Gallery of Modern Art
Brisbane, November 2021 TVC ploughed through the liquid heat, on Southbank along Gray Street, only to be told that most of the Gallery of Modern Art (that we’d been dreading anyway) was closed for some weeks to prepare a new exhibition based on the effects on art of colonization of Japan and Malaysia (we were tempted to ask the guard if any good effects might be featured – a depiction, say, of Madame Butterfly, or pieces of Chinese porcelain) but we let it drop. We liked Karam Shrestha’s “unhearing” (2020), (above), reminiscent of a Da Vinci sketch. There were some…
Continue Reading →Stuffing One’s Face in Brisbane
November 2021 The Varnished Culture spent a (very) warm week in Brisbane sampling, inter alia, some of the very nice eateries. From restaurant to cafe, Brisbane serves good food in elegant settings and a relaxed mode. Here’s a sample. Otto (Shop 1, River Quay, Sidon St, Brisbane, Qld) Very posh. A short walk through the steamy riverbank gardens and then seats in the bar with delicious cocktails (a “Sicilian Sunset” – Vodka, Limoncello, Lemon sorbet, Vanilla and soda; and an “Arancia Sour” – Johnnie Walker Black, Lemon, a Chinotto reduction and whites). Then in to lunch. There we encountered some…
Continue Reading →Tigris centenarius
A celebration of 100 years of Glenelg Football Club in the SANFL, Saturday 6 November 2021, Grand Hotel @ Glenelg A good year: one crap day. Unfortunately, that one bad day was Grand Final Day, in which the team was more or less humiliated (15.9 to 4.8.). The Tigers have the worst Grand Final win ratio of any club with 26.32%, having lost 14 out of their 19 Grand Final appearances. (I have seen 12 of those defeats.) So while musing in my room at the Grand Hotel, gazing out at the gloomy sea, it occurred to me that losing…
Continue Reading →Queensland Art Gallery – The Ugly
November 2021 In liquid heat TVC hit the street and made their way to the Art Array. We are pleased to report there is much good to be found here (of which more in a forthcoming post) but there is also a selection of work that can be kindly called comic (except by Queensland taxpayers). A sample below: The above work, signed by Ian Di-Jirus, c/- ‘The Lucky Country’, invites the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China to enter into a Treaty. But before treaties, first we have to have a war… One recalls Peter Garrett‘s comment: “[much] contemporary…
Continue Reading →Roadrunner
A film about Anthony Bourdain (Directed by Morgan Neville) (2021) Famously rockstar-level restaurateur, best-selling author (Kitchen Confidential), martial arts expert and prolific television host, the subject of Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain was no doubt a wildly successful man. As we have come to expect from biographical documentaries, this level of achievement means that he must also have been deeply unhappy. And often unkind. One of his friends is reduced to tears recalling Bourdain telling him, “You’ll never be a good dad”. Bourdain’s two marriages, to a childhood sweetheart and a restaurant executive, failed, in part because he was…
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