Ulalume
Nazi Philistines – Arthur Boyd – The Brians
Pyjamas
The Wall Street Journal reports that the art collection of Cornelius Gurlitt, who died on 6/5/14, has been bequeathed to a museum in Bern. The collection included works looted by the Nazis and ‘assayed’ under the stewardship of Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand: Matisse, Franz Marc, Monet and Renoir (which last perhaps suggests the basic philistine nature of the national socialists). German authorities famously carried out a home invasion of Gurlitt’s Augsburg home in 2012 and confiscated the art as, according to the WSJ, “Gurlitt sat shocked in a corner wearing his pyjamas.” This property was never returned to him but the…
Continue Reading →Cards Against Humanity – The Rolling Stones
Tired? Beat? Beyond blue? Why not Play Cards against Humanity? It is pure evil and a great way to relax. Note that the rumoured hidden (ultra un-PC) answer card, said to be secreted in the lid of the box, only features in limited editions. The standard answer cards are offensive enough! Adelaide is calming down after the Rolling Stones hit town. They performed a very tight and exultant set at the Adelaide Oval (see: “The greatest game of football ever played”). Not 24 hours later we had an electrical storm to rival that of Key Largo so I guess the…
Continue Reading →The Maybe
(2013) Tilda Swinton sleeps, encased in glass, at MoMA in Manhattan. The bed is cleaner than Tracey Emin’s but Tilda, with her death’s head and pale, slight figure, surely can find better roles than this pallid piece of modern confectionary. At least Marina Abramovic nudes up. In a letter to The Australian, Mr Tony Hennessy of Casino, New South Wales, avers “Two people standing on a box may be difficult but it is not art”. This begs the old answer-less question ‘what is art?’ And the claim made by the pop artists ‘all art is already mediated’ surely confuses outcome…
Continue Reading →Vale Gough Whitlam
Vale Edward Gough Whitlam (11 June 1916 – 21 October 2014) After the Australian Labor Party failed to win the cliffhanger federal election of 1961, in which it won no seats in Victoria, the leader, Arthur Calwell, failed to quell the left’s hatred of aid to non-government schools that lost it a stack of votes among working class Catholics. Eventually, on 8 February 1967, having not held the reins of power for the better part of a generation, federal caucus turned to Whitlam, who stared down the Victorian State Conference in June of that year (saying of their electoral death…
Continue Reading →Tranquility in Sorrento
I essentially completed my novel, Tranquility in Sorrento, Tasso’s town, circa April 2013. Unlike Joseph Conrad, who, when finishing Lord Jim one early morning, shared a piece of chicken with his cat, I couldn’t hear my cat’s insistent calls to breakfast: he was thousands of miles away. Moreover, there was no feeling of triumph, merely relief floating in a sea of fatigue and alcohol. I started this thing in 1979, ignorant of vast swathes of modern fiction, an ignorance that cannot be overcome, perhaps only palliated, by reading 24/7. By 2013, having worked on it in time to spare and short periods…
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