Archives for category: Rants

Holding Note

July 21, 11 //  

Le Gateau Chocolat

I’m out to the theatre every single night this week. This never happens, except at festival time. There is a festival on – the Melbourne Cabaret Festival, now in its second year. I went to the gala opening on Tuesday, and the line-up looks great. Highlight of the fest is Le Gateau Chocolat, but it’s worth checking out the program here. Get cracking, it ends this weekend.

Also ending this weekend is Ian Wilding’s The Water Carriers, a brilliantly acted two-hander that breaks open the shell of the modern sex comedy, washing it in ancient currents of grief. It’s the best performance of a new Australian play at the MTC in a while, and I’ll be writing about it in a more considered way shortly.

And you’d better be quick if you want to see the all-star cast in The Production Company’s latest revival of the Cole Porter classic Anything Goes. It’s a hoot, featuring some outstanding musical theatre talents, including Amanda Harrison, Alex Rathgeber, Christy Sullivan, Christie Whelan, Todd McKenney and Wayne Scott Kermond.

It’s a week of big openings, too, between Simon Phillips’ production of Hamlet starring Ewan Leslie at the MTC, and Matthew Lutton’s theatrical adaptation of Schubert’s Die Winterreise at the Malthouse.  And the independent scence bubbles along, with everyone from indigenous theatre company Ilbijerri to the elusive team at Four Larks getting in on the action. I’ll start posting from the backlog of reviews as soon as I can.

The Comic Plague: Essay

May 30, 11 //  

There are three kinds of plague: bubonic, pneumonic and comic. The latter, obscure but no less lethal than the other two, descends each year with the mephitic vapours of autumn, just in time to infect crowds at the Comedy Festival, ensuring maximum carnage. For years we’ve been warned the world is one gene-switch away from a global pandemic, and this year’s strain – Yersinia comedifestivalensis – seems to have mutated into some kind of Vancomycin-resistant superbug.

If you think this is going to be a whimsical whinge from a sick critic, wherein I describe chain-sucking Anticols through interminable stand-up and theatre of dubious merit, you’re right. It so is. But it’s also a chance to reflect on the ironies of bodily betrayal in the theatre – an artform that’s, after all, written in the language of the body; that demands physical presence, often in closer proximity to complete strangers than any sane person would otherwise dare.

My own lurgy worsened from mild head cold to galloping bronchitis at the opening night of Opera Australia’s La Boheme. Mimi eat your heart out. Physical discomfort didn’t detract from the pleasures of the best Boheme since Baz Luhrmann invoked the ghost of Jimmy Dean in the early 90s.

A scene from the latest Opera Australia production of La Boheme.

Relocating the action to the Weimar republic, Gale Edwards’ ravishing spectacle reached decadent heights in the Papignol scene: a riotous spiegeltent, where bare-breasted prostitutes and cabaret stars brush shoulders with clamorous urchins and the odd Nazi. But it was Christian Badea’s tornadic conducting, and the voices and chemistry of the romantic leads – Ji-Min Park and Takasha Meshé Kizart – that drew out the full dramatic power of Puccini’s music.

I briefly envied Mimi her ability to wheeze out an aria with a terminal lung haemorrhage, before being whisked back into the annual danse macabre of Comedy Festival reviewing.

Comedians and critics have an awkward relationship. Hardly a year goes by without controversy. This year it was some sexist reviewer at the Herald-Sun opining that women can’t be funny.

There’s no better proof to the contrary than Geraldine Quinn, winner of the Golden Gibbo for her rock-cabaret You’re The Voice. Predictably enough, it was a voice poor Quinn had lost by festival’s end. She had to cancel her last show, and was apparently reduced to communicating by iPhone at the awards ceremony.

Stewing in your own mucus tends to make you hyper-conscious of bodies in the theatre. Audience participation is a nightmare at the best of times, without, say, trying to avoid snotting on toddlers at an interactive kids’ show.

Bodily misadventure can strike anytime, though, and it’s especially funny when it happens to critics. Take my colleague John Bailey, who recently copped a piece of flying cutlery in the ’nads at a Dance Massive event titled – ahem – The Weight Of The Thing Left Its Mark.

It reminds me of the time I got sconed in the face with a mandarin at a performance of Black Lung’s Rubeville. The punk theatre outfit always claimed it was an accident. That would have been easier to believe if I hadn’t been the only person in the audience. Apparently the thrower, Thomas M. Wright, was aiming for another actor. Not, I might add, without cause.

Still, the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. Wright is currently starring as a bad-boy rock-poet in Simon Stone’s Baal. Theatre that makes you reflect on the vulnerability of the human body, it contains extensive nudity. Plus half the show is performed in driving stage rain. Wright informed me on opening night, with a look of glazed wonder, that the water’s unheated, and will stay that way for over 60 performances. Pneumonia seems inevitable.

Nor does the audience remain unmoved. In one story doing foyer rounds, a patron at Baal had her wig blown off by a particularly gusty scene change. Perhaps they should add “coup de theatre” to the show’s already substantial list of warnings.

And in the theatre next door, the set of Vanessa Bates’ astringent comedy Porn.Cake presented a different physical challenge. The woman sitting next to me seemed taken with the spectacle of 54 cakes onstage. Her peals of intestinal thunder were so loud they drowned out some of the early dialogue. It’s a tasty new play – just make sure you eat before you go.

Theatre is never separate from the great stage of life, of course, and offstage dramas are integral to the theatrical experience. It’s fitting that perhaps the greatest comic incongruity in theatre history belongs to one of its greatest practitioners. Moliere, recently performed with élan by Melbourne French Theatre, died on the job. The comedian succumbed to tuberculosis shortly after starring in his last play. You guessed it. It was called The Hypochondriac.

[An edited version of this article was published in The Age.]

I’m back …

April 4, 11 //  

I was going to make some kind of excuse for not maintaining the blog for a month or so. But why should I? It’s not like teh internetz is real life. Just posted assorted reviews from my back catalogue, below, and will get around to starting on the Comedy Festival, which is in full swing, very soon. I’ve seen quite a few shows already …

The Dream Life of Butterflies: Review

April 4, 11 //  

The Dream Life of Butterflies. By Raimondo Cortese, Lawler Studio, MTC. Until April 2


It’s been apparent since Features of Blown Youth (1997) that Raimondo Cortese is the most gifted Australian dramatist of his generation. Despite the subtlety and superb skill of the dialogue in The Dream Life of Butterflies, its premiere left nagging doubts.

The production is hemmed in by the mode of performance developed in Cortese’s recent work for Ranters Theatre – Holiday, Affection, Intimacy – all experiments in recessed naturalism heightened by structural artifice.

From Paul Lum’s diffident grin to the low-key, nonchalant delivery, these works were framed as studies in self-consciousness. Grafting the same shtick onto Cortese’s latest – which, though it features thematic similarities, also has stable characters and a dramatic line – seems to me a category mistake, subduing the acting into a sort of measured unlife, as if the butterflies of the title had been dreaming about zombies.

Two middle-aged sisters (Natasha Herbert and Margaret Mills) reunite, talking around their shared history and an elephant in the room. We enter on the performers mooching about on a sparsely furnished, barn-like stage, as if at rehearsal, while a recording of croaking frogs loops in the background.

This, and director Heather Bolton’s use of a harpsichordist (Anastasia Rusell-Head) to break up the action, borrows heavily from Adriano Cortese’s direction at Ranters – as does the acting, distracting from the intensity of the relationship between the sisters.

Muted, close-to-the-ground performances (Herbert even imitates Lum’s grin) don’t give adequate texture to the obstacles that mould the contours of speech, nor light the play’s submerged dramatic fireworks. The actors hit most of the notes, without providing harmonies of their own.

Have they forgotten that this time, Cortese’s silences and digressions proceed not from any external consideration of theatre but from a constellation of character and situation?

Herbert ought to have built a pervasive sense of fecklessness and bruised life; Mills’ compassion should be complicated by delicate sparks of spinsterish brittleness. They should complete the dialogue, rather than sketching it out. The result is more a play reading than a finished piece of theatre.

Conundrums of Charisma: Essay

December 4, 10 //  

Theatre that pays homage to charismatic celebrities is wildly popular. Performers impersonate stars, resurrect them, or at least borrow their glamour, usually through cabaret or musical theatre. Why? And what is charisma, anyway?

Weirdly, the mundane sense of the word – personal charm – is barely half a century old. To the Greeks, charisma was a “gift” from the divine. It struck like lightning, mysterious and elusive. This view remains common, and might explain why charisma is so valued. It’s one of the few things you can’t buy.

And yet it can be practised. Charm school is real. Castiglione’s Renaissance handbook on etiquette advocated sprezzatura, or nonchalance. Cultivate effortlessness, he advised. Centuries later, Emerson elaborated in his essay on manners. To be “fit to stand the gaze of millions”, you must carry the holiday in your eye and “exhilarate the fancy by flinging wide the door of new modes of existence”.

Emerson was right. Charisma isn’t simply about being liked. It’s about new kinds of being. Most descriptions involve an oxymoron: “practiced effortlessness”, “acting natural”, “public intimacy”. I’d suggest that the key to charisma’s mystery lies precisely in its unusual ability to embody paradox – to give valency to, and hold in flux, various contradictions of human character: power and vulnerability, virtue and vice, the exemplary and the ordinary.

So the world’s greatest stars tend to suffer tragedies commensurate to their talent. And, if we’re honest, there’s resentment behind the worship, a desire to make them pay for their gifts in blood. If celebrity culture is a kind of secular religion, it’s one that demands sacrifice. In the surveillance age, we consume and scrutinize the famous with no less savagery than the Aztecs, who ripped out the still-beating hearts of their enemies to keep the sun aloft.

Our ambivalence to human gods is dramatised in shows like Boulevard Delirium and Songs for Nobodies. In the former, Paul Capsis channelled the transgressive souls of tortured stars – his Judy Garland was at once pathetic and sublime, with tottering, drug-affected antics yielding to a soaring voice.

Songs For Nobodies, currently playing at the MTC, is animated by Bernadette Robinson’s gifted impersonations, from Edith Piaf to Patsy Cline. But it’s Joanna Murray-Smith’s compellingly crafted stories of ordinary women that provide a subtle dramatic counterpoint, exploring the ironies of fame:

“We can praise those who escape,” says one, reflecting on Billie Holiday, “We can stand on the sidelines, write our feature articles and buy the records as if we honour them, but underneath it all, we don’t like those who refuse to be earthbound. They frighten us. Their freedom reminds us of our own little prisons. And in the end, people like that… they have nowhere to go but trouble, ‘cos trouble is the only place that welcomes them.”

Fortunately, theatre permits miraculous resurrection.

In Dean Bryant’s Britney Spears the Cabaret, Christie Whelan showed it could be done while the star is still alive. Spears has been synthesised, mediated and demonised beyond belief. The cabaret is ingenious remedial satire, using theatrical language – real body, real voice – to salvage dignity from the degradation.

Even nostalgic entertainment like Jersey Boys remains faithful to charisma’s ambiguity. Bobby Fox’s simulacrum of Frankie Valli’s voice – its bright machismo filtering into vulnerable falsetto – has the same extraordinary range.

And it’s no coincidence that our last great political cabaret – Keating: The Musical – saw Mike McLeish channel a man who embraced extremes of vitriolic arrogance and aesthetic sensitivity. Keating was also the last PM to go to a main-stage theatre show. If you want to know why our politicians lack charisma, look no further.

Irony is crucial to charisma. I don’t mean the modish, ubiquitous irony that indicates you’re sophisticated and jaded and just way too cool to actually mean anything you say. I mean irony as a scalpel, not a butterknife; the kind that splits the surfaces of things and probes the tissue underneath.

Great performers know this instinctively. They play chords of emotion upon their faces, can summon grief and determination in an eyebrow, or capture innocence and experience in one note. It isn’t easy. Embodying contradiction is something our minds rebel against. Try thinking “I’m a good person” and “I’m a bad person” at the same time.

Consider the original victim of the virgin/whore trap, Helen of Troy, perhaps the most charismatic woman of all time. Legend has it she struck blind the Greek poet Stesichoros for writing a scurrilous verse about her. Unlike Homer, he wrote a palinode, or counter-song:

No it is not the true story.

No you never went on the benched ships.

No you never came to the towers of Troy.

His sight was magically restored; the price was only this – an acknowledgement that stars are nobodies, too.

That’s all you need to know about charisma, right there. It demands that we straddle contradiction. It shows us things about life that aren’t obvious. It inspires song and counter-song.

(This essay appeared in The Age 4/12/10.)

On Technology and Theatre

November 13, 10 //  

In an age where technology speaks in tongues through a culture of unceasing and increasingly rapid change, its dialogue with theatre has never been so complex. Our relationship to technology is perverse. It’s a source of agency and disempowerment. Too often, we ignore the latter.

There is such a premium on innovation in theatre, and across culture generally, that it risks becoming a value in itself. We need to acknowledge the darkness in this devotion to novelty – to know that whatever we worship will betray us. If we worship the radical above all things, we will become conservative, rigid, closed to other ways of seeing. If we worship change, we court repetition, obsession and addiction. And if we worship novelty, we’ll lose sight of the traditions that make it new.

How we should deploy technology in theatre has always aroused argument. Aristotle and Horace spoke against plots being resolved through a deus ex machina. They knew that, used this way, tech could reduce the human dimension of narrative. It’s something Robert LePage forgot in Blue Dragon – all the digital animation, mechanical magic, and optical illusion were, at best, distractions from a mediocre story.

The LePage bears comparison to 1927’s The Animals and Children Took To The Streets – a fairytale enriched by ingenious animation, also informed by the graphic novel. It is infinitely superior to the LePage, not least because it’s an entertaining story with moral resonance. But animated screens create one problem for the production it shares with Blue Dragon. If the stage is itself a metaphor, why use only two metres of its depth? This spatial shallowness hobbles one of the crucial freedoms theatre has over cinema.

A deep understanding of theatre’s traditional strengths must underpin its use of technology: the liveness of performance, its irreproducibility, its three-dimensional space, the communion between performers and audience, theatre’s necessary imperfections. One of the things we forget about theatre is that it is always new. Every night is different. Our craving for novelty can be satisfied simply by the oldest technology in the book – acting.

Performers compel us to reimagine ourselves, make us hallucinate truths we cannot know any other way. They can resurrect the dead, as Jane Griffiths did in Sappho, as Hannah Norris does in My Name Is Rachel Corrie. They can move us to pity and awe, as in Hayloft Project’s Thyestes, or make us laugh at the struggle to articulate the self, as Conor Lovett showed in The Beckett Trilogy.

What these performances have in common, though, is that they never condescend to the audience’s imagination. They make it work, meet it halfway. One of my favourite moments in theatre over the last few years was at Miriam Margolyes’ Dickens’ Women – through a trick of the light, but also a trick of the voice – she transformed from a portly, spry middle-aged actress into Miss Wade from Little Dorrit, a slender and sad woman in her thirties.

Audiences are not stupid. They will imagine what needs to be imagined, if performance and technology work in synergy. This has critical implications for contemporary issues in Australian theatre, like cross-racial and gender-blind casting, for instance. But it also needs to be calculated into technical decisions: where tech undermines or limits the actor’s power, audiences’ imaginations may suffer.

I’m no puritan on this issue. Who could deny, after seeing Heiner Goebbels’ Stifter’s Dinge, that technology alone can create a microclimate of the imagination, without any actors at all?

Nor is entertainment a crime. Any discussion of technology in theatre must take into account its magic lanterns. The high-tech marvels of Mary Poppins flying through air on her umbrella, or the hyper-real daydreams in Hairspray, light the eyes of parents and their kids, and provide an escape from reality, for a while.

But let us remember, too, that the pleasures technology affords us can be deadly. It’s through technology we know that rats will mindlessly stimulate the pleasure centres of their brains, ignoring food and water, until they die of exhaustion. Yet technology also shows how imagination and agency are more closely related than we think – the same parts of the brain light up when we imagine doing something, as when we actually do it.

The latest research into neuroplasticity indicates that for good or ill, technology changes our minds, literally, depending on how we use it. It has made us shallower watchers and readers. It has made us more impulsive, less critical, better at multitasking. It has bolstered our short-term memory at the expense of the longer view.

Theatre needs to know all this to avoid being complicit in it though ignorance, or worse – helping to create audiences who are lazy and complacent, stupid and unimaginative. It must recognise that – like the brain itself – technology is a useful servant and a terrible master.

Sex, Lies and Theatre: Yarra Council vs. MKA Richmond

November 6, 10 //  

“Bureaucracy”, said Balzac, “is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”  He meant moral pygmies, and it’s hard to think of more disgraceful behaviour (at local government level, anyway) than the picture that’s emerging from Yarra City council.

Today, The Age reported that council offices at Richmond Town Hall have been raided by police, as part a wide-ranging investigation into Melbourne’s illegal brothels. One council employee has been arrested. Police seized evidence that may disclose bribery offences and complicity with illegal brothel owners.

Amid clouds of alleged corruption, Richmond experienced a ray of cultural sunshine this week with the opening of a new writer’s theatre: MKA Richmond. Founded by Tobias Manderson-Galvin and Glyn Roberts, it’s dedicated to staging the work of local playwrights.

New theatres open on Melbourne’s independent scene on a regular basis, but this one stands out for its creative ambition and organisational nous. MKA’s inaugural program started on Thursday. It promises 25 plays in a month, featuring familiar names in the independent theatre scene – Declan Greene, Van Badham, Dina Ross, Robert Reid, Ben Ellis – shoulder to shoulder with aspiring writers for the stage.

In six years reviewing theatre at The Age, local dramatic writing is as robust as I’ve seen it, and having a theatre to write for is a crucial part of the creative process. Yet Yarra Council closed MKA down after only two days.

MKA has temporarily turned its Richmond site into a development and workshop space, and will carry on its theatre program at a new performance venue in the city, starting Monday. But it shouldn’t have to. The council’s decision is a gross injustice.

According to Manderson-Galvin and Roberts, the council assured them during negotiations that approval for the venue was a formality. Following a couple of complaints from residents about “increased foot traffic” in the area, however, council permission was denied.

Let’s look at that, for a second. The theatre is small. It seats 44 people. It’s in a mixed zone planning area, within spitting distance of a train station, a pub and a (legal) whorehouse. “Increased foot traffic”? Get real.

If the council wants to stamp on a promising bud of cultural endeavour, it’s going to have to find a better excuse than that. (I hope they’ve considered that even if there was “increased foot traffic”, it probably wasn’t all due to MKA. It might have been swollen by disgruntled johns, forced by the police crackdown to patronise the licensed brothel next door. Who knows?)

This isn’t just an unfair decision, it is bad politics. A Machiavellian view of art might see that it can be used as a smokescreen. Embroiled in a corruption scandal and grinding the faces of local artists in the same week? Who’s going to vote for that? They’ll be eating people’s pets next.

Yarra Council should reconsider its decision and grant permits to run MKA Richmond at its original site – in the council’s own interest, in the interest of surrounding businesses, and in the interest of the cultural life of the city. Oh, and it’s the right thing to do. You know, one of those actions that makes you feel a little bit taller, inside.

[A complete press release from the theatre company, what to do if you want to protest the council’s decision, and infinitely more moderate comment may be found at John Bailey’s blog, Capital Idea.]

Return of the Howling Fantods #1

October 3, 10 //  

My review archive. Crikey.

Ok so I’m building an archive of my published work (all that I can find, anyway). In time, it will date back to my first book review for The Age in 1995. I know – 15 years as a critic. Don’t look at me like that. The wind might change.

I’ve only done 6 weeks so far and it’s already giving me the howling fantods.

I’ll only put up the published version, rather than the original text, unless:

(a) some voice in the online wilderness really, really cares, and/or

(b) I care and it’s on my computer, and

(c) I have the time.

Some of the reviews that have caused controversy are already in there – Julian Meyrick’s production of The Birthday Party, for example. Now that I have an online voice, I’ll be opening up old wounds at leisure.

I don’t have much leisure right now, of course. Between the last week of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, the exciting program at this year’s Melbourne International Arts Festival, judging The Age New Works Prize AND keeping on top of a weekly fiction column … I’m expecting a serious case of Stendhal syndrome any day now.

Meanwhile, if there’s a particular review you want up here, so you can flame me or show it to your mum or whatever, I’ll take requests.

Another Essay On Criticism, Editor Unknown

September 30, 10 //  

?!

Silence, mostly …

Authority? Don’t get me started …

There is a constant tussle between all the possibilities of human thought and between all the possibilities of a human mind’s sensitivity and between all the possibilities of a human character. – Thomas Bernhard, Walking – trans. Kenneth Northcott.

… “He said he had a voice once, a privileged one is what he said. He seemed anxious. I guess he was trying to work out which came first, the privilege or the voi…”

“… watched the blogosphere develop, lurking.  She claimed what she read on there, arts-wise, had inspired in her a profound sense of nausea. She didn’t look like she was kidding around either. She got this wild look in her eye, then grimaced and stared at me with a hatred so singular I had to look at my shoes …”

All is infected that the infected spy,
As all seems  yellow to the jaundiced eye.

Alexander Pope – An Essay On Criticism.

… all writing is like vomiting, really. Your mind’s muscle clenches, the words come out in a hot, desperate splurge, and you either feel better or worse afterwards (usually worse); sometimes, if you don’t feel better, you clench again, you have to barf again, and again - dare I say ad nauseam - until you’ve ralphed everywhere, blowing ideas in half-digested chunks all over your own personal ivory tower.

My tower, safe to say, is in dire need of a clean-up … seismic shifts in squalor; caught between tectonic plates: – trash, steaming piles of publicity material and books – many, many books - with titles like (glancing around) Works of Rabelais, Oblivion and The Hidden Journey: Melanoma Up Close And Personal …

* * *

Woman on the Tightrope

In her centre I could suspend my world, if I were not corrupted by academic learning. I could have used, misused her for my theories, taken her all the way, even before she became a possibility. For which both she and I lack the intelligence …

Thomas Bernhard, Amras – trans. Peter Jansen.

*  * *

… the problem is – the only way to clean your tower up is by hurling in a slightly different pattern, with bile fluid and distressing gobbets of regurgitate all cloying together in a manner that suggests slightly different stuff … I don’t know about you, but watching someone heaving their guts out makes me want to puke too …

It’s always like this. Even the best, spangled-with-eloquence, most maddeningly well-considered writing is this way …

***

What, in your view, is a conversation?

I don’t usually have them. To me people who want to have a conversation are suspect, because that raises particular expectations they’re unable to satisfy. Simple people are very good to talk with. When talking is supposed to become conversation, that’s when things get gruesome! That fine expression “everything under the sun.” It all gets thrown in together and then one person stirs this way, the other stirs that, and an unbearable stinking turd comes out the bottom. No matter who it is …

- from an Interview with Thomas Bernhard, 1986.

***

… Dialectic you say? Well, two’s company, but I rather think you knew what you were looking for in advance …

“A just decision is always required immediately, “right away”. It cannot furnish itself with infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it. And even if it did have all that at its disposal, even if it did give itself the time, all the time and all the necessary facts about the matter, the moment of decision, as such, always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation, since it must not be the consequence or the effect of this theoretical or historical knowledge, of this reflection or this deliberation … that must precede it.”

– Jacques Derrida, The Force of Law.

… language is chunderous. Criticism? Art? They both depend on (a) what kind of violence you’re willing to inflict … (xxy) what you had for breakfast … Deadline? Such a misleading word – what a deadline really is is a kind of wound, self-inflicted or forced upon us …

If you’re still reading this, you might have a distinct urge to spew. Or perhaps you’re just a bit squeamish about when the next ellipsis is going to arrive … So, what did you have for breakfast? … Hnnnnnnhhhhhhh. I’m speculating …

… even though you’re dead to me, I admire your fortitude. Especially those last two pars: self-indulgent, completely vile … gross generalisation and annoying, circular facete; imagining (and speaking for) other people in front of them, etc … your gag reflex has become inverted, i.e. you can’t stop the technicoloured yawn without conscious thought …

***

… also this weird notion that you couldn’t actually show anyone anything in critical mode, you had to tell them. That’s mimesis bad, diegesis good, for you pointy-headed types. A repellent idea. It was partly why most criticism that came out of universities at the time was so apocalyptically stupid and boring no one wanted to read it

… ities were where art went to die; critics were undertakers. It was important to arrange the body with meticulous …

… You’ve never heard of Godel? Well that’s that about that … even mathematics has a burning fleck at the back of its throat … He killed himself, you know, starved himself to death more or less. Walled himself in his study … ties in with what I was saying before, about immurement as capital punishment … What’s a professor when she’s at home? …

***

If we hear something, says Oehler, on Wednesday we check what we have heard and we check what we have heard until we have to say that what we have heard is not true, what we have heard is a lie. If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible. Thus throughout our lives we never escape from what is horrible and what is untrue, the lie, says Oehler. If we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous, what we are doing is something terribly hopeless and that what we are doing is in the nature of things obviously false. Thus every day becomes hell for us whether we like it or not, and what we think will, if we think about it, if we have the requisite coolness of intellect and acuity of intellect, always become something nasty, something low and superfluous which will depress us in the most shattering manner for the whole of our lives …

If our intellect is keen, if our thinking is the most ruthless and the most lucid, says Oehler, we are bound after the shortest space of time to say of everything that it is unbearable and horrible. There is no doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible …

The art of existing against the facts, says Oehler, is the most difficult, the art that is the most difficult. To exist against the facts means existing against what is unbearable and horrible, says Oehler. If we do not constantly exist against, but only constantly with the facts, says Oehler, we shall go under in the shortest possible space of time.

- Thomas Bernhard, Walking – trans. Kenneth Northcott.

1.d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5 4. Bg2 dxc4 5. Nf3 Be7 … Aha! A Catalan.

Auto-save? Jesus …

Criticism as Hand-maiden to Art? No no no. Pope is cute, but we’re not in Kansas anymore. People with jaundice don’t see yellow, by the way, they just appear yellow to others … yes, terribly self-conscious … Criticism? Art? Dance partners, maybe, cannibals at the same feast …

… an asymptotic relationship …

… complete the following sequence:   … >.>   … <.<  … >.< …