Johnblog

The Vivid light show is on again in Sydney. This year it has spread out from the centre of Sydney to some of the suburbs. We + Viv and Chris decided to have a look at the installations in Chatswood. I headed out by train, met up with Jan (who had been working) at Town Hall station, then on to Chatswood to meet V+C.

I think it was my first time across the Harbour Bridge by train – at least the first I can remember (but my memory isn’t great).

At Chatswood we saw the first of the installations as we came out of the station. A couple of big pterodactyls were hanging from the roof of the shopping arcade. These were not your average run-of-the-mill pterodactyls, they were fully blinged up with lots of coloured lights. A couple of exercise machines on the ground floor appeared to be animating them, making them climb and dive and sort of flap their wings.

Chris took a bit of video.

We walked across a bridge which had a rope and wood plank bridge projected on it. This was good when the wooden planks broke and threatened to tip you into the abyss below! Jan had fun with it, and the many little kids thought it was brilliant.

Outside there were more projections in the pedestrian precinct. One was a jungle complete with flowing river, fish, lizards and dinosaurs. There were also, to Viv’s dismay, some very realistic-looking snakes slithering among the trees. Again, lots of little kids were having a terrific time stamping on all the creatures underfoot.

More dinosaur type projections lit up the sides of buildings and there were some impressive dinosaur eggs hatching out. There were rain showers coming through, but we managed to dodge the worst of them. We had a splendid meal at a Shanghainese restaurant, another little wander, then headed home on the train, tired but happy.

We’ll have a look at Vivid in the city later.

We had a couple of interesting events listening to authors appearing at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Our first gig was an evening talk by Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life  which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  The book, about four classmates from a small US college, was pretty harrowing. One of the characters has a terrible time as a child and has lots of painful problems as an adult. Nevertheless, a very good (but very long) read in my opinion.

It was fascinating to hear how a middle-aged Hawaiian American woman could write so well about the emotional lives of men – and gay men. This was my first experience of a literary affair and it wasn’t bad at all.

The following Saturday we went to a couple of Festival events down near the Wharf Theatre close to Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. First we heard Marlon James being interviewed about his book A Brief History of Seven Killings which won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Jan and I liked the book a lot, but lots of our friends hated it! The Wiki says: “The novel spans several decades and explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Jamaica in 1976 and its aftermath through the crack wars in New York City in the 1980s and a changed Jamaica in the 1990s.“

It’s a difficult read, not the least because some of the characters think and speak in a heavy Jamaican patois. Since Jan and I are keen Bob Marley fans, we quite liked the patois!

Marlon has a wonderful deep voice with a Jamaican twang. He told us he could speak in patois but we wouldn’t understand a word! Again, interesting insights into the craft of the writer. The talk was being  recorded for Radio National so they also played bits of Bob Marley song to set the mood. Great! I waved hello to my former colleague, David Marr, who was also in the audience. It was a packed house in a big theatre.

The area round the wharves was also packed with people going to the many Festival events. It was quite a buzzy atmosphere, like a sort of rock festival for old people! We had a snack lunch overlooking the water –  and met, by chance, our neighbours Dean and Paula. Small city.

In the early evening, we went up into the loft of one of the old wooden wharves on the harbour for a group book reading. The authors were Carmen Aguirre, a Vancouver-based, theatre artist and author, Paul Murray, author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes and Skippy Dies, Petina Gappah a Zimbabwean writer with multiple law degrees, Marlon James,  and William Boyd, author of 14 novels including Any Human Heart and Restless.

The readings were terrific. There was, as you might imagine, a great contrast in the books and the reading of them. I really enjoyed the session. We vowed to get some of the books.

I also bumped into another former Herald colleague – reporter Debra Jopson. She’s now written a novel so I had to buy a copy of that. It’s titled Oliver of the Levant and concerns a kid from Bondi who’s father takes him to live in Beirut. So far so good.

All that creative writing makes me feel guilty about my blog. I owe my readers more than this quotidian greyness. I vow to use more adjectives. More really really good expressive adjectives.