Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Dec 5, 2011, 2:46 am
Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a ... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Nov 3, 2011, 5:45 am
It's so rare to come across a 'straight' drawing show these days that it provokes comment for that reason alone. So my attention was drawn immediately to the invitation to Ginny Grayson's show at Place Gallery in Richmond, which starts on 9 November.
It also helps that I am a sucker for drawing whi... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Feb 8, 2011, 1:08 am
Spotted at this fast food outlet in Wheelers Hill: the rare and possibly endangered Chickenfish. Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Jan 27, 2011, 3:29 pm
When asked what kind of cheese he would like, my son Sweeney (two years old) stipulates "Old cheese. Like a grown-up". This must be what he means: Old Master cheese. Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Jan 18, 2011, 3:00 pm
My daughter recently returned from a study trip to Shanghai. In honour of her return, we sat and ate Pocky and watched the Hong Kong wartime and martial arts drama 'Ip Man' (2008).
While the historical accuracy of the nationalistic narrative, set in Foshan under Japanese occupation, was obviously c... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Dec 20, 2010, 2:26 am
Paul Schrader encapsulates everything a reader needs to know about his central character.
"TRAVIS BICKLE, age 26, lean, hard, the consummate loner. On the surface he appears good-looking, even handsome; he has a quiet steady look and a disarming smile which flashes from nowhere, lighting up his whol... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Nov 17, 2010, 2:21 am
Down at Bicentennial Park in Chelsea the other week, I came across this blast from my past: a mechanical traffic signal.
I was extremely taken with this sign when I was a child, whenever we drove through a particular Edithvale Road / Nepean Highway intersection beside the railway line. This would ha... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Nov 5, 2010, 2:52 am
Watching the TV series 'Jeeves & Wooster' which completely passed me by and I'm keen to fill in a cultural blank. I'm not sure it aired on Australian television at all and the first I heard about it was glimpsing a VHS copy at my local library.
I'm struck by a couple of things about Hugh Laurie's p... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Nov 3, 2010, 5:14 pm
Cartoonist Alan Moir in the Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 25 October. Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Oct 20, 2010, 2:18 am
Marieke Hardy attempting to review Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged':
Rand is batshit crazy. By all accounts she used to swan about wearing a swooshy velvet cape adorned with silver dollar signs which may be considered a charming sartorial quirk on someone like Flavor Flav but is less appealing on a Benze... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Oct 19, 2010, 2:55 am
Pottering in the Woodend Bookshop the other week, I found a copy of the 'Irma La Douce' screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, published in 1963.
It appears to be a cheap movie tie-in paperback, badly typeset, a Midwood-Tower Book, "First printing anywhere". Other books under that imprint ap... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Aug 30, 2010, 2:00 am
"What I do is kind of abstract. I break a lot of eggs. And I leave the shell in there. Texture is everything." Tom Waits Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Jun 1, 2010, 3:48 am
Louise Bourgeois (the last great artist of the twentieth century?) is dead.
Holland Cotter in the New York Times:
Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Apr 20, 2010, 3:05 am
Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (or just Amelie) (2001)
The very definition of joie de vivre. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's style is kinetic, the camera whipping about to follow any subjective whim of the central character (or whoever happens to narrating that particular bit). It's tone is whimsical, ro... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Mar 22, 2010, 3:23 am
"Welcome, America, to the world of universal health care. It will be alright. Really. Trust me. We've been there. We've had it for years, and we're doing well, thanks very much."
- The Rest of the World Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Dec 14, 2009, 1:53 am
In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx --- or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it --- and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly la... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Dec 7, 2009, 8:50 pm
From Black and WTF, "A photoblog of really strange black & white photos". Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
It’s difficult not to be curious
about this bone-man under the skin:
to think how he’s carried me over the years
without malice or contempt. In return
I’ve fed and clothed him of course,
shared the same bed, been shaped by his will,
but even after a lifetime together
I can’t say I know him, ... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
The Banquet of Cleopatra by Giambattista Tiepolo (1743-44)
The episode represented in Tiepolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra is drawn from the Roman historian Pliny’s Natural History (written in AD 77). Here Pliny recounted the tale of a famous contest between the Egyptian and Roman rulers (who beca... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
So radio Three Triple R's 'Film Buff's Forecast' program has just brought down its listeners' votes for the films of 2009, and I'm not happy.
Every year since I was about 16 I've been listening to the show's annual votes for best, worst, most overrated and most underrated films of that year. I go ba... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
It's the end of the decade* - time for a list.
One of the interesting things about doing this is to surprise yourself with which films linger in the memory even after the passing of years. It's a good test too, to check out which films remain good even after their cultural moment has passed. This is... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
William Caxton, the first person to print a book in English, noted the sort of misunderstandings that were common in his day in the preface to Eneydos in 1490 in which he related the story of a group of London sailors heading down the 'tamyse' for Holland who found themselves becalmed in Kent. Seeki... Comment - Like
Sean Payne posted an article on
Sign Language
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Dec 31, 1969, 7:00 pm
Children of Men (2006)
Manages to be both an utterly convincing depiction of a terrifying near-future and at the same time look like a rough-and-ready, low budget, hand-held record of events by a doco film crew on location. The Christian allegory in the last reel had me gasping for its fearlessness.... Comment - Like
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