Friends of the Armchair Traveller

 AT LONG LAST! WHY DID IT TAKE US SO LONG TO GET TO THIS DAY? I look forward to a day when it will be perfectly normal for  this flag to be flown side by side with our Colonial flag.           A day when no athlete will face a media furore for  wearing it such as Cathy Freeman did.

"Altar Boy To Girl"  is a theatrical presentation by Kim Miles, a gender  diverse filmmaker, artist and performer. Kim has  sent us these reflections about her show which she  performed to small audiences at The Butterfly Club  from 10th to 15th January. Each night as the audience entered the theatre I sat on a chair backstage, the red curtain wide open so I could see them and they could see me. It was a Zen thing, as in we are the same, I’m watching you as you watch me. Twenty years since I last performed I had six nights of a solo show. The lights went down and a film clip started, I removed my top and stepped on stage in just a pair of whitefront underpants mirroring the male in the film and removing them when he removed his. The clip ended, the lights went up and naked I turned to face the audience revealing my gender affirmed female form.  When I first conceived this theatrical idea it was too  good to dismiss no matter how confronting. Art i...

Recently my friend Tom sent me a digitised version of a film he completed in 1982.   Sweet Dreamers   (1982, 82 mins, 16mm, drama) Until this movie was digitised by the NFSA the only copy Tom had available was a poor quality videotape full of all the usual videotape baddies such as excessive 'noise' in the images. Now we have this vastly superior copy to view. When the film was first released Tom received quite a lot of negative comment. For any filmmaker this is hard to come to terms with, it is extremely dispiriting. After the passage of forty years Tom now sees the film very differently from the time in which it was created. SWEET DREAMERS WEB.mp4 from Tom Cowan on Vimeo . Here are some notes I received from Tom: "SWEET DREAMERS" Seeing it again after so long, I now find myself very proud of my most critically derided and unsuccessful movie. "S WEET DREAMERS" – I made it forty years ago. I was unsatisfied with it at the time, not just because it was...

For our Armchair Travellers who reside in Melbourne, a post about a show Kim Miles is putting on soon now. There was a post here about one of Kim's films a couple of weeks back, so you may have seen that. Kim's show, playing soon is called Altar Boy to Girl I personally really love Kim's film work.  Here is an essay I wrote about her a few years ago - http://www.pureshitauscinema.com/profiles/miles.html She is also a visual artist with a great style, and a performer too, so in ALTAR BOY TO GIRL, she will present an hour of talk, performance, nudity, and her art, at the renowned Butterfly Club for 6 nights, Jan 10 to 15. There are $28 discounted tickets if kimticket is typed into box office page. Butterfly Club info page - https://thebutterflyclub.com/show/altar-boy-to-girl Facebook event page - https://www.facebook.com/events/581515543154551/?ref=newsfeed Kim Miles' blog - https://digitalartbang.com/ Cheers, Bill

Many years ago I taught an eager young fellow named Richard Leigh .  That was a vintage year in 1997 when he was one member of my documentary class of 10. At the time I had no idea we would still be friends in 2022, but here we are. Now Richard has created a little flick about his own group of friends, a few nice people who have kept up with each other since their high school days about 35 years ago, give or take. Get Back to Glenn & Jills' from Richard Leigh on Vimeo . The story behind this little video is that recently these guys have been going for extended bike rides together between Xmas and New Year's day. A further story behind this little video is that I bought a GoPro action camera in May 2021 and my showing it off to my friends led to Richard buying one for himself. What do I mean when I call it an action camera? Well, it seems to have been mainly designed for people who live active lives, jumping out of planes, riding mountain bikes on perilous tracks, even ve...