unexpected herge

29 December 2020

ten years ago on fb

 

late december 2020

Laura pointing to a cat. Or offering a finger to sniff as prelude to something more intimate, I'm not sure. 

Nancy just hanging out. 

On Christmas afternoon I went to Laura's place and we watched a ridiculous Swiss film about the trials and tribulations of a young jewish boy from a fairly traditional if not stereotypical family in I guess Berne or perhaps Zurich who was attracted to a shiksa called Laura. I guess it engaged us but to be fair, it was also fairly crummy. The next day we went to the NGV for the Triennial which was actually pretty amazing but I found it overwhelming after a while and then had to sit down. Later we went to see a film I was very keen to view, Promising Young Woman, and I have to say I was deeply disappointed by the fact that she died in the end. That is not my idea of revenge, 'black comedy' or otherwise: part of vengeance is you don't get killed, and the people you seek vengeance on punished not for the original crime but for the crime of killing you. 

uninteresting walk

On Boxing day (today) around 6 Perry and I walked to Kensington station and took a train to Glenbervie station. 

This used to be a retirement village at the corner of Pascoe Vale and Moreland Roads. It's been vacant forever. I know I walked around there and took photographs, maybe I blogged it, do you remember? From there, we walked haphazardly to Moonee Ponds creek and went south (in the meandering way that the creek does). You can follow the creek for a while, then you are compelled to go onto the road for a while. This was something I saw on the way. 

This block of flats which was OK I guess. 

Once we got back to the creek, Perry decided he wanted to walk in the middle of the creek. 

We went past these flats in Flemington Road which have intrigued me for a while. I see they are called Braemar. 

That's it. It was a longish walk but very little happened. 

 

flook 22 dec 1951

 

I thought you'd like to see where Flook was placed in the Daily News when they ran it in 1951, it was at the top of the page directly above a strip called Daily Doctor. Daily Doctor is completely awful, almost salacious. Certainly undoctorly. 

What matters I guess is the emergence of Flook into the real world. Once again, that's not the Rufus I know. Compare! 

Don't think too much about Rufus washing himself in water from out of Flook's nose. Just think about it the right amount. 

More soon.

the aftermath of judy's death

So as I have no doubt mentioned, we watch a lot of The Box round here, and we're presently sometime in1975 (episode 259-60 territory). (It's hard to be sure when episodes were actually broadcast because IMDB doesn't say, and the newspapers of the day didn't either). This is the exciting/depressing ep where Judy has been blown up by Frank Roberts' bomb, but she's not precisely dead yet. Here are Paul and Lee in the street outside, seconds before the bomb goes off. 

This is where The Box starts to contort itself a bit to try and figure how to both deal with the demise of a major character at the same time as two other characters (Jean and Kay) leave (Jean's gone, to London to be with her husband Brad, and Kay is just about to be press-ganged into doing essentially the same thing by Michael Brooks (John Waters). Here are Sir Henry and Max dealing with the shocking situation while Jack O'Brian, um, is on the phone. 

Here's Kay dealing with that ridiculous situation where Michael is saying he has bought her a ticket to London that afternoon and she's, I suppose, required to not only pack in her job but leave her entire flat for ever, while her ex-lover Paul is grieving the likely death of his estranged wife. 

Here's Lee on Paul and Judy's couch, where so much has happened:

Michael and Kay blah blah. Laura said something funny, 'what's she going to do with her record?' (it's on the counter next to the flowers). 

I can't remember why Fanny was here but she is. She (and others like Syd Heylen as Vern, Ken James as Tony Wild, Tracy Mann see below, and I can't remember who else) have to serve the role of being light and shallow in the face of this tragedy, to propel the narrative to the future.

Tracy Mann must have simultaneously been really pleased to get the role of Tina the cleaner and really unhappy about how goofy the character is, at least at the beginning, will be interested to see where it goes. 

This is a golden moment, Paul's dream where he and Judy are having a baby. 

He is woken from this dream by a telephone call from a very unprofessional doctor who apparently thinks it's OK to tell a man his wife is dead over the phone. 

Unusually for The Box, the episode ends with a freeze frame on Paul's face and audio of a (simulated?) heartbeat while the credits go over them.

I just want to say that I am very much in the market for Philip Brown knitwear. 

Briony Behets went on to play someone called Jorja Jones in Class of '75 (I have watched practically every episode of that show, admittedly over a decade ago, and I don't remember her at all!) then she was in Bellbird and by the end of the year she was a weather presenter (in November John Pinkney wrote in the Age that she peformed this duty 'with the intensity of a Pinter heroine, but gets away with it'.) * 

The mainstream news, to the degree it paid any attention to shows like The Box, accused it of being unrealistic lol:

Sydney Sun-Herald 21 Dec 1975 p. 70

*26 November 1975 p. 2

more december 1951 flook

 Perth Daily News 17-20 December 1951

I haven't seen any of this before. I have to assume it's the original strips from 1949, though I can't check against the original. More shortly. 

apple tv yeah whatever

Why did I subscribe to Apple TV? I think it was because the second season of Severance which I somewhat strangely stopped watching after a couple of episodes. But I have to admit now I'm really enjoying Pluribus which is a completely fine show and also Slow Horses is not at all bad.* Even if it does have that grotesque Mick Jagger theme music and if the guy who plays River looks so much like Topher Grace it's madness.

The hateable bit about Apple TV is the constant requirement to sign in. So you have five hot shows, ATV, I bet everyone is really dying to get to your stuff. The constant requirement for scanning a qr code makes ATV seem needy, needy, needy. We don't have to have so much neediness. 

Select Apple TV on your smart (groan) tv and then you have to scan the code while it exposes you to umpteen hits from all five of the abovementioned shows and then you sign in and your phone eventually tells Apple TV that you've signed in, and then you have to select Apple TV again... ffs. Then you have to select your program and then 'play'. Who are these people?! 

* Update - a few hours after I wrote this we went to see Aunty Donna and I was intrigued to find that Slow Horses is a boomer show. Worse ways to find out what you are I guess. 

launceston's penny royal - ii

OK so using Melbourne newspapers from the 70s I managed to get a bit of a better understanding of the Penny Royal. I am embarrassed that I thought it was 'real'. It was a project of entrepreneur Roger Smith's. He was a British migrant who was involved in a lot of tourism (and hotel) businesses in Tasmania until he went bankrupt in, I think, 2004 (he died only a few years ago). Penny Royal was his favourite baby I think, though, and while it is a completely manufactured site (in an old quarry, well-positioned just outside Cataract Gorge and walking distance from central Launceston) he went a long way to making many of the features 'authentic'. Some or all of it was built with bricks from what seems to have been a demolished 19th century building (information is scant). He was adding all kinds of things to it through the 70s and 80s with ambition to build a tramline into the Gorge itself (somehow). None of that happened; there are a few tram tracks at the entrance to PR. 

I'm going to try and make a Wikipedia page about PR soon. The above is just from memory.