Quote of the Day

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I read out this extract from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet during my speech at my sister’s wedding – I was looking for a wedding-appropriate poem that a) didn’t make me vomit and b) expressed something I personally believed in. I think it puts a very practical advice on the need of space in relationships in a very beautiful way:

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

The Wolverine – Film Review

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I watched The Wolverine yesterday on regular TV; I really forgot how annoying the ad breaks are. Luckily a mute button was there for me to make things a little bit better.

I love Hugh Jackman and I love the character, but I skipped the movie during its theatrical release. I still had the foul aftertaste of X-Men Origins: Wolverine in my mouth, a legitimately shitty movie if there ever was one, and the trailers just didn’t look inspiring enough. While The Wolverine is not anywhere as terrible as Hugh Jackman’s first solo outing, it’s still nothing more than mediocre. It’s not exciting enough as an action/thriller and much too superficial to be a thoughtful, mature character study it was obviously aiming to be. In fact the best thing about it is the rather cool Japanese-style poster.

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Ex Machina – Film Review

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I had a day off work today, so I decided to check out this movie, especially since it’s ending its run soon. Day sessions are weird; there were only three other people in the cinema and one of them, a guy with crazy hippy hair and a beard, seemed to be something of a mutterer – he mostly kept quiet though, thank god. There were also scuffling noises coming from the roof throughout the session, as if a bunch of possums decided to throw a party.

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New Music 06/2015 – Chet Faker, Courtney Barnett

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I should have had this blog years ago, when I was buying up to five albums a week sometimes and my CD collection ballooned over 900. Since then, I cut down my collection by about a third, and got much more selective about my purchases. By a coincidence, the last two I got are both by Australian artists.

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Quote of the day

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What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend.

– Doris Lessing, On Cats

Mad Max: Fury Road – Film Review

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madmaxI haven’t seen any of the older Mad Max films and had no interest in the new one, until all the gushing reviews started to pop up. After watching the movie yesterday, I needed about an hour or so to decompress, because man that was one intense, exhilarating, bonkers insane experience that left me completely steamrolled, in the best way possible.

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Mushrooms

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Every autumn or so, we go picking wild mushrooms in various spots around Melbourne with my Dad and recently my sister. This seems to be a European thing to do, and gets a pretty bemused reaction from most of the Australians I know:

A. Mushrooms? Are they magic mushrooms, hahaha?

B. But how do you know which ones are good to pick?

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Quote of the day

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G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories are some of the most original detective stories I’ve read. I didn’t always find them 100% plausible – sometimes the mysteries are solved with pure intuitive leaps that seem a tad too far-fetched – but there’s no denying they have an atmosphere and style all of their own, not to mention Father Brown himself, an unassuming, shrewd, empathetic, endearing character. My favourite passage from the entire series is the speech he gives to the thief Flambeau in The Flying Stars:

I want you to give them back, Flambeau, and I want you to give up this life. There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don’t fancy they will last in that trade. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. Many a man I’ve known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime. I know the woods look very free behind you, Flambeau; I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a monkey. But someday you will be an old grey monkey, Flambeau. You will sit up in your free forest cold at heart and close to death, and the tree-tops will be very bare.