Renoir is a Pissoir
Renoir – Reviled and Revered (Dir. Phil Grabsky) (2015) at Palace Nova There are so many suggestive connections in the impressionist and post-impressionist world. In this well-made and balanced documentary film, several connections are made that help us follow a radical turn (arguably, in retrospect, a wrong turn) in the course of visual art and demonstrates the technical challenges of representation and meaning. Beautifully photographed and tastefully edited, it actually enhances some of the work of Renoir, the major artist under review. I don’t think the unnerving novelty of impressionism was more concisely and clearly put than by E. H. Gombrich: “outraged people would…
Continue Reading →Choose Chu’s
Chu’s Restaurant, 40 Unley Road, Adelaide Tired? Hungry? Needing a friendly face? Come to Chu’s, for some good no-nonsense Asian-fusion food, with the emphasis on Vietnamese / Chinese cuisine. They’ve been going for over 5 years now, which tends to be the threshold of survival in Adelaide’s fickle, spoiled-for-choice array of eateries. We shared starters of cold rolls, dim sims, crabmeat & prawn cakes, with champagne and a nicely cool but not freezing white wine. Then, gastric juices jump- started, we moved to graze, in ‘flights,’ on red duck curry, crispy fish in ginger and some stir-fried vegetables, washed down with a…
Continue Reading →10 Things We Hate About Shops and Salons
The conversation-starters which clothes sales assistants and hairdressers learn by rote. “Is it still windy/hot/raining out there?” “On your lunch break?” “Got much on this weekend?” “Do you live/work around here?” “Got a special occasion coming up?”… but…nail technicians won’t, or can’t speak English and they’ve got your hands imprisoned for an hour. “Do you have our special loyalty card? No? Would you like to join our loyalty programme? No? You should because you can get 2 percent off and endless emails from us. No? It’ll only take a minute to sign you up. No? Do you collect our special stickers?” “Have you taken…
Continue Reading →Bye, Bye, Baby
The Varnished Culture found themselves at a loose end on Sunday last! Glenelg had the ‘bye’…Norwood also had the ‘bye’. A sublime autumnal afternoon in Adelaide got us walking, walking, walking…we went past Peter Motley Oval (it used to be Unley Oval – and was re-named after a Sturt Great, who also tells the best jokes P has ever heard) and decided to see what the fuss was about. The fuss was that Central Districts (The Bulldogs), a very good team, had shot-out to a four-goal lead and then gone to sleep. The Double Blues came home with a wet sail and…
Continue Reading →Male Death Fantasy
(The Dirty Harry franchise as an emblem of the moral imperative in violence) Every boy, at some stage, has this daydream: he sits calmly while a bunch of thugs harass and bully him. But then they push his Mum / Sister / Girlfriend around. And boy becomes Man, psycho Man in fact, dealing out pain and destruction to the astonished thugs. By extension, this feeds the vigilante film genre, which started with silent films (where the hero bested the villains and saved the heroine in the final reel), through all those westerns and cop shows, through Death Wish and on, up…
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