Abbotsford gets its own short film festival: 3 March 2007

In the Realm of the Senses 2007 is to be held at the Collingwood Children’s Farm, probably a much more sensible location than last year’s under-attended Deep Rock Reserve in Yarra Bend Park. It’s a short film festival open to entries only from Australian and New Zealand film makers. I went to the 2006 festival, absolutely froze my balls off, and got quite excited about the lead film, about the tour to India by The Abbotsford Anglers, a cricket team, before realising very belatedly that the team belonged to Abbotsford in Sydney.

Their website is one of the most beautiful bits of web design I have ever seen, and you should go there now just to check it out (compare how crappy their Myspace site looks.) The brochure I picked up the other day says:

“Featuring a mish mash of live roving performers; DJs spinning a vast array of eclectic tunes; Visual Projections by hi.tek.trash; Healing and chill out zone; Random acts of kindness; Tasty mouth watering food; ‘El Rancho Relaxo’ bar; BYO couch, beanbag, blankets”. (1300 361 574)

New Yarra River Flickr Group

There is a long list of Flickr groups about things Melbourne here (including Abbotsford, Collingwood Children’s Farm, Abbotsford Convent, Richmond, Fitzroy, Kew, Fitzroy North, Collingwood, etc.).

Someone has set up a Yarra River group. Here it is.

This photo is by Alan Lam. His photos are stunning. I am noticing a lot of talk about something with the acronym “HDR” in relation to photos that are a bit more stunning than usual. I’m working on working out what that is exactly.

Slow Food Festival in the Blogosphere

Because I did such a crap job of reporting the Slow Food’s “A Taste of Slow” festival, I have found some links to blogs of folk who did a better job, like Esurientes — The Comfort Zone, and Caper Berry Gravy and A Few of My Favourite Things. If you know of any other good wrap-ups, let me know.

This guy‘s point of view — “largely pretentious yuppy rubbish” — definitely deserves representation: I have this nigling problem with the whole scene, and I think it comes down to this. This shows me to be hard to please, and really, the slow food movement can be whatever it and its members want. But for me, slow food should not be expensive; it should be a movement of the celebration of simplicity and home-cooked food, a rejection of the overpriced delicatessen. I would have liked to see big crowds of Italian and Greek families competing in an Olympics of home cooking where the teams could consist only of nuclear families, and 44 gallon drums spurting fire were provided to each team. Then peppers could be char grilled, goats roasted on spits, tomato passata produced in vast quantities and octopuses thrashed periodically to soften them up as they were roasted over the fire, basted with bitter herbal liquors. The Vietnamese could have made their minced meat wrapped in char grilled green leaf parcels, and taught the pronunciation of Phở. No doubt lawyers have ensured that no such festivity is possible.