The venerable David Stratton was addressing a lunch crowd at a launch of his autobiography, I Peed On Fellini. As he autographed my copy, I reminded him that I had sometimes been mistaken for him at film festivals from Cannes to Honolulu. Similar age, height, Panama hat, beard; easy mistake to make. To some people Australians all look alike. Even imported ones like Stratton.
The title of his book got me thinking. If I found the energy, the memory and the courage to one of my own, I might well title it I Danced With Fonteyn — with perhaps a sequel called I Dueled With Nureyev.
At about the same time as this launch lunch, my son discovered and sent to me an old scrapbook of mine in which was a cringeworthy poem I had written in my 20s about the then binary stars of the ballet universe, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev.
Read my new page, Invitation to the Dance, for the full story of how the book got to be so named and how I got to dance with Margot Fonteyn.
I recall a resolution I once made never to fly with a pilot who was not the same religion as myself, namely atheist. I figured that the less the captain believed in an afterlife the more likely he was to do his best to stay in this one.
I’m not a nervous flyer. More fatalistic than anything. I have had my share of interesting experiences including the kind of landings the produce an hysterical round of applause from relieved and grateful passengers.
This is a plug for a new page on this blog, A Traveller’s Tale. It is the story of my worst ever flight — and damn near my last.
I can’t paint or draw so I try to make paintings with my camera. Often angling, framing and exposing a shot is a visceral experience. Palpable. Making something, creating a picture that is more like how I see it and feel it than how it might actually be. Sometimes I get a result that actually approaches what I see and feel. All too often I fail miserably to capture or create the vision that was so clear and strong in my mind’s eye and that makes me wonder if it is worth the effort of trying again.
It is only by trying again and again that achievement is possible. One only begins to really achieve in any endeavour when one is no longer bothered with the mechanics, technology or technique of the process.
I doubt if when Jascha Heifetz was playing he was concerned where he was stopping his strings; when Nureyev was dancing he was worrying about the line of his back when performing an entrechat huit, or when Claude Monet was painting his attention was focussed on his brush strokes.
Bruce Lee once said to me: “Technique? I have no technique. I don’t hit — ‘it’ hits all by itself.”
I need to work more, read more, see more; to become so familiar with my tools that I don’t make the pictures — they make themselves.
All pictures shot with my Nikon D70. EXIF information should be intact on all pictures with all technical information.
Please leave a comment or use the “Contact me” mail form.
Life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea,
And love is a thing that can never go wrong
And I am Marie of Roumania.
Dorothy Parker said she wished she could write like a man and drink like a lady. Perhaps we should be grateful she got it the other way around. Along with her criticism and more serious writing, she penned astute and witty light verse much of which demonstrates her talent to use language like a well-plucked lyre.
As John Hollander points out in his erudite critique, Dorothy Parker and the Art of Light Verse*, the mention of the once celebrated Marie of Roumania no longer has the resonance it did when Mrs Parker penned those lines. He suggests that today those thoughts would need use a more contemporary figure as a punch line. Here is my modest example:
Life’s bounties pour upon me like rain
Life’s riches unceasingly grand.
Love is a never-ending refrain,
And I am Premier of Queensland.
OK, I said modest. Besides, she had scant respect for critics of her scansion:
Say I’m neither brave nor young
Say I woo and coddle care,
Say the devil touched my tongue
Still you have my heart to wear.
But say my verses do not scan,
And I get me another man!
Many of Mrs Parker’s aphoristic verses were effectively oozed by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the Robert Altman production Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle. In this there is much of the ambiance of American letters in the 1920s with its literary knights’ nights of jousting with wit-tipped lance and broad-sword tongue at the round table at the Algonquin Hotel, 59 West 44th Street, New York City.
I hope to get back there sometime to pay it a visit. Hommage, actually.
There was has been some barking in the local media columns about inaccuracies in the new Australian naval drama, Sea Patrol. Yes, ok, perhaps there were some and there shouldn’t be, but Sea Patrol and Australian production in general is not alone. Two recent episodes of the British crime series that gets all kinds of smiles and nods, Midsomer Murders, had errors so glaring they almost might be classed as “spot the deliberate mistake”.
In A Picture of Innocence,the opening sequence features a senior amateur photographer setting up a landscape shot with the excellent Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera on a tripod. (Anyone remember tripods?). He takes a light reading then adjusts the camera’s shutter speed and aperture settings — with accompanying loud, crisp clicks which no Rolleiflex ever made.
He then adjusts the focus — with more absurdly loud crispy clicks. The focussing action of the venerable and superbly-engineered Rolleiflex is absolutely smooth and completely silent.
He then uses the fold-out handle to advance the 120 roll film to a new, unexposed frame, but the frame counter resolutely stays at “0” indicating there is no film in the camera. In any case, advancing the film (which also cocks the shutter) is always the first step so the framing is not disturbed after composing the shot and the camera is ready to take the next shot.
And, please, not all amateur photographers wear hunting/fishing vests, not even old amateur photographers, especially when the vests’ many pockets are obviously empty of extra lenses and camera accessories and film (anyone remember film?) — and almost never over their business clothes and when not taking pictures. The gaggle of ageing amateurs all in their hunting/fishing vests was unintentionally farcical.
In King’s Crystal, a character with a rifle is apprehended in a field. He appeared to be taking aim at another character but protests he was hunting rabbits. This explanation rings no alarms with Chief Inspector Barnaby, notwithstanding that the rifle in the scene is a “civilianised” version of the Lee-Enfield .303 Mk. III.In its various versions, this was the basic, and best, infantry rifle of WWs I and II. The three-oh-three as it was commonly called, fired almost half an ounce (14 grams) of copper-jacketed lead at 2,440 feet per second (744 m/s).
Hit a rabbit with that and you might find fragments of fur and occasional pieces of skin surrounding the previous rabbit — but certainly nothing to make a meal of.
I owned a weapon very similar to the one in the program.Making a clean hole in the steel wheel of a old traction engine presented no difficulties. Ned Kelley’s armour would have been a mere trifle.
Oh, yes, I also own a hunting/fishing vest but I only wear it when out taking pictures. Honest!
Captions:
Rolleiflex: The Rolleiflex line of twin-lens reflex cameras was continuously manufactured by Franke & Heidecke in Germany from 1928 until recently, steadily advancing features and quality. At its height of popularity in the 50s and 60s it was the camera of choice for such luminaries as Philippe Halsman, Richard Avedon, Bert Stern and Cecil Beaton. I believe modern versions are still in limited production but Rollei’s recent focus has been on digital cameras, both amateur and top-end professional, the latter costing upwards of US$20,000. Batteries not included.
(Picture credit www.vieilalbum.com/images/RolleiflexT.jpg)
Photography vest: For me the khaki vest of many pockets conjures images of the Vietnam War and combat photographers, some of whom were friends or acquaintances. True, some of them did wear this gear around the odd bar or Foreign Correspondents’ Club when not actually taking war pictures.
SMLE .303 rifle: This is very similar to the rifle in the episode and to one I owned. I think I even did the cross-hatching on the stock, too. As I can best recall, the calibre of my version was designated 7.7/54 to distinguish it from the military version. The cigarette lighter indicates scale.
(Picture sourced at www.rickyguns.com)
Never mind JFK, do you remember where you were when Peter Sellers died?
I was sharing a poolside table at the rooftop restaurant Le Méditerranée at the Sofitel le Méditerranéeduring the 1980 film festival in Cannes with theatrical agent extraordinaire, Theo Cowan.
Theo was well-known for his “Cannes outfit” of army surplus safari jackets over the kind of baggy khaki shorts known to British troops of long-past wars as Bombay Bloomers. His heavily horn-rimmed spectacles were invariably adorned with clip-on, flip-up green shades.
Theo also represented Peter Sellers.
We were well into a salade niçois and about to signal for a second bottle of excellent Domaines Ott Château De Selle Cotes de Provence Rose for the main course. The olive oil drooled over the salad leaves and the pool sparkled watery diamonds around the perfect semi-clad bodies disporting themselves on a perfect Mediterranean day.
A quiet, private lunch with the inimitable Theo was a luxury in the madness of the Cannes Film Festival.
Theo was not expecting to be called to the phone. He apologized and followed the waiter. I sat back, sipped and took in the view.
Yachts jostled cheek-by-jowl at their moorings, stern-in to the pier as is the practice in this part of the world. Beyond the yacht harbour, across the Bay of Cannes, past Palm Beach and its casino can been seen the Île Sainte Marguerite, where, according to Alexandre Dumas, the man in the iron mask was imprisoned for eleven years. The intense luminous blue of the sea leaves no doubt why this is called the Côte d’Azur.
Theo’s voice broke my reverie. “Peter has died. I am so sorry but I have to get back to London right away.”
Doubtless the accommodations for the man in the iron mask on the Île Sainte Marguerite were not in the style of the Hôtel du Cap so near and yet so far just a few kilometres across the azure water to Cap Ferrat.
However his dungeon was free of charge.
Eleven years in just a standard room at the Hôtel du Cap would have set him back €3,412,750 (A$5,808,748, US$4,567,965), not including food, beverages, laundry or tips.
And believe me, food, beverages, laundry and tips can well bring that close to double.
If he had chosen a suite or villa his bill would have cleared the national debt of many former French colonies.
It is worth noting that only fairly recently did this and many other luxury hotels in Cannes accept credit cards, previously requiring cash in settlement. They also imposed minimum stays (ten days during the film festival), charged a full booking for early departure, and demanded 50% of the reservation in advance — non-refundable. Naturellement!
A guy is driving his date to a romantic mystery dinner.
She, in a knicker-twisting agony of romantic curiosity and atrocious over-acting: “Oh come on … where are we going?”
Turns out she gets a cardboard box of mangy chicken and cholesterol sides at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.
Hey guy, if she is tasteless enough and dumb enough not to empty that crap into your pants and get a cab home then you deserve each other. Have nice fat, greasy chickens together.
It doesn’t sound like a really funny word, but syntax is the key to much unintentional humour and miscommunication.
As a child I used to delight in Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes, limericks and riddles — as had a century of children before me. Syntaxually-challenged classified ads were a childish favourite: “For sale: grand piano, hardly used, by elderly lady with carved ebony legs.”
Hey, I was four!
Journalists can do it, too, and most of them are older than four.
Sometimes this leads to humour of a darker shade. The BBC reported† the disappearance of a man in Nepal saying “he was last seen being dragged from his home by soldiers wrapped in a blanket.”*
The most devastating effect of Australia’s current droughthas not been to the trimmed, green lawns and herbaceous borders of the cities’ suburbia, but to those who provide the crops and herds to feed this and other countries.
So overwhelming have been the consequences of the drought on the many farmers and graziers that some have been driven to take their own lives.
A common slug line for this sad statistic was: “One farmer commits suicide every fours days.”
Australia does not in general celebrate Groundhog Day. If only the solution were as simple as finding this one farmer endlessly recycling himself and stopping him before he does himself a damage.
*Anyone who sends me an illustration inspired by the soldiers wrapped in a blanket may have it included here. Use the “contact me” form to reach my e-mail directly.
Station promos: don’t we love ‘em? In the first outing of Channel 10’s “there’s no better place to be” series of promos, stars of the station’s leading imports (House, NCIS, Numbers) performed stylish, minimalist, tongue-in-cheek snippets to camera. I am guessing here but the clips were shot in the US and the lines, apart from the obligatory tags, were largely ad-lib.
Then 10’s promo department clambered on the bandwagon using home-grown star-equivalents. Sadly they missed the boat, the wagon and the point.
No doubt, every attempt was made to match the look and understated wit of the originals but either they just didn’t get it, or just couldn’t do it.
In any case the result only highlights the difference in production values in general between (most) Australian TV and that of the USA; the home of the best worst television in the world.
Was it inspiration or desperation that drove advertising agency creative genii to resort to grotesqueries?
More to the point, how, and with what conscience, do they persuade their clients to spend millions on detached slithering tongues, obscenely exaggerated erect male nipples and drenching underarm sweat to rival a car wash from hell.
Perhaps they missed the point that grotesque does not necessarily mean gross. Certainly it is the gross that the perpetrators of these abominations found irresistible.
In the hands of Goya, Bruegel or daVinci, grotesque exaggeration could be turned to artistic expression or satire. In the hands of these sad specimens only the vulgar and gross remain.
It seems a pretty fair bet that the word “drought” in a TV weather bulletin refers to a lack of rain — for time enough adversely to affect the environment.
So why does Channel 7’s David Brown insist that we have a “hydrological drought” — unless to distinguish it from a drought of intelligent weather commentary.
For the benefit of any other aspiring weather Barbies out there, hydrological merely refers to the study of water on earth and in the atmosphere. As in drought. Duh.
Perhaps the greatest danger of modern media is that it perpetuates errors by continually referencing itself rather than any original source — to the degree that the error eventually totally occludes the truth.
Eventually, the error becomes the truth.
The reasons are many: laziness, time pressure, lack of professional training or basic education, ignorance, stupidity, herd instinct. None of them noble and all have the same result.
A trivial but really annoying example: these days, a very large proportion of female tennis players have Russian names which sports commentators appear to have great difficulty pronouncing (along with many English words encountered above a grade three primer).
For their benefit the World Tennis Association has published a guide for broadcasters. Sadly, this has eight out of ten seriously wrong.
The WTA’s response to criticism has been that along the lines that “this is how most Americans would pronounce them and the players would go along with that”.
The prime example would be one of the world’s highest earning and most successful women players,Maria Sharapova. Russian speakers assure me that this is pronounced “sha-RAH-pa-vuh”, as do authorities overwhelmingly and, most significantly of all, the lady herself.
Now here is the kicker. I have read reports of prominent sport and news broadcasters knowingly using the popular but incorrect pronunciation for fear of being thought ignorant!
(Right-click on the picture and select “View image” to see the whole. Picture by my Nikon D70)
A year has passed. How strange that it should end Without a sound.
~ Haiku, RSC, circa 1963. A lot of years have passed since then. Not all of them quietly. ~ Day’s End, RSC 2006. The view across the bay from across my road and through the dunes.
As a kid there were more Saturday matinées than even the combined efforts of Peter Sellers, DannyKaye and JohnWayne could fill. That didn’t stop me from hoarding or begging the price of a train ticket, a packet of Jaffas* and a ticket to the movies for the Saturday matinée.
Sometimes what followed the cartoons and JohnnyWeissmuller cliff-hangers was not the stuff of comedy fantasy or cowboy heroes. Sometimes it was a movie of an entirely different genre. These were movies made in shadows; not soft shadows as between seasons, but shadows of fate and doom or the black glint of a death-threatening revolver. They were full of men and women, good and bad, doomed by their needs, flaws and frailties – or those of others.
Of course I had never heard of such a word as “genre” then but, in my youthful innocence, I classified these as “dark films”. As much as these movies frightened me they gripped me too. I had yet to encounter Shakespeare or Sophocles and so film noir became my introduction to theatrical tragedy.
I mention this because I recently watched again after perhaps 20 years one of the icons of my “dark films”.
Rififi (Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes) is a séminal work; a seed, and sometimes an outright template, for following films noir and for heist and caper movies to the present day – be they films couleur regardless. Overblown latecomers such as Mission: Impossible and its type have never approached the breath-suspending sour-sweat tension and ultimate sadness of this original.
I was still young when I was promoting Stanley Kubrick’s release of Sparticus, not so long after JulesDassin was forced out of America by the hysterical McCarthy House Un-American Activity Committee. Kubrick reportedly insisted similarly-accused Dalton Trumbo write and be recognised for the screenplay for Sparticus.
If you ever wanted to experience the rank fog of Gaulois butts and stale calvados, there is plenty here, as is a certain absolution and an exposition of a code de honoré– for some at least.
* A marble-shaped confection with a chocolate centre and an orange-flavoured candy coating beloved of Australian moviegoers.
Last night, over three successive newsbreaks in less than 60 minutes, Australia’s Ten Network News first had Australians in Beirut “…booted off their ship”. Next we were told their ship had been “commandeered” by “an international organization”, the United Nations or some other country — take your pick. The third version was that Australia had been gazumped by those sneaky Canadians who took the ship for themselves.
Which ship was that, Ten News?
The ship chartered by the Australian government which failed to show up in Beirut at all? Now that would make it difficult for those people to board the ship and even more difficult for them to be booted off it.
That it never showed up would also make it difficult to commandeer (such a juicy, dramatic word).
That the ship Australia had chartered through a Turkish shipping agency failed to show had already been announced on ABC Network News — and possibly on other networks — by no less than the Foreign Minister. It was also disclosed that the shipping agent had charted the same vessel to both Australia and Canada and cheated both governments. It happens in times of crisis. It is called profiteering, and in a sense, that is what news reporting of this kind is doing, too.
For god’s sake, Ten News, this is one story you don’t have to beat up. I know that there is nothing more important than ratings, but just try to get a few facts right and this is already more gripping and distressing than your execrable Big Brother.
While on the subject of the coverage of the plight of those people trying to leave Lebanon; why does every news story need to shoehorn the proper noun Australian or Australians between ever few words? Everyone is not just “Bruce Hayak” but Australian Bruce Hayak. It is never “they” but “these Australians”. Has every personal pronoun has been banished from the journalistic lexicon. What is this spin and why is it necessary? We get the point. We know, we know. Enough.
Gazumped?
Can’t smack Ten News for this because (Australian) Foreign Minister Downer used the word in an earlier reference to the “Whose Ship is it Anyway?” game. For the Australian government to be gazumped, Canada would have had to have known that the ship’s agents had finalised a deal with Australia then jumped in with a higher bid at the last moment. There has yet to be any suggestion that this is what happened. The only party who knew about both deals seems to be the corrupt Turkish shipping agent.
Go get ‘em, Ten News. Sic Sandra Sully onto them. That’ll fix ‘em.
Determined to eclipse his huge success with the Busby Berkley musical, 42nd Street, Daryl Zanuck demanded the writers at Warner Bros to come up with another sure fire hit. After rejecting dozens of new screenplays, Zanuck is said to have berated the luckless writers “Gimme 43rd, street, 44th Street, 45th Street …”
Nothing much has changed — except perhaps that now a successful movie clones both sequels and prequels. Hollywood production executives choose the projects they support not on the basis of instinct for a good story and personal judgement of good writing, but on the project’s “defensibility”. In other words, the elements of the project that determine how successfully they will be able to protect their executive arses in the event the film is a turkey. An “A-list” cast and director have high defensibility quotients — but probably the best defence of all is that the project is a sequel to a known money-maker.
“Hey, who could know? With that cast and Harry-whatsisname directing and the first one grossing $200 million in a week? I tell you, I did everything right and still I get let down. Hollywood’s a bitch. Sometimes I think I should’ve stayed in real estate.”
The fact is, of course, that sequels tend to cost a third more and make half the money of the original. There are several reasons for this: 1) often the cast and director on the original were paid less than asking rates and, now they find themselves part of a successful franchise, they want more money, so they get replaced. 2) the original project was likely to have been driven by the story. The sequel is almost always driven by the desire to exploit the original. (Godfather II is one notable exception.)
The result is usually a thin and flimsy facsimile that antagonises the audience. They feel that in buying a ticket to the sequel they entered into a pact in which they were promised, if not better than before, at least more of the same. And the result of that is the most potent box-office poison of all, bad word of mouth—and in these cyberdays of Internet chatter instant publishing and broadcasting, that can be a very big, fast mouth indeed.
So where does IBM fit into all this?
There was a long-running advertising campaign for IBM with the headline: “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”.
What that campaign was really saying was not that IBM is the best or most appropriate product but that the decision to buy it was defensible! It was saying that buying IBM night be the dumbest decision you ever made — but, don’t worry, you won’t get fired for making it.
As much as I loathe the thinking, the campaign works because that is the thinking of most corporations, all the way up. It is a dangerous call to fire an inferior today for making a decision on the same grounds you may well use to defend you own position to your superiors tomorrow.
Oh, and as for IBM, the Chinese bought a whole chunk of it.
In huge letters on the window of a Bourke street, Melbourne, lingerie retailer: “MASSIVE BRA AND PANTY SALE!”
Just the thing for women with massive tits and arses.
Massive is the buzzword of the month for the linguistically and educationally challenged. Actually, it has been the word of every month since the last massive New Year sales. If there is any good in it at all it is that it edged impact off the top spot in the deluge of clichés, malapropisms and grammatical howlers that dribble constantly from the mouths of politicians, bureaucrats and reporters and copywriters.
According to an admiring colleague at a 90th birthday celebration for the former Prime Minister-cum-elder statesman, Gough Whitlam “impregnated Australia …” Is that what is meant by “being the father of the nation” — or a wry comment on what he did to the budget when in power?
A report on the national broadcaster, ABC-TV, on the recent bombing atrocities in what I used to call Bombay rather lost the sombre mood of the moment when telling us that “Yesterday (this man) lost his son in the bombings and today he will be cremated.”
In case it appears that I made a monster typo or my sense of humour is even more askew than usual, here is the book in question. I did my best to wipe off the coffee mug rings but the photograph is as is and un-retouched. The title is more often misquoted than any I can think of. Could McLuhan have been making some point here?
Socrates was perturbed by the concept of Google more than 2,300 years ago.
Marshall McLuhan knew this and related the philosopher’s concern in his 1967 book, The Medium is the Massage.
“The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external, written characters and not remember of themselves … they appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” — Phaedrus.
Marshall McLuhan died on the last day of 1980, long before Google was more than a noise that happy babies made.
I bought my paperback copy of The Medium is the Massage from the Central Department Store on Wang Burapma in Bangkok in 1969 where I was creative director of the Thai office of the advertising agency McCann-Erickson. It smells brownly the way old books do, but it has held up well.
The cover price was US$1.45, about 30 baht as best I recall. For an extra ten baht around the corner you could get a carton of marijuana filter-tips complete with government tax seals.
Stuff about media, language, advertising, PR spin-doctoring, TV, movies or just some reverie and reminiscence.
But mostly it is the self-indulgent rantings of just another GOM (grumpy old man).
Comments are welcome.
At about the same time as this launch lunch, my son discovered and sent to me an old scrapbook of mine in which was a cringeworthy poem I had written in my 20s about the then binary stars of the ballet universe, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev.
Posted by Russell C 
Posted by Russell C 
Posted by Russell C 
