SKOLIMOWSKI

I plan on teaching myself how to walk like Jerzy Skolimowski next week. Soon I will be a tough nut with a shell that is hard to crack. A brick shithouse incredibly sturdy. Couple of Jerzy early films feature him walking the decrapitated Warsaw laneways, reciting poetry and charming utter babes if and when he feels like it. Right on, brother.

Moonlighting, 1981 (Slolimowski)
A team of Polish builders, led by the iron-fisted Jeremy Irons, go to London to renovate their boss's scummy terrace. It's cold out, Jeremy is colder and no one has any money. Their cultural challenges are rendered brutally. Jeremy fashions a contemporary moustache and figures out a way to steal from his grocer, but then he gets caught. He goes to church to confess his evil, turkey-thieving sins!

Pungent it may be, but damn is it ever tasty.

Thai from Patee thai on Brunswick street is best thai ever tasted. I heated the fishy leftovers up in the microwave at work. Now everyone wants to puke. Sent an email around don’t go into the kitchen for at least twenty minutes to see if the smell would dissipate. Not at all. But I got no regrets. Fuck 'em.

Loving the ladies

Lorrie Moore is back with a sweetass new short story about a whipsmart babysitter in the New Yorker (apparently she has a novel coming out in September). I bore into that sucker big-time last night after I finished Ivy Compton-Burnett’s incredibly kickass ‘A House and its Head’. This morning on the tram I started the badass 'Middlemarch' by George Eliot. Give it to me mama.

Deep End

Classic coming-undone coming-of-age story that gets young boys’ obsession with sex just about right. It’s pretty hard to take, but then again, so are young boys. The film is about a 15 year-old but it’s not for a 15 year-old. I’ll show it to my 15 year-old and he’ll either turn gay or admit that he is gay (something I would have already suspected anyway).

Story is about Mike, a virgin in the traditional sense (fornication) and also in regards to doing a job. All this is about to change. He’s cute and he’s hired at the local swimming pool. He looks like a cross between Parker Stephenson and Shawn Cassidy. He starts work and all the housewives want to bone him, repressed London coming unglued as Mike delivers more medicated shampoo to door #4 and 5. The Lolita-like redhead nymph is a legal age dynamo sex bait of the bath house. Her natural charm and effectiveness makes Natalie Portman rather unnecessary. She’s doing it to Mike’s former swimming coach. Her fiance is a pompous drip who studies blue movies with academic discernment. She torments Mike in wicked ways. He grows up fast. The repercussions are severe.

Two sequences stand out as total classics: One unfolds at a blue movie cinema, rivaling Mickey Rourke’s turn in The Diner for outright hilarity, but also delving deeper (hence the title, no, not really). The other takes place outside a peep show and involves the ingestion of numerous hot dogs and the pilfering of a life-size nude cardboard cut-out culminating in a ridiculous ruckus on a crowded tube train.

There’s an urge to refer to this film as Deep Red, for the contrast of perverse red against the rank landscape of 1970s London suburbia is luridly outstanding. The camera work is artful, the editing is droll, the performances are classic, the climax a tad unwieldy. Cat Stevens and Can provide the soundtrack that loses to Performance in a tenth-round knockout, but puts on a hell of a fight. Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski.

Role Models movie

Paul Rudd wrote and starred in this obnoxious vehicle that’s a real worthless piece of crap. Jane Lynch steals every scene from these douches.

I'm back on the beer again

Last night’s beef satay from ____ on _______ in ______ was the worst I ever tasted.

Worthless crap

In the City of Sylvia (2007) by Jose Luis Guerin
If the underused goth in the pub had raped, then murdered the vapid artiste, I would have still left the cinema unsatisfied.

Get your flippers out

Two and a quarter hours of riveting Flipper action last night at the Arty. A lot of cool people were there hanging out and having fun. Sadie was a wild child in her element up the front. Singer Bruce kept a watchful eye on her as best he could. She mussed his hair, stole his water and spat on him. Bruce couldn't have looked more proud if she was his own kin.

Before the show their new bassist, a Tasmanian Black Walnut-haired minx named Rachel from San Francisco, offered me her scarf as it’s frightfully cold in Melbourne and I seemed underdressed to her. I declined her offer, said I’d probably besmirch it. She said it would take a lot to besmirch it… Still, I said no.

Anyway Flipper were great!

what a stupid thing to write, makes no sense

"If you're starting to get annoyed when people cough without covering their mouths, spare a thought for the thousands at increased risk of serious illness from swine flu".

- from the good daily

Okkervil River last night

I got lucky. The woman in my life won two free tickets to see some Texans* rock out, so that’s what we did last night. I woke up in a crusty state of being this morning. She kissed me goodbye and left the house in her cute new coat (The light-brown buttons are mushroom-shaped). A few hours later, I’m on a north-facing park bench digesting my Atomica breakfast (scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns and flat white) wondering if that coat of hers was really worth it. It’s a beautiful autumn day.

* At one point I remarked on how the singer’s schtick is stretching alliterative phrasing into pliable melodies, but no one seemed to give a shit.

Torch Rockers

Zabriskie Point and The State of Things

Zabriskie Point
Corny-ass, hippy-dippy, drippy dumbshit lameness on a grand visual scale, culminating in an uncomfortable-looking sandstorm orgy in the desert. It’s enough to make you want to work for Rod Taylor’s housing developer (the film’s emblem of evil), but you no longer can, see his revolutionary daughter Daria exploded him so he be unable to make you an offer. Viva the Revolucion’!


The State of Things
A sluggishly hip, innocuous thing by Wim Wenders about a sci-fi movie that can’t get made, which is sad because it looks more fun than the one about the director who goes off in search of money to finish it which is what we’re watching! So, director leaves cast and crew in a drunken Lisbon stupor and flies to LA where he puts the top down and becomes Phillip Marlowe in an attempt to find the egregious moneybags. 1980, in black and white with pornographic synthesizers busted out at the most peculiar moments.

See New Estate before you die, or else I will kill you

Discuss

Ten Things You Probably Didn’t Know About A Movie You Have Probably Never Seen

• The name of this silent movie is "Haxan – Witchcraft through the Ages" and it came out in 1922. The execution of its niche objectives is a solid 8/10
• Be forewarned it will terrify your children
• The crazy-eyed red devils are tongue-darting pervs
• The juxtaposition of naked female tush with devils whose long sharp claws poke at them with tireless fervour is good image-making
• Narrative by director Benjamin Christenson has a pleasing ironic tone (I don’t have any examples except when he gets one of the cute actresses into a thumbscrew and pretends she likes it when in fact she is yelping)
• There are 7 parts to it
• The music (doubtlessly added retrospectively) suxx eggs and complaints regarding the badness of it were plentiful afterwards by the moviegoing contingency. A lot of silents have this problem. Makes you wonder if the movie would have been better off without it and I don’t think it woulda
• Did you know something like four million men and women were destroyed in the middle ages in the cruellest fashion for behaving in a way incomprehensible to doctors, monks and other God-fearing sucks? Hard to comprehend, I know, but once you put it into terms that people can understand such as Def Leppard would not have been able to make ‘Adrenalize’ after ‘Hysteria’ the full force of its destructive impact really hits home
• The advance of civilization was defined by the sophisticated techniques people were toasted and tortured with.
• The costume imagery and photography (brilliant blue for twilight and red for hell, plus sepia-tones for poor-house interiors) are so consistently great that you begin to lose interest in the whole operation, which is sad, but inevitable in a movie that contains no dramatic narrative or discernible flow

Shallow flicks, man.

Couple a flicks by Louis Malle, one, ‘Les Amants’, would be wise to give the flick to, poor Jeanne Moreau, the film is such a disgrace and insult to her sexuality (apparently it made her hugely popular – go figure). Requires a suspension of disbelief so hallucinatory I’m certain it’s a recommendation from the director that we all go take a flying leap.

Jesse loved it, he saw Jeanne’s boobies after all, sez I’ve changed now that I’m engaged, suspects I’d call Dorothy a trollop if I saw Wizard of Oz. My beef was with the total lack of psychological detail to validate the character’s ludicrous actions. Some awakening. I think Tristan was in my corner on this one, but he wasn’t saying much, he was too busy enjoying the ribbing I was getting from Monsieur Jackson Sheperd.

By movie’s end, I wanted to shake Mr. Malle and say what planet are you on? To its credit, the movie was strongly paced and I didn’t look at my watch once.

Next came a good one (Le Feu Follett) about an alcoholic with a good melancholy score by Erik Satie. Get this: the guy finishes The Great Gatsby and then he offs himself! The whole time I thought the actor (well-played) was Alain Delon, mirroring his own descent into alcoholism, but no, just some other hunk who had gone to seed named Alain.

Both films were preceded by the seed that germinated Wes Anderson’s fun Life Aquatic picture: a deliciously entertaining Jacques Cousteau short from the 50s when Malle was his DP.

Must be heard to be heard

I ordered Japanese for three last night in my Sean Connery voice.

Caution: Disinterest

Hungover today. Mixing red wine and champagne after seeing Steve Coogan who was damn near terrible wasn’t very smart. We had front row seats. Yayy! Imagine getting roped on stage by one of his slutty caricatures who he then pretends to bang behind the curtain. Perish the thought. Trotted off to my fav book shop at lunchtime to lift my mood. Went there with the intention of hoarding some Flannery O’ Connor or Carson McCuller based on this exchange I had with H earlier:

B: What was the last book by a woman that you read?
H: Mary Gaitskill's Veronica or Zadie Smith's On Beauty. I've recently read some more Flannery O'Connor short stories, but I thought she was a man. Actually, I stand corrected, I read Carson Mcculler's the Heart is a Lonely Hunter earlier this year, and loved it. Wrote like a deranged man. After perusing the hundreds of titles in my bookshelf, I can confirm that these are the only 4 female novelists that I own.

I ended up with Thomas Berger’s Feud about quarreling neighbours in 1930s small-town America. I selected four pages at random and every one was a winner – two of them were potentially laugh-out loud given the appropriate context. After getting back to work, I went on Amazon where there are four reviews all raves and thoughtfully constructed. I like this one for mentioning the saintly Charles Portis:

“This book is a cruel masterpiece of cynical and nasty slapstick humor. The protagonists, the Bullards and the Beelers, are both families of barely sentient wit who behave in ways that are competely understandable, completely human, and completely stupid. Berger's writing and plotting, though, are first-rate-- I laughed out loud throughout this thing, and I've read it three times over the last 25 years (time to read it again). You've met people like this before in the works of Flannery O'Connor, Faulkner, Charles Portis, and Erskine Caldwell, but Berger's light touch makes "The Feud" a real find.”

They had a Flannery O Connor book of short stories there A Good Man is Hard to Find, but I put it back and picked up two James Purdy books. I’ve heard good things about him. Gore Vidal calls him a genius. I was tempted to buy both, but I got freaked out by the almost fuchsia-coloured covers and the publisher Gay Modern Classics while at the same time Hercules and Love Affair came on my iPOD, I almost had a crisis of identity.

I’m still on the lookout for books by women writers. One of my goals this year is to read Middlemarch.

SIDE A: Taurean Trouble / SIDE B: 100% more Toby Dutton for your buck

Yeppity yep, apart from the BIG NEWS, it's getting towards Taurean time again!!

So you better grab a texta and draw some pretty little cell bars on the calendar square that reads Saturday May 9th because you are required to come celebrate the bull, the beer, the me, the bands, the other deliciously rad Taureans and the new NEW ESTATE!!! WOO!

Old Bar shall be hosting this awesome roll-up roll-up event, with extra special guests on the night Midnight Caller and Elizabeth Pistol Club.

And... surely a pre-funk at UFHQ, or dinner somewhere (??) will be in order, so put forward your ideas and we'll get something sorted!

De Campo xx

Little pleasures, cont...

Back again at the eucalypt tree with the big hole in it, I clicked my tongue a couple times and my two friends hurried out to see what the hubbub was all about. I had been whistling along to an acoustic version of Cold Blooded Old Times prior to that and who knows maybe that encouraged them to crawl out and take a long look at me. Them two are like two winged lovers in tie-dyed t-shirts.

Really quite animated with me again this time. Scratching the part of their green head where most people have ears. Their friendliness makes me suspect that people give them treats. One is more yellow and green then the other one who is red and blue. They kept twisting their heads and looking at me like a dog trying to make sense of things. The red and blue one flapped its wings and flew to an upper branch where it teetered on skinny branches and munched on these little tiny fruits.

A big guy in a loose fitting muscle shirt showed up and parked it on the bench nearby while his fat blonde Labrador went down to the river. I left the birds eating the bark off the tree and strolled passed the huffing and puffing dude on the bench, who I recognised as Gary Lyon, the ex-football guy. I almost told him about the birds, but he didn’t look too happy. He was sweaty and despondent. His dog was immersed in the Yarra barking at him.

Little pleasures

The rainbow lorikeets who live in one of the trees at the park where I stroll on my lunchbreak are back and almost started talking to me today. I repeat: they were gone, but now they’re back and almost chatty.