Category Archives: Uncategorized

Japanese Performance Art at the Carriageworks

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7-550x825Just returned from a good feed at the Parramatta Roxy with my Wednesday Night Dinner Crew. As you might have guessed from our name, we meet on Wednesday nights for dinner. A couple of weeks ago two Crew members were unable to come because they had free tickets to the Kirin Big In Japan event at the Carriageworks in Redfern, Sydney.

From the sounds of things it was a whole lot of Japanese performance artists doing stuff. Like the guy who played guitar while a machine painted onto a canvas in response to his music. About halfway through the song the paint machine broke and stopped painting, so another guy came and picked up the brush and continued painting.

It sounds absolutely riveting, and I know you as well as I would have been overwhelmed by the level of profundity. From all reports, the Inner City Chic Crowd were totally engaged with the performance works and lapped it all up with furrowed-brow seriousness. I really wish I could have seen the dudes with electrodes attached to their faces.

Another performance that sounded unmissable was a music act called Trippple Nippples. There are many fine photos of these Japanese ladies I could share which could give some sense of just how solid they are. I hear on Wednesday they were using gaffer tape as a bra. Maybe like in this video?

And here’s a sample of their music. My friends from the Wednesday Night Dinner Crew said they were having trouble not laughing throughout the event. The main reason they didn’t was because everyone around them seemed to be taking it all so seriously.

Now I’m quite a fan of performance in many shapes and forms, but I really struggle to find words to describe things like this other than ‘self-indulgence’.  It strikes me that the people who take this stuff so seriously must be completely out of touch with anything resembling reality. And the fact that these people are Sydney’s in-scene fills me not so much with horror as dismay.

I have no doubt that there are many fine performance artists out there. But I doubt they’ll be found at events put on by beer companies.

Total Eclipse of the Heart Flowchart

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Thought I’d share this flowchart of the lyrics to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart.

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I found it on the always entertaining ABC Arts Blog, Articulate , and they got it from internet newspaper the Huffington Post, which has a whole section of diagrams for songs. I like this Meatloaf one.

I was going to embed the film clip for this song, which I recall being VERY 80′s, and then I found this great video which is a literal video version. Funny stuff.

Sex Degrees of Separation

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Most of us will be aware of the idea of Six Degrees of Separation - that every person on the earth is separated from each other by at most six steps. The first step is me to the people I know, the second to the people they know that I don’t, and so on.  The idea became the name of a play, by John Guare (which I was in a production of at uni), and this in turn was made into a film, starring Will Smith, Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing (who I have a bit of a crush on). Here’s her playing Rizzo in Grease with an appropriate video:

The idea morphed into Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which is a fun game: through films they’ve been in, link any other actor to Kevin Bacon. For example, Australian actor Claudia Karvan was in $9.99 with Anthony La Paglia in 2008, and Anthony La Paglia was in He Said, She Said with Kevin Bacon in 1991. Check out the Oracle of Bacon and find out what Bacon number your favourite actor has.

Now the idea has been appropriated by English pharmacy chain Llyods into Sex Degrees of Separation. It’s a campaign to raise awareness of STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections) and encourage safe sex by pointing out the number of people you may have indirectly slept with. Going back six generations of partner (i.e. taking into consideration the people I’ve slept with, and that they’ve slept with, etc.), I have possibly had indirect sex with close to 1 million people. That’s quite a lot. How many people have you (indirectly) slept with?

I’ve been a lazy blogger…

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Alright, so I’ve been a lazy little blogger recently. I’m not beating myself up too much about it. It’s not because I’ve been generally lazy, the opposite is true. I took too much on and something had to pay the price.

This isn’t an unfamiliar pattern with me. I remember while I was doing my undergraduate degree I had my fingers in so many pies I had to start using my toes. I was in the drama society, a band, editing the university magazine, involved with the Student Union, dating, drinking drugs, a part-time job or two… it’s a wonder I found any time for my studies.

Oh, that’s right – I didn’t. Cs meant degrees for me, and I still managed to fail a few subjects. Never because I actually handed work in which was failed – I have standards – usually because I didn’t hand the assignments in at all. A couple of times I missed the census date for withdrawing from a subject without academic penalty, so I got stuck with an F for a subject I barely attended. I wasn’t particularly organised back then.

Am I better now? I’d like to think so.

This time I took on a couple of things which quickly swallowed my time. One is that I’m now volunteering one day a week in the office of NSW Green’s MP Lee Rhiannon’s office. It’s really cool. The highlight of my week, actually. Basically, I read up on things they’re interested in and then write about them – copy for websites, promotional material, media releases, speeches, stuff like that. It’s hella cool. Like blogging, but less self-indulgent.

The other thing, which was the real killer, was that I started back at uni this semester. Along with the Greens stuff, and some ‘help kids who can’t read good’ volunteering I’ve been doing since early in the year, it’s all part of a little ‘Meaning Quest’ that I’ve gone on in the last few months. I’m doing an MA in Literacy.

So I started doing two subjects at uni, and with all the other stuff I had on my plate, it was too much. I could have done it, but every second of my spare time would have been absorbed with study. I wasn’t really up for that, so I’ve dropped back to one subject per semester. It’s quite nice actually, I feel I can have a life and study at the same time.

Naturally this time I’ll be trying to do more than just pass my subjects.