Category Archive: HISTORY
McQueen M’Quakes – Mind, Mythos, Muse, Minis
(Special display at NGV, Melbourne, April 2023) The blurb – “Alexander McQueen (1969–2010) is one of the most original fashion designers in recent history. Celebrated for his conceptual and technical virtuosity, McQueen’s critically acclaimed collections synthesised his proficiency in tailoring and dressmaking with visual references that spanned time, geography and media. Showcasing more than 120 garments and accessories, Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse offers insight into McQueen’s far-reaching sources of inspiration, his creative processes and capacity for storytelling…” All true of course. And the NGV has put on a show for the ages; to see these works up-close is a great…
Continue Reading →Good
(written by C. P. Taylor (1981); Directed by Dominic Cooke, Harold Pinter Theatre, London, 25 June 2023) Regarding the grand achievements of the Third Reich, “As with Stalin’s Great Terror, only a madman could guess what was on the way. Even the perpetrators had to go one step at a time, completing each step before they realised that the next one was possible.”* In “Good,” A liberal German Professor of literature (NOT Victor Klemperer), named John Halder, becomes involved with the Third Reich’s war machine and the Final Solution. Halder, a ‘good man,’ shows all the moral courage of Albert…
Continue Reading →Dark Side of Parkside
Walking Tour (Adelaide Fringe Festival, 2 March 2023) Parkside, an old suburb just to the south of the Parklands which encircle the Adelaide CBD, is famous for one of the most well-known of all Adelaide’s infamous homicides – the one known as “the body-in-the-freezer murder”. But, while those of us who knew someone involved in this macabre crime, or who worked in the odd building which housed the freezer, are familiar indeed with the gory details, there are some – particularly people born this century – who must have only a vague notion of the events, if any notion at…
Continue Reading →Breaking History
By Jared Kushner (2022) Kushner is no prose stylist. But this tome is a valuable guide to the tour-of-duty of an outsider in a White House full of outsiders. It shows how a transactional background with amateur oversight, ego, and the Art of the Deal, can actually accomplish something in the Deep Swamp that is American federal executive governance. Take, for example, the Abraham Accords. The conventional wisdom, espoused by the likes of the never-right-but-never-in-doubt John Kerry, was that a Palestinian solution was a necessary pre-cursor to improvement of general Arab-Israeli relations. Yet the Trump administration, at Kushner’s suggestion, flipped…
Continue Reading →STONEHENGE STATS
Here are Druidic spatial data, which is leadenly prosaic in both tone and content. ***************************** But three trilithons abide Seven metres high, five metres wide Sarcens – mortise and tenon joints Aligned to Bronze Age sistral points After digging an earthen bank, Fifty-six Aubrey holes the Britons sank Outer circles, a central horseshoe arc In total, seven times one Central Park Ninety-three stones remain at Salisbury Plain Once purchased by Chubb – but not for gain! (Cecil paid six thousand, six hundred pounds, Did that include the funeral mounds?) The bluestones came from Wales by boat (At about three tons…
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