Daily Archives: August 30, 2018

I Hear With My Little Ear: Podcasts 23/8 – 30/8

Posted on August 30, 2018 | 1 comment

I’ve taken to walking from home to the museum in Heidelberg on Mondays, and to and from the library in Watsonia for Spanish on Wednesdays.  Plenty of time to listen to podcasts! This week I listened to:

In Our Time (Stitcher)  The Salem Witch Trials . Featuring Susan Castillo Street (King’s College London); Simon Middleton at the (University of Sheffield); Marion Gibson (University of Exeter). Gives an interesting economic perspective on why Salem Village generated these trials, as distinct from Salem Town. And the girls were only 11 and 9 ! Quite a different view to ‘The Crucible’!

Russia If You’re Listening (ABC Listen). I love listening to Matt Bevan on RN Breakfast each morning as he does a round-up of local and international news (that’s why I get up at 6.45 a.m.- I wait until his segment is finished before I get out of bed). Ever since Trump was elected, he’s been fascinated by events in America and now he has his own podcast that goes right back to the beginning. This week, episode 15 ‘Felix Sater: Criminal, informant, developer, spy.‘

The History Listen (ABC Listen). Not as good as Hindsight, but still a good listen. This week I listened to the four-part series Gone Mallee, a flat, marginal area in north-west Victoria. My favourite episode, dealing with a small town population 7,  was #3 The Mantung Yearbook

Rear Vision (ABC Listen). This week Radio National are featuring Australia’s relationship with China, and this program Modern China and the Legacy of the Opium Wars looks at the Opium Wars, and their lingering effects on how China views its own history and future.

Duolingo Podcast These podcasts are about 2/3 English and 1/3 Spanish, slow enough for me to understand straight off. You could follow it even if you didn’t speak Spanish, and there’s a transcript on the website.Episode 10, Los guerrilleros is about a journalist who meets with the FARC guerillas in their jungle camp.

News In Slow Spanish. A paid program that has a weekly round-up of news and commentary. I listened to Episode #492 dated 16th August. It dealt with the tensions between Turkey and the US; the World Rankings study where Melbourne slipped to second after Vienna; a study about the strategies to get someone to respond to your message on dating sites, and a snail race in England.

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Movie: Summer 1993

Posted on August 30, 2018 | 1 comment

 

This film, set in Catalonia and directed by Carla Simon, is autobiographical, telling the story of six-year old Frida whose mother has died. She is sent to live with her uncle and his wife and young daughter in the countryside, even though she is very close to a single aunt who remains in the city.  The young actress Laia Artigas is excellent, capturing both the deep sadness and passivity of a young bereaved child, and the joy of just being alive and feeling loved. The film is very much taken from the child’s point of view, and yet you can so easily empathize with the uncle’s wife who has most of the care of her husband’s niece; with the aunt who loves Frida so much, and with the grandparents who are now so distant. The movie is in Catalan with subtitles, and it’s a very quiet film where things move very slowly, with a sense of impending danger.  The sadness at the end snuck up on me -just as it did the characters in the film- and I found myself crying again when telling my husband about it.

My rating: 4.5/5

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Posted in Movies 2018