Category Archive: LIFE
Theatre of Embarrassment
Brent went home for his guitar (Photo Radio Times)
A very anglo-saxon form of comedy, the Theatre of Embarrassment makes one squirm as well as laugh, and the laugh is often through gritted teeth. It is hard to watch and even harder to believe, yet it unfolds before your very eyes, arch and formal as Kabuki, visceral as a knife-fight in an alleyway. When Norman Gunston asks Warren Beatty if “it’s true Miss Carly Simon wrote that song about you…?…The Impossible Dream…?” or mentions en passant to an interrupting Linda McCartney “It’s funny, you know, you don’t look Japanese,” you are at The Theatre. When Larry and Cheryl David,…
Continue Reading →Saved Cats
Top Cat
Out of the caged room wandered a tiny ginger kitten and nuzzled P’s leg. “He has made his choice.” The inside of his bat ears were green from microchip dye. He howled in his box on the passenger seat all the way home. He reprises this Allen Ginsburg-sized howl, learnt from early on, when he wants to eat or go outside. We called him ‘Miron’ after Sean Micallef’s accident-prone, French plasticine figure, a terrific parody of the old ‘Red and Blue’ euro-trash TV show. We were then living in a rented, rambling pile on the side of a hill and Miron often disappeared…
Continue Reading →Biggles Flies Away
Vale Graeme Bignell (1938-2015) A big crowd gathered at Adelaide Oval for a moving and friendly memorial service to farewell a Great of Glenelg who passed away recently, aged 77, after a long struggle with ill health. Graeme drove a cab in Melbourne as a young man and then took on a month by month job selling cars (if he sold 12 in a month, he kept his job), whilst bringing up 2 children on his own. Having become a phenomenal success at his chosen career, he moved to Adelaide in 1971 to take over the reigns of a failing Ford…
Continue Reading →Funerary Music
The Village Funeral (Frank Holl, 1872) Leeds City Art Gallery
THE ETHER IS AWASH WITH DESIRED SONGS FOR FUNERALS – THEY’RE COMMON AS MUCK, OR INTERNET KITTENS. SO HERE ARE SOME MORE! L WANTS: Here Comes the Flood (Peter Gabriel) Not Perfect Day (Lou Reed). OUR FRIEND GRANT WANTS: Funeral For a Friend (Elton John) at commencement Comfortably Numb (the Pink Floyd original, not the Scissor Sisters‘ version – although we like that as well) Roll Away the Stone (Leon Russell) at conclusion. P THINKS A SAMPLE OF THESE MIGHT SUIT HIM: It’s Time (Elvis Costello) The Final Taxi (Wreckless Eric) Trauermarsch (Richard Wagner) + (maybe) The deformed lady singing In Heaven…
Continue Reading →Peppers Springs Retreat
Winter, 2015 For The Varnished Culture, it was a week of cancellations, most of which, surprisingly, suited us mightily. 1. We were groaning in the early cold and imagined damp, having packed late the previous evening, when the airline rang and said our morning flight to Melbourne was cancelled due to fog. So we got to fly at a more genteel time. 2. Above the clouds, we were warned that turbulence was expected, so hot drinks were not available. This meant free booze in economy – such a shame the flight was a shorty! 3. Our hire car’s handbrake had been…
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