Clarke and Dawe reviews the greatest flop in Australian film history: the Australian government

They just keep punching them out. This week's is a good'un.

Number one dads releases new album

Big Scary frontman Tom Iansek will release his second solo album, About Face, in August.
About Face is the followup 2011’s Man Of Leisure– which Iansek released under the name Dads.

The album’s lead single ‘Return To’ is a collaboration with singer Tom Snowdon of Melbourne indie crew Lowlakes.

Put it in your brain. Yum.

If ye love me - Thomas Thallis

Even if...

Even if this is all Tallis did with his life. Even if this was all we had to judge him by. From a lifetime; these 2 mesmeric minutes of bliss. I would not but conclude that it was, all of it, worthwhile.



If ye love me
Keep my commandments
And I will pray the father
And He shall give you another Comforter
That he may abide with you forever
Even the spirit of Truth

Stillways - Steve Bisley

Death.

There were other fires in other years. People died in them.

One family, new to the district, were overcome and incinerated in their house. They were found all in one room in a charred huddle. The mother and baby had melted together to be forever as one. The father, at the top of the pyre, had tried to protect them all with a wide embrace that would last for eternity. We all went to look, to lean what sadness meant.

The Milk Carton Kids - Memphis

The Milk Carton Kids - Michigan

That chorus...

Keinen Zentimeter - Clueso

German pop - what the? Yeah, I know, I know. Give it a listen though. It is tres 90s and damn catchy.

Sing along, you know the words: Ich will keinen zentimeter mehr zwischene uns...

Procedure for Disposal - Clive James

It may not come to this, but if I should
Fail to survive this year of feebleness
Which irks me so and may have killed for good
Whatever gift I had for quick success -
For I could talk an hour alone on stage
And mostly make it up along the way,
But now when I compose a single page
Of double-spaced it takes me half the day -
If I, that is, should finally succumb
To these infirmities I'm slow to learn
The names of lest my brain be rendered numb
With boredom even as I toss and turn,
Then send my ashes home, where they can fall
In their own sweet time from the harbour wall.

Arstidir sing in a train station

Love.

Richard Hawley - Baby you're my light

I definitely want to play this at my wedding. Pete on lead guitar. Andrew on bass. Hugh on egg shaker. Fie on Cello. Luke on drums. It's all planned. But who plays slide guitar?

Singapore

To Cover or not to Cover

Sometimes covers are better than originals. Sometimes they completely ruin them. Sometimes they're not bad, but the strip the original of the magic it was written with.

Any thoughts on which one this is?

The National - About Today

I went and saw The National on Saturday night. They were performing at the Sydney Opera House forecourt as part of the Opera House's contemporary music program Music At The House. (check out their website - they have a cool graphic designer)

It was a pretty special night, with the Opera House and the Bridge lit up in lapis lazuli blue, the Sydney sandstone a warm yellow and the gentle eucalypts a swaying calm green in the warm summer breeze.   

I've seen The National before, and while this was not their best gig ever, they were solid.  This song was the highlight for me. Mainly because of the Aaron Dessner's gentle guitar riff and the simplicity of the lyrics.

Hey, are you awake
Yeah I'm right here
Well can I ask you
About today

How close am I
To losing you

Images by Vincent Moon, JM Goett, Gaspar Claus
Edit by Vincent Moon
Produced by Beggars Banquet

Paris, Guinguette Pirate, december 2005

laura veirs - the sleeper in the valley

And amazing song by Laura Viers - so gentle, so delicately layered. The words a translated from a well-known French poem by Arthur Rimbaud called Le Dormeur du Val:

C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière,
Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D'argent ; où le soleil, de la montagne fière,
Luit : c'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.

Un soldat jeune, bouche ouverte, tête nue,
Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort ; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,
Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme
Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme :
Nature, berce-le chaudement : il a froid.

Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine ;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.

Veir's English translation is not wholly loyal to the original, but it is just as moving:

In a green hollow where the river sings,
Tiny valley, bluebells ring.

There's a young soldier under the clouds,
His mouth is open, and the light rains down.

And the light rains down,
And the crows come round,
To the two red holes in his right side, oh
In his right side, oh.

Sleeping in the sun, hand on his breast
The nape of his neck bathed in
Blue watercress
He's just a kid and he never knew,
He would would be a sleeper in the valley so soon.

So soon, So soon,
And the crows, they swoon,
At the two red holes in his right side, oh

So soon, so soon,
And the crows, they swoon,
At the two red holes in his right side, oh
In his right side, oh.

As a side note - Rimbaud wrote this poem at the tender age of 17. By the time he turned 18, Rimbaud had moved to Paris where he'd lived a absynthe-fuelled existence with fellow french poet Paul Verlaine; lived in abject squalor in London, relying on the free heating, lighting, pens and ink of the British Museum to write; and survived being shot in the wrist by Verlaine in Brussels.  All of Rimbaud's poetry was written as a teenager and he gave up creative writing completely before he turned 20.  He travelled extensively for the remainder of his life, working as a stone quarry forman in Cyprus, and member of the Dutch Colonial Army in Indonesia and as an exporter of coffee and weapons from Yemen, before dying of cancer at the age of 37.

Elbow back at it - Fly Boy Blue and Lunette

Elbow have released two songs off their new album, The Take Off and Landing of Everything.

I have posted this song primarily just for the way he sings the following phrase:

But there isn't words yet for the comfort I get from the gentle lunette of the top of the nape of your neck that I wake to.  And where are the words for the leap in my chest.

Yummy.

Little Aches and Pains (Paul Kelly)

This is my first go at sharing some of my covers online. This is a cover of a beautiful song by Paul Kelly called Little Aches and Pains. Hope you likey.

Shrinking Women

On Beauty and Being Just

Two quotes from Elaine Scarry in her book 'On Beauty and Being Just'.  With thanks to Kate Brennan

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterward one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction— to locate what is true. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Homer sings of the beauty of particular things. Odysseus, washed up on shore, covered with brine, having nearly drowned, comes upon a human community and one person in particular, Nausicaa, whose beauty simply astonishes him. He has never any- where seen a face so lovely; he has never anywhere seen any thing so lovely. “No, wait,” he says, oddly interrupting himself. Some- thing has suddenly entered his mind. Here are the lines:

But if you’re one of the mortals living here on earth, three times blest are your father, your queenly mother, three times over your brothers too. How often their hearts must warm with joy to see you striding into the dances— such a bloom of beauty. . . . I have never laid eyes on anyone like you, neither man nor woman . . . I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.
Wait, once I saw the like—in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar—
the young slip of a palm-tree springing into the light. There I’d sailed, you see, with a great army in my wake, out on the long campaign that doomed my life to hardship. That vision! Just as I stood there gazing, rapt, for hours . . . no shaft like that had ever risen up from the earth— so now I marvel at you, my lady: rapt, enthralled,
too struck with awe to grasp you by the knees
though pain has ground me down. 

Odysseus’s speech makes visible the structure of perception at the moment one stands in the presence of beauty. The beautiful thing seems—is—incomparable, unprecedented; and that sense of be- ing without precedent conveys a sense of the “newness” or “new- bornness” of the entire world. Nausicaa’s childlike form, playing ball on the beach with her playmates, reinforces this sense. But now something odd and delicately funny happens. Usually when the “unprecedented” suddenly comes before one, and when one has made a proclamation about the state of affairs—“There is no one like you, nothing like this, anywhere”—the mind, despite the conŠdently announced mimesis of carrying out a search, does not actually enter into any such search, for it is too exclusively Šlled with the beautiful object that stands in its presence. It is the very way the beautiful thing Šlls the mind and breaks all frames that gives the “never before in the history of the world” feeling.

Odysseus startles us by actually searching for and Šnding a pre- cedent; then startles us again by managing through that precedent to magnify, rather than diminish, his statement of regard for Nau- sicaa, letting the “young slip of a palm-tree springing into the light” clarify and verify her beauty. The passage continually re- starts and refreshes itself. Three key features of beauty return in the new, but chronologically prior, object of beauty. 

This small photo strip...

Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia

I have been meaning to post these photos for a while now. A few quick snaps from a trip to Malaysia from earlier this year. Two orphaned orang-utans in rehab and some night market shots.