The Varnished Culture's Thumbnail Reviews
Regularly added bite-sized reviews about Literature, Art, Music & Film.
Voltaire said the secret of being boring is to say everything.
We do not wish to say everything or see everything; life, though long is too short for that.
We hope you take these little syntheses in the spirit of shared enthusiasm.
France Soir
Google Maps suggested that we could walk to this restaurant from our Melbourne central hotel. Wrong. Luckily we chose to cab it through the leafy suburbs to this hole in the wall gem. France Soir is a treat.
The provincial French theme may not suit those hardy souls who prefer minimalism and modernity but it suited TVC right down to the butter (butter!) served with the bread.
The garlic snails were too garlicky for words and the bouef bourginon was black and unctuous. Pommes frittes come with the main courses. We were invited to have another drink despite the diners at the bar waiting for tables. There is none of this come at 6.15 and leave at 8.15 rubbish. The tables are crammed together, diners have to shout to be heard and it is terrific.
The Prodigal Son (16C) by permission of the Yorck Project
The Flower Drum
Opposite the Ding Dong Lounge in Market Lane, Melbourne, is a sinister looking red door. Push it open. Nod to the couple sitting behind a desk in the “lobby” (why?) and catch the lift to reception on the first floor. Ahh!! The Flower Drum.
Decorous, traditional and calming. The venerable waiting staff, (all Chinese, all male) are courteous to a fault. The menu is happily confusing and peculiar, in true Chinese style. The food is understated. It’s a must.
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The Windsor Hotel
At 111 Spring Street, opposite Parliament House, a tall man in purple has been welcoming guests to The Windsor for a very long time. The Windsor is TVC‘s hotel of choice when in Melbourne and indeed we are such regulars that both we and our close relative D were once upgraded to suites and we always receive a handwritten letter of welcome from the CEO when we check in.
This is a grand eminence of red carpet, federation tiles, chintz curtains and afternoon tea.
There is no day spa but there is the Cricketers’ Bar, with deep window embrasures and hypnotic crickety wallpaper. It is not like other hotels :- the floorboards creak when the ghost of the kangaroo which, (reportedly), once lived with a permanent guest passes by and L can’t help but feel under-dressed when looked upon disapprovingly by the portrait of Mrs McWhatsername in the foyer. Marvellous.
Update: The Varnished Culture reads with horror that the Labor Government in Victoria is standing in the way of a tower development at the rear of the Windsor that might allow it commercial viability for the future. Please Mr. Andrews, please! Let them build the tower! It’s not as if there are no ugly high-rises in the city of Melbourne! We need to retain the old Windsor in façade and substance, our stomping ground when in Melbourne for cultural purposes. Beware, Mr. Premier! When we’re in your glorious capital, we spend a lot of cash (vide: Vue de Monde; The Ring). So take note: if you let the Windsor degenerate into a backpacker hostel, opposite Parliament House, you’ll make some powerful enemies, and you’ll also have to stump up a lot of gold coin donations. Thank you for your attention.
The Varnished Culture awaits the day when it will join the Windsor Hotel’s list of honoured, treasured, guests.
The Book Show
TVC loves this show, although the initial set was a shameless rip off of “Hidden”. A great argument for the national broadcaster, although surely the Fry-B-C could muck along for a few millions less? We attended a taping some time back (incognito) and thus got stalker-close to Ms Byrne, Ms Hardy and Mr Steger plus guest.
Jennifer Byrne is the perfect host – charming, open-minded, enthusiastic (but no pushover – she does generally not abide shite). Marieke Hardy is P’s favourite, hardiest critic – she and P may share few opinions overall, but when she hates something, he listens. Steger seems to have read everything and whilst he needs to learn to hate more, his opinions resonate. Which is more than we can say for their top 10 this year (to be fair, based on a write-in vote).
Continue Reading →Shadowlands
“We read to know we are not alone”…so we appreciate the intellectual tug of love between lonely but accomplished Clive Staples (Jack) Lewis of Magdalen College, Oxford and lonely precocious poet Joy Gresham (“the Jewish Christian Communist American”) in this simple, sad and beautiful film, easily Attenborough’s best (and a lot shorter than his Oscar acceptance speech for Gandhi, or so it seems).
‘the pain now is part of the happiness then.’
William Nicholson adapted his earlier TV and film scripts with additions based in part on the lovely book by Joy’s son, Douglas (“Lenten Lands”) and the script is wondrous – tasteful, literate and loving, shot with a superb feel for 1950s England, and Oxford in particular; unbearable closing moments convince because all before has rung hard and true as a broken femur. They “live in the shadowlands…the sun is always shining somewhere else…around a bend in the road; over the brow of a hill.”
It features golden performances, in particular by Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, Debra Winger as Joy, Edward Hardwicke as Warnie, Joseph Mazzello as Douglas, all in supporting roles peerless. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s our kind of happiness. And by the way, it is ‘two gins and tonic’, not ‘two gin-and-tonics’….
Magdalene College in the shadows
The Wannsee Conference & the Final Solution
(by Mark Roseman)
20 January 1942 – 15 government men, “fifteen serious, intelligent men” met at a villa on Lake Wannsee “to give their assent to genocide.”
Roseman’s concise account is a superb reconstruction, amply supported by evidence. Yet as he says, the Conference per se “was not the moment of decision.” We do not know just when Hitler set his hideous policy but Wannsee was clearly a watershed in the clearing of bureaucratic hurdles and articulation of logistics.
The partygoers
Of course, Hitler had had the so-called ‘Jewish question’ in mind for a long time. Mein Kampf drips with extermination babble – the National Socialists progressively escalated the oppression from 1933 to 1939 – his speech to the Reichstag in January 1939 predicted the annihilation of European Jewry if war broke out – and there were plenty of extra-judicial, non-battlefield executions going on in 1940 and 1941. Yet the circumstances and date of the actual green light for Project F is not verified. The conference at Wannsee Villa had originally been scheduled for 9 December 1941 but it was pushed back – Germany had a bit on its plate that month, what with Pearl Harbor and Operation Barbarossa.
There is an intriguing, speculative, episode of H. H. Kirst in his novel Nights of the Long Knives as to the aetiology of The Final Solution. The scene is Berchtesgaden. Hitler, Heydrich and a ‘Gruppenführer Wesel’ discuss policy reform over Nymphenburg cups of Indian tea;
“HITLER: And now, gentlemen, to come straight to the heart of the matter, we must formulate a final and definitive approach to the Jewish question. May I have your recommendations?
WESEL: I suggest we teach them an object lesson. A deterrent – a symbolic threat to their survival.
HEYDRICH: I suggest we exterminate them.
WESEL: All of them?
HITLER: Every last one!”
The protocol or minutes contained in Roseman’s book show that geographical (national) boundaries were not necessarily an impediment to carrying out a final solution. But the protocol only talks of ’emigration’ or ‘evacuation’ of European Jewry, – extermination is not mentioned. Were euphemisms deployed in order not to tip their hand? Or with the Third Reich’s list of enemies supplemented by both the USSR and US, were they taking out some insurance? Roseman shows, however, that the protocol is nevertheless drenched in this unspoken solution and that “Wannsee emerges as an important act of closure in the process of turning mass murder into genocide…The Wannsee Protocol was…a signpost indicating that genocide had become official policy.”
You WILL rsvp to this invitation…
Probably the best way to summarize this grim snowy Tuesday meeting at the lakeside is by Daniel Finkelstein, in “Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad” (2023), who comments of the conference: “The proceedings lasted an hour-and-a-half, during which the group agreed to murder all the Jews of Europe. Then they had lunch.”
Continue Reading →Begin Again
(dir. John Carney) (2013)
A slight, Star-is-Born vignette features thick slices of schmaltz, yet manages to say something genuine about the contemporary creative process. Gal with wafer-crisp lungs is taken on by down-at-heel Svengali – sweetness prevails but not necessarily as predicted. Keira Knightley shows considerably more charm than she did through the entire ‘Pirates’ franchise; Mark Ruffalo underacts to shaggy advantage; James Corden is everyone’s kind older brother.
TVC’s favourite bits:
I) Keira’s lover returns from L.A. and plays her his new song, whereupon she instantly apprehends he has fallen for another;
II) Ruffalo drops his still respected business card on the ballet school pianist who immediately quits with ‘good luck girls’ and the lovely little ones wave an encouraging goodbye;
III) Keira and Mark dance in an acid house while plugged into Stevie Wonder’s ‘For Once In My Life’.
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Calvary
(dir. J M McDonagh) (2014)
This is Craggy Island without the laughs, a richly human ‘who-will-do-it’ as Brendan Gleeson, the village catholic priest, struggles with his faith in the wake of a confessional death threat. Paul Byrnes in the Sydney Morning Herald well described Gleeson’s role as “the one good man in a town of jackals” – the relentless vitriol and mockery spat at him by various village types is matched by their own astonishing, preternatural candour – no feelings are spared in this story.
The whole tone reflects an Irish ambivalence vis-à-vis organized religion, its utility and its scars. Example – Dylan Moran, as the guilt laden, lonely financier, urinates on Holbein’s The Ambassadors (hopefully not the original). Perhaps fittingly, the only one to share the condemned man’s warmth for faith is a visitor from France. Great performance by Gleeson and the cast are all fine.
Forgive us, Father…
Falstaff
Opera Australia, Melbourne December 2014
To the claustrophobic scarlet pit that is Melbourne’s Arts Centre for Verdi’s take on Sir John, a rather broad and heavy handed work drawing mostly from the plonking Merry Wives of Windsor with only salted bits from the history plays.
First done at La Scala in 1893, this is a radically economical opera in structure: no overture, no recitative, almost no arias; melodies that rattle along, into each other and most formalities discarded as it cuts to the Garter Inn without ado.
Shakespeare’s Falstaff is big in every sense but here he is merely fat, “not a formidable adversary” as Garry Wills puts it, but audacious, comically aroused and a bit of a dill. Warwick Fyfe, who is always good, makes something of Sir John’s cabaret turn and manages to hint that if you “banish plump Jack…you banish all the world.”
Christian Badea managed the chaotic score and Simon Phillips produced some very nice scenes, such as Falstaff clambering out of his river- soaked laundry basket, warming his chills in the late sun and mulled wine, and the final romp in Windsor Park where Sir John hears the chimes at midnight and eventually admits to foolishness, while laughing last and best, staging a Rodney-Dangerfield ‘throw’ to the concluding rollicking, polyphonous sing-song. This is not great opera but done fairly well by all.
Painting by James Stephanoff from ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’
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Jamie’s Italian – Adelaide (with a Minority Report)
TVC ventured with friends L and M to Jamie Oliver’s eponymous restaurant in a restyled bank – an immense vault – on King William Street. Having valiantly resited the Jamieabilia for sale in the lobby shop the diner is then assaulted by a tsumani of sound and the unappetising sight of a sea of cafe-like booths. However, the further end of the restaurant is slightly more impressive, with individual tables and banquettes, low lighting and tall, bare windows. The “marble” bar, hung with red peppers and sausage lights, is an imaginative (if not authentic) rendering of an Italian lunch counter. People who looked like after work regulars sat there for hours. The menus are in the now somewhat dated, typographically varied, quirky, difficult to decipher style. Of the things we sought, or were promised, several were unavailable or failed to materialise. Service is overly friendly and tip-seekingly flirty but that’s the style of the place. My caprese salad was poor – islands of unripe tomato and hunks of tasteless boconcini garnished with tiny basil leaves in a pond of olive oil. The fettucini ragu was oddly chewy and gritty without much ragu. But, if you are disappointed with your meal, cheer yourself up with a visit to the bathrooms downstairs in the old high-security section.
MINORITY REPORT FROM OUR FELLOW DINER L
The service staff were charming and gorgeous popping up when needed, delivering smiles and competent service. It made the experience of the restaurant fun and relaxed, amidst a large space bustling with conversation and smells of garlic. Jamie’s brand everywhere while stylish was very much that – everywhere bordering on excessive – bread with ‘Jamie’ burnt into it, was OTT. Food tasty though not exceptional and perhaps because the food is expected to be the hero of the evening it is a tough expectation to live up to. Still enjoyed the experience and the buzz of being there.
[note: in the Spectator (22/8/2015), Tanya Gold says of the Soho version that it is inauthentic, narcissistic: “spiritually it is a Surrey pub for divorced dads on Sundays”.] Continue Reading →