Going Down, a 1982 film by Haydn Keenan
2 November 2021
Made in 1982 and filmed on a micro-budget over the course of a few days, Going Down, directed by Australian filmmaker Haydn Keenan is a gritty, no holds barred, slice of life glimpse of a night out on the town in Sydney. While the pacing and narrative technique reminded me a little of something like American Graffiti, Going Down is far more in your face.
Karli (Tracy Mann) is about to fly to New York. Her friends Jane (Vera Plevnik), Jackie (Julie Barry), and Ellen (Moira MacLaine-Cross), take her out for one last night of revelry before she leaves. The result is chaotic. Parties and bars are gone to, drugs are taken, sex is had, and a large sum money is lost. In the middle of it all, one of Karli’s friend’s tries to find sex work, as the girls, individually and collectively, make their way around the inner suburbs of a now barely recognisable Sydney.
Check out a snippet of the film here (NSFW: profanity, drug references).
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Australian film, film, Haydn Keenan, trailer
The Other Side of Beautiful, by Kim Lock
2 November 2021
A traumatic workplace incident several years earlier has left Mercy Blain, a former doctor, housebound, in The Other Side of Beautiful (published by HQ Fiction/HarperCollins, July 2021), the fourth novel of South Australian based author Kim Lock. For two years she has not left the safety and security of her home. But when the house burns to the ground one night, Mercy has no choice but to step out into the world.
Her first port of call is her former husband’s place. But he is living with someone else, and Mercy is on the move once again. This time though she goes all out. She buys an old – an incredibly old – campervan, and leaving her hometown Adelaide, in South Australia, with Wasabi, her sausage dog, Mercy makes her way north to Darwin.
But then things begin to change. As Mercy continues towards Darwin, she begins to experience a catharsis of sorts, and she starts to see a way around the anxieties that have kept her shut away behind closed doors. All seems to be going well until she is required to return to Adelaide to resolve a legal matter, where even the mere thought of being back causes to her anxiety to come to the fore again.
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The Metaverse, one step closer to the Holodeck
1 November 2021
Last week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the social network company he co-founded in 2004 will be known as Meta. Later, in his keynote presentation at the company Connect event, he unveiled a raft of technologies in development that have the potential to change the way we live and work.
The Star Trek geek in me could not help but make comparisons to the Holodeck, a room on the Enterprise that allowed the crew to realistically create, or re-create, almost any situation they could imagine. If you have a spare eighty or so minutes, check out Zuckerberg’s keynote. Tech analyst Ben Thompson interviewed the Facebook CEO shortly before the keynote, and if you have another forty-five minutes to spare, it’s a conversation well worth listening to. It’s a fascinating time for those of us with an oblong obsession.
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Mark Zuckerberg, metaverse, technology
House of Gucci, a film by Ridley Scott
1 November 2021
Ridley Scott has put together a star studded cast including Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Salma Hayek, Jared Leto, Al Pacino, and Jeremy Irons, for his adaptation of House of Gucci (trailer), based on the 2002 book by Sara Gay Forden. Not that a star studded cast really makes much difference to whether I see a film or not.
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It’s November 2021, that means it’s NaNoWriMo 2021
1 November 2021
It’s November and that means NaNoWriMo is upon us. NaNoWriMo? It’s an acronym for National Novel Writing Month, an annual writing event established by Chris Baty, a freelance writer, in 1999. And if you think you can knock out a mere fifty thousand (50,000) words by the end of the month, you too can take part. As of 2020, over half a million people worldwide were participating in various NaNoWriMo projects.
Originally held in July of 1999, the event later switched to November, a move intended to take people’s minds off the approaching winter, tricky for people south of the equator though gearing up for summer. But heck, summer arrives in December down-under, so why worry? An impressive collection of NaNoWriMo works have gone on to be published, so it’s something worth checking out if you’re an aspiring author.
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A very SETI Halloween
30 October 2021
Happy Halloween for tomorrow. Do you enjoy the prospect of an Alien invasion? Better look the other way at A No-body Problem from SETI then. I’m not sure which is scarier… what happens here, or the chance SETI may find extraterrestrial life. Because, you know, has no one been watching Invasion?
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Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black enhanced by Spotify
30 October 2021
It’s been fifteen years since the release of late English singer Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black album. Holy moly, fifteen years. To mark the occasion Spotify have accorded the defining release the enhanced treatment:
Spotify worked with Winehouse’s label and estate to create a bunch of content for the playlist: video clips but also new ‘canvas’ looping videos, ‘storylines’ lyrics analysis snippets, and video of other artists talking about how they’ve been influenced by Winehouse and the album.
Check it out here on Spotify.
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Passing, a film by Rebecca Hall
29 October 2021
We’re all passing for something, aren’t we? Passing (trailer) is the directorial debut of British actor and filmmaker Rebecca Hall, and is based on the 1929 book of the same name, written by late American author Nella Larsen. Clare (Ruth Negga) and Irene (Tessa Thompson), are old school friends who meet again by chance years after leaving school. While both women are mixed-race, Irene identifies as being African-American, while Clare’s light complexion allows her to “pass” as being white. But their obsessive interest in each other threatens to unravel both their lives.
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Book of the Year Award 2021 shortlist announced
29 October 2021
The shortlist for the Small Press Network 2021 Book of the Year Award (BOTY) was unveiled on Monday, 25 October, 2021. Previously the award was known as the Most Underrated Book of the Year Award, but the name was changed in 2020. The Small Press Network represents small and independent publishers in Australia, and the winner of the 2021 BOTY will be announced in late November. Do check out the work of the shortlisted authors, these are titles I seldom see on Bookstagram.
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Australian writing, literature
Boundless writers festival 2021
29 October 2021
Boundless, a Sydney based festival of Indigenous and culturally diverse writers, is on from today, Friday 29 October until Sunday 31 October. A number of panels and workshops will be presented online, including Should I? Ethical Questions for Screen Storytellers, which touches on the topic of who can tell, and profit, from publishing certain stories. Writers of fiction might also find themselves asking similar questions, in regards to how much they can draw on the lives and experiences of people they know, in their work.
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