Ladies in Black (film) - Hungarian, Slovanian and other Refo culture invades Sysney Mosman Double Bay etc - Ladies in Black is superbly written, subtly realised, deeply faithful to the book and the rarest of triumphs: a feel-good movie that is intelligent, humane, insightful and funny.
The first images for the Ladies in Black film reveal a story embedded in a time and place when the modern version of Australia was about to explode on the other side of the world away from the High Tatra Mountains ...
Madeline St John’s elegant 50s coming-of-age novel about a clever young girl who is transformed by her summer job in a Sydney department store has been crying out for a movie “makeover” ever since it was published 25 years ago — Ladies in Black takes you back to Simple laughter And memories of Birriga Rd Appartments ... Not far from Beresford Street
Many of the period details thus carry the authority of
first-hand experience, restored to life with judicious
use of digital effects: the brick and weatherboard cottages
with their tiled roofs, the trams trundling down to Circular Quay,
the ferries crossing the harbour, all looking fresh as paint.
Fresher, possibly, than the city ever appeared in life―but then
the film makes no secret of its nostalgia. Its trick is that it's both
real and unreal, proposing that the most ordinary place imaginable
can also be seen in hindsight as a lost, magical world.
Beresford was born and raised in Sydney, belonging to the
same generation as his heroine Lesley (Angourie Rice),
a bookish teenager who signs on at Goode's to help with the Christmas rush.
same generation as his heroine Lesley (Angourie Rice),
a bookish teenager who signs on at Goode's to help with the Christmas rush.
Many of the period details thus carry the authority of
first-hand experience, restored to life with judicious
use of digital effects: the brick and weatherboard cottages
with their tiled roofs, the trams trundling down to Circular Quay,
the ferries crossing the harbour, all looking fresh as paint.
Fresher, possibly, than the city ever appeared in life―but then
the film makes no secret of its nostalgia. Its trick is that it's both
real and unreal, proposing that the most ordinary place imaginable
can also be seen in hindsight as a lost, magical world.
Toiling through their daily routines and longing for excitement,
the characters are unaware they have been positioned all along
on what might as well be a musical comedy set
(The Women In Black was, in fact, the basis for a recent stage
musical, with songs by Tim Finn).
the characters are unaware they have been positioned all along
on what might as well be a musical comedy set
(The Women In Black was, in fact, the basis for a recent stage
musical, with songs by Tim Finn).
Almost as old as the Man from Cold River After more than 20 years, Bruce Beresford’s Ladies in Black lights up the big screen
Ladies in Black , despite its tender and heartwarming moments, is not without darkness. Miss Cartwright attends to her elderly mother at Christmas lunch, who is only physically present, at a large dining table forlornly set for two. Magda, Stefan and Rudi each recall their grim periods spent at refugee camp. But if anything, the film and its protagonists inspire hope in a future filled with possibilities. Lisa’s fair-dinkum father drinking red wine and identifying olives correctly is one of many scenes that forecast a nouveau Australia where girls have a tertiary education and men cook – mon dieu!
Far side of nowhere
under cool shade of pin oak
singing the park bench blues
to the cello sounds
of cicada whorls
that mesmerize me deep
to the sonic rhythm
sonata of August.
(Carl Kaucher is not a poet who walks. Kaucher is a wanderer. Often from the foot of Irish Mountain in Temple, Pennsylvania to the sometimes familiar, often forgotten urban landscapes of southeastern Pennsylvania. From city to dusty borough, to boroughs on the rebound. Kaucher wanders the main streets, back streets and alleyways, ever the observer, ever the recorder.)
Banksy Painting Sells For $1.4 Million, Then Self-Destructs
The work, “Girl With Balloon,” a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby’s “Frieze Week” evening contemporary art sale. After competition between two telephone bidders, it was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby’s. “Then we heard an alarm go off,” Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based advisory firm Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Saturday. “Everyone turned round, and the picture had slipped through its frame.” … [Read More]
We have plenty of “information” but not enough wisdom. It is thejob of the novelist to turn information — and misinformation — into wisdom
The meaning of the word “consolation” is forever changed by Geoffrey Hill’s usage in stanza CXLVIII of The Triumph of Love (1998):
“So – Croker, Macsikker, O’Shem – I ask you
what are poems for? They are to console us
with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.
Let us commit that to our dust. What
ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad
and angry consolation. What is
the poem? What figures? Say,
a sad and angry consolation. That’s
beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry
consolation."
Freelancer Matt Barrie
Walter Laqueur, a German Jew who fled Adolf Hitler and became one of the
preeminent intellectuals of his generation, with seminal books dissecting events that shaped the 20th century Walter Laqueur, eminent scholar who probed the 20th century, dies at 97 - The Washington Post
The first printed Old and New Testaments, reproduced in this new Taschen facsimile edition in two folio volumes, marked a cultural turning point, which was to shape religious controversies and political crises and conflicts throughout the following centuries. The production was technically complex and required an extraordinary amount of careful labour, which included setting 42 lines of text per page, consuming 2,500 bits of type, drawn from a font of 300 distinctive pieces
preeminent intellectuals of his generation, with seminal books dissecting events that shaped the 20th century Walter Laqueur, eminent scholar who probed the 20th century, dies at 97 - The Washington Post
Ten Reasons Why We (And Literature) Love Lists
How Penguin Has Strengthened Its Publishing Empire
The Gutenberg Bible Was An Information Revolution That Changed The World
Vulture’s ‘Premature Attempt’ At A 21st-Century Literary Canon
A couple of months ago, we reached out to dozens of critics and authors — well-established voices (Michiko Kakutani, Luc Sante), more radical thinkers (Eileen Myles), younger reviewers for outlets like n+1, and some of our best-read contributors, too. We asked each of them to name several books that belong among the most important 100 works of fiction, memoir, poetry, and essays since 2000 and tallied the results. The purpose was not to build a fixed library but to take a blurry selfie of a cultural moment.”
Does Banned Book Week Serve Any Purpose?
The New Literary Star From (Of All Places) Greenland
Nordic noir, Scandinavia’s best-known cultural export, mixes violent crime and political intrigue. The climate is savage, the characters terse and there aren’t many laughs. Instead, you get snow, secrets, abuse, alcohol and some pretty ragged writing. Niviaq Korneliussen’s debut novel is completely different.What Happens When Writing Fiction Hurts The People The Writer Loves Best?
Not to mention this price: “I stand apart, casing the joint. Always on the lookout for a good line, the odd detail. It’s what writers and visual artists are trained to do: In the midst of a flood, consider the color of the water. We might or might not get a good story that way, but we’re at least more likely to survive the crisis. “
Where Are All The British Working-Class Writers?
In Scotland, of course. “Scotland has an incredible wealth of working-class writers, thanks to a strong community and tradition of support from established authors.” But really, there are English, Welsh, and Northern Irish working-class writers as well, but the working-class writers and their publishers need to see interest from the public.
Latvian Literature helpfully has a list of the 10 saddest Latvian books
Victor Martinovich -- author of Paranoia and Мова -- writes about Belarusian culture: National, European, post-Soviet in a New Eastern Europe-article now available at Eurozine.
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Theodor Kallifatides On Memory, Language, Love, and the Passage of Time, Another Life.
Greek-born Kallifatides emigrated to Sweden when he was in his twenties, and this is an interesting work from someone between two cultures, and the choice of what language to write in -- a good complement to Jhumpa Lahiri'sIn Other Words.
The history of the book does not begin with books. Chinese tortoise shells inscribed 3,000 years ago; Sumerian clay tablets with cuneiform scripts; knotted string records by Incan officials We Can Toni Morrison on the Deepest Meaning of Freedom
In praise of loving anything and anyone you choose to love.
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Everything can be taken from a man,”Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his timeless treatise on the human search for meaning, “but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Fourteen years later, at the apogee of the civil rights movement, James Baldwin observed: “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given, freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.” It is a sentiment of piercing insight in Baldwin’s original context and one which Kanye West would echo in a completely different, completely inappropriate context half a century later — a difference both subtle and unsubtle, assaulting the meaning of freedom.
