Vignettes of this 'n' that

I've been suffering from a major case of blogckage over the past week. As each day draws to a close, I look at my lonely computer and lament the lack of meaningful engagement I've held with it before berating myself into a fitful sleep and turning up to work 45 minutes late the next day. The idea of spending any amount of time trying to construct interesting posts seems to be immeasurably draining. A small part of me is considering just shutting the whole thing down, but I'm a vapid fame whore who gets off on checking her stats each day.

I blame Facebook. It has ruined my life. After souping up my profile, I added the Scrabble application and now spend approximately 75% of my working day refreshing the screen and trying to think of new and inventive ways to disguise the fact I'm playing with letters all day instead of doing the work I get paid for. I'm playing 13 games all at the same time which makes for a lot of refreshing. It's become like a nervous tic - I can actually feel that tension creeping into my neck when I lapse into my autistic scrabble playing geekdom. How can something so rewarding feel so bad? LE SIGH.

See? Even now I've just ducked out to make one of my moves and install a Top Friends application. Madness! Facebook will be the end of me.

Ah well. Things could be worse. I could be addicted to My Spazz, which would make me both time poor and unappreciative of superior web 2.0 endeavours. Swings and roundabouts...

***

I went to see the most incredibly bad musical last week. Hailed as Australia's next great thing by an arts fraternity seemingly without vision, imagination or taste, Everything's F**ked is described as thus:

"At last! A musical about 20 somethings in Australia!"

Which is great, because that's exactly the thing that's been plaguing me every night for I don't know HOW LONG...

Note to blurb writers: a proliferation of 20 something themes in a theatrical outing is likely to turn your audience off, for the simple reason that we 20 somethings are vapid, boring and vain and nobody finds our lives interesting except ourselves and sycophantic Arts buffoons.

Here is the review I wrote for Indaily. It will give you a fair idea of the quality of the production...

"Sean Peter's Everything's F**ked has emerged from five years of workshops, rewrites and grant applications to a final product blessed with a sold out performance run. Winner of a swag of awards already, Everything's F**ked seems to have taken the arts scene by storm. In light of such accolades, I have to ask - were we all watching the same production?

By all accounts, Everything's F**ked should be a ripper experience. The ensemble cast is extremely talented and charismatic, and work well together on stage. One can't fault Geoff Crowhurst as director and Kathryn Sproul's set design is inspired. Multimedia is employed cleverly and to great effect, while the conventions of musical theatre are duly acknowledged. On paper, Everything's F**ked looks really rather good.

And really rather good it it would be, were it not for the fact that the plot is contrived rubbish [Note: I wanted to say "completely pants" but I wasn't sure if the readership are au fait with pretentious indie speak]. Honestly, I would love to one day see a theatrical production about twenty-somethings that doesn't insist on injecting "gritty" into its thematic structure. "Gritty" is not a compelling enough element that it may entirely replace substance. Must we insist on perpetuating the notion that all twenty-somethings are self obsessed, tiresome bores? Stories like these have become so predictable that my companions and I (all of whom are actually 20 somethings) were entirely unsurprised when the second half revealed a former drug problem- cum-blood disease [Note: It was Hep C. Hep C! The girl couldn't kiss the boy because she had Hep C from being a dirty needle sharing drug addict when she was 16. Can anyone say this-play-was-clearly-written-in-the-nineties-then-awkwardly-updated-for-a-naughties-feel? As Petstarr sang on the night, "Everybody has AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!"].

Peter may have been trying to write a modern day opera, but I think he forgot that the reason opera is more greatly enjoyed in a foreign language is because singing about the minutiae of your day is actually insanely dull. Judging by the abundance of empty seats during the second half, I'm not the only one who thought so.

But all this could have been forgiven had Peter written characters with any depth. More than once I found myself wanting to hurl my glass at the invariably self indulgent crisis occurring onstage and yell, 'For Dumbledore's sake, I DON'T CARE!'.

Everything's F**ked? No sh*t."

Gratifyingly, I've had feedback from others who resoundingly agreed with me (as well as a few who are quite obviously connected with the production and have hence had rose coloured blinkers permanently attached to their tasteless heads

Seriously - this is a musical that includes a song called "On The Bus" (which you can watch here), an embarrassing time line referencing of September 11, a declaration of love through the creation of a worldwide computer virus, a character stupidly named Red for no apparent reason other than she likes to wear a lot of that particular colour (it certainly had less to do with her personality than Sean Peter's probable conviction that nicknames are all the rage amongst the twentysomethings) and the aforementioned predictable 'traumatic past' reveal.

But the piece de resistance came when Belle's ("Everybody has AIDS!") condition is revealed to the two owners of their share house and they kick her out (compassionate, no?). Belle stands in front of her TV, drops to the ground to perform some weird Voldemort style slithering before diappearing under the floor.

Yes. The signposted TV addict character's attempted suicide is illustrated through a reverse Samara journey into the box.

She crawled into the fucking TV people!

God, it was so bad.

It's not that I want to be bitchy for the sake of it. Everything about the play was great apart from the actual script, lyrics and storyline. I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of Sean Peter and the mentalist team of people who kept awarding him grants to turn what is clearly a hopeless puddle of utter bilge into an embarrassing outing for all concerned. This production has been workshopped for FIVE YEARS - you'd think someone might have twigged that it was beyond help a long time ago, and the root cause of the problem probably has something to do with the fact that Peter clearly wrote it more than ten years ago and has no apparent sense of humour about the fact that twenty somethings are, for the most part, nitwits.

The moral of the story is that my tax payer dollars have in part gone towards funding something that the 90s would reject for being derivative.

So, you know. don't go see it.

/ rant.

***

Begins with "H" and ends with "ypocritical"

OR

Why I love our government

irreverent larrikin

terrorist

Democracy at work. Stand by our brave men and women etc.

***

From The Tele:

"What are Jennifer Hawkins' tips for looking good in a bikini? Ask her. Miss Universe Blogs Live."

Question: Is the incredibly popular Daily Telegraph's content proof that

a) Australia's print media is up the spout

b) Merely further evidence that the Australian people are dimwitted nincompoops?

c) Another indicator that Jennifer Hawkins is both overexposed and overpaid?

Discuss.

***

Speaking of The Tele, I read that Australian Idol 2006's Dean "Dhinn" Geyer is jetting off to LA to spend two weeks with his girlfriend, Veronica #1 (or is it #2? Does it matter?)

So much for being a big fat Christian virgin. The Veronicas wear black net clothing man, and as everyone knows this means they're massive sex beasts with a penchant for liking it rough. Probably he'll do it with both of them after snorting cocaine off of their porcelain lady pillows. I guess True Love doesn't wait after all...

***

Speaking of Idol, there were some monumentally tragic auditons on tonight' debut show. I had to cover my eyes for most of them, especially that poor girl who kept playing her originals on the keyboard and singing over the judges' pleas that she leave. It's the sincere ones that upset me the most. They bound in there, all full of confidence from the handful of tone deaf friends they have that insist they try to 'make a go of it' and then they spectacularly crash and burn. Classic/Painful.

Make sure you check out Petstarr's weekly Idol recaps - not only is she a mad genius, she's quite possibly the funniest woman on the planet.

***

Speaking of The Veronicas, I'm halfway through season one of Veronica Mars and I'm madly in love with it. I want to marry the series, the series creator, Veronica AND Veronica's dad and live a gloriously polygamous life in a fictional town somewhere sunny and warm. I would even venture to say that I love Veronica Mars as a character more than Buffy Summers (although the shows are of course incomparable in a remarkably comparable way).

I love discovering new obsessions.

***

In tonight's episode of Survivor, the two men next on the chopping block snuck away to strategise about their next devious steps. They kept going on about how smart they were and how it was so great to see two incredible brains joining forces, little realising that two members of the opposing alliance were hiding in the bushes behind them. It was classic.

Must have been so hard for the cameraman to not shake from laughter... Hah!

***

There, I feel that's made up for my gross lack of typage over the past week. Now I sleep.

Peace out (you irreverent larrikins, you...)