MAN ABOUT TOWN

Fjarkanistan - Amina Amy - Dirty Three A Time To Be Small - Interpo lMusic is my Radar - Blur Sister Jack - Spoon Milk Bottle Trio - Saint Etienne Modern Art - Art Brut What Did We Talk About (Before You Had Babies?) - Rob Clarkson Something in the Way - Nirvana In A Radio Show - Okkervil River Ballistics - The Great Fire of London I've Seen It All - Bjork w. Thom Yorke Don't Stop Now - Lemon Jelly Cool Kids Keep - The American Analogue Set The Chaos Offensive - Oceansize Come In Out of the Rain - Engineers Kennedy Killed the Hat - Buck 65 The Happy Sea - Colleen The Winter Hit Hard - Hood Dance Me In - Sons & Daughters

The last couple of months of my life have felt rather like being in a holding pattern above an airport, circling endlessly, lost in the clouds, waiting for clearance to start my descent from freefall into a new era of my life. I think yesterday the signal finally came through. I got a phonecall asking me to come in for a job interview on Thursday afternoon; a job I really want, and think I could do well. If I get it there's going to be a significant period of adjustment, as I haven't actually held down a fulltime job since I quit the public service in 1989. Yes, 1989. That's sixteen bloody years ago. Shit. Let me shake my head in disbelief and think about that for a moment. Sixteen...years? Wow. I feel suddenly old. Sixteen years of working in part time jobs (as a medical receptionist at the Victorian AIDS Council, as the Text Coordinator of the 2000 Next Wave Festival, and as the Artistic Director of the youth arts organisation Express Media). Sixteen years of falling in l...

I should be doing the dishes. I should be doing my laundry. I should be vaccuming the flat. I should be cleaning the bathroom. I should be reading media releases. I should be replying to e-mails from people who have requested an interview on my show. I should be listening critically to the pile of new release CD's on my loungeroom floor and making notes about them for my MCV music column and for next week's radio program. I should be joining a gym. I should be drinking less. I should be taking less speed. I should be eating better. I should be calling old friends. I should be making new friends. I should be finding a boyfriend. I should either tell D. how I feel about him (how I've felt about him for the last two years while being a shoulder for him to cry on when his emotionally and psychologically abusive boyfriend was getting too much) or just walk away. I should be rewriting my old novel. I should be starting a new novel. I should be writing new short stories. I should ...

For some reason - don't ask me why (who am I to explain my actions to you when I don't even understand them myself?) - I thought you might like to read a list of the songs that I played on my RRR arts program SmartArts today; lists apparently being popular things to write on your blog when you want to write something but are incapable of writing anything insightful, amusing or coherent. So, today's SmartArts playlist: Expect the Worst/Cos She's a Tourist - The Dears Small Change - Gersey These Wooden Ideas - Idlewild Been Caught Stealing - Jane's Addiction Rebellion (Lies) - The Arcade Fire The Mercy Seat - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds Wolf on a String - Machine Translations Blood - Editors Evil and a Heathen - Franz Ferdinand Love in Fear - Constantines Spirit Ditties of No Tone - Deerhoof A Man Walks Into A Bar - Jens Leckman I'm the Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side - The Magnetic Fields Small Memory - Mum Into the Light - Jah Wobble After D...

'Flying Lessons', a photogravure by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison (USA) So it's just gone 10.44am on Saturday morning, and I'm sitting in front of the computer on the new ergonomic desk chair that I bought myself this week. My back will thank me for it, although my chiropractor will probably be sad cos it means she'll see less of me, which in my book is officially A GOOD THING (tm). Right now I should be working: specifically, I should be reading though, then scoring on their artistic merit, a big folder of Arts Victoria grant applications that's sitting on my kitchen table. Instead I've been successfully procrastinating for the last hour by adding a couple of recent articles to my blog, then scanning through blogs by friends to see what they've been up to, then clicking on their links to discover new blogs (such as Surlyboy 's blog: A Falling Out With The In Crowd . Love the name, liked the cynical humour of his posts). Having done all that, and ...

Y oung composer and clarinettist Richard Haynes talks with Richard Watts about the great love of his life. Aged only 22, composer and clarinet player Richard Haynes has already won numerous accolades, including Symphony Australia ’s 2003 Young Performer of the Year award. He has performed as a soloist with symphony orchestras in Victoria, Tasmania and Queensland, and has seen his original compositions performed by ensembles and soloists in Australia, China, Germany and Italy. He’s young, gay, successful and good-looking. So why is he still single? "I’ve chosen a particularly difficult career path within the classical music world, so I really must travel as much as possible and make as many connections as possible with other performers and composers and organisations," Haynes explains. The past few years have seen him performing and studying in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and France in order to further his career. Consequently he says he has abandoned the ...

Richard Watts gets behind the tulle and tutus of male ballet troupe The Trocks to discover what makes the company tick. Tory Dobrin has worked with the drag ballet troupe Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo since 1980, first as a dancer, and since 1994 as the company’s Artistic Director. He attributes his longevity with ‘the Trocks’, as the company are generally known, to a love for ballet that borders on the obsessive. "I - and indeed all of the dancers too - really love classical ballet," he says. "It’s the sort of love that can be a really obsessive thing. We have fun with that obsession, so it makes for a good time. We’ve found the thing that we really love and we pursue it. It just happens to have a particular kind of twist." Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo formed in 1974, and over the intervening decades has grown into a company adored by gay man and hardcore ballet aficionados alike for their sly juxtaposition of camp humour and a mastery of class...

Ordered to 'strike a pose' at Bec and Bob's wedding reception, Richard vogues, while Bec wonders just what the hell he is doing. (Oh, and note the sporan - very handy for preventing your kilt blowing up in windy weather.)

POST-ROCK Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK – Múm [Morr Music] This hard-to-find debut album from Icelandic post-rock band Múm saw an original limited release in 2000, and has now been re-released on German label Morr Music. A combination of wistful, ambient electronica, cut-up beats, and a diverse array of instruments (including accordion, glockenspiel, guitar and harpsichord) it reveals the early Múm to have been more reliant upon synthesisers and harmonies than they are today, yet still displays the sense of experimentation evident on the band’s more recent albums. While primarily of appeal to Múm’s fans, Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK will doubtless delight anyone with an interest in Iceland’s innovative music scene. 'Glõsõli' – Sigur Rós [EMI] ‘Glõsõli’, the first single to be released from Sigur Rós’s forthcoming fourth album Takk… was one of several new songs the Icelandic post-rock band previewed at their rapturously received Melbourne show during their re...

Just cut and pasted the appropriate HTML code into the sidebar of my blog so that I can start adding links to some of my favourite places on the web. I have to fine-tune it yet, but hopefully on another few days you'll be able to visit some of my friend's blogs, and many other informative, entertaining, or downright strange corners of our virtual world. Right now though, I'm heading off for another evening at the Fringe!

Richard Watts talks to Fred Frumberg from Amrita Performing Arts about the struggle to resurrect an almost-lost Cambodian artform. It is a backhanded compliment of the most terrible kind that dictators so greatly fear the ideas of artists and intellectuals that they murder us in our thousands whenever they come to power. Cambodia under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge was no different to China during the Cultural Revolution in this regard, for in addition to the estimated 1.5 million (one in five) Cambodians who died of malnutrition during Pol Pot’s regime, at least 200,000 more were executed as enemies of the state: countless artists among them. "Approximately 80 to 90% of all Cambodian artists died in some way or another during the Khmer Rouge," explains Fred Frumberg, a former UN Peace Corp member who originally intended to stay in Cambodia for a year and who is still there almost a decade later. "Basically I just fell in love with the place," he says, "and after almos...