Drawings

Sometimes, when everything shatters, what you're left with is something unexpected. I've been really enjoying drawing over the last month or so. I've never really done it before. I think I may pursue it. This is a drawing of Patrick White, from a William Yang photograph.

'After the Rainbow'

By Soda_Jerk

King's Artist Run Initiative

Level 1 / 171 King Street, Melbourne

From 7 May - 29 May

Wednesday - Saturday 12 - 6pm

Next Wave

In 1995 I was in 'The Wizard of Oz'. It was the nadir of my musical career at high school. The yearly musical productions were my moments in the sun at school, the singular time of year in which I was totally accepted. The one time of year that I felt comfortable. I basked in the small-scale stardom that the annual musical production brought me. Over the years I had put in the hard yards. I had patiently worked my way up the rigid hierarchy, making brief but memorable stops at Tom Thumb in 'Barnum', the Artful Dodger in 'Oliver!', Professor Abner Sedgwick in the little known musical interpretation of Superman's life: 'Superman', Sancho Panza in 'The Man of La Mancha', and here I had arrived at the role of the Scarecrow in 'The Wizard of Oz'. I was the subject of high expectations, from none more than myself. The highest. It was the year after I had corralled scores of people to work on my first film (coincidentally titled 'After the Beanstalk') and a few months before I directed my first large-scale theatre work, a school production of 'Amadeus'. Ambition was writ large in flames across my future which lay before my like a golden duvet. My first true relationship had yet to come to a close. I had not yet experienced any real pain, rejection, loss or disappointment. I had not yet begun the process of developing a veneer of sadness, a veneer that comes with age and wisdom. I was still raw, I had no self protection. I was cloaked in unbridled self-belief, or at least, the belief in my skill, if not my self. My self was nothing more than a vessel for my perceived ability.

I shudder to imagine my disappointment if I could have seen myself as a broken thirty-one year old at that tender, ambitious, uncompromising age of fifteen.

At the Doctor's surgery during the week, my Doctor, as he has every right to do, began to tell me that with a chest infection and all, it really might be time to quit smoking. I have been at the Doctor's a fair bit of late as a month ago I broke my hand playing in a playground. My fifth metacarpal was shortened, angulated and twisted, ushering a titanium plate into my otherwise metal-free right hand. My hand is now strapped up in a plastic splint by electric blue velcro and somewhat out of habit I nurse it like a broken wing. Sat there, in the Doctor's surgery, with the now habitual posture borne out of protecting my broken hand, my entire body hunched around it, the Doctor told me: "You're not Peter Pan, you know." Believe me, I know.

The very day I turned thirty-one, everything was blown apart. Any expectations that I once had of stability and any sense of a future now lies in tatters. I've yet to gather any sense of what may emerge.

Judy Garland is the perfect figure to represent the dissonance between the promise of youth and the disillusion and dissolution of age. Her face in 'The Wizard of Oz' always appears as if looking into a glorious sunset. Her voice follows the cadence of expectation and promise. It is partly this vocal quality that marked her performances as an older woman with such poignancy.

To hijack Dorothy's journey to Oz to illustrate Garland's very public passage from youth to age is a master-stroke.

The journey and particularly the vision provokes a near profound tragic inevitability.

And it's gorgeously done. The groundbreaking cyclone scene disintegrates, the celluloid of the rear-projection burns away. The artifice is made tangible.

Soda_Jerk have produced the remix with an acute attention to detail, utilising the best possible footage of Garland, both from 'The Wizard of Oz' and from 'The Judy Garland Show' some twenty-three years later. The terror of the apparition is quiet and solemn.

'After the Rainbow' runs on a loop of about ten minutes. I watched it three times over.

It may well be the vulnerability I am currently feeling, but I experienced profound grief for the loss of Garland's, and all of our promised futures.

See it.

Things to do when you're thirty

Every once in a while I get obsessed. I have the make up of a zealot so let's all consider ourselves lucky that I am in no way religious, new wave, politically conservative nor radically active.

For my thirtieth birthday last November I received two gifts in particular that alluded to my obsessive nature. I was given me a turntable and a first pressing of The White Album, coincidentally released exactly 10 years before I was born. My parents gave me a mixmaster. Pastry and LPs ensued.

It seems that last year I was briefly obsessed with blogging - and now in the cold, sober light of the morning I've looked over what happened here and am in amazement and wonder. You were there, and you were there.

I am humbled by what occurred when I flippantly began to publicly rant. When I reconsider the spirit in which this venture was born and the state of mind I am now in, I think I have this little pastime to thank in no small part. I was reengaged with the performance scene in a way that hasn't been the case for years. I had a voice and an opinion that seemed to be held in some regard. And the voice, at least shall continue, comrades. 

Last year during the fringe I had a wonderful, spirited, challenging, honest and generous exchange with Marcel, the director of 'There' which I had every intention of publishing as I believe in a right of reply, but the moment seems to have passed. Marcel will be the first to be invited to review my next work, and I will invite him to published it here. 

I saw a few more things at the end of last year, things which uplifted and confounded me as much as anything else last year, but again, the moment has passed.

Oh, and there was a delightful evening of Throwies.

So, there are many things I am seeing this year. There are many things I am looking forward to seeing. My own work will, at some stage, be a part of the mix.

And if there's anyone still interested out there: ta.  

There... I've said it.

I must now impart to you my reasons for airing my thoughts through such a public forum as this.

It really began as a whim. Actually not so much a whim as a fit. A fit of impotent rage brought about by what has been, for me, a tough year. I needed to be heard. I needed to be honest and transparent. I needed to have an obligation to objectively and subjectively reflect. Reflect upon what I've witnessed, what I've heard and what I'm going through. 

It has, as I said, been a tough year. 

Masculine nonchalance tells me that it thickens my skin, toughens me up, engenders me to be more able to cope with a life in the arts. And I hope that this is true. It does not, however, stop me from being sad, exhausted, filled with self-doubt and loathing, bitter, angry and envious. And lets face it, who, in this line of work, hasn't honestly felt these things from time to time?This racket tends to require irrational degrees of self-belief which I simply don't possess - and nor will I pretend to. 

I've always been a spectacular failure at protecting myself. I always get my hopes up, I always tell everyone what I'm applying for and get excited. I always set myself up for a fall. And I can feel this changing. I've begun to get secretive about my hopes and desires. I've begun to withhold information from the people closest to me. I've begun to 'take it on the chin' without fully allowing myself to be openly disappointed. This is not good. This is out of character for me. This is typically masculine - and as I near my 30th, I fear the kind of man that I may be becoming. One that doesn't go to the Doctor, doesn't express his fears and vulnerabilities in order to not show weakness. One that doesn't confront his inherent lack of control. 

So here, in one of the most public ways possible, in the interest of transparency, and in the hope of expressing honestly, fully and eloquently the turbulence of a life in the arts I will divulge my fears and display my weaknesses.

Over the last twelve months I have applied for several grants. Three or four to develop a project that has been hanging around for a few years, one for a community arts organisation of which I am the artistic director. I have also applied for two awards.

I have been successful in none of these applications.

Now, I'm not complaining. The funding and the awards were granted to people, groups and projects that are very deserving. I don't desire to be comparative as it helps no one. But, Jesus, it's hard. And I don't know that this was ever communicated to me as a young artist. Actually, it probably was and I possibly ignored it believing (with the arrogance of youth) that it would not apply to my future stellar career. But let me tell you, it does apply. 

Now, I have had my good years. In 2006 I received a number of grants for a number of projects and I was on could nine. It was great. But now, after sitting on a project for three years, it's hard to keep believing in it. It's difficult to continue believing that it will be successful after so many knock-backs, and artistic success and worth is totally beside the point as it is so subjective. 

And this is the thing: these applications, these rejections begin to fertilize comparison, envy and jealousy. As you read who won the grants, the awards - it really is hard to not go: 'Who, [insert name here]? How are they more deserving than me?'. And this is poison. I don't want to have to build myself into a lonely tower of moral righteousness, against the vacuous hordes, just to save face. I don't want to have to believe that my project, my skills or myself are any more deserving than anybody else's. I don't want to have to push myself into artistic martyrdom just because I missed out on a  couple of awards and a bunch of goddamned grants. All this will do is leave me lonely, bitter, angry and irrelevant. 

I don't know what the answer is. I am not able to write an application without a modicum of hope. Whilst studying I never said that I wrote my essay the night before. I didn't. Whilst writing grant applications, I am never able to distance myself from it. In order to summon the energy to write the cursed thing I have to believe in it. I have to buy into it. I cannot write it without imagining myself in the job, imagining the opportunities that would arise from it. I am just that way inclined. 

And I shouldn't have to erect this armour of false self-confidence and nonchalance. It isn't me. 

So here I am. I'm disappointed. I'm a little bit broken. My self belief has taken a battering. I honestly believe that the aforementioned grants / awards went to the right projects / people. I'm just disappointed that the right project / person wasn't me. 

This is not a cry for platitudes to buoy my spirits. I'm okay. I have a great job doing something that I'm privileged to do. I collaborate with great people. I have great friends. 

I am responsible for my self-motivation, self-belief, inspiration. 

I'm just saying it's hard to cop sometimes. 

I have used the words impotent and erect in this post. What a man.