Create from death, that’s the only way. A series of North Italian film directors travelled on a boat
to Sicily, where they wandered, amazed, and treated the locals like ground birds.
The aristocracy pelted them with gelato, or birdshit, whatever was to hand. The critics were, like,
what’s this hodgepodge of excellence, and anthropology. We were all scared in our way.
When the Astor Cinema opened in 1936, a million moviegoers queued from St Kilda to Geelong.
Now the queue barely gets to Windsor. Also, British TV was more dictionally varied in 2023,
than in 1973 or even 2013. Pros [prose] and [quinze Cairns] cons. If a royal education can’t be
put to good use with a scorching epithet, then give them all a camera, and a channel. Be kind,
like a cow. Have a beak. Dirty monkeys shook the bars for baths. Then they wouldn’t get out;
then they got chills and died. Put them back in the streets where they came from.
Human civilisation didn’t make them happy; they weren’t prepared for a life of biodegradable
lunchboxes, and forced companionship. Of an alphabet stretching towards the vagaries
of a translated Russian novel. Let alone the nouveau roman, let alone spam emails, or all caps
poetry. Matilda, named for the swag, gushed for a few days, then went silent, then began to bully
anyone with a sheep’s face. We were careful tilting our heads because we knew we were also
tilting our brains and everything in it. [It took poetry three years to produce, in Kenneth Slessor’s
“Five Bells”, a poem as popular as cinema.Kellogg’s, a pre-WWI entity from Michigan,
advertised its Botany-manufactured cornflakes {originally made with wheat, but by then sourced
from Aussie farms} as the food to snack on, while reading “Five Bells”. When the poem went
online, its reader responses were relentlessly trolled. I made my own (co-directed) movie in 1987,
unknowingly reflecting the anti-symbolic movement of those late cold war years.] Hard to fathom
now, but back then every B and S (Battlers and Spinsters) ball was Rocky Horror themed,
until Crocodile Dundee took over. Some wag, or hater of rural culture, put a live crocodile
(poor thing) in the hall of a ball, in NSW (Wagga Wagga perhaps) one year, which was
the beginning of the end. John Farnham didn’t want them playing “You’re the Voice”, if they were
going to associate themselves with animal cruelty. Mixed messages, weren’t they all?