AUGH

The above comic, which I find very funny, is from Pictures for Sad Children. I recommend it.

When I was a kid I read several racist children's books by Helen Bannerman, whose most famous was probably Little Black Sambo. I'm pretty sure I've seen them re-released in a bookshop not too long ago, which I think is not a good thing. They really were deeply, deeply offensive and I think I even knew that as at a very young age. Of course they're also silly and kitsch and a re-release is probably a supposedly ironic move, but nostalgia for a period when open racism was ok isn't something I can encourage.

Bannerman, who was writing around 1900, also created The Story of Little Kettle-Head which is only slightly racist but also very compelling and eerie. Check it out.



Both of these links come from the blog My First Dictionary, which is quite rather funny.

That's all.

Happy Centenary Born Dancin'

This is an interesting article. In brief, a study in the US has sought to quantify whether and why female playwrights have a harder time getting their work produced. I'm not totally sure about the results but I'd like to know if the same situation occurs here in Australia.

Anyway, last night I saw my 100th production for 2009 and wished I hadn't. It was the MTC's Man from Mukinupin and I'd actually seen half of it before - I left at interval on opening night because I was deeply and dramatically bored and fell asleep a few times (which would rule out a review anyway). Yesterday I coughed up $70 to watch it again and my earlier suspicions were confirmed. Mukinupin isn't like watching a car crash but is more like looking down in a public bathroom to notice that your shoelace is untied and trailing in an unidentified liquid. Not a disaster, but occasioning a very heavy sigh.

IN OTHER NEWS: This week's Super Dance Style is Jukin (or Jookin or just Foot Work). It originated in Memphis but is getting pretty popular across the US. It pretty much focuses on super fast, complex footwork. Watch them feet.

ANT FACT MONDAY

Alright you fools, here's your required dose of anty trivia. Although - it must be said - sometimes I wonder why I bother. Not that you don't appreciate it, but I do on sleepless nights wonder if it's not like dishing out gruel to Dickensian urchins only to find that, over time, they have come to love the stuff, to crave it even, and eventually to lose sight of the fact that there may be more to life than this. Am I the prison warden, my ant facts the kind treatment that makes this insufferable jail-time somehow manageable? Such is the internet.

In any case, I am not open to replies. I must simply ladle out my facts and keep my concerns to myself. If anyone should care to produce an Ant Fact Monday theme song, possibly called "Born, I'm Antly Dancin'" then perhaps ('mayhaps'?) I may reconsider this stance ('stants').



SOME FACTS

There's a fungus which turns ants into zombies.

When infected, the ant is compelled to wander away from its colony and attach itself to a plant.

The ant eventually dies and the fungus emerges as a growth from the ant's head which drops spores to the ground.

More ants come across the spores and themselves become infected as zombies.

The cycle of unlife continues.

MORE FACTS

The inventively-named Large Blue Butterfly of northern Europe was until recently near extinction.

Scientists have discovered that the butterfly's disappearance was linked to cruel farming practices.

Farmers in the 1950s killed a lot of rabbits with myxomatosis. As a result, grass grew a little taller, since the rabbits weren't munching on it.

The grass - now longer by less than an inch - cooled the soil below by a degree or two. The local red ant population wasn't keen on the chill and moved away.

But while nobody likes ants, everybody seems to like butterflies.

The Large Blue Butterfly is a bit of a leech on the red ant population, since Blue Butterfly caterpillars have learnt to imitate the sounds of little red ants. The ants look after the caterpillars and nurture them, even while the caterpillars are feasting on the ants. Eventually the grub becomes a beautiful butterfly and takes to the skies.

Someone worked this out and brought cows in to graze on these grasses, and now the ants and the butterflies are back.

CONCLUSION: Ants are stupid but sort of kind. Butterflies, on the other hand, are merciless bastards.

THIS THEME MAY BE CONTINUED IN A FUTURE SERIES ENTITLED "WTF GARDENING or WHAT MY VEGIE PATCH HAS TAUGHT ME ABOUT THE WORLD".

The Pig War

His garden is not orderly but it is, to his mind, in order. Lyman Cutlar sees the black pig digging its nose into one of the potato beds. It is the size of a port barrel on squat, hairy legs. It is oblivious to his presence. A man stands by the fence laughing.

Cutlar fetches his gun from its resting place above the back door’s lintel and returns to the garden. The pig’s snout has uprooted several dirty potatoes and is scattering them as it eats. The laughing man runs off at the sight of the weapon and Cutlar, red-faced, shoots the swine. Or, he raises his gun and fires at the pig and the man scampers off into the trees.

The pig does not die easily.

Cutlar has killed animals before.

The pig was not his to kill. He is dimly aware that it belongs to the Irishman. He finds the Irishman on the sheep ranch and words are exchanged.

I will give you $10 for your pig.

The pig was not yours to kill. You will give me $100 for the pig.

Your pig was on my land. You must keep your pig out of my potatoes.

It is up to you to keep your potatoes out of the pig.

The Irishman reports Cutlar’s offence. Cutlar, meanwhile, has been unsettled by the nasty affair. He talks to fellow American settlers, one of whom asks to see the gun. Cutlar does not want to produce the weapon.

Cutlar and the Irishman live on an island, but the island is large enough that one can never see it encircled by water. It does not feel isolated, not entirely.

The British across the strait are sending men to arrest Cutlar. The American settlers grow defensive. They call for a blockade. Sixty six American troops arrive on the island to prevent the British arrival.

The British send three warships to the island.

The Americans send cannons and more than five hundred men.

The British send more ships, more guns, more men. Two thousand men. Cutlar has never counted to two thousand. His mind still turns to the gun, to the pig, to the disorderly garden. The British will come tramping through his garden, boots sinking into the soil where the pig and potatoes yesterday lay rotting. The Americans will come to fight them, overturning the earth which has only now begun to settle, be covered with cold dry leaves.

What did he do with the pig and where did those half-chewed potatoes go? What of the laughing man? He no longer remembers, on this island slowly filling with other men from elsewhere.

The men leave the island and the Pig War of 1859 becomes the only war in which the single fallen corpse belonged to a pig.

And Cutlar, staring at his gun on the lintel and the potato patch beyond, realises that he was the only man to fire a shot in this war. Where does that leave him? Will it leave him? Where is the laughing man? Why does he no longer remember, now, in 2009, so many islands away? As he types this the only thing he remembers are his rash words to the Irishman. They are both a long way from understanding pigs and potatoes.

Tom the Loneliest

Just a quickie for Melbourne theatre types:


This doesn't really look like an image that would sell a show to me, but Tom the Loneliest is definitely worth catching at La Mama. It's by Adelaide's No Strings Attached and is proof that if you bear the theatregoer's cross for long enough you'll be rewarded with some kind of salvation (however temporary). It's sort of somewhere between Black Lung and Ranters; it doesn't exactly have a story or a pin-downable setting but is more a succession of presents that evoke recognisable types, genre situations and comic set-ups. Tom is a loser addicted to porn, Fiji water and calling Maureen at the QuitLine. He lives with Tom, another loser addicted to porn, hating on his neighbour and playing with the lights. More Toms proliferate as the show unfolds, including the brilliantly played Tom the Real Estate Sign (who is exactly that) and a Tom that doesn't even exist. It's junkyard theatre done well, the chaotic set filled with all sorts of detritus, but with the added element of cunning product placement.

That's all I'll say for now. A weird, powerful, consistently funny show. Let me know what you think.

Scientific Concepts Explained Through Dance

LESSON ONE: EMERGENCE

The following clip (which I discovered through my old housemate and noted diarist Jess) demonstrates the scientific concept of "emergence". Watch it closely, without skipping through it.



Emergence has been in vogue amongst egg-headed types for some time, and is essentially an academic word for "magic". The final note in this video is wrong: it does not take one person to start a party. It takes one person followed by a few others who seem to be taking the piss who are joined by others with perhaps drunken or drug-fuelled enthusiasm. If enough critical mass is achieved, a tipping point may be reached in which piss-taking becomes something entirely other and irony makes a leap into genuine, magical energy.

I found this clip quite annoying at first but by about halfway through was giving it two flailing arms up.

YOU MAY CLOSE YOUR BOOKS NOW.

MITCHELL BUTEL HAIR - UPDATE

Yesterday I asked Mitchell Butel about the Mystery of Mitchell Butel Hair.

"How embarrassing. When I did Hair a few years ago I got all the dog publicity so I had to do… I think it was called Fresh on Channel Nine. They said can you cook something hippy, you know? I thought: I don’t know, I’m a dreadful cook. Then I thought I’ll make rice paper rolls. It was a disaster and I burnt the tofu. But then they put my recipe online. I think that’s the first thing that comes up when you google my name."

INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM WIN.

As you were, readers. You may go back to reading something more important.

At a Jamaican festival in Tokyo

I've got a lot of work to do at the moment, but this fella gives me hope.

From I Rub Your Brog.

Autumn

It's autumn!

So clap your chalk hands and let your eyes become boats.

Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber on Vimeo.

Monkey Business

COMPANY

When I was in Japan last year I took this footage of some Japanese macaques. Such insanely wonderful beings. A week later and 500kms east I spent half a day at a monkey park which contained around 1000 primates from more than 100 species. Some were free-roaming (you could walk around Spider Monkey Island, for example) while others were in pens or cages or open-range fields of various sizes.

This week I arrived at Malthouse Theatre's production of Kafka's Monkey with no expectations and these were duly met. It's a hugely acclaimed production by a very talented English performer Kathryn Hunter, but it really didn't work for me.



It's an adaptation of Kafka's "A Report to an Academy" and it's undoubtedly a show that a lot of people will (and do) like and enjoy and appreciate and take something away from. I'm not writing that in a snide superior way. This is a wholly personal response, you know. I just thought it did a vague injustice to two things: Kafka and monkeys.

Kafka's stories are incredibly difficult to translate into performance, mainly because they're so damn literary. They do things that reinvent the relationships between language and reality, narrative and identity. What I've always loved about his stuff is the way they produce spaces (or places) that are in themselves a sense of character. You can't divorce the narrative voice or interior psychology of each tale from the environments in which they exist, and I have incredibly vivid images of the rooms, doorways, tunnels and streets of his stories. This is why his narratives are so uncanny - to misquote Tommy Pynchon, they're "not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into-"...

Reading Kafka isn't about uncovering the secret at the heart of his writing but of getting progressively folded into it. You get knotted into an increasingly tangled world which is pure language. I'm not sure it's possible to recreate that experience theatrically. I wish I'd seen that Icelandic version of Metamorphosis which played in Tasmania recently - it sounded like a pretty successful attempt. But Kafka's Monkey didn't come close to the mark for me - it's staged in a nearly empty white space (apart from an almost irrelevant lectern and a giant projected photo of a monkey). The performance is very energetic but not evocative of those interior spaces - it's a disentanglement. It has a point and the hour or so is devoted to explaining that point. That so many reviews see that point as an incredibly reductive one - humans and monkeys are pretty similar; or our sense of humanity is pretty tenuous; or who were are is a performance - seems to me a good argument to go read Kafka rather than go to the theatre.

Now: monkeys. To stick with Pynchon, here's another quote:

"Once, the only reason Men kept Dogs was for food. Noting that among Men no crime was quite so abhorr'd as eating the flesh of another human, Dog quickly learned to act as human as possible... so we know how to evoke from you, Man, one day at a time, at least enough Mercy for one more day of Life. Nonetheless, however accomplish'd, our Lives are never settled, - we go on as tail-wagging Scheherazades, ever a step away from the dread Palm Leaf, nightly delaying the Blades of our Masters by telling back to them tales of their humanity."

The monkey of Kafka's Monkey only appears to hold value or interest in the way it tells us tales of our humanity. Hunter's performance really confused me - it's nothing like a monkey's at all. It felt like someone who has never actually seen a monkey trying to act like one. And, even more confusingly, that monkey is acting like a human. In fact, there was no monkey in the performance for me, at all. While a lot of critics have remarked on Hunter's big expressive eyes, simian agility and loose-limbed monkeytude, all of that seemed to me just an interesting human, not at all gesturing towards the primate. The silence of the monkey, for instance, is given no space here. In short, the monkey is just a metaphor for ourselves in this production, and I didn't find any real respect for the animal at all.

John-Paul Hussey's "monkey" trilogy - Chocolate Monkey, Space Munki and Love Monkey come to mind when thinking about Hunter's performance. I only saw the second two of these works and I wasn't that impressed by Space Munki, but Love Monkey was an impressive piece of theatre. The ape isn't a simple metaphor or screen for Hussey. Instead he seems to have cultivated a persona which is "Monkey" and which allows him to weave together his autobiography, fabulist fictions, meta-theatre, parapsychology and Jungian archetypes. He doesn't play a monkey but is a monkey - he doesn't interpret monkeys but labels what he is "monkey". I don't think I'm explaining that very well.

Then there's the Harry Harlow project by James Saunders, Martyn Coutts, Brian Lipson and Kelly Ryall. I saw a development showing of this last year and don't know where it's at now, but it was an intensely affecting work which engaged the human/monkey dynamic without reducing the ape to a mirror of ourselves - in fact, it questioned this very process by focusing on the often terrible experiments conducted by one of the pioneers of child psychology and producing a true sense of the beautiful, complex interior world of the monkey which is not simply an infantilised version of the human. It was also thoroughly theatrical - its narrative progressed in an elliptical, non-rational fashion, and the physicality of performer Saunders was the most visceral evidence of the dance between the civilised man and the animal which underscores Kafka's story.

Maybe it's because I don't think of Kafka as a humanist - when he wrote all those stories from the perspective of monkeys, dogs, bugs and others denied language, he wasn't upholding some essential dignity to Man, but was writing of how humanity is as knotty and inchoate as the rest of existence - inseparable, really. It's not that we're like monkeys at all.

"So vast is our land that no fable could do justice to its vastness, the heavens can scarcely span it -" Kafka, "The Great Wall of China".

What a long and rambling post. On a competely coincidental note, I discovered a band the other day named Gregor Samsa (named, presumably, after the main character in Kafka's "Metamorphosis").

POWERS

After yesterday's swine flu post, I was understandably excited by the headline on the Age site's front page today:

What new powers has the evolving Swine Flu granted to victims now?



(Also: I am very pleased that this picture is on a page called "All About Latvia." This is "Cūkmens" or "Pig Man". I think more nations should have national half-man/half-pig mascots.)

UPDATE: This is the sound of swine flu. Some dude took the genetic structure of the virus and translated it into ambient music. It's pretty depressing if you leave it playing while you do something else (work, minigolf, PAYG accounting, sitting in the corner of an unfurnished room trying to throw a chisel into a bucket in the opposite corner of the room).

The Dance of Futures Past

Here's how someone, once, in the 1960s, in Germany, decided that peoples of the future will dance. I'm sure the conversation going on in the foreground is compelling but it's hard to tear your attention away from the people behind them. It's like they've been told to imagine a mating flamingo doing calisthenics on Prozac.



And here's what the future did burp up - ACROBATIC ROCK N ROLL.



I don't think you get this in Australia, but in a lot of Europe, especially former Soviet states, this is a big thing. It's pretty fascinating. You can see the definite rock n roll/lindy hop influences but they're filtered through a very 90s Euro pop dance aesthetic. It's like US cheerleading today but, strangely, more reverential towards the rock n roll dancing that was spawned in the US half a century ago. I don't know why I find it so confuzzling to watch extreme swing/rockabilly dancing performed by people in brightly coloured unitards. But I do.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SWINE FLU

This swine flu business is nothing new.

The following clip comes from the wonderful John Hodgman, who helpfully points out that the truck driver at the beginning of the clip is obviously drunk.



NO ONE IS TOO FAST FOR SWINE FLU.

While I'm on this topic: why is it that diseases such as swine flu never live up to their name? If you're going to employ such a radical term as "swine flu" why not save it for an infection that turns its victims into half-man/half-pig abberations. Then you can have reconstructed footage such as the one above featuring ordinary people rolling around in the mud, insatiably craving slops and being smarter than dogs? You could even insert a few laughs as some college kids joke about how Stan is such a sweaty hog and smells like bacon - before Stan suddenly reveals trotters instead of hands and begins to oink uncontrollably! I'd pay to see that!

But I guess I'll have to get used to disappointment.

ANT FACT MONDAY: SPECIAL EDITION

"A VISIT FROM THE QUEEN"

The other week I noticed a little movement on top of my fridge. Upon closer inspection I found this:




After some observation I came to think it might be a queen ant looking for a nest. I'm not really sure though. Perhaps someone out there can help me.

In either case I treated it with the respect royalty deserves. I didn't really want a nest in my kitchen so I took the possible queen out the back and recommended some more attractive real estate options.

ON TO THE FACTS:

The South American Trap-Jaw ant can snap its mandibles at up to 145 miles an hour or 100,000 the force of gravity - the fastest predatory strike in the animal kingdom. The force it generates is 300 times the ant's weight. It can also use the striking mandibles to fling itself up into the air - covering up to 40 centrimetres horizontally. I wish I could do this.

An ant can survive being microwaved. This is because microwaves send out, um, waves, and the ant can sense where the waves are high temperature and where they're low. They just run around the hot bits.

Equilibrioception, the sense of balance we possess to help us tell which way is up, seems to be based on some fluid in the inner ear if my patchy knowledge serves me. I'm pretty sure ants don't have ears, letter alone inner ones. This makes me wonder if they even know which way is up, and how. Maybe it's why they have no problem climbing really high and sometimes upside down.

Also: could an ant get dizzy? I don't think so. Maybe this is related to the same fact (not a fact, obviously, more a supposition).

The Yellow Crazy Ant has one of the best names in the ant phone book.

Ants and butterflies don't get along. Ants will bust the ass of any loser butterfly if it so much as looks at them the wrong way. Make no mistake: Ants are mean mofos with a grudge. But one family of butterflies, the Lycaenidae, have brokered a deal with ants and the two need each other to live. Ants shepherd the butterfly larvae to particular plants that they can feed from, and help raise them to the beautiful, fluttery beings who eat the living shit out of my vegetable garden. In exchange, the caterpillars secrete a boozy juice that gets the ants all hopped up and happy. So in short, ants are willing to lend a hand if it means they can all tie on one and have a knees up at the end of the day.

And that's the end of ANT FACT MONDAY. For today.

Thanks queen!

2009 Barry Nominees

Well, you heard it here first unless you heard it from someone else.

This year's top gong for Outstanding Comedy at the Melb. Int. Com. Fest. will be going to one of the following acts:

1000 YEARS OF GERMAN HUMOUR


SARAH MILLICAN



WILSON DIXON



TIM MINCHIN

THE PAJAMA MEN



ASHER TRELEAVEN




OTIS LEE CRENSHAW

Having seen all but one of these, I reckon it's a killer list. Given that six different countries are represented there (if you count Jesse Griffin's Kiwi origins), as well as a huge range of comic genres - character comedy, stand-up, musical comedy, absurdism, physical comedy etc. it's also probably the most diverse nominee line-up ever. One week to go.

The Sounds of Comedy

I really don't have time to write up all the comedy I've been seeing, so here's a quick breakdown on shows I've caught so far organised into music genres.

60s FOLK
Wilson Dixon Rides Again

BIG HAIR MUSIC
Wes Snelling in Kiosk

ADULT CONTEMPORARY/MOR

Mark Watson – All the Thoughts I’ve Had Since I Was Born

VARIETY NIGHT (OBVIOUSLY)
Ali McGregor’s Late-Nite Variety-Nite Night

DYNAMIC TRUMPET PARTY MUSIC
Sam Simmons in The Net Starring Sandra Bullock

DEATH METAL

Nick Sun – UnFucTheAbyss

UNCLASSIFIED

Mother of the Year

PORN MOVIE MUSIC

The Soft Toy Mafia

THIS GUY

Janeane Garofalo

RUSSIAN DRINKING SONGS
Danny McGinlay – Food Dude


NERDCORE HIP HOP
The List Operators


CLASSICAL
Judith Lucy’s Not Getting Any Younger



JAZZ
Jason Byrne – The Byrne Identity
Only because I hate jazz.

NU POLKA
1000 Years of German Humour


INDIEPOP
Josie Long – All the Wonders of the Universe (Shown in Detail)


STONER ROCK
Arj Barker’s Original Style Bits and Pieces


THE BENNY HILL THEME SONG
Steve Coogan


THIS GUY
Des Bishop – Desfunctional


DRUM AND BASS
The Mad Max Remix


VIKING ROCK
Celia Pacquola in Am I Strange?
Only because I love that there is such a thing as Viking Rock, and I loved Pacquola's show.


DISCOFOX
An Evening with Charles Barrington


THE SUPER MARIO THEME
The Delusionists in Bunker 5


ITALODANCE
Club XX


COUNTRY
Beaconsfield the Musical


CELTIC ROCK
Matt Elsbery – Thoughtcrime

UNCLASSIFIED
So You Think You Can Cow

Hope that clears things up for you. This is possibly the laziest post this blog has ever seen.

LET LOOSE THE DOGS OF COMEDY

And so it begins again. The Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

"YEAAAAAARGGGGHHHH!!!"

ANT FACT MONDAY

ATTENTION FELLOW MYRMECOLOGISTS: THIS JUST IN FROM THE HOME OFFICE.

(I have a home office).

One morning last week I woke to find that a whole crazy bunchload of my little ant friends had invaded the kitchen and were hanging around a plate I had forgotten to wash. After I basically lost my shit and howled the secret name of G-d and made a coffee, I determined to put my recent ant experiments to the test. I grabbed a few handfuls of catnip from the garden, tore ‘em up and sprinkled them around the plate and general near-plate area. GUESS WHAT ANT-FACTERS? Within an hour or two the ants racked the heck out of there. Chalk one up for modern science, and no ants were harmed either.

On to today’s facts.

First a quiz: have you been doing your homework? If so, you should be able to work this out. If not: IDIOT! Why do I even bother? You’re wasting my time and you’re wasting your own time and if there’s one thing we can all agree on it’s surely that the internet is not a place we go to waste time.

Here is the quiz.

What’s this?

The correct answer will be provided at the end of today’s lesson.

Did you know that one of the ways ants communicate is by rubbing body parts together to create clicking noises? A bit like The Fonz clicking his fingers and going “Eeeeyyyyy…” Ants are cool.

Ants also “sing” to each other to communicate.

Some other insects can imitate these sounds and sneak into an ant colony, where the ants will take care of them as if the intruder were one of their own! Truly a devilish business, being an ant! Whom do you trust?

"ANSWER: NOT CATERPILLARS. NEVER TRUST CATERPILLARS"

Have you worked out that puzzle I gave you yet? Answer coming up.

A scientist in the UK found that when he recreated the sound of a queen ant and played it to a colony, all of the workers stood to attention and greeted the tiny speakers. I read this in The Guardian, which is where I have stolen most of today’s facts.

Another fact from this article is that some kinds of ants domesticate aphids, “tranquillising them with drugs to keep them docile and ‘milking’ them with their antennae for a sugary honeydew.” That’s amazing. Even The Guardian says that ants are “amazing”.

Now for the cruncher: pencils down! What’s your answer? What is it? Let’s see the picture again.

Did you get it? If you said “a bridge made of ants, their bodies linked together in order to cross some kind of gulf” then you are CORRECT.



OK BYE