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 →The Wider World of Arts
Florilegium # 1 by Joseph McGlennon
Spring Has Sprung Yes, okay, we are dubious about photography as fine art. It is not snobbery exactly, it’s just…well, never mind. But we like composite work that involves more than a lucky snap from a smart phone, such as the work of Chuck Close and the pretty featured image by Joseph McGlennon, Florilegium # 1, the recent winner of the Bowness Photography Prize. We don’t know much about the technicalities of the multi-layered effect, but we know what we like. The Return The Varnished Culture has not been assiduous enough to catch the Adelaide Theatre Guild‘s current production, The Return, by…
Continue Reading →Mr Turner
Mr Turner embraces the culture of varnish (by Thomas Fearnley, 1837)
(Dir. Mike Leigh) (2014) “Grrrrr.” Stoically holding back the memories of Dali’s opinion of J M W Turner (1775-1851) which we largely share, and of many of Mr Leigh’s previous films (a herd of head-in-oven slices of domestic life), The Varnished Culture settled down to see this handsome period piece on the famous British proto-impressionist. To our disadvantage, we had failed to recall the usual outcome of painterly biographies – more agony than ecstasy. It doesn’t look bad – lots of lovely brown and gold set pieces, a la Peter Greenaway, and a terrific re-creation of the Fighting Temeraire tugged to its last berth…
Continue Reading →Eighteen Books You Should Read After You Die
Hell is other people's libraries
We are all familiar with the lists of ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand and one “Books You Should Read Before You Die”. We at The Varnished Culture had not realised that it has been definitively proven that there is reading in the afterlife but, as it obviously has, we have compiled a list of books which absolutely must be read after death – i.e. not in this lifetime.:- The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt The Magicians by Lev Grossman Anything by Milan Kundera Wired by Bob Woodward Zeitoun by Dave Eggers The Kite Runner by…
Continue Reading →Memento Mori
(Giovanni Martinelli c. 1635)
(by Muriel Spark) Don’t let the question of who is making the famous “Remember you must die” phone calls distract you, o gentle reader, from the more important reflections on memory, sanity, guilt, narcissism and avarice raised in this searing novelette. Although under threat, a phalanx of elderly people simply up the ante and behave even more badly than they did in their (adulterous, manipulative, black-mailing) youth. There are amusing characters – a bellicose poet who gets into fisticuffs with a crippled but no less fearsome critic over the reputation of a dead poet – a would-be Margaret Mead of the geriatric who studies the elderly;…
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