I am going to the Sydney Festival this weekend. There are some fairly exciting cultural forces to be reckoned with up there this weekend, including Standing There Captain of Industry Melanie Mars Bar Howlett and a chap who goes by the name of Beckett (seems to have written a couple of plays).

Speaking of culture, did anyone watch that brilliant, brief, dirty adaptation of Macbeth on the ABC the other night? Some of my favourite British performers and some presumably very happy production designers were let loose on a script that has traditionally bored me, despite its obvious brilliance. The whole thing was set in a kitchen, leading to a brilliant combination of Jaime Oliver undertones and ready access to sharp knives. Can't wait to see if their Taming of the Shrew is going to be as good as Ten Things I Hate About You.

(This leads me to an obvservation I have made many times to housemates and long suffering friends: don't you think that the easiest way to tell where a TV show was made is to mute the sound and look at the lighting? Bright or soft warm = America. Dark and shadowy or blue and alarming = Britain, anywhere close to Britain. Stark yellow or flat and white = Summer Bay. It's the Asian ones that are hard to pick. Try it.)

Anyway, the writing's going well thanks.

Shut up.

Today we went to check out "the space" (that's dramaspeak for the stage) at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne. It brings a whole new frightening realism to the pending deadlines of having a show on when you can actually see where the audience would be sitting (if it existed yet).

I wonder what it's like for a doctor to meet the patient s/he's about to perform brain surgery on. Probably just something you get used to, right?

Right?

Guys?

Er...

Is this thing on?

Horrible, nasty, vindictive weather in Melbourne this week. The wind hurls dust up under your eyelids and into your nostrils and hurtles along the street swirling dirty clouds of McDonalds packaging and dead leaves into the gutters. It's October and it feels like March. A particularly hideous March. If you haven't already seen Al Gore's climate change film, go and see it, if only so you can realise how many of the "Things You Can Do" that you're not doing. It's getting a bit spooky.

Tonight I'm going to see 1984 at the Melbourne Arts Festival, with many thanks to Rita. It's my first festival show and I'm really looking forward to it. Hopefully they have re-conceived the show in a contemporary setting, such as in the accounts department of Telstra, which I have been suggesting to anyone who will listen for some time now.

Dave Eggers (culturally aware frisbee playing writer = dream boy) has written a book about Sudan, which you can read about here. Eggers wrote one of my favourite books and is responsible for many impressive things since then, such as the above website, this website, and this very cool dvd magazine.

Anyway, Sudan.

He doesn't do anything by halves. Read the interview.

Meanwhile, I'm getting away again this weekend. I saw Jet of Blood last night, which is Artaud, who I remember studying and whose biography goes some way towards explaining his artistic approach, which is refreshingly insane and experiencing a bit of a renaissance at the moment.

Also, thanks to the always sensible Dave Barry website, here is today's What I Would Be Talking About If I Still Worked In Commercial Radio link.

Because you should always finish the week on a light story that really only yahoo would print on the internet, right?

I went to a Fringe Festival show last night, and I was late. This is not a surprising or newsworthy event by any means, but it did afford me the opportunity to catch up with the doorbitch while I waited for the "late entry" moment when they open the door and allow you to slink guiltily into your front row seats (man I hate it when pricks like me walk in late to shows).

Anyway, the doorbitch at this show was a chap who goes by the handle of Noack. Now, Noack is the kind of bloke who rigs his shitbox car up with an elaborate alarm system, so that when he approaches the car in the street and points a remote control at it, passers-by are befuddled to see a 1984 model Sigma going "bloopbloop". Several years after first meeting Noack, I discovered that he is a highly skilled (not to mention bestockinged) performer of traditional Estonian Dance. This is completely irrelevant but it is the kind of detail I wish I could think of for characters in the scripts I write.

But I digress! Noack and I had a conversation which got me thinking. Noack has clearly put some thought into this, and I doff my hat to him while completely stealing his premise and writing it here:

WANT TO MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS IN THE FILM INDUSTRY?

Can't be done, you say?

Not in Australia, you say?

No such thing as a film industry, you say?

Then think outside the box...

START YOUR OWN FILM FESTIVAL!

Seriously. Start your own film festival. Now. What are the overheads? Maybe you have to get a permit for something. Maybe you have to get some insurance. Maybe you have to do a teensy bit of publicity. But get this, you charge! You charge, say, thirty bucks to EACH SHORT FILM ENTERED. Imagine that! That's, like, three dollars per minute that most of these films will run for. Most festivals have twenty thousand submissions. The smaller ones only get hundreds.

Hack in to the desperate market of filmmakers who can't find a way into the film industry, and watch them come to you. You can even write it into the application form that you own various rights in relation to the films these people submit to you.

Then, and here's the really good bit, hold the "festival" somewhere big and cheap but with a huge screen and CHARGE FOR ENTRY. Better still, the prizes for best film and so on can be donations from companies who want their stuff advertised to young people . Also, get a website and try to get Americans to enter or something. That way you can call yourself an International Festival, which means people will be doing interviews with you in the EG all about how you started the idea in a garage one time because you "just knew there was this gap out there and all these voices weren't being heard". Preferably there will be a shot of you on a lounge chair that has been dragged into an urban street, which will afford you an excellent opportunity to be photographed in sunglasses. And possibly also to carrying a martini which you can rest on a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

If it seems that I have a chip on my shoulder in relation to any of the above, well that is because I do. I wish I had thought of it earlier, frankly.

My festival is going to be called Alternation Film Festival (because it's alternative and nation all merged into one). Bugger, though, it already exists in Taipei.

Of course it does.

I went and saw the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra playing the other night with a young lad called Ben Folds. It really was quite something, and it made all of us want to go to the orchestra more often. Like, ever. There are some things I never do much, which I possibly should do more. These include:

- Attending orchestra productions

- Attending dance productions

- Reading books without interrupting self by purchasing more exciting book, which I then also don't finish on account of newly purchased and more exciting book

- Messing about in boats

I plan to add to this list. Lists of what I am inadequate at doing are always long and thick and rich with juicy goodness.

Carry on.

I've been writing, which means everything else in my life is in disarray.

I did manage to get to the theatre on the weekend to see a play that reminded me why I never go and see mainstream theatre. Thirtysomething dollars to see a tortured metaphor and some heavy symbolism flogged to death on a very expensive and very contrived set. I don't like saying bad things about theatre, but my Lordy, that show I saw at Black Lung for ten bucks a few months back (which is what inspired me to get out more to see shows) really was the best theatre I've seen in ages. They have a new show on at the moment. Check it out here. Miles more interesting than anything you'll be overcharged for in the CBD.

Anyway then I checked out an exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, which I couldn't hear any of because the acoustics were so bad. Seriously. You can stand as close as like to the little TV screens and all you hear is screaming and wailing from the other room. So you think, "I might go into the other room", and you go into the other room and all you hear is talking and shouting from the exhibition you just came from because you couldn't hear it. Generally, though, it looked like it was probably quite good. I like the more political art that's out there at the moment. It's a good sign. Or, well, it's a sign. What it means for the future of the depressing things it's critiquing, I'm not sure. But at least someone is noticing.

Speaking of depressing things and critiquing, I'm also five chapters into Crime and Punishment , which is like saying you're a hundred metres into a marathon, but I'm enjoying it very much. Which is a good thing because I also purchased another book on the weekend. John Banville's The Sea , which he read from at the Sydney Writers' Festival and which was lovely, or maybe his accent was lovely and he was reading Spot Goes To School , I probably wouldn't have noticed. The task is not to start it before I finish the Russian. Yeesh.

And last night I saw the film version of Everything is Illuminated , by Jonathan Safran Foer, one of my faves. I enjoyed the film, actually, more than I thought I would. It must be hard to make a film from such a beatifully constructed first person narrative that relies so heavily on the voice of the person - or people - telling the story. If you get it on DVD, check out the deleted scenes. Sometimes I think the DVD menu should divide the deleted scenes into "DELETED FOR A REASON" and "OUT FOR REASONS OF LENGTH, DEBATE WITH PRODUCERS, RESULT OF AUDIENCE POLLS ETC". Most of the deleted scenes on DVDs would fall squarely into the first of these categories. I would go so far as to say that most of them would fall into the WHAT WERE WE THINKING menu as well, but that's unfair. I'm being a bit unfair today.

Perhaps this is why. On my way to gym this morning, a sign on the side of a Church. You know those ones with the messages? The well-considered, often topical, questions of faith they put up outside Churches?

Go past the one in North Fitzroy and witness the following blunt threat:

GOD EXISTS. OTHERWISE EXISTENCE IS MEANINGLESS.

Er... okay.