Paris, Texas

January 1, 2025 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classic Film, FILM, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

(Directed by Wim Wenders) (1984) Virtually no one has seen this film, but those who have, love it to bits. We caught it in Adelaide at a special New Year’s Eve screening. It is not as good as Wings of Desire, but then, what is? An alien film set in an alien landscape, ponderous and slow, it captures the heartbreaking loss of love between a couple, and reflects upon the nature of obsession. A child-like man (Harry Dean Stanton) stumbles out of the wilderness, is taken in and cared for by his brother (Dean Stockwell) who helps him reconnect –…

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Childhood

(By Shannon Burns – 2022) Having forgotten virtually all of my childhood (relentlessly happy I imagine, thus unfit to record), I tend to spurn memoirs of early years, having confined myself to undoubted classics, such as Gorky’s My Childhood, Speak, Memory, and Unreliable Memoirs. Childhood is a worthy addition to those classics and also stands as a bemused, relentless, almost angry monument to the power of compartmentalization (selective forgetting), and particularly, the redemptive and palliative power of great literature (Burns shares with others a love of The Brothers Karamazov). “We read to know we are not alone” (attributed to C.S. Lewis)…

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Amedeo Modigliani

December 29, 2024 | Posted by Guest Reviewer | ART, HISTORY |

(By Rita Kirkman) I frequently revisit artists who never fail to touch my heart with their unique talent for the creation of timeless beauty and their representations of the worlds in which they lived. Amedeo Modigliani was born in Italy in 1884 to a French mother and a Jewish-Italian father. From the outset, he was plagued by chronic bad health which he endured for the rest of his short life. At age 7 he suffered from typhoid fever, and thereafter tuberculosis. He was very close to his mother. When he was 11, she noted in her diary: “The child’s character…

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More from the Post-Eternal Phase

December 24, 2024 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART, LIFE |

"Plate pole prop" by Richard Serra - minimalism ad absurdum

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 17 November 2024 Modern Art is, to an alarmingly increasing degree, pure fraud. It operates on ruthless market principles, clothed in doubletalk, agitprop, and gobbledegook. It has largely abandoned aesthetics and no longer seeks, were it even able, to be evocative. We call it the “Post-Eternal Phase,” because its representative works leave the mind as soon as one turns away, and its work is complete as soon as the cheque is cashed. As Robert Hughes once memorably observed, the role of modern art is to hang on the wall and get more expensive (a gaffer-taped…

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The New Jacksons on George

November 26, 2024 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | FOOD, Restaurants |

176 George Street, Sydney – (02) 8027 9997 When landing in Sydney, The Varnished Culture habitually strolled around to Jacksons on George for lunch while our hotel room was made ready. It was a typical old pub: dark, dingy and grungy, beers and sticky table-tops, Irish lasses behind the bar, an air of uncouth lassitude. We liked it. So imagine our surprise when, having been away from the Emerald City for a few years, we strolled into George Street to find a totally new and glamourous Jacksons on George, with a downstairs bar and concourse café, an upmarket bistro on…

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