Category Archive: LIFE
Back to the Future
Glenelg v North Adelaide, 13 May 2023 (John Sandland Cup) It was a very pleasant autumn afternoon, starting with a 104 point win to the Tigers Reserves, and then, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Greatest Game Ever Played, surviving members (or next of kin) of the 1973 Premiership Team paraded on to the ground, led by Captain Peter Marker. The Sacred Heart School Drummers gave all of them a fine volley of percussion. It was a lovely trip down Amnesia Lane to catch up with the Greats from that Greatest of Great Days, including Neville Caldwell, Peter…
Continue Reading →Write, Don’t Talk
(Random thoughts regarding Adelaide Writers’ Week, 2023 – a verse dialogue) (With apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Stearns Eliot) READER A lovely form there sate beside my bed, And such a feeding calm its presence shed, A tone so pure, far from earthly leaven, A message reassuring, newly down from heaven. ‘Twas some comfort – A fact drawn from bone; “We read to know that we are not alone.” AUTHOR And yet here it shrinks back, as if mistook! That weary, wandering, disavowing look! ‘Twas all another feature, look and frame, And still, methought, I knew, it was…
Continue Reading →Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man
(A Memoir, 2022; edited by David Rosenthal from taped conversations, recorded from 1986 to 1991) George Segal said, “Paul Newman is the last star. He’s the link. We’re just actors.” Impossibly pretty, and self-consciously ‘cool,’ Newman was a Great Big Movie Star for about thirty years, and since filmgoers managed to look past the looks and the sass, he avoided becoming a symbol during most of that time. His best films are (or include) The Left-Handed Gun (1958), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Hustler (1961), Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), Hud (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Butch…
Continue Reading →A Difficult Woman
Renée Geyer (11 September 1953 – 17 January 2023) “A white Hungarian Jew from Australia sounding like a 65-year-old black man from Alabama.” This how Geyer described herself, one of the true originals, and the first (and best) Australian woman to master Soul, Jazz, R & B songs (think “It’s a Man’s Man’s World,” “Since I Fell for You,” “Heading in the Right Direction,” “Stares and Whispers,” “Stormy Monday,” “Midnight Train to Georgia,” “Difficult Woman,” and the pop classic “Say I Love You.”) She was interpreting, and enhancing, the great world songbook long before Rod Stewart or Jimmy Barnes. Whilst…
Continue Reading →The Old Stoic’s Lethargy
POEM FOR THE YEAR (with apologies to W. H. Auden) This earth in 2023 Is not the planet fit for me, A world, I need, to give me hope Opposed to the end of a rope. *** My Eden landscapes and their climes Are great constructs from rational times, When reason meant, at least, induction, Not dogma posed as deduction. *** The plastic bags we gather to be Transformed as if by alchemy: I chose to send them whence they came, The ground, from fossil fuels by name. *** I’m now required to approve Blighted wind farms that rarely move:…
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