One last post on Turkey. My companion, known here as the Art Student, was fascinated, even obsessed with the many women tourists in Istanbul who were dressed in black from head to toe, faces veiled and even sometimes hands concealed by black gloves. She was indignant that their male companions were very often wearing shorts. Far too hot for a man to wear long pants, they seemed to say, while the women simply sweltered. Paradoxically, many of these women carried cameras. We did see some lowering the veils to below their chins so as to be photographed, but mainly they took snaps and remained themselves unsnappable. Traditional Turkish attire for women involving garments resembling trench coats of varying lengths and colours, didn’t look much cooler, but at least the women showed their faces in public,
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- Uncoupled ( Jeffrey Richman & Darren Star 2022) 8 August 2022Neil Patrick Harris holds this together as a gay man who is dumped without warning by his partner of 17 years. It has been described as Sex and the City only with actual gay men. well, I never took to S&tS, but this stays charming. I especially like the inscrutable affability of Colin the dumper.
- Fixing the Broken Nightingale (Richard James Allen 2013) 8 August 2022Another in Flying Island's Australian Pocket Poets series
- La Boîte: An Ideal Husband (Lewis Treston, after Oscar Wilde 2022) 6 August 2022We went to this with high hopes, but although most of the audience seemed to love it, laughing heartily at things invisible to me, I thought it was abysmal: badly paced, grimaced and shouted rather than acted, cynical about politics with a reactionary and misogynistic undercurrent. Poor Oscar. That is my impression of the first half. The second half may hav […]
- Late Journals (Antigone Kefala 2022) 3 August 2022While everyone's talking about Helen Garner's diaries, here's another Australian literary diary keeper.
- Terminally Poetic (Ouyang Yu 2022) 2 August 2022A line lit on at random – 'I call it mediocrity whose name is australian poetry' – reminds me why I approach Ouyang Yu's work with caution. Either he is describing himself as mediocre or he is worryingly exceptionalist. But worrying isn't the worst thing poetry can be, so here goes.
- Uncoupled ( Jeffrey Richman & Darren Star 2022) 8 August 2022
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