http://www.thepunch.com.au/author-bios/matthew-clayfield/ Born and raised in Mount Gambier, South Australia, Matthew attended film school on Queensland’s Gold Coast, bummed around for two years in Melbourne, and currently lives in Sydney where he writes news and self-deprecating columns for The Australian. Before he joined the paper in June 2008, his writing appeared in a number of online and print publications, and his films have played at various local and international film festivals. His most recent screenplay was produced in Canada in January 2009. He would like to work as a war correspondent and is currently writing a television series, suggesting that he’s probably suffering from an undiagnosed case of split-personality disorder. When he is not busy being tired and run-down, Matthew likes complaining about how busy, tired and run-down he is. He dislikes writing about himself in the third person. en Copyright 2012 The Punch penberthyd@newsltd.com.au penberthyd@newsltd.com.au Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:00:46 +0000 Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:00:46 +0000 Politics, opinion, world news, sports news, latest news, views, Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Nathan Rees, Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Garrett, Barnaby Joyce, Australian, federal politics, opinion polls, election, The Punch, thepunch, punch ExpressionEngine 1.6.7 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 15 http://www.thepunch.com.au/images/punch-logo-rss.png http://www.thepunch.com.au/ 144 70 Politics, political opinion, world news, sports news and the latest news and views updated live, daily on The Punch - Australia's best conversation. Search The Punch keywords http://www.thepunch.com.au/search/ http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/postcard-from-san-francisco-cocktails-and-suicide-spots/ Matthew Clayfield is a freelance journalist, critic and screenwriter travelling through the US and Mexico. He is filing weekly postcards for The Punch. I am writing this postcard, my first dispatch as a freelance travel writer, from a bar in San Francisco. Arguably, this is the greatest workplace in the world for an alcoholic typist like myself: the gin is cold, the pianist’s songs are old, and the tips are necessarily low. The San Francisco Chronicler’s Charles McCabe, who died in 1983, was once asked:” If San Francisco is such a great place to live, “why does it have the nation’s highest rates of alcoholism and suicide?” McCabe responded almost instantaneously: “Why, for the simple reason it’s the finest place on earth to drink yourself to death.” It’s also the finest place on earth to throw yourself into the ocean, as cinephiles everywhere are only too aware. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Kim Novak famously throws herself into San Francisco Bay underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, only to be rescued moments later by Jimmy Stewart, who suffers from the film’s titular affliction. Vertigo contains a number of Hitchcock’s most famous scenes, not to mention some of cinema’s, but this one more than any other has always had an indelible effect on me. For many people’s money, Vertigo is the quintessential San Francisco film. For mine, Novak’s leap into the bay is the quintessential San Francisco scene. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Matthew Clayfield) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/postcard-from-san-francisco-cocktails-and-suicide-spots/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/postcard-from-san-francisco-cocktails-and-suicide-spots/#item3304 Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:45:33 +0000 Matthew Clayfield | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/interview-christopher-hitchens/ There is a tendency, in profiles of Christopher Hitchens, for the bestselling atheist and militant author to be defined solely in relation to his high-profile targets and the high-velocity force at which he hits them. Very rarely is it elucidated anywhere – except, of course, by Hitchens himself –  precisely why he has gone after such perennial favourites of the general populace as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and Bill Clinton. That he took exception to the first’s acceptance of money from the Haitian dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the second’s support for thermonuclear testing in India, and the third’s opportunistic decision to authorise the execution of a mentally retarded death row inmate in the middle of the 1992 Presidential election campaign, well, none of this ever really gets a look-in. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Matthew Clayfield) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/interview-christopher-hitchens/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/interview-christopher-hitchens/#item1386 Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:29:04 +0000 Matthew Clayfield | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/shed-kilos-and-get-bitchin-abs-with-existential-prose/ It has become somewhat fashionable of late to out oneself as a bit of a reader. A self-confessed bookworm. A well-read head, as it were. The trend, of course, was started by this site’s resident well red-head, complete with that strangely-situated hyphen of hers, and it is indeed her shining example that has compelled me to write this piece. In her first column for this website, and in more or less each of her columns since, Ms Sales has – I’m sure you will have noticed – been detailing her personal history as a reader: her obsessive love of word puzzles; her discovery of camaraderie and community at a writer’s festival; and the origin of her love reading, Enid Blyton’s The Enchanted Wood, as well as the many tributaries that have fed into that love ever since. For my money, though, her best piece remains the one she wrote, somewhat earlier on, about being interrupted when very obviously engaged with a book. “The final step,” she wrote in that piece, “is to explode.” feedback@thepunch.com.au (Matthew Clayfield) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/shed-kilos-and-get-bitchin-abs-with-existential-prose/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/shed-kilos-and-get-bitchin-abs-with-existential-prose/#item1332 Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:35:27 +0000 Matthew Clayfield | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/animal-death-toll-soars-at-groovy-film-festival/ I have never seen as many dead animals on screen as I have in the past two weeks. From grasshoppers roasted over an open flame in to kangaroos mercilessly slaughtered in the night, I have been witness to a macabre cinematic menagerie of dead and dying fauna. The Sydney Film Festival ended on the weekend, over for another year. And while there may not have been a programming strand dedicated to films with dead animals in them, the sheer number of those that did will remain with me as one of the most striking and unexpected things about those twelve days. Obviously, it is the sort of observation that can only be made when one has attended a lot of films at the festival, an observation supported, as it is, by sheer weight of numbers. When more than one third of over forty-five features contains either a dead or dying animal, one begins to take notice of the trend. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Matthew Clayfield) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/animal-death-toll-soars-at-groovy-film-festival/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/animal-death-toll-soars-at-groovy-film-festival/#item358 Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:30:13 +0000 Matthew Clayfield | Author bios | The Punch