Saturday, October 3, 2009
The Gross Art
So I am returned.
Why I hate contemporary theatre: part II
So, in the past few months I have again found myself slotted into some uniform chairs, some cheap and coarse, some not so. Some stacked in graduating height, and some sadly not so. I have this dear friend, you see. He likes the 'magic' of the theatre.
I have stood beneath the frigid prism of university sandstone watching Classics students romp as Satyrs, we knew they were Satyrs by the puce cotton-filled pendulum listing between their legs (one actor had thoughtfully sculpted a flared glans at the tip of the otherwise taper-less cylinder). I viewed the show within the effulgence of a rotund man in lambent black who was not enjoying the show perhaps as much as he was enjoying sucking on the frayed meatus of his fat cigar and discharging a blue plume of ordure. His small, wet teeth glistered as he grimaced, opening his mouth slightly, like a dog, smelling the high perfume of his shapely cigar secreted within the aperture of his damp fist.
I have known myself ensorcelled by a Hecate-like director to sample a mug of arterial-red mulled wine on top of a lunch and dinner of air and believed I was rather close to vomiting upon my neighbour.
And most recently I could be seen dotted amongst the audience of the Fringe festival. Oh, what earnest treats are to be had there. I have watched two couples dismantle washing machines and bicker in a crosette of cliche. It was then that I dearly wished (Wishing Chair, take us to the nicest spot you know!) to be instead supine on the pier in Capeside by the thankfully aureate cliche of Dawson and Co. And to be contemplating the strange geometry that is Dawson's head.
Let us return to the aforementioned friend, said friend moonlights as a reviewer of theatrical works and is likely to have an effigy of him torched to the puling of Brian Molko by all the toadying DIY theatre groupies, in between polishing up their Doc Martens with spittle and the scarifying of the arms, of course.
Here is a template of the critical delights one might receive if one does not like another's art and makes it known:
Dear Reviewer,
You are an unassailable jerk. Since you do not like my art, you patently do not possess the right vintage of intellect to comprehend my art. You are certainly palsied, are without friends, and ringed by blubber. You are most obviously jealous of my singular talent. You have the imagination of a Shih Tzu. And your rodomontade makes me and my hackneyed Sharpie feel sick.
Love from Fey, Limp-Haired Best Friend of Production's 'Director'
PS: I have coralled all my Facebook fanlets and they shall send you volleys of superbly turned hate mail. So watch out, Dickwad.
As the elegance of 10 CC would have it, "The things we do for love".
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Peanut-crunching crowd
In the winter’s blear I trundled off to
As the credits rolled, people collected their belongings with a cheery lightness, as if they’d done their charity bit for the season. So the kid with the circle of black paint ringing his mouth will still cause people to cross the road as he approaches And the slight, long-haired indigenous woman will continue to pace Brunswick Street singing ‘Happy birthday to me’, dollarless and jumperless.
Monday, May 18, 2009
The tamed shrew
Let's all fetishise typists, nylon stockings, girdles and being ancillary to an owerweening cad in a suit!
Now, which partisan bloggette will follow in tow?
My next post shall address the colourless bloggers and their 'thrifting' the palatable aspects of Grey Gardens as assisted by HBO, of course, that is, headscarves and charming kookiness not decrepitude, flea-ridden squalor and a pair of old shrews. It promises fun.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
A family romance
Ah, I believe I’ve found a kindred in the old dame A. S. Byatt. Somehow her deflating 2003 review of Harry Potter managed to pass me by. Here is a snatch:
Neatly wrapped contempt within lolly-pink foil. She goes on to say sans wrapping:
Thanks, Antonia. I may now look upon your new novel beyond simply remarking that its jacket could be confused with one of Rushdie's chromatic muddlings.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Off with her head!
Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are
Adiga’s The White Tiger
Nick McDonnell’s Twelve
Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi
Colette’s Cheri
Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope! I think I could, if I only knew how to begin.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
The world is not a stage
Tonight I took in a play, well, two. Below I proffer a few reasons why visiting contemporary theatre chafes me so.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The dress of thought
Perhaps Mr Strunk could shepherd them from ugly solecisms. Or perhaps not.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Fame is vapour
Dear Dylan Moran,
So it is with regret that I must say that you are a churlish coxcomb.
Please give my best to Fran and Manny,
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
“What a deformed thief this fashion is”
So, the much-anticipated Mad Men will be screening on free-to-air television this Thursday evening—and it is palpable, we are certainly to see blogs and the local aping high street awash with girls turning out their earnest and embarrassing studies of Joan Holloway and co. Nasty elasticised polyesters shall rule over silk in yet another show of how the current film world really does govern our collective imagination—how we require it to hold our hand, to direct us to the otherwise unheeded charm of ‘60s seersucker and shirred skirts.
Friday, April 10, 2009
“Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.”
Why the fuck is fur careening down the cat walk once more? Why are erstwhile ignored ratty mink stoles suddenly generating bids on eBay? Why are revolting pelts being fashioned from gorilla hair? I am just too shocked.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Let us not then speak ill of our generation...let us not speak well of it either
Dear World,
Let us not look to Hollywood adaptations
Recently, I spied an obtuse-looking lad photograped in mismatched tweeds
Let us look too to that ridiculous moving picture of the love-letters of Dylan Thomas, The Edge of Love. Let us all admire Sienna Miller's moue but not the dipsomaniac's sullen art. Let us now wear tea dresses and scratchy cardigans. Let us buy beautiful fifties cotton sun-dresses and take the scissors to their knee-length hems.
And let's look onwards to Kubric’s apple-cheeked Lolita--a favourite of the girl-blogger. A proliferation of girls snapped in heart-shaped specs and slick mouths are popping up everywhere. Let us look to emulating sexually precocious twelve-year-old girls and to Chuppa-chups, and to malt and French fries.
And if we must read, let us look to all fictional floozies. I am made rather uneasy, indeed, (as is Ms Susan Faludi) by a staggering number of women exhibiting an eager return to the feminine—the domestic—the feeble. Local fashion bloggers have been piping in unison that Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby is a ‘literary crush’ of theirs. Insubstantial, flimsy, cotton-wool Daisy. Daisy: a figurehead for all the vapidity and callousness of the roaring twenties. Do let's look to Daisy and take her remark, "[...] a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." as sterling instruction.
Monday, March 30, 2009
"Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / and I eat girls like air"
Dear we-all-know-you-don’t-need-those-glasses second-year girls,
I am so frightfully tired of your mousy, guileless utterances of,
“I used to be obsessed with Sylvia Plath, but now I’ve outgrown her.”
or as an exemplar of the solemnity and exquisite vintage of your taste,
“All the girls in my poetry class list Plath as their favourite poet.”
Excuse me? Was it your mastery of poesy and Ancient Greek arcana that lead you to 'outgrow' her? Or perhaps you tried your hand at some sudden glistering adjectives, or was it the impossible nadir of your first-year heartache over jejune art-school poseurs in slack-assed black jeans that saw you vaunting above the cinders of Sylvia Plath.
Girls, I have read your juvenilia—your flat-footed whimsical pieces in local self-published vanity rags and I assure you your fondness for the words ‘oneiric’ and ‘liminal’ does not see you superceding Plath.
I’m so bored of qualifying why I like her work to you twerps with half an arts degree, you who have now ‘moved on’ to proliferate your shelves with unread copies of Deleuze and Zizek.
So, kindly please surrender Sylvia from beneath the friable accoutrements of your insufferable clever-girl phoniness: newly acquired glasses, cupcakes, leather satchels and a yen for ‘discourse’.
Regards,
MV
Monday, January 26, 2009
The lady doth protest too much!
In the coming weeks I shall opine my distaste for a hatful of horrors, some, not all, of which are:
- poseurs who wear spectacles sans lenses;
- sub-literate girls who like to collect vintage novels for the cover art;
- toadying morons whose scant interest in reading is indigenous only to the latest Hollywood molestation of some classic book;
- Baz Luhrmann's intention to re-film The Great Gatsby;
- an imbecilic article in the obnoxious magazine Russh (Feb. '09) which trills "It's stylish to be well read!". It suggests Nabokov's Lolita is "light and summery" amongst other egregious tripe such as taking a copy of Baudelaire on a date even though the readers of said magazine possess the reading-age of a slow nine-year-old child;
- fashion blogs that exhibit not even a modicum of talent, blogs which use thrift as a verb, as in, "Unremarkable '80s polyester shift and men's tan office belt thrifted from Savers, inspired by Sex and the City whose approbation of 'vintage' dressing has informed the slipshod, unflattering and crudely matched way I now dress".
So, why not fetch a madeline and pleat your lips to a scowl.