On Sunday in a quiet inner city church, the Gloriana chamber choir sang Arvo Pärt’s Da pacem Domine. And I was reminded of Gorecki’s No. 3, of lying on the carpet in an apartment above Lavender Bay in Sydney, very late one night in the mid 1990s. The soprano was Dawn Upshaw. It was like [...]
READ MOREMarch, 2011
Eating Aunt June’s clitoria cake
With the news coming out of Japan and Libya so vividly immediate in its horror and heartbreak, I’ve felt constrained from posting anything at all — it seems so impertinent, in both senses. But of course, things go on, life rolls by. Indeed, there is much to think about concerning the abundance of excellent works [...]
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The hottest Reality TV: Q and A
The footage of the tsunami in Japan is wrenching and horrifying; coming so soon after the Christchurch quake, and the Australian floods, television has become the opposite of its usual dumbly reassuring self. Last night, TV exercised at full tilt another of its metiers — live intercourse with an important public figure, our PM. On [...]
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From US with the Finger
On a stage a couple of evenings ago, two extremely erudite men conducted a free range conversation of high entertainment value. (Watch on the Wheeler Centre video page next week.) The visitor was Melbourne native Angus Trumble, now resident in Connecticut, having just bought a house there — he is senior curator of painting and [...]
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The Social Nitwit
Way behind everyone else, in the air a few days before the Oscars, I caught up with a pair of unlikely winners: both featuring a fiercely antisocial protagonist who is surrounded by loathsome characters, and replete with computer hacking hijinks. Män Som Hatar Kvinnor Unexpectedly enjoyable was the subtitled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [...]
READ MORECover design mulched on The Book Show
Somewhat self-consciously, the Mulcher informs readers that an interview . . . oh alright, the Mulcher (that’s I, me) was interviewed about book cover design, specifically the jacket of Hand Me Down World, by Lloyd Jones, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Mr Pip three years ago. (A sudden and thrilling emergenge of [...]
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