Hedwig and the Angry Inch

A week & a half ago saw iOTA playing Hedwig (with his Angry Inch) at the Newtown RSL. We sat directly behind Tim Friedman (of The Whitlams) and his date. iOTA's performance (a bit Frankenfurter a bit 70's David Bowie) was very strong - an hour and a half of rockin' songs and monologues. Would be nice to see it get extended or even bumped up to a better theatre.
Favourite songs - The Origin Of Love and Wig in a Box.

Matthew's Survey Results

A week ago I used questionpro.com to survey my friends, getting results from 18 people (or maybe it should be 15 or 16, since I think some people accidentally did it twice!).
THE RESULTS:
* Most respondents were in Australia, though there was one response each from folks living in Canada, Italy, and the USA.
* There were 5 votes for me to dye my hair chocolatey brown; 2 votes for black & dark blue; and 2 for black & dark green. Other single votes came in for pink (eek!); blond with red tips (very 80's); silver (how distinguished); flourescent pink; orange; metallic purple (I like it); and pitch black.
* The most popular Australian actor was Cate Blanchett, voted for by 9 people! My friends have such good taste! There were 7 votes for Toni Colette; 4 for Geoffrey Rush; 3 for Nicole Kidman; 2 each for Heath Ledger, Naomi Watts, and Hugo Weaving; and 1 vote each for Eric Bana, Ben Mendelson, and Grant Dodwell(!!!). NOBODY voted for Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. Poor Russell - nobody loves him AND he sings like shit :-(
* It appears that people would be equally horrified to learn that their daughter was engaged to either Tom Cruise or Michael Jackson, which makes sense. 3 people also didn't like the idea of their little baby getting engaged to Anna Nicole Smith, and 2 people didn't want to hear that it's Charlie Sheen. However, nobody was much concerned about George Michael or Mr Magoo. Go Mr Magoo!
* Out of seven obscenely wealthy people, only Paul McCartney managed to get only positive responses. It's nice to know that if he lost all his $ in a fire (a really really big one) he'd be welcome in pretty much anyone's home.
The other six folks, ranging from nice and ending as 'certified bastard' were - Oprah Winfrey (fairly nice), Bill Gates, The Queen of England, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and finally Donald Trump (correctly picked by almost everyone as a 'prick').
* What my friends have done with their lives - Riden a horse (14 people); Been to a drive-in movie (12); Spent over $200 on an item of clothing (9); Bought something off e-bay (9); Voted for someone on a reality tv show (8); Walked out on a movie (7); Shoplifted something (6); Eaten snails (4).
* As well as thinking Paul McCartney's sweet, my friends seem to love the Beatles music too - 12 people have owned a Beatles album; 9 had an ABBA or U2 album; 8 - Madonna, REM, Bob Marley, and Billy Joel (oh really!); 7 - Meatloaf, Nirvana, David Bowie, and Boney M (wow, 7 Boney M albums - I'm impressed); 5 - Queen; 4 - Pink Floyd; and 1 - The Clash.
* 64.29% of people ARE in favour of changing the national anthem from the bloody boring Advance Australia Bloody Fair to the Aeroplane Jelly song! This must be the best survey result ever!
* The following 6 items of behaviour were rated from nastiest (after Mass Murder) to nicest (after Being Kind to Puppies) in this order - Strong body odour; Nost-picking; Loud agressive swearing; Talking on a mobile phone during a movie; Shoplifting; Loud slurping of hot tea.
Which is a bit of a bugger - I was hoping everyone would agree with me that loud tea-slurping was an unbearable habit. Maybe more people would be on my side if they heard the tea-slurping that goes on in my work tea room. Horrific! Argh!

2006 Sydney Film Festival - The Films

Made it to around 20 films this year at the Sydney Film Fest. Would have loved to see the Australian opening night film Ten Canoes but the $45 ticket price turned me off.
I'll just comment on the better films - with maybe one or two exceptions.
I didn't walk out on any films this year - though I did have to wake a patron who snored through one of the more tiresome documentaries!
The first four films especially get my full support.
* Little Miss Sunshine. Won the audience award for most popular feature during the festival. Indie-comedy. Lots of fun. A family celebrating the joy of losing in a culture obsessed with winning. Toni Colette is mother to a family of quirky loser types who go on a road trip to get their daughter to a horrid 'Little Miss Sunshine' beauty contest that she's always dreamed of winning. Has a hilarious feel-good ending. Total winner.
* United 93. Intensely realistic retelling of the fate of the 4th plane hi-jacked on 9/11, which eventually went down in a field. Cade came along to this one with me and he left the cinema quite traumatised. Terrifying at times, but made with impressive integrity. The terrorists are recognisable human beings, and the passengers' attempts to do something about their situation come across as heroic and perfectly believable. It left me with admiration verging on awe for everyone involved in making it.
* An Inconvenient Truth. Won the audience award for Best Documentary. Al Gore discusses why we should all be concerned - or more like totally wetting our pants - about global warming. Americans probably won't like being lectured to by one of their liberal politicians, but they should listen, because he's great at getting all the basic issues across. Australians need to see this too as we're far too lazy about what we're doing to this world's future - we were against the Kyoto protocols, have been slow to invest in renewable energy, and have a government bizarrely insisting on increasing the birth rate (there are 6 BILLION of us already!). Nobody should NOT see this film.
* Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story. Startling documentary regarding North Korea's old habit of kidnapping civilians off Japanese beaches and taking them back to Korea to teach them about Japanese language and culture. Sounds like a paranoid fantasy at first but it's all true, and it appears likely that some of the abductees are still being held captive. I'd heard the basics of this story before. The great thing about this documentary is that it spends a lot of time with the families of the abductees, so we can see what it is really like to be a victim to world politics. It's shocking to see these otherwise ordinary people continuing to suffer such a perverse fate.
* C.R.A.Z.Y. Canadian comedy/drama. The main character is a gay teenager, but really it's about his whole family - a family with 5 sons. I never had any brothers, but this family felt very real to me. There are a number of great little scenes revolving around what music means to them. Charles Aznavor & Patsy Cline for Dad. David Bowie & the Rolling Stones for the son. Ground Control to Major Tom...
* God on my Side. Andrew Denton made this documentary for ABC tv, spending a number of days talking to folks at a convention for religious broadcasters in the USA. It's funny & scary, but frustrating because he's there as an observer and therefore only gently challenges what they have to say. Almost everyone is white, and everyone supports George Bush Jnr simply because he professes to be humble before god (Denton was on stage after the film was shown and said that EVERY person they spoke to there supported crazy old George).
* Friends With Money. American comedy/drama involving 4 female californian friends - 3 of them wealthy, 1 doing it tough (Jennifer Aniston) and having to resort to being a cleaner (oh the horror!). Interesting & amusing movie, well-acted even by Jen, but then it just ends. Possibly one of the most useless endings ever (though at least it makes more sense than the ending of Mulholland Drive!).
* The Sun. Unbelievably slow russian art-house film on Emperor Hirohito's experiences at the end of WWII. For the first half hour all I noticed was how slow it was, but then it started to become mesmerising. Everything is dark, foreheads are sweaty, mouths twitch (Hirohito did this in real life), and odd sounds creak. Definitely better to see this in a cinema, where you can ease into the moodiness of it. Some great little scenes - my favourite being the emperor's dream of a Japanese city in flames as bombs are dropped from flying american catfish.
* Perhaps Love. Okay, this is one film I didn't like. A chinese musical made by people who obviously watched Moulin Rouge too many times without taking enough notes. The songs are HORRIBLE! Well, to be more exact, a couple of the songs range from okay to iffy, but the others are plain painful. The musical numbers are badly directed too , which doesn't help. Things aren't so bad when they stop singing. The story is about two actors in the middle of filming a musical, which is a very unoriginal plot but actually quite good WHEN THEY DON'T SING. The two stars are great to look at (the male lead is the adorable Takeshi Kaneshiro - the pretty-boy lead from The House of Flying Daggers).
* The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema. Slavoj Zizek is an 'acclaimed philosopher and psychologist' who likes to talk on and on about the 'fantasy' and 'reality' of famous scenes from famous films. This was sometimes enlightening and fun, but more often just pretentious waffling. This is the film where I had to prod a guy near me who fell asleep and started loudly snoring in the middle of it. That guy knew knew what he was doing.
* Girl Shy (1924 silent) The audience laughed and laughed at this silent Harold Lloyd comedy, featuring an absolutely smashing chase scene. This was a good reminder that silent films were never meant to be silent - an audience's 'oohs' and 'aahs' and laughter, as well as a final cheer at the end, being part of the experience.
* L'Armee Des Ombres (aka Army of Shadows; 1969) Based on the real experiences of people involved in the French Resistance during WWII. Damn good, with strange and memorable scenes that make you wonder what you'd be capable of doing in similar circumstances. This film should be better known than it is.

St John vs Tom Hanks

The Da Vinci Code movie is out, and tourists are flocking to Milan to see Da Vinci's The Last Supper. According to one of Dan Brown's puzzles, the face of one of the apostles looks like that of a woman, and people want to see this for themselves so they can go 'ah, it's true, Leonardo must have known something! How tricksy!'. What's particularly stupid about this is that nobody stops to point out that Leonardo loved painting androgynous-looking characters, so the fact that the guy in The Last Supper looks a bit girly is no earth-shattering discovery. To prove my point, have a look at the picture I've attached. It's Leonardo's 'St John The Baptist'. Just looking at John's face, tell me he doesn't look like a total chick!

Underground

There's a column by Paul Sheehan in today's Sydney Morning Herald about the recent fuss over the two Tasmanian miners recently freed from their underground cage.
He wonders at the way the media has labelled them heroes, when they have their lives due to the good work of their rescuers. And that it's strange for the whole thing to be treated as a feel-good story when one guy was killed (though he's mostly forgotten in the news stories). It'd be nice to think some of the media $$$ might go to that miner's family.
The writer pointed out something else annoying - recently three guys were lost out in the seas of the Torres Strait for 22 days. They were out there so long in their 5-metre boat that the search party was called off. They were there for quite a few more days than those two guys were trapped in the mine, but they managed to survive, making use of seawater, raw squid and shellfish (and they did it on their own, unlike the miners). But their story hasn't gotten onto the Footy Show or anywhere else - they were three outback Aborigines.
I've been trying to think that it's nice to see Australians caring about a story like this, since it's about two people being rescued rather than the usual gloom and doom new stories. And we probably shouldn't be too hard on the media, as they could hardly be expected to leave the story alone - 'boy trapped in well' stories are like 'attractive young woman on trial for taking drugs into Thailand' stories - short term events full of human drama that can be dragged out over a number of weeks, with a guaranteed exciting ending (both death and salvation sell papers).
But I don't like how obvious the media and politicians have been in picking and choosing who they're going to promote to us as being 'heroes', great 'Australians' (as if two Chinese miners would have eaten each other in the same situation), and great examples of 'mateship' (that term starts to sound more fascist and racist every time I hear Johnny H use it).

Art - 2006 Archibald Prize

Found a number of pictures to enjoy at the Archibald Prize exhibition at the NSW Art Gallery today.
* Loved the winner - The Paul Juraszek monolith by Marcus Wills. Dozens of Paul Juraszeks climbing about the stone face, with some of his sculptures dotted here and there. Unlike most modern portraits, I can imagine it still being interesting to look at in 20 or more years' time.
As usual I didn't think much of the messy pictures which lacked any kind of craftmanship. For $25,000 (the Archibald prize booty), I think a bit of effort should be required.
* Michael Zavros painted himself presumably at a time of artistic frustration - Michael lays down to listen to the latest Kate Bush on his iPod. Good picture, and good title 'Michael Zavros can't paint'.
* Great-looking dogs in Peter Smeeth's Clover Moore picture. Catherine Abel's 'Portrait of Julia Leigh' had a nifty retro sheen. And Peter Churcher managed something unsettling in 'Bruce, Linde and me on the road to Guadelupe', featuring a party of modern young Spaniards butchering stags and boars at a hunting party. The people looked a little like they'd come out of an illustrated children's book. I'm not sure if this was intentional, or if it's the artist's usual style. The style was a bit mild and shabby and didn't seem to suit the scene of bloodshed very well, but in a way it helped add to the overall oddness.
* As usual there were three other competitive exhibitions on show. A lovely photo-real cow portrait (and there's never enough of them!) by Peter Hickey (but with a bad bad title - 'Who me?'); nice pair of shops by William Breen 'Alphabet City'; and a lovely Vermeer-inspired photo of Lisa Tomasetti's daughter 'Vanilla and Misfortune'.
* I've attached 3 pictures to this story. The winning Marcus Wills picture; Michael Zavros' self-portrait (with iPod), and Vanila Netto's very swish prize-winning photographic portrait.
* After leaving, I sms'd a friend who knows Michael Zavros, mentioning that I liked his picture. I got a text back saying that he was in town and was going to the exhibition in the afternoon. I wish I had've been there at the same time he was - would have been interesting to see a painter checking out his own self-portrait.
*** Oh, one last thing. The gallery has finally removed the large piece of modern 'art' that used to resemble huge gobs of phlegm suspended from the ceiling in a collection of old stockings. It was remarkably awful and pointless, and I used to love having a chuckle over it. Now it's gone. I thought I'd be happy about it - but I kind of missed it.