Ulalume
It’s the Yartz
King of the Lounge Lizards,,,Dave Graney
Dave Graney and Co. reprise their seminal album Night of the Wolverine (but so adagio that you want to scream) in bustling Adelaide. We last saw Dave at the Wheatsheaf, a funky Sapphic pub you pass on the way to the Port Adelaide docks, but whether he is in his Endeavour Tron, Leaving the Mount, or mooning about the world’s lounges in a reptilian fashion, Dave is a citizen of the world; a louche. knowing, Peter Lorre-style Master of Groove. See and Hear him! At Adelaide Town Hall over the same weekend, ASO gives us Felix Mendelssohn (with whom P shares a birthday) and some of…
Continue Reading →Sporting Supporters
'Nothing unwholesome about baseball...'
Spring in Australia merges with sporting finals in a series of codes, but if your team has missed out, you can always fall back on uplifting or downbeat sporting films to fill (or at least, line) that emotional void. 1. The Underdogs Triumph Rocky A most unlikely hit, this film meanders around the back streets of Philly for what seems like years, and then down-an-almost-outer Rocky Balboa gets pummelled for 15 rounds but stays on his feet. Total schlock, but try to resist. Year of the Dogs …
Continue Reading →The Wider World of Arts
Florilegium # 1 by Joseph McGlennon
Spring Has Sprung Yes, okay, we are dubious about photography as fine art. It is not snobbery exactly, it’s just…well, never mind. But we like composite work that involves more than a lucky snap from a smart phone, such as the work of Chuck Close and the pretty featured image by Joseph McGlennon, Florilegium # 1, the recent winner of the Bowness Photography Prize. We don’t know much about the technicalities of the multi-layered effect, but we know what we like. The Return The Varnished Culture has not been assiduous enough to catch the Adelaide Theatre Guild‘s current production, The Return, by…
Continue Reading →Eighteen Books You Should Read After You Die
Hell is other people's libraries
We are all familiar with the lists of ten, fifty, one hundred, one thousand and one “Books You Should Read Before You Die”. We at The Varnished Culture had not realised that it has been definitively proven that there is reading in the afterlife but, as it obviously has, we have compiled a list of books which absolutely must be read after death – i.e. not in this lifetime.:- The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt The Magicians by Lev Grossman Anything by Milan Kundera Wired by Bob Woodward Zeitoun by Dave Eggers The Kite Runner by…
Continue Reading →Homeless
"Evicted" by Erik Henningsen (1892)
At a recent symposium on the homeless, a number of aspects arose in a policy and legal sense. Access to Justice and availability of work were naturally to the fore. The futility of fines and the false panacea of cheap grog and drugs loomed large. There was no talk of starvation and in fact, in these days of safety nets there would not appear to be any need for indigent people to go without food for five days (the ‘standard’ complaint in Down and Out in Paris and London). Intriguingly, public or affordable housing did not feature at all. Dare…
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