December 21, 2011 – 10:36 am
In 2012, let’s Occupy… – Julia’s mirror – Tony’s speedos – paper book shops – the front row – your partner/parent/kid’s email account (omg/lol/awes) – Kyle Sandilands Occupies Andrew Bolt – bilbies, bandicoots, potoroos – business class to Mumbai – a BBQ Best wishes, merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, et cetera. Culture Mulcher will return oh [...]
December 20, 2011 – 11:00 am
Last week I went for a ride with Peter Temple’s publisher, Michael Heyward, to a warehouse in Footscray. Temple, of course, wrote the celebrated The Broken Shore, and its Miles Franklin award-winning follow-up, Truth. He’s also written four novels featuring Jack Irish, a lawyer turned sometime detective, though it’s hard to quite pin down what [...]
December 19, 2011 – 11:16 am
I simply can’t follow music anymore, and just listen to what’s in the air, or on the shelves/hard drive — next to nothing post-2009, you understand. Nor can I do more than read the reviews of books and movies, and catch what I can. Springsteen reckoned there were 57 channels and nothing on, but then [...]
December 13, 2011 – 10:43 am
This Christmas, be very nice to yourself or someone you want to impress. Here is my limited edition hand-coloured linocut portrait of David Malouf, which appears on the cover of the latest Australian Book Review (Dec 11 – Jan 12). I should’ve started flogging this earlier except that I quite forgot — the post-holiday cascading [...]
December 9, 2011 – 11:04 am
Extraordinary scenes in the city yesterday, in the old Georges shop on Collins Street. The crush was in the hundreds, quite possible a thousand people, jovially pushing themselves among shelves, swigging wine, and astonishingly — queueing with abandon, in the flesh, each toting several actual object-books to the cashier. And by queue: it went half [...]
December 8, 2011 – 10:52 am
We were having breakfast-coffee and there was a lot of bee talk — did you know that when it gets really hot a bunch of bees (workers/females directed by drones/males) whiz off to collect water which they place as micro-droplets in various of the comb cavities, and then back off to beat their wings madly [...]
December 6, 2011 – 10:32 am
Cabbie, let’s call him Shiva: Have you just finished work? No, I’ve been having drinks with friends. What time do you start work? 4 pm. And finish? At 3 am. An 11 hour day — do you get a break? It must be hard to sit all the time. Oh yes, I take half an [...]
December 2, 2011 – 10:46 am
Constant Gardener planted this glorious brugmansia, or Angel’s Trumpet, next to the studio. We saw quite a bit of it in Rome, and lots of it in the Princess Volkhonsky’s garden, now the grounds of the British Ambassador’s residence, which we got a scholar-assisted entree into. It reminds me of its wicked cousin, the Belladonna, [...]
December 1, 2011 – 10:39 am
It’s a shaky time in the financial world, in the world world — remember 1987? Somehow that tune keeps replaying in variations on a theme. Still, on we go, working, eating, shopping. Because where would our lovely global capitalism be if we stopped shopping? But there are ways and there are ways to shop; it [...]
