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Thread: Clive's Out on His Own tour. (Read 8309 times) |
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Kevin Cryan
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Clive's Out on His Own tour.
« : 24.07.07 at 21:15 » |
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The details of Clive's forthcoming Out on His Own tour of Australia are now to be found on the clivejames.com site.
There was a piece about his first visit to Albury-Wodonga region in Monday's edition of ABC Regional online. It's not an especially well written or sub-edited piece, but I suppose if it does the job of advertising Clive's visit to that part of Australia, then it has done what it set our to do.
Mind you a clanger like Tour dates for Clive Robertson includes the Wagga Civic Centre on the 19th of October and Albury Performing Arts Centre on the 20th. suggests that nobody actually read the piece before it was posted to the site.
Kevin Cryan
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Clive's Out on His Own tour.
« Reply #1: 05.08.07 at 13:09 » |
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Adelaide Now, the online offshoot of the Adelaide-based The Advertiser and its stablemate Sunday Mail, prepares its readers for Clive’s Adelaide stop-off in the Out on His Own tour later this year with a generously proportioned and solidly written profile of him in its August the 4th edition.
Kevin Cryan
PS. The accompanying photograph,taken by Gaham Crouch, is not without merit.
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Clive's Out on His Own tour.
« Reply #2: 11.08.07 at 10:05 » |
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In what has now to be considered the run-up to his appearance at Sydney’s Parramatta Riverside Theatre on September the 14th Clive talks to the The Australian’s European correspondent, Peter Wilson, and tells him about about what he hopes to do on the Out on His Own tour, and, as is usual with Clive, digresses to give his views on (quite) a few other things, including the upcoming Fedral elections in which he hopes that Kevin Rudd and the Labor party he leads have got enough in them to defeat John Howard and the Liberals who have been in power for almost a decade,
The main message, though, comes over loud and clear: "I'm not clearing my desk just yet because I have a few years' more work to do but, yes, I am thinking of what I might hand on."
Kevin Cryan
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https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=App&action=display&num=1185308109&start=2#2 |
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Clive's Out on His Own tour.
« Reply #3: 11.08.07 at 18:08 » |
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Brett Debritz, writing in today’s (Sunday 12th) Entertainment - the section of which he is also editor - of the Brisbane-based newspaper The Sunday Mail has more or less allowed Clive to present what he is up to*at present in more or less the way he would want it presented, which means that what the reader gets is a bland, rather pedestrian piece of writing, which is unlikely to generate much by the way of excitement in anyone who is not already familiar with, or excited by, Clive’s recent work.
Kevin Cryan
*"Clive James – Out on His Own will play the Gold Coast Arts Centre on September 15, Cairns Civic Theatre on September 29, Mackay Entertainment Centre on October 1, Townsville Civic Theatre on October 2 and QPAC in Brisbane on October 5."
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Clive's Out on His Own tour.
« Reply #4: 13.08.07 at 09:26 » |
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on 11.08.07 at 18:08, Kevin Cryan wrote:Brett Debritz, writing in today’s (Sunday 12th) Entertainment - the section of which he is also editor - of the Brisbane-based newspaper The Sunday Mail has more or less allowed Clive to present what he is up to*at present in more or less the way he would want it presented, which means that what the reader gets is a bland, rather pedestrian piece of writing, which is unlikely to generate much by the way of excitement in anyone who is not already familiar with, or excited by, Clive’s recent work.
Kevin Cryan
*"Clive James – Out on His Own will play the Gold Coast Arts Centre on September 15, Cairns Civic Theatre on September 29, Mackay Entertainment Centre on October 1, Townsville Civic Theatre on October 2 and QPAC in Brisbane on October 5."
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Having realised that he has singularly failed to drum up much excitement with his main story, Mr Debritz tries again with this little titbit which he posted to his cleverly-named ShowBritz blog.
Clive and kicking
Sunday, August 12, 2007 at 08:30pm
Here’s a little addition to my Clive James story published in The Sunday Mail: James says he will use his time in Brisbane (on October 5) to write and to catch up on some of the city’s sights. “I always go out and check up on the art gallery and see what’s going on. It’s been a year since I’ve been to Brisbane and I’ll be going straight back to the art gallery - straight through the door and up to that wonderful picture by William Dobell of The Cypriot. It’s one of the great pictures in Australia.” He also says he’ll be making his way to the new Gallery of Modern Art “like a shot“‘. “Brisbane obviously is going to be the capital of Australia quite soon, so I’m very eager to maintain relations with it.”
That should get all the Brisbane celebrity-spotters* out on force. Well done Brett!!!
Kevin Cryan
*Note to celebrity-spotters: If you do spot Clive, I won’t promise that carrying a copy of Cultural Amnesia will automatically get you an autograph, but I don't suppose for a moment that it will damage your chances of getting one either.
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Clive's Out on His Own tour.
« Reply #5: 12.09.07 at 21:10 » |
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“THE man who helped invent the great Australian cultural cringe has issued its last rites” writes Simon Ferguson in the September the 13th edition of Rupert Murdoch’s News.com.au. I don't think that Clive helped to invent the Australian cultural cringe, but Ferguson is right to suggest he has been issuing its “last rites” whenever and wherever he can.
Clive James, the famous wit who, along with Brett Whiteley*, Germaine Greer** and Robert Hughes*** was one of a generation of fine minds who fled in the '60s to make their mark in England, yesterday declared our national inferiority complex extinct.
"Really, those days are over," he said.
"If you're asking is Australia still the isolated place from which you felt the necessity to escape, the answer is blatantly no. Australia's got everything you want."
Since before Federation, artistic Australians have felt compelled like James to make tracks for Europe or the US due to their birthplace being seen as a cultural wasteland with no self-confidence.
But nowadays, James believes, we have grown to be more comfortable with ourselves and our place in the world.
James said the cultural landscape has changed along with architecture and urban planning.
"Back when I lived in Sydney, the word 'eyesore' wasn't really used, it wasn't a concept for people and you could tell," he said. "Now we've all gotten a lot more sensitive."
"I would still advise young people to see the world, however, if only to find out just how different it is from Australia. The world is an underprivileged place on the whole, and that's part of Australia's problem. It's hard to see world politics in perspective from the top of the heap."
The author, webcaster, presenter and raconteur extraordinaire will prove his case by touring his one-man show Clive James: Out On His Own! to some far-flung centres in the next six weeks.
The author, webcaster, presenter and raconteur extraordinaire will prove his case by touring his one-man show Clive James: Out On His Own! to some far-flung centres in the next six weeks.
While the Kogarah Kid won't be performing in his childhood home town, he will be hitting Wagga Wagga and Thirroul as well as the capitals.
The erudite expat starts his nationwide tour at Parramatta's Riverside Theatres on Friday.
James, who turns 69 on October 7 when playing Perth, has been loitering in Sydney recently to soak up local material for his show, which consists of himself talking about "everything" and then taking questions.
Considering he'll be touring the nation as the federal election looms larger, James will definitely be talking politics.
"It's a big story worldwide. The whole democratic world has its eye on Howard and they want to know how he does it. For more than a decade he's been doomed at every election but somehow he wins, they want to know how he does that. And just at this very moment it's brewing up beautifully."
So who would James bet on to win?
"Howard has been this far behind before and he's come back. As for Rudd, it was a masterstroke on Rudd's part or on the part of his people to put out the rumour about the strip club****, that was brilliant."
But James says neither leader will have final say. "As usual the election will probably be decided by timber cutters in Tasmania."
Kevin Cryan
* Brett Whiteley
** Germaine Greer
*** Robert Hughes
**** as reported by The Daily Telegraph (England)
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Clive's Out on His Own tour.
« Reply #6: 13.09.07 at 20:15 » |
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on 12.09.07 at 21:10, Kevin Cryan wrote:“THE man who helped invent the great Australian cultural cringe has issued its last rites” writes Simon Ferguson in the September the 13th edition of Rupert Murdoch’s News.com.au. I don't think that Clive helped to invent the Australian cultural cringe, but Ferguson is right to suggest he has been issuing its “last rites” whenever and wherever he can.
Clive James, the famous wit who, along with Brett Whiteley*, Germaine Greer** and Robert Hughes*** was one of a generation of fine minds who fled in the '60s to make their mark in England, yesterday declared our national inferiority complex extinct.
"Really, those days are over," he said.
"If you're asking is Australia still the isolated place from which you felt the necessity to escape, the answer is blatantly no. Australia's got everything you want."
.........
Kevin Cryan
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In the interests of fairness, I have to acknowledge that not everyone in Austraila welcomes what Clive and other expatriates of his generation have to say about recent developments in the Australia to which they have returned to in recent times.
Richard Jinman, arts editor for the The Sydney Morning Herald, may be speaking for many when he wrote the following piece.
Fatal surety for expats who keep our culture cringing
Richard Jinman
September 14, 2007
Has Clive James jumped the shark? Has Robert Hughes become a fatal bore? And how did Germaine Greer, feminist icon, turn into a toy boy-fancying harridan who unleashes bilious assaults on sacred cows such as Steve Irwin, Princess Diana, Shakespeare and, er, teddy bears, between stints on Celebrity Big Brother?
Once they were cultural heroes, uber-expatriates who represented the flowering of Australian talent and its ability to match it with the finest minds in London, Paris and New York.
Today they are more likely to leave us indifferent, uneasy or even embarrassed. Older and, in the case of Hughes and Greer, more cranky than a cobra, they venture home sporadically to heap hyperbolic praise on the place (James) or stick a boot into its wide, brown backside (Hughes and Greer).
Of the Fab Four expatriates profiled in Ian Britain's book Once An Australian, James was always my favourite (although, to be fair, it was years before I realised Dame Edna had an alter ego called Barry Humphries).
Growing up in a dreary corner of England, his TV column in The Observer was essential Sunday reading. James analysed Doctor Who with the seriousness other people analysed Dostoyevsky, but got a lot more laughs in the process.
He stuck it to the beautiful people in self-deprecating TV documentaries with names like Clive James and the Calendar Girls and turned his peripatetic life into a string of mesmerising autobiographies such as Unreliable Memoirs and Falling Towards England.
But even James - back in Australia to present his one-man show Clive James: Out on His Own! - seems to have lost his sparkle over the years. Yesterday, in an interview with a Sydney newspaper, he boldly pronounced the cultural cringe dead. "If you're asking, 'Is Australia still the isolated place from which you felt the necessity to escape?', the answer is blatantly no," he said. "Australia's got everything you want." I seem to remember James saying pretty much the same thing in one of his television shows broadcast 10 years ago. Ignoring, for a moment, the fact that Australians have not worried about the cringe for some time now - we prefer to concentrate on world-class levels of mortgage stress, traffic congestion, obesity and carbon emissions - it's such a dreary cliche. Of course we've got everything you want, Clive, it's 2007, the economy's booming. Kylie's no longer in Neighbours.
John Pilger is another big-name Australian expat whom I admired fervently in the days of Margaret Thatcher and the miners' strike. Everyone with an interest in questing journalism did back then. In my 20-year-old mind, he was the fourth estate, a profession populated entirely by men with great hair and hawkish features.
Pilger is also in Sydney this week, promoting his first feature film for the cinema, the portentously titled The War on Democracy. An analysis of US evil-doing in Latin America - you expected a comedy, right? - it may be the most brilliant thing ever committed to film.
But am I alone in feeling a twinge of Pilger fatigue, the result, doctors say, of prolonged exposure to the man's right-on polemic? The cynic in me stirs, and I recall Auberon Waugh's coining of the term Pilgerism, which, he said, denoted the "presentation of information in a sensationalist manner to reach a foregone conclusion". Then again, Noam Chomsky once said people mock Pilger because they are uncomfortable with the awful reality of US foreign policy. He may have a point.
To be fair, James and Pilger have an awful lot of ground to make up if they are going to match Hughes and Greer in the fallen expat icon stakes. And Humphries continues to subvert the paradigm by creating comedy that is edgy, relevant and, in the case of Les Patterson, teeters brilliantly on the precipice of poor taste.
No, we must leave it to Greer, the ne plus ultra of barmy expats, to set the pace. As a contributor to the Manic Times website wrote recently, "It's a shame, really - one of the fiercest intellects to emerge from the ashes of postwar Sydney has been reduced to penning sprays about people she doesn't know, doesn't like or simply doesn't care about."..............
It would be all too easy to say that there is not much point in paying a great deal of attention to the opinions of a man - and an editor at that - who seems incapapable spotting a dangling participle, but that, it seems to me, would be to try to deflate what many would consider to be fair comment with a cheap shot.
Kevin Cryan
Later
The fact that the Sydney Morning Herald's arts editor has some doubts about what Clive says about Australia doesn’t mean that Clive has been shunned from the paper’s pages. If you look, you’ll find that there’s short Joyce Morgan interview with him that is published elsewhere in the same edition.
Now that’s what I’d call fair.
KC
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| « Last Edit: 13.09.07 at 20:48 by Kevin Cryan » |
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Clive's Out on His Own tour.
« Reply #7: 17.09.07 at 13:00 » |
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New Zealand's TV3 news programme had Clive, who is about to enter that part of the world with his Out on His Own tour, as one of its guests today. You can catch what he had to say by clicking here.
Kevin Cryan
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https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=App&action=display&num=1185308109&start=7#7 |
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Clive's Out on His Own tour.
« Reply #8: 18.09.07 at 20:52 » |
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This is the first review I’ve seen of Clive’s Out On His Own tour. I imagine that as The Age is a Melbourne newspaper, the performance reviewer Cameron Woodhead saw and is commenting on was probably the one at The Arts Centre, Melbourne, on Sunday the 16th of September.
Extracts
Poet, novelist, critic and TV personality Clive James is a living example of Australia punching above its cultural weight - something his latest book, Cultural Amnesia, takes to extremes with its unorthodox argument that Australia is the centre of the world.
James certainly took centre stage in his one-man show Out on His Own! With his irreverent wit and constantly churning mind, he ranged widely…………….
…………….
No doubt Clive James would make a fabulously entertaining dinner companion. For a few hours, at least, everyone at his show had a seat at the table.
Kevin Cryan
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Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
I love Midnight Voices!
Posts: 1144
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Re: Clive's Out on His Own tour.
« Reply #9: 21.09.07 at 12:22 » |
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In an interview with Tom Cardy for the Saturday the 22nd of September issue of the New Zealand newspaper, The Dominion Post, Clive, while explaining how the Out on His Own show developed, managed to shoehorn in references to both Pete and the songwriting.
Extract
"The show has been growing naturally over the last few years. I would tour Britain and Australia with my friend Pete Atkin, where we write songs together.
"The bit I did between the songs was starting to join together. Then I was asked to go on-stage with symphony orchestras in Australia to talk about film music in between the musical numbers and that started joining up into a show."
Kevin Cryan
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https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=App&action=display&num=1185308109&start=9#9 |
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