A thing much overlooked in most Shakespearean criticism appears to be his remarkable aptitude for show-stopping musical numbers. This weekend I went and saw As You Like It performed by the Bell Shakespeare Company, and was treated to not one, not toe, but THREE blow-out song-and-dance pieces, complete with Morris dancing and live instrumentation. Granted, the definition of "live" might have to be stretched a bit to include a synthesiser orchestra being piped in while one of the actors in a non-speaking role bashes away at a snare drum and an old Roland, but you get my point.

Really, the musical numbers were a bit much. A few of them were reasonably entertaining, especially the lower-key ones, but when things are propelled into the realm of full-on productions complete with soldiers goofily leaping over sticks and shepherdesses in stars-and-stripes hot pants tango-dancing, it can get a bit silly. I wish they'd scaled it back a bit to be less tacky.

Anyway, the performances were all quite good! Especially Sakia Smith and Lexi Freiman as the female leads. Damien Ryan's Jacques was pretty good, too, although he became the subject of a strange subplot inserted to critique current attitudes towards same-sex marriage as a way of compensating for the Happily Ever After ending. That was a little ill-considered, I thought. The cross-dressing priest and all that - they rewrote some of his lines and everything. Very strange. I thought the subtler stuff with Jacques worked much better - they made him gay, in an not-especially-overt way, and had him try to kiss Rosalind-as-Ganymede. Then, when he went into the monastery at the end, it had the weight of Implied Meaning and Back Story. So I liked that part.

Speaking of the cross-dressing priest, I must say that Touchstone started-out pretty likeable, but after a while Ed Wightman became so scenery-hungry it became sort of a alarming. I guess the play was trying to convey frenetic energy and a kind of burlesque attitude, but by the end it had lost some of the momentum of the earlier scenes, and was heading to a place I didn't want to follow it to. Which is as much Shakespeare's fault as Bell's. The play has some great lines and set-pieces, but it's a bit uneven overall.

The best "part that probably wasn't in the original" parts were probably Touchstone the fool travelling through the forest, where he is frightened by people acting like animals (including putting chairs on their heads to imitate stags), and Camilla Ah Kin's cry of "No John, we haven't rehearsed this part I don't know how to do it" as she was roped by Touchstone into doing a ventriloquism set. Touchstone is played by Ed Wightman, so I don't really understand that at all, unless she was talking to the director.

All in all, it wasn't half bad. Some parts of it were excellent (any time that Rosalind and Celia were on stage together). The crazy approach is probably closer to how it would have been played in Shakespeare's day anyway.

7/10 I guess.

As for other things, I have a 2000 word essay due today which I haven't started yet, a presentation due Wednesday which I haven't started yet, and a 200 word essay due Friday that i, need it be said, haven't started yet. I'd like to say that I never used to have this problem, but I'd be lying.

In other news, Somewhere, Anywhere by New Buffalo is absolutely beautiful. I've listened to it six or seven times since Saturday.

And I have gas.

Tags: homework, theatre, vapours
Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Decoder Ring - Fractions

WRITING is hard.

I am currently undertaking a project to write 14 decent songs in the month of February, and record them as demos. The recording part isn't essential but I'd like to do it anyway, just plunking them out live into a tape player and then maybe putting them on the computer later.

You may not think that writing 14 songs would be hard, but I would like to draw your attention back to the decent part. So far I have only one song that I am mostly happy with, and the meter shifts around on that one like sand in your underpants. I also penned a 15 stanza folk ballad about a child being stolen by the fairies and irresponsible parenting, which I consider substantially lacking. And a bunch of stuff about family matters. Anyway, most of it is fairly shoddy, although at least it manages to avoid a using cliche phrases most of the time. If nothing else my guitar is improving in leaps and bounds.

RIPPING JOHN DENVER ALBUMS is hard.

You wouldn't think it would be, but I lost my stereo for god knows how many hours, I have to listen to it hiss away when I'm by this computer, and I have to rush back in here every 20 minutes and flip sides. Then I have to burn them all to CD. Feh! I say.

FACING DEMONS is hard.

Metaphorical demons, mostly. See the first two paragraphs. Real demons are also hard to face, but in a different and less immediately vexing way.

LIVING AT HOME is hard.

On the one hand, you get your washing done for you and have access to satellite TV. There's company and things are fairly pleasant. On the other, all the deep-seated rage which we suppress in regards to our parents comes boiling up and you find yourself constantly muttering expletives under your breath and hating your father for not being the kind of person you wish he was.

ALGEBRA is hard.

Obviously.If you disagree you're probably a spalien.

Also lately, I have been listening to Bob Dylan again. You know what I hate about Bob Dylan? it is impossible to listen to the music of Bob Dylan and not try to emulate it. This is a problem, I feel. On the other hand, his stuffed has helped me to overcome a few problems in the productivity department.

fffgug

Last year, I downloaded the advance leak of Ear Drum by Talib Kweli, because I'd heard some good things. I thought it was okay, but sort of boring and lacking in the sounds department. And Talib Kweli's lyrics aren't good enough to justify a lack in the sounds department. Also, for some reason, Kweli's flow was out of time.

But now I have reacquired the album, and this time the sounds are tip-top! And his words are in time to the beat! I mean, it's not stellar, but it's enjoyable. I'm kind of getting tired of a lot of this new stuff aping that damned Big Kanye West Production stuff and the tinkly pianos and EVERY FUCKING HIP-HOP ACT WANTS TO BE JAY-FUCKING-Z. Fuck Jay-Z. How many fucking versions of god-damned "99 Problems" do we need? And how many "Jesus Walks"?

Fuck Lupe Fiasco too, for good measure.

I don't actually hate Jay Z and Kanye West. But I am angry anyway.

Perhaps this is most condensed occurrence of the term "fuck" in anything I've ever written.

Okay now I've gotten angry at this album because the sounds are too good. Everything is so dense and sort of annoying. Damn it. At least there hasn't yet been a sped-up, high-pitched Al Green sample.

I have mixed opinions. I should have bought that copy of De la Soul Is Dead I saw in the -$10 bin.

Damn.

[[ WE'VE GOT MORE FUNK THAN A TOURING DRUG BAND ]]

They have a damned fancy website. Good luck!

We went to the beach today. I gave a thirteen year old girl a flying clothesline and then I sprained my ankle. I am currently hobbling around the house on a cane.

As penance for my profanity, here is the fifth best mix I've ever made

http://www.thojit.kundor.org/lastfm/januarybodyparts.zip

1. Funkadelic - Free Your Mind... And Your Ass Will Follow
2. Architecture In Helsinki - Heart it Races
3. Groove Armada - I See You Baby
4. Dan Deacon - Trippy Green Skull
5. Broadcast - Corporeal
6. Four Tet - Smile Around the Face
7. Grandadbob - Open Mouthed
8. Grinderman - No Pussy Blues
9. Can - Mushroom
10. Bjork - Mouth's Cradle
11. Shriekback - My Spine is the Bassline
12. A Tribe Called Quest - Clap Your Hands
13. Future Sound of London - High Tide on the Sea of Flesh
14. Clark - Night Knuckles
15. Cocteau Twins - Feet Like Fins (Otherness Mix)
16. Air - Biological
17. Bjork - My Spine (Evelyn Glennie Mix)

I need to listen to more house music.

Or back to Geelong, it being my principle place of habitation for many years and my preferred City to Live In.

People who write Geelong of as some sort of scum pit or industrial hell hole have either never actually been to Geelong, or drove through it once three years ago on their way to the Great Ocean Road and decided that it was all like Corio. Which is sort of like saying that all of Melbourne is like Footscray.

Anyway, I am going to study at the Deakin branch in Warn Ponds, which is utterly enormous, and stay at my Dad's for a couple of months until we get sick of each other and I bugger off to a share house.

It's all very exciting. I even get to pay a month's rent on the house I'm currently living in, only to move out in a week.

In other news, I still don't think much of New Years. And I kind of think that both my dad and my sister are arses.

Just recently I watched Grapes of Death, a wonderful French zombie film from the golden age of genre films (the 1970s). I did not watch it on my laptop however, because my infuriating DVD drive has become even less accepting than usual in regards to the discs I try to play in it. I can't even watch my copy of Blood and Black Lace anymore! I payed 20 bucks for that movie (not counting postage)!

Anyway, Grapes of Death is an excellent and very strange film filled with wooden acting and things that don't really make sense.  A pair of young women are attacked during a train ride by a lunatic covered in open sores. One of the girls is killed, but the other (the brunette, naturally), escapes and spends the rest of the film wandering around the French countryside being menaced by people who have been rendered murderously insane, pus-oozing well, sort-of-zombies. Really they aren't zombies at all, so much as they are just people who've been driven mad by the pesticide trace elements of which have found their way into the local wine stock. Anyway, this is a good thing, as it gives a break from the usual zombie formula of long periods barricaded up inside some large building culminating in the destruction of the safe haven due to bickering on the part of the humans. That was good in Night of the Living Dead, and I guess ripping it off for a few million other movies seemed like a surefire idea. it might have been, twenty years ago, but my previously undying enthusiasm for the formula has begun to waver slightly.

Anyway, this all leads the brunette, whose name I've forgotten, to hang-out with a blind chick, almost get murdered by the ludicrously attractive Brigitte Lahaie (really, the woman is astonishingly pretty), and then team-up with a couple of sane fellows who pack rifles and dynomite and make the final trek to the town where she was supposed to be meeting her fiance.

I liked it! It's beautifully shot, the French countryside is nothing of not a novel setting for a zombie movie (although, I guess the fact that the whole outbreak of lunatics is caused in large part by grapes could give it some sort of tenuous link to The Day of the Triffids, if one were squinting and also drunk - and hey! Both films have blind chicks in them!), and the decidely weird nature of the threat itself makes everything all the more disconcerting. I especially like that aspect of the film - despite being a thoroughly gory film with lots of boobs and blood and boobs covered in blood, the central horror of the film comes from how weird everything is. I wouldn't exactly call Grapes of Death a horror film of ideas, but Jean Rollin does manage to create a very curious atmosphere, where everything becomes quite nebulous and alarming and creepy synthesiser music plays as people run through pointy rock formations and lots of fog. Rollin also manages to pull this off better than a lot of the big-name Italians (although i wouldn't begin to say that the film as a whole is as good as something like The Beyond or Suspiria), by creating a dream-like and fragmented scenario within a landscape that doesn't clash with it at all - i.e. a plotless and languid film doesn't seem nearly as stupid when the scenario does not require a plot and people are roaming through the green hills of Arcady. This probably makes it seem slightly less weird at times than it actually is, but it also stops Grapes of Death from seeming as silly as it sometimes actually is.

That said, I really wish Rollin had kept the politics as a subtext in this film. The conversations between the brunette's (what was her name?) two rescuers just come-off ham-fisted and dumb, and seem to be taxing the film-makers' abilities as writers of dialogue. it definately seems that this film came-off as well as it did because it coasts by  on images and actions more than writing.

That said, I do like some of the writing! I think the best stuff remains unsaid, like the very subtle set-up for just why (apart from the obvious reasons) the brunette (Elisabeth! I looked it up) does what she does at the end of the film. When people open their mouths it can get pretty silly.

Anyway, I would definitely recommend the film. It's technically excellent (especially the gore effects - I'm still trying to figure-out the mechanics of that pitchfork scene), a fun premise and many of the better aspects of 70s horror without too many of the downsides. It's not exactly a masterpiece, but it works quite well.

Also, my CD player keeps refusing to play my burnt CDs. I am irked. There are only so many times that I can listen to Led Zeppelin IV before growing tired of it (five times).

The following song was originally recorded by Blind Willy "Lightning" Johnson, back in 1935, and made famous by a 1956 reworking by jazz-pop quintet Chester Best and his Forward Feet. However, Best modified the lyrics slightly to focus upon the looming threat of Communism, and as a consequence I have followed the original recording.

Well I sat down to write, the words wouldn’t come
When it came to narration seems I had been struck dumb

I’m struggling hard
I got the Writer’s Block Blues again
I’m struggling hard
To do a damn thing with this pen 

It’s not so much making a plot or a pun
As actually mustering wherewithal to get things done

I’m struggling hard
With those ol’ Writer’s Block Blues again
Guess I’ll be alright
Come a day or ten

Guess I’ll be alright
When the words come back again

Every time I try and use my laptop DVD player it seizes-up halfway through a film. If it even starts at all. The other night we tried four different discs in it before having to resort to using data-CD with Suspiria burnt on it. And to add insult to injury I can't figure-out the timing on the subtitles I downloaded for my copy of Sholay.

Pah.

In other news, my novel is not really working-out. Unsuprisingly. At 3,000 words it has gone through several orgies, a number of P.O.V. changes and a mangling of the history of gun powder.

Also, I've decided to embark on a campaign of self-education. Much like last Summer, I intend to spend my time in the air-conditioned comfort of the library watching VHS copies of old movies.

And who the hell keeps stealing all my food. Half a loaf of bread and half a green capsicum.

Fhneh.

In closing! Though it saddens me, I have decided to leave-off growing a moustache.