Mad Max 4 - Fury Road - a furious ride!

Howdy Folks, it’s exhortation time! I am exhorting you to drop everything and go see Mad Max 4: Fury Road.

Now that I've come down from the aural/visual/sensual high that is this extraordinary film, I urge every single one of you to head to the nearest big screen cinema and strap yourselves in for the cinematic ride of 2015. Fuck yeah!

Take your loved ones, your parents, your (older) children, your grandparents, your friends, and while you’re at it, your pets. Let George Miller take you through a crash-course in Directing Action Films 101.

It features real humans performing real stunts – and I mean seriously death-defying stuff. It uses minimal CGI. It features Charlize Theron rocking a gorgeously butch haircut, looking like the sun-kissed Amazon of the Veldt she is. It features the melancholically pretty and thankfully near-mute Tom Hardy as the eponymous Max. Megan Gale makes an appearance in the nuddy.

Strange as it sounds, there are quite a few nods to iconic silent films. Yes, you read correctly - silent films. In amongst the noise, the crunch and the crash, amidst the thrash of drums and electric guitars, there's some real visual poetry here.

Without giving too much away, the early scenes inside the Citadel look a lot like Fritz Lang’s classic Metropolis, and the henchmen perched atop the long swaying poles evoke the Keystone Kops or Buster Keaton-style antics from that same era. Muddy reckons they reminded him of Balinese fisherman hanging off fishing poles! In a pre-audio world, silent films told stories through physical action, body language and facial expression alone. No words required.

So much has been said about its feminist slant – brutal patriarchy overthrown by a ballsy chick, a pregnant supermodel-cum-Boudicca, a bunch of grannies on motorbikes and a couple of tag-along blokes lending their muscles on the journey – that I don’t need to add any more. If you’d like to read a good deconstruction of the film, then check out Anthony Lane’s review in the New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane

For me, the image of a girl madly clutching a handbag containing precious seedlings thirsting for soil and water is one of the film’s more poignant images. The film is full of these arresting moments that take you by surprise and make you think, but never slow the film down.

This is a stand-alone epic. No need to have seen the originals.

Check it out on the big screen while you can.

Coils ain’t coils. Going curly just got complicated…

Time to get confessional, peeps. And personal. Deeply personal.

Towards the end of last year I started noticing some serious moulting. Hair clumped around the shower drain, stray strands in food and a few more than usual wound around the teeth of my ‘afro’ comb. Not surprising, given hair loss is a product of hormonal change due to impending menopause (me) and stress (also me). We grow old, we grow anxious, and things drop off and fall apart. It’s life.

Still, there’s something confronting about losing your hair. I’m hardly going bald (not yet anyway) but running my fingers through my freshly blow-waved hair before a big event last year sent a chill up my spine. My hair never felt so thin, wispy and insubstantial. There’s a strange, primitive sense of diminution, a loss of vitality that goes hand in hand with losing your hair.

So I decided I would no longer blow-wave my hair, or lighten portions of it in an effort to ‘work’ with the grey (bleach can’t be good right?). No longer would I try for the sleek silver-fox look. I decided once and for all I would revert to my dark, adolescent curly locks.

Sounds like it should be easy. Wash, condition, chuck in some expensive salon-brand curling product and voila – instant rockin’ locks. Alas no, it wasn’t quite so easy.

Years of repeated bleaching, blow-drying and an irregular curl pattern (my hair is a mix of spirals, waves and coils) meant my hair needed serious attention – especially since the only hairdresser I trusted to cut my hair had gone back to the UK. Dry and damaged, plus no real haircut in months meant my hair was growing into a weird, fuzzy shape. I would go into work looking like a badly-cropped poodle then twist my hair into a messy pony tail at my desk. Depressing and despairing…

Enter the internet, the greatest tool bestowed upon the curious autodidact with too much free time.

I Googled ‘looking after damaged curly hair’ and discovered a curly-hair movement/ revolution/ renaissance/ reformation has been taking place right under my nose.

After years of being told to straighten their hair because it’s more WASP/ acceptable in the workplace/ professional/ sophisticated/ sexy etc. a whole bunch of angry ‘curlies’ have jettisoned their straightening irons and rediscovered their natural waves, kinks, coils, curls, spirals and twisty bits. They have binned the sulphate-containing shampoos and chemical conditioners, and embraced the natural (vegan!) stuff to manage their natural hair. I have lost count of the number of dedicated curly-hair websites.

I confess I found myself getting swept along by their fervour.

So based on an astonishing number of positive reviews on Amazon and the number of times it popped up on various websites, I started using the Kinky-Curly range of sulphate-free shampoo and conditioner (their leave-in conditioner ‘Knot Today’ is the crack-cocaine of curly hair) thoughtfully delivered by my ‘Amazon mule’ Red Karpitz. I noticed an immediate difference in my hair’s texture after only a few days.

The fervour took hold. Over the last few weeks I

binned my straightening irons.
stopped drying my hair with a hair dryer.
bought a microfiber ‘snood’ to towel-dry my hair.
started sleeping on a satin pillow-case.
joined three curly-hair forums and a curly girls Facebook group.
started using pomade as part of my styling regimen.
made an appointment to visit Neel Loves Curls – a dedicated curly hair cutter – in late May (birthday treat).
self-diagnosed my hair ‘type’ (not a joke). I believe I am a 3c/4a, low density, high porosity ‘coily’.

I am a woman obsessed.

I am also losing less hair.

What???!!! Not another rev-head exhibition, Dusty!

Oh yes, peeps, you read right: another exhibition to excite the rev-heads, petrol-heads, design buffs and motoring boffins. And it's only a two hour drive North of Melbourne in sunny Shepparton.

Muddy and I have just returned from a weekend away in fruit-canning country, where we enjoyed two remarkable exhibitions dedicated to car design and manufacture. Yep, TWO exhibitions.

The Shepparton Art Museum is hosting Dream Machines, a terrific collection of more than a hundred hand-drawn illustrations of cars - both concept and production vehicles from the 1940s to the 1970s - from America's iconic carmakers. The materials are pretty prosaic - pencils (graphite and colour), magic markers and ink pens and occasional watercolour brushwork - but the sketches are gorgeous and near-photographic in their precision. This is before CAD, people, when artists and designers drew this cool shit by hand.

A tasty accompaniment to this, is the amazing selection of fully-restored cars on show (4-5 actual real-life manufactured and fully restored cars featured among some the sketches in Dream Machines) at the Shepparton Motor Museum, just 10 minutes out of town on the main highway.

A $17 adult ticket buys you entry to both exhibitions - and you don't need to visit them on the same day.

Dusty says check them out.

(A pleasant surprise was discovering the work of a local artist, Jane Spencer, on display in the wing next to the Shepparton Art Museum. This talented local has some terrific landscapes and still-lives on show).

NGV exhibition in top gear!

Howdy culture vultures! It’s getting to that time of year – shorter days, cooler nights, brief sunny bursts punctuated by rainy afternoons. This means indoor pursuits like degustation dinners, museum visits, footy matches on Foxtel in pubs, open-fire trivia nights and art gallery crawls are just around the corner.

To kick-start (or indeed rev-up) your winter entertainment regimen, I highly recommend you get down to the National Gallery of Victoria (Ian Potter at Federation Square) and check out the exhibition Shifting Gear: Design, Innovation and the Australian Car which “presents some of our most iconic vehicles as objects of art and design”.

As the online catalogue says:

“Shifting Gear: Design, Innovation and the Australian Car, traces the development of the family car from its earliest form, as a steam-powered ‘horseless carriage’, through to its present-day role as a major design object and highly refined and efficient means of transport.”

Petrol heads, cultural historians, design buffs, boffins and engineering geeks will all find something to like here. It takes no more than an hour to enjoy the exhibits, and soak up some gorgeously restored works of engineering art.

Runs until 12 July 2015.

WWSMD? Or What Would Seth Mnookin do?

A little over four years ago, in an attempt to broaden my reading horizons, I went through a bit of a popular science/philosophy/psychology/economics phase. There were the usual suspects - Jared Diamond (Collapse), Norman Doidge (The Brain that Changes Itself), a little Michael Lewis for light relief, and of course, a generous helping of Dubner and Levitt (AKA the Freakonomics guys).  

One book that caught my eye during this time (I confess it was the cover design that did it – a striking image of a vial against a dark blue background) was Seth Mnookin’s The Panic Virus . The second thing to grab my attention was the name ‘Seth Mnookin’.  I hadn’t heard the name before and two things flashed in my mind:

1.     That sounds like an obscure model keyboard/synthesizer, of limited manufacture, but beloved of instrument collectors. (“Wow, dude, is that a Mnookin P48?” “Nah, this is a Mnookin P49, one of only four left in the world. The other three are in the Smithsonian.”)

2.     Hang on, wasn’t Seth Mnookin the bloke who taught Martin Scorsese at NYU Film School? Oh, no, wait, that was Haig Manoogian, my bad…

Yep, that’s how my brain works.

A quick scan of the book revealed it was all about the history of vaccinations and immunization, the MMR-vaccine-causes-autism controversy (I knew quite a bit already about the dodgy English doctor who started the whole nonsense), as well as the spread of the anti-vaccination movement in America and its pernicious influence in Australia. In short, it looked like a good addition to the other science-y books I was enjoying at the time - but with a mightily serious human-interest element.

I ordered the book through my hubby’s then-employer, a quality Melbourne bookshop and local institution – that’s right, I’m cheap and wanted the staff discount.  It sat on my bedside table for a couple of weeks while I ploughed through a steady stream of Scandi-crime (a girl’s gotta take a break from all the pointy-headed science-y stuff).

Of course, once I got round to starting the bugger, I couldn’t put it down and read it in three sittings over a weekend. It was that good.

This is what ‘popular science’ (ugh, why does that phrase bother me so?) should be: well-researched, elegantly-written, and punctuated throughout with real-life, real-people stories.  

Mr Mnookin’s characterisations of key players puts serious meat on the bones of this story. Key players include hideous myth-perpetrators (Jenny McCarthy, Meryl Dorey), their enablers in the media (Oprah Winfrey, Larry King) monsters (Andrew Wakefield – or as the chatty half of Penn and Teller once referred to him, “Asshole” Wakefield) and victims (baby Dana McCaffery, who died of whooping cough because she was too young to be vaccinated and lived in a region with low vaccination rates).

I loved this book so much, I sent the author a gushy, faintly embarrassing fan-girl email (from my work address no less, that’s how overwhelmed I was by the book…) which I publish below for your amusement:

Dear Mr. Mnookin,

This is a short note to say I just finished "The Panic Virus" (Oz edition published by Black Inc) and needed to tell you it's one of the smartest, sanest, scariest and wittiest books I've ever read.

Congratulations on putting together a book that outlines in exhaustive (but never exhausting) detail, the history of vaccination programs, the MMR/Autism/Wakefield disaster, the ridiculousness of Jenny McCarthy's crusade (does the woman have no shame?) and the irresponsibility of people like Oprah Winfrey and Larry King for giving people like her oxygen.

I found myself fist-punching the air reading the penultimate chapter on the Omnibus Autism Proceedings. Whilst I felt enormous sadness at the plight of Michelle Cedillo and her family, I was heartened by the way good sense and science prevailed in the end.

I'd like to believe the "debate" will now die the death it deserves, people will ignore the lies and young mums will start vaccinating their children again, but I suspect some major damage has been done in the last decade and fixing it will take longer than we like. When the educated classes start thinking this way, I lose hope...

You have set the benchmark for popular science journalism (for lack of a better description of the genre!) and I look forward to your next book.

Best regards...

The recent measles outbreak in the United States has reignited my interest in this topic. I now follow (polite word for ‘stalk’) Seth Mnookin on Twitter. I plan to reread his book. I want him to visit Australia so I can stalk him properly.

I will have a piece of that delicious-looking pecan pie he posted on Twitter.

He’s a dead-set legend of science journalism. Read him. Follow him.

(I used to work with a man who believed the earth was a few thousand years old, had not vaccinated his daughters, and whose wife was a chiropractor who performed “adjustments” on infants and children. I’m so glad I hadn’t read The Panic Virus when I worked with him. I would have kicked him in the nuts until he was unconscious.)