From desperate housewives to rampaging teenage anarchists, ‘the girls’ are up front in these stylistically brazen films by women directors from the sixties and early seventies.

The films brought together in Focus on Girls 24/7 each signal a unique creative vision behind the lens. The contradictory impulses of the modern woman are rendered on screen in bold, unfettered performances from the leading actresses.

Friday 3rd July to Sunday 12th July 2009
ACMI Cinemas
Federation Square, Flinders Street, Melbourne
Full $13, Concession $10
6 session packages also available: Full $60 or Concession $48

This year Oxfam Trailwalker Sydney will see 500 teams (that’s 2,000 individual participants) walk 100km on the weekend of the 28th to 30th August 2009, principally on the Great North Walk and the Harbour to Hawkesbury Walking Track in the bush land of northern Sydney.

Oxfam Trailwalker is the world’s greatest team challenge and it’s also one of the toughest. The challenge is to get your team of four across 100km of Australian bush in less than 48 hours – and, collectively, to raise at least $1,000 to help to overcome poverty and suffering around the world.

So what are you waiting for? Get behind team ‘Transformers’ and help the ladies raise as much money as possible. It’s for a wonderful cause and these four (4) ladies have been putting in the hard yards. Check out their blog and make a donation right here.

QPAC is searching the shopping malls, street corners and parks of Australia for the most innovative, talented and audacious entertainers in the country. Whether whimsical, witty, wonderful or wacky, buskers have an uncanny ability to grab our attention, delight us with their antics and then wrangle the loose change from our pockets while we cheer them on!

From amateur beat boxers to virtuosic violinists, clowns to contortionists, and statues to stilt-walkers, this unique breed of performers injects an unexpected burst of entertainment into the daily lives of pedestrians everywhere. Queensland Performing Arts Centre is making a concerted effort to lure talented buskers from across the nation from the street to the stage as part of the inaugural Australian Busking Competition.

With $10,000 in cash and prizes, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fill your hat with more loose change than you can carry, balance or juggle. Be quick, online applications close 3rd July 2009.

Worried about the gentrification? Rising rents? Apartment blocks popping up on every corner and yuppies taking over your local neighbourhood? Well you’re not alone… There Goes The Neighbourhood: Redfern and the Politics of Urban Space is a book produced in conjunction with an exhibition in Sydney which explores these issues. From Collingwood to Redfern to New York to Copenhagen people the world over are negotiating life in the city – squatting, living space, evictions, rents and so on. Come along to a launch of the book and a discussion about spatial politics in the city.

There Goes the Neighbourhood begins with a close study of Redfern before expanding into international examples to provide a detailed exploration of how the phenomenon of gentrification is altering the relationship between democracy and demography around the world.

There Goes The Neighbourhood
Melbourne Book Launch & Tea Party!
Brunswick Bound, 361 Sydney Road, Brunswick
Saturday 4th July 2009
2:00pm to 4:00pm

There Goes The Neighbourhood is edited by Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg from You Are Here, a Sydney based art collective which focuses on social and spatial mapping. For more information: http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org/book.htm

Modern Odysseus is a visionary creation by young author Julian Shaw of a movie in book form. Told in blinding poetic prose, Modern Odysseus creates a Lynchian world of distrust and soul-death, satirising the slick excesses of the 21st century.

Corporate burn-out Thomas Dedal has made a mint on the killing fields of W55th Street New York. But on the 16th of June, 2004, he is woken from his numbness by a reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Aided by a mysterious young man named Seb, Thomas decides to record the imagined and real events of the day in a journal, sketching out the shape of his spoiled soul. Thomas knows he has slowly murdered his imagination, and must bring it back to life by writing a perfect fable for his time.

Modern Odysseus features esteemed Australian actor Colin Friels in the lead role of Thomas. Modern Odysseus is Julian Shaw’s first book. Check out the book right here.

Our friends at Lee & Me Cafe are turning one. Get down there & check out the birthday specials.

Click here to find a review of the cafe.

St George TAFE Couture Exhibition

Featuring the Couture Garments of 3rd Year Advanced Diploma of Fashion Design Students.

OPENING NIGHT:
Wednesday 1st July, 6pm to 10pm.
When: 1st, 2nd 3rd of July
Where: The Gallery, Darling Park (201 Sussex St Sydney)
Times: 9am – 5pm daily
FREE ENTRY

Dung Tran is one of the students and says, “As talented, young, energetic and focused students, we are all eager to share our designs and concepts with the wider community. So, please come along! Bring friends, family, and colleagues – whoever you like! Support the future of the fashion industry as we students endeavour to further raise the profile of both our college, and indeed ourselves, as emerging fashion designers”.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, at 45 letters in size, and meaning “a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano”, is the longest “coined” word in the English language to also be included in the Oxford dictionary.

There are two other words that are longer, and while one of those – at 183 letters – is also a coined word, it does not appear in any dictionary. Another “word”, that is 189,819 letters long is the subject of some contention as to whether it is in fact a word at all… which doesn’t surprise at the least.

While MasterChef Australia is heating up, Julia Jenkins is hard at work trying to get the edge over her fellow contestants. Julia takes a hard earned break and chats with Two Flat Whites. She is obsessed with food, and it wasn’t until she was in her late teens, Julia confesses that she was an extremely fussy eater and could never have imagined herself becoming a cook. The race to the finals is only week’s away, check out more right here.

Where did you grow up & where do you hang your hat?

I grew up in Perth, Western Australia but moved to Melbourne almost two years ago.

In your own words, what did you do before MasterChef Australia?

Before Masterchef I was working as a Marketing Assistant at a cinema company. It was a great job and a fantastic company, but ultimately it wasn’t where I wanted to be. Basically, it wasn’t food.

How did you become involved with MasterChef Australia & was it a lengthy process?

I resigned from my job at the beginning of the year and was in the thick of deciding what I wanted to do with my life and how I wanted to get into the food industry when I heard whispers that Masterchef was coming to Australia. I applied, managed to get through the lengthy audition process, and the Top 50 week, and here I am. I don’t think I ever expected to even get the first call back, let alone get through to the finals!

What has inspired you to become a chef?

I adore food. I love cooking it, reading about it, tasting it, eating it, cooking it, and talking about it. I have met so many passionate and knowledgeable people in the industry and they have really inspired me to follow this path.

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As I reflect on the four days I spent at the 2009 Dungog Film Festival, it is the above quote – from festival director Allanah Zitserman – that seems to be the easiest way to describe my experiences to you all.

Dungog is unlike any other film festival I have been to.  I saw many great Australian films, met many interesting people (film-makers, film-goers, and local residents), and listened to many enlightening film industry discussions.  What made it unique was that all of this took place in a small, northern-NSW rural town, three and a half hours out of Sydney.  This was not the Dendy in Newtown (my local inner-city cinema), this was foreign turf, and I was a wide-eyed tourist having my own little personal adventure.  I’m sure that every single one of the 6,000 people that flocked to the festival this year had their own personal adventure as well.  It’s the sort of thing that you really need to experience for yourself.

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