disassociated

Radio and television broadcaster Myf Warhurst speaks to Good Weekend Magazine writer Melissa Fyfe, on the Good Weekend Talks podcast (Spotify link).

I used to listen to Warhurst when she presented on Australian radio station Triple J, from 2000 to 2007. She later had a show on Double J, originally known as Dig Radio, a digital station that was spun off from Triple J in 2002.

Her television credits include Spicks & Specks, a quiz show, and being an Australian commentator for the Eurovision Song Contest. Presently Warhurst is a narrator for stage rock musical, The Rocky Horror Show, which also happens to be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year.

Update: if Spotify is not your preferred streamer, you can also tune into the podcast via Apple, or Google.

A scene from Bill Murray’s “cameo” in Wes Anderson’s film Asteroid City.

American actor Bill Murray has starred in all but two of Wes Anderson’s feature length films. Murray missed participating in Anderson’s latest, Asteroid City, after being side-lined by a Covid infection. Murray had been cast as a motel manager, but Steve Carell was brought in instead at the last minute.

But that didn’t stop the veteran actor, and Anderson stalwart, from making an appearance on the Asteroid City set, after he had recovered. In a “retro” trailer, posted by the New Yorker, Murray can be seen in a specially created role, walking through the township, where he meets Jason Schwartzman, who in this instance portrays someone called Jones.

Perfectly made, beautifully acted and pitch-perfect. Charlotte Higgins, writing for The Guardian, of A Room with a View, the 1985 Merchant Ivory film that launched the careers of British actors Helena Bonham Carter, and the late Julian Sands:

The film, in a small way, has followed me. Not unconnected with having loved the film, as a student I did travel around Italy, with a friend, and wandered around Santa Croce, and gazed at the Arno, and took a trip to the hills above Florence, though without, alas for us, romantic incident. On the morning of my 21st birthday I woke up in a house in rural Tuscany to be given, by a friend, a mixtape containing O mio babbino caro, the soaring, glorious aria from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi that we hear as the film’s opening titles roll.

A first edition print of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first book in the Harry Potter series, published in 1997, will be auctioned later this week and may fetch up to five thousand pounds. A British collector of books and memorabilia, who died recently, had purchased the title, which was one of a print run of five-hundred copies, from a library for thirty pence.

First edition books, as the term suggests, are the first published copies of a book, and as such are often of interest to book collectors.