Category Archives: Media and Entertainment

The Australian Superbowl (minus the ads)

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I think the Superbowl is the best possible comparison to Melbourne Cup Day (and for those of you who don’t know, pronounce it Melbin please).  Just like during the Superbowl, you spend the day eating and drinking massive quantities, and bet away a tiny to extremely large portion of your salary on the possible outcome.  Only during Melbourne Cup Day, you eat canapes instead of chips, you drink champagne instead of beer, the betting is legal, encouraged, and highly profitable (for the winners that is) and instead of team jerseys and sweat pants, you wear your race day finest.

The fashion is perhaps the most fun part of the day’s festivities.  Whether you are attending the race or not, you are expected to dress for the track.  Men wear fine suits with Easter egg colored ties and women wear tiny, highlighter colored dresses, with elaborate hats called fascinators.  I don’t know why they are called fascinators, but they certainly are fascinating.  Somewhere between a hat and a hair clip, they are decorated with feathers, flowers and all sorts of bright flora and fauna, and worn at a jaunty angle.  This tradition has to have come from Australia’s British routes.  The Empire lives on!

But at it’s core, Melbourne Cup day is just another good excuse to party.  It’s a formal holiday in Melbourne, and an unofficial afternoon off for the rest of the country.  Perhaps they realized long ago, that even though the race itself is only a blurry two minutes of jumbled up racehorses nosing their way to the finish, that the massive lunch and several glasses of champagne consumed before the race, would leave every Australian in a useless state for the rest of the day.

And just like the Superbowl, Melbourne Cup Day ends with stumbling and a little vomiting.  Yes, everyone may look classy but being well dressed doesn’t increase your tolerance.  Melbourne Cup attenders beware, if you vomit while still on the field, you will be on the news.  Their parents must be so proud.

This particular Melbourne Cup day came with a bit of an inconvenience for those of us living on the North Shore of Sydney.  Just when everyone was starting to stumble home post race, the trains broke down and legions of brightly dresses party goers were forced to walk home in the record heat of thirty seven degrees.  If you are only familiar with the Fahrenheit scale, just know that that’s HOT!  I’m very glad that as a brazen foreigner, I decided to violate race day fashion rules and wore flats.

Saved for a Rainy Day

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If you were wondering about my radio silence over these past few weeks, it was not a result of alien abduction, or any other suspect activity, but simply a consequence of a weather induced lockdown, a.k.a. a slow couple of weeks.  With the insanely high winds that followed the infamous Mars Day dust storm, and a week and a half of rain and otherwise unreliable skies, my activities have been limited at best.  But that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of fun to be had in the great indoors.

Even though I have already been won over by the classy experience offered at the Hayden Orpheum theater, I couldn’t refuse an opportunity for promotionaly priced Gold Class movie tickets at another theater.  What is Gold Class, you ask?  I think it’s probably best described like this, as close as you’ll ever get to watching a movie in Spielberg’s private screening room, plus waiter service.  For the wallet thinning price of $32, a Gold Class ticket lets you wait for the theater to open in a lounge instead of a line, gets you a lazy boy style seat in the theater, complete with adjustable back and leg rests, offers a menu that includes more than just hot dogs and plastic cheese covered nachos, and waiter service that can time food deliveries with the beginning, middle and dramatic conclusion of the movie you’re watching.  Awesome!

Even though you have to pay extra for the food and drinks, they actually come at reasonable price, a decent (for Sydney) $7 per cocktail and $11 per dessert or entree (which we would call an appetizer, but they call them entrees here.  Which one of us is right about that?)   My malteser covered sunday was delicious, even if a little hard to eat while leaning back in a lazy boy, in a darkened theater.  Despite the hefty price, it’s an experience well worth repeating.

The other safe indoor activity we decided to participate in was getting ourselves cultured.  This was done at a combination of the Art Gallery of New South Whales, and the Powerhouse Museum.  The Art Gallery of New South Whales, is an interesting combination of the Met and MOMA, housed in a lovely landmark building in the heart of the Royal Botanic Gardens.  In addition to a large collection of historic paintings from all over the world, that included a fair number of Australian landscapes (makes sense) the gallery also displays the works of many contemporary artists.  Did you know that Christo once wrapped up a piece of the Australian coast line?  What hasn’t that man covered in fabric?

The Powerhouse Museum is more a kin to the Smithsonian, with a dash of the Exploratorium and a design museum, all rolled into one.  Located inside an actual old powerhouse, this massive structure houses an interesting collection of furniture, clothing, planes, trains, automobiles, satellites, spaceships and I saw more than one kitchen sink on display.  The lower level of the museum includes an area full of interactive displays, where you can experiment with electricity, magnets, chemistry, sound waves, gravity, and all other things that are only cool when learned about outside of the classroom.  I’m sure that had I been the primary target age for the displays, that I would have had a blast, but my mature Sunday morning gin haze was a bit overstimulated by the noise.  Personally, I wanted to play with the art nouveau era dressing table, but that’s just me.

It still gets a bit windy in the afternoons these days, but I can’t complain about the temperature.  I’ve enjoyed my cultural excursions around Sydney, but hope that this weekend will bring with it the opportunity to add to my steadily increasing number of freckles with a little sunshine.

My New Favorite Place

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This is the theater where we saw Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (which, by the way, was awesome).

The Orpheum

And this is what it looked like about fifteen minutes before the show started.

Orpheum Seats

So, not only did the Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace offer a pleasantly uncrowded movie going experience (unheard of during the opening weekend of any Harry Potter movie) in a graceful art deco theater, but also many other amenities not standard to the popcorn scented cattle corrals I’m used to seeing movies in.  If you’re going to pay $17 for a movie, which is pretty standard out here for any movie, not just the IMAX or special screenings one might pay that much for LA or NY, it might as well be here.
Instead of standing in line so long you inevitably sink to the rash producing carpet below, and spend your time contemplating how much uglier the dizzying pattern could possibly get, you instead sit on a velvet couch under the flattering light of well proportioned stained glass fixtures, and sip a glass of wine while you wait for the theater doors to open.  No one was playing the white piano perched in the corner of the room while we were there, but I’m sure the theater finds occasion to use it.

As you walk into the theater, you can take the time to appreciate the decor, instead of stomping off the shoes of several small children in your attempt to beat them to the good seats.  And once you’re in a well appointed seat,  you won’t be subjected to the same loop of badly animated ads and movie trivia questions (Yes, I already knew that Whoopi Goldberg worked in a funeral parlor).  For pre-show entertainment, the Orpheum opts for songs masterfully played on the impressively complicated Wurlitzer pipe organ.  I was already impressed by the decoration, so the fact that the organ rose from the stage, and the sound beat out of pipes built creatively into the proscenium, was just icing on the cake.  Did I mention the organ was complicated?  Mad props to Neil Jensen.

We still had to sit though a loop of pretty bad television style ads (the standards of which are lower in Oz than those played during daytime cable re-runs in the States) and the screen size would not have satisfied my super-sized American standards if I had sat much further back, but the experience was calm, classy and fun.  This is where I will be seeing all the movies from now.  It’s a good thing I found a new source of entertainment, since a third of my TV screen just went black.