MAN ABOUT TOWN

Tired and hungover after late-night drinks at Control with houseguest (couch-guest?) Martin, best mate, down from Sydney. Several lines of speed later out the door intent on seeing Sleater Kinney at 2.30. Pushing through crowds. Sleaty Kinney taut, tight, excellent. VIP tent: everybody looking for pills, too paranoid about sniffer dogs to have brought their own. Saw no dogs. Purchased ridiculously expensive cans of UDL and am subsequently broke. TZU doing art-hop. M.I.A. a powerhouse of sass. Disappointed by the Go! Team. Iggy Pop urging the crowd to climb up on stage and dance with him. Mayhem. Heat. Sweat. Miso soup. Shirtless boys aplenty. Discombobulated. Evening breeze. Coming down now. Brain fog.

...about Brokeback Mountain and Hollywood homophobia, which you can check out here if you haven't already seen it. Hopefully this will be the first of many arts features in The Age to come!

Fuck, it's been far to long since I actually wrote something for this blog, as opposed to just cutting and pasting in an article I'd written previously. Well, not that long I guess, but a week and a half is a long time in blogland. Time for an update. Oh, and if my mum is reading this post, or my sister, or for that matter any of my friends (or even total strangers) who would prefer not to know the sordid details of my sex life, you should stop reading now. No really, I mean it. So, to quickly recap on what I've been up to of late: For starters, I'm still hosting Summer Breakfast on RRR but finishing on Friday, and very much looking forward to not having to get up at 4am any more! Thanks heaps to all my special guest co-hosts: Dr Andi, alicia sometimes, Denise Hylands, Holly C and MJ; it's been a real pleasure working with you all. Last Wednesday I went to a media preview of Man In Black , James Mangold's new biopic about musician Johnny Cash staring Joaqin Ph...

Richard gears up for some homo rock action at Midsumma festival . Part of this year’s Midsumma Festival, The Big Gay Out: Homorock 3 is a welcome alternative to another year of dance parties, gay bars and obligatory pop idol crushes, as the crowds who have flocked to the live music series since its inception clearly indicate. "We were really surprised by the number of people who turned up to the first homorock gig to be honest," says Hope Collins, from rock band Meebar, one of the organisers of the event. "The first show was pretty much sold out and we’ve had packed houses ever since." The gigs are a much-needed antidote to the sometimes-homogenous gay and lesbian scene, Collins believes. "If you come into the scene and you’re kind of different, then it can be difficult. I’ve known people who have come out and within a few weeks have got their heads shaved, are growing their armpit hair and are only wearing comfortable shoes," she laughs wryly, "just ...

...for procrastinating in. Until I started this stint of breakfast radio on the Arrrr's, I was happily unemployed, living a six-month stint of the life of leisure, during which time weekends lost their spice a little. When every day is a "sleep in til you damn well feel like it" sort of day, there's little to differentiate weekends from weekdays - apart from the fact that it's easier to talk your friends into going out and getting smashed with you on weekends, seeing as they don't have to work the next day. Now that I'm back in the world of working five days a week (albeit only temporarily) I'm loving my weekends, although dagnabbit, they just aren't long enough. This weekend I was supposed to: Do the laundry Do the dishes Go to the gym See at least one film (I'm catching up, you see) Write up an interview for MCV Write up a DVD review for Beat Read through a stack of media releases from people wanting coverage for their shows on RRR Go out and...

The strangest - and most sublime - thing happened while I was DJ'ing at Q + A last night. My ex-boyfriend Mark, with whom I parted in 2000 under particularly messy circumstances* that resulted in him telling me he never wanted to see me again, showed up out of the blue! One minute I'm DJ'ing and gazing out over the crowd, the next minute his grinning face, hair bleached an unconvincing but strangely suitable blonde, pops up over the edge of the DJ booth and says hello. To cut a long story short, we ended up chatting for almost an hour as the night progressed, and although we didn't discuss our break-up, or any of the events associated with it, I feel that we've had some sort of rapprochement. It seems like an altogether excellent way to start the year to me! * Said messy circumstances involved me sleeping with my ex's new boyfriend. Yes, I know, it was a bad, bad thing to do, but I assure you that it wasn't deliberate. It was one of those stupid, 'drunk...

I know why I'm so mopey - it's blindingly obvious! I just need to get laid! Clearly, a good root will help me get over this period of angst and sadness I am currently going through. Who needs emotional intimacy when you can have its tawdry, meaningless replacement, an anonymous fuck?!

Ennis hugging Jack in a scene from Brokeback Mountain . I haven't been this obsessed about a film for years. Maybe it's because it resonates so strongly with my own, on-going case of unrequited love. Maybe it's because it's such a remarkable union of adept and minimal script-writing, luscious cinematography, superb acting and faultless direction. Either way, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain creeps into my thoughts on almost a daily basis, and most times that it does, it brings tears to my eyes when I recall key scenes or lines... As Jake Gyllenhaal's character Jack Twist says in the film, "That old Brokeback got us good." Here's a review of the film from one of my favourite bloggers, Towleroad . If you haven't seen the film's trailer yet, go here . And you can watch a copy of the Logo special about the film over here (Logo is the gay cable channel in the USA). Proper posts will resume once I finish presenting Summer Breakfast , which as much...

Pop music meets classical concert in a premiere event at this year’s Midsumma Festival, reports Richard Watts . Scandal'us. Scott Cain. Paulini. Bardot. Is it any wonder that pop music is getting a bad name, when manufactured idols come and go faster than your last one night stand did? In this world of disposable pop, it’s nice to be reminded that a great song and a popular song aren’t mutually exclusive concepts. Seriously is a new production by writer, director and performer David Knox, who gave us the 2002 Midsumma hit, Kylie the Musical . For his latest show, Knox has taken the songs of iconic pop duo The Pet Shop Boys and stripped them back to their bare essentials, to reveal what the show’s musical director Dean Lotherington calls ‘intelligent pop.’ “They set about writing music that’s going to last, you know?” he says of the song-writing team whose hits include ‘It’s A Sin’, ‘Always On My Mind’ and ‘Absolutely Fabulous’. Lotherington, a composer and accompanist who has worke...

1. Mysterious Skin : Director Gregg Araki outgrew his ‘enfant terrible of queer cinema’ pigeonhole with this devastating, poetic nightmare of a movie. 2. Sigur Ros live at Hamer Hall. 3. The Laramie Project : Presented by The Act-O-Matic 3000, this play about the 1998 murder of gay youth Matthew Shepard was simply staged yet utterly devastating. 4. Page 8 : Indigenous performer and composer David Page brought the house down with this autobiographical show at the reinvigorated Malthouse Theatre. 5. Basic Training : Khalil Ashanti’s one-man show at this year’s Melbourne Fringe made me laugh, cry, and rejoice in the human condition. 6. Little Black Bastard : Another one-man show, this time at Midsumma Festival, another indigenous performer; another night I left the theatre with tears in my eyes and joy in my heart. 7. Stay Young : A marvellous exhibition exploring masculine beauty at the Centre for Contemporary Photography by local artist Lyndal Walker. 8. At Swim, Two Boys : The ...