what swerves

Bande dessinée by numbers

2012-01-14T21:44:00.001+11:00

The excellent ToutenBD.com, the French website dedicated to all things French graphic novels, recently posted the annual health check of the industry. Despite the economic straits France finds itself in, the comics industry continues to grow. While the overall picture seems quite healthy, a closer look reveals a more interesting picture. And students of the Australian publishing sector will certainly draw some parallels with our colleagues francaise.

Being on holiday and at something of a loose end, I have written a translation of the article, and added links. ToutenBD.com were contacted for permission but have not yet replied. You can read the original version at the website.

In the meantime, allons-y!

Bande dessinee is 2011: the boom of the sure thing

The annual meeting of the Bande Dessinée Critics Association (Association de critiques et tournalistes de bande dessinée) noted again this year the growth of the production of albums (books) -- but with the caution that publishers are supporting the safe bets.

The traditional annual report from Gilles Ratier, the general secretary of the Bande Dessinée Critics Association (ACBD) has been delivered for 2011.

For the sixteenth consecutive year, the production of albums has increased: 3.04% against 2010; an increase of 162 titles, for a total of 5,327 albums. However the report noted "the economic conditions are hardly favourable for industry, which for three years has lacked a strong engine. Hence, we have a general climate of watchfulness, highlighting safety first and anxiety!"

Watchfulness in effect because of the 5,327 albums only 3,841 are strictly new (of which only 1,577 originated in francophone Europe). The traditional publishing sector (le secteur patrimonial) is fully expanded, with 1058 new releases, compilations or bind-ups (980 in 2010), 224 woks dating from more than 20 years published finally in album and 31 francophone series reprised or continued by new creators.

Watchfulness also because in 2011 on 99 "sure things" (valuers sûres), had sales of more than 50, 000 copies and bestowing the bulk of sales on this sector. At the head of these 'locomotives' are: XIII (500,000 copies); Kid Paddle (360, 000) and Boule et Bille (253,000). Counting manga, ten series (from five publishing houses) provided 50% of sales, Naruto at the head (250,000 copies of each of three titles in the series).

Looking at publishing houses, 310 publishers produced bande dessinée in 2011. And yet the trend towards concentration is again confirmed: four groups accounted for 43.6% of production. With the acquisition of the majority share of the publisher Soleil by Guy Delcourt, Delcourt became by far the biggest producer of albums with 840 titles, being 15.77% of production.

On the economic graph, the prize nevertheless gos to Médias-Participations group (Dargaud, Le Lombard, Dupuis, etc).

The report noted the strong success of the bande dessinée blogs, which have become a "fishtank" (un vivier) for the print publications. On the other hand few were seduced by the e-book. And bande dessinée is always well exposed in the news stands, with 76 specialist journals.

FIN

So, thanks again to ACBD and ToutenBD. And apologies for all infelicities in 'la traduction'.

Viewpoint again

2011-11-01T11:38:00.003+11:00

The latest issue of Viewpoint: on books for young adults, includes my review of two recent graphic novels. Neither book fits easily into the received notion of 'graphic novel', which is probably why I like them so much. Thanks to Pam Macintyre and the team for publishing the reviews.

A Taste of Chlorine

Bastien Vivès (Jonathan Cape, hbk)

and

Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie A tale of love and fallout

Lauren Redniss (It Books/HarperCollins) hbk

A Taste of Chlorine (Goute de Chlore) by Bastien Vivès, the young Parisian writer/illustrator won the Revelation Award for best first book at Angouleme in 2009, Europe’s biggest comics festival. Simply put, A Taste of Chlorine is the story of a teenage boy ordered by his doctor to swim regularly to repair a damaged spine. At the pool, he comes into contact with a young woman who offers him advice on swimming technique and companionship. As their tentative relationship develops, companionship leans towards attraction.

Most of the action takes place at the pool and in the water. Bastien Vives delights in depicting the body’s curves and lines in all its various positions, shapes and poses. What, after all, is swimming, if not contorting the body into striking shapes? All those aquatic blues and greens lend the book a certain cool mood, punctuated by the black ribbon of the lap lanes. The minimalism of the colour and location allows the viewer to attend more closely to the emotional exchanges, since below the surface however and emotional drama of subtly and force plays out. In this regard A Taste of Chlorine is a remarkable debut, a book where the artist shows us what he can do within the tight confines of setting. Vives exploits perspective and point of view with some authority. It is also a book that is long on visuals and lighter on text, but that doesn’t mean that viewers will simply skim the book (The act of swimming is not a language-based activity, so why not remove all but necessary language from the pages?) The drawing sometimes appears simple, even at times rudimentary, but this is somehow in keeping with the story’s unaffected emotional tone.

One reads this book as one watches a film, where the dynamics of space and gesture are all important. Vives also neatly exploits the use of the ‘frame’ or panel as a way of isolating his characters. There are points where the panel behaves like the lanes of a pool, bringing the swimmers closer yet exquisitely resisting the shared moment so desired by the young man. A Taste of Chlorine does not give up its secrets easily. Perhaps it doesn’t need saying that the book will not be to everyone’s favour. But this quiet, deftly told drama challenges some received ideas of the graphic novel. The ending is enigmatic, open, and will have keen viewers returning again and again, to tease out the elusive relationship at the heart of the story. A Taste of Chlorine is also an example of the innovation that the French graphic novel, la bande dessinee, is capable of achieving, as artists and writers explore the creative potential of the form.

Radioactive works differently. It’s a book relatively long on text and strictly speaking, is not really a graphic novel. Well, insofar as it does not use the panel structure to tell its story, and avoids speech balloons. But the life of Marie Curie, the remarkable scientist, is passionately communicated through sophisticated picture-making and bold page design. Again, the drawing style has a slightly ungainly, improvised manner, which is belied by the confident use of colour to shape mood and emotional response in the reader. After all, an account of a scientist whose major work was more a hundred years ago, may not immediately hold great interest for the reader today. That this world is remote gives way at the first glance of the endpapers. (Doubt stops at the border.)

Pages often employ a full-bleed (colour to the edge of the page) that reinforces a slightly ethereal, otherworldly quality. The absence of the authorial frame supports the otherworldly dimension of radioactive materials that were the working tools of Marie Curie’s life. The extent to which she and husband Pierre exposed themselves to these deadly substances soon becomes plain and provokes an immediate anxiety in the heart of the reader. We know this won’t end well. Still, one reads the book with a sense of excitement too. Marie Curie was not a woman to sit aloof from life in her laboratory: she also loved, suffered and survived scandal. Interleaved with the Curie’s life and their discovery of radioactivity, are stories of the implications of their research. Here Redniss uses, for example, eyewitness accounts of Three Mile Island, Hiroshima, and points the way to which nuclear power might fuel space travel. So science is not kept in a museum, put on a pedestal and admired. Author/artist Lauren Redniss shows us some of the consequences of the use of uranium and raises questions that remain urgent.

The pages are beautiful, some Rothko-like in their floating planes of colour. Others exploit reworked photographs, playing with the idea of a scrapbook, an album of memories. This is a book that throws off any shackles of the worthy aspects of non-fiction. I think in the end, Redniss and the reader are suspended between two points. On the one hand we marvel at what Marie Curie achieved, the sacrifices she made - and what science has unlocked. Radioactive is science with a human heart and wonderful, memorable and moving book. Try and catch it.

For a taste of Radioactive, visit the New York Public Library, where Lauren Redniss researched the book.

Lastly, both of these books are published by smaller imprints of major publishers. Let’s hear it for the promotion of experimentation and risk in an age of caution and anxiety.

Libraryland

2011-11-01T10:58:00.000+11:00

Libraryland is the result of Oslo Davis's creative fellowship at the State Library of Victoria in 2010.

The subscription model - patrons underwriting a book's production - is just about as old as publishing itself. But, thanks to wonders of social media, pre-pub support has become a whole easier.

Oslo's comics in the Age always bring a chuckle or three around the kitchen table. More about Oslo here.

And more about State Library of Victoria creative fellowships here.

Dream of the thylacine

2011-08-15T20:32:00.000+10:00

Two years ago I took a plane to Hobart and then a drive down to Huonville, there to meet Ron Brooks, one of Australia's finest book illustrators. I travelled with Sarah Brenan, Ron's editor. At the time Ron was finishing his memoir Drawn From the Heart, which covers his life in books. I wrote about that visit here.

Throughout this year I have been contributing book reviews to Viewpoint, a quarterly magazine on young adult literature. The current issue includes this review of The Dream of the Thylacine, the latest collaboration between author Margaret Wild and illustrator Ron Brooks.

In recent times it almost seems Ron Brooks’s picture books have been offered as rations, the patient readership grateful that there one more book is added to the canon. There is the generous, revealing and invaluable memoir Drawn From the Heart. And if it has been a while between picture books, still have the inexhaustible legacy of those books that made Brooks’s name and reputation as Australia’s finest picture book maker. The Bunyip of Berkeley Creek prepares to celebrate 40 weird and wonderful years, while John Brown, Rose and Midnight Cat (both texts by Jenny Wagner) remains as mysterious and affecting after 35 years. Children may grow up quickly, but great children’s picture books endure.

For Fox (Allen & Unwin, 2000) Brooks created a set of searing images to depict Margaret Wild’s story of trust, betrayal and hope. Likewise, Old Pig, again the text by Margaret Wild, speaks not only of the vulnerable child, but to the knowing adult and to all readers that have lost a parent, a grandparent.

“Who in the world am I?” wonders Alice as she navigates life down the rabbit hole. The bunyip echoes with a question of his own: “What am I?”

What kind of creature was the thylacine? The unfortunate animal is no longer here for us to ask any such probing, so such questions will remain forever moot.

Dream of the Thylacine sits somewhere between the lyricism of Old Pig and the raw power of Fox. Indeed the book swings between two worlds: the Edenic landscapes of Tasmania where the thylacine made its natural home, and the stark, punishing world the zoo, where the last known thylacine died in captivity. Either way, score one more masterpiece into a catalogue crowded with them.

The thylacine is the most lamented, ironically the most celebrated, of Australia’s extinct fauna. We have a right to feel angry about this slaughter, not just misty-eyed. It’s pleasing the Brooks’s treatment of the story invites the reader to feel raw emotions, not merely the approved emotions. But what animals will pass from sight in our lifetime?

Trapped am I,

in a cage of twisty wire, cold concrete.

PROWL

RAGE

HOWL

Brooks has not only created vivid, bristling landscapes. He has also set the text, re-built the simple words so that they grab the reader as pulsing Beat poetry. I like the way the text has been condensed, thickened up, made strong, in this design. It would have be too obvious and too easy to parcel those couplets evenly across the book. This way, the poetry comes roaring to life, the white text is embedded onto stark, monochromatic backgrounds. What might have been a lament becomes a howling rage against the dying light. The image of the thylacine on thext pages is the familiar one: the trapped, dying animal, viewed through wire. The image is degraded, like a fourth-hand photocopy, breaking down like memory. The background on which the bold typeface is impressed, offers another layer of meaning: the weathered timber of farm sheds inverts the pioneer myth. Here the buildings are not signs of progress and expansion but repression and ultimately destruction.

This text never appears on the colour pages, but remains segregated, trapped, as it were, in this world. There is no comfortable fantasy of the animal at one with nature. The landscape is already empty: the last known thylacine recalls the landscape from the cage in which it will die. And this also closes off the clichéd possible that somewhere out there...

The text is also an invitation for Ron Brooks to paint the landscapes of Tasmania that he knows so well. This stark, desperate introduction does give way to the thylacine moving across its native space. The thylacine’s body is sleek and stylised; you just want to stroke its stripy back.

See me swagger across the wild lands...see me glory at the edge of cliff

But this swagger is halted. Everywhere there are limits.

There is an essential drama in the book, that as the trapped thylacine becomes more abject the landscapes, the places of which it dreams and remembers and longs to escape into, become more seductive, more dreamlike, more enchanting.

The poet Auden wrote that "There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children." The Dream of the Thylacine is a book for readers of every age. Teenagers might well respond to its Romanticism. One of the pages in the final is of a bleak mountainside; a scene split by a rainbow, which softens the experience but can’t entirely efface the existential mood. Because I think this is a book about loss and enchantment. It is about finding consolation in place, in the physical world, the same physical world from which the thylacine has been taken.

Carrying on

2011-06-21T08:39:00.000+10:00

One of the many wonderful things that has come out of my visit to the Angouleme has been the opportunity to work with Bernard Caleo. Mild-mannered museum program officer by day; by nights and weekends Bernard is a comic creator, teacher, publisher and raconteur.

Bernard is currently running What It Is, a monthly program at Readings bookshop in Carlton, exploring the nature and diversity of comics today. Last month I climbed aboard the What It Is express, to revisit Angouleme. This was no ordinary presentation, certainly not your standard powerpoint click and chat, or two fine gentlemen stroking their chins for an audience of bored academics.

What It Is combines storytelling, conversation, performance and humour. Readings bookshop hosts the event - it's free to attend - and makes everyone welcome with a glass or wine or two. This one also included comic writer/illustrator Brenton McKenna, whose first book Ubby's Underdogs was recently published.

Events like What It Is bring people together. Despite appearances I am not really a comic geek. I got into this area out of frustration that there is too little local production of comic book publishing for young people. (Hence the need to go to france, obviously.) I am really pleased to have been able to share my little experience with Melbourne's comics community. Details of the next What It Is can be found here.

Bernard's blog has more photos, including his kamishibai on Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Check it out!

Autumn music

2011-05-22T13:45:00.008+10:00

It has been said that greatest hits albums are like political careers, since both tend to end in failure. Stephen Duffy turns this truism on its head.

Launching himself on the charts as Stephen 'Tin Tin' Duffy, in 1985, Kiss Me was a top five hit in the UK and top 20 in Australia. I remember rolling my eyes that someone would be so desperate to call himself Tin Tin, as if he had any call on this name. I carried on listening to The Smiths/Go-Betweens/Triffids/Chills/REM/etc.

In 1989 I left for a little trip overseas and my friend Jim Payne, late of Dada Records and always of impeccable taste, made a me a C90 with all sorts of things on: Julie Cruise, Devine and Stratton, Kitchens of Distinction...and this one.

Which I had pretty much forgotten about until I received Stephen Duffy's career sampler Memory & Desire: 30 Years in the Wilderness. I have been playing the two-CD set constantly, breakfast, lunch and tea, for the past couple of months.

Hearing 'Lost Girl' after 22 years instantly set my feet tapping, taking imaginary walks around autumnal Hyde Park, Streatham High Street at Christmas, through spring to Kew Gardens and Southbank. It's a song I had forgotten, buried under the leaves, I suppose.

I came back to Stephen Duffy and the Lilac Time by a curious route. In France in early 2008 I read review of the Lilac Time's Runout Groove album. Intrigued, I poked around a few record shops there and in London hoping to find it. No luck. So I forgot them, more or less, but something about that review stuck in my mind. So before we returned to France this year, I went in search of Runout Groove at iTunes. And there it was, $16.99, and no need to leave my study. While I was in France earlier this year, I listened to Runout Groove all the time. It was almost as though the intervening years hadn't happened.

Alexis Petridis at the Guardian reviewed the album here in 2007. In 2009 Caitlan Moran interviewed Duffy for The Times.
Runout Groove is apparently the band's lowest selling record in a three-decade career where under-performing sales became the Lilac Time calling card. The album is loaded with poignant, personal and exquisitely crafted songs. Influences of Nick Drake, Incredible String Band and the Beatles linger but have been turned into something new and lasting. In the 1980s the Lilac Time were darlings of the indie scene, but that doesn't shift units. Not like the 2005 eight million-plus sales of Robbie Williams' Intensive Care, for which Duffy wrote or co-wrote most of the songs. Is that not one of the strangest musical alliances ever? The money he made working for Robbie Williams paid for Runout Groove.

Strange is the word that best describes Duffy's career. He left formed Duran Duran in 1978 and left just as they were getting their flounce on. Showed up briefly in the electro-pop period with a song leaning heavily on the Song of Solomon. Became a Peel favourite, swapping record companies like football cards, formed a band with violinist Nigel Kennedy, moved to Alaska, crashed, returned to England, wrote and toured the world with Robbie Williams, all the time piling up songs and albums that the world largely ignored. He even has an album titled Keep Going (1993). And many of the best songs are gathered up on Memory and Desire.

Duffy reflects in the film Memory and Desire. "What would you call him? A maverick? An outsider? A cult? Or just a failure?"

All of these travails are documented in a film about Stephen Duffy titled Memory & Desire. At least I think so. The film has had limited festival screenings in the UK in 2009 and 2010 and is not currently available on DVD, so I haven't seen it in full. So keen am I that earlier this year I alerted the Melbourne International Film Festival, suggesting they might like to include Memory and Desire in the program, which always runs a section on music documentaries.
I figure that if a low-fi, country-influenced, semi-successful indie band of impeccable taste can't find a home in the hearts of Melbourne inner-city music fans, well, I have cabbages for ears.

I really am a bit obsessed with the Lilac Time. My wife remains politely neutral, and like most, finds them pleasant but not exceptional. But there is something, the sound of a man wrestling with success, with failure, his own worth and place in the world, that has its hooks into me. The songs are seductive, the landscapes timeless, the emotions sharply felt and described in images that linger. As a writer Duffy's songs become more detailed and more direct over time, and shake off the vagueness of early work.

Stephen Duffy turns 51 next week. Happy birthday Stephen Duffy, and may we share Lilac Time for many years to come. This career isn't done yet.

For more Duffy/Lilac goodness, don't miss the Duffypedia, an awesome labour of fan-love.

Three little gigs

2011-04-20T15:56:00.001+10:00

Gig one:
On Wednesday 4 May, I will be speaking with Meg Rosoff at the Wheeler Centre. It's a free event but bookings are preferred. More information here.

I am a bit of a fan of Meg Rosoff. Her first novel how i live now is a landmark book and a stunning debut. Rosoff worked on and off in advertising for about two decades before changing track with this extraordinary book. Her latest novel, The Bride's Farewell, keeps the standards high. It's a taut, gritty historical novel about a girl who flees from an arranged marriage and survives, somehow, in the fields and farms in C19th England.
UPDATE: The Wheeler Centre posted the video of our conversation here.

Gig two:
On Saturday 14 May, I am giving the final curator's floor talk for Look! The art of Australian picture books today.

Detail of illustration by Leigh Hobbs from Old Tom’s holiday,

Little Hare Books, 2002, ink, pencil and watercolour on paper,

State Library of Victoria

Gig three:
Then at the end of the May, Monday 30th to be exact, I am talking at Readings with Bernard Caleo as part of What It Is. This monthly comics event is a kind of an ideas laboratory for all things to do with comics, graphic novels, or in my case, bande dessinee. So I will be talking about Angouleme and what I know about French comics. Shouldn't take long.

Bernard Caleo is the publisher of Tango, a comics anthology. He is brilliant at making comics, talking about comics, and performing comics, so I am looking forward to that. It's sure to be a unique experience. Also speaking on the night is Brenton McKenna, Broome-based comic writer and illustrator, whose book, Ubby's Underdogs comes out very soon. I met Brenton last year when he still working on this book so I am dying to see the final results. As my conversation with Bernard is around creating Australian comics Brenton's experience should be fascinating.

Heavy Trash unload in France

2011-03-02T21:52:00.001+11:00

This post is dedicated to the team at Rock Town Hall.

One of the highlights of the Angouleme Festival de la Bande Dessine were the Concerts des Dessines. Here's a taste of Heavy Trash, led by Jon Spencer, getting down to business.

Jon Spencer speaks not only the worst French you have ever heard, but forgets the name of one of the premier illustrators. But heck, c'est la vie, c'est la pierre.

The dignified guy with the silver hair is Baru, festival president. I have fallen just a bit in love with his work, which depicts working class men and their lives in an un-sentimental way, like the love child of Raymond Briggs and Paul Kelly. I like the way he draws, very tentative, feeling his way through to the character, nothing formulaic. Baru is joined by Chauzy and Flao.

Tour Baru's fantastic exhibition here.

But there is nothing stopping Jon Spencer, and when it all comes together at the end, well, it is indeed a very rock and roll moment. Or as the French say, un pur moment du rock and roll.

This year the festival presented three concerts with drawing. I was lucky enough to see all three. Fatoumata Diawara, the Malian singer and her polished, nimble band appeared with illustrator Clement Oubebrerie, his gentle watercolour and ink pen lines occasionally showing something stronger and darker.

There is more video and Concerts des Dessines at the festival website. Areski Belkacem, sorry - I'm drawing a blank, led a band through a story titled Coup de Foudre (a sudden blow to the heart/falling heavily in love) that involved masked wrestlers, femmes fatales and cross-dressing to audience heavily loaded with school kids. Who loved every biff and clinch. The music was a slithery, rhythmic set that offered endless twists and surprises, a kind of rootsy, moorish funk.

Comics and music: who knew they could be so damned groovy?

Streets of Angouleme

2011-02-18T20:56:00.001+11:00

Not all the artwork is found indoors, in galleries or in books during the Festival International de la Bande Dessinee.

Here's a selection of street art and a couple of festival surfaces. Most of the street art was taken late on Saturday afternoon during a little walk through the town's narrow, winding streets. Even with the buzz of the festival, Angouleme is an attractive historic town. Limestone is the dominant building material and its widespread use makes the town feel ordered and calm. For me, having grown up around Fremantle, I found all this limestone quite evocative.

Let's start with the big one. Rue Hergé is the main street of the town. Here's the man it's named after.

Cheating a bit here as the illustration is part of the festival imagery, but part of the flavour.

Again, the festival uses BD images to good effect.

This one on a postbox appeared to be permanent.

But not all course not all of the artwork is state approved.

Someone I met while walking the ramparts.

Another rampart dweller.

Artists' studio doors

Paste-up on the window of an empty yard.

And another, part of a cluster of paste-ups.

This is found near the corner of Rue Froid and Rue du Soleil.

At night the limestone walls of the Hotel de Ville became a giant projection screen.

Careful, they might hear you

2011-02-18T14:18:00.000+11:00

It's always a little anxious-making when I am being interviewed for radio. I'm never sure what crazy thing I might be tempted to say, what crazy kite I'm trying to cut free. Luckily being interviewed is an infrequent event.

Late last year I was interviewed about Look! by Sarah L'Strange for the Book Show on Radio National.

At one point I told her that I didn't read much adult fiction because it was so boring. Thankfully this piece of wisdom was left on the cutting room floor. What did go to air is a really good 20 minutes about the pleasure and process of picture books. Also interviewed are Ann James, Shaun Tan and a couple of parents and their children.

You can hear the program via the Book Show website.

Welcome to Angouleme: world comics capital

2011-02-02T20:45:00.003+11:00

Just one of the many marquees, or bulles, that are part of this massive festival. Photograph taken from the roof of le Hotel de Ville, looking onto le Noveau Monde marquee.

Imagine the crowd at the MCG, the AFL grand final. Double it and then add a few thousand more.More than 200,000 people turned up for the 38th Angouleme International Festival de la bande dessinee. And like an AFL grand final, people come from all levels of society. Angouleme, two hours by TGV south-west of Paris, is indisputably the home of BD in France. Don't be put off by the term 'la bande dessinee': literally it means 'drawn stories' and encompasses comics, graphic novels and sometimes picture books.

Saturday afternnon in Angouleme: packed!

Diversity is at the heart of this extraordinary festival. Across four days and nights, the festival caters to all tastes. Exhibitors, artists and publishers also come from all over the world.I met French, Romanian, Belgian, Finnish, French, Spain, and Hong Kong publishers, writers and producers.

Australia however, is largely invisible. In 2008 Shaun Tan won the festival's Best Album prize for Là où vont nos pères, or The Arrival. The young independent publisher I spoke to this weekend thought Shaun is an American. We are the great unknown, and Australians could learn a great deal by coming to this festival. Why more, or indeed any, Australians don't go there is a mystery to me.

Highlights included:
This year's festival president, Baru, is renowned for autobiographical depictions of the French (and migrant) working class, beginning in 1982 with Quéquettes Blues. The exhibition that honoured Baru's work was generous, imaginative, sympathetic, just a delight to explore and experience. Baru's exhilarating exhibition Debout les damned de la terre (translating roughly as Showing the damned of the earth) is a journey through working class lives over fifty years. Baru's massive body of work was smartly curated, displayed with real panache, and a great introduction to this artist.

Part of the marvellous Baru show that also included video, a documentary film, juke-box, old cars, boxing, rock and roll and original examples from his huge body of work.

Kaleidoscope: a history of bande dessinee in Hong Kong produced by the Hong Kong Arts Centre succinctly, elegantly and engagingly explored a turbulent past and present. The show - designed for touring - touched on the political, economic and technological changes that have driven Hong Kong's diverse visual comics culture. But it looked so good that it could easily stand as a permanent exhibition. I would love to see this show in Australia.


Kaleidoscope world: Hong Kong's classy comics history

Kaleidoscope was housed in a former 'cave', a storage space for wine and grain.

The design of the Hong Kong show was museum quality - built in road cases and designed for travel.

The varied, diverse and distinct thematic marquees, ranging from the big (really packed) commercial houses to the edgy and innovative (Pavillon Jeunes Talents). If you want to see what is happening in comics internationally, this is a great way to see it. Angouleme is not just French and Belgian comics: it welcomes the world. The French remain famously relaxed in matters of sexuality.


Vie de Merde is a raunchy, very funny slice of teenage life.

And finally, Les Concerts des Dessins. I saw three, each very different in flavour though using the same ingredients: live music matched live drawing. Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara was coolly complemented by illustrator Clement Oubrerie. On the other hand, Jon Spencer's new outfit Heavy Trash rocked the house down (around 800 screaming French women and men going absolutely bonkers) while Baru and friends drew up scenes of rockabilly mayhem, culminating in the artists setting fire to their pictures. Why don't all concerts come with live illustration? It was a hell of a way to go out.

Baru and friends get Jon Spencer up on the screen, while the band rocks on stage.

Angouleme is not a convention, or a fan-meet. And it's not, obviously, only about Tintin, Asterix and Spirou. There is an exhaustive schedule of in-conversations, panels and debates. 'Is Temeraire a little Nazi?'; 'Teaching BD in art school'; 'Lesbians and bande dessinee' 'Violence and manga'; 'Mainstream or indie - is it necessary to choose?' There is also a rights market, meetings with artists, film screenings and projections, book signings, sales (oh, my suitcase) and an incredible buzz throughout the town.

The festival is both a celebration and a masterful promotion of the bande dessinee. Prizes are awarded on the final night. This year's Angouleme Festival Grand Prize winner, and therefore next year's festival president, is Art Speigleman. The shortlist of 51 titles in a range of categories are heavily promoted in bookshops and beyond. FNAC (think JB HiFi meets Borders meets Ticketmaster), is a festival sponsor. National newspapers and magazines across the political and cultural spectrum get their hands dirty. The industry, its artists and readers, are taken seriously.

Yes, the French comics industry was built on the likes of Tintin and Asterix, but there is so much more. So, so, so much more.

http://www.bdangouleme.com/

Travel to Angouleme was supported by the Copyright Agency Limited Creative Industries Career Fund.

My host Evelyne was also extraordinarily helpful in all sorts of ways.

Merci beaucoup, Evelyne. Vous êtes génial!

The French, they do this comic book thing differently

2011-01-02T15:24:00.001+11:00

The main reason for going to France at this crazy time of year is be at the Angouleme Festival International de la Bande Dessinee, from January 27-30. I have my four day pass, I have accommodation, I have the train ticket booked from Paris. This year, it's Hong Kong in the spotlight, along with much more. The exhibition design hits a high standard and I am really keen to see this year's work for myself.

The Copyright Agency Limited provided me with an airfare to travel to France and see this festival. I was thrilled to receive this funding because it supports research into graphic novels and I look forward to sharing what I learn when I return. In youth literature there is much talk of young people and their interest in comics and graphic novels, which may be true. But in Australia we produce so little of our own material. Artists like Shaun Tan don't come along every day - so how can Australia's book industry nurture the graphic novel culture? I am hoping that Angouleme might provide a few hints. After all, a festival in the middle of winter, hundreds of kilometres from Paris, where accommodation is at a premium, but still attracts nearly 250,000 people, must be doing something for readers.

Counting down

2010-12-31T11:35:00.002+11:00

In just under three weeks time my wife, daughter and I will be heading to France for four weeks. After our visit nearly three years ago we are keen to get back.

We must be keen: the weather looks like being absolutely arctic. On the plus side, the dollar is more than pulling its weight against the euro. And January-February is not exactly peak tourist season. So museum and gallery queues are unlikely to have us standing out in the sleet for an hour or two. But accommodation is cheap - especially compared to what you pay in Australia. We've booked apartments through the excellent Homelidays website. We've stocked up on thermal clothing, gloves, scarves, hats and boots. For coats we are hoping to pick up something in the soldes. And I am hoping to do a little of this.
What else should we do? Is there anything on the *avoid* list?

Ca glisse à l'Hôtel de Ville
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Say it with pictures

2010-12-07T21:07:00.000+11:00

The New York Times recently ran a story about the sharp decline of picture book sales in the United States. There are many reasons why this could be so, not least is the nearly 10% unemployment and declines in library services through years of tax cuts. What the situation is in Australia sales-wise I couldn't say.

But there are many reasons what sales might decline. Children of course are introduced to what is called (somewhat euphemistically I think) screen culture at an early age. So they become very dexterous with their thumbs, less so perhaps with their vocabulary.

I also wonder to what extent parents are keen to demonstrate their child's reading skills. What better way than to kick away the ladder that pictures provide. Since reading has become one of those fought over issues, does this also feed our anxiety? And why are we so concerned with measurement and less troubled by questions about the transmission of cultures, the sharing and propagation of stories?

In regard to the prospect of children being rushed onto chapter books, I wonder to what extent parents are anxious to show how well their children are reading? Do they know what they are missing? And being able to decode a word should not be confused with understanding or even enjoying a story. Many books have gone back on to the shelf that simply have not arrived at the right time. The Tale of Despereaux is one that waited on the shelf perhaps twelve months before going on to become a firm, enduring favourite. Some schools impose the policy that students in free-reading time must read 'to their literacy level'. I often wonder how they measure a child's imagination.

Of course, reading independently also absolves parents of reading aloud at bedtime and at other times. Last week a picture book exhibition opened, which I had the privilege to curate. Reading with my daughter was an immense influence on the stories and pictures selected. Put it this way: I would not have understood these books in the way that I do, as stories and images connected to a real child's life, her imagination, her growing and changing, without seeing the stories through my daughter's eyes.

Picture books give such immense pleasure. Lauren Child's early books were powerful shapers of her worldview: the word play, the sideways view of the people close to us, the sense of quiet mischief and seriousness in the pursuit of the things we hold dear. These are powerful and important values, yet strange how the resonate in that humble medium.

Today as we came up the path I remarked on how beautiful our neighbour's trees are. Our neighbour is old and frail and may not have another summer left in her in that hot, little house. And then what of her trees? "I'll being chaining myself to them", said my daughter. Said it in a way that reminded me of the Lauren Child book, What Planet Are You From, Clarice Bean? about eco-warriors who camped in a tree, turned the family upside down and got themselves on the television news.

All of this was long ago, before she really took notice of the news or wondered about global warming or the floods in Pakistan. And yet somewhere in their the imprint was made. A way of looking at the world. Whether we chain ourselves to the trees is another matter entirely. But in a book, we learned about what was important in the world.

Everything old

2010-10-30T17:15:00.008+11:00

At Moonee Valley racetrack last Saturday, Daryl Braithwaite was whipping the crowd up with his 1991 hit Horses. No finer music critic than Drew Morphett observed that ’20 years ago Darryl seemed gone for all money, and yet here he is, the crowd in the palm of his hand’.

Later that night Ricki Lee Jones, the writer of Horses, was doing similar at the Myer Music Bowl, lacking only Darryl’s equine anthem. Ms Jones joined Sinead O’Connor and John Cale, others whom we might say did their best work in another generation, or two, or three. An appearance from Archie Roach was cancelled due to his suffering a stroke a week prior. Only the indigenous quartet - Dan Sultan, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Ursula Yovich and Leah Flanagan - could be said to be of more recent or current times. The occasion was the closing night of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

(Dan Sultan, delivering the goods.)

The theme of this geezer jamboree was transcendence. A topic those of us greying at the temples, thin of pate and/or thick of waist, might easily turn to. The artists’ brief was simple: select and perform seven songs ‘to leave behind’. Which is, I guess, an elaborate version of the parlour game: ‘what song would you have played at your funeral?’ Each performer also chose a Leonard Cohen song. (Had Leonard been in attendance the average performer age would have risen by at least a decade.)

John Cale, who could make a case for popularising Cohen’s anthem Hallelujah, evaded time's tidemark with a bent version of Heartbreak Hotel. This stratagem seemed like the novelist dabbling in historical fiction, a neat sidestep around more current concerns.

Like Moonee Valley, the Myer Music Bowl was packed, even if those on the lawn could be forgiven if they huddled for warmth. But given the audience paid around $110 each to be here, this gig was as much about their involvement with transcendence. What songs you would leave behind; what songs you would take with you? Perhaps such questions are the luxury and privilege of middle-age. Surely twenty-somethings are too busy living, than to sit on a freezing hillside contemplating their eternal soundtrack.

A slightly different version of this post appeared on the Wheeler Centre website.
(Thanks to George Dunford.)

Ch-ch-ch-changes

2010-10-19T17:07:00.000+11:00

Yep, time for a change. Recently I resigned from my job after nearly nine years. I have been unemployed in the past - and I don't much like it. So volunteering for the cause wasn't something that I was planning for.

The State Library of Victoria and the Centre for Youth Literature are wonderful places to work, but last month I reached a point when I filed notice. I am working up until Christmas, will have a holiday, and re-load in the new year. Nine years is personal best by some margin, so on that score I'm satisfied, but also know that I need new challenges.

Youth literature is a fantastic field to work in. There are a lot of smart, passionate, creative people: writers, editors, publishing people, booksellers... YA fiction remains wide open to innovation and change, the boundaries are ever being tested. (Just like it is with teenagers.) And I liked the sense that we were working for teenagers, to support and to challenge them.

More recently I have been working on exhibition of recent Australian picture book illustration, which opens on 3 December, my wife's birthday. I am enjoying working with the exhibition team at the State Library of Victoria; they are like watchmakers, every fine tooth of every cog in its perfect place. There is some wonderful artwork in the show and I hope that people young and once young will get a lot out of the show.

When I was offered the job at the Centre for Youth Literature I remember being a bit speechless. I honestly did not expect to be offered it. All things considered it has been a wonderful experience for me. But I don't believe in hanging on for the sake of it.

Whatever comes next I hope that it won't be far from the world of books and young people.

But, who knows?

Superhero guide to New York

2010-09-04T15:16:00.000+10:00

Earlier this year my wife went to New York with her mother. Mother was keen to take in the nightlife of the city that never sleeps. And since their apartment was next door to nightclub things pretty well lived up to billing.

But in the daylight hours she was on the trail of New York's superheroes and comic book culture.

You can read the account of her New York experience here, published today in The Age.

This time last week

2010-08-28T21:26:00.003+10:00

We were hovering around the television awaiting details of booth counts in outer-western Sydney electorates...and whether Green preferences would be enough to carry the day in Boothby, an electorate in South Australia. Melbourne had already fallen to the Greens as predicted and, also as predicted, the Liberals were carving their way through marginal seats in south-east Queensland.

Oh, it was a night of thrills and spills. Spills for the red team mostly. Damn.

Now, well, we are none the wiser. Indeed we await the calling of three wise men of the north as to which side - red or blue - they are prepared to shack up with to form stable government. That being the key phrase of the year. One of the three who holds the balance of power is Bob Katter (above), who I think of as like the mad uncle at Christmas time. For ten minutes he is hilariously inappropriate but then the afternoon sets in. And sets in. And sets in.

So a week later and we still don't have a government. Stable or otherwise. The only person happy in all of this is the ABC's election analyst Antony Green, a genius with a spreadsheet and savant of psephology. Normally his appearances are limited to one night every three years, when he can strut his numerical stuff. Now it seems we can't get enough of him.

We can, but it will take some delicate arm-twisting in Canberra to get Antony Green back in his box.

It must be winter

2010-08-05T21:09:00.000+10:00

It must be winter. People are saying this is the first real winter we have had since 1996. Which was the year that I moved to Melbourne.

It's true that the thermometer has stayed consisting low, rarely rising past 14C for the past six or eight weeks. Last night I succeeded in scalding my leg on a hot water bottle. Ouch! Of course 14C is not particularly cold, a fact I remind myself of whenever I think about going to France next January.

The weather has been cold and even a little bit wet. The rainfall is nearer the long term average - but still way, way down over the past decade. The past couple of winters have been disturbingly erratic, one recently saw spring arrive sometime around June as trees kept their leaves and around June flowers burst into bud.

This week I have moved to part-time work, due to a combination of fatigue and demands at home. Today was the first day of office-free, guilt-free living. It's about giving more to the family and a little about more time for myself.

On the way back from the city I stopped in and put a deposit on a bicycle for my wife. The bicycle is a long overdue birthday present that became a long overdue Christmas present. As she not a terribly sporty lass, and one who moved house/town/country pretty frequently as a child she didn't do a lot of biking. So we will see if riding a bike is something you never forget. We pick it up on Saturday. Look out for us all on a pavement near you.

Down time

2010-06-27T20:32:00.000+10:00

Lately I have had a few things on. But today I found myself at home with nothing I absolutely had to do. Weather too damp for laundry, shopping for the weekend done, my wife and daughter out looking for a 40th birthday present for sister/aunt.

So, a good moment to kick back and dig in to the record collection and establish some ambiance for the afternoon.
For some reason I have always had a soft spot for this solo record by David Johansen. He of the New York Dolls and later, improbably, one Buster Poindexter. All of these clips are songs from David Johansen's first solo album, filmed, I think, in Germany around 1978 or '79. The audience is torpid to put it politely but nobody on stage seems to give a damn: Johansen is all swagger and the guitars rip and roar.

There are a lot of spin offs and connections for Johansen: after all, he has been in the business for nigh on 40 years. But I just love this record. It's full speed ahead from the get-go. Cool Metro is the first track. The band don't do anything ground-breaking but have all the moves and there's none of the desperate-to-get-noticed drag act nonsense of the New York Dolls. It's not particularly punk but god it's loaded with energy and excitement.

I would have been happy if Johansen went on to make ten more records like this, but I suspect he finds a straight line hard to follow. As for later New York rockers The Strokes, I am afraid I wouldn't know them if they bit me on the ankle. There was something a bit Spinal Tap about that album cover that made it impossible for me to listen to them. So my education on New York style begins and ends here.
Has it really been 30 years?

The Duke

2010-06-12T11:45:00.001+10:00

Richard Hinds in The Age takes time out from the World Cup build-up to interview Mark Viduka, aka The Duke. Viduka, the pride of St Albans, is back in Melbourne and comfortably in retirement.

The previous evening, Viduka took his oldest son Joseph, 7, to soccer practice at the local club. He shakes his head about how quickly he has grown. It makes him appreciate the time he spends with his family now that his weekends are no longer a blur of hotels, coach trips and games.

''That's been my life since I was a little kid. My life has been associated with football,'' he says. ''When you see the build-up to the World Cup, you get excited. But realistically I don't think I had that hunger I needed to play in another one.''

I love the big guy. Maybe he didn't score as many goals as he could or should have for Australia - but the joy of his playing was something to see. He played from the heart.

Warming up to The Chills

2010-05-15T18:08:00.002+10:00

When The Chills last toured Australia I missed them - twice. So the prospect of seeing the Dunedin band live - a mere 18 years later was not to be sniffed at. Since the early 1990s, The Chills fortunes have declined while their reputation has grown. But in their day, the Flying Nun label was as much a rallying flag as the Postcard label was for Glasgow or Factory Records for Manchester.

The Chills play a sort of surf music, if you were to surf the cold, dark green and turbid waters that surround New Zealand's south island. But it is music of surprising depth and beauty, too.

Four songs into the set last night Martin Phillips, the mainstay of the band, had the misfortune to have his amplifier blow up. And so they set about repairing it. Several minutes later Phillips told the audience, " I don't whether it's more professional that we were able to fix it, or more amateur that we didn't have a bunch of roadies up here to do the job for us". The 400 bodies crammed into the East didn't seem to mind.

The set was entirely old stuff. But jesus, what a catalogue. Highlights were Pink Frost, a thunderous Love My Leather Jacket, Rolling Moon, Part Past Part Fiction and Wet Blanket. A two-song encore ended with Phillips pleading the need to save his voice for the gig in Sydney tonight.

Along with the guitars - sometimes driving, sometimes chiming - The Chills run on a precise metronomic rhythm and Phillips' words. He is a master of the simple declarative statement that, delivered in his awkward tenor voice, hits straight at the heart.

You could see these guys were doing it tough. They were pioneers in the days before this internet thing, heading off from the south of New Zealand to conquer England. Were they successful? Taking the two albums Submarine Bells and Soft Bomb as evidence, the answer is an emphatic yes. Neither of these mighty documents are in print today, though there is talk of re-issues and re-masters.

When we were in Christchurch earlier this year a guy in the big secondhand record shop made a good case for the Chills and other Flying Nun bands as a vital but neglected part of the cultural heritage. "The number of times I have been asked for their stuff - it kills me that we have nothing", he said.

A year ago today the Guardian newspaper ran this long feature on Flying Nun and the bands it championed.

I can only imagine that Phillips left the stage last night with a mixture of humility, pride and a burning desire to be back. And not to leave it another 18 years.

Welcome to Angouleme**

2010-04-24T21:38:00.009+10:00

Richard Thompson in 1000 Years of Popular Music tells a joke that goes like this.

Imagine heaven as a restaurant. The the welcome is by the Italians; the catering is done by the French; the organisation is by the Germans - and the English provide the entertainment.
In hell, however, it goes like this. The welcome is from the French; the Italians do the organising; the English the cooking. And the Germans provide the entertainment.

I was reminded of this little gag today when I first tried to book accommodation in Angouleme, south-west France. We are heading there in January for the international comics festival. Not wanting to appear over-eager, I thought I would wait until we were within nine months of the event before attempting to secure accommodation. You know, you don't want to fire off too early. You book, you pay, you think it's all good - and then you turn up and they have never heard of you or your booking.

But it seems that every, yes every bed, in every hotel and every bed-and-breakfast of Angouleme, is taken by someone else. Nine months ahead of the ruddy festival.

The tourism office advises to wait until November when the office will release the "chambres chez l'habitant". People who live in Angouleme and nearby rent their rooms or their apartments for the Festival. Am I being just a bit suspicious thinking that "les chambres chez 'habitant" looks like a nice little earner for the locals? Or is it an opportunity for a more authentic experience?

Halp!

** Update: I rang the Tourist Information Office in Angouleme last night. I asked Nathalie if she could speak English. "A little," she replied. In a way that suggested she wasn't about to try it out on me. So I did what I am trained to do: spoke slowly and carefully and as simply as possible in French.
We agreed that no, the office would not supply me with a list of alternative accommodation. I could, like everyone else, wait until novembre. "Quand en novembre? Une? Quinze? Vignt?"
"En debut."
Okay. The beginning of novembre.
J'attends, j'attends...
Cette sera interresant.

A quiet week

2010-04-13T19:39:00.000+10:00

It's been a quiet week in Brunswick and it's about to get quieter. My wife is going to New York at the end of the month.

She lived in Manhattan for about a year in 1980; her father is an academic and was doing post-graduate work there. The recent book Newberry Award winning book When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, is set in the same time and much the same neighbourhood.

So when my wife's mother mentioned that she was hoping to go to New York a plan was hatched: guide books consulted, Google maps gleaned, novels and histories digested.

My mother-in-law loves music and is probably the world's biggest Leonard Cohen fan. She was in the front row of this concert and we reckon was in Lenny's eyeline when he sang I'm Your Man. So a lot of research is going into scanning the gig guides.

One of the things she will be doing is dropping in for the Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor's long-running radio show at the Town Hall in New York. It's a uniquely American experience, one that couldn't be replicated.

Back in the days before the internet I went to Edinburgh for the Fringe. Where I discovered, since it wasn't in the brochure that I sent away for and which arrived in the mail, that Garrison Keillor was appearing at the Book Festival. Oh frabjus day! Callum! Callay! / He chortled in his joy! I had read Lake Wobegone Days and listened to the radio show avidly...Norwegian bachelor farmers, tomato growing as a competitive sport, the Side Track Tap, Lutheran Church. What a wonderful place the world was, that one of my favourite writers should fall into my path like this.

And so I arrived on the day at the appointed hour.

Not. A. Chance.

...Ah, the internet.

So enjoy Garrison, dear. And think of me. I will listen to the show, eventually. At home. On the radio.

There won't be too many other distractions.

Save the Cliffe

2010-03-25T21:20:00.000+11:00

Everybody knows that Perth, Western Australia is the home of ugly architecture. And the wealthier the place gets, the uglier the buildings. So please, sign the petition and save the Cliffe.

The what? The Cliffe. It's a timber bungalow perched high on a bend in the Swan River. Number 25 Bindaring Place, to be exact. It was also home to the young David and Robert McComb. The nesting place of young Triffids.

Cultural heritage rates pretty low in a place so devoted to making money and right now developers are hovering. Triffid-like, you might say.

But a campaign to preserve the house is firmly afoot. The local council is taking this seriously, but the pressure needs to stay on. And a petition will actually help. The plan is not to turn the place into a shrine to all things McComb, but preservation of the house will help towards some permanent memorial.

The last time my wife and I were in Perth we drove along the river front to see the McComb house. My various gods. What a sea of hideous architectural pomp. But there sits the Cliffe, over a hundred years old. A little care and concern, and your name on a petition, and who knows, in a hundred years more, it may still be there.

David McComb wrote the book for Western Australian rock music. And many of his best songs are rooted in this particular patch of ground.

Maybe this plays to my Village Green Preservation Society leanings, but even saving one building is worthwhile protest against vile greed.

Four seasons in one day

2010-03-06T20:55:00.004+11:00

After I was woken up by the neighbours at 5am by a 30 minute sonata of slamming doors, I picked the newspaper up from the lawn. Tinges of orange sky. By 9am, not a clous in the sky.By midday, I was glas I took a hat. At 3pm, I I was woken by a sound something like a herd of cattle thumping across the roof. The very timbers were a-shivering. Great chunks of hail smashing on the skylight. And then some.

Welcome to Melbourne. Neil Finn knew of what he wrote when he sung Four Seasons in One Day.

No casualties thank Jehovah. Some great pics at The Age.

Missing in action

2010-03-02T20:20:00.013+11:00

On Monday night my wife came back after four days in Adelaide. She was ashen faced. Tense. Crest-fallen. Searching for words.

Four days in Adelaide can do that to a person.

What was wrong?

"I left your laptop in a taxi."

Oh.

In a taxi!!!!!!!!??????????

Yes, a taxi. In Melbourne. Small, white Macbook in dowdy but functional carry-bag. After tearing around the Adelaide Festival for days, my wife had fallen asleep on the way into Melbourne. When she was woken and bundled out of the taxi, the laptop and its bag stayed behind. About 90 minutes later, and no doubt several passengers later, the penny dropped.

Twenty four hours of gnawing anxiety followed.

This morning, she had a call from the St Kilda Road police station. The computer had been handed in. Before my wife headed off last Friday morning I had put a business card inside the bag. Just on the off-chance that she and the computer became separated. Just in case.

The taxi driver was a Sikh man. She caught a cab home with another Sikh driver and poured out her story. He promised to put the word around. There are not that many Sikh drivers in Melbourne, he said.

My wife rang him this afternoon and offered him a cash reward. He flatly refused. She is still counting her blessings and thinking of ways to repay the good karma that has come her way. Taxi drivers get a bad press. But this is evidence that there is certainly another side.

Me, I just am happy to be reunited. To be honest, I was glad it was only a lost computer. And glad that my wife is back from Adelaide, too.

(My daughter is also happy. "I am glad you have the computer back. It effects me, too.")

Everybody's learning French these days

2010-02-11T19:51:00.003+11:00

Even Iggy Pop.

Thanks to the wonderful Filles Sourires.

Je m'appelle Mike

2010-02-08T21:07:00.008+11:00

The new year clanks into life and that can only mean one thing: back to school. In my case, that means French classes on Saturday morning.

This is, I think, the fifth year that I have been learning. Seems like forever, which is strange because I hardly command the language. In fact, I'm still at lower high school level. Get through this and I could enrol at VCE level. No thanks, I have quite enough stress already.

Back in the class on Saturday with some familiar faces and some new ones, I felt the anxiety levels rise instantly. I kind of stage fright takes over.

But I can't imagine not studying. I am this stage of beginning to read reasonably. Not reasonably well, but I can read for sense. Which is progress on a year or two. I lapse into franglais at moments of doubt and it's my aim this year to do away that habit as much as possible. If that fails, well, there is always large hand gestures. But I still have a long way to go.

I spent the summer revising and going back to absolute basics. A really useful podcast that I stumbled upon (actually, my daughter found it) is the Verbcast. It's designed as pilot program for high school students in the UK and uses relaxation and visualisation techniques. So effective are these methods that the first three times I tried I fell asleep. Something about the offer to imagine a isolated beach in the south of France, waves lapping the ankles. Breathe in through the mouth, and out through the nose. Shut everything else out of your mind. Zzzzzz.

Verbcast uses a simple and consistent method to introduce conjugations of the most common verbs. Very effective it has been. Overcoming a feeling of anxiety is for me one of the most important steps in learning and this one helps - a lot. You can download Verbcast for free at iTunes.

Vale Eric Rohmer

2010-01-29T14:28:00.036+11:00

Soon after I moved to Melbourne in 1996 my girlfriend, now wife, and I went to see A Summer's Tale (Conte de ete) by Eric Rohmer. The film was showing at the now defunct Carlton Movie House, or the bughouse as it was affectionately known. All cinemas were called 'the bughouse' once upon a time, but this one truly earned its title. Maybe the title.

Inside, the cinema wasn't merely dark, it was gloomy and disheveled. The foyer was tiny, the box office truly poky. But the films!

One of the projects of this blog has been to write about the films of Eric Rohmer, which over the past 20 years, have given me more pleasure than the work of any other director. I recently started on the Tales of the Four Seasons, though I have seen these films in the cinema.

A Summer's Tale is the story of Gaspard, a young man on holiday at the beach in Brittany. His girlfriend Lena has more or less blown him off; she is on holiday elsewhere and without explanation, delays her arrival. So Gaspard walks the wide empty beaches, or sits at home practicing his guitar and writing songs. At a cafe, Gaspard meets Margot, a pretty, slightly boyish waitress who more or less takes him under her wing.

But Gaspard remains diffident. Lena finally arrives, and proves to be real ball-breaker, but in the meantime Gaspard has become interested in Solene, a willowy teenager looking for some holiday action. As Gaspard bounces between Lena and Solene it is Margot who remains constant. But even she has an alibi of sorts, a reason not to become involved. Margot's boyfriend is in the Pacific, an anthopologist who frequently abroad. One gets the feeling though that were Gaspard to make a decision Margot would not be disappointed.

But Gaspard dithers, and doubts and delays. But all too soon summer's lease must expire and the holidays end. Indeed the ending of the film is as finely balanced in its sweet sadness as any of Rohmer's movies. It's not the neatly folded ending of My Girlfriend's Boyfriend. Here is a brief, piercing moment about the missed oppotunities, perhaps that sadness lies more in the things we don't do than in the things we do. Life is all about Gaspard and he, watching it spin and turn, loses the things most worth catching.

Of course Gaspard has the usual litany of reasons for his evasiveness: some to do with commitment, some to do with a lack of belief in others. Rohmers delicately holds these notions up to the cool Brittany sunlight and finds them terrribly wanting.

A Summer's Tale is full of typically rapid exchanges (thank god for subtitles) as Gaspard and his girls walk the wide beaches at low tide. Many of these scenes were shot drawing a camera on a large trolley (or 'dolly' as I believe film-folk like to call them), some of the scenes stretching over hundreds of metres at a time. The space allows scenes to play out with minimal editing and is one reason why the performances achieve such naturalness. (Another is the delightful Amanda Langlet, who brought the magic to Pauline a la plage.)

There is some improvisation in the dialogue. Rohmer's ability to match his methods with his means was one of his great strengths. There appears to be so little artifice in his films. Very little lighting; almost never any music in post-production, and actors like Langlet who seemed to do their best work in his films. It amazes me that the young heroines of his films didn't all go on to great careers.

Rohmer made his own kind of film. You see the influence in films like The Summer Hours and even a little in The French Kissers. (Although he would surely disdain the gross-out aspects of the boys.) He is even referred to directly in I've Loved Yo So Long. But none of this quite equals the calm, watchful, steady gaze of Rohmer's camera. Or the exquisite, understated comedy. Or the tenderness of emotion that his seemingly endless gallery of young actors brought to the screen.

Eric Rohmer died on 11 January, 2010, aged 89.

A year of Serge?

2009-12-23T18:57:00.011+11:00

Sometime next year, perhaps at the French Film Festival in March or April, the Serge Gainsbourg biopic will be all over the cinema. So expect an upsurge in interest in the great songwriter, singer and arranger.

In English speaking countries Serge Gainsbourg's name tends be mentioned just before a smirk. All that saucy French nonsense, it's not real music, is it? Oh, it is most certainly is. For me, he's easily in the company of the Brian Wilsons and John Lennons of this (or the other) world. I think of him as akin to Joe Strummer for intensity and charisma.

Nicknamed 'Cabbage head', he still persuaded Brigit Bardot and Jane Birkin to share his breakfast coffee.

So I await the film version of his strange, troubled and dramatic life with much interest. With a little luck it may even encourage a wider appreciation of his music.

Notes on the future, notes on the past

2009-12-09T20:36:00.018+11:00

If you don't like pretension, look away now.

Over the past couple of years it seems I have become a bit of francophile. I know this puts me in a difficult position. The Rainbow Warrior, diplomatic slipperiness, Mr and Mrs Sarkozy. And that's before we look much of the recent movie output.

Since about 2006 I've been learning the language, slowly and perhaps quite badly. So I'm not quite ready to tackle Proust, but if I suddenly found myself lost on the Rue de Rivoli I could probably survive by ordering take-away coffee and turning left at the bank.

Learning the language was a response to a planned trip that I took with my family (less one) last year. I had spent about a fortnight in France in 1989 without so much as a bonjour to bless myself with.

At that time, I didn't 'get' France and I didn't enjoy it. The main reason was that I felt so hugely disadvantaged the entire time. Nothing was any fun. I mostly remember splitting headaches, possibly from the coffee, and walking for miles around Paris without ever seeing much. I know, I know...

So having been to France and satisfied my earlier frustration, why do I remain fascinated by the place? It is partly the exotic qualities. Melbourne is a great place to live but you couldn't call it one of the world's great romantic places. Lots of adjectives but not that one.

It is partly the myth of France that attracts me. I am fascinated by the contradiction between the old world and its modern manifestations. A country that is both progressive and deeply conservative. Paris pretty much invented the avant garde. Entwined in its history is a deep concern for the rights of man and yet the present is riven by racism. France is the seedbed of existentialism (and many other isms) and the place of so many grand cathedrals. And so on and so on.

When I went to university, cultural studies and semiotics were all the go. Out with the Anglo-American school, in with the French: Saussure, Roland Barthes, and hot on his heels, Foucault and then the feminists. I didn't get too far with all of this. Reading Sausurre and Barthes was a lot like going to France and not speaking the language. You could observe, and it could be vaguely enjoyable, but for the most part one had not a bloody clue what was going on.

I have been thinking about Barthes lately because I have been reading a book on French and Belgian comics, which takes an old school semiotic approach French and Belgian comics. It's a closely argued 200-odd pages on how meaning is made in la bande dessinee. It was a pleasure to revisit this kind of writing and thinking, this analytical approach to a subject. It was like revisiting a younger self.

Now, I feel like I get it. I get that the task the theorist undertakes is to tease out meaning, not to pronounce it. I get on board and enjoy the game, see how the writer investigates the relational nature of meaning. And in a funny way, I don't read it with the same earnest approach that I might have 25 years ago. I enjoy the pursuit.

I think those early university encounters, even in their frustrations, set me up for a longer interest in France. I should repeat that I didn't ever make great headway in matters theoretical. I lacked the truly obsessive character needed to fully get ahead in that. But I tried. It was like I didn't really understand what theory was for.

Roland Barthes was like a sideways entrance into French culture of the period he was writing about. Perhaps what Barthes did was point me towards a world that I didn't understand. But I did enjoy the view of the world that certain French writers and thinkers provided. Whether it was the dandyism and style of Jean Cocteau's films, the wryness of Louis Malle or Philippe Noiret, or a dozen other films, there is something revealing and serious about this stuff.

I also enjoyed, if that is the right word, the books of Simone de Beauvoir. All her four books of her autobiography; The Second Sex, The Blood of Others, She Came to Stay, The Mandarins. Especially that one. By the time I read it, I knew enough about de Beauvoir to piece together some of the facts and the fictions. Perhaps I dreamed of going to another country and starting a new life with another lover, as the character does in The Mandarins. Maybe, can't remember.

I have just finished reading to my daughter a French novel (translated, of course), Toby Alone by Timothee de Fombelle. The book has a little motif towards the end that reminds Toby that his life really only has one true thread and he can turn his back on it but it will always be there. That there is no running away, just as it was for de Beauvoir.

While we were in Paris, we made a point of going to Montparnasse Cemetery to see Simone de Beauvior's grave. It is a simple, quite plain headstone, near the limestone wall. I confess that I was just a little bit cross that she is sharing eternity with Sartre, who, I'm afraid, I see as very much her inferior. Their lives were far more complicated than the ending implies, but as another poet said, such is life. It was, I think, de Beauvoir who really got me hooked on French culture. In her autobiographies she is both a close-hand observer and a critic. An insider and outsider. Think of the reception that she received on the publication of the Second Sex! C'est scandaleux! Her books so fascinated, informed, confounded and yes, inspired me, that 25 years later I am still looking for answers.

I encountered Simone de Beauvoir's books at a time that it was absolutely crucial for me. They provided escape, challenge and insight at a time when I needed certain things to be explained. In writing about her past, she provided me with the sense of a future.

Young marble neighbours

2009-11-12T21:31:00.007+11:00

Last night was hot. Windows open, sounds drifting in from neighbour's house. A kind of not quite funky, proggy bass-driven thing. A bit kraut-rock, a bit I dunno what. But it reminded me of something.

It wasn't annoying though it wasn't exactly what I would choose to put on. The neighbours are the kind of demi-monde bohos that Brunswick is supposed to be too expensive for anymore.

So I popped next door. And gave them this. In a neighbourly sort of way.

I can hear it playing through the window now.

The illustrated Shakespeare and Co.

2009-11-04T21:16:00.009+11:00

Over at the ever-fabulous Baudade you can follow her progress - illustrating the walls of Shakespeare & Co, the famed Paris bookshop.

In bookshop news closer to home, I popped in to Readings Carlton tonight to hear Robert Forster talk about 10 Rules for Rock and Roll, his reviews and essays. He's a fantastically balanced writer about music, possessed of a snappy turn of phrase and keen pair of ears. He's also a modest and straightforward speaker on music. Which is amazing given that he opened the conversation tonight by playing a new song called I Love Myself A Lot and I Always Have. He remains a diamond, always curious, never grinding an axe.

You can hear Robert talking about the 10 Rules of Rock and Roll, courtesy of ABC Perth.

Angouleme dreaming

2009-10-29T19:21:00.011+11:00

When we went to France last year (like it's something we do often), the idea jumped into my head that I might come back and explore the world of la bande dessinee. Everybody knows the French and Belgians are nuts about graphic novels and everybody knows and has probably read some Tintin and Asterix.

But the whole French graphic novel thing jumped to the front of my mind when, coincidentally, Shaun Tan won the Angouleme International Comics Festival Prize for La Ou Vont Nos Peres. Although we probably know it best as The Arrival. So yay, Shaun.

Today I read the Angouleme Comics Festival is 'the largest and most significant comics festival in the world. (So says Bart Beaty in Unpopular Culture, transforming the European comic book in the 1990s). So you might say that to win such a award is the comic universe equivalent of the Booker Prize. Or Le Tour de France.

Anyway, I got thinking that I might like to go there to find out how the French do things and why it is that la bande dessinee maintains such a broad audience. Why is it that comic books are seemingly not viewed as the preserve of pimple squeezing dweebs, would-be manga cultists or indie hipsters? Hey, maybe the French really do look down the Gallic conk at comic book readers. But what the heck, the industry is large, diverse and ever-changing. Not without its problems I'm sure but big and complex.

At least I hope so. Because this week I learned the good people at the Copyright Agency Limited have provided me with a little money to travel to Angouleme in January 2011 to attend the festival. So yay, CAL. I would love to go this January, but the year's gap gives me time to plan and set up other activities. And save some euros. And keep learning the language.

Crates of time

2009-10-17T20:25:00.013+11:00

On the road

2009-10-11T17:45:00.020+11:00

Last weekend I hopped over to Perth, my old hometown. And indeed to Collie, my late father's old hometown. Nowadays my uncle and cousin live in Collie, two hours south of Perth.

It was great to see Greg and Zoe again. Zoe I haven't seen since she about 13. She's now in her 20s and a theatre nurse. Seems she's not at all put off by the sight of strangers' innards. Zoe told me a very funny story about our grandfather, who arrived in Collie around the mid-1950s. Being a town built on, surprise, surprise - coal mining - Collie was a strong union town. And it seems my grandfather hated unions and wasted no time in letting his feelings be known.

No surprise then that his time in the south-west was not profitable. Indeed, it was something of a financial disaster. Though perhaps this had as much to do with his interest in the gee-gees and associated punting as with the politics of Karl Marx. And perhaps explains my father's politics, which were resolutely anti-Labor. I had always found this strange since he was hardly born to the manor (the stable more likely).

The main reason for going was to see some friends and family and to pick up my vinyl albums.I drove down with Jim, who I used to do a lot of radio programming with. So there's another bit of history, right there. We had a great time rolling past the green, sodden paddocks and through the small towns along the South West Highway. And avoiding the delights of Mandurah.

My uncle Greg had 40 kilos worth of vintage vinyl stored away. That equates to about 150 lps and the odd single. All up I reckon the trip cost around $1000, which works out at about $7 per disc. Wouldn't it have been easier to download them? Yes, I suppose. Sort of. Maybe. Not really. Can you download the first James single, Folklore? No, it seems not. Is worth $1,000? Umm.

Can you download Steve McQueen by Prefab Sprout? Of course. $16.99 and it's mine all over again. But there it was, the record that cost me my job when I told the boss I took a day off work to stay home and review it (with Peter Bonner). D'uh. Or Howlin' Wolf's double anthology for Chess. No, can't get that either.

Anyway, there are all sorts of things in there, some good, some so-so. Some, like Culture Club's 12 of Karma Chameleon with picture sleeve of course, puzzling to say to the least. A 2008 re-issue of The Smiths This Charming Man is currently asking US$10, so I'm in front right there.

Bringing it all back home

2009-09-28T16:11:00.008+10:00

This weekend I am heading back to Perth. Collie, in fact, about two hours south, I think. I have never knowingly been to Collie although my father was born and grew up there.

Why am I going to Collie? It's to get my record collection. I have lived in Melbourne for nearly 14 years and when I moved here I left my collection of vinyl behind. So long has it been that I can hardly remember what is among them. I think there is probably 100 albums. And maybe a few 12 inch singles. Sure to be as many, most, were bought during the early to mid 1980s.

There might be a copy of The Smiths Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. There was in the 1980s. I know there was a copy of Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and maybe some other Dylan stuff. And there is a double Sonny Boy Williamson record. Get Happy by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Hopefully London Calling. Maybe a Gram Parsons disc or two.

I know that there are records that I once owned and may never see again. Some I gave away; some I loaned. I'm thinking of the Motown double Marvin Gaye anthology. And yes, Andrew Sproat, I'm looking at you.

But there are sure to be a few blushes among the Proustian moments. Let's hope it's worth the cost of freight back to Melbourne.

Keith Floyd

2009-09-16T19:14:00.007+10:00

I cooked our dinner tonight in a cast-iron frying pan that I bought in 1988. The frying pan is a Floyd, and it will probably outlive its owner. It has already outlived its begetter. Keith Floyd, television presenter and cook, died this week after a heart attack, aged 65. Like my father, though far less entertaining, he was married four times. (My father was a dreadful cook, but like Floyd, also handy around a bottle.)

Keith Floyd's kind of cooking program was a long way from Master Chef. A very, very long way from that sanctimonious nonsense. Oh my god, you could not even see Master Chef's porch light from where Floyd stood.

For starters, the theme music was Peaches by The Stranglers. Eh? I got hooked on Floyd on Fish, hooked by his mad enthusiasm for cooking and enjoying food. By his alright on the night style. He did not have a face for television, but he had a great way with the language and real curiosity about food, where it comes from and how it gets to the table. Floyd on Fish was a sort of mad drunken dash around the harbours of England and France, stopping to stew up lunch and uncork a bottle or three. It was food with guilt and pleasure without judgement.

Meeting Ron Brooks

2009-09-02T20:17:00.017+10:00

Some days I really love my job. Yesterday was one those days.

Two days a week I work on an exhibition of picture book art for the State Library of Victoria. At the moment I am in the pretty lovely position of going about to people whose work I know and admire and asking if I can (a) look through their files and (b) ask to borrow the best of it for a couple of years. The exhibition will open in Melbourne in November 2011 and all being well, tour to other venues in 2012.

So at a pretty sharp-ish hour, a taxi is pulling up outside my house. Already on board is an Allen & Unwin editor who is working with illustrator Ron Brooks on his memoir. Ron Brooks is one of Australia's best illustrators, whose work is published internationally. This one, John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat, (written by Jenny Wagner) has been in print since it was minted in 1977.

It's a haunting little tale of an old lady and the dog, John Brown, who shares her life. All is peaceful until one night a mysterious black cat arrives, insisting it be let in. John Brown is having none of it, not trusting this intruder. It's a book full of unforgettable images, tenderness and haunting questions.

Ron grew up in rural Victoria, then lived in swinging Warrandyte in the 1970's. But these days he calls Tasmania home. He is virtually unknown to the locals. The education authorities seem unaware of the treasure that they have on their doorstep.

Most artists would be happy to have one classic against their name. to my mind and eye, Ron Brooks has at least four books that deserve that title. One is 'John Brown'. He also illustrated The Bunyips of Berkely Creek, published in 1973. Hobart Airport didn't have a copy for sale (as I said, the locals seem oblivious), but I did see one on the spinner in Sydney Airport recently. 'The Bunyips' is a haunting, melancholy and highly original imagining of the mythical creatures' secret life. It's also a suitably surreal, moonlit world that Ron has created.

Not to be done with that, Brooks produced two more in the mid-1990s. The first of these is Old Pig, (with Margaret Wild) in 1995. It's the story of a grandmother and grandchild, and the realisation that these are Old Pig's last days. A more gently heartbreaking book you will never read. When I mention this title to adults who have read Old Pig, they often involuntarily clutch at their heart. Going to Brooks's house and seeing the landscape where he lives, you can see how fully and how richly the light, the trees and the sense of space is absorbed into his work. It's simply one of the most beautiful books you can find.

The fourth book in the canon is another written by Margaret Wild: Fox. Again, it's a celebration of landscape, of outsiders, of friendship under pressure. The images are dramatic, primal, unforgettable. Seeing the original images, some of which will go into the exhibition, really got the heart beating! I can't wait to see the selection up on the wall of the gallery. Because that's where Ron's work belongs.

At the moment, Brooks is working on two books, one a Margaret Wild text with a distinctly Tasmanian flavour. There will be a book by Julia Hunt first, a humorous, musical romance with Chagall overtones.

His approach to illustrating is a fine balance of the craftsman and the artist. He is both fox and badger. Before he even picks up a pencil, he is thinking about the text and how to make every word on the page resonate in the images. He can be highly critical of his own performances, even years later wishing he had done things differently. Rueful, but not bitter. Thinking about how to make the book he is working on the best it can possibly be.

The memoir for Allen & Unwin, which promises to reveal a lot more about this singular artist, will be out next year. Just before the exhibition.

Bittersweet

2009-08-16T21:17:00.010+10:00

There is a mood that certain French movies do so well. Daddy Nostalgie (1990) is a beautiful film with an exquisite ending.

Dirk Bogarde plays father to Jane Birkin's emotionally conflicted daughter. 'Daddy' is recovering from heart surgery. Caroline (Birkin) has arrived to help with the recovery but soon realises that he is dying. The film is directed by Bertrand Tavernier and written by his former wife, Colo Tavernier O'Hagan. So very much a family affair, since Birkin plays a scriptwriter in a performance that seems effortlessly natural. God, it's a millions miles from Slogan, in which she seems acutely conscious of the camera. I guess she got better. But the role of an English artist living in France could almost have been written for her. Bogarde came out of retirement to make this, his last film.

Father and daughter have not been close. At one point she mimics her father, saying, "I had no memories of you before the age of 20'. Ouch. The father has been, is, an alcoholic; a gentleman of the old school. Little girls should be seen and not heard, while the grown-ups get on with the serious business emptying bottles. The important thing in life for him is himself and the need to have a good time. Quietly, mind. There is a drole moment where he confesses to a barman his fears of not being able to make the journey from the carpark to the bar.

The film offers plenty of poignant moments too. It's a movie that speaks to anyone who has ever felt themselves cut out by their parent(s). But this is not a story of bitterness and recrimination. Somehow the film navigates its way into the hearts of Caroline and Daddy, and even the anxious, frightened wife. As someone whose relationship with his father was, to put it kindly, not close, I like this film for its compassion, kindness and honesty.

Daddy Nostalgie is a film I first saw 20 years ago. I bought this copy from Amazon.uk since it was on no shelf in Melbourne, rent or buy. It comes with a fascinating conversation between Birkin and Colo Tavernier, where they discuss, among other things, the overlapping identities of actors and their real and imagined families.

Remembering David McComb

2009-08-01T20:33:00.008+10:00

Vagabond Holes, a book reflecting on and remembering David McComb, has just been released. My connection to McComb is the same as many people: I loved his band The Triffids.

The collection of essays, memoirs, photographs and the odd poem by McComb (and others including John Kinsella), is edited by Chris Coughlan and Niall Lucy. Of Niall, I should say a great big thank you. He was a DJ on 6UVS-FM in the post-punk period: for awkward 17 year-old brought up on commercial radio his programs were pretty powerful stuff. They were surprising, challenging, exciting.

David McComb, like me, grew up in Western Australia. There the similarity ends. He in the lap of upper-middle class comfort, me not. As student, I saw The Triffids an awful lot. They were the main game in Perth from 1982 to, um, the early '90s. The only fun in town, you might say. David McComb wrote with such eloquence and intensity that "coming from Perth" became a much, much more interesting experience than it otherwise could have been. He gave us the words and the emotions to explore the world with.

David McComb died in 1999 in Melbourne, just before his 37th birthday.

Anyway, the book throws up all sorts of memories. There are photos of gigs I was at (like the Shaftsbury Hotel, where I hitch-hiked a couple of hundred kilometres to be there). But Vagabond Holes provides more than just a beanbag of memories to flop down in to. It is a generous tribute to a brilliant songwriter. The editors try to tease out some of the themes and achievements that myth has overgrown or obscured. There are some wonderful personal touches, too, like Gavin Martin (a journalist who arrived in Perth from the UK) finding David "gracious, attentive, always wanting to be sure I had amusement and company during my stay". David had that kindness about him. Later, Martin sees McComb at The Triffids London headquarters, at "the sort of convivial get-together they did so well". Megan Heyward records David's "exceptional kindness...it's the kindness and generosity I remember most". He showed the same generosity to me, when I was at a loose end in London. Kindness we can't repay.

I like James Paterson's piece. It's an unfinished argument with David about songwriting. Paterson not only writes clean, unfussy prose, but has stories to tell of working with McComb on songs. Paterson notes how McComb became enthralled to the Birthday Party, steering away from the more ironic, playful pop of the early tapes and singles. (When I saw Nick Cave at the Brixton Academy in 1990 Frances Walker came up at the end and said to me: "That was the Triffids".) As for me, well, I could get with McComb's fondness for Gram Parsons, but found the Rolling Stones covers hard to understand. Like, jesus, they are the enemy.

That the book embraces both a vernacular and an academic world view says something about the world in which David McComb moved. There is still more to explore and consider.

Not all the questions are answered. The one that I don't get is how McComb got so low so young. Yes, he and the band travelled constantly and probably lived in less than genteel poverty a lot of the time. So did a lot of people. But nobody wants to talk about the alcohol with any candour. What part did that play in his life and in his death? I lack the imagination to understand why someone as gifted could be so apparently self-destructive. His death was sad, is sad. But so were, it seems to me, the later years of his life.

But still that needs to be weighed with what David McComb and The Triffids did, and what they aspired to do. And that was, at times, heroic: to create this enduring sonic template of a young man at the edge of the world at the end of the 20th century.

Cricket is rarely this funny

2009-07-13T20:17:00.006+10:00

Amid the angst, the recriminations and the accusations of the "thrilling draw" in the first Ashes Test overnight, comes this dee-lightful homage to Victorian-born quickie Peter Siddle. Guardian columnist Barney Ronay explains why he would like to be friends with Siddle.

I love his ripplingly muscular head and the way, after he'd got Andrew Flintoff out, he didn't really know how to rearrange his features into a "pleased" expression and settled instead for looking pained. I also love the quietly guttural "UUNNCCHH!" sound he makes as he bowls, a deeply male noise, the noise of a man who has just dislodged a particularly stubborn wingnut on a vintage motorbike.

He also says some very, very funny things about Glenn McGrath. Much more like this from Ronay and he will have a cult following of his own, never mind Siddle. One Test match down, four to go.

La crise...cinema?

2009-07-04T13:36:00.014+10:00

My friend, a film reviewer, despairs of French movies.

John, let's call him, is chugging back a minimum of four films each week. Some of them are from the Hexagon. Recently he slung me a fistful, including Welcome to the Sticks (Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis) and The Grocer's Son (Le Fils de l'epicier). And for good measure the 1968 Gainsbourg-Birkin premier collaboration, Slogan.

Slogan is the story of an advertising man's midlife crisis (la crise du moyen age?), which is, I admit, a pretty banal plot. Seriously wealthy and successful guy gets bored flying to Venice to pick up advertising kudos. Meets beautiful, much younger woman, throws over wife. Fellini's 8 1/2 it is not.

Jane Birkin is 22, wears improbably short frocks and speaks with an appalling accent. Until she auditioned for the film, Birkin had never spoken French. (She admits to all of this in an accompanying 30 minute documentary.) So, a middle-aged man fascinated by a woman far too young to be seen with who quickly becomes an obsession. My friend John might suggest here that this pretty much the French film industry's calling card...but back to Slogan.

This is a curious film. Made in 1968, it's oblivious to the Paris riots, even though when the couple do eventally (inevitably?) move in together it's in the shadow of the Pantheon. Don't look to cinema for history, I guess. Serge Gainsbourg's idea of revolution was something else altogether I suspect. The film is clunky in the script and the production. The pacing is uncertain and even the music written by Gainsbourg fails to establish a clear motif or mood. Laboured might best describe the enterprise. But the film established them as the "it couple" of the time and changed Birkin's life.

Neither Birkin nor Gainsbourg seem comfortable in front of the camera. There is often a self-consciousness that makes viewing the film uncomfortable. And yet...and yet. What starts as the lament of a middle-aged man turns into something much more interesting. Because as Evelyne, Birkin's ingenue becomes the rebel. There is one darkly funny, slightly cringe-making scene in which Serge introduces Evelyne to a score of friends and colleagues: "Please meet my little home-breaker" he says to a gallery of disapproving faces. Clearly infidelity is okay as long as it stays out of sight. Everything about their relationship put two fingers up to the ruling standards of the day. And their affair does catch a certain joy.

But the beautiful Evelyne quickly finds herself in the role of haus-frau. Her status as mistress is deeply uncertain. She demands that they have a baby, and that they marry. Both options seem rather quaint nowadays, but likely perhaps then. Not even frequent trips Venice can quell the resistance, her apparent freedom now another prison. In Venice Evelyne meets a muscular Italian whose only qualifications for her heart seem to be driving a speedboat dangerously fast through the crowded canals and clambering onto historic bridges. Bogans it seems are international.

Serge meanwhile seems impervious to what goes on about him. He never seems to really solicit our sympathy, continuing in his lugubrious way. Until Evelyne and the Italian elope. And then he turns very nasty indeed. But freedom won't be denied. What is most striking is the extent to which Slogan unwittingly provides the template for Birkin and Gainsbourg's own relationship, which lasted twelve years. Birkin sets out the influence of Serge Gainsbourg on her life with lasting affection and respect.

In the DVD's accompanying documentary, Birkin talks of their separation as like an adolescent revolt, kicking over the boundaries set up by a tyrannical parent. She also talks about Serge's peculiar attractiveness and charm. It's a fascinating relationship that began with Slogan. Birkin has made over 60 films: this one launched her career and changed her life. Even my friend the film critic must concede that you have to start somewhere.

Clearly Gainsbourg would have been a man that was difficult to live with. This little reflection by UK music writer Nick Kent on Gainsbourg's later years spells out just what a mess he became. (Oh that Kent could write with the same candour about, say, Keith Richard.) Serge Gainsbourg's life will get a more detailed examination when the biopic appears next year.

Whole wide world

2009-06-15T18:40:00.008+10:00

Wreckless Eric, he of the utterly timeless Whole Wide World, now pops up his own radio show. Well, music blog. So, if you like your music with a sideways French lilt, and let's face it, who doesn't it, you can tune in here.

(Amy Rigby and Wreckless Eric)

I was mighty surprised to find that Eric now shares his breakfast toast with American indie semi-legend Amy Rigby. Her Diary of a Mod Housewife was a staple at our house when it appeared, ooh, a dozen years ago.

Saturday morning

2009-06-14T21:12:00.007+10:00

On Saturday morning I wandered into a local vinyl vendor and found a record I never owned, the one and only lp of The Tom Tom Club. Played when I got home and discovered all that lovely uncodified fusion. Joy!

Later on Saturday my good lady wife flipped on Amadou & Miriam's disc Welcome to Mali. It strikes me that Amadou & Miriam are doing what David Byrne and company did. (And what Tina Weymouth does so delightfully here.) That is, plunder the shelves of another musical culture.

Talking Heads were all over African music. And Amadou & Miriam bring it all back home -- via Paris. Viva le bricolage!

Another weekend in front of the tele

2009-06-10T20:55:00.006+10:00

Hey, someone's gotta do it. A month or three ago Eric Rohmer's Early Works lobbed into the letterbox. Yay! Having savoured the Comedies & Proverbs eight film collection I was keen to dig deeper.

There are three main films in the set, including The Sign of Lion (Le Signe du Lion), his 1962 debut feature. It's the story, somewhat hackneyed, of an obnoxious American in Paris who believes he is about to come into a large amount of money. But the twist comes when, having racked up debts and outstayed his welcome everyone, no money appears. In fact, his fortunes take a dive and he is soon homeless. You can see some the familiar tropes beneath the leathery exterior: probing moral questions of behaviour; Paris streets as the natural stage for the drama; apparently aimless search for connection, for purpose.

At one level the film invites the question, what would you do faced with a sudden change of fortune? What does it mean to be a part of society? How easily can we slip between the cracks?

Probably not a great date movie and it's not hard to see why Le Signe du Lion failed to find an audience at the time. The main character, Pierre, doesn't engage our sympathies, so one watches in an appropriately detached manner...Pierre is a failed music student, a dilattante whose violin playing is akin to badly played Bartok. But his fall from uncertain grace is believable and well, there is always Paris. Most of it takes place in the St Germain, the Latin and along the Seine. So plenty of architectural eye-candy. But their is a sense of earnestness that is a bit ponderous. That earnestness soon gave way to mere seriousness. So I look forward to more of the early years.

The dBs

2009-05-31T20:43:00.009+10:00

Where did The dBs come from and what the heck became of them? In the days when I lived on student wages and the intrawebs were the fanciful dream of the cider-deluded engineering student, The dBs were band that cast a beautiful shadow. They never toured to Perth, though Peter Holsapple joined REM on the road, and never seemed to be written about. There was a lovely sense of mystery about them, not quite like early Belle & Sebastian but maybe not far off. Enough to say that The dBs played a style of pop that was embraced by many, including I think, Dom Mariani (then and still a charming man).

Anyway, tripping about the interwebs, invented thankfully in the intervening years, I found this delightful short film by Emily Hubley. Hublely has gone on to a successful career as an animator - and the dBs? Well, who knows, and if the song seems a little light on, well, such were the times.

Days

2009-05-16T15:06:00.016+10:00

What a week.

Friday, emergency trip to the dentist to start root canal.

Friday night, Fremantle Dockers throw away perfectly winnable home game with lousy kicking.

Saturday, French language class, introduced to the subjonctif tense.

Next?

Oh, well. Stumbled on this on ABC2 a few Sundays ago and it has been following me around ever since.

Lest we forget

2009-04-27T20:52:00.008+10:00

I was talking to a publisher recently about possible subjects for future books. There are so many books about war, soldiers, battles and so on, why not a book on the peace movement, I suggested. The Anzacs, Simpson and his donkey, Vietnam, the Western Front...these subjects are catnip to awards judges. But the peace movement? My publisher friend just laughed.

"If I wanted to throw away money," he seemed to say.

Such thoughts were in mind in the lead up to Anzac day, the one day of the year. It is not I look forward to. Sure I love a footy match as much as any, but I feel uncomfortable with all that unquestioned acceptance of authority.

My unease about the way we mark war was there again recently during my first ever trip to Canberra. A friend works for the War Memorial; its education program is experienced by more school children than any other cultural institution in Australia. Canberra seems built for grand parades, though its no Champs Elysees. The money expended on memorials, sculptures and buildings marking our war history...it's all just a bit over the top.

Anyway, my thoughts on why I don't get Anzac day crystallised yesterday listening to this lecture by historian Marilyn Lake. Commemorations like Anzac day are not only acts of remembrance, but of forgetting, also, a highly selective version of history, one that smoothes over difficult passages, the conflicts that go on in the making of history. Anzac day itself has a particular history, one not unconnected with the political influence. Howard was particularly adept at wrapping himself in the flag. It is the selective remembering of war and what war is that makes Anzac day one that I find very hard to love indeed.

Waking us to this

2009-04-16T22:11:00.002+10:00

I'm intrigued and hopeful about this.

(Thanks, Bec.)

how i live now

2009-04-11T19:02:00.006+10:00

I call myself a lapsed West Australian. This week I celebrated my thirteenth year in Melbourne. Sure I'd love to live in Paris but Melbourne does fine for me.

Today columnist Susan Maushart gave some good reasons as to why that might be. Quoting author Richard Florida (Who's Your City?) Maushart writes that choosing a city is like choosing a mate and that cities have their own metabolic rate and their own personalities. Maushart summarises:

Cities...can be categorised as "open to experience" (Melbourne maybe), conscientious (Adelaide, assuredly), extroverted (Sydney - OMG!!), agreeable (Hobart o Brisbane, if you like), or neurotic (Perth, now piss off). Truly - Perth was ranked among the most neurotic cities in the entire world. Turns out it's all about Perth's extreme isolation, and the unique mental trade deficit that goes with that. Basically, we export the sort of people who week social engagement with the wider world (the young and the functional) - while attracting the sort of people who seek divorce from the wider world. And in most cases, the differences really are irreconcilable.

So, don't take my word for it.

Good Friday

2009-04-10T16:52:00.011+10:00

Radio National's The Book Show served up an Easter treat this morning when Ramona Koval spoke to Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Their topic? The novels and the ethics of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, of course. Williams is the author of the book, Dostoyevsky: language, faith and fiction.

Clearly the archbishop has plenty of time for the Dostoyevsky. He speaks with a lot of insight about the Russian's complicated relationship to Christ, and also about the way a novel works. Williams describes the novels like The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment as a kind of working out of possibilities and questions that would be impossible in life. Which is not to say that the novels are an idealisation of possibilities. They act like a laboratory in which the answers are never conclusive.

The conversation between Koval and Williams is a lively tennis match, the host lobbing questions nonchalantly, yet always being challenged by Williams's insightful, probing returns. They also talked about the lack of dogma or certainty in the novel, how any good novel, any real novel, is devoid of doctrinal position. (Which is why CS Lewis continues to get a caning for the Narnia books, whatever else might be said of them.) Fundamentalism has no place in the novel. Williams is a more than decent literary critic.

In talking about the life of Dostoyevsky, the archbishop and the journalist agreed firmly on one thing. That is, it is usually better not to meet your idols. Dostoyevsky is described as quarrelsome, hyper-sensitive and self-absorbed. Even for a writer, that's quite the trifecta.

Williams had taken leave from his role as the Archbishop of Canterbury and talked about how good it was to get up each day and write. To not have to attend endless committee meetings, and write endless letters and campaign to solve life's insoluble problems. It was someone speaking with real delight about the pleasure of his work. My only quibble was that in signing off Koval patronised Williams, aiming for match point by wishing him well in the struggle with those problems by regular prayer. He deserved better than that.

When the interview had finished (and I had finished shaving) I went in to my bedroom. There to see wife and daughter both crying, (daughter weeping) over the death of Lee Scoresby in Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass.

You bring the amps

2009-03-27T21:36:00.004+11:00

...I've got the band names.

If I was forming a band (and the good news is, I'm not about to) there's just one place I would go looking for name. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. It is a goldmine. Here's some random possibilities, and the band one might form (if one was forming a band).

Inexpressibles: art rock, obviously.

Marine Store: industrial strength indie

Mari Lwyd: ambient-ethnic-folk

Maul of Monks: goth-core

Rochelle Salt: riot grrrl revisited

Ruffian's Hall: Hmmm, not sure about this one. Maybe they aren't, either

Sea Lawyer: smart-arse pop (think TISM meets Loudon Wainwright III)

Shekinah: metal

Sugar Daddy: r 'n' b, apparently

Dr Syntax, pub rock with art rock pretensions

Synecdoche: instrumental, post-prog

Syrinx: prog

The Seven Against Thebes: Liverpudlian trip-hop

Tokyo Rose: I actually saw them in Perth in the 19080s. They were terrible.

Wayzgoose: John Butler wannabe

Praying-wheel: indie wimp-pop

See, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. For all your musical needs.

A year ago

2009-03-15T16:23:00.033+11:00

...we were packing our backs for Paris. So much planning, saving, talking about and dreaming had gone into the trip that my stepson, who stayed home to follow the footy, wondered out loud what we would do with ourselves after it was all over.

What else? Plan the next one, of course. Anyway, in memory of all that, here's a couple of images from the trip.

Iris, day one, on the Seine

View from the Louvre

Printemps a Paris, Jardin de Plantes

Ninth birthday, at the wonderful Red Wheelbarrow Bookshop

Down by the Seine, Michelle, soaking up the sun

Rue Mouffetard, our neighbourhood

Friends in high places

Serge Gainsbourg's grave, Cimetiere du Montparnasse

This really was a great and pleasant surprise. The site has, and I hesitate to say it, a distinctly happy air about it. There is an enormous fondness for the late singer, expressed through objects left here by fans: packets of cigs, wine bottles, photographs, notes, gifts, a cabbage, and least explicable of all, the Teletubby doll Po hanging on a branch. I left with a whole new regard for the old guy and listen to his music in a new way. The cemetery is also home to writers including Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett.

Next Saturday I start a new course in learning French, a year to the day we arrived there. I am planning to study over the next two years and develop a more solid knowledge. We can but dream.

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend

2009-03-02T21:16:00.020+11:00

I love this film. Always have, always will.

Okay, so what if the acting is a little rigid: ruffling one's own hair and waving one's arm wildly does not emotion make. But that is what Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet) does during moments of provocation, and there are plenty of those in this superb romantic comedy.

Fabien (Eric Viellard) wants to be with Blanche but she is aware that Lea (Sophie Renoir), Fabien's boyfriend, is her new best friend. So Blanche is keeping her distance, or at least trying to.

The proverb of this film, the last of the six Comedies and Proverbs is: 'the friend of my friend is my friend also'.

Emmanuelle Chaulet in just one several delightful period pieces.

Complicating things further, Blanche believes (and is encouraged to believe by Lea), that she is drawn to Alexandre, a charming Lotharia, played by Francoise-Eric Gendron. Alexandre is a friend of Fabien, just to square the circle.

Blanche works an arts bureaucrat in Cergy-Pontoise, a rather futuristic village, or at least futuristic in 1986 when L'ami de mon amie was made. It's a rather sterile, remote place, yet one that allows the four main protagonists to encounter each other in the course of a day or evening, in a way that a city might not. There are no cars, everybody walks everywhere, there are plenty of cafes and the lake is surrounded by parklands. (What's not to like about that?) It is the cleverly and carefully orchestrated crossing of paths that makes this film swing. That and the wonderful, vulnerable and believable characters.

Blanche is such a likable heroine; her situation so recognisable. She is not at all calculating, or if she is, not presumptive enough to act on her plans or hopes. One of the pleasures of the film is watching and waiting as the pieces fall intricately into place.

The film has a number of my favourite sequences. Watching the film again on dvd brought back some of the feelings I first experienced when I saw it for the first time. Where was that? Can't remember: either Perth Film Festival (Somerville Gardens?) or the Windsor in Nedlands. There are a indelible moments such as when Blanche and Fabien go for rambling on the tow-paths and forests outside Cergy-Pontoise; when we see the vast empty modernist plaza of the village, so far from Paris; Alexandre's unexplored differences with his girlfriend (who he completely fails to understand) and when all are united by the story's end.

Unsurprisingly, after watching My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, I spent much of the weekend wishing I was in Paris.

Le sigh.

Full Moon in Paris

2009-02-15T15:25:00.016+11:00

Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune (Full Moon in Paris) turns on the following proverb: "He who has two women loses his mind. He who has two houses loses his soul".

Not surprisingly for Eric Rohmer, the 'he' is in fact a 'she'. Louise (the late Pascale Ogier) lives with her boyfriend Remi (Tcheky Karyo) in a drab dormitory suburb. When the film begins she is already working on restoring her Paris apartment, her pied-a-terre, where she can, if she likes, spend occasional nights staying over in town.

As one might.

This is not going down well with Remi, whom Louise deftly out-maneuvers with some typically rapid fire joustings. "Surely you want me to be happy? This will make me happy, therefore you ought to be happy that I am doing this."

Louise is a young (and quite beautiful) design graduate. She has a friend, Octave (Fabrice Luchini), a writer whose self-obsession and self-importance is a comic counterpoint to Louise, who merely wants her own way in most things. Louise is one of those beautiful, capricious women that one goes to university in order to meet. Indeed how she came to be with the rather stolid Remi is a bit of a mystery. Their relationship is prickly, unfulfilling, unhappy. In wanting both worlds, her own life in Paris and the stable but rather boring suburbs, Louise is walking a tight-rope. She is tempted by others but wants to hold firm to her ideals, however muddled they might be.

Full Moon in Paris shares some of the concerns of Love in the Afternoon, though the characters arrive at a different destination. In the earlier film Frederic, married and living in the suburbs, is attracted to Chloe, an old friend who re-enters his life at a point where he is contemplating the attraction of others. This attraction culminates in one the most exquisite scenes in all Rohmer's films, where Frederic, rather unwisely goes to Chloe's apartment, pursuing his dreams. Louise, likewise, wants to fulfill some half-expressed desire for independence. But in getting what she wishes for it might seem that she is being punished for it. But this would be wring. After all, Louise might be unwise, even a little misled, but in the end it is not that she is forced to choose but that her choices have been made for her.

This film might not have all the surface sparkle of others like My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, Pauline a la Plage or A Summer's Tale. Despite the title, the film is something of an anti-romantic film. The comedy is disguised by the apparently indulgent, self-absorbed actions of Louise and Octave. On the other hand, my wife was agog at the early 1980s fashion, which included extravagant cowl-necks, a black faux-punk zipper shouldered dress, Louise's flamboyant beehive hair-style and period precise elbows-in dancing.

Honk if you 4QATED today

2009-02-04T21:08:00.009+11:00

SA4QE, as I mentioned in an earlier post, celebrates the work of writer Russell Hoban.

Today, 4 February, is Hoban's 84th birthday. He is still writing and his books for children, teenagers and adults, are still published, read and enjoyed.

Here's my 4qation, left in the State Library's La Trobe Reading Room. I chose this piece because of the way it plays with ideas about language, creativity and time.

“Burning to say something! shouted the night watchman. “It is in me, something to say!”
“You simply don’t know how it is with literary people like me,” the crocodile went on. “The waiting, waiting, waiting for that perfect time!”
The night watchman had burned more incense than usual that evening. He was giddy with the fragrance and the heat of it, words danced in his head. In all the words of his own language he found nothing to say, but as the hours passed his mind became full of the sounds of the language the crocodile spoke so flowingly. Unknown words danced in his head. Eleven o’clock came, half-past eleven. Then it was midnight, and there was that tiny buzzing pause while his clock gathered itself to strike twelve times.
“NOW IS THE ONLY TIME THERE IS!” shouted the night watchman. He shouted in the crocodile’s language, in words he did not know the meaning of.
“What’s that?” said the startled crocodile as the clock finished its twelve strokes.

From La Corona and the Tin Frog by Russell Hoban, illustrated by Nicola Bayley
London, 1979

Bravo, Babar!

2009-02-02T21:01:00.005+11:00

Recently I was talking with my colleague and we agreed that Babar, the elephant character of French picture books, is a curious beast. There is something a bit antiquated about these books that doesn't quite leap easily into the modern idiom. I suppose that is part of the charm.

As a parent, I never found that my young reader nor myself particularly enjoyed the world of Babar. As we did say, the poems of AA Milne and the stories of Winnie the Pooh, to take another antique animal character at random. Bof!

Recently I have been following the blog for Babar, Harry Potter and Compagnie, an exhibition at the BNF in Paris. The exhibition highlights the picture book collection of the Bibliotheque National de France. It's quite a traditional looking show going by the video documentary you can see there. Charming, beautifully curated and designed...but perhaps a little dry for the intended audience.

Anyway, digging a little further into the website (yes, blog and website, they are full-service library) I discovered this charming page-turn with audio. Taking the Babar book, ABC de Babar, the clever BNF'ers have digitised the pages to create a game of lexical hide and seek. Roll the mouse across the page. Explore the illustrations and discover the words. Click and you can hear the words in French. It's a kind of Gallic Animalia, only with lots of elephants. There is an English version too, but as the French would say, pour quoi?

Geezers III

2009-01-26T20:29:00.010+11:00

Ladies and gentlemen, Leonard Cohen.

Fifteen years since his last tour, and 24 years since I saw him in Perth on the Various Positions tour, Leonard Cohen opened this Australian tour at the Rochford Winery for Day on the Green. Think of it as the Big Day Out for the over 40s.

His band was simply magnificent. The arrangements were all about respect for the songs and the singer. Virtuoso players were kept on a firm leash by the musical director Roscoe Beck, himself deftly working over a five-string bass throughout. But the stand-out (besides Cohen obviously), was Javier Mas. You can see Mas here playing 12-string with Sharon Robinson, Cohen's collaborator and vocalist on this tour.

There is something European and decidely non-rock and roll about Cohen's songs. The language of his music often seems to be the cast-off idioms of gentle waltzes, cabaret and torch and in this he was brilliantly aided.

Leonard Cohen has forty years of songwriting and he picked the eyes out of them in a perfectly paced set. Highlights were a wonderful reading of Bird on a Wire, the spoken word If it Be Your Will, the sweet satisfaction of Democracy and I'm Your Man. But there were so many highlights that I'm merely lining up my own. I don't thing I've ever seen an artist receive so many standing ovations. It was just spontaneous and sincere. (Also, no Bono!)

The tour is all about recovering the financial losses inflicted by a shonky manager. Five million short in the retirement fund is a compelling reason to perform live again. That may well be so but I wonder if there is also something about showing off the tapestry of a long and interesting career. As I type this I can almost hear Neil Young at the real Big Day Out where my stepson has gone. Ragged glory was never Cohen's way.

And yet this wasn't merely about trotting out the big moments. He wasn't doing cover versions of himself, a victory lap for the benefit of baby-boomers. (Even though his appeal is mostly to the boomers, there is plenty for everyone.) Yes, the show was slick and the set list in the Yarra Valley is the same as in Amsterdam or Auckland. But even at 74 he pushed his voice hard, gave the songs all the care they demanded and showed that he remains a rare and valuable artist.

Learning slopes

2009-01-21T21:59:00.006+11:00

Tonight I fronted the 'preparing for French 2A/2B' class. "Third floor, room 310 on the left" said the burly guy at the desk. So I go in. A little late. Sit at the back of a crowded classroom.

Olivier continues talking. At some speed. I can keep up. Just. Sort of.

He then begins to read speedily text about the film Amelie. We are asked to write down any verbs we hear. It's a little idiomatic. Not much is making clear sense. I lean to woman sitting beside me. "This is 2A, yeah?"

"No, this is 3A."

Me: "Oh."

I persevere. It becomes clear that some people have a very sound grasp of business and some are a little shaky. I stick it out and contribute as much as one can in a class of 25.

Afterwards another student tells me what text book was used in previous classes. Voila! It's the same one that we used with Anita.

It's much faster, more down to business, but hopefully enjoyable.

PS, Later Iris asked: "What were your favourite low-key moments in Paris?" For the record, hers was driving home at night in a taxi. "It was like having New Years's Eve at your fingertips."

Le rayon vert

2009-01-18T19:03:00.009+11:00

Last week my good lady wife and I went off to see Il y a Longtemps Je T'aime (I've Loved You So Long), the Kristin Scott Thomas film, which I much enjoyed for its restraint and nuance. This is the kind of film one despairs of seeing in these days of Miramax market-researched movie making. In one scene, the belligerent host of a dinner party begins a tirade about the death of French cinema and how Eric Rohmer is the successor of Racine. We're not inclined to take him at his word but the movie is not without its Rohmer-esque moments.

Which caused me to leave left cinema determined to watch Rohmer's Le Rayon Vert. Talk about delayed gratification. When I was a callow youth of, ooh, 23 or 24, Le Rayon Vert screened at the Perth Institute of Film and Television. I remember the reviews leading up to it. The story of a young woman on holiday who can't make up her mind where to spend it, who to be with or what to do with herself. The review took on board Rohmer's low-key cinema and urged people to go along and see for themselves. I don't exactly know why (I was broke?), but I didn't see it. And kept on not seeing it for about 25 years.

A friend who did see it then was of the opinion that Le Rayon Vert was a bit of a waste of time. "She wanders around and can't make up her mind and then, pffft!, she looks at the sunset and that's it", was her opinion. So hardly a ringing endorsement and really I was none the wiser. That was probably my first brush with ER. I think the first Rohmer film I saw was L' ami de mon amie (My Girlfriend's Boyfriend), probably at the Windsor Cinema in Nedlands.

Suffice to say that the wait to see Le Rayon Vert was worth it. This is the fifth film on the Comedies and Proverbs sequence and is attended by the couplet: 'Ah, for the days/that set our hearts ablaze'.

Ah, for the days. For this what Delphine seeks and yearns, to have her heart ablaze with a true and unique love. But it seems that she is bent on ensuring only her own unhappiness and frustration by a kind of neurosis of place and self, played out in Paris, Cherbourg, the mountains and then, finally Biarritz. However Delphine's avoidance of others, of family, of social friendship and casual affairs, has a purpose that gradually reveals itself through the film. This sympathetic, subtle and skillful film-making. Surprisingly most of the dialogue is improvised. Maybe this is why Marie Riviere has such a command of the role: she is creating it as she goes. The ending of the film is exquisite, a mystery, a possibility, an answer and a question.

In thinking about this film and remember how first missed it I went for a little search about PIFT. I didn't find quite what I was looking for but did turn up a highly detailed portrait of film culture in Perth in the 1960s and '70s. By the time I was ready to go the movies in the 1980s, (a time before Miramax) Perth had a fertile film agenda and a curiosity about the wider world that belied its remote location, its conservative nature, and the difficulties of getting the best world cinema to the screen in a timely way. Tom O'Regan's article, Film societies and festivals in Western Australia, told me quite a lot I didn't know and didn't suspect, about how a band of dedicated folk brought the world to Perth's screens. People of my age benefitted from some challenging programming at PIFT and the Perth International Film Festival, which took place (and still does I presume) in the pine trees at the University of Western Australia.

Blighter's rock

2009-01-08T21:22:00.009+11:00

The Russell Hoban community online celebrates the author's birthday every year in a unique way. You see, Hoban is rather attached to yellow paper. Writing on the stuff. Has been for years. He turns 84 on 4 February.

Russell Hoban is the author of more than sixty books for children (including The Mouse and His Child and the Frances books) and more than a dozen novels for adults. His best known novels include Riddley Walker, Turtle Diary and Kleinzeit. There is even a YA novel, The Trokeville Way, squeezed in there. He still writing and still being published. But back to the yellow paper.

Russell Hoban's birthday is marked simply, quietly, by readers leaving quotes from his work printed on to a page of yellow A4 paper. Why yellow paper? Hoban writes on yellow paper, he says, to ward of "blighter's rock...to intensify the blankness of a blank sheet of white paper is to run to meet trouble considerably more than halfway."

You can catch up on past SA4QE events at the spiffy new blog. Prepare to be surprised 4 February.

What other ways do readers celebrate the birthdays of their favourite authors?

Youth novels

2009-01-05T21:26:00.014+11:00

If you have seen the earlier entries of What Swerves you may have noticed a fondness for geezer rock. Last night I think I broke the mold, getting my zimmer along to the Prince Bandroom for a sold-out dance party of the mind with Lykke Li.

Soup to nuts, the Swedish singer/songwriter/performer played for an hour. Including encore. She hit the stage like a demented Muppet and just went from the there. Needless to say, the crowd went with her every twist, bump and grind of the way. It was a great show. A dance party with a jagged edge. A popstar with a post-punk tilt. She is a thesis, a thesaurus of influence and attitude. Vulnerable, a little bit Betty Blue, a little bit early Blondie.

Her three piece band, all lads who looked like escapees from the Ikea School of Design, rock. The set list was tight, all from her first album Youth Novels, plus a Kings of Leon tune. I was taken by the way the guitar player was kept at the back of the stage, the drummer to the front. This arse-about arrangement kept the focus on Lykke and emphasised the rhythm. Lykke herself occasionally blew hard on a kazoo. And sang through a loud hailer. And prowled the stage like she was brought up by Public Enemy. When she wasn't purring like a young Eartha Kitt. Or belting the bejeezus out of a cymbal.

No wonder I was bleary eyed this morning.

Pauline a la plage

2008-12-27T16:14:00.009+11:00

Pauline a la plage (1983) is a superbly balanced story of four people who meet, where else, at the beach, becoming entangled in a delicate mesh of amorous misunderstandings. Marion has taken her fifteen-year-old cousin Pauline on holiday to the Brittany coast and there meets Pierre, an old boyfriend. Almost immediately another, older man, Henri. It has to be said that Henri is un roue vieux, a libertine of sorts. The recently divorced Marion is of course immediately drawn to Henri, despite Pierre 's earnest confession that he is still in love with her.

Marion is classic Rohmer, her high-minded ideals soon undermined by her own actions. Of course this is done without malice for her, it is simply the way we humans prefer to live our lives. " A wagging tongue bites itself" is the motto of the film, the third in the Comedies and Proverbs, and thus it proves for Marion. (And yes, it's another very talky Rohmer film, brimming with lively debate and dialogue.)

Henri and Marion getting to grips

All this emotional to-ing and fro-ing is observed with equilibrium by Pauline. And of course Pauline has a little love interest too in Sylvan, whom she meets also a la plage. Their attraction is uncomplicated by the standards of the adults, but Pauline is drawn into their machinations by Henri, acting to save his own skin. For Pauline it's a bruising encounter with the double standards of the adult world.

Pauline a la plage would make a great YA novel. The teenage characters are deftly and convincingly captured by Rohmer, an absolute master of the late adolescent years.

A final, not insignificant pleasure is the Brittany coastline in late summer: though there is a glimpse of Mont St Michel, the season is the wind blown, low slanting light of late summer. Not the postcard France yet all the more affecting for it.

DIY

2008-12-25T18:52:00.004+11:00

So the solution to the where to get the buche de noel turned out to be pretty simple. Do it yourself. A quick search of the intrawebs, a couple of hours to weed out the totally chocolate versions and, eh, voila! I made it myself.

You will just have to take my word that, though. I followed this recipe from the BBC website.

I had plenty of raspberries and should have used more in the filling. (Should have read that part a little closer!) But it was enjoyable and surprisingly easy. The roll is a meringue-sponge and not as fragile as I feared. The result was a real crowd-pleaser and very, very tasty.

Next year I will experiment and try for something lighter. All that cream...but a happy alternative to pudding.

Paris swings

2008-12-16T20:34:00.004+11:00

Earlier this year we spent three and a half glorious weeks in Paris. Just Paris. In March and early April the weather is cool - even the locals long-faced. Still, we spent a fair amount of time checking the playgrounds. One, because you can't spend all of your time at galleries and cafes (maybe not all), and two because the playgrounds of Paris can be fantastic.

My good lady wife wrote this story about Paris playgrounds, published in The Age travel section.

By the way, I am Paris dreaming again, thinking of winter time trip next time. So any advice, tips or information on traveling in France en hiver warmly welcome!

Buche de Noel

2008-12-01T20:24:00.008+11:00

One of the joys of Christmas in recent years has been Buche de Noel, the 'Christmas log'.

Christmas pudding is never a bad thing, I love it of course, but the Buche de Noel is something else. Essentially a sponge-cream roll with chocolate and fruit you get all the calories and not so much the pudding's heft. It's light, it's sweet, it's creamy.

Anyway, such thoughts were in my mind today when I hopped into La Parisian Pates in Lygon Street. Would LaPP have B de N this Christmas? No, they haven't for the past couple of years. Though they are currently stocking up heavily for Noel.

So where to go? That's my project for the next month. Hunt the Buche de Noel. Game on.

The end of the affair

2008-11-02T11:22:00.019+11:00

The Aviator's Wife is the first in Eric Rohmer's six-film Comedies and Proverbs series. I watched The Aviator's Wife over two nights while away on a tour of regional Victoria. It's the story of Francois' attempts to woo Anne, a woman five years his elder and of Anne's affair with Christian, an airline pilot. The film opens when Christian visits Anne's apartment early one morning to tell her that things must change as his wife is now moving to Paris.

The story works as series of fragments, or fractions of the whole, you might say. When Francois follows Christian later that day to Parc Buttes Charmont and sees him lingering there with yet another woman, he assumes Christian to be having another affair. But who is this woman? Further, Francois is 'picked up' by a young woman who joins him in spying on the couple. What does she mean to Francois? Later when he mentions the girl to Anne, Anne all but encourages him to pursue her.

Each character is unable or unwilling to see what desires others have. In Anne we have a complex, sometimes frustrating woman. Faced with the news from Christian she is clearly wounded, yet shows her defeat with flinty, brittle gestures. Not her for the amateur dramatics. Somehow her reticence rings truer. Yet she treats Francois rather offhandedly. (But he is young and might one day know better.) The story works almost as series of negations, or question marks. Scarcely anyone, it seems, is destined to get what they want.

Richard Brody in The New Yorker recently reviewed The Girl from the Monceau Bakery, a film Rohmer made twenty years earlier. He notes: "His plan is to frame chance as destiny - his great religious quasi-metaphysical theme - and his message, his career-long trope, is the deferral of pleasure in anticipation of true love."

Chance plays its part in The Aviator's Wife, but not to the point of guiding destiny. The realities of other lives press a little closer here, but the deferral of pleasure is resonant and lasting. The conclusions are more open ended and the film all the more memorable for that.

Eric Rohmer

2008-10-15T21:07:00.005+11:00

When my tax return appeared in the mailbox a few weeks back I decided to spend some of it on a bunch of films. I have waited for the re-issue of Eric Rohmer's films, in the way that Louis Malle and Jean Luc Godard have enjoyed. Not to be, or at least, not yet.

So I fired off an order to amazon.uk. Voila, nine days later, The Eric Rohmner Collection. Eight films and the usual extras (short films, trailers and interview with the director). Six films are from the Comedies and Proverbs series, including The Green Ray, Pauline at the Beach, Full Moon in Paris and more. We jumped right in Love in the Afternoon (L'Amour L'Apres-midi). What needs to be said? The film is a typically wry yet surprisingly passionate portrayal of the life of a recently married man. Frederic is a busy young entrepreneur, but he has, shall we say, a rich and vivid inner life. His musings are made real with the re-appearance of Chloe, a young woman Frederic knew before he married.

And there are those incidental pleasures that Rohmer's films offer. The cat and mouse game between what is said and what is meant; the weave of the everyday and the philosophical, the absence of histrionics behind the camera (or in the editing suite). And then there is Paris. The streets of (I think) St Germain de Pres, the cafes, the stlyish offices where the secretaries hammer at typewriters...Made in 1972, the film glows with a look that sums up the period. We suspect the hand of Yves St Laurent. The clothes, in particular those of Chloe, are stunning.

So while I continue to savour this one, I look forward to six or seven more over the coming months.

Photobooth

2008-10-04T21:57:00.006+10:00

So I am dope with a keyboard.

But this afternoon I discovered Photo Booth.

Ooh, hoo, Andy Warhol...

Elegant camping

2008-10-01T20:36:00.017+10:00

We have just come back from a week in South Fremantle. We stayed at our favourite suburban eco-lodge, The Painted Fish. Currently owned by Tim and his wife Shani, it's a slice of old-school Fremantle in a town that is rapidly changing. I grew up around Fremantle and just south of there, so it is a place ripe with memory and association. This is the second time we have stayed at the Fish: finding accommodation in Fremantle is a fraught business. In May we looked far and wide (well, spent a couple of frustrating hours on line) before realising that, yes, we would be paying more to stay in Fremantle than we paid to stay in Paris. Yes, you read that right.

Anyway, the upside of the Painted Fish comes with (sorry for this) actual frogs and is close to South Beach. The apartment runs on solar energy, has its own water tanks and the gardens are lush with green vegetables. Tim is a tireless worker and fixer-upper and the Fish is a monument to his labour.

This is a pic of the studio where we stayed. The tree was a magnet for bees and the ponds are home to motorbike frogs, named for the loud but not unpleasant croaking they make in the night. Iris enjoyed riding her scooter by the beach, we walked a lot and ate perhaps a little too well.

South Fremantle is something of a refuge (albeit a pricey one) from the centre of town, which is fast becoming a shell of itself. I am reminded of Peter Carey's story about a town that built a replica of itself that became a tourist attraction, the residents ever after forced to perform their own lives for the amusement of American visitors. Fremantle feels in danger of becoming that kind of place. South Terrace, or the cappuccino strip, is a long empty shell waiting for the tide of weekenders to fill the bars, cafes and pavements. With fast swelling suburbs to the south and east, Fremantle becomes a default destination. There are few other choices it seems.

Our trip was something of a flying visit, mainly to catch up with family and friends. I did get to surf at Scarborough with Jim and marked my thirtieth anniversary by riding a single-fin! Jim recently became a father of a handsome boy who looks uncannily like his grandfather.

We also saw Refat and Elmira Shakir-Aliev. Refat is a doctor of psychiatry but could just as well been a writer. But Uzbekistan in the 1950s was not a great time for writers or journalists. Refat told me a wonderful story about being at school when the teacher came in one morning sobbing with tears. What happened, he wondered? A student said that he saw the teacher hit on the head by a rock. Her tears continued. The class was mystified. The teacher raised her head from the desk and looked out at to the class. "Stalin is dead!" The whole class joined her in crying openly.

Refat tells this story with not cynical laughter, but laughter of one who long since learned the truth. Elmira's family lost their small land holdings under collectivisation and fled to Uzbekistan. So there were few illusions about Stalin. It puts my own memories of childhood into some kind of perspective. For sure and certain.

Book of memories

2008-09-13T16:05:00.010+10:00

Iris has recently discovered The Jungle Book.

It's a film that I saw a number of times at the Melody Drive-In when I was about seven. It was the one film we waited and waited to be repeated.

Nearly 40 years ago. The enjoyment has not diminished. Iris likes it, too.

Footy Almanac 2008

2008-08-31T17:20:00.011+10:00

One of the best things I did in 2007 was a write a little article for my friend Paul Daffey. I assumed that the piece, about a game between the Fremantle Dockers and Collingwood at the MCG, would go onto Paul's website. It did. You can indulge us all by reading it here.

In fact the article formed part of a book, the Footy Almanac 2007, edited by Paul Daffey and Gentleman John Harms. The Almanac collected a lot of amusing, insightful writing about season 2007 from a wide range of blokes, most of whom, like me, are not professional writers.

The good news is that Paul and John have kicked on again for 2008. Here's the cover of this year's edition.

The 2008 Almanac will be out in late November, distributed by Penguin Books. I will have a piece in this one, too, about Fremantle against Richmond at the MCG. So does this make a Penguin author? The pressure is on...

Paul Weller Melbourne 2008

2008-08-17T20:31:00.017+10:00

Another Saturday night, another festival of geezer. Paul Weller worked his way through power supply problems to open his Australian tour at the Forum in Melbourne. Highlights included Changing Man, Eton Rifles and Too Much to Dream Last Night from 22 Dreams.

The sold out crowd matched him year for year, pound for pound. We aint getting any younger, folks. But unlike Morrissey or even Jarvis, Weller has not picked up a younger following. It's not surprising really since his song these days tends have a retrospective glow about it. The urgency of Eton Rifles or That's Entertainment (you want an anthem for a generation, I'll give you an anthem for a generation) is pretty much gone. However, I wouldn't pension him off quite yet. Each of Weller's phases has been so distinctive who is to say whether some other incarnation is not just waiting up the road. At least he is being true to himself. And 22 Dreams floats up enough possible threads for future action to keep us guessing.

One thing that puzzled me to the point of slight fatigue was the endless swapping of guitars. What gives, buddy? A rack at the back of the stage held around a dozen or so. Two battered acoustic guitars, two Telecasters, at least two semi-acoustics and others I can't exactly recall. Between songs seemed to be devoted to achieving Olympic records for guitar switching. I know the back catalogue offers a range of tones and textures (and he's the Modfather, he could what he damn well likes, thanks), but come on. Does Keith Richards change his guitars like this?

Kim Salmon was recently explaining a how frustrated he became watching the guitarist of a brand name band who needed a different instrument for every song the guy played. Kim made the point that a good guitarist should, within reason, be able to get the sound out of the guitar that he or she needs. A guitar player, like a writer, should develop their own voice, so that when you hear the sound, you know who's making it. Is it the tradesman, or is it the tools?

Michelle had a different take on all this guitar business. She says Weller's guitar fetish is like Carrie Bradshaw's craving for shoes. It's about showing off what you have got, impressing everyone you know with your vast collection of desirable items. I can't argue with that.

Robert Forster

2008-08-10T11:43:00.008+10:00

Last night Michelle and I saw Robert Forster at the Toff in the Town.

At The Toff Robert played two sets and was in fine form throughout. A fistful of new ones salted with the best of his own and Go-Betweens' back catalogue. Plus Quiet Heart, written by Grant McLennan.

The performance had a bristling freshness about it. His band included bass player Adele Pickvance, the implausibly talented Glen Thompson and a drummer who looked like he would have trouble getting into most licensed venues.

The Australian has this nifty video.

Learning to look

2008-07-31T21:15:00.005+10:00

Today I started a new job. Actually a job within a job, a tandem job. Mostly I work in books for teenagers, but from today I'm working on an exhibition of picture books.

The exhibition will be in late 2010 at the State Library of Victoria. (They like a nice timeline in Exhibitions.)

So for one day a week for the next six months, and then on off until the end of 2010 that's my second gig, mon deuxieme bureau.

Now, the world of picture books looks pretty genteel against the rough and tumble of YA. We'll see.

Please hold

2008-07-26T16:00:00.004+10:00

I don't want to make this blog a grumble-fest, but here goes.

Three Australian airports in the last month, three completely different wireless *services*. In Melbourne, you pay. In Brisbane it's free. In Sydney, you go via Optus or Telstra, or some weird and complicated thing of the local airport corporation involving rejigging modes of reception or something...

But the idea of being at the airport, popping open the laptop and logging on at Sydney, forget it. Hey, it's only Australia's busiest airport, the one where you are most likely to be delayed.

As it happened, a woman who was phoning through text changes for a Telstra advertisement, while working on her laptop, let me use hers for a bit. Maybe it had something to do with the outburst I provided when I realised I would not be going online during the ninety minute wait for my delayed flight.

Still, it could have been worse.

Is this the greatest family cookbook yet?

2008-07-14T19:29:00.007+10:00

Take a bow, Tessa!

Last night my French class gathered for a Bastille Day dinner. We all brought something for the meal. My task was the soup, vichy soir, or leek and potato soup. (While we were in Paris, Iris developed a real taste for it.) So it was Apples for Jam by Tessa Kiros down from the shelf and on with the makings. Although her influences in this book are mostly Italian, there is a lot of room for flexibility. But that requires, I think, sound recipes to begin with.

As I was the first course (that's how it goes for soup), I felt just a teensy bit under the pump. Some of those attending are seriously good cooks and dine at restaurants I can rarely afford. But thanks to Tessa's guidance it was smiles all round and we were underway. Coq au vin and tarte tatin followed, plus cheese and truffles and a round or two of The Marseille.

A good night all round, with a little help from friends.

Screw Loose

2008-07-08T16:43:00.000+10:00

Chris Wheat is a teacher in the western suburbs of Melbourne. He is also the author of Screw Loose, the funniest book I have read in a very long time. Equal-opportunity offence. No minority group (or anyone) comes out untouched, but all done with a smile...

This book took me by surprise. It maintains its lightness throughout: no moralising, no lessons learnt, no lectures. But a lot of laughs.

Hello

2008-07-08T16:05:00.000+10:00

So, here we go. This blog is dedicated to the things that blow back my rapidly thinning hair.

And occasionally the things that bug me.

This is one of the former. We were in Paris recently and missed them by a few days. Darn.