I don’t know if Reg Livermore meant a bunch of 15-year-olds rubbing sleep from their bedheads as they duck out for a day of skating but I love the way old toons can be reinterpreted.

Check out this nice little nostalgic short Wake Up written and directed by Rex Woods, son of one of our industry’s super creative couples Rowan Woods and Jacquelin Perske.

“It’s late September and I really should be back at school…”

Film school for this one too, perhaps?

Ah, for the days before liposuction. When it was still okay to have girls in high cut bikinis playing sax, and kissing monitor lizards on the edge of swimming pools, while dirty old men walk around in T-shirts.

The ’80s are definitely back, with ‘Surprise Hotel’, the latest clip from LA band Fool’s Gold.

The video is inspired, says US director Matthew Lessner, by “those innocent days of summer, just being proud and strong and free and soakin’ up the rays.” A perfect backdrop for the band’s unique blend of Moroccan beats, African jive and ’80s pop.

Director Lessner’s films have won awards at numerous film festivals worldwide, including Sundance, SXSW and Clermont-Ferrand. His work has been featured on Wholphin, Canal +, PBS, iTunes and MTV.

The clip will screen in Video From the Borough – six video artists from Brooklyn, NY who feature as part of the Anode arts events in Sydney and Melbourne until December 5.

Check out the video here.
Find more about Anode here.

If that doesn’t rouse you, get a load of this fabulous letter faxed by Hunter S. Thompson to the then production exec Holly Sorensen re progress on adapting The Rum Diary here.

That should get you going.

Against the news that filming of the six-hr pay-TV series of Tim Winton’s iconic novel Cloudstreet will go ahead in Western Australia early next year after a period of uncertainty, my favourite Australian novelist and favourite Australian photographer – Tim Winton and Martin Mischkulnig – will present in the same room with the project Smalltown.

Shot on a very large format camera, Mischkulnig took some of this series before asking Tim Winton to write for it. He said yes, which inspired Mischkulnig to shoot the rest, all around Australia over a three-year period.

Mischkulnig’s quirky composition and humour illustrate here the breathless wonder with which Miles Franklin Award winning Winton adulates his landscape.

The cinematic nature of both the images and Winton’s work itself makes me more eager than ever to know what’s going on with the film adaptation of Dirt Music?

Image taken in South Australia © Martin Mischkulnig 2005