I think Bach had had enough of life when he sat for this

Mike's Pith & Wind - Deathsweat
One of my early encounters with the music of Bach was when I was eleven or twelve or so. I’d wandered (or fled from some dispute) downstairs to my grandmother’s ‘granny flat’ and she was knitting or playing whist or something grandmotherly whilst listening to Bach on the radio. I was rather taken with the music – I adored Charles Foster Browne’s renditions of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor at the Christchurch Cathedral – but granyips expressed some irritation with it and said it just sounded like a bunch of scales to her.
She’s not the first person to think that of Bach, and I’m still not sure what transforms any one of Bach’s compositions from the clinically mathematical into the sublimely spiritual. Is it the composition itself or the rendering of it? Or is it the simply the mood of the listener?
After my brief stays in Box Hill Hospital recently, I was parking in The Well’s car park, when I heard part of a discussion concerning JS Bach and his cantatas on Radio National. (Bach- the Evangelist – Encounter)
The prospect of one’s suddenly taking ill and dying unpleasantly from any amount of causes was ever-present in Bach’s time, so the contemporary perceptions of sex, religion and death overlapped rather more than they do today – think of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal to conjure up the atmosphere of the times. The metaphor for an orgasm, la petite mort, also conveys something of the attitudes of the times to art, sex and death. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - It must be the drugs..
The advertisement on the bus shelter outside the Rialto Building of what I presumed to be an unsavoury backyard kitchen laboratory for the manufacture of ecstasy or methamphetamines gave me pause for thought. It reminded me almost simultaneously of the more memorable student flats of my youth and also of several Melbourne restaurant kitchens. I also was troubled by the fact that somebody thought it might be effective.
Did someone in the agency believe that the youth of the land would see this disturbing image and see the light, throw their mind-altering pills into the gutter and go to Church the next day?
It seemed unlikely when all the advertisement needed was Elsa Lanchester as The Bride of Frankenstein to lend authenticity, irony and a pleasing cultural note . read more