Christmas (or “Giftmas” as I’ve heard someone cynically and amusingly describe it as lately) came early for me this year in the form of a brand new mobile phone. You might recall reading last week I lost my previous mobile in the back of a cab, soon after arriving back from a weekend Canberra. Late last week, I called Telstra to organise a replacement phone, which arrived today. A replacememt which had more cords than I thought necessary, had a book which took me about 30 minutes to read, and which still took about 15 minutes of fiddling around with before I could actually make a call. It has a radio, an mp3 player, G3 access, Office Suite, and an inbuilt nuclear reactor, I’m sure. Tonight, on the way to see “Borat: The Movie” (which I’ll write about later), I decided to make use of the phone’s 3megapixel camera. I snapped this photograph of the Christmas Tree at Taylor Square. I think the night-time quality is reasonably good, but look forward to further experimentation. So yes, an early Christmas present for myself, but I just better make sure I don’t lose this one.
I often find myself complaining (to whoever will listen) that Sydney lacks a good cabaret scene. Tonight, however, a few friends and I caught a wonderful show called “Old Friends,” featuring Mark Trevorrow, Rupert Noffs, and Bev Kennedy, at Gingers on the top floor of the Oxford Hotel in Darlinghurst. The show was fantastic, packed with classic Kander and Ebb tunes and even some surprise “yacht rock.”
For me, it was a definitely night of “old friends”, too. I went with some people I’ve known for maybe twenty years and also chatted with a man called Brendan who I haven’t seen in such a long time. We were first introduced to by our mutual late friend, Colin. “The last time I saw you was at Colin’s funeral.”, we noted.
Colin and I used to go to theater productions all the time and shared a deep love for cabaret and show tunes. Together, we enjoyed what felt like a golden age for musical theater and cabaret in Sydney.
Of course, I’ve read about the original golden age in the ’60s when stars like Shirley Bassey and Judy Garland came to Australia, but there was a palpable energy back then in the early 2000s. I remember the peak of this wonderful scene was when Hayden Tee hosted late-night “talk shows” where singers and actors would pop in for a chat in a small theatre in Darlinghurst.
These days, if you search for “cabaret,” you’re more likely to find burlesque. While I enjoy burlesque, it’s quite a different thing. So when I heard Mark Trevorrow was doing a show with such a great title, I was immediately interested.
I’ve known Mark for maybe 25 years through his own shows as Bob Downe and his career in radio. In fact, there was a lovely funny moment when he acknowledged me in the audience. I was just slowly putting my jacket on because I was a bit cold, and because I was seated right at the front, and probably distracted him, he joked, “We’ll just wait. We won’t do the next number yet; we’ll just wait for James to put his jacket on.” It was a very funny moment that gave the audience a laugh and was a lovely acknowledgment of our shared radio connection
Much of the show focused on Kander and Ebb, the famous composers of Cabaret. There were a number of songs from that musical, but also some incredible songs from other shows I’d never heard of. I was surprised to learn their first big hit was “My Coloring Book,” a song I’d first heard Barbra Streisand sing years ago and that Agnetha from ABBA later used as the title of her album.
Mark Trevorrow and Rupert Noffs
Rupert and Mark interpreted these songs brilliantly, their voices blending beautifully in harmony. They were accompanied by the amazing musical talent of Bev Kennedy on piano, who provided a rich and dynamic backdrop to their performance. It was clear that the three of them share a wonderful chemistry on stage, making for a truly memorable evening.
I remember this venue from when it was called Gilligan’s, a legendary cocktail bar in Darlinghurst famous for its “lethal” Long Island Iced Teas. It was a great place to go on a Sunday night, and it’s a great place to be now.
The only thing to be aware of if you have a mobility issue is the venue itself. The bar is located upstairs, and the toilets are downstairs, with lots of stairs in between. It doesn’t appear there’s a lift available, so keep that in mind when planning your visit.
Rupert Noffs
The combination of great tunes, a few laughs, and that feeling of community made it a truly great way to spend a Sunday night. If you’re looking for something to do in Sydney, I highly recommend going to see “Old Friends”.
The barmaid received a spontaneous round of applause for the way in which she handled the “trouble-makers” seated in the corner. Neither Sue nor I could work out what was going on. As they took their seats at the corner table, it was pretty evident they’d already had a fair bit to drink. But with the exception of Sue and I, so had everyone else in the bar!
Our attention was more focused on the nearby “cougar” and her potential younger “suitor” for the evening. We both agreed she was probably well into her 40s, and he was probably 30 at best. They were both very attractive. They were also both very drunk. By our guess, she was there with her son (and his male partner) and her daughter (and her male partner), and, of course, the hunky looking young bloke.
We had watched them flirt with each other for almost an hour before they finally began to touch each other. Or should “grope” be the more appropriate word? Just about everyone in the bar was watching them, wondering what it would all lead to. And just when they had the attention of just about everyone in the bar, the “incident” with the “trouble-makers” occurred.
The barmaid, for her part, was a fairly imposing figure, being well over 6-feet tall. She dealt with them firmly and fair. Unlike the “thuggish” behaviour you often associate with people being exited from bars, she spoke to them strongly, directly, and uncompromisingly. She was amazing. When the applause broke out from just about everyone in the bar, she seemed chuffed. She laughed out loud, thanking everyone for their response.
“What happened there?”, Sue asked her as she came by to collect our glasses. “They were snorting stuff right off the table in front on them”, she told us. Clearly, both of us lead sheltered lives, as we had no idea.
We were at the Jernbanecafeen, a bar I’d completely forgotten about until Sue noted, in 2010 I’d described it as possibly the best bar in the world. On my blog, I’d written…
In some ways it reminded me of those bars I found in Amsterdam a couple of years ago. Lots of crap on the walls. A bunch of old blokes playing schlager and everyone singing along. For a moment I thought, “This could be the world’s greatest bar”. There were quite a few bohemian characters in the bar, including my favourite, a woman I discovered was from Finland, who offered to sing “Besame Mucho” in Finnish, and who spent much of the evening drawing pictures of people she didn’t know and then getting them to buy her beers.
How could we NOT visit such a place?
Late afternoon drink in a bar in Copenhagen 2013
For us, it was most definitely a “non-tourist” kind of day. We didn’t visit a single tourist attraction, we just had a terrific day together, hanging out.
The day started “late”, as we enjoyed a Sunday morning at home, doing nothing much at all.
After an aborted attempt to find an English language church service, Sue and I had lunch at a terrific cafe/restaurant/bar called Kalaset. I’d discovered it quite by chance while Sue was tying, unsuccessfully, to locate the church service. Although it’s a place I entered quite randomly, it was oddly enough, a place decorated with old recording equipment, from reel to reel to cassette tape. I felt quite at home. The food was good, and the general vibe was “very Surry Hills”, I said at one point.
The other place we visited today which was divine was Torehallerne, a food hall near the centre of town. As we wandered around, looking at the wonderful variety of food on offer, we both toyed with the idea of quitting our jobs and living forever in Copenhagen just so we could go to this wonderful food hall every day. Sue “indulged” with a rasperry-caramel chocolate which tasted both “sublime” and “orgasmic”.
So all in all, it’s been a bit of a non-tourist day, but a very enjoyable one, and one where we had a chance to explore a few of the things ordinary Copenhagers (is that the right word?) might do on a Sunday afternoon.
Recording equipment on the wall of a cafe in Copenhagen
We’re back home tonight watching Danish Big Brother (it’s like BB used to be in Australia, but oddly enough they don’t sound as much like bogans when they’re speaking in another language), doing a bit of washing (in preparation for our train trip to Stockholm tomorrow) and eating some wonderful Danish ice-cream. But wait, Häagen-Dazs, isn’t actually Danish!
According to Wikipedia Häagen-Dazs was, in fact, invented by Jewish Polish immigrants Reuben and Rose Mattus in the Bronx, New York, in 1961.
Mattus invented the Danish-sounding Häagen-Dazs as a tribute to Denmark’s exemplary treatment of its Jews during the Second World War, and included an outline map of Denmark on early labels. The name, however, is not Danish, which has neither an umlaut nor a digraph zs; nor does it have any meaning in any language or etymology before its creation.
I really wanted to see Elvis Costello with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. I’ve long admired his work, as he combines a wonderful whimsical lyric and vocal style, with exceptional melodies. Throughout his career, I’ve been impressed with the obvious highlights, including “Olivers Army” (which actually used the piano line from Dancing Queen”), the soulful country of “Good Year For The Roses”, “Every Day I Write The Book” (with its early Charles and Diana in divorce mode video), through to his more recent collaborations with Burt Bacharach and Sophie van Otter. I really like Elvis Costello.
But to be totally and brutally honest I was disappointed with last night’s performance with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra because I didn’t really think he was all that engaged with either the work or with the audience. The phrase, perhaps unfairly, that both Damien and I used was “going through the motions”.
Early in the piece, Costello appeared on stage to explain the first half of the evening would be a piece he composed for a French (or was it Italian?) dance intepretation of a Shakespearean work. The work began, and it was pretty interesting musically and I was genuinely excited. Although Costello had explained the different musical motifs and how they related to the work, after a while it all began to sound like a movie soundtrack, like an ipod on shuffle, not really coming to any real conclusion. The audience was non-plussed, clapping politely at the end. I noticed a prominent Australian and his wife, both great consumers of the arts, politely leave at the end of intermission, reflecting what I thought was a non-plussed mood in the theatre.
In the second half Costello emerged to sing many of his favourite songs with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. With one or two exceptions where he sang familiar works, he stuck to the lesser known works, thereby disappointing a large section of the audience. Yeh, he did Veronica and yeh, he did an interesting version of Oliver’s Army, but that was about it. The rest of the works were unfamiliar, often obscure, songs he had written for other people, often sung by Costello in an uninterested, dead pan manner. He only really “came to life” when he started singing the works with Bacharach – and my god, he SANG – or in songs like “She”. The last three or four songs were really good, really dramatic and heartfelt, which made both Damo and I wonder why he hadn’t been like that earlier in the night.
He probably did too many encores (I think it was four) when the crowd wasn’t really demanding it. I also think the limited standing ovation (only a small percentage of the eahtre) was probably more in recognition of previous works than last night’s performance. Bit sad, really.
When you grow up in a naturally beautiful area like the North Coast of NSW (like I did), I suspect you sometimes take it for granted. Even now, when I go home to visit my family, most of the time there is spent at home with them. If you’ve grown up with an environment like that, I guess you sometimes never realise how fantastic it is. I suspect the same may be true of the Cataract Gorge at Launceston. On such a gorgeous day, I thought more locals would have been out and about enjoying a really beautiful location on their doorstep.
One of the best things about the gorge is that it’s so close. Sue dropped me off there this morning, as she made her way to visit some relatives. While she enjoyed their company, I enjoyed wandering around the gorge.
Cataract Gorge Reserve
There’s a ski-lift not far from the car park which (for $12 one way; $15 both ways) takes you from one side to the other. In hindsight it was probably a waste of money, as the walk itself isn’t too difficult.
On the other side, I stopped and looked briefly at the feeding wallabies, before embarking on walk to the lookout. The sign describes the walk as difficult, steep, and requiring about thirty minutes. Due to the incline I found the walk pretty difficult for a while, and so I stopped a couple of times on my way to the top. I wasn’t the only one finding it difficult, though, as a small group of Dutch and French tourists also stopped and paused on their way up. I figured it was best to get the “hard walk” out of the way first. The view from the top was good, though perhaps a little disappointing, as many Australian lookouts are (there’s too much to see), since it also looked back towards suburban housing in Launceston.
It was much better, in my opinion, to walk more closely to the gorge (though you never actually get the opportunity to walk around the flowing water and rocks due to safety fences). Down a little closer you get to feel the energy caused by the rushing water. You also get to see the variation. For many, I think the Australian landscape of the type you find in the gorge seems to have only two colours: brown and green. But when you look closely you see the rust colours of the rocks, the occasional blue and yellow of the wild-flowers, and the many deep variations of those dominant colours.
Cataract Gorge ReserveCataract Gorge ReserveI really loved my time wandering around Cataract Gorge. The views are wonderful and the walks aren’t too strenuous. The only thing I’d change (if possible, but maybe safety is an issue), is that it would be great to get a little closer to the rushing water and the rocks.
In the last twenty-four hours, I have begun to seriously question my sexuality, and I blame the “Unisex Amateur Strip Night” at Sydney’s Newtown Hotel. In an otherwise lacklustre lineup, there was only one stripper last night who you might even begin to see as somewhat sexy, and she was the reigning Miss Nude NSW.
Stripper Night
Having previously attended the Grand Final (and heat) of Season One of the amateur strip night, I was very excited when I noticed the posters appear a couple of weeks ago announcing another competition. And in the same week that a political scandal had erupted about Kevin Rudd’s fifteen minutes of fame in a New York strip joint, I felt sure that acclaimed drag artiste Vanessa Wagner would have some very funny jokes to make and maybe, just maybe, someone would have the comic time to appear on stage as Mr Rudd himself, before stripping down to some knee-length socks and white BVDs (yes that’s how I imagine Kevin might appear). Alas, it was not to be.
Sadly, Vanessa was on holiday in Thailand, replaced by the very fine Nurse Betty (or something like that). Sadly also they were clearly struggling for contestants. Thus the lineup included only one actual contestant, who took an awfully long time to take his clothes off. And while my fellow attendee, Papertrap thought that was okay, The Other Andrew rightly observed he was pretty lame. If you can imagine yourself having gone out for a night with friends and having consumed a beer or thirty, and then on your arrival home, you start taking your clothes off at the front door, and by the time you’ve made it to the bedroom some ten minutes later you still haven’t managed to get your pants, shoes and socks off before you finally collapse on the bed. If you can imagine all of that, you can imagine the only real contestant last night.
So that meant they needed to make up the numbers with an assortment of others including a comic female stripper in an anatomically correct bodysuit; a self-declared professional male stripper (I can’t imagine you would actually pay); a drunken/stoned audience member; and one member of the regular bar staff who as Papertrap observed bore a remarkable resemblance to Gollum from Lord Of The Rings, only hairier.
Actually, it wasn’t all that bad. We enjoyed an earlier meal, had a good chat, enjoyed a few laughs and drank some fine beers. And of course, we got to see Miss Nude NSW perform her act. She was pretty good as she used feathers and such, and her use of a Nick Cave song was truly inspired. And compared to the others, she was pretty sexy. So on the Kinsey Six Point Scale, you can probably now put me down as a 5.9, I suppose.
“EVERYONE was wearing these checked shirts”, my friend Sam said to me as we walked around the store. And he should know, as he was in Stockholm just a couple of weeks ago.
We were walking around a clothing store in Surry Hills, Somedays which sells Swedish clothing. Yes, really. There’s shirts and jeans, and shoes, and all sorts of things from Swedish clothing companies. Well, not H and M, but the other ones.
At the moment, they have a forty percent sale. So of course, their “sale” sign is in Swedish.
To be honest, there’s nothing I’d actually purchase myself, except maybe some of the stuff from Tiger of Sweden. It’s all a bit young and groovy for me. There was some Björn Borg underwear which caught my eye, but I have enough socks and jocks right now, so I didn’t worry too much about them.
Also today I ran into a mate from work who has a new baby. That was nice.
And then tonight I’ve watched the Hawke telemovie on Channel 10.
A shot from interval during Keating - The Musical at Sydney's Seymour Centre, Australia
Although I’ve had a life-long interest in politics, it was during the 1980s that I “came of age” and was able to vote for the first time. It was an interesting period for politics, being the age of Hawke, Thatcher and Reagan. We still had apartheid and we still had the Soviet Union. And we were fighting wars in the Middle East, first against Libya.
As hard as it must have been to sum up 10-15 years in a 2-hour movie, I thought the story moved along well, without a sense they were jumping over major periods. I guess there’s always a tendency to feel you have to account for every moment and every action in someone’s life when you do a biopic. Thus, I think they did a good job focussing on major themes.
Without knowing the characters you can never be sure how accurately they’ve portrayed those involved. I was moved by the article in yesterday’s paper by Ros Hawke saying her mother was portrayed as overly ambitious. I’ve also been interested in Keating’s reaction to his portrayal in the new biography of Hawke.
It’s probably still too early to be sure about the historical accuracy of it all. The wounds between Hawke and Keating are obviously still very raw, based on comments from the last few days. You still have the aching legacy of Hazel Hawke’s illness contrasted with the apparent happiness of Bob’s marriage to Blanche,
And on top of that, you have film-makers, actors and so on, who lived through this period and who probably have strong views about the characters also.
In maybe 10 or 20 years time when the “key players” have passed on, perhaps we’ll have a better, more independant view of things. But in the meantime, I still enjoyed it very much, even if there were far too many bloody ads.
Christmas (or “Giftmas” as I’ve heard someone cynically and amusingly describe it as lately) came early for me this year in the form of a brand new mobile phone. You might recall reading last week I lost my previous mobile in the back of a cab, soon after arriving back from a weekend Canberra. Late last week, I called Telstra to organise a replacement phone, which arrived today. A replacememt which had more cords than I thought necessary, had a book which took me about 30 minutes to read, and which still took about 15 minutes of fiddling around with before I could actually make a call. It has a radio, an mp3 player, G3 access, Office Suite, and an inbuilt nuclear reactor, I’m sure. Tonight, on the way to see “Borat: The Movie” (which I’ll write about later), I decided to make use of the phone’s 3megapixel camera. I snapped this photograph of the Christmas Tree at Taylor Square. I think the night-time quality is reasonably good, but look forward to further experimentation. So yes, an early Christmas present for myself, but I just better make sure I don’t lose this one. 
