Festival Update

It’s January, which is always a busy time for arty events, what with the Festival and all. I haven’t managed to post about individual things, so here’s a brief round-up of things, mainly not festival related:

White Cabin – Theatrical rubbish from Russian experimentalists. I actually became quite angry watching this, because it must have bumped something else out of the festival programme. There was all sorts going on but it seemed to me like there were no ideas, just lots of stuff. Most people seemed bemused, although there were a few people in raptures and the reviews I Googled were rapturous. Pseuds.

Down The Line – Splendid piss-take of radio phone-ins from Radio 4, full of all too familiar non sequiturs and bigotry.

Volver – Deliriously entertaining new Almodovar. Not quite his best, but once you sit back and let it wash over you it’s a delicious experience, and Penelope Cruz is a revelation.

Clerks 2 – Desperately disappointing sequel to the genius original. Average user rating on IMDb is 7.9, as opposed to Volver’s rating of 7.8. Phht.

If you really want to disappoint your parents, and don't have the heart to be gay, go into the arts.

What kind of a word is girt anyway?

Tomorrow is my least favourite day of the year – Australia Day. I am always deeply suspicious of overt displays of patriotism because the lines between patriotism, nationalism and racism are so perilously thin. It seems to me that flag-waving has an exclusionary rather than unifying subtext, which is deeply uncomfortable in a multicultural nation in which the indigenous people are so marginalised.

In December 2005, discussion focussed around the Cronulla riots, in which Anglo-Celtic drunken flag-waving idiots got into running battles with police whilst protesting against “lebos and wogs”.

This year, there has been a big fuss kicked up over a suggestion that people don’t drape flags over their shoulders at the Big Day Out music festival, which falls today (i.e. Australia Day eve). Now, I was at the BDO last year and I saw a number of flag-draped pissheads doing the “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” chant and demanding that people join in, all in a very intimidating and aggressive fashion. I was dreading being asked myself, a friend of mine saw somebody get whacked for not being sufficiently "patriotic", and there were reports of somebody copping a broken jaw.

Sadly, this sensible request from BDO organisers has been jumped on by media and politicians eager to pick up a few cheap votes. Insight and relevant knowledge has been completely absent in the debate, and the whole thing has been frustratingly awful. Sigh.

By the way, I should clarify to avoid offence. I hate Australia day because it emphasises all the things I like least about Australia (smugness, American-style uncritical patriotism, the godawful anthem) and de-emphasises all the things I like best (multiculturalism, vigour, curiosity, laid-backness, Nick Cave). I don’t hate Australia. Thank you, here endeth the sermon.

Music in movies Top 10

I just read an interesting article about classic music moments in movies. I found Bradshaw's a pretty good list, if sometimes a bit obvious. I would concur with Brief Encounter, 2001 and Jaws. I'd also have Mean Streets in there too, but I'd go for the Ronettes singing Be My Baby over the opening credits - electrifying. That's four, so let's see if I can complete a top 10:

5) The Cure's Plainsong in Marie Antoinette - A breathtaking moment in a mediocre movie, matched perfectly to the edit to denote the promotion of Marie from insecure courtier to Queen of France.

6) Ennio Morricone's theme to Once Upon A Time in America - The only orchestral soundtrack I own (although if anyone can track down a cheap copy of Rota's Amarcord, I'd be grateful).

7) East Hastings by Godspeed! You Black Emperor in 28 Days Later - The scene in an entirely deserted central London. the music helps you believe that the end of the world has come.

8) Cabaret in Cabaret - Before I saw the movie, I thought this was a trite bit of nonsense. It hit me like a brick when I realised it was a cry of desperate frustration. Joel Gray's Wilkommen is ace, too.

9) It's Always Fair Weather - The bit with gene Kelly on rollerskates. It's the sequence that belatedly made me realise that musicals could be the best kind of cinema there is.

10) Just about anything in This Is Spinal Tap - I'm torn between Stone 'Enge and "Big Bottom got me out of my mind/how can I leave this behind?"

Anyone else?

Photos added at the Flickr site

Beth with Jenny, Dad and Nana in the Blue Mountains
Originally uploaded by Tom Goodfellow.

I've bunged a few photos up over at the Flickr site if you're interested - www.flickr.com/photos/tomgoodfellow

Hectic

Ever have one of those weekends where you arrive somewhere and you are immediately thinking about where you have to be in 2 hours time? We overstretched ourselves somewhat over the last couple of days, and I'm glad that next weekend we should be having a quiet one.

Saturday:

1) Ollie's first birthday party
2) Dropping Beth off with her grandma
3) Afternoon at Atonal Parping in the Domain
4) The Twilight Singers at the Metro
5) Pick up Beth at 1am and take her home

Sunday:

1) M&B to Karen's for Yet Another Tupperware Party
2) Tom to the city for lunch with Bruce
3) Tom gets home and M goes to see a dance event
4) Football, DVD, book, sleeeeeeep

In other news, I listened to Disintegration and felt all nostalgic and teenage again.

I've been looking so long at these picture of you that I almost believe that these pictures are all I can feel

Revelations, unless you are my wife

Tagged! I think the idea is that I write 5 things that people don't know about me, which I'm struggling to come up with. Different people know different things, I guess, so if M is reading this there's nothing she doesn't know. Anyway, here goes:

1) I cry all the time at movies. At the end of Manon Des Sources, which I watched last night, I was a gibbering wreck. At least that was in my living room, the bit with the phone call in Brokeback Mountain had me wailing away in the multiplex - very embarrassing.

2) I am always dropping pointless film/TV/book quotations into conversations that no-one ever gets so the end up as non sequiturs. "The breeze feels good".

3) I have a desire to do stand-up comedy but I don't have the guts. I even have a small routine I wrote when I was thinking about doing an open mic night. Stand-up genius Bill Hicks is probably the greatest single influence on my politics and outlook except for my parents.

4) I bite my fingernails really, really badly.

5) I am about to have my first article published. Fame and fortune awaits.

That'll do.

G'day mate

I just caught an article on the insidious nature of the Aussie accent, and I smiled wryly because its something that has come up a few times for me recently, largely because my mum has been visiting and she listens carefully for any hint of "Strine" in my voice.

I would like to keep my Jamie Oliver drawl for as long as possible, and I still have it after 4 years living in Sydney, but I suppose it must have mutated a little. I don't think any local would have any problems identifying me as a pom but perhaps a Londoner would detect a certain antipodean lilt to my vowel sounds. The strange thing for me is that I can no longer tell the difference between an Aussie accent and a "generic" (ie south-east-ish) English accent - they both just sound normal.

So, I want to keep my accent but on the other hand I have gleefully taken up a great deal of Aussie vocabulary. I got berated by Nick the other day for talking about finding "a park" as opposed to "a parking space". I hadn't even realised that the former is an Australianism, and isn't it a much less unwieldy way of saying it? I reckon I can make use of such handy terminology without sounding like I'm asking a question at the end of every sentence or pronouncing yes as yiii.

Besides, life would be a whole lot duller without the bottle-o (1), the stubbie (2) and longneck (3), and of course the eyebrow-raisingly graphic budgie smugglers (4).

(1) Off licence
(2) Small (375ml) bottle of beer
(3) Large (750ml) bottle of beer
(4) Trust me, you don't want to know

Is this guy a cabaret act or England's new wicketkeeper? Read on...

Wow! That was some long weekend.

Thursday and Friday were spent sobbing into my low alcohol beer at the Sydney Cricket Ground as England contrived a swift and humiliating finale to the Ashes series. Not sure what I can say about this other than what you will have already read if you’re interested, other than Australia were obviously the better team but England were still pretty shameful. The wrong team were picked, the players were lackadaisical and the attitude all round gave us no chance. I’m reluctant to use terms like “moral strength” or “lack of character” in sport but if they can ever be applied, it's with this shambles.

It was great to be at the ground, though, especially for the final day for both McGrath and Warne. Great players both and Warne is surely the most important player of my lifetime. Hats off.

Saturday was Mum’s birthday, so we made it a big one. First up we went for a walk around Bradley’s Head and Clifton Gardens on Sydney Harbour. I can’t believe we’ve never been there before – the views are the best of Sydney Harbour that I know, the path feels like proper bushland, and Clifton Gardens is like a beach only with less sand – perfect. The half-day has now been installed as a core component of the Goodfellow-Player Sydney tour (standard version).

In the evening we took in an excellent restaurant and followed it up with La Clique at the Sydney Festival. The show was a circus/burlesque treat featuring naked magicians, a midget belly dancer, strongmen, trapeze artists and so on. My favourite act was the hilarious contortionist comedy of Captain Frodo, but strangely M, Mum and Jenny all preferred the preposterously handsome German David O’Mer frolicking about in a bathtub. If you’re in Sydney this month, I heartily recommend it.

Mum’s heading home tomorrow – back to reality, as somebody once sang.

Skeptic's Horoscope

THE SKEPTIC'S HOROSCOPE for Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, and Sagittarius (Jan 1, 2007 – Dec 31, 2007):

The coming year is likely to present challenges; these trials are when your true character will show. Trusted friends can provide assistance in particularly pressing situations. Make use of the skills you have to compensate for ones you lack. Your reputation in the future depends on your honesty and integrity this year. Monetary investments will prove risky; inform yourself as much as possible. On the positive side, your chances of winning the lottery have never been greater!

(From Tim Harrod. Arf!)

Books read in 2006

In case you hadn't noticed, I also write a book blog and I've just completed my 2006 round-up. I read exactly 100 books last year, and here's the evidence. What a sad case I am.

Flaubert’s Parrot	Julian Barnes
The Silent Traveller in London	Chiang Yee
The Pickwick papers	Charles Dickens
Exodus
To The Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf
A Study in Scarlet	Arthur Conan Doyle
The Bridge of San Luis Rey	Thornton Wilder
Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie
Rabbit, Run	John Updike
A Wizard of Earthsea	Ursula K LeGuin
The Moviegoer	Walker Percy
Freakonomics	Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
The Da Vinci Code	Dan Brown
The Final Solution	Michael Chabon
Vertigo (BFI Film Classics)	Charles Barr
1001 Albums You Must Listen to Before You Die	Robert Dimery (Ed.)
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (BFI Film Classics)	David Robinson
Bride of Frankenstein (BFI Film Classics)	Alberto Manguel
Maus – A Survivor’s Tale	Art Speigelman
Ubik	Philip K. Dick
The Big Sleep (BFI Film Classics)	David Thomson
The Swimming-Pool Library	Alan Hollinghurst
Ender’s Game	Orson Scott Card
Pulp Fiction (BFI Film Classics)	Dana Spolan
Vernon God Little	DBC Pierre
Chinatown (BFI Film Classics)	Michael Eaton
A Year With Verona	Tim Parks
First Abolish the Customer	Bob Ellis
Little Dorrit	Charles Dickens
Invasion of the Body Snatchers	Jack Finney
Zofloya, The Moor	Charlotte Dacre
George Melies, Father of Film Fantasy	David Robinson
Amsterdam	Ian McEwan
The Code of the Woosters	P.G. Wodehouse
Right Ho, Jeeves	P.G. Wodehouse
Port Out Starboard Home	Michael Quinion
Cosmopolis	Don DeLillo
The Castle of Otranto	Horace Walpole
Losing It – The Inside Story of the Labor Party in Opposition	Annabel Crabb
Play It As It Lays	Joan Didion
Aberystwyth Mon Amour	Malcolm Pryce
Wrong About Japan	Peter Carey
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (BFI Film Classics)	A.L. Kennedy
Film Noir	Alain Silver and James Ursini
Paradise Lost	John Milton
Ivan The Terrible (BFI Film Classics)	Ivan Tsivian
The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinbeck
Jane Eyre	Charlotte Bronte
1919	John Dos Passos
Wide Sargasso Sea	Jean Rhys
Lady Sings The Blues	Billie Holiday with William Duffy
Leviticus
Day of the Locust	Nathaniel West
Asterix the Gaul	Goscinny and Uderzo
Mapp and Lucia	E.F. Benson
Venus in Furs	Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Disgrace	J.M. Coetzee
Vathek	William Beckford
The Time Machine	H.G. Wells
A Confederacy of Dunces	John Kennedy Toole
The Essential Calvin and Hobbes	Bill Watterson
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?	Philip K. Dick
Cold Comfort Farm	Stella Gibbons
The Outsider	Albert Camus
London Orbital	Iain Sinclair
Notes from Underground	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Eyre Affair	Jasper Fforde
The Last Party – Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock	John Harris
31 Songs	Nick Hornby
Running Wild	J.G. Ballard
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell	Susanna Clarke
The Lost Decade and other stories	F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Adventures of Caleb Williams, or Things As They Are	William Godwin
The Accidental Woman	Jonathan Coe
The Long Tail	Chris Anderson
Monsieur Monde Vanishes	Georges Simenon
The Painted Bird	Jerzy Kosinski
The Uxbridge English Dictionary	John Naismith et al
The Clerkenwell Tales	Peter Ackroyd
God Bless You, Mr Rosewater	Kurt Vonnegut
Words and Music – A History of Pop in the Shape of a City	Paul Morley
Vile Bodies	Evelyn Waugh
The Silent Traveller in Oxford	Chiang Yee
Apocalypse Movies	Kim Newman
The Conformist	Alberto Moravia
A Christmas Carol	Charles Dickens
Decline and Fall	Evelyn Waugh
The Eye	George Bataille (aka Lord Auch)
Riders of the Purple Sage	Zane Grey
The Floating Brothel	Sian Rees
The Man Who Was Thursday	G.K. Chesterton
Aesop’s Fables	Aesop
The Loved One	Evelyn Waugh
Elizabeth Costello	J.M. Coetzee
A Room With A View	E.M. Forster
The Nun	Denis Diderot
I Married A Communist	Philip Roth
Slow Man	J.M. Coetzee
Where Angels Fear To Tread	E.M. Forster
Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka

Happy New Year and all that

OK, that's Christmas and New Year out of the way so I'm back to blogging. G'day all.

Christmas was fun. We hosted for my Mum, M's parents, sisters and sundry hangers-on, a total of 10 adults and 3 kids. Much to my relief things went without a hitch, thanks largely to everybody chipping in with contributions in the form of pavlovas and suchlike. The highlight was the entire mob decamping to the swimming pool at the end of the road for an afternoon dip. Christmas in Australia, eh?

New Year was spent with Nick, Lou and various other chancers at a dodgy old bierkeller in the Rocks. The mood was drunken and unselfconscious with an oompah ban leading us in renditions of The Birdy Song and The Banana Boat Song to much hilarity. It was also a chance to catch up with old mates, in particular Chico and the long-lost Beverly Dale. The fireworks were as amazing as you've heard, but felt almost incidental at the time.