in 'The NGV Story' (ABC) considers the work of Mueck
(Adelaide Fringe Festival, Garden of Unearthly delights, 28 February 2016) It’s the Fringe and you gotta go to something, unless you’re saving those pennies for the stock car race Adelaide puts on to insinuate that it hosts great races and makes great cars (implications no longer true, if they ever were). The Varnished Culture naturally plumped for Hannah, art historian and well known actress and comic. She tends to steer clear of gynie jokes and deploy real wit, a rather radical departure. She is also excellent in a sweet ABC show, Please Like Me. We lined up (with our pre-paid tickets)…
Continue Reading →ECO : A Gift From the Heavens
We at TVC have procrastinated about posting an item on the death of Umberto Eco on the 19th February, due to our shame at not having read a great deal of his writing. Of course we have read the potboiler “The Name of the Rose” and the accessible “The Island of the Day Before”. But we have not been able to get past about page 50 of “The Prague Cemetery”, “Foucault’s Pendulum” or “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana”, finding the prose at times impenetrable. But that is our deficiency and we will try harder. We do admire his essays “On Literature” and…
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