Mr Beige Man

I spent most of the day today taking photos of Blackwall Reach in Melville (Perth WA). It was so named in 1896 by an Admiralty Surveyor after the above bit of the Thames in London. Apparently the river wall there was blackish, tho I doubt there’s an image of that extant. Perhaps L.S. Dawson R.N. thought that the river cliffs at this point on the Swan River also looked blackish. We’ll never know.

I’m just listening to Django Reinhardt dealing with a tune called ‘Heavy Artillery’.  It’s obviously a ripoff of ‘Tuxedo Junction’ (Hawkins/Johnson c. 1939) or vice versa.  And there’s a tune that Ry Cooder does with Manuel Galban called ‘Drume Negrita’ (Ernesto Grenet) on Mambo Sinuendo (2003) which begins exactly as does the music opening of the film Bad Eggs (Tony Martin, 2003) for which David Graney and Clare Moore get the music credits.  (I haven’t looked at the credits on the actual film to see if this is mentioned).  There’s also a Pigram Brothers song called ‘End of Time’ (on Jiir, 2004) which sounds to me as tho it was ‘inspired’ by ‘Hobo’s Lullaby’ (Goebel Reeves) which I hear on the album of the same name by Arlo Guthrie (1972): I mean the tune, but even the lyrics are a little similar.

Awaken from your sleep you weary battler …
Go to sleep you weary hobo …

Why all this fuss about the ‘Kookaburra’ riff on ‘Down Under’?

I suppose part of my enthusiasm for Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) was what I saw as its originality. But I’d never heard of Larry McMurtry, and I’d forgotten about Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963) which as a star-struck kid I saw as a film about Paul Newman, rather than one about Texas. Having now seen Hud again, and noted that it’s a McMurtry story, LPS is looking a bit derivative. The two films could certainly have used the same town’s main street (they didn’t).

My ‘favourite Australian film’ (I get asked) used to be both of the 1971 Ws (Walkabout, Wake in Fright) but, since I first saw it, has been Ivan Sen’s Beneath Clouds. So I was shocked just now, when I went to check the Wikipedia entry, to find that (it says) that the lead actor died in a car crash last year (2009). Sad farewell to a fine actor who only made one film: Damian Pitt. We don’t know where his character Vaughn is going at the end of the film; now, in a sense, we do.

I’ve ‘finished’ (a webpage/site is never finished) my comments on my page of ‘best’ Australasian films.

I’m reading Memoirs of an Infantry Officer with the aid of Google Earth: not much help, as the landscape is so different now.
One is struck by the things the author takes for granted, like ‘class’, as here:

It’s queer, I thought, how little one really knows about the men.  In the Line one finds out which are the duds, and one builds up a sort of comradeship with the tough and willing ones. But back in billets the gap widens and one can’t do much to cheer them up. (Sherston Memoirs, Faber, 1937: 310)

So the government is going to identify every schoolchild (that is, everyone!) with an ID number. In case some deviants figure out how to change their number in the system, they should tattoo it on their arms.

Is there an acromegalic face?  Fascia?  I’ve always been surprised at the conventional success of Jimmy Smits (The West Wing etc.).  And here we have Fenella.

Looking forward to My Place on Sunday [not], expecting my heart to be warmed [not]. Mind you, after being reminded by Hud, the night before, that I have a barbed-wire soul (it was a youthful formative experience for me, far more important than Camus) it may not occur [so].
Why am I telling you this, wasting your time? Because the ABC has advertisements (not [many of them are] commercials) so I’m passing mine, at your expense.

You’ve always wanted to know what a gabion is, haven’t you? Well, here are a couple of local examples, on either side of the HMAS Perth Memorial’s slipway, Preston Point.