Published April 2013 in Crikey
If you’ve ever wondered what it might feel like to be slapped in the face with a dildo, Slutmonster goes some of the way to making that a viable possibility. Thankfully in this instance, the dildo-slapping experience is happening to somebody else. Literally.
For what opens as a sexed-up, highly warped fairytale, the plot of Slutmonster manages to get ever more twisted as it progresses. The titular Monster (played by Jessie Ngaio in the most anatomically incorrect onesie ever made) bumps into Larch (Lucas Heil) and Bovril (Wes Gardner), two princes lost in a land full of poisonous berries, boob flowers and friendly puppets. The pair attempt to socialise the Monster, but their increasingly dire situation sends the course of this fairytale spinning into ever filthier, crasser, funnier territory.
The production is surprisingly polished for a team of people that don’t appear to have been on the comedy circuit too long. The set pieces are beautiful and absurd things, packed full of genitalia-like imagery. The music cues and comic timing are almost always spot on, the cartoons that link each section are beautifully and cleverly rendered, and the puppetry is basic but very effective. While there are one or two scenes that drag (both musical soliloquies), the show sails along on the strength of its ideas and production values.
The whole show is a completely bonkers idea. On one hand, you’re likely to exhaust any need you might have to hear another crude joke. And there seem to be more penises and nipples on stage than there are audience members watching the show unfold. When operating on this level of crassness, most shows stumble, crash and burn in a spiralling attempt to milk the filth out of every last sex joke simply because they’ve got nothing better to fall back on.
But here’s the thing: Slutmonster actually works. Magnificently. At first glance, this seems like one of those shows that is happily swept along by the madness of its own ridiculous plotline. But on closer inspection it becomes abundantly clear just how well each element of the show is structured. It’s a show that’s happy to roll about in its own muck, but it’s also capable of pulling out all these other relatively clean jokes that demonstrate the team behind this is no one-trick pony. Simply put, most of the jokes are in there partially because they’re disgusting, but mostly because they’re good.
Slutmonster is gross-out porn of the highest quality, and dammit if you don’t just swallow your gag reflex and wade through this festering delight of a show.
Published April 2013 in Crikey
Here’s a lesson to remember: never go and see a show thinking ‘I really wanted to see this guy in my university days’.
Welcome to Arj Barker’s Go Time, the so-so comedy show that makes you feel like you’re watching a used-car salesman put sawdust in a gearbox. The aim, of course, is to successfully keep the whole shebang going until the cash is safely in the till. Rehash some of the old, semi-reliable material, chuck in some new stuff, make sure the build-ups are long-winded enough to fill in some time and bam! You’ve got yourself an hour-long touring vehicle, good for the next few months.
It’s not all that bad. But it’s getting there; the structure of the show is virtually non-existent, the jokes take forever in the build-up, and for all that, the payoff isn’t actually all that good. Usually, in a decent long-form joke, even the build-up has some laughs to get you rolling before the final line knocks you flat. But the second half of the show just seems to comprise Barker’s ‘this is just the way I feel’ proselytising on his deliverance from the sad-sack lifestyle of a 9-5 working week. It’s enough to make you blank out midway through one of Barker’s long runs and come back before he’s delivered the punch line. And you still won’t laugh. The show is a cavalcade of blandness, with one random joke seeping into the next.
Masters of comedy spend hours on their routines, and it shows in their structure, tone, delivery and execution. But Barker isn’t one of those guys. Arj Barker is the go-to comedian for people who don’t know what comedy show they want to see.
Go Time is a good reason why it’s worth spending a little more time doing your comedy research and giving a few different shows a shot. You might get one or two misses, but at least you’ll get a proper hit rather than this shambling, lacklustre show.
Published November 2012 on the Killings blog (a Kill Your Darlings initiative)
This article is a summary of discussions covered in my minor thesis, which analyses ebooks and how they affect editorial processes at an Australian educational publisher.
The only editors who haven’t heard about the rise of the ebook must be those who live and work on tiny islands. Specifically, islands that have no access to the internet, libraries, media, messages in bottles or telepathic individuals. The rise of the ebook has been, after all, quite hard to miss. Two major publishers (Penguin and Random House) have become merger casualties, a result heavily influenced by rising ebook popularity. Big technology companies are also paying attention to consumer demand. Microsoft predicts that it will take until 2017 to grab a 51 per cent market share in the US ebook market, and only then because of technological issues. In terms of digital devices, Apple’s iPad has given some considerable boost to the consumers’ familiarity with digitised reading, while Amazon claims to have 950,000 ebook titles in their catalogue.
But what is an ebook, exactly? An ebook is, by its own definition, a taciturn, confusing beast, which means that researching what to do about accommodating ebooks becomes a matter of constantly trying to reach shifting goalposts. But in terms of a simple definition, ebooks can, for example, be used on a range of devices (iPad, Kobo, Kindle), within a range of formats (such as mobi, epub, and Kindle-friendly files), and display the gamut of book types.
Given the increasing popularity of ebooks, it’s important that publishers adjust their processes to ensure optimal production of book ebooks and print books. This area of the discussion centres around a publisher’s content management system, or CMS. Transitioning a publisher from a book-centric CMS to an ebook-friendly one has several steps involved in the process. The challenge in modern-day publishing is to find a CMS that can produce content for a project, digital or print, in a manner that makes the content easily adaptable and available for use within the parameters of almost any other format.
Still, there are risks inherent in change, which is perhaps why the publishing industry, particularly the commercial element, has been so slow to act on improving production processes that may benefit both print and electronic elements of publishing. The negatives are clear: failing to get a system flexible enough to withstand ongoing technological development could mean gaping, long-term production inefficiencies and ultimately, wasted expenditure compounded by a failure to maximise profit. It’s a process complex enough to justify the government establishing a Book Industry Strategy Group, tasked with developing viable strategies for publishers transitioning to an ebook-friendly production model. But this process takes time, allowing technology to drift ahead of a publisher’s technological capabilities before it has even been able to efficiently exploit what was commonly available for consumer use several years ago.
But what do these changes mean for people central to the publishing process? To be an editor of an ‘ebook’, for example, is to be master of several different content-display systems, all of which have their own inherent quirks and layout challenges. The fundamental role of an editor won’t change, but this is still a simplified example of a larger, more fundamental change at the heart of what an editor does; that editors may no longer be editing ‘books’ but simply ‘content’. While some books might try and resemble the ‘look’ of a book (such as those produced for iPad), print and electronic books are about as similar as an en and em dash. Both serve a similar communicative function, but the content within them is manipulated in significantly different ways.
For starters, ebook devices make it incredibly difficult to avoid instances where one word is left ‘hanging’ on its own line at the start or end of a paragraph. How, for example, can you reliably eradicate these in an ebook when the user can customise font size, and thereby re-flow the layout of the text themselves? Checking that an ebook works in both landscape and portrait mode can stretch an editor’s checking time, as can checking for poorly-interpreted fonts, dud or missing links and, in the case of an adaptation, checking that all the text from the original print book has been correctly translated to an onscreen, usable format. This, on top of the regular ‘book’ editing that applies to both print and electronic products.
Whatever happens, it will be fascinating to watch how the publishing industry in Australia develops and implements convergence-friendly CMS. For editors, the challenges appear to be wide-ranging but ultimately fascinating. Ebooks, in whatever format they take, will allow editors to literally test the boundaries of what is possible in this field. Even then, the boundaries will continue moving outwards as technology develops new and better ways to present content on electronic devices.
Published by the Society of Editors newsletter, 2012
Spell It Out
David Crystal
Profile Books
Given the intricate and highly convoluted nature of the history of spelling, one gets the impression that to call an etymological historian a pedant is something of a compliment. Following the trail of spelling variations through English history is a monumental task, even more so if the explorer in question is foolhardy enough to translate this history for the masses. But here, in David Crystal’s Spell It Out, is a largely intelligible plain-English resource that is perfect for anyone willing to spend their reading time verbally enunciating letter sounds as they go. This is something worth avoiding on trains if you don’t favour looking like a monkey.
Typically, it’s easy for any editor to appreciate what must have been some serious structural editing for this particular project. The thirty-seven chapters are split primarily into three main sections: the history of spelling; famous spelling ‘rules’ and supposed misdemeanours of spelling; and a sort of miscellaneous section towards the end that deals with exotic spellings, unspellable noises and the now-mandatory final chapter discussing the ‘future’ of English spelling.
One of the most distinctive elements of this book is its illustration of the truly inconsistent and chameleon-like state of English spelling since the time of sixth-century monks in Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, envisioning spelling as anything with a ‘fixed’ state has been largely a concoction of the post-Gutenberg era, when mass-produced books made it necessary to settle on agreed forms of spelling.
Spell It Out also highlights several ironies. For one, Crystal argues that people who are efficient at writing abbreviated text messages are actually displaying a fairly developed capacity for understanding the rules of legibility. Ostensibly, people who are good texters are generally good spellers, since abbreviation requires an understanding of which letters can be omitted and which cannot in order for a text message to be understood. And there is plenty of room in Crystal’s work for a general, light-hearted scolding of English spelling curriculums throughout history. Crystal argues, for example, that English classes past and present are guilty of enforcing ‘rules’ that, when the history or spelling evolution is explained, do little to aid new spellers. Instead, Crystal suggests classrooms would be better off replacing these ‘rules’ with a lesson on how to recognise words of Latin or French origin (the logic being that words with similar origins follow similar spelling practices).
Indeed, for any teacher or editor responsible for dictating useful tips on spelling practice to young learners, this is a useful (if highly detailed) tool. Spell It Out is a beginner’s manual on why English spelling has become so bloody complicated and why it has so many relatively unfathomable and exception-filled rules. What is perhaps most fascinating about Spell It Out is Crystal’s ability to make even dry subject matter a relatively interesting read—as long as you’ve had your morning coffee.
This isn’t really a book around which you can curl your exhausted body in bed after a hard day at the office. It’s a book for those interested in grasping the foundations of what is an exhaustibly intricate topic. Thankfully, Crystal’s style is clear-cut enough (and firmly edited enough) for readers who might be overwhelmed by the breadth of the subject matter covered by this book. Crystal allows the reader to grasp how easily the history of English spelling could easily fill several volumes before it reaches the current era, a time in which spelling pedants write passionate blog posts lambasting the increasing use of the greengrocer’s apostrophe or nosediving spelling skills amongst teens.
If anything, Crystal gives us hope that the internet, and indeed the future of spelling, need not be as dire as some editors fear. We may work at the very nucleus of the spelling atom, spending our days with our noses buried in dictionaries and prizing (or despising) the spelling consistency with which we must align our projects. But like any human invention, Crystal’s Spell It Out illustrates just how susceptible—and beneficial—spelling evolution can be to a language that has survived the centuries to become one of the predominant languages on the planet.
Published by Beat January 2013
Cirque du Soleil is well-known for certain elements of its act, not all of them universally liked. This includes hyperactive performers, garish costuming and props, and a certain element of grating childishness.
To be fair, the nature of their new show Ovo does make the performers look like somersaulting Teletubbies. And the ‘plot’ is annoyingly nonsensical. There’s an egg. A clownish mosquito wants it but other insects want it more. Perhaps if you watch them all perform their seriously dorky Hi-5 dance routines, you may be able to discern some interpretive-dance-related explanation for why insects want to simply have a giant egg. Still, it’s difficult to see why they bother with all of this, since the acrobatics themselves are so stunning that everything else just seems like unnecessary fluff.
It’s an injustice trying to squeeze in all the performances here. Suffice it to say that if there’s one particular type of circus act you prefer, you’ll find it in this show. Worthy mentions go to the foot-juggling Ants, who were stunningly adept at throwing things—including each other—into the air using their feet. Spiderman Julaiti Ailati deserves kudos for a sore head, since it took all of his weight during a handstand…on a slackwire. Graceful butterflies Svitlana Kashevarova and Dmytro Orel made us swoon with their romantic interpretation of the straps, while the circus clowns consistently proved their worth. The trio (Simon Bradbury, Barthelemy Glumineau and Michelle Matlock) were caricatures magnified, adept at being cartoonish but not overly garish.
In terms of logistics, there were some elements that seemed ill-conceived. There appeared to be only two small toilet blocks—for a sold-out crowd of around 2600 people—and the strategy for mass exiting was so strangely engineered that cars in the VIP parking area left more quickly than hundreds of people lining up to use a tiny pedestrian exit. But since Cirque du Soleil has successfully weaved its own brand of circus magic for years, I have no doubt that such logistical anomalies will not stop the masses coming to see what is a consistent and professional circus show.
Published October 2012 in Beat
Melbourne Writers’ Theatre’s production The Stairs Are Moving is an ambitious play that aims to make a new space within the realm of melodrama. It is, however, let down by uneven pacing, a difficult structure and a slow opening third.
The plot of this production is straightforward—two siblings, Marjory (Sarah Plummer) and Dmitri (Maurice Mammoliti) go to the funeral of a hated Aunt (Carolyn Masson) to exact post-mortem revenge on their cruel relative. Marjory does, anyway; Dmitri is too busy drinking away his past to be capable of anything more than sullen distrust of everyone he encounters. Meanwhile, the hyperactive and super-organised Tulip (Charlotte Nicdao), Aunt Petunia’s servant, buzzes around like an unswattable fly, adding a thin layer of lightness to the proceedings throughout this dark and depressing production.
One of the more interesting aspects of this play is the surrealist touch. It’s small but significant, revolving primarily around the titular stairs and the way in which their activities lead directly to the ‘downfall’ in the play’s climactic ending. Still, it’s not enough of a quirk to change the overall tone of the play or detract from some pretty depressing proceedings. When you spend that much time covering abuse, depression, alcoholism and pent-up rage, it’s easy to miss the surrealist woods for the melodramatic trees.
There are other elements, too, which make this play a difficult one in terms of audience engagement. Characters, for example, very rarely interact with each other in real time, speaking instead mostly to the audience. And after 90 minutes, it’s difficult for an audience to maintain interest in how characters might relate to each other when it’s indirectly shown.
The Stairs Are Moving makes bold attempts on several levels, including a different approach to character interaction and surrealist sub-elements that leap to the fore just when required. But it’s always difficult for audiences to become engaged when characters rarely speak directly to each other while treading a well-worn path to emotional deliverance.
The Stairs Are Moving is playing at La Mama Courthouse from 24 October to 3 November.
Published October 2012 in Crikey
First Dog will always hold a special place in my heart, most noticeably because my heart is full of other cartoon animals who appreciate interpretive dance. He’s in good company.
Still, my appreciation of his show has a lot to do with the fact that First Dog employs Smart Humour for Intelligent People, and these people have been out in abundance recently, if his sold-out show How to Draw Cartoobs and Other Typos is anything to go by.
The premise of the show is simple but effective, if precariously close to uninventive. It’s just a slideshow, a guy in a suit and a script, and it could quite easily go pear-shaped. In general, it doesn’t, even if the show drags on a tad too long.
Most people will appreciate the thoughtful drawings, multitude of cute cat pictures and yes, real-life interpretive dancing. You don’t need to know First Dog’s cartoons, but it helps.
It suits those with relatively short attention spans because it’s a show with a wandering heart. First Dog demonstrates his broad emotional range, leaping from critical, amusing discourse on climate change to feminism and the many ways in which a bandicoot can enchant the public with his stunning bodily interpretations of the machinations of Australian politics.
