Hogmanay with Spike

It's all (a bit more than) double Dutch to me

The old year is drawing to a close with an unexpected flurry of socialising, which is a bit uncharacteristic for a grumpy old man like me. Yesterday my former colleague at the National Disability Insurance Agency, Ray Jeffrey dropped in to say hello.  He's a Gilmore resident like us but has been based in Brisbane since August to help prepare the ground for the roll out of the NDIS in Queensland from mid-2016.

Shortly after Ray departed our visitors from The Netherlands arrived to stay the night.  I've not seen Klary Van Keulen since 1974 or maybe (at a push) 1975 when I was 17 or 18 years old.  That'll be forty years ago.

Dib, dib, dib ...

We met for the first time in 1973 at the international Scouts Chalet in Kandersteg, Switzerland.  I was there with the 24th Glasgow (Bearsden) Scout Troop on what was my second visit to the Bernese Oberland. Klary was a member of a Dutch Scout Troop which, much to our adolescent Scottish boys' delight, included girls as well as boys.  That would be enough of a reason to be friendly as far as we were concerened but there were all kinds of other attractions, not least their smoking habits - Drum and Samson loose leaf tobacco extracted from bright blue pouches to roll into cigarette using just one hand!  How cool might that be to a teenage boy from Glasgow still wet behind the ears? Forty years on, none of us smokes.

The year after we met I took trains around Europe using the InterRail Pass ticket system which, at that time, allowed you unrestricted train travel in 17 countries or thereabouts for a month for a ridiculously low price. (The same pass today, covering about twice the number of countries, costs a bit under 800 Euro.  Is that still a bargain?  No idea.)  Not that it matters to anyone but me, but the fact my InterRail trip was my second time meeting Klary - this time in Enschede and Hengelo in The Netherlands - means I would shortly go to university which means I'd left the Royal Bank of Scotland (my first job after leaving school) which means I was 17 when we met in Switzerland, so - 1974 - forty years ago.  But I digress.

Klary, her husband Gerrit, Klary's sister Nettie (who I also met in 1974), Nettie's daughter Diana, Klary's daughter Margriet and her fiance, an Australian soldier named Clint arrived ysterday evening.  We talked, ate food, drank wine and beer, retired to bed then started the eating and talking again this morning over breakfast.  And then our Dutch friends left for Sydney where Margriet and Clint will be married on the 9th January.  By ten to five in the afternoon the tourists were posting photos of themselves on the beach at Wollongong having lunched with Clint's family in Campbelltown.  
 
An hour after Klary and her unambiguously Dutch entourage left Gilmore we were visited by a school friend of Spike, Stephanie with her husband Nick and boys Ruben and Fraser.  Outside of a school reunion earlier this year Spike and Stephanie had not seen one another for about 15 years.  It all makes me wonder, where does the time go?  But we both owe it to Facebook for re-connecting us to people we've not seen for years; decades in my case.  It's too easy to have a go at Facebook but you can't really argue with this re-uniting potential that it carries for all of us. Or is that simply an observation for old fogeys like me? Probably but what can a man do?  An old fogey is an old fogey.  Need proof ...?  While Stephanie and Spike were chatting Ruben, Stephanie's six year old eldest son, wupped this old man's ass at noughts and crosses on the youngster's iPhone.

Tragic old man.  But a happy old man who's had a lovely twenty four hours with friends old and new.

Carpenters - Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft

I never knew there was a longer version of the Carpenters venture into the trippy world of beyond.  Clearly, I don't have much on my plate today while poor old Spike has to make the house decent for our friends from The Netherlands who arrive this evening.

Small birds will fly regardless

The day will come, believe me,
when the same old yellow sun
will rise from East as it has always done
to meet another dawn 

but one you will not greet,
old man, for there will no more be
the time remaining, time to wonder 
what it's for, what it is all about.

That sun will rise, the air skip gently 
through another lazy morning 
or blow a gale the likes of which 
you never saw in all your too short days.

So do not linger. Do not pause to speculate
on what might happen, one day, should you wait.

Peace - Burial at sea of Sir David Wilkie by J W Turner

I watched a short arts programme on the BBC iPlayer; Benjamin Zephania (who I saw perform in a small theatre on Mile End Road, Tower Hamlets - where I lived in 1982) was taking us through A Private View of an exhibition of Turner's late works at the Tate Museum.  The poet paused to reflect on Peace - Burial At Sea, painted in 1842 to mark the burial of Turner's friend Davd Wilkie.  Critics didn't take to it at the time.  Too dark.  Too gloomy.

Anyway.  Benjemin Zephaniah ruminated on the painting and the artist.  He drew our attention to the small bird gliding over the water, almost emerging from it.  I wrote my poem.

Tab A into slot B

We drove home today from Ashfield to Gilmore via the IKEA store in Tempe.  Contrary to my worst fears and much to my surprise - given it's a Saturday after the sales have started - the vast warehouse was much quieter than I expected.  The canteen (no other word does justice to the awful utilitarian atmosphere of the eating place) was the busiest spot on the site.  Spike managed to capture my enthusiasm for the dining experience in her photo below.  

This thought may be unfair but it's the thought that came to me as we sat at the formica-topped retro table (it seems the 1960s have been back in vogue for quite a while).   I read the notice above the conveyor belt carrying off the trays bearing the remnants of the hopeful purchases of hundreds of less than wholly-satisfied diners which said something to the effect that all waste organic matter would be recycled to minimise the use of landfill.  I couldn't stop myself thinking of one of the deeply secret horrors revealed to Sonmi-451 in The Orison of Sonmi-451, the fifth of the nested tales in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas; cannibalistic re-processing of clones.  But I cannot tell a lie.  As grim as the experience may have been I finished off most of my 'fisherman's basket' with a side of garlic bread, so let he who hath not sinned cast the first stone.

The fish ladder on the River Tummel

As for the shopping, well ... it's IKEA.  Every fibre of my being revolts against the ways in which we're forced to follow the route layed out by the social engineers who have created the brand and all that comes with it.  I instinctively turn left when the arrow on the floor points right.  Whenever I feel my irrational, juvenile need to resist I turn round, retrace my track to return for a supposedly essential second view of a bookcase, sofa or table.  It's a bit like being a salmon, I imagine,  heading upstream, making your way home to primeval spawning pools via the fish ladder at Pitlochry Dam.  Sort of.  But only in my head.  Other shoppers simply regard me as troublesome - going the wrong way.

The point of IKEA, however, is to purchase furniture, fittings and home accessories that you think you need - in flat packs, of course, so you can get in touch with your inner carpenter back home.  I am no less guilty than all the other miserable sinners swimming against the stream in the great Nordic warehouse.  But I leave the assembly tasks to Spike, who has both the patience and the finger-function required.  We came, we viewed, we purchased: trestles, a stool, a reading lamp, crockery (so our Dutch visitors on Monday could all eat from plates, which seems the least we could do), cutlery, cheap wine glasses.  The bookcases we need are too large to fit in the car and the kitchen cabinet we fancied is out of stock.  

Galahad, Bors & Percival achieve the Grail,.  Morris & Co., Birmingham Museum

The Grail Quest it was not but we failed in a not entirely dissimilar way.  We shall keep on searching for the out of stock cabinet.  

One day - perhaps next October when the Canberra IKEA store opens - we may triumph.  Isn't that the enduring appeal of Romance - the journey, the trials and tribulations on the road, the momentary glimpse of the cherished artefact?  No.  I don't think so either.  I am not Sir Galahad nor was meant to be (to paraphrase Eliot) and we need that kitchen cabinet to house all the damn plates and bowls we bought.  IKEA the drug.  You always need just one more hit.

The Battle Of The Five Armies

Inevitably, we caught the final Hobbit movie on the day of its release here in Australia.  Matt, my nephew, suggested we see it together so I thought we should make it as eventful a movie trip as possible (you only have your first Sydney Christmas once and I want him to remember it as fun because he's a long way from home and his family).  I got tickets for one of the screenings at the IMAX at Darling Harbour.  It claims to be the largest IMAX screen in the world which may or may not be true but it hardly seems worth arguing the point.  It's a massive screen.  We were sitting at the rear of the steeply raked auditorium, where the wheelchair spaces are located.  When I booked the tickets I was told the space would be at the farthest left position but, as it turned out, we were directed to the centre of the row, the very best viewing position for such a large, curved screen.  I was pleased indeed at that change.

As for the movie, well what can one say?  First, of course, you have to tip your hat to Peter Jackson and his team for pulling off a remarkable cinematic achievement.  We can quibble - if we must - about stretching out one small children's book into three more or less three hour films but to do so seems churlish. We've been entertained splendidly and at times genuinely excited by the series of Tolkein films; never less than good, always visually sumptuous, arresting and sometimes excellent.  This last Hobbit episode was enjoyable and entertaining.  It avoided the worst excesses of bombast and pretensions that sometimes detracted from story telling in other parts of what is now a six-volume epic. And, it's fair to say because this was an improvement on its predecessors, it is the shortest of the three Hobbit films (although still a good bit over two hours).

So, a tighter script is a definite plus.  The performances were all good, although I doubt any of the actors felt particularly stretched by the task. Martin Freeman is a wholly believable, charming Bilbo Baggins; rounded, three-dimensional, genuinely moving and, when it's called for, witty.  Ian McKellan doesn't have a great deal to do but every time he appears on screen it's Gandalf that we see.  Lee Pace, as Thranduil, is and has been for me the outstanding presence of movies 2 and 3.  I believe that's a King of woodland elves I see before me, one who knows loss and cares for those he leads and who can rise above the bitterness he feels for past injustices and wrongs.  Beyond the performances I was relieved that the battle scenes were not interminable as some have been in all previous five films. In this area, I firmly believe, less is definitely more.

There isn't much more to say about the movie, oddly enough. The entire trilogy was rather underwhelming I feel, its coherence undermined by the unnecessary three film structure.  Peter Jackson brought home the mammoth project he started maybe 20 years ago with an entertaining romp but not a film anyone will rave about to friends.  I'm glad we saw it on the giant 3D screen of the Sydney IMAX and I'm glad my nephew got to see it with us.  There are many, much worse ways to spend a Boxing Day.

It was 171 years ago this very night ...

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant, 

C.D.

December, 1843.

Joe Cocker

I can't remember when I first heard Joe Cocker perform; forty years ago, a bit more?  My older brother had a marvellous album collection from which I acquired my defining musical preferences. 

One of his albums was, perhaps of course, Mad Dogs and Englishmen.  

So ... farewell Joe Cocker.  As with so many ageing men like me, he was one of the lead singers on the soundtrack of our lives.

#ThanksTony - on women

You couldn't make up this nonsense ...

Source - GetUp!

This morning, on the Channel 9 breakfast programme TODAY, our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, was asked to nominate his biggest achievement as Minister for Women.

He answered, "Well, you know, it is very important to do the right thing by families and households. As many of us know, women are particularly focused on the household budget and the repeal of the carbon tax means a $550 a year benefit for the average family".

Truly, you just couldn't make it up.

Beatrice and Virgil

I finished Yann Martel's third novel today; Beatrice and Virgil.  It's the first of his works I've read which is, I suppose, a mildly sacrilegious statement to make if you want to lay claim (as I do) to an interest in literature.  How could you not have read Life of Pi, Douglas?  At your age?  Dunno, is all I can tell you although I did see the movie.  Will that get me off the hook?  Probably not because I was drawn principally by the fact it was directed by Ang Lee. As an aside - the film is still the best 3D movie I've seen; truly astounding in places, visually breathtaking.

Back to Beatrice and Virgil, though.  It's somehow both ambitious and timid; daring in the idea that underpins the novel but it bottles out.  It's simple really - if you're going to toy with the conceit of an allegorical tale about the Holocaust I think you need to commit entirely to the idea or you're bound to end up falling short of your ambition.  Animal allegories can and do work.  Animal Farm works.  Watership Down works.  Beatrice and Virgil doesn't work and the problem is the injection of the quasi-realist but barely plausible tale about the blocked writer and old taxidermist.  It keeps butting into and undermining the animal allegory.  

There's also a problem - for me anyway - with the allegorical part.  This may seem a bit harsh - and I accept that only on the day I have ANYTHING published will I posses even an ounce of credibility when it comes to literary criticism - but when you read Mr Martel's frankly derivative script for the 'lost' play you realise again how remarkable and brilliant is Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot (on which '20th Century Shirt' seems - too obviously - to be based).

I liked these components:

•  The writer's idea and ambition, neither of which were sufficiently realised. (sadly).

• "The use of animals in his novel, he explained, was for reasons of craft rather than sentiment. Speaking before his tribe, naked, he was only human and therefore possibly - likely - surely a liar. But dressed in furs and feathers, he became a shaman and spoke a greater truth. We are cynical about our own species, but less so about animals, especially wild ones. We might not shelter them from habitat destruction, but we do tend to shelter them from excessive irony." pages 29 - 30

• The games for Gustav, the most effective and affecting section of the novel.  Its few pages sit in stark contrast to everything that preceded them; a reminder, in a sense, of what doesn't work in what came before.

• The initial description of the back room at the taxidermist's shop.

So ... a bit of a disappointment but I hold on to my high hopes for Pi.

An afterthought.  It's not Yann Martel's fault he received - if the story is true - an advance of maybe $2 Million or $3 Million for this novel, the follow-up to Life of Pi.  But it's hard not to imagine the panic that must have descended on the commissioning editor or publisher when the draft was submitted.  

"$3 Million in advance for this ... ? Oh shit!"

Camouflage For Beginners

Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Breathe in again.
Try not to think, not think too much.
Try hard to limit what you think or say or write
To careful, cautious words that favour what is right,
Seems right, reflects the way you’ve learned,
The way you taught yourself, to limit what gets out,
What can be said, expressed, exhaled, expelled
Like poison from a fevered body, fevered mind,
A spirit held in self-made, well-worn chains.
Self-made?  Self-mad more like.  A madness so perfected
Others take it for a measured state of mind,
Mistake it for some kind of equilibrium.  Normality, 
The wretched soul’s best hiding place. Out here.
In plain sight where all one needs is mediocrity.

Memorial service for Stella Young

Here on The Drum pages of the ABC web site.  Nothing I can add really.

And a good write-up in The Guardian here.

Gnats

Is it true?
Do we only have the attention span of 

Sorry, what was that?
I wasn't really paying

No, I was just saying
there's this thing on 

YouTube.
YouTube?

Not another 
cat

dancing to whatsisname.
Whatsisname? 

Rick
Rick Astley? 

Never Gonna Give You 
Up.

Boy band from the Eighties
- without the band.

But all that other stuff.
What stuff?

Rickrolling.
How enthralling.

Just saying.
Saying what? 

Nothing really.

The first of several seasonal meals

The office lunch for Christmas.  We dined at Ottoman Restaurant in Barton where, it hardly needs to be said, the food is Turkish.  And not half bad.  

Dips - beetroot was best

The "cuisine [according to the menu] consists of classic Turkish dishes that have withstood the test of time."  So, few surprises made it to the table and you'd have to imagine that the meat eaters among our number - that'll be most of our happy little band of NGO campers - experienced more of what the place and its cooks have to offer.  But I'm not complaining.  We were all well-fed by the end of our time together.  It wasn't an exiting dining experience by any stretch of the imagination but it's the best meal I've eaten all week and I didn't have to pay, so thank you National Disability Services.  

Happy Christmas comrades - if that's not mixing one's ideological frames of reference.

There will be days like this ... but not always

You have to keep moving - sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively.  Sometimes you need to remind yourself that you have to push on.  Some days you'll cover more ground, sometimes less.  

Prepaing for the next move

Two years ago today Spike started packing up our lives in boxes, stacking them from floor to ceiling in the flat in Ashfield.  Within a few days it was almost impossible to open the bedroom door.  And then we moved, first to a room in a hotel on Northbourne Avenue, Canberra (where we stayed longer than either of us thought we would) then here to suburban Gilmore.  We have a house that's bigger than we need, a double garage we don't park cars in but which provides a base for an artist to emerge and gardens front and rear that Spike is making her own, now we've decided it's here we'll stay; at least for a while.

Shit happens.  You do whatever you can, however insignificant it may seem, to be part of the solution; not the problem.  And you move as much as you can - large or small. That's what matters.  You move at least a little.

#illridewithyou

Nothing else need be said.

I'm not a Muslim. This man is.

Full text of Prof Mohamed's statement

His Eminence the Grand Mufti of Australia, the Australian National Imams Council supported by the Muslim community have been devastated by the recent news that (has) been circulated in the media agencies about the reported hostage incident unfolding in Martin Place.

The Grand Mufti and the Australian National Imams Council condemn this criminal act unequivocally and reiterate that such actions are denounced in part and in whole in Islam.

We along (with) the wide Australian society await the results of the investigation about the identity of the perpetrators and their underlying motivations behind this criminal act.

His Eminence the Grand Mufti, the Australian National Imams Council and the Muslim community express their full support and solidarity with the victims and their families and aspire to a peaceful resolve to this calamity.

Slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails

One of the troubles of gardening is that we acquire responsibilities.  That'll be The Royal We. I am but a spectator when it comes to matters horticultural. Spike does all the work.

The - perhaps - inevitable has befallen some of the seedlings planted during the last couple of days.  Slugs and snails!  Late November / early December is thunderstorm season, as news reports will have it.  We've had four giant storms in the last couple of weeks; another localised one today over our suburb.  Sydney has had some monster-size events over the same period.

This morning we had lost the heads of a couple of sweet pea plants that Spike bedded in a pot the other day and a few of the sunflower seedlings she planted out yesterday.  It was, therefore, a determined woman that attacked - which is neither the wrong nor too strong a word to use - the gardening tasks upon our return from a visit to Bunnings.  The growing area is being liberally carpeted with sugar cane and pea straw mulches.  Severed plastic bottles are being rammed into the ground around each seedling as protection.  And for maybe half an hour after this afternoon's storm with its heavy rain Spike wandered around the garden like a heat seeking missile spotting snails that made the mistake to surface from their clammy dens in search of food - Spike's seedling sunflowers, sweet peas, beans and peas.  The offending beasts have been expelled from the garden but with less grace and ceremony than Adam and Eve when they were cast out from Eden.

Garden snail defecating, apparently

We recognise, of course, that the struggle against the garden's seemingly never-ending supply of terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs is a gargantuan endeavour - not to say futile.  But Spike is a determined woman and, despite the almost overwhelming odds arising from the innumerable hordes of slowly moving, slithering creatures that surround us and our would-be flowers and veg, I would not bet against her.

Suburban Saturday

Some days are lazier than others.  Today has been one of my laziest in a long time, almost to the point of doing nothing.  

Almost?  Reading articles in The Guardian Online and listening to the terrifically enjoyable Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode movie podcast from BBC Radio 5 Live may be about as close to doing nothing as it's possible to get.

Spike has been more active.  There has been gardening.  Despite the drenching received during the thunderstorms of the previous week and assaults by armies of snails and slugs about have of the sunflower seeds have made it into infancy.  They are about to be transplanted into the garden where, we can but hope, they'll thrive.  

Million Dollar Arm

Million Dollar Arm

Serviceable sports movie ... if you can put up with the genre (I suspect most folk can't be bothered with it.  I take to it in much the same way as I order pizza for home delivery or buy packets of crisps when I go the movies.  I know I shouldn't but every now and then I do.  Formulaic but less fattening than pizza).

John Hamm is believable.  Alan Arkin steals the show (no mean feat when a large chunk of his screen time is spent sleeping).  Rinku, Dinesh and Amit played by Suraj Sharma, Madhur Mittal and Pitobah are compelling enough.  Their fish out of water trip to America is sort of balanced by John Hamm's fish out of water trip to India.  The scenes in what's purported to be the boys'  home village are quite engaging without tipping over into sentimentality. 

It's not great by any stretch of the imagination but if you find yourself with a need to watch something decent enough on a cold, rainy evening this'll do.

Bargain books join the reading list

After a late lunch on Tuesday at the excellent Penny University in Kingston ...

Thinking about it now it may have been a late, late breakfast.  Spike had very dark bread, toasted, with a mountain of avacado and poached egg.  I had the Penny University Rarebit - bagel, toasted cheese, poached egg (perfectly done) and spinach - with side orders of truffled mushroms (not sure about that verb but who cares) and harissa baked beans.  We could debate whether or not I needed both 'sides' but ... you know ... they were there, on the menu, calling out to me.

After lunner ... way too late for our meal to be brunch ... we stopped off at the bargain bookstore between Penny University and the local IGA (a pretty dismal little supermarket if we're being honest about it).  The book store's unique selling proposition is that every book inside is $10, although there's a back room with a few bookcases on which every book carries a sticker announcing 2 for $10.  And there's a bargain bonus - buy 6 books for $50.  So it's not entirely true to its USP, come to think of it.  But my point is it's a shop full of cheap books.

Summer holidays reading list

We bught 6, bargain hunters that we are.  Spike, who was not feeling at her tip top best and therefore lacked her usual apetite for a book bargain, selected just one title, Persepolis.  I chose the other five.  It's a good bunch of books, don't you think?  All hard covers too!!  Now I just have to make time to read them.

• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
• Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel
• Home by Tony Morrison
• The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
• The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
• Dracula by Bram Stoker and illustrated by Becky Cloonan

Spike started on Persepolis so I took Beatrice and Virgil.  Top of the pile.  Enjoying it so far.

Exodus - Gods and Kings

I like Ridley Scott movies for the most part.  You know ... Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down.  Each outstanding in its own way.  The first two - Alien and Blade Runner - among the best science fiction movies ever made.   Blade Runner in particular is just about my favourite movie of all time.

Even those of his movies I think of as second tier - Matchstick Men, Kingdom of Heaven, American Gangster and Prometheus - are good movies in their different ways.  Films that most Directors would be very pleased to send out into the world.

So I'm not quite sure what I can say about Exodus - Gods and Kings, which I saw this evening.  Spike was attending a function at the Canberra Glassworks so I took myself off to Hoyts at Woden in the Westfield shopping mall, which looks like a location from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange; one that the great director rejected because it looks far too bleak and inhospitable even for a 1970's dystopian fable of a bleak and inhospitable future. 

But back to Moses ..

Who's that standing next to Ellen Ripley?

Disappointing?  Would that be the word?  Bombastic, tedious (at times ... too often ... I'm sad to say I found my mind drifting off to check out the curtains every now and then), poorly written.  It's less engaging than Charlton Heston in Cecil B De Mille's The Ten Commandments (and I never imagined I'd find myself writing those few words) and just plain bizarre in places

... casting John Turturo as Seti and Sigourney Weaver as his wife and the mother of Ramses?  ... crocodiles cause the plague of water into blood? ... and despite the Biblical assertion to the contrary (Exodus 14:28) Pharaoh survives the return of the Red Sea waters?

It's an odd film.  

As you would expect with any Ridley Scott movie it's visually arresting and, at times, beautiful.  The landscapes are spectacular and awe-inspiring; beautiful but harsh and unforgiving - Old Testament vistas in which a man could easily die or wander in the wilderness for days or decades.

Blade Runner does Memphis at night

Memphis is magnificently rendered (although the residence of Ramses looks suspiciously like the Tyrell Corporation HQ in Blade Runner).  The quarries of Pithom take your breath away.  Believe me, you would not want a summer job there.  The plagues make your flesh creep. Locusts? Don't like them.  Rotting fish? You can smell them.  Frogs in your bed? Yeuch!  Christian Bale is a believable Moses.  And as bizarre as John Turturro may be in the role of Seti you kind of accept it, although you do wonder how such a delicate, refined man could have fathered the brute force that is Joel Edgerton's Ramses.  Sadly, however, you can never suspend disbelief when the Pharaoh's mum appears on screen.  You just keep thinking, what's Sigourney Weaver doing here?

On the down side?  Well the whole thing runs out of steam as soon as we've crossed the Red Sea.  It felt as if the director no longer had any interest in the rest of the story ... there would be fewer big money shots maybe. 

Or ... Psychology 101 here ... the brother narrative severed by the return of the unbridgeable gulf of the sea, Sir Ridley's enthusiasm waned.  There's a brief stone carving scene inside a cave on Mount Sinai while craven images are worshipped down below and a peek at an ancient Moses sitting with the Ark of The Covenant in a covered wagon then we're done.  Roll credits.

The two hours and thirty minutes seem much longer.  The conceit of casting God as a somewhat spoilt and impatient 10 year old boy wore thin after a while. Ben Mendelsohn's Viceroy Hegep is written / presented like a Saturday morning cliffhanger baddie - ready for a boo and hiss every time his rolling eyes and sneaky glance appear before us. 

Maria Valverde as Zipporah

Ben Kingsley gives us a decent enough wise old man in the first half but is reduced to a wordless starer into the skies once the flight from Egypt gets underway. And whatever happened to Moses's mum, sister, wife and son?  They do their exposition bit then vanish from the screen.

So ... Exodus - Gods and Kings? Definitely not in the top rank of Ridley Scott films and struggling to hold on to the second tier too.  If I was asked for an opinion on where to spend your movie ticket dollars this weekend I'd tell you ... somewhere else.

PS. There are a couple of interesting points in the screenplay which, I think, show that with a bit more work, some more rigorous development, there could have been an edgier film drawn out of this Cecil B De Mille lite offering.  Early on in a war planning room Seti asks his advisers if the Hittite army massing on the border of Egypt poses a threat.  No one can tell him.  It's possible, advises one, they're marshalling a defensive capability - not an invasion force - because they're worried Egypt will attack them.  Seti sends in his armies anyway.  Iraq anyone?  It's hard not too see the analogy for modern pre-emptive defensive strategy (as our modern Imperialists like to put it).  And later, when Moses has risen to his leadership role, there is a discussion about the tactics his newly trained army will prosecute to secure freedom.  Moses explicitly rejects action against military targets.  Instead he organises an insurgent, guerrilla, terrorist campaign against civilian infrastructure, property and people.  Had the rest of the screenplay been as comfortable with risk taking we might have had a magnificent movie.  But sadly no.

Which Glenelg are you looking for, sir?

Glenelg, Mars

So I'm sitting here, enjoying a late breakfast and a cup of tea, surfing the Internet as usual.  Necessarily that involves reading The Guardian Online because no day is complete without my habitual dose of the newspaper I've been reading for forty years.  I am that most disparaged of British left wingers ... a committed Guardian reader. 

Anyway ...

My attention was snared by this headline:

Nasa's Mars Curiosity rover finds that 96-mile-wide crater once held lake

It's a bit hard for a non-science person like me to get my head fully round the idea that for over two years now the Mars rover Curiosity has been trundling over the inhospitable surface of the red planet that is - on average - 225 million km distant from us.  Even the idea that there's no fixed distance between our two planets takes a bit of getting used to, although I do understand both Mars and the 3rd Rock revolve around the sun, that planets have different orbits and we're always in motion so that when we're at our closest the two planets are only - only he writes - about 54 million km apart but can reach as much as 400 million km distant.  (You'll need to take more than one bus to make that long journey, Douglas.)

Truth be told the article is jam-packed full of amazing and fascinating factoids that greatly increase the respect, admiration and awe with which I regard space geeks and boffins.  You know ... I like words and sentences and, therefore, literature; beginnings, middles and ends (although not necessarily in that order).  So I'm left flummoxed, wondering, "how do they know things like these ...?"

• There was a lake in the crater 3.5 billion years ago;
• That Mars could, therefore, have supported microbial life;
• How can they tell Mount Sharp wasn't there when the lake was there?

Glenelg, South Australia

But here's the aspect of all this space travel and Mars exploring I like the most.  Its human dimension, even though no human has yet set foot on the red planet.  Who was it, I wonder, decided to call the area shown in the Mars photograph Glenelg?  

Glenelg, Scotland

I have been to both Glenelg in South Australia and Glenelg in Scotland.  There can be no surprise then when I tell you, neither looks even remotely like Glenelg on Mars.
 
We're a funny old bunch, we humans.  Name it and it's not so scary, never again quite as alien as it was when it was simply uncharted, broken rocks on the surface of a planet far, far away but not too, too far away.

Stella Young

The news came today that Stella died on Saturday evening.  She was 32 years old.  I knew her a little.  Others knew her well.  We are all saddened by her death.  No more for me to say but these links connect us to someone we shall miss.

Stella's TEDx Talk:

The Guardian's report of the sad news with a selection of touching reactions on Twitter is here.

Stella's letter to her 80 year old self, reproduced on the ABC Drum web site, begins this way (and you can read the whole text via the link above.)

Dear 80-year-old me,

Eighty, hey? Eighty.

Eighty is a long way from where I write to you now. Fifty years, in fact.

To be honest, I've never thought a great deal about you, 80-year-old Stell. I tend not to think about living to some grand old age. Then again, I don't think about dying either. I suppose you do; you're 80. You've done a lot of things. Seen a lot of things. You almost certainly have a hover-chair by now. When I was seven and watched an episode of Beyond 2000 that featured a floating armchair, I thought we'd definitely have one of those by 15, at the latest. As we both now know, the 21st century has been nothing if not a tremendous lie.

Bummer.

For unto us a Child is born ...

A Christmas message of sorts ... in the Woden shopping mall

I'm not a Christian, not a person of any reigious faith.  But even I think that 'the message' may have been lost in translation here. The version we were given in Sunday school went more like this:

Matthew, Chapter 2

1. Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,
2. Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.
3. When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.
4. And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.
5. And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet,
6. And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.
7. Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, enquired of them diligently what time the star appeared.
8. And he sent them to Bethlehem, and said, Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.
9. When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.
10. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.
11. And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.

 Maybe I'm nit-picking.

Donald Westlake, a name to remember

The thunder storms continue; our third in four days and just as big a storm as those before.  There was nowhere to go in such wild weather and nothing sensible to do but shelter here at home, surfing the Internet, reading and inevitably - for me - watching movies.  I stumbled across a mildly ridiculous, violent heist / caper film by the name of Parker, directed by Taylor Hackford.  To describe it as implausible and full of plot holes one could drive a bus through would do a disservice to the very idea of implausibility.  It is as cheesy as Emmental.  But the rain poured down out of angry skies and there was nothing more appealing to download so I watched it to the grim and violent end.  I can't say I'd recommend it but that's not my point here.

The end-credits started with "IN MEMORY OF DONALD E WESTLAKE", a name I thought I recognised vaguely but as the credits rolled I couldn't see any further reference in the list of cast or crew.  So I googled ... as one does.

Donald Edwin Westlake is here.

Donald E Westlake

He's described on the fan web site as "crime novelist and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Donald E. Westlake, creator of John Dortmunder, the most clever and least lucky thief in crime fiction, and, writing as Richard Stark, the hard-boiled heist master Parker."  The sentence doesn't quite do justice to a pulp fiction author who produced over 100 books in his writing life with up to 16 pseudonyms.  Sixteen?

As I read more about him (primarily on Wiki) I found two references to work he'd created that might have provoked my vague recollection.  The first was the movie The Grifters for which Donald Westlake wrote the screenplay and was nominated for an Oscar.  It's hard to believe that the Oscar went to Dances With Wolves ... actually it's not that hard.  It is, after all, the Oscars.  But The Grifters is a brilliant movie with a fiercely good screenplay.

The second point of reference goes much further back, all the way back to 1967 and Point Blank, John Boorman's movie version of Donald Westlake's novel (writing as Richard Stark) The Hunter.  I couldn't have seen it, of course, in 1967.  I was only 10 years old but I must have seen it somewhere, some time after.  It's a brutal story.  There are memorable scenes, especially the brilliantly edited long walk down the corridor as Walker / Parker makes his way to where his wife and her lover are supposed to be hiding out.  And the fight, which Walker loses, with Angie Dickinson's character - all those electric appliances drilling their sounds into Lee Marvin's cool killer's brain.

You can see the roots of Jason Statham's Parker in Lee Marvin's Walker but the 2013 version is a long way from the original and much diluted.  And if you're looking for menace and an animlistic, dangerous presence on screen you wouldn't look anywhere else but Lee Marvin in 1967. But the core of both lies in the writing of Donald Westlake I suppose.  I've never read any of his 100 plus works.  Maybe I should.

Old Habits Die Hard

There is science to explain that thunder
"is simply caused

by vibration of the air"
when lightening strikes at speed.

Some say
three thousand, seven hundred

miles per hour
or in a flash

too fast to count,
too quick to measure

but not so fast
we do not run for cover, cower

and watching angry clouds
thank ancient Gods 

we are not 
rent asunder.


Another thunderstorm, our second in two days, hit Canberra. I wrote a poem as the rain fell.


http://www.sciencemadesimple.co.uk/activities/thunder

Movie Fest ...

A thunderstorm that brought wild winds and heavy rain left not much to do with my Wednesday evening and with Spike not yet returned from the Glassworks I decided to catch up on films I had missed at release.  So I've given over the last few hours to a couple of well-made, entirely contrasting movies: 12 Years A Slave followed by The Grand Budapest Hotel.  I much preferred the latter of the two.

Steve McQueen's rendering of the Solomon Northup's memoir was visually stunning in places - arresting landscapes beautifully captured and held, almost longingly, in the frame, an artist's eye for the sky at dusk or swampland almost as an abstract painting.  The performances were never less than excellent - Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong'o, Afre Woodard, Paul Dano and Benedict Cumberbatch in particular.  But I was far from moved as I'd expected I would have been.  There was an air of detachment that felt curiously disengaging about the film.  Structurally, it felt odd too as if the director couldn't make up his mind whether to give us a straightforward narrative with beginning, middle and end or, as happened now and ten, to mess with linear time by circling around places, characters and events to reveal some core truth by peeling away layers of perception until only one reading could remain.  A greater commitment to that latter approach might have overcome the episodic feel to the movie. 

I guess the episodic approach may reflect the structure of the original text, which I've not read (yet).  I have, however, read Hariet Jacobs' incredible tale, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published 8 years after Solomon Northup's story.  That's certainly episodic, which may reflect the literary style of the time.  So this comment may come across as a bit churlish but given the praise heaped on McQueen's film - which I stress is a powerful event - I expected more.  Didn't Arthur Haley's Roots - both the novel and the television series - have everything that 12 Years has (excluding the kidnapping component)?  And, I have to say, nothing in 12 Years came as close to taking my breath away as many parts of Toni Morrison's Beloved; not even the hanging scenes(s). I'd recommend the film to anyone to watch and I don't mean to damn it with faint praise but it felt just a bit too 'worthy'.

Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel by contrast was, by contrast, original, imaginative, surprising and truly memorable.  Contrary to conventional wisdom I feel that movie lovers will be watching Anderson's film long after McQueen's has been filed with all those other officially 'important' documents.  Structurally, Grand Budapest, mirrored the novel Cloud Atlas with its set of nested tales - the fictional today (the girl in the graveyard), 1985, 1969, 1932, 1969, 1985, the fictional today (back to the girl in the graveyard).  There were the different aspect ratios on the screen with a link, I'm guessing, to time period but I'll have to check that; maybe it was related to point of view.  And so many forms of film-making and genre - melodrama, thriller, car chase, romance, animation, Saturday morning thrillers, comedy, horror (hotel corridors straight from The Shining), a parody of The Shawshank Redemption.  Everything you could ask for in not much more than an hour and a half.  Every performance is pitch perfect.  I see now why The Guardian has selected it as one of the top ten movies of 2014.  (I've not read the article but shall any minute now).

The thunderstorm has passed.  We're back to a warm summer evening and I've caught up a bit on my movies.  Life could be worse.

Goal of the year

FIFA (boo, hiss ... love the game - scrap FIFA) has created a short list of three strikes to contend for their goal of 2014.  The award is known as the FIFA Puskas Award and the three nominated finalists can be seen here.  Like most folk, I imagine, I'd vote for James Rodriguez

Among the goals that made the long list is one by Tim Cahill against The Netherlands in the World Cup match at Porto Alegre on the 18th June.  Spike and I were in the crowd.  There was a moment, not so very long after this goal was scored, that Australia could have gone two up.  Had they done so me, Spike, Joe and Steph would have been required to alter our travel and accommodation plans (and bookings!!) for the four weeks that followed.  Sadly it was not meant to be.

Here's the best goal I saw in person in 2014.  Tim Cahill.

Not merely Kafkaesque ...

I read The Metamorphosis this morning.  It takes barely any time.

You can't do anything but admire the way Franz Kafka gets right to the heart of the matter with the opening sentence, "One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin."  There's no preamble, no context-setting and, as we discover when we've finished reading, not even the vaguest notion or slightest nod towards an explanation of the transformation.  One morning a man called Gregor awoke in his bed as an insect.  Read on, says the author.  That's as much background as you need.

I'm intrigued by the ways in which Kafka builds a compelling idea of Gregor the vermin as a physically repulsive creature from whose sight - or the idea of seeing - we instinctively recoil just like his family, the maid and the office's chief clerk.  Gregor the human remains an essentially decent, empathetic being.  But we don't like the bug.

It's such clever, accomplished writing because we're only given physical description in fragments, at different points of the story.  We catch glimpses of the legs, the back, the head but we're never given a portrait of the creature as a whole.  Our imagination, maybe our instinctive fear, is left to fill in the blanks.  As readers, I suspect we do most of the work to join the dots of constructing the vermin that worries us most.  I saw a cockroach as soon as Gregor struggled to get off his back.  The cleaning lady in the story calls him a dung beetle.  Vladimir Nabokov - a lepidopterist - was adamant that Gregor was neither a cockroach nor a dung-beetle (an "epithet only to be friendly" apparently) but a big, brown, six-legged beetle (even though Kafka never enumerates Gregor's legs).  I have no wish to contradict one of the greatest writers of 20th Century literature but I believe Mr Nabokov proves my point.  Kafka never fully describes the vermin into which Gregor is transformed so as readers - even a reader as renowned as Vladimir - we construct the bug that works for us. 

Franz Kafka

I really do not like cockroaches.  Some visceral part of me is triggered when I see one - or two, as the case has been in our house over the last week or so thanks to heavy rain or moving cardboard boxes or whatever disturbs those ugly wee brutes.  So - SPOILER ALERT IN CASE ANYONE HAS NOT READ THE STORY - I was even more impressed by Kafka's writing when I felt loss, sadness and sympathy for Gregor at his end.  

In real life I'd feel no qualms at crushing any cockroach that provokes me simply by being and being visible.  Kafka, however, may have intended me to reflect on what Gregor's story tells us.  The facts of his life are pretty straightforward we're told.  Life is absurd, inexplicable and short.