@PRODUCTION

So, the latest episode of Showtime’s new series The Loudest Voice opens with a Manhattan doctor in his surgery with his finger up the crypto-fascist arsehole of the guy playing the now dead head of Fox News, Roger Ailes. That’s our own Rusky Crow, for those not watching. It’s a heartening scene because it represents the beginning of the decline of his ridiculous and unwarranted power, bequeathed in total by, also our very own, Rupert Murdoch, who in this series is well played by the British actor Simon McBurney.

Murdoch is well played and it’s a great feeling to be invited into the room at News Corp HQ in New York but the part is not well written because it gives the impression that Rupert and his two sons are always trying to put the brakes on Ailes’s runaway promotion of the incoming fascist regime, masquerading to the world as the lunatic right-wing of American politics. Given their track record, I can’t believe this is true. In fact, I’m sure that all three of these corrupt demagogues, Lachlan, James and Uncle Rupert himself, take great delight in the deft manipulation of public opinion, expertly deployed by the arsehole Ailes, that ultimately allowed the Trumpian revolution to succeed.

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Still, it’s great to see Rusky in a prosthetic fat-suit repeating the brilliant portrayal of an American right-wing dickhead by Christian Bale playing Dick Cheney in Vice. Hollywood can do great journalism (if you ignore the mandatory ending) and increasingly as the mainstream press fails us at almost every turn now, we need more truth telling like this. But the danger that lurks behind shows like The Loudest Voice is that arch-evil characters like Rupert Murdoch will be underplayed by the writers and producers, who for some reason, see it in their best interests not to tell the whole truth.

Wintersick and laid up on the couch, I recently indulged in three movies and a history book to quell the fever. Doused with a cocktail of painkillers and vitamins I wrestled the remote to SBS on Demand and dialled up Death In Venice, a much revered adaptation of the novel. Although it took some time to get over my attention deficit, brought on by too many action thrillers no doubt, before long I had settled into the extended silent pauses with camera resting peacefully on the director’s (Visconti’s) thoughtful gaze, and eventually, the sparse storyline started to build an ants nest of meaning inside my own corrupted brain.

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Although I had always been aware of this film/novel, it was not until now that I had any inkling of plot or theme, and I must say, it took me most of the film to realise the meaning, which is of course beauty. In particular, the beguiling effects of it. Set, as it is, against a backdrop of plague, the story casts the ultimate thrill of great beauty, side by side with death, the inevitable equaliser. Point taken.

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While not knowing, I had always suspected an existential theme, simply from the title, and fresh from a ridgey-didge immersion in the pure phenomenology of Camus’ The Plague, I was ready to ascend to the high plains of humanism. This film really challenged my tolerance of new wave cinema but in the end I was glad I got through it for, like most of life’s experiences, watching Death in Venice in a drugged stupor on the couch, was good for my soul.

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Without so much as a toilet break I found myself push-buttoning my way straight into Kubrick’s most famous moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Familiar with almost every moment, as I was, the take home meaning of this film had eluded me for decades. Like many, I have watched this brain-tickling essay on humanity many times but failed to ever attain the level of understanding that even a late 20th century undergraduate humanities student might derive. But here, on the sick couch, as autumn fades into winter outside, and the leaves turn to mush on the cold wet ground, a ray of light at last shines through the blanketing cloud of Kubrickian philosophy to reveal its meaning. As I sat, more like floated, on the black leather of the couch, swaddled in bedclothes, the warm thrill of understanding rose up from the base of my spine and exploded in the centre of my cerebral cortex as I finally got 2001: A Space Odyssey. It ends where it begins. The birth of humanity. Apart from our existence, there is nothing else.

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By the time I got to the cheap Australian comedy chronicling the ill-fated Australian tour by Frank Sinatra in the 70s, I was flying high and ready for a laugh. Compared to the raw entanglement of European cinema with the ultimate meaning of life, this film was like a poolside margarita. An aging Denis Hopper was born to play this role and going with him through this story was what you might imagine being with ‘old blue eyes’ would actually be like. Built exactly like a Hollywood rom-com, The Night We Called It A Day is a triumph of Australian filmmaking. It has all the hallmarks – irreverent, funny, political, and ultimately meaningless. Guilty pleasures included siding with the Sinatra camp after he referred to an Australian journalist as a whore and watching Bob Hawke pull a swifty on the Australian public as a prequel to his long running Prime-Ministership. Funny, ha ha!

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Movies aside, I decided to lay back on the couch and cast my eyes across the pages of my 50 cent copy of Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore who, before I finally drifted off to sleep, reminded me that I dwell in a timeless land that was populated well before the dawn of time by a resilient force in the history of human thought and meaning making. As I sank slowly into the depths of a deep restorative sleep, my last notion was a glimpse of the crushing power of those pacific rollers as they smash into the rocky heads, north and south of Sydney Harbour, sending a mist of sea spray spiralling into the air spreading sparkling rainbows across the sky. Zzzzzz!

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The best thing about Ridley Scott’s new Aliens film is the animated logo for his production company, Scott Free. Although this is nowhere near new, seen on the big screen in an old style cinema with a 70 foot screen and fuck-off sound system, the 15 second animation has all the grace and style and storytelling panache that the film itself lacks.

You know it. It’s the one where a noir agent in overcoat and hat melds into the darkness before re-hatching as a bird and flying off in a swirl of glossy colour, like oil paint being pushed across a canvas, as it spreads it wings to escape in full flight – 'the culprit getting off Scott Free!' I suppose.

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You saw it at the start of Prometheus, the Martian and Black Hawke Down and you’ll no doubt experience it again before you settle into the generation imploding sequel to the knock-out sci-fi detective story of the century (20th), Blade Runner. If only my favourite bands from the early 80’s had survived as well as my favourite movies. Why can’t I see Pel Mel or Tactics at the corner pub?

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It can only be read as a good thing that Scott has been kept away from Blade Runner 2049 and it remains to be seen whether the capture and taming of a genuine Harrison Ford from the wild, to presumably reprise his role, will benefit the film. Ridley has well and truly peaked and should now be discouraged from ever sitting in the camp chair marked Director again.

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I guess getting Sigourney Weaver back to play Ripley again would have been stretching that storyline further then it could go without snapping. Her replacement, Daniels, is a more subtle heroine, but ultimately she suffers from a lack of story because somebody at the studio forgot to put that bit into this film.

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I need only review one scene to legitimise my comments. It’s a replay of the shower scene from psycho, only the female figure has company in the form of a hunky black man sporting a six-pack. Threes a crowd, and when the Alien shows up, first by thrusting his blade-sharp tail up between the naked woman’s legs and then by punching a hole through the boyfriends head, well then there’s blood all over the shower curtain isn't there. But it’s not scary, it’s not sexy and it’s not funny.

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So what is it? It’s a cheap, celluloid hamburger. Comes with a coke.

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In 1978, fresh out of high school, I went with my sisters Felicity and Janene, to an old church on Cleveland Street in Redfern that had been converted into a theatrical performance space. A cabaret artist, Jeanie Lewis, was presenting a piece of political theatre that combined the songs and poems of South American revolutionaries with monologues about contemporary global politics. It was only five years since the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet, with backing from the CIA and the US Navy, had put an inglorious end to yet another democratically elected socialist government.

This night was the first I had heard of Victor Jara, but the story of this passionate folk singer and poet, who was shot in the head and then machine-gunned to ribbons before his body was strung up at entrance of the Santiago football stadium that held thousands of political prisoners awaiting similar fates would stay with me throughout my life. So last night, while I was watching a bio-pic of the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, when I saw a young activist named Victor helping the communist poet flee a previous fascist regime just after the Second World War, I was transfixed. It was Jara.

Although 30 years his senior, Neruda would outlive Jara only by a few days, also dying at the hands of Pinochet’s murderous henchmen. We don’t see anything of this mayhem in the film by Pablo Larrain, currently showing at Palace Nova, which ends, still in the 1940s in a bar in Paris where Neruda is introduced to the press by his friend Pablo Picasso, to tell the story, only a few short years after the defeat of Hitler, of the rise of fascism in his homeland.

Despite the troubling political terrain, the film is full of lyrical beauty. The script, translated into English scrolls across the screen like an epic poem of phenomenal charisma and charm. The story unfolds like an art exhibition exhorting the best traits of human nature resilient against the efforts of a blood-thirsty elite who will stop at nothing to maintain their jewel encrusted grip on the rains of power. Watching this enigmatic film is reminiscent of curling up in bed with one of those thick, almost surreal, Latin American novels by Marquez or Allende. It’s comforting but philosophically challenging and it borders on the surreal in its depiction of the dilemma of being alive in modern times.

Neruda is what poetry is all about. Neruda is what life is all about.hat poetry is all about. Neruda is what life is all about.

Most coastal communities now have an annual art event titled something like Sculpture by the Sea, which, in Australia originated along the rock shelf walkway between Bondi and Tamarama in Sydney back in the late 1990s. This great idea grew crabs legs and now similar events take place everywhere including my own seaside suburb south of the Adelaide metropolis at Port Willunga.

This is not so much an advertised, organised or curated event but a naturally occurring phenomenon whose gallery attendants are the wind and tide. Rather than protecting the works from interference, their job is to ensure that ephemerality remains the guiding principal of the exhibition. A Piccasoesque statue standing firm in the morning light will be nothing more than a pile of rocks in the sand after the turn of the tide. Such beauty short lived.

The artists, presumed human, are anonymous but leave traces of their identity sometimes in ochre handprints on nearby rock faces or merely a scatter of footprints, child and adult, around the work itself. Once a slew of mermaid figures in the local bright orange clay graced the rocks at the head of the bay, but these were just the welcoming party for a beautifully executed stand of rock sculptures that seemed to mimic work by the early surrealists. The shapes but not the colours of Miro, the rock sea and fish of Magritte, the primitivist hoodoo of Max Ernst and perhaps the ideas but not the form of Andre Breton.

On a dawn walk with the dogs I had no camera or phone of course, preferring a walking meditation, and again the next day I left my devices in the house and on the third day, predictably these formidable erections, impressive in size as well as beauty, had been swept out with the tide. You’ll have to take my word for their greatness. The sky is my witness and now each day I come across more rudimentary efforts. Everyone is having a go it seems but I know there’s a genius at work along this coast and the next time they show, I’ll have my eye out.

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Those on the east coast - watch out! This accident waiting to happen is coming to a town gallery near you! Currently on show at SASA Gallery on Hindley Street - South Australian's do drop in - it will gently rock your sense of balance and politely question your faith in the reality that has been constructed for us and around us. You will indeed, upon exiting the gallery, experience the world that surrounds you in a slightly different way, never knowing if the thing you are trying to balance is tilting a bit this way or that, never quite knowing whether you are in fact in the foreground of your own story or in the background of someone elses. Derek Kreckler's Accident & Process is reassuringly unsettling! See it if you can!

Last night at Venue 63 on Light Square Eric Kuhlman took us on a twisted journey through the European folk tradition of telling the stories of our lives through ballad. From the long retired bus routes of Henley Beach Road to the grimy back alleys in the Port of Amsterdam, and of course the streets of his favoured Paris, Kuhlman mixed his own original material with an eclectic choice of covers that ranged from Australian country, inner city art bands from Adelaide and Melbourne and the masters of this form, Brell and Piaf. But masters as they are, nothing compares to the ngarly angst ridden story telling of Kuhlman. Since I first saw him in Edith Bear at the Feast Festival some years ago, he has become a more confident performer, cut off some of the rough edges and taken a more reflective approach to his stage show, leading the audience into their own personal tomb of introspection as he dredges up all sorts of fear and angst about sex, death and rejection. But Eric is ultimately a funny guy, always looking on the bright side and encouraging everyone to find out and be who they really are. are.

What's this I'm listening to Steve Reich on the train. Music for 18 Musicians. It carries me along. Percussive and melodic never straying too far from the imaginative. It's like not listening. It's so ambient it blends in with the station stops and computerised voice announcements, door alarms and what have you. The train is filling up. Soon I'll be surrounded by smartly dressed student types reading airport novels and spreading their just smoked cigarette odour through the cabin. When I'm standing up I can see all the Instagram and Facebook pictures and videos that everyone is watching on their screens. It's like an art installation. Too much to make sense of. Wacky.ntion...

Jess Ribeiro's second album Kill It Yourself sounds like an album full of songs that didn't make the cut for her brilliant first record My Little River. Apart from hearing the soothing thoughtful tones of her singing voice, there's not much that resembles the inventive, playful drama and truly original Australian folksy, bluegrass, jazz influenced song structures of her debut. Also, she seems to be leading a different life after hitting the hump of her mid-20's and leaving the angst and gristle of her textured family life behind for an emotional landscape that seems devoid of the drama that shaped the compelling story telling that her songs on My Little River embody. And I can't hear the brilliant nuanced arrangements that seem to have come from a studio filled with the fun of comraderie on this album. Second records are difficult and the first record from this artist was so beautiful, I ache for her storytelling to continue, for her inventiveness to be let off the leash, and her hillbilly musical mayhem to be let loose in the studio once again.

I’m thinking about the way young people think because I’m travelling to a suburban campus of the University to teach first years in the mid-morning. Last night, for some reason, I watched the experimental film Marianetti by Albie Thoms. Well, as experimental films should do, it certainly made me question who I am and what I expect out of life and I did feel it quite a pity that I hadn’t seen this film when I was twenty when it might have made some kind of difference to how I approached the search for meaning. Of course it eschews plot and character and instead presents a melange of mangled sound and image. That said, the most engaging segments for me came when the screen was totally black or alternately totally white. What sense I did get from the film came from the cut up conversations between disembodied voices ruminating over philosophical questions thrown up by the now legendary art movements of the early 20th century. The interesting thing about this was that the young hippies seen parading naked around their Paddington terraces in the late 60’s when the film was made, seemed so excited by the history of ideas and they knew so much intricate detail of the lives of obscure characters left behind by the bulldozer of official history. They were hell bent on intervening in this history, simply by thinking about it. But thinking bold and brave and challenging thoughts. So I’m thinking, what bold and brave and challenging thoughts will surface in the room I’m in, this morning?

Last night in Adelaide’s Festival Theatre the South Australian Opera showed us once again the quality of justice through the age-old wisdom of the Italian masters. In Puccini’s Tosca we get tragedy on a majestic scale as a pair of innocent art lovers are caught up in the turmoil and tyranny of violent political change.

This turn of the century Opera has not been without its critics and has copped some derogatory reviews over the almost 120 years since it opened in Rome, but where it fails to convey the nuances of history and the original story on which it is based, it packs a powerful punch by distilling the essence of the drama, of every drama, into a well crafted and beautifully scored bolt of emotional lightening.

Puccini and his librettist spent four years refining this work and use every mechanism available to tell the heart-wrenching story. This, more than any other, is an opera where you don’t need to understand the language to connect with the tragedy. The music speaks, describes, foretells and translates for us throughout every scene. It whispers to the soul on a purely emotional level and the vocal performances, in the same way, relieve us of the burden of narrative.

Kate Ladner’s performance in the leading role brought a staggering gravitas to the impossible situation of women held hostage to the lust of powerful men. As she wrestled herself out of the groping embraces of the lecherous Scarpia, Chief of Police, on this occasion the image of America ensnared in the pussy-grabbing grip of Donald Trump was forefront in the mind. Her resistance to being done over by a privileged slime bag is what’s at the centre of this awful tale and it’s no secret now that she stabs him to death as she negotiates to save the life of her lover, the artist, Mario.

The portrayal of police brutality and corruption in a pre-unified Italy speaks volumes about the foundations on which our modern democracies are built. When Tosca cries out that she has spent her whole life dedicated to art and love only to be met with an utterly unjust fate at the hands of corrupt and evil men, it’s kind of like, strangely, we all know exactly how she feels.  What does that say?

The magnificent tenor, Rossario La Spina does a splendid job holding out against a corrupt regime to defend his friend from persecution, and the evil baritone voice of the Police Chief is ably delivered by Mario Bellanova.

Cheap seats are available. Two nights to go.