division 4 the grasshoppers

This is a truly classic episode called 'The Grasshoppers' (aired 9 April 1973). It is topped and tailed with these two river flats derros played by Michael Duffield and Jack Perry. Yeah, there's kind of circus music over the top of their scenes which isn't really what we wanted but it's a brilliant device and their scenes are nuanced otherwise. 

So much happens in this episode it's remarkable - all I really want to talk to you about is some of the locations - like Fishermans Bend and the wasteland around it, where the Westgate Bridge is under construction. 

There's a scene where Ross Thompson is chased through a scrapyard and I felt that this shot through a pipe was in part a James Bond-style reference but I might be wrong. 

Anyway, Ross Thompson. He appeared twice in D4 before this, in 1970 and '72, as Sergeant George Bell, a kind of endearingly clumsy novice policeman, and he made enough of an impact on me as a character that when I saw him here I assumed it was George Bell again and he was undercover. But no, this is Thompson playing someone else, an ordinary (and reasonably benign) crook. 

I wondered when two fingers became 'up yours'. I always think of that scene at the beginning of Don's Party where John Hargreaves does 'thumbs up' as an 'up yours'. I guess both gestures, meaning the same thing, were used at the same time but no-one was doing the thumb by the mid-70s, and the reverse v became the main thing. 

This is the house where the bad guys are mingling with some alternative types. In fact, the house is called The Alternative. It's right on what I think must be South Melbourne beach. 

One of the fabulous characters is a mute artist called Peach Tree, played of course by Bruce Spence. He's silent because he was shot in the - um - the trachea? During the (Vietnam) war. Here's him writing his name down for the police:

I could be wrong (how often do I say this?!) but I think this is a ship from Lorimer Street - until the bridge was finished these big ships could get further up the Yarra. 

I'd love to know what Peach Tree wrote in this letter Marg Stewart is reading but I can't see it well enough. I have to say that while I really enjoy the Peach Tree element, I don't think it's really pertinent to the overall story (drug deals, etc). 

And this is the beautiful final scene of the two itinerants of the riverbank wandering off. 

So nicely done. 

what's more offensive? (this morning 8:47am)

Music-making still performs the normal functions Background noise for people eating and talking and drinking and smoking That's alright by us. Don't think that we're complaining After all it's only leisure time, isn't it?

That's a verse from the BBC version of Soft Machine's 'Moon in June' and it's probably my favourite version of that song. The 'us' of course is Soft Machine, making the background music. I am not sure that the band were all of a mind on that one but I can't know. It would have seemed arrogant or weird for Robert Wyatt to just say 'that's alright by me...'

Anyway this morning I was in Mr Tulk awaiting the annual staff day, held this year in the State Library, and I was reminded once again that most people don't even notice, much less like or dislike, the background music played in places like this, and also, that the only thing they would notice is if there wasn't background music. I suppose this is where spotify sees a market for lame non-music* to be pumped into public spaces to its own profit. 

Anyway, this morning, AC/DC's 'TNT', a version (not the actual Beatles version, slightly faster, though it did sound like George Harrison singing) of 'Here Comes the Sun', and Supertramp's fucking fucking fucked 'Give a Little Bit' were paraded before me saying 'we won, we won, bland old shit music is here forever and you can't do anything about it', all that was required was a visual of Trump jigging and swaying to it.** 

Now, the music has been drowned out by 12 yarra trams ticket inspectors around the central table. I actually think that's preferable. I can hear something pumping underneath but luckily I can't identify it. 

* ie the music it pays people a pittance to create and sign over to Spotify forever. 

** Later song was Stevie Wonder's 'Isn't She Lovely' which I can handle but the point still stands. Although I read on wikipedia that 'Wonder performed the song live for Queen Elizabeth II at her Diamond Jubilee Concert on June 4, 2012, with lyrics modified to refer to the Queen' which is gross. 

special cameo by 'louise humphrey'

This episode of D4 (screened 21 March 1973) is a great showcase for Cecily Polson who, for some reason, Crawfords always typecast as a slightly rough young woman, heart of gold optional. In this case she has one of those, and Polson plays her with genuine subtlety. But of course what really jumps out at me is Louise Homfrey, in this instance her name misspelt in the credits as Louise Humphrey. Once again, she plays a neighbour who is pissed off about being bothered. I wonder what Louise Homfrey did to get in the mood for these tours-de-force. Anyway, always good to see her. 

In this case she's talking with an extremely nasty piece of work, Bob Anderson, played by Bill Pearson. Aplomb all round. 

yet another sentimental journey

So for actual work reasons (book chapter I'm writing, I get paid for this) I watched quite a bit of the first season of Aunty Jack this weekend. I watched the whole of the first ('pilot') episode and bits and pieces of all the others. I was actually really impressed by it, on the whole, and the weirdest part of that is I remember watching most of these a couple of decades ago - or whenever the DVDs came out, it was a while ago - and finding them a bit tortuous. But no. It's actually pretty good. I have previously told you  the amazing news that Aunty Jack debuted on the ABC the same night that Monty Python was first shown (but earlier) and I still find that incredible (also, possibly I watched them both - I certainly remember watching Monty Python when we lived in Kew and that was 1972). 

One of the important things about Aunty Jack is that it is definitely Australian but the jokes are not jokes about Australia per se, or things Australians do. That's interesting. Also, another interesting thing, I heard Tony Martin say on Sizzletown a few weeks ago that he was inspired to do The Olden Days and Bargearse from watching What's Up Tigerlily? which makes sense but what I didn't know, but surely he does now because he knows a lot, is that there is a lo-o-ong sketch in Aunty Jack - I think it might be the last episode of season 1? which is an old roman (?) war epic completely dubbed the same way. 

This weekend was not bad, particularly because it was not superfucking hot, though it's going to get hot again towards the end of the week which sucks IMO. But overall, not unhappy. Laura and I watched Starstruck which is always good to see. Perry and I went for a longish walk. 

He made a friend. How jolly!

margaret dumont - still an unknown quantity

I mentioned a few weeks ago how excited I was that someone had finally written a biography of Margaret Dumont. I ordered it immediately at the beginning of January and it came quite soon afterwards. I started reading it, stopped about half way through, and came back to it yesterday. 

I admit, at the time of writing I'm coming up to possibly the most rewarding bit: the quarter-century of Dumont's career after she worked with the Marx Brothers. But people are always writing reviews of things when they've read the whole thing, completely avoiding the reality that to get to the end you also have to get half way through. Here are my thoughts so far:

If there are insights to be had into the mind and actions of Margaret Dumont that are not, magic-eye-like to be divined from unfocussing your eyes and imaginatively looking through decades of almost-hundred-year-old studio promo guff, to try and imagine whether Dumont actually said this stuff about herself and if so, whether she meant it, then the authors have not found it. Possibly they have not tried to find it. 

The authors are accomplished people, they didn't need to do this. Chris Enss writes about women in the old west (i.e. not character actors in mid-20th-century Hollywood) and has apparently written umpteen books on this topic, arcane but you can imagine why it would be popular. Howard Kazanjian is a very successful film producer, working on Star Wars and similar pablum. There's no special reason for him to be interested in writing about this person, much less in this cack-handed manner. I suppose it's possible that one employed the other to whip stuff into shape. 

If the non-Dumont Marx material (including for instance 1930s photographs of the Four Marx Brothers without Dumont, stuffed way into the section where Zeppo was long gone) was taken out, I don't think there'd be very much left. The authors may not have had the opportunity to see the films Dumont made outside the Marx orbit, and apparently she made many, reputedly usually playing the same kind of reserved, upper-class 'society lady' person but often in dramatic roles, etc, but you would have thought Howard Kazanjian for instance could have brought a bit of pressure, money, influence etc to bear to at least find copies of some of them to sit through and report on. Instead, I am going to say that they have not seen many Margaret Dumont films outside the ones she made with the Marx Brothers and indeed the ones they made without her get significant reportage too. When it comes to her non-Marx films, they just give a summary from, I assume, press reviews or reports from the period.*

Most of the text, as suggested above, is based on press reports of the films, their content, and things that were reported about Dumont and/or she reputedly said to the press. The authors do not for one second question any of this stuff, although Kazanjian surely, if not Enss, must understand that most of the material reported in the press as coming from the mouths of film stars was if not made up, then very processed (and sanitised). I have no problem with being given detail of what Dumont (or Groucho, or whoever) was reported as saying in the media in 1940, but I find the assumption in these pages that this is just what they said a bit weird. 

The Wall Street Journal's Jeanine Basinger calls this book 'prodigiously researched', which suggests to me that Jeanine Basinger has never done a newspapers.com search. I don't know for certain but there must surely be a huge amount of studio archives and so on which at very least would give some insight into how she was contracted to films and so on. Did she have a manager/agent? Did she have correspondence with publicists, etc? There must be some non-published sources that could have been consulted. There are even some things you could probably get to the bottom of online in half an hour - when MD's sister died in the early 1940s, what killed her? 

More soon... 

*It's quite possible that many of these films are lost. But then, they need to tell us that. But they won't, because they don't care if they're lost or not - they weren't going to watch them anyway (if they did, it's not at all obvious they did). 

back from going dead

So that was a prime bit of drama which was so quickly resolved I will have forgotten about it tomorrow. I took the phone to a nearby phone repair place where a nice lady told me various ways she might be able to fix it and so on, and asked me to come back in 20 minutes. When I came back, it was fixed. I said 'what was wrong?' and she said 'I don't know, he's fixed it, and he's gone to the toilet.' Elves and the shoemaker eat your heart out. It cost me $35. 

The thing was I had resigned myself to two days or so of no phone and what was it going to do to my mind, getting broadened so much by relying on its own resources? And yeah nah that's not going to happen. 

It's really, really hot outside and that is pretty disgusting. Mid-February really is the worst, also, 'February' is a ridiculously stupid word. 

gone dead

 

Some time in the last 24 hours my phone became unable to be charged. Can you believe it! I am completely cut off from everything and I will be until at least later today (perhaps tomorrow!). Obviously I know I am dependent on it for all kinds of mundane things, but also, the weirdest thing is how vulnerable you feel without a connected phone service. That is ridiculous, considering that firstly, until, um, 15 years ago most people were fine without, and secondly, you're probably more vulnerable if you're dependent on that for a lifeline. You're distracted, you're slow, you're stupid. I hate you with your phone you big jerk. I'm better than that. Why, when my phone was unable to be charged for about a day, I was absolutely fine and barely even cried. Of course I will be up at the repair shop at 9am hankering for a fix, of my phone I mean.