It's Hip When You Slip

When I was a kid, a friend of mine had a book called Minerva the Dragon - it could have been Minerva the Dinosaur, I don't recall exactly - and he enjoyed it so much that he never finished it. He didn't want it to end. He said that he only wanted to read the last chapter on his deathbed. I wonder if kids still talk about literature and deathbeds and books so fantastic that they don't want to finish them.

Not that Minerva was literature. It was a pretty trashy kids book, from what I remember, but it must have been pretty terrific, too. That's John Barth's advice to writers - you can make it erudite, or witty, or self-referential or verbose, but first of all: make it terrific.

And I don't even know if my friend remembers the book. I have a vague memory of bringing it up once, not too long ago, and of him being as incredulous as I about this 11-year-old who made the decision to not allow a conclusion to be forced on one of the best experiences he'd had. Surely that same impulse is what makes the what-might-have-been more charged than the what-ended-up-happening. The romantic lure of unrequited love. The glamour of an unsolved murder. The pause occasioned by a did-that-happen-the-way-I-remember.

On the weekend I was talking to another friend and we chatted about a dream I'd had once, and had told him about. In this dream, I was had an itch in my eye or was crying or was pulling out a contact lens - whatever - but what happened when I felt around my eye was strange. I felt something solid there, and pulled out a dry, crumbling autumn leaf. And pulling one loosed more. And soon I was pulling handfuls of autumn leaves from my eyes.

When my friend mentioned this dream maybe, ah, seven or eight years ago, I had no recollection of it. It was my dream but I'd forgotten about it and he'd remembered. He'd remembered it because the image of someone dragging a stream of burnt-orange leaves from their eye sockets was so dramatic (he's an actor, but that's not what I mean by dramatic).

Ever since he told me my dream, I've remembered it, too. That image is so striking that I had the same experience he must have had when I first told it to him. But I don't remember the dream itself, just his retelling of my telling of it.

He also remembers another dream I had, where I was torn apart by feral children who feasted on my limbs. I do actually recall that fairly vivid dream, along with the peculiar feeling of calm and acceptance I felt when I realised that my death would at least provide nutrition to some underprivileged kids. True fact.

I guess we sometimes remember other people's dreams more vividly than they do. After all, most dreams serve a point, and when they've done their work we move on and let them go. But another person's dreams, being not our own, can open up a window onto all those subliminated fears and desires that gave them birth. Then again, there can be nothing more boring than listening to someone else's dreams, too.

Meet Mingering Mike, if you haven't already.

"Between 1968 and 1977 Mingering Mike recorded over fifty albums, managed thirty-five of his own record labels, and produced, directed and starred in nine of his own motion pictures. In 1972 alone he released fifteen LPs and over twenty singles, and his traveling revue played for sold out crowds the world over."

Except for the fact that Mike didn't exist - or, not in a strict sense. Mike was a lonely teen who dreamed of being a famous soul singer and created a huge number of records under his imagined persona. The albums were made of cardboard, with labels and grooves drawn on, in full colour sleeves and featuring details of all aspects of production.

Take Mingering Mike's official soundtrack to the movie "Hot Rodd" (1973).

MINGERING MIKE - OST TO THE MOVIE "HOT RODD"
Ramit Records #110974 (1973)

Hot Rodd (Takes Revenge)

Baby Look My Way (Love Scene)

Rumble In The Streets

It’s Hip When You Slip

Welcome To Our Party

Something In Green

Epitah (Before & After)

Man’s Only Hope (Power)

It’s A Boom

Man’s Only Dream

Talkin’ About Freedom

Suddenly A Message

Train Ride (Urgent)

Hot Rodd’s End

It opens with what's obviously the theme tune: "Hot Rodd (Takes Revenge)". Those brackets. What do they mean? "Mike's" imitation of the blaxploitation soundtrack style is already terrific, in Barth's sense. He follows up with the tantalising "Baby Look My Way (Love Scene)". Later, it's tracks like "It’s A Boom", "Suddenly A Message" and the twinned "Man’s Only Hope (Power)" and "Man's Only Dream" that flesh out another person's, well, dreams. Even if these dreams only seem so significant to me, who didn't dream them.

Maybe it's the scope. Along with Mingering Mike, various other personae made up his bedroom-doodling-recording-studio world - Rambling Ralph, Joseph War, The Big D and more. This kid had big dreams, the kind of dreams made for breaking. He wrote more than four thousand songs, and sent off some to be recorded - along with the small fee requested - before realising that the ads he was responding to were money-making scams.

As part of the Increase Your Uncertainty exhibition at ACCA, there are a series of forums which take place regularly and have been developed by the wonderful duo A Constructed World (the brains behind the same exhibition). This Sunday's 3pm forum is on Failure and I was asked to be a part of it since failure, if not my middle name, is at least something I'm fascinated by. If the notion of failure, the problems of success, the perhaps illusory distinction between the two, the social function of that distinction, the artistic challenges to that function, the dangers of such challenges and the messy edges of all of these things are of any interest, drop by and add your thoughts.

If you don't make it, though, that's ok too.

Agenda

LIFE
The last few weeks have been all


and

and

and

and


and thirty-something comedy shows and theatre and other things, all in surprising combinations I won't detail here.

It's been a very very busy year for me and so I haven't really written much round these parts, about which I do not feel bad at all since I owe you nothing, as Bros sang so memorably many moons ago. Apparently Bros also informed an unsuspecting public that "you've read Karl Marx/and you've taught yourself to dance/You're the best by far": quite a strange coupla lyrics, to me.

Anyway, I've read a little Marx and I've taught myself to dance so I feel qualified, if not compelled, to offering the following morsels to Melbourne readers interested in beefing up their aesthetic guns.

DANCE
Merce Cunningham is coming to Melbourne for the Melb. Arts Festival. Awesome. But not everyone (and not every festival goer, even) really gets contemporary dance. I just love what this person has done. Watch it. But don't skip ahead, just watch it. The only letdown is the apologetic text insertions. Totally unnecessary.


ART
Last weekend I went to the closing of the David Shrigley exhibition because I heard they were going to give away all of the works. They were, for a donation, and I gave everything I had on me.

So for about $1.85 I scored a work by one of my favourite artists.

The exhibition was at Kings ARI - the ARI stands for Artist Run Initiative. ARIs are pretty sweet, as they're run by artists for, well, anyone really. If you're free, there's a bus doing a tour of some of the non-CBD ARIs of Melbourne this Saturday (tomorrow) - call 9419 0931 if you want in. Don't know, maybe it's too late.

There's also a stencil fest going on at the moment in Melbourne. The City of Yarra gave $4,000 to the project, even though most councils also consider street art with a wary eye. Still, I like that there are increasing numbers of spaces where art is encouraged, or tolerated, or turned a blind eye to - the extreme opposite (or is it?) might be Brazil's Sao Paolo, which has banned billboard advertising.

Nice, haunting images here.




MUSIC
I guess too many people had complained about ugly advertising. I'm not one to encourage a culture of complaint (lord, what a horrible term, sorry) but I like the Complaints Choirs which are popping up around the world.



Strangers gathering to are their grievances in harmony, in public. That's the Helsinki Complaints Choir, above. My fave is "Our ancestors could have picked a sunnier place to be".

From Melbourne:

"my complaints are trying to buy a tin of tuna, how many varieties and sizes do we need and when will we stop being homophobic?"

"my housemate’s boyfriend’s eyes are too close together"

"Myspace pages hurt my eyes"

"Why is nudity demonised?"

"Yes I’m a ‘pianist’ and no that isn’t funny"

"I’ve wasted my life"

The first Complaints Choir in the Southern Hemisphere will perform outside ACCA on Sunday June 3 as part of A Constructed World's "Increase Your Uncertainty". More on their time there later (especially a forum on failure that I'm particularly interested in).

Ignore this Posting

What with it nearly being the middle of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and what with me managing to bend the Space/Time Continuum (hint: coffee) in order to see not only every show physically possible but also some with clashing timetables, some separated by vast distances and even some not technically in existence yet, it only makes sense that I'd use this important and user-friendly Web 2.0 online outlet for critical expression and link pasting to offer you, the reader, my hints and tips and dire finger-waggling warnings regarding shows to see for fun and profit. I picture you as a querulous circle of young Dickensian chimney sweeps, eyes and ears eagerly (if metaphorically) upturned in the faint hope of a morsel of comedic recommendation which may be dropped your way. For this reason, I will not offer such recommendations here, for it will only encourage you. Get a job.

I will write some reviews some time soon though, once I manage to be both awake, coherent and not actually in a comedy show.

For now though the Comedy Fest seems the perfect time to write about something totally different: modern art.

With nary a shadow of foreshadowing, David Shrigley is coming to town for an exhibition. Shrigley is one of my favourite artists, especially his hand-drawn doodles or text-based scribblings. He's very very funny, and very very original. Faux-naive drawing is pretty popular these days, but it takes a sharp mind to make the stuff memorable. I think his stuff is memorable. He also does film, painting, photography, spoken word and more.

Go see him at Kings ARI Gallery (1/171 King St, Melbourne) from Saturday.

In New York recently, street art has been the target of a vandal/artist being dubbed The Splasher. This is a great story: well-known, highly praised graffiti is being defaced, and people are debating whether vandalising what are essentially works of vandalism (though aesthetically accomplished ones) can itself be aesthetically defensible. It's fascinating.

See some examples of Splasher's work here and here, and read more about the case here.

Also: Kurt Vonnegut died this morning. Good writer.

"Oh Boy! Look at that Baby with the Schoolgirl Complexion!"

Every year around this time I have to gird my nethers with thick absorbent towelling in case I have an accident. Just thinking about what tomorrow brings is enough to cause me to soil myself so I'm forced to distract myself focusing intently on other distraction, which I've decided to share with you, imaginary friends. Scouring the internet for attention-grabbing oddities, at least, is enough to prevent me from thinking about that wonderful several weeks that kicks off tomorrow, The Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Urrgh, there I go!

Everyone who counts knows that I love the Eurovision Song Contest, more for what it represents than anything else. This year's hot contender is the totally awful DJ Bobo, whose Vampires Are Alive is drawing controversy and not just from people who have watched the video with the same expression you have when you realise what's been festering under the plastic bag in the kitchen bin.



In his homeland of Switzerland, Bobo has been criticised for promoting "satanism and the occult" with the imagery and lyrics of the video. 50,000 people signed a petition to that effect, though it's unclear how many were just using it to get the guy off-air. Would you want him representing your country? It's obvious Bobo is just trying to ride the coat-tails of last year's winners LORDI from Finland. But would it blow your mind if I mentioned that Bobo is closer to "Lordi" than you realise? That he is actually the Artist Formerly Known as Jordy?

He's not. But he's certainly proof that evil walks amongst us (when we're walking around Switzerland, at least).

Here's a fantastic and completely inexplicable video I blatantly stole from Monkeys for Helping.

I really don't know what to add except that it might well be the best thing ever put on YouTube except for everything else that's rad.

What really gets me isn't the bizarre framing narrative, the "it was all a queer dream" ending or the incredibly great 70s camp of the slow-mo retro robo dance-man's fringed cowboy pants.

It's that as I was watching this in stunned awe, I couldn't help but be taken back to yesterday, when I watched someone dressed almost identically belt out a late 70s pop tune on an old TV show. It would be worth posting on its own, but the fact that it's TV's McGuyver in those high white pants and sailor-style red chesty tee makes it all the better.



Tell me he doesn't open the clip with an expression of sudden realisation as to what he's wearing. Tell me it doesn't get better when we actually get to see what he's wearing. Tell me the last second's revelation of an awesome white wristband doesn't seal the deal. And then tell me I haven't based my hairstyle on some half-remembered infantile viewing of this clip which permanently imprinted on my brain.

And finally, to wash all of this down, a film starring dogs dressed as people. If the bit where they're assessing the sweet looks of the leading ladies doesn't have you laughing like an old cur, there's something wrong wit' ya. Oh, and the leading lady they do choose sure is a real swell dame, too.



Now I'm off to see everything in the Festival and maybe occasionally writing about it.

That's my day made.

Everyone knows that giant robots are way up there in the list of humankind's greatest aesthetic achievements (along with kitsch animal paintings, imaginary maps and Religious anti-self-abuse literature) so it's great to see Michael Jackson supplementing his already impressive contribution to Western culture with his latest enterprise.

"Michael Jackson is in discussions about creating a 50-foot robotic replica of himself to roam the Las Vegas desert, according to reports.

The pop legend is currently understood to be living in the city, as he considers making a comeback after 2004's turbulent child sex case.

It has now been claimed that his plans include an elaborate show in Vegas, which would feature the giant Jacko striding around the desert, firing laser beams.

If built, the metal monster would apparently be visible to aircraft as they come in to land in the casino capital.
It is the centerpiece of an elaborate Jackson-inspired show in Vegas, according to Andre Van Pier, the robot's designer.

Luckman Van Pier, his partner at the company behind the proposal, claims blueprints have been drawn up for the show and seen by the star.

"Michael's looked at the sketches and likes them," he told the New York Daily News.

On the subject of the robot, he continued: "It would be in the desert sands. Laser beams would shoot out of it so it would be the first thing people flying in would see."

More at:

http://music.yahoo.com/read/news/41620594

http://www.nme.com/news/michael-jackson/27345

Powered by Jesus Juice.

Holy crap

"RELIGION!"

The End Times are upon us, my children. Well, maybe not, but it's been quite the theological fortnight for me.

A few weekends back I had a much belated co-birthday party with a cult theme, which was visited by some angels and demons and non-denominational unearthly figures. Fun stuff. I call this guy Pig Jeebus and I'm pretty sure he's what the future of the human race will look like once we sort out all this human-pig cross-cloning business which is surely what's keeping the eggheads from attending to the global warming stuff.

Then on Friday night I ended up at a bar which might well be one of Dante's circles of Hell. At one point I was wandering around a room that looked like Heironymous Bosch had eaten the palace at Versailles and then upchucked all over Tony Montana's Miami mansion, when I turned to a friend and said "this is horrible". He immediately replied "I was just thinking 'horrific'". It was the kind of place you'd see in an 80s straight-to-video flick starring Mickey Rourke in which his investigation of a mysterious and big-haired femme fatale takes him deep into a labyrinth of passion and murder. The title would be some combination of the words "obsession", "naked", "deadly" and "hidden" and he'd end up at this club that masks a cult of demon-worshippers who perform unspeakable rituals in the basement. The club would be supposed to come across as all decadent and evilly lavish, but you'd be thinking "No, that's Mickey Rourke, and like him it just looks tasteless and cheap."

So that's where I ended up on Friday. If you want to know what circle of Hell you belong in, go here.

Saturday over lunch I was somehow talking about Satanism with someone, who was idly pointing out that it rests on pretty solid and non-baby-sacrifice requiring philosophical principles. But we agreed that it's probably not worth pursuing too seriously. He pointed out that even if it is sound in a theoretical way, you might be better off just not taking the risk. If you turn out to be wrong, well, you've really blown your chances. I just pointed out that it's really, really uncool to tell people you're a Satanist.

Yesterday I opened the newspaper to find a story on Pastafarianism, which struck me immediatley since I'd been explaining it to someone on Friday. That was eerie. I hadn't thought about the Flying Spaghetti Monster in years, and here is was, twice in less than a week.

But all of this is nothing compared to the strangeness of the new Christian web revolution, which seems aimed at taking absolutely everything you can find on the internet and God-ifying it.

Conservapedia is great. Some people noted that wikipedia was really a godless hive of anti-Christian slander, and was in fact "six times more liberal than the American public". Conservapedia replaces wikipedia's pagan bias with the true voice of the Lord, so you'll find articles explaining how kangaroos made it from Noah's Ark to Australia. They probably got here on rafts made of matted vegetation, apparently.

And since YouTube is all wicked teens miming to The Rapture and people videoing their warcraft battles, it's no wonder that some good soul came up with GodTube, which allows people to spread the word of the lord by uploading nice religious videos. It's awesome.

Here's someone explaining how proof of God's existence can be found in the humble banana, though you could very easily use his explanation to support something else.

And here's someone's take on the classic, if not quite Jesus-positive song "Baby Got Back", now changed to "Baby Got Book" (or "Baby Got Bible" - it's not entirely clear.)

Ladies? “Yeah!” Ladies? “Yeah!” Do you want to save people from Hades? “Yeah!”

I think I'm converted.

Holiday Hippo or Aesthetic Automaton?

What, what!? Yeah, I know, I know. I haven't been posting much, but in the spirit of my last contribution here's another play-off.

There's a point to all of these, by the way.

Sleep or Skate?

As I will be away from my computer most of this week, I thought I'd post the following videos before I forget. They're pretty much the best things in existence right now (subject to council approval) so I didn't want them to go the way of all things internet, ie into the gaping maw of forgetfulness, which looks remarkably like the gaping maw of a hungry hungry hippo, but with less spite.

Baby Sloth or Skating Robot? Must we take sides?





YOU BE THE JUDGE (and wield your gavel judiciously).

Party Like It's 1929

If I was ever going to lie about my age, I'd be saying I was in my 80s just so I could be associated with the bitchingest decade ever: the 1920s. If they ever have the 1920s again, I'm so first in line.

"Take a number, bub."

The 20s pretty much gave and gave and gave. What other decade came up with flappers, dancing on the wings of biplanes, going out to find some hooch without it suggesting something sleazy, really good cocktails, and much more. The women all spewed acerbic witticisms in vaguely New England accents while careening around the countryside in white-walled cadillacs with running boards, and the men all wore tuxedoes (even to bed!) and said "spiffo" a lot. There was surrealism and futurism and existentialism and some very nice poetry but really, that was just window-dressing. When the 1920s came along, they essentially just hung out a big sign saying "HEY LETS PARTY it'll be div" and let things rip from there on in.

"Let yourself out, toots, I'm too stinko to get me up."

They called it the Roaring Twenties. Can you imagine what a decade would have to do to be called "Roaring" these days? Think about it, the Roaring Noughties. It sounds like an old timey euphemism for genital inflammation. That said, if any burlesque troupes want to take on the name The Roaring Noughties, it's yours.


But one thing I've just realised is where the 20s let us down. Because looking at old footage like this:



I've come to understand that THE CHARLESTON IS THE DUMBEST DANCE EVER. Now that clip starts off with both a drunk-looking flapper and some liveried dancing midget, which should be a sure sign of gold. But where did the 20s go wrong? Was it all that cheap hooch and smoking cigars in the bathtub and somesuch that addled people's brains?

There's some great dancing in here, but when you get to the point where the fur-coated women are attempting to charleston across the street, I'm sure you'll agree with me.




And that's not to mention the bastard younger sibling dance move, Monkey Knees.




Wherein, believe it or not, it actually appears as if one is swapping one's knees. The drollery. And while normally a solitary vice, the above image suggests multi-party monkey knees, though this may have just been a cunning way to exchange drugs or phone numbers or something.


But what also strikes me is the similarity between the robotic mindlessness of the charleston and that moronic-yet-hypnotic French (or Belgian) Jump I posted a little while back. The following clip illustrates it well, and is one of the few good demonstrations of the Charleston I've been able to find.



Maybe if more Charleston dancers had been as fly as these guys, and had been doing it to some old Daft Punk track, well, things would have turned out a little different (IE NO WAR AND/OR PROHIBITION?)

A Big Bag of wtf

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but sometimes I can't even think of the questions, either. Here's a case in point: unless the question is "Why has someone recreated the final battle scene from Star Wars using... lots of hands?" all I can say is:

"Dude, wtf?"

Here's what George Lucas was doing all those years between Return of the Jedi and that other one with the kid with the bowl haircut.

I've never been a fan of Jethro Tull, with their fey Celtic melodies and oh-so-quirky prog rock imagery. Since they were proudly anti-drug, it always seemed a bit lame that they ran off the back of psychedelic videos that just didn't quite cut it. Kind of like when you're a little kid, and you pretend to be drunk by imitating drunk people you've seen in movies and on TV. But lord, you don't base your career around it.

Still, the following video has got to be one of the stranger ones of the period, and I think it might be that drugs or no, frontman Ian Anderson was, actually, quite insane.

But while the Tull just could have been losers, I'd stop short of calling them complete morons.

On the other hand, I recently received an email with the subject line "A bunch of idiots review 1984," a line I instantly fell in love with and which I decided to title my autobiography.

Being exactly what it sounds like, it's some chap's (CAN WE REALLY KNOW ON THE INTERNET?) collection of great reviews of Orwell's 1984 as taken from amazon.com.

It contains such gems as:

"Let's try to be a little more optomistic, and work on a happier ending, shall we?"

"Thus, it doesn't make any sense to think that a novel like this one is really any better than say, Michael Crichton or Stephen King."

"This book isn't as good as Harry Potter in MY opinion, and no one can refute me. "

"first of all its NOTHING like the future is probly going to turn out."

"Maybe if you live in a country that's a monarchy, this book's worth reading, but this is *America*, ok? The whole reason we live in a democracy is so that we the people don't have to worry about things like this. "

"please george do us all a faver and stop writing books."

"It's 2000. 1984 was a bad movie with Michael J. Fox. "

"WE MAKN WITH THE BOOK LURNIN"

Perchance, to Dance.

People often ask me how to fix up their rubbish lives and the world and stuff. At least, a whole series of strangers decided to do that last Friday night in a very weird hour or two at a bar. It turned out that my oracle/life coach skills are at a much higher level than I realised, as every one of these people walked away happy and warmed in their hearts as if little cosy hearths had been stoked there (metaphorically - never try lighting an actual fire in your chest cavity).

I tend not to give advice so this was an exceptional night, but I think that one piece of advice that can never go astray is pretty clear here - you can never really go wrong dancing. I mean, I suppose you can go wrong dancing in lots of ways, but it's never going to deplete our dwindling water supplies or kill a whale or contribute to global warming in a significant way.

My good friend Mark knows me well enough to have emailed me the following link today:

How to do the Robot. As the title suggests, it's a sequence of instructional videos on robot dancing. My favourite part is the fact that the guy doing it seems neither particularly exceptional at the robot nor particularly interested in it. It's as if he wants to be excited, but he'd really just rather be chilling on the couch with a beer and his Wii.

This kid really knows his robot, though; wait until the weedy dude in the orange skivvy shows up, as he actually contributes several original moves to the form. The robot pirouette is at a very high degree of difficulty.

Someone really needs to get over to Europe and work out why so many ravers have become possessed by jumpstyle (this horrible move that becomes quite hypnotic when performed in unison by dozens of the freaks - which is exactly what happens).

Can't stand the music, or the outfits, or the very idea, but how on earth in this day and age can grown people become obsessed with a "move" a la the macarena or something? It disturbs, even moreso since there seems to be nothing written about it anywhere, only youtube videos, so I can't even trace the phenomenon.

The Belgian Jump is even weirder. What's going on with these freakin' kids? It's like one starts doing it and the others get infected with this crazy epileptic move and can't help all rushing out to join in.

In the Nederlands it's quite horrible, taking over shopping malls. Here's a TV spot on it:

But at least it has a strong historical pedigree.

We apologise for the interuption

We're on an extended hiatus here at Born Dancin' Enterprises, with the potential never to come back to this internet thing, since it seems such a 2006 kind of place. But just when you thought there was nothing left to it, something like this comes along, combining Dick Van Dyke dancing with Herbie Hancock Rockitt-ing. And if this guy wasn't born dancin', I don't know who was.



This is pretty much me all day, every day, including the black and white and the bit with the marionette-strings and the giant scissors. If like to imagine one day in the future, when Richard Wayne Van Dyke shuffles off this mortal coil, that he'll be mixing it up with a little Tamil electro-midget in the great dancehall in the sky. But I try not to imagine it too much, since it hurts my head.

Maximised

When I think back to the halcyon salad days which surrounded this site's first infant stumblings, I am often given occasion to grow misty-eyed as I feel the corners of my mouth curl skyward. You must remember that this was a time of perpetual summer and frequent canape and cocktail-including afternoons on the forelawns of various embassies, chancellor's abodes and presbyteries, the soft murmur of charming bon mots interrupted by the ringing of clear crystal glasses meeting for a brief communion and the occasional yelp of a lolly-limbed puppy scrabbling beneath the legs of a wrought-iron outdoor table. You will of course note that this was way back in 2005, when the internet was still in its fledgling state, barely more than a couple of wooden boxes connected by rough twine. How things have changed.

Way back when, I started this site in a half-hearted attempt to document my impressions of the Melbourne shows I'd caught and hadn't written about elsewhere, whether it be theatre, dance, the occasional art opening or film screening, whatever. Less reviews, than impressions. Nowadays we've reached the point where there are others far more committed and energetic and worth reading than I ever was, and you can tell the health of this burgeoning online theatre community by the fact that the last week or so has seen its very first stoush. Not exactly the sort of Wild West gunfight to have onlookers scrabbling a path through the sawdust to leap out windows in order to avoid the crossfire, but enough to generate some really interesting discussion, which certainly hasn't been resolved and hopefully, in a sense, never will be.

It all began when the very esteemed Theatre Notes published a short non-review of Theatre @ Risk's Requiem for the 20th Century, which wasn't exactly full of praise: "it seemed to me a mistake of disastrous proportions" isn't really something you'd want your work tarred with. This set off some interesting comments debating the duty of a critic. The show's director later emailed the writer and argued that it was hardly fair to make such comments about a show when, by the author's own admission, she'd left at interval. This sparked more commentary, which spread to other blogs, and also made me aware of a whole swag of new-ish theatre blogs covering Melbourne which I hadn't known about previously. Excellent, for that alone.

Anyway, as is probably obvious, I haven't really been reviewing much lately, mainly because I have been too busy but also because I figure you're all grown up now and no longer have the need to accost your sensorium with the critical equivalent of a drunk barfly trying to explain to you the show he thought he saw on the tube last night but could well be a product of his imagination and can I have one of those what are these my name'sh Born oh I already told you haha sob.

But I saw Requiem on Sunday, and I thought I'd weigh on the debate (which is probably now over, since the show is). It's worth noting before I start that in a sense, I'm not weighing in much at all, since the debate itself wasn't really about the show; it was about the duties of reviews, the rights of theatremakers, the expectations of audiences and those who read reviews, and so on. This could have been spurred on by any piece of writing.
Anyway, this isn't a corrective to Alison's original (non-)review. But as I commented there, I'm a little stumped as to how some people had such an extreme reaction. I can see how some would have felt it didn't work, or was too safe, or didn't succeed at what it was trying to do (not my reactions). But disastrous?

Huh?

The piece purports to offer a "theatrical tour through the last century"; it's more than two and a half hours spanning the first half of the 20th century, with a central plotline involving the doomed romance of a pair of lovers with uncountable cameos from historical personages flitting through their lives. It's historical melodrama on a ridiculously inflated scale.

One review compared it to the Monsterist movement in Britain - I disagree. I see it as fitting more with the literary form of Maximalism, or Encyclopaedic Narrative. I'm thinking of Thomas Pynchon - no accident since I'm making my way through his massive new novel - as well as various mammoth works by John Barthes, Gaddis, even back to Melville and Sterne. Maximalist works are long, jumbled, often overwritten, obese, crowded and messy; they usually cover great historical periods and overlap with the genre of historical metafiction, mingling fact and fiction and not really respecting any divide between the two. They often come across more as catalogues than narrative, listing events and personages without paying attention to the usual demands of plot and character; psychological depth is the first thing in the dustbin when attempting to achieve the breadth these works aspire to. Critics argue that a catalogue is hardly the stuff of great art, that taxonomy is all these things offer. But that's the point: they both acknowledge and question the human impulse to attempt to impose order and arrangement to the great carnival of human history, toppling the notion of 'progress', serving up a panoply of disconnected moments, characters of little to no lasting importance, "great" events flattened out as mere spectacle. How else to tackle the sublime and ludicrous project of attempting to summarise the 20th century?

The piece begins with clowning, a painful scene in which a Charlie Chaplin figure attempts to be rid of an abandoned baby he's found. I didn't like the scene at first, but later pondered what better way there might be to introduce not the period in question, but the idea of a tour through that period. Begin with farce. Of course. Just so we know what we're getting into.

I could go on. But I think it's apparent that my response to the show, owing as much as it does to other things I've been thinking of lately, is hardly going to be everybody else's. Which has sort of been the credos of this site: I've never tried to review a show as good or bad, as getting anything right or wrong. I sincerely believe that every production has its audience, and it's the reviewer's job to clue that audience in on the show while warning other audiences what they can expect. Sometimes that audience is limited to one or two people in a whole town of potentials; lordy knows, I've been to shows where the audience perhaps should have been limited to the writer and director. I'm saying 'reviewer' here, not 'critic'; different thing going on there. But when I've got my oversized ten-gallon reviewing hat on, I'd much rather say "I didn't get it" than "They didn't get it". And I'm more likely to try to work out what a show contained, rather than second-guessing what it lacked. But until next time...

Some Day

Nestled amidst the musty railway trunks, three-legged hatstands and grime-spackled bookcases of the Born Dancin' Office for Paranormal Investigations squats an old-fashioned rolltop desk devoted to research into mechanical oddities. Faded prints of steam-powered wheelchairs, eighteenth-century animatronics and automaton engineering butt dusties with giant Japanese robot technologies, furled parchments on Disney rides and a subscription to Tamagotchi Collector's Monthly. It's here you'll find a darkened pigeonhole containing all available information on one of the most successful robotic creations to emerge in recent years.

Dakota Fanning is a remarkable achievement, to all appearances a real life human child. It's only when she talks that one notices the gears and cam-shafts and flywheels which must be whirring away in there. Everyone knows that machines can't think, which is why she seems to have been equipped with a speaking mechanism produced by Hollywood media moguls, spouting flawless interview-speak with the confidence and lack of self-consciousness found only in the biggest of Tinseltown stars. She acts like an aging Katherine Hepburn in tween form. Maybe that's why the director of the new Charlotte's Web called her "the greatest working actor in the world" at the film's world premiere on Sunday. Certainly, it seemed that few, if any of the thousand-plus children in attendance were troubled by their little pint-sized Hollywood hero was a bunch of nuts and bolts. But I guess kids have always been able to identify with toys and dolls and puppets that way.

The film itself was pretty good, in an understated kind of way, but the afterparty was a scary ride into the unknown. Firstly: the buses. We were herded from the Regent that sunny afternoon into a squad of waiting buses, which felt more like school camp than anything else, kids clambering over the backs of seats, a gleeful ruckus of little 'uns who'd been sitting still for the last hour and a half and sure as hell weren't going to stay put any longer. Our coaches took us the the Collingwood Children's Farm, got up like Charlotte's Somerset County Fair, brass band, petting zoo and all.

Once there, the grownups (there were no 'adults' in this particular world) were freshened up with an endless supply of booze ferried out from lord-knows what thicket while kids mainlined bags of cotton candy, hulking golden donuts with a visible nimbus of saccharine glazing and bottomless red-cordial-infused ice buckets. Tipsy parents and sugar-soaked kiddies? Recipe. For. Chaos.

I'd had a bet how long it would take before we saw our first tantrum, and I was surprised that it took a good hour or two. Perhaps it was all the pony rides and miniature ferris wheels and carousels and fully operating lifesize Dakota Fanning which provided distractions for that time. Certainly, the animal nursery was popular, with different stalls featuring animal actors portraying the various characters in the film.

Here's Bitsy the cow, looking a little more formidable in real life.

Less successful was the lair of Templeton, the rat.

Note: if you look closely, you'll realise that THIS IS NOT A REAL RAT. Also, I'm pretty sure I saw a kid walking off across the field holding this stuffed rat later in the day.

I had a moment of perspective-sharpening after leaving the nursery to see two groups formed around separate objects of interest. I went to the smaller group, which pretty much consisted of me and about two other people all looking adoringly at this little fella, our Wilbur for the day. He's sleeping here, which, at four weeks old, is understandable.

A much bigger group was ooh-ing and aah-ing over the day's real Prize Pig, Young Miss Fanning.

I kind of found it sad that Dakota was getting so much attention because she was a) famous and b) could autograph things for people, when nobody particularly cared to appreciate the beautiful little Wilbur, who is a far more astonishing and heart-stirring creation than anything Hollywood could produce. Then again, it was Charlotte's writer E.B. White who'd always proposed that same old notion:

If you let nature play itself, it'll entertain you for the rest of your life.

Over the course of the day, I noticed that Dakota was just playing herself too, and that despite her flawless ability to emulate exactly what we imagine a celebrity to be, she's still just a 12 year-old kid having a great time. Maybe she's got a bit too much energy and enthusiasm, but with the sugar flowing on Sunday that could have been any kid there. And all of them, from the tottering toddlers to the tantrum-tossers, and even the beaming parents and coolsie blow-ins, were all pretty entertaining as themselves. Quite the cast, and no CGI effects needed. Sunny times.

Magazine or Book or Magazine

First edition goes out tomorrow. Isn't it gorgeous? Follow its progress along with the other 51 copies at bookmagazine.blogspot.com. I won't mention it again here though, where other, more pressing issues of national emergency take precedence.

PITCHING IDEAS 2

Continuing on from yesterday's post, which you may read if you care for continuity, or skip if you are a rebel thought nomad, trim sails to the wind.

What I like about Hoegsberg's Thought Project is its unfinished nature, which is perhaps due to its quasi-collaborative method. It takes as its subject "thought", but doesn't present a rounded set of conclusions or deductions or implications: it focuses on thought (and ideas and even art) as process, not product. And I think I'm interested in the process of thought, as made evident in the narratives accompanying each photograph. They trace routes of thinking, sometimes doubling back, sometimes leaping across a chasm to end up somewhere different, but never sitting still, since I suppose that's impossible. Maybe thought is a kind of movement (a dance?) and too often we do the movement in private, attempting wherever possible to show the world only the finished pose, the final figure rather than the clumsy routine we've been through to arrive there.

Gillian Wearing's art frequently centres on the line between ordinary people's inner worlds and the faces they present to the public. I first saw her stuff a few months back at The Greatest Gallery In The World and was immediately impressed. It was in the same room as some shots by another favourite, Cindy Sherman, so I was double-chuffed. And Wearing's series of photographs which feature herself, um, wearing almost perfectly realised latex masks of other people is very Sherman-esque.


The photo sequence in question, though is part of the series "Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say". Wearing asked passersby to write a thought on a piece of paper, which they then held up as she took their photograph, and some of the results are fantastic exercises which question our expectations and social stereotypes.

Other works in the Wearing exhibition currently on at ACCA include a confronting and touching series of photographs of a working-class prostitute with various of her regular clients, each accompanied by a handwritten (and often barely legible) letter by the respective client, explaining his feelings about her. The notes range from the heart-rending (the old man who declares that he loves her and wishes she wouldn't sell herself for the price of a beer) to the shocking (the angry soul who seems worried that she calls him a dud in the sack, and soons begins a horrible diatribe against her).

Something about the method here prevents the series from simply turning into another exercise in voyeurism, in prurient gasping "look how they live!" sensationalism. I think it's the way the subjects are given the opportunity to express themselves, without editorial intervention from Wearing, though as the framer she does have a lot of involvement in that sense, of course. And it's very interesting (and I'd venture to say quite deliberate) that the woman in question doesn't get the chance to respond to these writings, or express herself. We don't get to know her at all. Do we get to know the men any better?

I typed in this web address today and came across a very sweetly sad little site - a blog from the US covering two and a half years of a relationship (between 'Jennifer' and 'Alan'). It was set up so that they could write how they really felt to one another, though reading it, I got the feeling that they'd be pretty open in real life too. Who knows. But charting the course of their ups and downs, the blog makes for fascinating reading, especially if you just click on random dates. There are times when they seem wildly, passionately in love, but other entries hint of a cooling off from one party or another, or a feeling that something is being held back, or that something is being covered over.

The saddest thing is the way it ends on Sunday July 25, 2004. Jennifer is the last to post, and her final line comes from nowhere: "i feel so sad and forlorn! where are you when i need you?!"

And that's all she wrote.

Unfinished, peripatetic, ideas-based, half-baked, processive, meandering: something seems to link all of these things, but I'm not sure whether one adjective will really nail it. And of course it's a family resemblance, not a single feature.

But it's hard enough finding work that I like, so I thought I'd start one myself, or at least throw out a net and see what it brings in. So here's a little pointer to a project I'm starting which will be a magazine called Book, or perhaps a book called Magazine.

There will be 52 copies. Each week, I'll post a copy of a blank book (each book will be different) to somebody, who will contribute whatever they like to it. Writing, obviously, and drawing and painting and music and cut-outs and pasted objects and origami and coffee stains and pieces torn out and lamination and essays and plagiarism and photographs and stencils and so on, it'll all be welcome. Every edition will have its own theme, though these can be interpreted widely. It's a pretty open brief. And when its recipient has added (or subtracted) as much as they want, they'll post it on to the next person.

The final results will vary in quality, I imagine, but in toto should be fun to compare. Who knows?

I'll track the various copies across the world via the website, too, and people will be able to post impressions on the developing books as they recieve them.

If you'd like to be added to the list, just keep an eye on the site for more info.

PITCHING IDEAS

I spent last night workshopping some of Shakespeare's monologues with a friend who has an audition with Bell Shakespeare. Said workshopping mainly involved sitting on a darkened oval as he bellowed things from the other end of the cricket pitch like Shane Warne in an excited moment.

"What a rogue and peasant slave am IIIIIII!!!"

A very fine bottle or two of red was involved, sponsored by an unexpected double win on a $2 sweepstake (his win - I remain a loser). And thrice did the field with tall terraces bound echo with a throaty cry of "vengeance!" Most of the time he played with much more nuance, however, and it was unexpectedly thrilling to put myself back in the position of director (or, I suppose, dramaturg) as I offered comments and criticism and "do it again like this" and so on.

In honour of this occasion (which I now dub the Inaugural Annual Yell Shakespeare on the North Fitzroy Oval Festival - all invited for the 2007 event) I will today completely depart from my usual performance focus by taking a meandering, rhizomatic journey through some of my favourite art of recent times. Art, as in pictures and stuff, or at least a bit like that. I'm not really that well-versed in art, and I'm not even sure I know what I like, but I do know what makes me feel different and deserving and such; the sort of thing that has me thinking "well, I may not know why I exist, or anyone else, but I'm very very glad I do right now."

IDEAS CATALOGUE

A while back I interviewed VCA grad and ACCA employee Gabrielle de Vietri about her Ideas Catalogue, and I'm really very all over it for the awesome and utterly charming idea that it is. Briefly, de Vietri assembles a catalogue of unrealised projects from people around the world, which are then put on sale, much in the style of an art catalogue. Prices range from a few bucks to a few thousand, and the Ideas themselves are in turn funny, provocative, offensive and sublime. And some are, to gurgle up the old cliche, so crazy that they just might work.

For example, I like the first issue's BREAK-UP INDICATORS, a pair of walll-mounted metres that can be used by the respective members of a couple to display "a percentage of likelihood of staying together." Useful, huh? And "at 0% and 100%, the adjustable knob could lock, as these are stages that imply unchangingness." I like it. $120.

Or, for the literarily/statistically inclined, why not pick up ALL THE POSSIBLE STORIES (also from Issue One - we're now up to Two)? The Idea calls for its owner to "Find every story that can be written in the English language in 1000 letters," and goes on to explain just how this can be accomplished. It's worth someone doing, though clearly I'm too lazy/erratic to try it myself. $620.

MORE IDEAS

Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know was quite the indie hit flick a little while back, and she's an accomplished artist in all kinds of forms. She's one of the people behind the website Learning to Love You More, which my sis put me onto, and which features "work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists." These assignments are things like "Make a portrait of your friend's desires" or "Interview someone who has experienced war" or, my favourite, "Take a picture of your parents kissing". The results are posted on the site.

THOUGHTS

Simon Hoegsberg is the guy behind the Thought Project - a photographer, he gave himself the task of stopping ordinary folk walking the streets of Copenhagen and asking them what they were thinking about at precisely that moment. The photographs themselves are gorgeous; even better, though, is the fact that most of the people he stops are sweet, complex, articulate souls who open up, just for a moment, a doorway into their minds and lives. All through a few words. Take this one:

... you can read the rest of this (and the many others) at Hoegsberg's website.

I had a lot (LOT) more written, which I've just lost. That's how the internet and me get along, I guess. I'll try to re-write it tomorrow, or not.

INFREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Sometimes I wake to find questions crowding in like cats batting their angry paws at my bedroom door. I usually realise quite quickly that what I have taken to be questions are, in fact, cats batting their angry paws at my bedroom door, but I find the easiest way to ignore this kind of feline spam mail is to imagine that they are questions, rather than hungry and irksome creatures over whom I have some responsibility. And so I retreat to an idyllic corner of my mind (I call it "Christopher Walken's House of Pantaloons") and ponder these queries, which are to me a kind of frog chorus.

For instance.

DOES EVERYONE YOU EVER KNOW READ THE SUNDAY PAPER?

It would seem so, yes.

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? YOU NEVER FINISHED YOUR ARTS FESTIVAL WRAP UP.

I know. There were a few shows I didn't get to mention (Mantalk, La Clique) but they weren't traffic-stoppers so I don't feel too guilty. Also: Cairns.

WHY WERE YOU IN CAIRNS?

I cannot say. But if it were a James Bond film, it would most decidely have been one of the early 70s ones, since it involved a contraption which looked like this:


It also involved a man explaining to me the finer points of cognac appreciation, an afternoon in an open air spa with cocktails and lovely ladies, fast boats, scuzzy underwater photography and, well, Cairns. So definitely a 70s number.

WHAT ELSE DID YOU DO?

I accidentally licked an old lady's finger while trying to lick an ant. I swam in a watering hole with a turtle. I was introduced to a kind of fruit which weighs about 50 kilos. And I ate more food than I really should have.

WAS IT FUN?

Mostly. Almost entirely. Here's an image-based approximation of my feelings over the whole trip.







IS IT TRUE THAT ONE IS STILL WHAT ONE IS GOING TO CEASE TO BE AND ALREADY WHAT ONE IS GOING TO BECOME? THAT ONE LIVES ONE'S DEATH, AND DIES ONE'S LIFE?

This is a watering hole.


HOW'S THE NEW HOUSE GOING?

Great guns. I now sit of an evening upon my grand balcony, gazing through smug, half-lidded eyes at the glory that is my dominion. Or at least the park opposite. Also they make good coffee on the corner.

CAN WE ALL COME AND SIT ON THE BALCONY?

Of course, it'll be a grand old time and we can toast future happiness and tell tall tales and also just more ordinary stories too (not tall).

TELL US A STORY, OH WISE ONE.

Well, I recently heard a story from someone who, as a child, was quite the enterpreneur. She grew up in Hong Kong and was intrigued by the economies of scale involved in the whole tooth-under-the-pillow thing. At a local feast, she found some pigeon's heads discarded after a cook-up, and figured that a beak was worth at least a few teeth. A week later her parents complained to the housekeeper about the godawful smell coming from her room, and it didn't take long before somebody lifted her pillow to reveal the little row of bird heads festering underneath.

Huh. Kids.

CAN YOU RECOMMEND A GOOD BOOK?

I'm reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita right now, and it's very, very good.

HEY WHILE WE'RE HERE, CAN WE BORROW SOME MONEY?

What, so you can blow it all again, like last time? Geez, is that the only reason you came over? I'm not a cash machine.

WE WERE JUST ASKING.

Well if that's all I am, fine. But I don't have time for your stupid panhandling; here I am holding down a full-time gig, fending off the creditors and jetting up and down the coast, while spending the rest of my time with my forehead pressed against the steering wheel of the '78 Falcon I bought thinking it would give my life "vim", listening to Harry Nilsson's Without You on repeat and wondering exactly what would happen if I just closed my eyes and floored it. Basically, I'm really busy.

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM US?

Nothing! I just want to sit here out on my balcony, reminiscing about tropical Far North Queensland and ignoring your stupid scratching at my door. Is that too much to ask? So quit your mewling and let me get back to getting back. Oh wait.

Sounding Out (Melb Arts Fest pt 8)

My voice is the first thing to go. If you want to give me a 100-point check-up, the way a mechanic would sort out a car's current state of being (but at a mere fraction of the cost!), I suggest you listen for the rattles and whines. I can go for long stretches coasting down life's highways with nary a shudder, but I'm pretty sure my vocal register acts as an index to what's going on under the bonnet. Maybe it's just me.

For someone with so little control over that register, however, I've found over the years that other's voices really stick with me. I used to delude myself into thinking I had a good memory for names, and when that proved wrong I went for the obvious "faces" option, but really, it's turned out that I have no particular facility for remembering either. Voices, on the other hand, I do recall rather well. If I think of someone I once knew, I can always summon up their voice. Can everyone do this? I hope so. I can imagine that, in our visual/textual culture, when we think of another person we rarely do so by conjuring their sound. If you're like me, though, and find it pleasurable to drag a memory out of the old toybox and enjoy it for itself, passing it from hand to hand, feeling its weight and the way gravity pulls at it, you could do worse than trying this kind of recollection on the aural level. If you know me, try to recall my voice.

Two of the shows I've enjoyed most during this year's festival have been dependent on the power of one person's voice. They're vastly different pieces, but each offered a sole speaker throwing words into the void, hoping that they would find some purchase.



William Yang's Objects for Meditation sounds as dry as can be, on paper at least. One guy standing alone on a stage, talking for an hour and a half about, well, stuff, while twinned projector screens behind him are filled with photographic images illustrating said stuff. It works, though. Yang is a charming orator, speaking in a very emphatic, slow style, and taking us on an eclectic oral journey encompassing decades of his life, his travels, his sexuality, his family, his pseudo-Daoist philosophy and the relationships between all of these things. It's an artfully artless performance, seeming on the surface to consist of little more than the peripatetic ramblings of a worldly (and wordy) soul, but hinting at great correspondences between the various aspects of a person's existence. It's also a very humble work; describing his attraction towards water, he sums this up well. Water seeks out the lowest places, but it carves its way through mountains. Water's softness slowly defeats hardness.

There's a great deal to ponder over in the narration, and it's the kind of piece that slowly settles into your mind over a while, well after the show has ended. It kind of reminded me of W. G. Sebald's writing, which I've never felt I truly understood, but which nonetheless gets my mind going in all kinds of directions. Which, I suppose, is a kind of understanding in itself.

Yang's an engaging speaker, but not quite engrossing. Marie Brassard, on the other hand...



Brassard's Peepshow really is my festival pick for 2006. I didn't go in with particularly high expectations, since the idea of a solo show that boasts a performer whose voice is electronically altered screamed 1979 performance art nightmare. How wrong I was. Brassard is an actor who holds her audience in the palm of her hand, but uses that power conscientiously. She takes us to places we might not be comfortable with (and god knows, her climactic thigh-carving bit is an exercise in Deleuzian panic-button-pushing) but also offers a shag-pile carpet to fall back onto when all's said and done.

Well, all might be said, but it's never done; not if a show is worth it. Peepshow is worth it. If you only see one show this fest, make this the one. If not: sorry. Come back next week to read more.