Category Archive: LIFE
Stuff We Hate
You know what we hate? :- Quizzes involving flags. Excessive celebrations by athletes. The Age (of recent times). Fitted sheets with narrow walls. The paper on which UK Grazia is printed. Alcohol-free wedding receptions. Expensive compacts (I’m looking at you, Lancômbe and Chanel) designed so that the application sponge presses against the mirror when the compact is shut – smudging and smutting the mirror. The much cheaper Revlon compacts are designed so that this doesn’t happen, people! Christmas wrapping paper on those annoying, inconvenient rolls. Why does it never come flat and folded up like other wrapping paper? The conversation-starters…
Continue Reading →Sporting Supporters
'Nothing unwholesome about baseball...'
Spring in Australia merges with sporting finals in a series of codes, but if your team has missed out, you can always fall back on uplifting or downbeat sporting films to fill (or at least, line) that emotional void. 1. The Underdogs Triumph Rocky A most unlikely hit, this film meanders around the back streets of Philly for what seems like years, and then down-an-almost-outer Rocky Balboa gets pummelled for 15 rounds but stays on his feet. Total schlock, but try to resist. Year of the Dogs …
Continue Reading →Homeless
"Evicted" by Erik Henningsen (1892)
At a recent symposium on the homeless, a number of aspects arose in a policy and legal sense. Access to Justice and availability of work were naturally to the fore. The futility of fines and the false panacea of cheap grog and drugs loomed large. There was no talk of starvation and in fact, in these days of safety nets there would not appear to be any need for indigent people to go without food for five days (the ‘standard’ complaint in Down and Out in Paris and London). Intriguingly, public or affordable housing did not feature at all. Dare…
Continue Reading →Cry Jailolo
Oz Asia Festival, “Cry Jailolo” (Dunstan Playhouse, Festival Theatre, Adelaide) (24/9/15) Jailolo, part of the Indonesian archipelago, has coughed-up a troupe of seven fit young men who (choreographed by Eko Supriyanto) present a genuinely novel dance sequence based on indigenous tribal myth from North Malaku, with modern overtones of environmental threat to a pristine local environment. Sinuous, mesmerizing, ephemeral and fluid, involving moves that are both new and alien, this is an interpretation that intrigues and engages lovers of dance and agnostics alike. Their unusual motion, use of light and shade, stillness, subtle use of hand and foot for percussion, and sense of space,…
Continue Reading →Winningness
It's About the Journey (from "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?")
Marcus Aurelius said “To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.”* Such a relief, then, to see that the Australian television industry is free from all malice, as they join hands and combine to serve us a homogenous array of competition drama. These are not reality shows, but rather a kind of existential reality where you idolise the biggest master who’s talent rules and mark their dance card with an X. These realities simulate contests but actually are, like life, far more varied, subtle, oblique, unfair and satisfying than any staged match, and describe life in their arbitrary and pre-ordained outcomes, which are classified and ritualised according to…
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