Black in Fashion: Mourning to Night is now showing at the NGV Australia in Federation Square and NGV International on St.Kilda Road. The exhibition features some extraordinary clothes, and provides an interesting insight into the meanings ascribed to the colour black.
Nick Cave: The Exhibition is now showing at the Arts Centre in St.Kilda Road. Loved the video on the history of Cave’s endeavours (which briefly touched on the importance of the suburb of St.Kilda to the post-punk era of music in Melbourne), the beautiful photographs by Anton Corbijn and the diary entries from days gone by in which Cave has written such things as “buy hair die (sic)”, ”buy cosmetics”, and “Dole form to be handed in” .
St Paul’s Cathedral, corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets: It’s nearly Easter.
Is this a very Gothic Monday morning for you Darlene? Churches, black garb and Nick Cave. I took the Black in Fashion to be a subtle hint to the city to get back to its puritan stylist roots. The people on the street look disgraceful. Like they’ve been ogling the ‘Celebrity Goes Shopping’ spreads too long and’ve lost all sense of the Joy of Gloom. C’mon people Paris Hiltion is comedy relief, she’s anot a good look! Are you crazy? Bring back the Black-clad Melburnian. Pale, interesting and very very neurotic.
Yes, I had a goth kind of weekend. Given the weather in Melbourne, wearing those heavy black boots got a bit stinky. Yikes.
Lurve the black look.
ooo such delicious shoes….
Was this the Palm Sunday song to kill for or what?
Nick Caves’ new album is great, incidentally, Darlene.
And are those punk stilletos really yours?
CROWD
Hosanna
Hey Sanna Sanna Sanna Hosanna
Hey Sanna Hosanna
Hey JC, JC won’t you smile at me?
Sanna Hosanna
Hey Superstar
CAIAPHAS
Tell the rabble to be quiet, we anticipate a riot.
This common crowd, is much too loud.
Tell the mob who sing your song that they are fools and they are wrong.
They are a curse. They should disperse.
CROWD
Hosanna
Hey Sanna Sanna Sanna Hosanna
Hey Sanna Hosanna
Hey JC, JC you’re alright by me
Sanna Hosanna
Hey Superstar
JESUS
Why waste your breath moaning at the crowd?
Nothing can be done to stop the shouting.
If every tongue were stilled
The noise would still continue.
The rocks and stone themselves would start to sing:
CROWD AND JESUS
Hosanna
Hey Sanna Sanna Sanna Hosanna
Hey Sanna Hosanna
CROWD (alone)
Hey JC, JC won’t you fight for me?
Sanna Hosanna Hey Superstar
JESUS
Sing me your songs,
But not for me alone.
Sing out for yourselves,
For you are bless-ed.
There is not one of you
Who can not win the kingdom.
The slow, the suffering,
The quick, the dead.
CROWD and JESUS
Hosanna
Hey Sanna Sanna Sanna Hosanna
Hey Sanna Hosanna
CROWD (alone)
Hey JC, JC won’t you die for me?
Sanna Hosanna Hey Superstar
As I recall there’s a cape in the exhibition from the early 20th century. Very Mina Murray, high collar and embroidered. Don’t see that kind of thing anymore even amongst the Goth Elite. “S my favourite bit.
Melbourne is very Gothy.
In this weather, that goth outfit is completed only with a camel.
Do those shoes have girl hackles?
Sublime and Joe2, those shoes are from the famous Sex shop (think Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren). They look great, although not particularly friendly on one’s footsies.
Great track………will give Nick’s new CD a listen.
Adrien, you are correct about the cape.
Incidentally, they’re not goth outfits as such, just dresses from days gone by that indicated that the woman who wore them were widows, but they look very gothy. Having said that I’ve never seen any of the goths who hang around Flinders Street Station look that good.
Katz, every girly thing gets hackles from time to time ; )
And Puritans who’re silumtaneously eschewing wicked Catholic materialism as displayed by rich colour (see Patrice Chéreau’s Queen Margot for illustration)) but also perversey to display their wealth as black was very expensive. Marguerite de Valois: the original naughty Catholic schoolgirl.
I’ve seen a marked dive in standards amongst the Goths in this town. Don’t they know they are the avatars of this city’s lugubrious haute gloom? Something must be done. I suggest fines and possibly fashion re-education camps for the worst offenders. Particularly 19 year-olds who acquite tatoos the way 14 year olds acquire crap CDs.
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Hint hint Bozos you can’t throw away naff tatoos and pretend you never had ‘em.
Eh, the Flinders Street Goths seem to be less in number now that every third teeny kid is an Emo.
Love some of Nick cave’s songs(like into my arms) but when I recently saw “the proposition” I was most disappointed, full of gratuitous violence and lacking in anything that redeemed it…
Great respect for any women who could wear dresses like the ones pictured, imagine wearing those in weather like they have been having down Adelaide way…
“Love some of Nick cave’s songs(like into my arms) but when I recently saw “the proposition” I was most disappointed, full of gratuitous violence and lacking in anything that redeemed it…”
Gosh, Iain Hall, whatever you do, never buy Murder Ballads by uncle nick. Probably his best. And Darlene the song is from Jesus Christ Superstar. Seeing the pictures of the palms in the church reminded me of that one.
‘The Proposition’ was utter shite, in my opinion, and the script was a large part of the problem. Writing great lyrics and writing for film involve very different sets of skills, and it would take a rare talent to do both well. Mr Cave is not that talented, no matter how awesome some of the Bad Seeds stuff is (and more recently, Grinderman). Also, the idea that his diary entries are worth exhibiting in public verges on the offensive.
Wow. I never would’ve thought. I’m actually going to defend the quality of an Australian film. I thought The Proposition was good. The way it covered that triumvirate ethnic conflict - the Aborigines, the Irish, the English. It was well written, sorry, but it was. In fact I thought it was an opportunity at the development of an Australian genre. Unfortunately it didn’t do too well at least domestically it made a little over 10% of its budget.
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I’ve only seen it the once so my opinion might change. But at the very least the story was well crafted and the dialogue wasn’t stilted. It’s main problem was the direction. When will Australian directors learn the meaning of the word ‘angle’. All our films are shot at eye level probably ’cause they spend most of their time shooting for TV.
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And the bit where Captain Stanley goes off to face the bad guys was a glaring example of a lack of dramatic insight. The camera shoots Emily Watson (as his wife Martha) looking after him from the one angle it shouldn’t have, from the side. We either need to see her reaction or the shot needs to be composed for something else entirely. So a close-up or some kind of Fordian long shot.
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Still I thought it was good.
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Why does displaying an artist’s diary entries border on the offensive Klaus? I thought it quite standard. Banal maybe, but standard.
I really hated The Proposition. http://allordinary2.blogspot.com/2005/10/proposition-very-bad-movie.html
Never seen The Proposition, but Australian films can be great.
It must be conceded they do often concentrate on the same themes (e.g. Australian masculinity and the bush as metaphor).
Regardless, I’m a great fan of movies like Idiot Box, Australian Rules, Sunday Bloody Sunday etc
Can feel another top ten lists coming on.
I thought his diary entries (which were admittedly quite banal) were quite funny: “buy black hair die” made me chuckle. It both confirmed his image and mocked it at the same time.
Can’t imagine wearing those frocks in the current weather. No wonder they had fainting spells.
Emos
“Jesus Christ Superstar”: a rock opera. Wonder if that show stands the test of time.
Yes, million of teeny kids dressed in tight jeans and possessing floppy fringes. Ms Laurie, it’s a terrifying thought.
Adrien, when it comes to tatts, I can understand why the hip young things get them, but just because something’s hip today, don’t mean it’s going to be hip tomorrow.
I found the whole thing utterly pretentious, its cultural politics heavy-handed, colour-by-numbers, the redemption narrative stupid and boring. It fell short of the kind of mythic dimensions it was grasping at by a long way. While the director is ultimately responsible, a lot of things I disliked about it were straight out of the Cave playbook. Some devices that work well in a pop song become ludicrousl when inflated to the scale of a film. Also, not an ounce of humour in the thing.
As for the diaries, while some artist’s diaries are worth displaying (and sometimes even publishing), I don’t take to the idea of Nick Cave’s being worth all that attention. I don’t doubt that some aspects of the exhibition are worthwhile (in particular I’d like to see those photos), but I don’t hold to the whole celebrity artifact pilgrimage thing, and to compound my dislike for the idea Cave fans don’t even think of it in those terms but that is precisely what is going on here. Purely personal, a matter of taste and I make no claims to the authority of these opinions.
Cultural politics? Nick Cave? Mmmm methinks ’tis a bit of a stretch myself. This is a guy that got kicked out of Art School for provoking his (feminist) art teacher. He’s more anti-political or apolitical than anything. I pretty much thought of it as a straight up Western. John Ford but a tad gothic. And I really didn’t see anything of Dead Man or Sergio Leone in it. The ethnicity thing in it is a matter of historical record. The Irish seeing the English (not unreasonably) as their enemy allied themselves with Aborigines and vie versa. This started with the First Fleet.
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But as you say it’s a matter of taste.
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I like Cave’s music but I find his disciples ridiculous. I liked his diaries/notebooks for visual reasons. The exhibition’s okay. In any event it’s better than touring the junk Warhol collected and paying for it, or in my case not.
From Laura/Lucy Tartan’s link:
I agree. I thought that, what the fuck was it called, oh True Love and Chaos did that. There were shots out of Reservoir Dogs and this Godardesque dance sequence that totally flopped. It’s pretty bad when you’re ripping stuff off a pastiche artist who’s referencing a guy who’s basically referencing other people.
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I must’ve seen Dead Man a hundred times and I just didn’t see it being ripped off in The Proposition. Maybe I just missed it.
The idea that Cave is not taking a position on the cultural politics of frontier history in this film is difficult to accept. An ‘anti-political’ or ‘apolitical’ position is also a position. No Australian film that deals with race relations and the history of dispossession can avoid taking a position on questions of cultural politics.
As for the alignment of the Irish and the Aborigines, I can only suggest that indigenous people made alliances where they could find them but they were rarely met with reciprocity in the long term. The implication that Irish settlers were in some way not dispossessors because of tension with the English, or because they had themselves been dispossessed, is simply denial.
I wanted to like the film because I like the actors playing the leads but the direction was stilted the script full of tedious and rather anachronistic attitudes and as mentioned by others here I just did not buy the Irish aboriginal alliance at all. and at the end I just could not believe the Ray Whinstone character just waiting to be killed at his home.