The blog of a 58 year-old gay man living in Melbourne, Australia; a writer, broadcaster, cultural critic and arts advocate.
MICF 2010: Anyone for Tennis?
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The third Comedy Festival show from Anyone for Tennis? sees this Melbourne duo abandon the narrative structure of last year’s Cutthroat in favour of a random series of sketches and comic songs. The result is a Pythonesque collection of ideas that leaps madly from penguins to time portals, and from copyright dramas to the plague.
In songs such as ‘Future Wife’, a clever pairing of masculine insecurities and feminist leanings, the pair sing about the thought of some other man having sex with the women they will one day marry; while ‘Five Cent Effect’ is a cleverly structured exploration of chaos theory. The pair’s strong gag writing skills, chemistry and comic timing are showcased in sketches exploring speed dating and competitive sleeping, although some sketches, such as those about prison and verbal graffiti, drag on too long. Such minor faults aside, Anyone for Tennis? are goofily endearing, and damn good fun.
Three and a half stars
Anyone for Tennis? - Abacus Birdcage Gramaphone Lamp
The Portland Hotel until April 18 Tue-Sat 8.30pm, Sun 7.30pm $16 - $20
This review originally appeared in The Age on Thursday April 8.
The last time I posted on this poor, neglected blog was in August 2023, and a lot has happened since then - I've been meaning to blog about it for ages, but time got away from me. So, consider this post a quick catch-up on some of the creative work I've been doing over the last 12 months or so. I say quick, but given I'm an all or nothing kinda of guy, let's see how long I write for this evening and how much detail I go into, shall we? Last year, starting on Friday June 8th and continuing on over the weekend, I was a Guest of Honour at the innaugural Chaosium Con Australia ; a celebration of the games published by Chaosium Inc , a company whose work I've long admired and was once a regular contributor to, especially their game of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, Call of Cthulhu , which I first encountered in 1984; I also contributed significantly to Chaosium's Stormbringer and Elric! game lines, roleplaying games based on the work of enormously influential Englis...
The long-awaited film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking novel presents the perfect opportunity to re-examine the lives of the Beat Generation, writes Richard Watts. It’s not hyperbole to say that the Beat Generation – a small coterie of writers who met up in New York City in the spring of 1944 – changed the world. Without their individual quests for personal freedoms – a quest for sex and drugs before there was rock and roll; a quest which spawned the western world’s first counter-culture, the beatniks – the hippy movement of the Sixties would never have happened, and punk would have been a quiet snarl rather than a global reaction. Of all the Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac, author of the autobiographical beatnik bible, On the Road , is unequivocally the most famous. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, to working class French-Canadian parents, Kerouac aspired to be a writer from a young age, though he was also a keen football player. Indeed, it ...
I've lived in Fitzroy for 14 years, and long before I moved here spent some formative moment in its pubs and terrace houses. I have an unpublished novel that set's in Fitzroy in the 1940s (originally it was set in the 1950s but I've realised it was the wrong period). I love this suburb, even as it changes before my eyes, which is why I love articles and photographs and stories of its past. From the Herald-Sun , here's a series of images of the old inner city slums that once characterised much of Fitzroy. And from The Age just yesterday, here's an article about a photographer who was documenting the vanishing post-war Fitzroy culture in 1973-74. Happy reading. And maybe allow Dan Sultan to provide you with a soundtrack?
The third Comedy Festival show from Anyone for Tennis? sees this 
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