Waking us to this

I'm intrigued and hopeful about this.

(Thanks, Bec.)

how i live now

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

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

...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

...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

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

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.