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Italian Wine and Food Festival 2017

The Cutaway, Barangaroo Reserve

Sydney, AU

August 28, 2017

The origin of the festival goes back to Lara Caraturo, a sommelier who in 2013 thought that an occasion needed to be created to shed light on Italian wine and food culture in Australia.

It is produced by Lara and the team at Progetto Panevino, an events company obsessed with all things wine and food, and especially all things Italian. 

Their mission is to create engaging and informative events with artisans, quality wineries, renowned chefs and personalities, allowing guests to discover industry luminaries as well as rising stars, and deepen their love for authentic Italian wine and food.

In a bid to capture the spirit of Italy’s rich gastronomic culture and the diversity of its many regions, they give guests an opportunity to explore Italian wines region by region, taste food, coffee and beer, plus feast on authentic Italian pizza, pasta and snacks. 

Held at The Cutaway and Barangaroo Reserve, the Sydney incarnation of the festival found an appropriate backdrop to celebrate its fifth year anniversary to appease an audience ranging from spaghetti-loving kids to the most engaged Italian-speaking wine connoisseur
 
Sydney’s top Italian chefs were turning out in force to make it a day to remember, with much-loved locals Giovanni Pilu (Pilu at Freshwater), Lucio Galletto (Lucio’s), Federico Zanellato (LuMi), Stefano Manfredi and Gianluca Donzelli (Pizzaperta), Nino Zoccali (Pendolino), Richard Ptacnik (Otto Ristorante), Gabriele Taddeucci (Balla), Lucio de Falco (Lucio Pizzeria) and Youssef Touati (Salt Meats Cheese) showed their skills in terms of preparing authentic Italian cuisine, be it with key ingredients like salami, cheese, pasta, bread, coffee, olive oil, pastries or more exotic fare and desserts like gelato featuring Vannella Cheese, That’s Amore Cheese, Arancini Art, Molecola, Truffle Traders, Rivareno Gelato, Drink in Style, Cellar V, Vinotopia, Botella, plus a Nutella Pop-up.

Vino played of course a more than instrumental role and over two hundred region specific fine drops were proffered, backed by masterclasses and Q & As with the makers.

Coffee had its very own place, as did Italian beer and aperitifs, e.g. Negronis and Venetian Spritzers and proceedings were framed by an engaging entertainment program ranging from pizza acrobatics

and the performance of traditional music from Southern Italy. 

A perfectly curated festival that is all about celebrating wine, food and culture together in inimitable Italian style.

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Photos by KAVV

Vera Blue

Metro Theatre

Sydney, AU

September 2, 2017

Celia Pavey, known in muso circles under the moniker Vera Blue, is a Sydney-based singer-songwriter that managed to transition from reality show credit, i.e. via an interpretation of Simon and Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair, and reinvent herself as somewhat of a darling indie act.

Her melodic folk-inspired songwriting is laced with electronica, which creates the foundation on which own stage persona lays down her impressive vocal range. Combining melancholic, gentle and fiery components to a mélange of her own, she had the audience swaying along in a trance-like state from the get go.

Being a multi-instrumentalist, Vera Blue accompanied herself demonstrating her versatility and musical prowess. She has come a long way from the glittery mainstream realm of a reality show to creating her own mesmerizing sound, which is based on her love for sultry electronica and folk music, infused with her take on lost love and the freedom of singledom.

An artist that has successfully reinvented and found herself, full-heartedly embracing a new sound and distinct identity – at times fiery, at others gentle, yet never contrived – that is on her way to conquer bigger stages.

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Photo from artist website

You Am I & Hoodoo Gurus

Enmore Theatre

Sydney, AU

August 31, 2017

If you paid an iota of attention over the last couple of years, it would not have gone unnoticed that when it comes to artists on terra australis, Tex Perkins and his various incarnations are held in high esteem by yours truly.

There are not many unikums like him but Tim Rogers, frontman of You Am I, is a somewhat more flamboyant equivalent.

Having taking a page of two from The Kinks’ Ray Davies in terms of observing everyday occurrences and channeling them through his idiosyncratic reflective and nostalgic lens, You Am I has created a solid back catalogue of audacious and incisive rock’n roll albums that somehow managed to be appealing to both the Australian mainstream and the underground. Credibility is the keyword.

Being the charismatic rock’n roll existentialist he is, Rogers lead his comrades through a loose yet sonically tight and powerful set, embodying and paying homage to the spirit of the cooler parts of the 1970ies without getting caught in retro trappings – dirty glamour paired with a humble attitude on a solid foundation of punk.

A 50-minute tour de force paved with their hits and peppered with a Deep Purple and Cheap Trick cover.

Compared to You Am I, the Hoodoo Gurus are the more refined and polished elder statesmen of Aussie rock. Decked out in their trademark psychedelic shirts, Dave Faulkner and gang mixed hits with b-sides and lesser known gems, executing their set with precision and prompting sing-a-longs galore.

What makes the Hoodoo Gurus remarkable in 2017, and always has, is that each and every one of their offerings sounds fresh and timeless, which speaks volumes about the craftsmanship that informs their songwriting.

A great evening with two iconic Australian bands that complemented each other perfectly and culminated with all protagonists sharing the stage to celebrate Sweet’s Ballroom Blitz.

Stone Sour

Hordern Pavillion

Sydney, AU

August 26, 2017

Touring in support of their latest album, the groove-heavy Hydrograd, Stone Sour descended upon Australia via a stint in New Zealand to an enthusiastic crowd in Sydney.

For the uninitiated: Stone Sour was Corey Taylor’s original band, predating his Slipknot incarnation, and has been his vehicle on and off since 1992, resulting in a back catalogue of six albums each of which was revisited in tonight’s performance.

While one could argue that bands in masks try to deliberately create another layer of distance between the audiences and them, it is refreshing to see how engaging Taylor is with his original band: Working the stage, heavy on banter and both effortlessly and passionately playing the emotional claviature of Stone Sour’s diverse offerings seamlessly shifting from screaming to singing and back, from stripped down acoustic numbers to their heavier songs that give a nod to thrash metal with double bass drum patterns.

Backed by a band of solid musicians comprised of Roy Mayorga, (ex-Soulfly), Christian Martucci, knows for his collaboration with Dee Dee Ramone and the duo Johnny Chow and Josh Rand, the show culminated in the band being joined by brightly coloured air dancers, known from their recent video "Fabuless" with a streamer / confetti gun being made use of extensively.

Stone Sour’s show was an ambitious display that proved that the band has always at times been considered to be a mere side-project, is a powerful entity in its own right that is still evolving and pushing forward with their sound, not being stuck with reaching for the tested, lower hanging fruit.

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Photo courtesy of Live Nation

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
by Mark Manson
Pan Macmillan Australia

It is only after you have lost everything that you are free to do anything.
Nothing is static.
Everything is appalling.
Everything is falling apart.
You have to realize that some day you will die, until you know that you are useless.
Quintessentially, Mark Manson could have joined Tyler Durden’s campaign, adding the inscriptive of Charles Bukowski’s tombstone “Don’t try.”
Manson’s oeuvre is based on the truism that some things in life are just awful and we have to deal with it, no matter what positive thinking mantra is being propagated as the latest fad for the spoiled generations of millenials that are being rewarded for trying.
Despite the profane lingo – one cannot help but think that the crude language is used as a tool to trick to engage an ADHD riddled audience to engage with actual values - the book is inspiring as it is grounded on academic research and a fundamental acceptance of some truths, i.e. that you are not a unique snowflake with unlimited abilities.

It is about embracing your shortcomings, fears and limitations – about acceptance, lessons learned and confronting unpleasant truths to enable yourself to move on to figure out what truly matters and what needs to be disregarded and let go, limiting concern over things that have little to
no meaning or value in your life.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F is both a reality check and a mirror for self-confrontation, devoid of any positive airy-fairy fluff that mainstream media spoon-feeds us to believe in self-help gurus.
As per Manson, life is essentially an endless series of problems, no matter what your approach is.
Instead of wasting time avoiding those problems, Manson encourages the reader to make a deliberate choice to decide for which problems you are willing to sacrifice for.

“The path to happiness is a path full of shit heaps and shame,” Manson quips.

While the book does not reveal a world changing epiphany, it is an at times painfully honest, refreshing and fulfilling read that succeeds at kärchering the grime of denial and delusion off our pneumas to ultimately find the courage and confidence we desperately seek.

While abandoning hope, the book actually is hopeful and does leave you feeling elated.

The nourishing effect of Manson Trojan horsing some unfiltered truths past our filters to inspire thoughts that count.