Latest news with #Heartburn
Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Try dating Josie': A Melbourne single's unique approach to finding love
While Buden's approach to looking for love is novel, their growing disdain for dating apps is not. An increasing number of singles are taking their search off their smartphones and into real life, whether through organised singles events or by joining community groups for like-minded people, such as run clubs. Loading '[Dating apps are] just very deeply impersonal,' Buden said. 'I was getting a bit nowhere.' Buden is also a romantic who loves a good meet-cute story. An intimacy director in uni theatre, they are pursuing a career writing for screen and stage, and writing a romcom for the Melbourne Fringe Festival. The late Nora Ephron – the writer behind the films Heartburn, Sleepless In Seattle, You've Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally, as well as books and essays – has a special place in Buden's heart: 'I love her entire oeuvre.' 'You kind of want there to be a story to a relationship. Dating apps just don't have the same personality. 'I'd be lying if there wasn't a part of me that wanted to S leepless [in Seattle] myself,' they said, referring to the film about a widower who inadvertently attracts thousands of women after he speaks on a radio talk show about his grief. Last year, an investigation by The Age reported that dating-app user numbers were flatlining, prompting the tech giants to try to squeeze singles with costly subscriptions. Melbourne-based Brenda Van started her company Dating Apps Suck three years ago to create real-life events for singles to meet after she became deflated with her own swiping experiences. She now organises speed dating, all-in mingling and events based on activities, such as salsa or running, in Melbourne and Sydney about three times a month. 'You can't gauge chemistry until you meet in person,' Van said. 'Between being ghosted or stood up or meeting people who have girlfriends already, there's no accountability on the apps; people have less investment when swiping.' Van said going to a dating event was no longer seen as 'desperate', with a huge jump in companies catering to this as the apps fall out of favour. CitySwoon is one of Australia's biggest dating events businesses, with about a dozen gatherings organised in Melbourne each month. The company's chief operating officer, Chris Marnie, explains that they harness technology by having singles at their events use an app that matches them up in real-time to have mini dates through the night. 'It really comes down to, we just want to put people together face-to-face as soon as possible,' he said. Marnie said the company started a decade ago and there had been exponential growth in Melbourne since 2022, with an expansion from the core demographic of ages 25-49 to 50-65, plus people in their early 20s. 'People are sick of dating apps,' Marnie said. 'Suddenly, speed dating and singles events and actually paying money to meet singles isn't as much of a taboo.' As for Buden's dating flyers, they have yet to result in love. The posters led to some genuine messages of interest, but Buden said some people misinterpreted the flyer's humour. Loading 'It has jokes, the intent is to be funny, but it is not in itself a joke. It's a sincere attempt to try to find something.' If they make another attempt, they would consider changing the poster slightly. They may also try other unique methods – being in The Age, for one, may even count. 'I'd like to meet someone who is independent and focused, but then do fun things together. I also just kind of enjoy dating. I like the silly, cute moments.'
The Age
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Try dating Josie': A Melbourne single's unique approach to finding love
While Buden's approach to looking for love is novel, their growing disdain for dating apps is not. An increasing number of singles are taking their search off their smartphones and into real life, whether through organised singles events or by joining community groups for like-minded people, such as run clubs. Loading '[Dating apps are] just very deeply impersonal,' Buden said. 'I was getting a bit nowhere.' Buden is also a romantic who loves a good meet-cute story. An intimacy director in uni theatre, they are pursuing a career writing for screen and stage, and writing a romcom for the Melbourne Fringe Festival. The late Nora Ephron – the writer behind the films Heartburn, Sleepless In Seattle, You've Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally, as well as books and essays – has a special place in Buden's heart: 'I love her entire oeuvre.' 'You kind of want there to be a story to a relationship. Dating apps just don't have the same personality. 'I'd be lying if there wasn't a part of me that wanted to S leepless [in Seattle] myself,' they said, referring to the film about a widower who inadvertently attracts thousands of women after he speaks on a radio talk show about his grief. Last year, an investigation by The Age reported that dating-app user numbers were flatlining, prompting the tech giants to try to squeeze singles with costly subscriptions. Melbourne-based Brenda Van started her company Dating Apps Suck three years ago to create real-life events for singles to meet after she became deflated with her own swiping experiences. She now organises speed dating, all-in mingling and events based on activities, such as salsa or running, in Melbourne and Sydney about three times a month. 'You can't gauge chemistry until you meet in person,' Van said. 'Between being ghosted or stood up or meeting people who have girlfriends already, there's no accountability on the apps; people have less investment when swiping.' Van said going to a dating event was no longer seen as 'desperate', with a huge jump in companies catering to this as the apps fall out of favour. CitySwoon is one of Australia's biggest dating events businesses, with about a dozen gatherings organised in Melbourne each month. The company's chief operating officer, Chris Marnie, explains that they harness technology by having singles at their events use an app that matches them up in real-time to have mini dates through the night. 'It really comes down to, we just want to put people together face-to-face as soon as possible,' he said. Marnie said the company started a decade ago and there had been exponential growth in Melbourne since 2022, with an expansion from the core demographic of ages 25-49 to 50-65, plus people in their early 20s. 'People are sick of dating apps,' Marnie said. 'Suddenly, speed dating and singles events and actually paying money to meet singles isn't as much of a taboo.' As for Buden's dating flyers, they have yet to result in love. The posters led to some genuine messages of interest, but Buden said some people misinterpreted the flyer's humour. Loading 'It has jokes, the intent is to be funny, but it is not in itself a joke. It's a sincere attempt to try to find something.' If they make another attempt, they would consider changing the poster slightly. They may also try other unique methods – being in The Age, for one, may even count. 'I'd like to meet someone who is independent and focused, but then do fun things together. I also just kind of enjoy dating. I like the silly, cute moments.'
The Age
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Two new books delve into the 20th century's wittiest women
Kaplan's lavishly illustrated book would certainly catch the eye on anyone's coffee-table (although the captioning of the pictures is eye-rollingly literal and sometimes just plain wrong). But much of her commentary about Ephron reads like marketing hype. 'Think of her as the fairy godmother of modern-day rom-coms,' she urges. 'After years of a genre lying in wait, she waved her magic wand and penned dazzling scripts, equivalent to charming ball gowns for women who wouldn't take any shit.' And her afterword – in which she confesses that 'Nora's trio of groundbreaking genre films had shaped (her) core beliefs of finding true romance' – is simply embarrassing. And it's 'Nora' throughout, even though she never knew her. She's alert to the primary focus of Ephron's work: 'Each project focuses on women who were three-dimensional and who had something to prove – either to themselves or to the world at large.' She also attends to her public persona – her humour, her fashion sense, her love affair with food – and to how her mantra that 'everything is copy' fuelled her work, especially her 1983 novel, Heartburn, a thinly disguised account of the collapse of her marriage to famed Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein. But she never looks far beyond the surface, relying far too heavily on others' observations or assessments and coming up with few insights of her own. Jacob Bernstein's 2015 documentary about his mother, Everything Is Copy, is much more illuminating. Only in the book's final chapter, made up of interviews with some of those who worked with Ephron on her films, does Kaplan seem on more solid ground. By way of contrast, British academic Gail Crowther's fluently written book about Parker is much more revealing, attentive to detail and interested in what might lie beneath the surface. She easily dispenses with the most dominant myth regarding Parker: that she was a bouncy, carefree soul, tossing witticisms across the famous Round Table with her illustrious peers in the literary world (among them Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Sherwood and Donald Ogden Stewart) at New York's Algonquin Hotel during the 1920s, before heading off to Hollywood where real money beckoned. Her account instead fixes on the collision between two early 20th-century phenomena, Parker and Hollywood, neither nice to be around, despite the surface glitter attached to both. Like Crowther's 2021 book, Three-Martin Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton, her portrait of Parker ponders what went wrong, what made this professionally successful woman so mean, why she seemed to be forever sabotaging herself, why she repeatedly attempted suicide, why she suffered such a sad, lonely death. Intrigued, compassionate and affectionate at the same time as she keeps her distance, Crowther hones in on Parker's 'mix of helplessness and viciousness' as she situates her biography in the social circumstances of the time. Significant events swirl in the background: the 'Roaring '20s', the Great Depression, the imposition of the Hays Code to counter Hollywood's perceived debauchery, the general oppression of women in the social hierarchy, the rise of the 'Red Threat' and the establishment of HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Commission) to deal with it. Meanwhile, in the foreground, her Parker is a restless figure, struggling to make her way in a world that has no serious interest in anything she has to offer aside from her reputation, suffering the consequences of her alcoholism, dealing with the torture of miscarriages and failed relationships, discovering a political cause and finding herself blacklisted. Loading Curiously, Crowther largely sidesteps the possibility that traces of Parker's personality might be found in her work, whether on the page or the screen. But otherwise thorough in her research, she draws intelligently on her sources pointing to the gaps in their examinations and recognising that, perhaps inevitably, everyone's inner life is, finally, fated to remain a mystery.
Sydney Morning Herald
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Two new books delve into the 20th century's wittiest women
Kaplan's lavishly illustrated book would certainly catch the eye on anyone's coffee-table (although the captioning of the pictures is eye-rollingly literal and sometimes just plain wrong). But much of her commentary about Ephron reads like marketing hype. 'Think of her as the fairy godmother of modern-day rom-coms,' she urges. 'After years of a genre lying in wait, she waved her magic wand and penned dazzling scripts, equivalent to charming ball gowns for women who wouldn't take any shit.' And her afterword – in which she confesses that 'Nora's trio of groundbreaking genre films had shaped (her) core beliefs of finding true romance' – is simply embarrassing. And it's 'Nora' throughout, even though she never knew her. She's alert to the primary focus of Ephron's work: 'Each project focuses on women who were three-dimensional and who had something to prove – either to themselves or to the world at large.' She also attends to her public persona – her humour, her fashion sense, her love affair with food – and to how her mantra that 'everything is copy' fuelled her work, especially her 1983 novel, Heartburn, a thinly disguised account of the collapse of her marriage to famed Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein. But she never looks far beyond the surface, relying far too heavily on others' observations or assessments and coming up with few insights of her own. Jacob Bernstein's 2015 documentary about his mother, Everything Is Copy, is much more illuminating. Only in the book's final chapter, made up of interviews with some of those who worked with Ephron on her films, does Kaplan seem on more solid ground. By way of contrast, British academic Gail Crowther's fluently written book about Parker is much more revealing, attentive to detail and interested in what might lie beneath the surface. She easily dispenses with the most dominant myth regarding Parker: that she was a bouncy, carefree soul, tossing witticisms across the famous Round Table with her illustrious peers in the literary world (among them Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Sherwood and Donald Ogden Stewart) at New York's Algonquin Hotel during the 1920s, before heading off to Hollywood where real money beckoned. Her account instead fixes on the collision between two early 20th-century phenomena, Parker and Hollywood, neither nice to be around, despite the surface glitter attached to both. Like Crowther's 2021 book, Three-Martin Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton, her portrait of Parker ponders what went wrong, what made this professionally successful woman so mean, why she seemed to be forever sabotaging herself, why she repeatedly attempted suicide, why she suffered such a sad, lonely death. Intrigued, compassionate and affectionate at the same time as she keeps her distance, Crowther hones in on Parker's 'mix of helplessness and viciousness' as she situates her biography in the social circumstances of the time. Significant events swirl in the background: the 'Roaring '20s', the Great Depression, the imposition of the Hays Code to counter Hollywood's perceived debauchery, the general oppression of women in the social hierarchy, the rise of the 'Red Threat' and the establishment of HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Commission) to deal with it. Meanwhile, in the foreground, her Parker is a restless figure, struggling to make her way in a world that has no serious interest in anything she has to offer aside from her reputation, suffering the consequences of her alcoholism, dealing with the torture of miscarriages and failed relationships, discovering a political cause and finding herself blacklisted. Loading Curiously, Crowther largely sidesteps the possibility that traces of Parker's personality might be found in her work, whether on the page or the screen. But otherwise thorough in her research, she draws intelligently on her sources pointing to the gaps in their examinations and recognising that, perhaps inevitably, everyone's inner life is, finally, fated to remain a mystery.
