How It Feels??? Synchronistic That's How! (Part 1)

All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane
movie poster

I've just finished reading another book I bought at the 
Byron Bay Writers Festival after meeting and chatting to the author and getting a signed copy, called How It Feels written by actor/author Brendan Cowell.

Here's a review by another blogger who I agree totally with;

Growing up in Cronulla – ‘How It Feels’ by Brendan Cowell

WARNING:
This novel contains explicit language

Oddly enough, he won the Patrick White Playwrights' Award for his third play Bed along with a collection of other awards.
In one of the only interviews that Patrick White ever did for a TV audience the interviewer starts off by asking Patrick "how it feels" to pick up the Nobel Prize for Literature  for an epic and psychological narrative art, which has introduced a new continent into literature in 1973.

Interview of Nobel laureate Patrick White
He is the author of The Eye of the Storm, which was made into a movie (which I saw yesterday ... more on that weird day later) by  
Six Degrees of the Separation director Fred  Schepisi.

I have never really heard a lot about Brendan before the BBWF, to me he was just that handyman guy from a TV show a while back called Life Support.

I loved that show.
It was a send-up of all those lifestyles shows that started to be shown on the TV screens around that time, giving you tips on how to lead a better life.
Here's one skit called "Autograph", starring Abbie Cornish (the actress from the movie Limitless);
"The Adjustment Bureau" or "Limitless"???

Now if you've read my blog up to this point, then you will know that even though I've lived in the Brisbane area just about all of my life, I'm a life member of the Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks rugby league club.
I started following them in 1977 (Brisbane didn't have a team in the NRL until much later, but I don't like them, anyway. Long story.) and finally became a paid up life member around 1988.

Brendan was born in Cronulla in 1976 and claims  to be a committed supporter of the Cronulla Sharks rugby league team.
So we are both mad Sharks fans.

A book I found when
searching How It Feels

I was wearing my Cronulla Sharks polo shirt at the time he signed my book at the BBWF and I forgot I was wearing it at the time and asked him if he could write "Go the Sharks!" after his name, in my copy of the book, but he said he already had.
I was dumbstruck, but then I realized the shirt I was wearing and found out that he could read shirts and not minds after-all;-)
I bought his book after seeing/hearing him at the  
Creating Words for Physical Space talk which I wrote about here;
Manning and Malthouse and The Dead End (Drive-in)

Me waiting in the line to get
the book signed by Brendan

 Now, before I talk about the synchs I came across in the book, just let me explain the link between Brendan and the movie  
All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane (right up the top of this post).

I saw this movie years ago, just after it first came out and meant to buy a copy when it became cheaper ... it never did though, so I decided to buy a copy last week and watch it again, because one of the actors in the film (Gyton Grantley) was going to play the lead role of Rubin Guthrie, a play by the same name, which started in Brisbane just last night at the La Boite theatre.
It was written by Brendan Cowell and is loosely based on his own run in with booze.
Ruben Guthrie 
Grantley also starred in the movie Beneath Hill 60 with Brendan, not long ago.

Which I wrote about here;
White Feathers
After reading How It Feels and watching  
All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane again.
I realized that both stories are very similar, but almost the exact opposite of each other. How It Feels is about a character named Neil Cronk who grows up in Cronulla, but feels he has to leave and see the world, and tries to convince his friends to do the same, but only he leaves to see the world while his friends live out their lives in Cronulla.
It is obviously loosely based on a lot of

Brendan's own life experiences mixed in with some fiction.
All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane is about a guy who grew up in Brisbane but wants to convince his friends not to leave, but to grow up living their lives in Brisbane instead of going overseas to live.
It's almost a Yin/Yang combination, the book and the movie. 
Here's something funny, too.
I put in the DVD and watched the opening scenes of the Brisbane movie, and it shows a Brisbane Yellow Taxi driving over the Story Bridge, a bridge I wrote about here -
Story About a Bridge

and here -

Darkside of the Bridge 
then the movie cuts to London and shows kids from Brisbane riding in those famous London cabs you see in all the movies about London.
I remember thinking as I saw that shot of the London cab,
"well I guess I'll never see a real London cab in this life, as I don't see myself ever getting motivated enough to travel to London.
I'll just have to be content with seeing them at the cinema". 
Que the Trickster.
I asked my brother if he wanted to go right over to the other side of Brisbane to a cinema I have never been to in all my life living in Brisbane, to see Fred Schepisi's movie The Eye of the Storm.
As I had some discount tickets out of the Brisbane Entertainment coupon book, and told my brother I'd pay his way in if he drove us in his car, as mine was playing up. 
As we got to the cinema steps, I could not believe what pulled up right outside the cinema.
Two old London taxis which were now being used as wedding cars.
I have never seen or heard of these cars driving around in Brisbane before.

London Taxis outside the Regal Cinema,
yesterday as I was catching a movie there?!

 I heard what I assumed was the bride saying they wanted to see a movie before going to wherever it was they were going to. 
I cringed also when I heard the line in the Brisbane movie where one of the characters says,
"If everybody jumped off the Story Bridge, would you too?" 
Another thing that stunned me was right before the screening of  
The Eye of the Storm an trailer was screened for an ABC TV series called, The Slap
I have never seen the ABC (which is a government funded TV station) advertise on the big screen before, so that was weird enough, but  
The Slap is an eight part mini-series based on a book by  
Christos Tsiolkas and adapted to the small screen by none other than Brendan Cowell, among others.
Christos Tsiolkas has an endorsement on the back cover of Brendan's How It Feels.
Talk about "Six Degrees..."!? 
Also playing at this cinema is a movie called The Hunter.
Which was filmed in Tasmania (Australia) and stars Willem Dafoe as an American hired by a bio-tech firm to track down the last Tasmanian Tiger, which are believed to be extinct.
It also stars Morgana Davies from The Tree and Dafoe also played opposite Charlotte Gainsbourg (also from The Tree) in the movie Antichrist.
A film about;
"A couple lose their young son when he falls out the window while they have sex in the other room. 
The mother's grief consigns her to hospital, but her therapist husband brings her home intent on treating her depression himself. 
To confront her fears they go to stay at their remote cabin in the woods, "Eden", where something untold happened the previous summer. 
Told in four chapters with a prologue and epilogue, the film details acts of lustful cruelty as the man and woman unfold the darker side of nature outside and within."
I have yet to see that one.
I'll get back to Charlotte Gainsbourg in Part 2 of this post.
One more coincidence before I end Part 1, is that in the novel
 How It Feels, Brendan writes a lot about Bathurst, a town were his University days were spent in the novel, and in his real life.
It is home to  one of Australia's motor races, The Bathurst 1000, which was held today.
I had only finished reading the novel last night, and not being a motor-sport fan I didn't realize it was going to be on today ... although I knew it was coming up soon.

Oh ... and one more thing I should probably mention in this part of the posts is that Cronulla and Brisbane both have something in common.
They both have a "Captain Cook Bridge" you cross over water to get to them, 
so if you drove from the Brisbane city CBD to the Sutherland Shire you could begin and end your journey by crossing a

"Captain Cook Bridge".

The Captain Cook Bridge in Brisbane

Captain Cook Bridge, Brisbane

The Captain Cook Bridge in
Sydney/Sutherland Shire

Captain Cook Bridge, New South Wales

How It Feels??? Synchronistic That's How! (Part 2)