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.
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.
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.
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.")
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.
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.
