Performance

Sydney Theatre Company: Frankenstein
The Border Project: Highway Rock 'n' Roll Disaster
The Hayloft Project: Chekhov Re-Cut: Platonov
Ridiculusmus: The Importance of Being Earnest/Tough time, nice time
Melbourne University Student Union Theatre: Attempts on Her Life
Sydney Theatre Company: The Season at Sarsaparilla
Opera Australia: Arabella/The Makropoulos Secret
Red Stitch Actors Theatre: Pool (No Water)
Griffin Theatre Company: The Modern International Dead
floogle: Ollie and the Minotaur/B Sharp: Killer Joe/Frogbattleship: Stoning Mary
Higgledy Piggledy Enterprises: The Impotent Fury of the Privileged

Honourable Mentions: Wendy Houstoun: Happy Hour, Sydney Theatre Company: The Women of Troy, The Hayloft Project: Spring Awakening, Redroom Theatre: The Threepenny Opera, Dancehouse: Terrain/You're not alone...just in New Zealand

Cinema

This year has been marked by a shocking lack of cinema-going, in part because I was moving between cities at the time of at least three international film festivals. That and, well, I just didn't get to the cinema very much. But I will be doing so over the next twelve months with some of the zeal that marked my time at university.

1.

Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)
There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
The Rape of the Sabine Women (Eve Sussman, 2006)
The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)
Man On Wire (James Marsh, 2008)

Honourable Mentions: The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007), Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (Mark Hartley, 2008)

Spot Matt's Cameo: The Beautiful and Damned (Richard Wolstencroft, 2008)

2.

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964)/Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)
Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995)/Je vous salue, Sarajevo (Jean-Luc Godard, 1993)
Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982)
La Commune (Paris, 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2000)

Television

The West Wing (Seasons 1-7) (Created by Aaron Sorkin, 1999-2006)
Black Books (Seasons 1-3) (Created by Dylan Moran, 2000-2004)
30 Rock (Season 1) (Created by Tina Fey, 2006)

Alchoholic Mentions: Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure and Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure: The New World (Presented by Oz Clarke and James May, 2006-2007), Jancis Robinson's Wine Course (Presented by Jancis Robinson, 1995)

Music

Musica Viva: Private Fundraiser with Alina Ibragimova
Sydney Symphony Orchestra: Igor Stravinsky's Firebird
Australian Chamber Orchestra: Vivacious (Vivaldi's Four Seasons with Alina Ibragimova)
The Famous Spiegeltent: Megan Washington

The Only CD I Listened to On a Loop: Dream Until We Die by Martin Martini and the Bone Palace Orchestra

Books

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman
Cultural Amnesia by Clive James
Echoes of an Autobiography by Naguib Mahfouz
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Silk by Alessandro Baricco
A Late Education by Alan Moorehead
More Please/My Life as Me by Barry Humphries
Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
The Perfect Glass of Wine/How to Drink Absolutely Everything by Ben Canaider

Harold Pinter, 'Art, Truth & Politics', Nobel Lecture, December 7, 2005:

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

[...]

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us—the dignity of man.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, p.74:

"Ought we to be drunk every night?" Sebastian asked one morning.
"Yes, I think so."
"I think so too."

...is how some reviewers described it. And to some extent they're right. But it's also as addictive as crack.

Catch the live version in Sydney if you get a chance. A right-wing stealth bomb that isn't at all stealthy and, in any case, redeems itself with sheer energy, passion and precision. I'm going a second time.

"I don't think he was happy with a dancer unless their feet bled." – Russ Tamblyn

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I have always been a big fan of Jim Carrey. Not merely because he makes me laugh, but also because he scares me: something about the plasticity of his body and its wiry contortions has always left me feeling unsettled. When writers like Nicole Brenez talk of the body and figuration in the cinema, I always think of Carrey and his pushing of the human form to its limits. What pathologies is a body like that expressing? Of which unspoken pressures is it a symptom?

Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered the following article on The Atlantic's website, completely by accident. It's not a lengthy analysis, by any means, but may well be a launchpad for one.

James Parker, 'The Existential Clown', The Atlantic:

Movie after movie finds Carrey either confronting God ("Smite me, O mighty Smiter!" he roars in Bruce Almighty) or enacting, violently and outrageously, some version of the dilemma identified by the Spanish existentialist José Ortega y Gasset—that man, as he exists in the world, is "equivalent to an actor bidden to represent the personage which is his real I."

[...]

All of which would be the sheerest philosophical prattle if Jim Carrey didn't so consistently, as a performer, embody these various propositions. Here, buzzing in his shoulder sockets, is the struggle for authenticity; there, warping his tongue, is the torment of becoming. At his most Carrey-esque, he is always trapped mid-metamorphosis, wrestling visibly with the sort of transformative inner pressure that in another context would produce a superhero—or a man-size cockroach.

Naguib Mahfouz, Echoes of an Autobiography, p.115

Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta'ih said:

How beautiful it is to bid someone farewell with each of you holding the other in more esteem.

The Kinks, 'Strangers', Lola versus Powerman and the Money-Go-Round, Part One:

Where are you going I don't mind
I've killed my world and I've killed my time
So where do I go what do I see
I see many people coming after me
So where are you going to I don't mind
If I live too long I'm afraid I'll die
So I will follow you wherever you go
If your offered hand is still open to me
Strangers on this road we are on
We are not two we are one

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