I read an interesting article on the saying no to the Cult of Busyness yesterday. It advocates doing only one thing at a time, and I can’t say I’m completely on board with that, but I do think that our society undervalues down-time.
I’m particularly bad at this, juggling a few competing priorities; social contact, work, creative activities, outings and rest time. I have a bunch of projects on the go, including a couple of writing projects, two music projects, and one theatre project. I like to get as much value as I can out of my time, but last night as I lay in bed not sleeping I felt oppressed by the sheer number of balls I was trying to keep in the air. It doesn’t help that my day job is particularly busy at the moment either.
I will be able to take a bit over a week off around Easter, partly because I am working a bit more in the lead up to our big assessment. I’ve arranged to go to a little cottage near Lake Eildon for four days, just on my own. I plan to go for walks, get coffee, eat out, write in my journal, read a nice book, and possibly get some ‘proper’ writing done.
I will never be able to do one thing at a time, that’s not my style. I think I operate well when I can give things time to stew in the back of my mind while I’m doing something else. I can get better at scheduling in times for resting, and exercising.
Here is a photo of one of my favourite bands, a local Melbourne crew called Destrends, who I saw yesterday at the Sydney Road Street Party. Apologies for the quality of the photo, they kept moving (and I didn’t get the drummer, sorry Nathan). I’m glad I went, but after a really intense Saturday I didn’t have the energy to hang around and soak up the atmosphere.
Once work is less busy, I’ll be heading to some Melbourne International Comedy Festival shows, and getting stuck into a week off! While I’m doing that I’ll practice saying no to (some) things.
In my last post, I mentioned that I was thinking of doing NaPoWriMo, that is, National Poetry Writing Month. The idea is that you do one poem every day in April, and then you have thirty poems, and some good habits. I did it in 2014 and enjoyed the experience, even though the poems were of very mixed quality.
Only I forgot that I was going to do NaPoWriMo until Tuesday (5th). So I was like ‘Ah, crap!’. I’ve caught up a little bit but still three behind.
I forgot because I was all distracted by the Melbourne International Comedy festival. I’ve seen a lot of shows. I like seeing lots of shows. I like seeing the different stuff people do. I like having an excuse to go up to performers after they get off stage and gush at them in the hope of getting a nice hug. Sometimes it even works! WOO! Bart and Nicole, I’m looking at you!
Here’s a brief list of shows I have seen and can recommend:
Mel Buttle’s Up to Pussy’s Bow: Mel’s from Brisbane and she’s obsessed with Gumtree. Stand-up. Very good.
Luisa Omielan’s Am I Right Ladies?: Luisa is from the UK, she does stand-up with dancing and a killer soundtrack. Excellent.
Velvet: Not sure if it technically counts as comedy, it’s a cabaret/circus/variety show. It’s expensive but boy is it worth the entry price! Sexy glittery good times!
Hannah Gadsby’s Dogmatic: It’s a journey through Taylor Swift lyrics and Hannah’s no woe life. Stand-up with intellectual weight. Many lols. Loved it.
Wil Anderson Fire At Wil: The title doesn’t work in America, so get into it here. For reasons why Malcolm Turnbull is a comedians nightmare and other political stand-up hilarity.
Michelle Brasier’s Space Tortoise: What could be better than a singing, dancing tortoise who wants to be a cosmonaut? Not much. Amazing.
Bart Freebairn’s Unlimited Comedy Battle Spirit: Making the everyday absurdity funny, and making absurd hilarity everyday. Weird stand-up also featuring very tight pants. Gold.
Ali McGregor’s Late-Nite Variety-Nite Night: For those late nights when you just want a bit of a flavour of some other shows. Also featuring Ali’s glorious vocal stylings and the Omnichord.
Peter and Bambi Heaven’s The Magic Inside: It’s a magical cabaret show with so many costume changes the mind boggles. You’ll never look at fruit and veg the same way again. Brilliant.
Juan Vesuvius’s Calypso Nights: Juan, Two?: This one requires a bit more work from the audience, but if you’re concentrating you are rewarded with some high-level lols. There are also some excellent physical slapstick gags. Defies classification. Get it in ya!
Becky Lucas’s Baby: Lazy-Feminist-Lady-Stand-up extraordinaire. May or may not feature actual baby. Bloody good shit here.
Andy Matthew’s Plenty: A curling, twisting, beautifully curated narrative journey through existential dread, death, and quantum physics. Makes you think hard. Makes you laugh. Good stuff.
Nicole Henriksen is Makin’ it Rain: Ever wanted to know what it’s actually like to be a stripper? This show is Nicole getting real vulnerable with bonus nudity. Epic.
So um, yeah. I’ve been busy eating up all the art! If I come up with a poem that’s any good I’ll put it up here. Otherwise I’ll try to pack in a few more laughs before the MICF closes on 17 April. Big love!
Last night was the first night of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF). I went out to see two shows; Mel Buttle’s Up to Pussy’s Bow and Luisa Omielan’s Am I Right Ladies?
Two beautiful, strong, funny women. I bought this awesome Bumper Book for Boys, published in 1938, from Mel for 35cents. I’m looking forward to seeing more MICF shows over the next few weeks, it’s such a fun time to be out in Melbourne!
Bumper Book for Boys, it’s going to look great in my flat above a shop in Fitzroy North. I’m not a hipster, I swear.
I’m also giving consideration to doing NaPoWriMo again. That’s National Poetry Writing Month, the idea being that you challenge yourself to write a poem a day for the month of April. I did it two years ago and I quite enjoyed it, although the standard of the poems that came out varied wildly. I don’t know whether I’ll have the time to do it properly, with the comedy festival and the band and the new job and the life modelling and the trying to organise and write our Fringe show, but I might as well give it a try.
If you’re out at the MICF and you see me, say hello! If you have recommendations for shows, tell me! If you want to do the poem a day challenge I’d love to hear from you, it’s always nice to know that there are others out there who are attempting the same stuff I am!
Last month I wrote a super angry poem for my poetry group. It was confused and ranty and not very good. I can look at it now and see that. I had massaged it so that I could keep a couple of lines I was really enamoured of, at the expense of content. The group was very supportive, they gave constructive feedback and were very kind in their framing, even though the poem was really bad.
Intellectually I know that there will be versions of things, or whole pieces that simply aren’t suitable for public consumption. Whether they’re built on flawed premises, or they don’t really make sense, or they’re just a bit crappy. I have to be better at letting them go.
Emotionally I get attached to things. I want things to be good. I want all my darlings to take glorious flight into the world and resonate with other people. But that’s not how life works. Some stuff is great, other stuff is okay, some stuff is terrible. That’s how things are. With practice, the proportions are more skewed to great, but nothing is guaranteed.
I think this is what killing your darlings is about. It’s about learning to see which work needs to be persevered with, and which should just serve as an exercise and be put away in a drawer. With a lock on it. Like all of my angsty teen poetry, which still exists on the internet unfortunately, but I’m certainly not giving any of you the link!
In other news I’m gearing up for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. I hope to post a few little reviews here for the shows I get along to – I have four booked in so far!
And so it was that we came to closing night of the MICF for this year. I have some mixed feelings about my festival experience. I saw nine shows, which is more I think than any year previously, but I also wanted to see so many more shows but didn’t/couldn’t for various reasons. I mean they were pretty good reasons, I was sick for a bit, then I spent a whole weekend in Adelaide, and then I had obscene amounts of uni work. But still –
Anyway, let me just give you a quick run down of my last shows:
Ross Noble seems to make most of his material up as he goes along, it’s a sort of surrealist/childish/bollocks-fuelled journey into his brain and I laughed so hard I was sweating (please tell me I’m not the only person who does that). There was one joke that was a bit off in my opinion, but I guess that’s going to happen from time to time when you make it up as you go along.
I saw Backwards Anorak do a cabaret show last year based heavily on Game of Thrones, and it was pretty funny, except I’m not into GoT so I didn’t get some of the jokes. I’m totally into The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy so I thought I’d go better. I guess maybe they’re work is… well, absurd is maybe the word for it. I laughed, I enjoyed myself, I sang along and did the dance moves (apparently no-one else in the audience did them though, I discovered that when I turned around, awkward!) but it was still pretty incomprehensible. Good, incomprehensible, with singing.
I’ve read some of Clem’s work in The Age, and I respect her politics and her puke yellow armpit hair choices, so I thought I should see her. Her show was great, although her sound guy was odd. I suppose that’s a bit what you get for going on the last night. Also it wasn’t stand-up, it was an amusing story. A very good, amusing story.
There were so many other deserving, fabulous artists/comedians at the festival this year, as there are every year, and I wish I had had the opportunity to see more. I have a Facebook friend who was seeing two or three shows per night for the whole festival, I was jealous. One day, I’m going to write a show and maybe I’ll have the guts to put it on at the MICF. Until then I’ll just go to lots of shows, I’ll see weird lucky dip shows, and random what’s-on-in-the-next-half-hour-shows and see people I’ve heard of sometimes too. I’ll continue to sit in the front row, on my own, because no-one wants to play to an empty front row, and also fuck it, when else do you get to get up in a performer’s grill like that?
Anyway, I guess that’s it. I’m at home in bed with a knee blankey because it’s cold, thanks Melbourne weather. I’m looking forward to getting to some more comedy and theatre in the next few months and I might even get to some Fringe Festival show when it comes around later in the year.
Yep, it’s another Melbourne International Comedy Festival post. I’ve had a bit of a cold over the Easter Weekend so I didn’t get to as many shows as I would have liked but I’ve got another three to add to my list.
It’s lovely and good value. Ali is a singer, so she does some singing, she’s very good. She also gets various other acts from the festival to come do a little snippet during her show. I went last Saturday, so we got DeAnne Smith, Sara Pascoe, The Pajama Men, and Gypsy Wood (who does burlesque). It starts late, but it’s worth staying up for.
Five Stars! Ten out of ten! Holy crap, so many reason everyone who is alive should see this show. It’s sad. It’s hilarious. There’s dancing. There’s singing. Go see it. The end.
Lucky Dip Show
I’m not going to name this last show coz, well, it wasn’t very good. Two guys doing a half hour set each, first guy was really awful, bad mic technique and really odd material which was a bit more like the story of his life and not really jokes. Second guy was much better but still not great, however I see potential.
You can’t win them all, and what’s life without a little bit of awkward lucky dip comedy festival times? More to come! This weekend I’ll be in Adelaide though, going to MoonFaker’s EP launch, also supporting them is Destrends. Woo! If you’re in Adelaide come down.
Most people who live in Australia know Wil Anderson. I hadn’t seen him live before but I thought why not! So I did. It was excellent. Quite thought provoking. Recommended!
Josh Earl does song related comedy. I saw him do Spicks and Specks one time before they cancelled it. As my Facebook friends would know this show involved bubbles and Nick Cave’s ‘Stagger Lee’, what’s not to like? Recommended!
Sammy J and Randy, apparently soon to be on the TV in their own sit com on ABC. They were both much ruder and better in person. Got touched by Randy when he fell into the crowd (I was in the first row), and accosted Sammy J when he was at the restaurant where I ate dinner. Recommended!
Over the next few days/weeks I’m going to see more shows, not sure which ones yet, we’ll see. I’ll try to see some people I haven’t heard of and will definitely see some shows that are not by straight white dudes I promise!
Thursday night was my sixth Melbourne International Comedy Festival Show for the season. I went to La Mama Theatre in Carlton, my companion and I bought a ticket, we waited until the allotted time to shuffle in, sat down, and realised, this was not the show the thought it would be.
La Mama, it turns out, has two venues. In venue A, where we were, they were showing ‘The Legend of King O’Malley’. In venue B, up the road, they were showing ‘The Return of Eric’, the show I had intended to see. ‘Eric’ is a sketch comedy show performed by Scott Gooding, who taught an amateur acting class I took last year and who I was keen to see perform so I could see him in action, but it wasn’t to be.
So to give you some thoughts on the show we actually saw. ‘King O’Malley’ is a lot of things; musical, Australian political history, comedy, drama, in part surreal, in others not so much, with a strong Faustian undertone. Written by Bob Ellis and Michael Boddy and first performed in 1970, the play has a strong fidelity to the sequence of events that were King O’Malley’s life (at least as far as the wikipedia page indicated, which we looked up while eating frogurt as soon as the show had finished).
The production company is Don’t Look Away, whose raison d’etre is to dedicate themselves to ‘reviving and reimagining classic Australian plays’ (from the program). I came out of the experience feeling as though I had thoroughly failed at knowing anything about Australian history.
The acting was of a high standard across the board, especially James Cook (who appropriately played King O’Malley) and and Alex Duncan (who played Nick Angel, the Devil). Being a musical there was a lot of singing, most of it un-miced in the small theatre, which was all very well done.
The production values were good – there were lots of costume changes, lots of inexpensive but highly effective props and backdrops and the whole thing flowed smoothly throughout. I should also make a special mention of Tom Pitts who provided the musical accompaniment (piano mostly) for the entire two and a bit hour show, plus playing us in and out of the theatre and during interval.
My overall impression of this show was mild confusion. I think this was heightened by the fact that it took until about interval to really be convinced that this was not going to turn into ‘The Return of Eric’, and was not helped by the surreal elements of the play. It probably also didn’t help that King O’Malley‘s life story is somewhat unbelievable*. It was, however, a highly enjoyable evening, and one which prompted much discussion and an interest in Australia political history.
All in all it was a fascinating, fruitful, fun if slightly absurd accidental theatre experience.
*Side note: O’Malley was a massive puritan, hated gambling and alcohol among other things, and in true Australian style, instead of getting a suburb in the ACT he got pub named after him.
Last night was my fourth Melbourne International Comedy festival show for 2014 – ‘Laughable’ by Jennifer Wong. I feel like I need to tell you how I made the decision to see Wong’s show, because it’s important to me. After having booked my tickets to Frank Woodley and The Boy with Tape on his Face, I decided that I needed to support female comedians.
So I went through the festival website and looked for women I’d like to see. For a few of them, I’d seen bits of on the TV or on youtube and I knew I wasn’t into their style, and then there were a few unknowns. I gathered the names of the unknowns together and googled them (separately, not all together because that wouldn’t have worked).
Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I find a lot of comic’s material offensive – if it relies on an -ism to get a laugh (racism, sexism, ableism, all the -isms) then I’m not into it. I don’t mind a bit of childish humour, I mean everyone poos, so that’s all good, but occasionally one wants a more sophisticated humour. So when I found a youtube of Jennifer Wong on Channel 31 (a local access TV channel in Melbourne) where she made jokes based on her family and background, but didn’t just make fun of their accents, I was sold. I got to the Forum Theatre in plenty of time for the show, so I sit around for a bit, I go to the toilet, I stand around for a bit more, I look at the time and it’s past the time to start the show and I think ‘I haven’t seen anyone else go in, maybe it hasn’t started yet…’ so I asked the usher and he looked at my like I was stupid (rightly so), and said that the show had started and I should go in.
So I walk in, about 4 minutes late, and sit in a room for about 20 which is only half full. This is the single smallest show I’ve been to ever. Wong is very nice about my lateness, and welcomes me in as I sit in the back of the tiny room. ‘Laughable’ is a show about puns. I like a good pun, but I suspect that I didn’t show my appreciation as well as some of the other patrons because I’ve been schooling my face not to react to the terrible puns inflicted on me by my boss. I therefore apologise for any eye-rolling or sighing that I sent Jennifer’s way – it wasn’t you, it was me, honestly.
The show is interactive, as Wong takes suggestions from the audience and works the suggestions into ‘pun’chlines. With such a small audience I think it would be really hard to keep your energy up, and I have a lot of respect for Wong for standing there and being bubbly and awesome throughout. She is an intelligent, polite comedian and deserves to do well at it, so you should all go to see Jennifer Wong at the Forum. You may roll your eyes, but I think that’s probably allowed and it’s all good stuff!
Here is a youtube, which doesn’t appear to contain punning, to demonstrate:
The observant among you will notices that this post is entitled ‘Two for the price of one!’. After wandering off from the forum I went to the frozen yoghurt place in Swanston St and then wandered over to Fed Square where the Spiegel Tent is set up. Jennifer Wong had mentioned that she was appearing in a couple of other shows – Sam Simmons’ ‘Death of a Sails-Man’ and something else at the Melbourne Town Hall at 11:00pm which I’ve forgotten the name of and now can’t find a link to. I took my frogurt over to the Spiegel tent and saw a massive line of people filing in in an orderly fashion. I thought, ‘maybe I’ll see that show sometime over Easter, could be fun’. It was about that point when I was offered a free ticket to the show by a man who’s friend was apparently unable to attend and I wasn’t about to say no to that!
I vaguely know Sam Simmons because he appears a bit on Triple J, but had no idea what the show was about. Since I was on my own, I was ushered to a seat in the front row, which turned out to be both amazing and sort of frightening. The best way I can describe ‘Death of a Sails-Man’ is to call it a surreal play. It’s really very odd. And quite rude (adult content and swearing). And sort of genius. Maybe. To be honest I’m not really sure what happened during the 60 minute show, but I laughed a bunch and came away feeling confused, slightly soiled, and with a general feeling of happiness.
It’s a good show, if you like feeling like you’re not quite sure what’s going on and there’s a slight danger that something might go horribly horribly awry. There were also lots of props.
Show three of my MICF for 2014 was ‘Winter is Coming‘ performed by Backwards Anorak. As you may be able to tell, the show was a Game of Thrones parody. The first thing I should probably mention is that I’m not a Game of Thrones fan – I’ve never attempted to read the books, and I’ve chosen not to watch the HBO show because the one or two episodes I’ve seen were far to cruel and bleak for me; everyone seemed to hate everyone else and humanity I just didn’t feel nice inside afterwards. I’m sure that it’s a well crafted stroy and all of that, but I’m just not particularly knowledgeable. There I said it!
I am however a bit of a massive nerd about various other fantasy texts, and the references to J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ series and ‘The Hobbit’ found me well, I also enjoyed the ‘Doctor Who’ bits, and the ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ stuff too. Oh, I nearly forgot that Hogwarts is also in Westeros, apparently! I was actually able to get most of the GoT references because of my *cough* slight problem with Tumblr, and the fact that I don’t live under a rock.
Content aside then, how did I rate the performance? My biggest complaint was that the venue did not suit the show. We were in the Music Room at the Trades Hall, which would be fine for a stand-up comic where what they were doing was not so important because it was very difficult to see the performers over the heads of the crowd, and I was only in the middle! It was a smallish room, it probably held 100 people, and most of the seats were taken, so that’s good. It did mean that it was incredibly hot in there though so that wasn’t my favourite thing either.
There were five performers, Michelle Brasier, Vince Milesi, James Baker, Laura Frew & Leo Miles, all of whom appeared to have spent a goodly amount of time in acting classes with improv bases, which at times was great, but at other times made the show feel like they didn’t know what they were doing. I’m sure that the whole thing was meticulously scripted, but as my friend commented as we left, it was a bit like we just saw an acting workshop, not a show – therein lies the danger of acting like you’re not acting so well.
Anyway, if you enjoy loving parodies by nerds, improv theatre, dragons, incent, ambiguous sexuality, beards or singing (which was very good, or Eurovision, which gets a mention too) then I would say this show was a solid choice.
Fleur Blüm 