My own recent poem: ‘The engine on the edge’

A poem about the Zig-Zag Railway in Blue Mountains, a particular type of incident in the Edwardian era and, to a lesser extent, steam trains in general.

‘The engine on the edge’

Blue Mountains, early 1900s

Another day for a driver and fireman on the Zig-Zag Railway.
One moment they have a routine run,
working on steady progress for a downhill section.

No warning! Brakes fail.
The men are irrelevant and soon know it.

A wooden buffer isn’t up to the job.
Sheer mass and speed plough the engine
through it, towards the lip of the cliff at Top Points.
Driver and fireman jump away, trust to their luck.

On the edge: the engine’s front half is over the cliff.
Leading wheels, funnel, lights, half the chamber -
no support. Empty space below, down to the valley floor.
The other end: the mass of rolling stock provides an anchor
…for how long?

A photographer arrives: hot from a rushed buggy trip,
excited by his chance.
He gets his record before the engine is taken for repair.
The incident enters Zig-Zag’s history.
In this age of rail, his work is a fossil disguised as a postcard.

I’m looking at my copy of that postcard.

Barack Obama becomes new President Elect in US!

World news, world history: Barack Obama wins the 2008 Elections to become new President-Elect in US.

It has finally happened! A candidate identifying themselves as a Black American has not only been their party’s endorsed Presidential candidate but has WON! He achieved a substantial victory in the vital Electoral College system and also won the Popular Vote.

I haven’t been this excited about and interested in a US election before, but this time there was a very real difference in the candidates: Obama made history simply by being in the final group people could vote on.  Then he went one better and became the new President Elect. It opens up a lot of possibilities in the US and beyond it as well.

There were many on-line electoral maps being checked throughout the day in my office area, and plenty of buzz about the changing numbers and which states showed up blue or red. Then in mid-afternoon Obama passed the ‘magic’ 270 vote mark to win, and kept going. When news came out that McCain had called to conceded defeat, Obama had over 330 votes. News coverage went into overdrive. I wasn’t able to listen to the victory speech at the time, but will try to catch up with at least an excerpt very soon.

Exciting day! New hope!

‘Burn After Reading’: Coen brothers back in top comic form

Note: may contain spoilers

‘Burn After Reading’ is the new best proof of what the Coen brothers can do with comedy when they do their own material and are in their best form. At the Saturday afternoon/evening session I went to, the whole audience was audibly ‘into’ the movie right from the first credits.

It was great to see actors like J K Simmons -who I last knew as the police shrink in Law & Order: SVU -take on a new kind of cameo senior role as a CIA chief, and for Brad Pitt to have fun in a supporting role of a goofy gym trainer who thinks he ‘knows the score’. He plays against Frances McDormand’s equally ditzy plagued-by-insecurities colleague who has real difficulties in staying quiet at strategic moments. John Malkovich is back to his bitter&twisted best, George Clooney gives a lot to laugh at and Tilda Swinton does a first-rate job of being a total bitch.  It’s a fine ensemble who really do work with the story, so the whole movie becomes an adventure for them and the audience.

The basics of the story as I saw it: CIA analyst (Malkovich) gets down-graded from his field job, has a hissy fit, quits, then starts writing his scathing memoir. His wife (Swinton ), who has her own plans, seeks advice from lawyer, gets ’some dirt’ on hubby -copies his memoir and financial info to disk, then loses it at her gym, where two twitty staffers (Pitt and Mcdormand) find it and decide to try profiting from it. Farce quickly escalates, increasing mis-communication problems tangles characters in each others’ lives, accidents and discoveries eventually eliminate most of the players and only the truly clueless or undeservedly lucky actually escape more or less unscathed, while CIA chief (Simmons) has to decide how to finish the espionage side of it all.  The story overall is full of hard-boiled wit, smart observations on human behaviour under unexpected stress and situations so crazy you start worrying they could be plausible.

I’m already hoping the Coens do one of their commentaries as a bonus feature for the DVD release.

Russian Film Festival tour in Australia – 2008 program

‘Letters from a Dead Man’: 1980s science fiction film included in Russian Film Festival tour in Australia – 2008

First things first: I am pleased that I made the effort to see the film ‘Letters from a Dead Man’ that screened as part of the Russian Film Festival program this year. It is a finely controlled, well-balanced and intensely atmospheric  work of sustained storytelling power in both the film medium in general and more specifically in the tradition of man-made holocaust/apocalypse films.

The main story of the film: in Moscow, in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse/holocaust, an aging professor is living in a fallout shelter under the museum where he and colleagues used to work. He fills in a lot of his time using scrounged stationery supplies to write letters to his son, who he hopes beyond hope is still alive somewhere outside. These are the letters referred to in the film’s title; compared to his earlier professional life, which included winning a Nobel Prize, he is already ‘as good as dead’. He shares the bunker space with his estranged and dying wife, a father & son duo with their own take on what is a good time to end life, another senior museum staffer who takes on an honorary role of funeral director, plus a few others. Safe food supplies are extremely frugal, the radio and light bulbs are pedal-powered, medications are either unavailable or have to be found outside the shelter and at black-market rates, after risking the murderous military patrols.

At one point, the professor relates how he witnessed the disastrous mis-communication and delayed reactions that led to multiple missile launches; this account is quickly complemented by an extremely graphic sequence of the nuclear war in progress. Floods of fire, explosion-speed winds and super-intense radiation roll over whole cities and instantly wreck them; the atmosphere is simultaneously ruined by the blast waves. Cut to scenes of monotonous shelter life and flooded basements, then the ruins outside: charred remains of cars and  buses, twisted railway tracks and distorted metal frames marking former sites of tall buildings, mountains of rubble, thick dust in the air, no sunrise or sunset.

One day, while out on a scrounging mission, the professor discovers a group of orphaned children in a medical shelter. They have all become mute and zombie-like through total shock and sickness, and he suddenly finds he is faced with a choice to either go straight back to his shelter and convince himself he never met them, or try to do something to help them. Of course, his own experiences as a father and his desperate letter-writing habit make it clear he can’t bring himself to ignore them. The extreme detachment of the one surviving doctor, who has already been confronted by many fractured-families cases and never given new or extra supplies to deal with them, adds to the children’s plight and the professor’s determination to help. In this action, I felt he was making a personal promise of redemption: if he could no longer help his own son, he could use some of his remaining energy and resources in his shelter to try to help the children.  A lone woman in the medical shelter has been trying to care for the children, but her own time and her chances of getting any multiple permits are severely limited.

Later in the story, after his own wife has died and other characters have left for other shelters or consigned themselves to being buried under the museum, the lone woman manages to brings the children to the professor’s shelter and he takes on the carer role for what little life time he has left. Finally, and on his urging after a very poignant improvised Christmas, it is up to the children to draw on their own strengths to leave him to his now-peaceful death and seek their own escape.

Retrospective & miscellaneous comments: Watching this film was a very intense, bleak and strangely compelling experience. From the first seconds of the prologue to the very end, it relentlessly showed the famously Russian genius for depicting unremitting misery and despair. This was occasionally leavened by a memorable demonstration of human capacity for compassion or humour that is truly awe-inspiring and deeply sad at the same time. At my matinee session, on an early Saturday afternoon, there were actually more characters in the bunkers shown in the on-screen story than there were paying audience members in the cinema… which added to the theme of isolation.  If possible, this film was even bleaker than ‘The Bunker’ film about Adolf’s last days, and the only other Russian film I’ve seen that possibly equals ‘Letters…’ for sheer bleakness value is a black&white version of ‘King Lear’, with music specially written by Shostakovich.

The under-the-museum setting and presence of the ruined collections give their own imprint on the story: faded and ruined memories and proofs of what people once were and suggestions of what they could have been, counterpointed by new proofs of what have become.

Technical/editing point: the subtitles were clear, in un-boxed white text and stayed on screen for a useful amount of time without being obtrusive.

This film by Konstantin Lopuchansky was released in the mid-1980s, and won Best Film at the Mannheim-Heidelberg festival in 1986. It is a vivid depiction of one film-maker’s ideas of world news and Cold War politics becoming a real disaster story.

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A “life-affirming” film in most drastic way; not really recommended as a ‘date movie’. If you do or did see it as a ‘date movie’, then I offer either my congratulations on your incredibly strong relationship or commiserations on your or your date’s choice. 

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fyi: http://www.russianresurrection.com/2008/programme.php?movie=retro2#retro2mv2 -for specific info about the ‘Letters from a Dead Man’ movie; or just http://www.russianresurrection.com for general festival site.

‘DRALION’: Cirque di Soleil’s new show in Canberra

DRALION is the spectacular new Cirque di Soleil show in Canberra. It is full of fresh stunts, sets and a generous serve of clown antics.

The strong Chinese circus theme for Dralion is represented by the dra [gon] in the show’s title and in the overall feel of the show, which offers an interesting change from the sea/reef-inspired look of Varekai! last year. Chinese dragon costumes ‘animated’ by pairs of acrobats are included in the range worn by the cast; there is an awesomely agile star solo female contortionist; an adventurous juggler; solo singers, who sometimes perform a chorus role during the acrobatic action; teams of acrobats leap & twist through sets of hoops and do high-speed skipping-rope tricks; the dragons do a team stunt of their own; and the trampoline action makes some Olympic gymnastic events look almost boring by comparison.

As a general spectator with no circus background, I don’t know how innovative the trapeze work is in terms of professional standards, but in the atmosphere of the big ‘Grand Chapiteau’ tent it offered a fantastic experience in its own right, whether in the form of two male-female duos on seat-style pendulum frames or the extended romance played out by a male/female pair, using giant ribbons.

Clowns have been a main feature of the circus format since the earliest days of the art form, and for ‘Dralion’ there was a quartet who did both audience warm-up and central acts. The audience in the session I went to loved both the variety and in-your-face style. The clowns’ energy, stamina and team work was very impressive, especially given a schedule sometimes demanding two shows a day.

Highly recommended!

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fyi: The ‘official info’ from press release for the Canberra show: http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/mail/en/newsletter_pr/dralion/release_Canberra.htm. Also: http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/CirqueDuSoleil/en/Pressroom/touringshows/dralion/about/default.htm