Australian premiere (*maybe) of Tristram Cary's < Trios >

... *leastways, as near as we can figure out.

Tristram Cary's Trios, for "unskilled turntable players" (I & Pat O'Brien) & "skilled synthesizer player" (that would be Ant Pateras), as part of the next concert in Ant Pateras' season, during his year as resident composer at ANAM.

Ant will be performing on the same EMS VC3 synthesizer, & DK1 keyboard, that Keith Humble ordered from Tristram Cary back in 1971. Which is a congenial serendipity, I guess.

Friday 26th March
Australian National Academy of Music
Old South Melbourne Town Hall
Bank Street, South Melbourne
7pm-9pm

concert program:

Anthony Pateras Chromatophore
Keith Humble Bagatelles
Tristram Cary Trios
Anthony Pateras Thirst
Neil Kelly Flush (World premiere)
Mary Finsterer Ether
PIVIXKI Ayala Valva
PIVIXKI The Stratosphere and the Bird

Michael Kieran Harvey - piano
Max Kohane - drums
Jim Knox & Patrick O'Brien - turntables
Anthony Pateras - synthesizer/conductor
Musicians of the Academy

Entry by donation!

... iteration of the same infos at the ANAM website, here

Ant will also be diffusing electroacoustic works by Natasha Anderson, and Robin Fox (both World premieres), as well as historical e/a works by Jack Ellitt and Percy Grainger.

Thanks heaps to Samon Takahashi (creative audio champion) and Monica Syrette (brains-trust of the Percy Grainger Museum)

ABC-FM is recording the concert; broadcast details will follow.

(gratuitous image theft...)

March 26th is Ant Pateras' birthday, & this concert maintains his recent tradition of celebrating the date with live performance. He's a super-fine fellow, and a tireless partisan for the cultures of both organized and disorganized sound: it is a rare honour to be performing with him. Cheers, ears!

Serendipity extra: Trunk Records have just released a compile LP of Tristram Cary's music. Among which pieces are soundtracks to several films that I screened for the Lumpen Intelligentsia Film Society, way back when. It is a solid collection, & recommended accordingly.

DIY cinema notes (local)

Nice coverage in today's Age for my friend (one-time Brisbane art/punk compeer), Dean McInerny. A link to the article is here

... Had the pleasure of dinner w/ Dean twice in the last week; an avuncular cat & possessed of a rare and lucid intelligence. Timecapsules is his regular intervention into local screen culture & his venue, a muy simpatico bar/gallery within a Collingwood warehouse conversion, is probably the most agreeable local forum for film screenings.

Irving Gribbish celebrated 10 years of continuous screenings with his Splodge! Film Society at the Empress of India Hotel, late last year - a milestone that passed seemingly unremarked in the local media. (Irving probably needs to do something about maintaining his on-line presence, but it is also remarkable that he should be so casual about it...)

Anyways, Dean related to me part of his interview/conversation (missing from the published text), & he made the point that a contemporary audience is accustomed to the phenomenon of a DJ choosing a mix of tunes; why not a film curator doing the same thing in a public space, but with the moving image? And while Dean is quick to acknowledge the evident differences in the social functions of music & cinema, he has a point - Irving has exhaustive historical smarts on US comedy & animation (among other things); Dean has an acute sensitivity to radical politics & camp aesthetics. The audience at their screenings is assured of revelations, even when viewing seemingly familiar films. Those epiphanies proceed from the respective curatorship.

... Of course I tend to think the whole thing is essentially unsustainable at a personal level - the audiences are typically modest and diminishing all the time. How much time & energy (not to mention: your own money) can a curator commit to a project like this? Thankfully, they persist.

(An historico-legal aside: film societies in Australia began in the 1960s on university campuses. While film societies presume a measure of, unnh, "discretion" in the application of copyright law to their activities, the law as-such only provides formal exemptions to strictly "educational" screenings...

So what happened? Well, after the original drafting of Australian copyright law in 1968, social agitators of a cultured persuasion recognised that film societies were a productive means of building and supporting creative communities. This trend is exemplified by the Workers Entertainment Association, operating out of Sydney...

If they changed their name to the WEA Film Study Group to facilitate some limited state funding, they never compromised their unique (imminently oppositional) political stance. Extreme art, as workingpeople's culture. For cheap! And with trade union affiliation!)

* & not defunct, as previously stated - check the link...

I think everyone that persists at this particular endeavour shares some variety of that politic. The point is: cinema is a social phenomenon.

The alternative? Atomised individuals staring into their mobile phones...


... which finds a certain correspondence with this great bit of investigative journalism into the politics & commercial interests behind facebook, from the Guardian

More in this thread, "shortly". Meantime, some links:

Unlike to ACMI - which arguably deserves to be the subject of an ACCC lawsuit in the Federal Court because its commercial operations (repertory cinema, festival venue) are both state-subsidised and in direct competition with commercial cinema operations (the government isn't supposed to compete with existing private industries!) - the new Australian Cinematheque is showing some remarkable programs; imported prints, curated for a local audience...

Head of film programming at ACMI is Richard Sowada; interesting character with some fascinating perspectives on cinema exhibition in Australia. He really needs to think on ACMI's breach of Federal law, but...

Jack Stevenson is one of the most prominent champions of this area internationally. Here's a link to my review of his book (which is great: mostly (the book, that is)).

Senses of Cinema's Film Culture Forum, from a couple years back.

lumpen intelligentsia film society - programming archive

Found at Archive.org: the defunct website of the lumpen intelligentsia film society... Program notes for most, tho' not all, of some initial 45 screenings.

Lumpen intelligentsia was coordinated by a trio of myself, Rob Bonica & Tony Arividis. Tony now devotes himself mostly to his landscape architecture business, & Rob is teaching English in Japan. 2001 program screened at Glowbar on the edge of the Melbourne CBD. The following year, we moved to the Rob Roy Hotel in Fitzroy before relocating to a warehouse loft (the "Bughouse Omniplex") in the CBD. Everything was in hiatus through 2003, though we organised an Australian tour for Dame Darcy, brought a program of Jean Painleve's films to the ACMI, and staged a book launch for Outre's Beatsville - among other things.

The 5 months of screening in 2004 - at the Victoria Hotel, in Brunswick - exhausted the last of my own dwindling commitment. By that point, I was working in partnership with a number of music festivals: Liquid Architecture, What Is Music?, the Meredith Music Festival, as well as the OtherFilm Festival in Brisbane.

The screenings sometimes won some generous plaudits in the media, & there's a considerable amount of material here in the form of press clippings & etc.

Sometime (soon), I'll post the audio & video of the Dame Darcy tour... Meantime, this is a live recording of her super-fine cover of In The Pines (200VBR mp3, 5.2Mb via SendSpace)