This weekend, after seeing Oliver Twist , I promised myself I would read more "classic" novels, at which point I purchased a distinctly non-classical novel from the new releases section, Blue Water , which I am now half way through. To make up for the obvious disregard I have for my own conviction in these matters, I then purchased the appropriately titled Crime and Punishment , which was six dollars and which had on the back cover "the most readable of the classics". Shut up, I am at least trying.

I saw four movies this weekend, including The Chumscrubber , a movie they're saying is quite like American Beauty mixed with Donnie Darko and as a result it's derivative and boring, but I liked it. It had a sense of humour about itself - a rare thing in films about "young people" being "disenfranchised". I also could ignore its slight misjudgment of things at times because of the acting, which I thought was excellent. That Billy Elliot, I tells ya, he's orright (also, Glenn Close was brilliant, and CJ Cregg from The West Wing should probably be in most films). I took it as a satirical movie - not just a satire on contemporary America (which I agree is getting kind of boring), but a comment on films like the ones it's being compared to. Perhaps I was being too generous, for once, although I doubt that.

******
I visited my Grandmother. She said, out of nowhere, "What are you proudest of?"

My Grandma is a modern-day Shakespeare character. She speaks in simple, considered prose. She looks at you directly. She asks questions that could unravel a kingdom in a day. Then she offers you a cup of tea with a shortbread.

******
I also saw In The Shadow of the Palms this weekend. It's a documentary about Iraq before, during and after the first attacks by the USA. If you would like to know what Iraq is actually like, and how people live there, and precisely how ignorant the media is enabling us (in the west) to be, then check it out. I think I thought of Iraq as just this kind of empty desert with blood and anger and death. The filmmaker, Wayne Coles-Janess, an Australian, has just used footage to make an overall picture, really. No "plot", no cohesive "message", except that Iraq is a country just like where you live, except someone started dropping bombs on it and all the Christians and the Muslims and the pro-Saddam and the anti-Saddam Iraqis were suddenly rushing from crumbling building to crumbling building to haul people out of the rubble. It makes you realise that, as the brilliant chain-smoking school teacher in the film says, "We are under the control of liars". The politicians, all of them, were leading people into a war that the people had no control over but that would change them forever. It's obvious, but it's horrible. Watch the footage of the bombs dropping. Nothing precise or targeted about it.

Actually, I recommend, to really feel the full force of how ridiculous the world is, that you go and see this movie alone, as I did, and then emerge to see a huge TV screen broadcasting photographs of Nicole Kidman's marriage to Keith Urban.

*****
Later on Sunday, I stood in a shop that sells nuts from the counter. They're served hot and in a paper bag. I was waiting for the guy in front of me to order some cashews. His five or six year old son was with him. Their conversation was lovely:

Kid looks slightly perplexed. Peers in at nuts.
- Dad?
- Yep (slightly pre-occupied with nuts)
- Is salt a chemical?
- Ah, no. No, I don't think so. Not a chemical, exactly.
- What happens when it dries up?
- Salt?
- Yeah.
- I guess it gets dry and crystalised. You know, if you took all the water out of the sea, it would just be salt left. Crystalised salt, I guess.
- Yes... What's it for?
- Some people say it makes food taste better. But you can't have too much because it's not good for you.
- (Kid looks at salted cashew nuts for a bit)
- (Dad watches kid watching nuts) Speaks to kid again:
- Do you know what salt tastes like?
- Yes.
- It's kind of bitter, isn't it?
- Yes.

Kid and Dad leave. I tried to get a picture in my head of the kid so that one day I can send him a congratulations letter when he wins the nobel prize in twenty years. Was seriously five. Maybe six, if you squint.

*****

Then last night I saw Richard E Grant's film, Wah-Wah , which was brilliantly performed. As usual, I couldn't cope with the romanticisation or the melodrama that the film sometimes tipped into, but maybe it was necessary in this case.

In keeping with the sublime/ridiculous dichotomy of today, check this out - a most amusing and very brief article about the presents George Bush has been receiving from people since he became president. Yes the presents. The gifts. What would you get President Bush for his birthday? Nothing? (Tony Blair) A gun? (it's on the list) A whip? (same) Booze? (that one makes me laugh).

*******

Lastly, I found out today that the line in the Bright Eyes song I have been listening to in the car in fact refers to the protagonist having a "head full of pesticides" rather than to his having a "head full of pasta sauce". This disappoints me, as I had very much empathised with his position in regard to the pasta sauce. Life is full of disappointments such as these. Go here and check out a website full of them.

In The Weekend Australian this weekend, there is a full page advertisement in the glossy weekend magazine. The advertisement is "An Australian Government Promotion". Its purpose is to encourage eligible persons living in Australia to apply for Australian citizenship "so they can fully participate in this great nation of ours" (to quote Andrew Robb, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs).

The hook? "Australia's spirit and beauty prompted the 2003 Nobel Literature Laureate, John M. Coetzee, to become an Australian citizen".

Presumably the rationale behind this "promotion" is that people who read The Australian will be spluttering into their morning coffees and saying aloud at the breakfast table, "J M Coetzee did it? Where do I sign?"

A "literary crowd" at Coetzee's ceremony this year apparently "witnessed the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Senator the Hon. Amanda Vanstone, lead Mr Coetzee in his pledge of commitment to Australia", which must have been a singular joy.

Coetzee is quoted saying that taking on Australian citizenship creates responsibilities and duties. Robb (would you believe it) agrees, saying, "In Australia we value basic rights, such as democracy, equality under the law and equality of treatment and opportunity".

For reports on how well things have been going for the Aboriginal communities up North, you'll have to sift through the rest of the paper and try and find the words "basic rights" and "opportunity" in amongst the words "third world living standards", "infant mortality" and "paternalism". If you'd like to know how the asylum seekers who are about to have the law changed on them (again) feel about "equality of treatment and opportunity", you might have to wait a teensy while longer.

Still, why complain? The soccer seems to be going rather well, and a millionaire North Shore Sydneysider who lives in the United States is going to put a frock on and get married tomorrow, so that should be fun to read about until August.

I'm going for a walk.

Today I saw a headline in the papers that appeared to say "Government Provides Free Porn" but which actually when I looked closer I saw went for two lines rather than one and so on further inspection turned out to say "Government Provides Free Porn Filters".

If ever the people in layout should have a say over the sub-editors who write the headlines, it's moments like that don't you think? I've got a headline somewhere that I cut out of The Herald Sun one time that just says "INSERT HEADLINE HERE". You just know someone got fired for that one.

So anyway I saw Polanski's Oliver Twist last night. I said yesterday that I haven't read many classics. That is sadly true. Of the classics I have read, however, most of them have been Dickens. I've read Oliver Twist at least once (meaning once - and another time when I was "studying" it), I've seen the non-musical film version and the musical film version, and let's not forget that I played the role of the Artful Dodger in the grade six play (the only interpretation of the role I'm aware of that has included a top hat combined with a ponytail). So, in terms of knowing the story of Oliver Twist inside out, I'm probably only a fraction less well informed than the probably countless thousands who are currently writing a thesis on it. HOWEVER I did enjoy this interpretation. Ben Kingsley is really quite brilliant as Fagin, who is the key to the whole thing in my opinion - and the rest of the casting was pretty spot on. Dodger, though, should really have had a ponytail.

Then I went to Readings with the intention of buying a classic Russian novel or a Thomas Hardy or even a D H Lawrence. Needless to say I did nothing of the sort. I am now the proud new owner of the new A. Manette Ansay book. Manette Ansay spoke to my writing class when I was studying at Boston College and she was such a breath of fresh air amongst some of the more conservative influences (which were probably better for me than I thought they were at the time). Her website is here. I've never forgotten the class she spoke in and I've found it really hard to find her writing anywhere in Australia. Her book of short stories, Read This and Tell Me What It Says is just so damn good. The title short story is a corker. I'm looking forward to a weekend of reading punctuated by cups of tea. My favourite.

Writing's not hard.

Who said writing was hard? What idiot said that? Writing's excellent fun. As if you'd do anything else. Having fun with the writing today, which is typical because it's back to my other work tomorrow. Oh well. Round we go again.

Ironic that the person who showed me the following link is a producer, but Rita is a good producer and this story is about a bad producer. Producers are kind of like witches in that way. Some are wicked and some are nice and look after Judy Garland and help her get to the Emerald City when her house falls on their wicked counterparts. Anyway go here for a story about Richard E. Grant's producer, which I must admit I haven't listened to yet but I'm willing to bet it's worth a listen. Richard E. Grant, for those of you who don't know, is my boyfriend. Or to put it another way, we've never met but I quite liked him in a movie I saw once.

Now, in more important news.

Tim Stitz, who is leaving us on Monday to go to acting school in America, organised a trivia night last night to raise money for his plight. It was a most hilarious evening, and if you haven't seen Stitzy's Chinese Grandmother character, you reeeally have been missing out. The quiz itself was impossibly difficult for those of us who are ignorant in a range of areas, which I thought was rather unfair. Where were the questions like "Describe in general terms one of the articles you've read in the newspaper this week" or "Provide a Marxist critique of The O.C". What's with the yes/no answer bias at these things?

Anyway my friend Jeremy won the raffle. My other friend, Honor, won two tickets to the theatre. And what did I win? Well, I didn't win anything, but Stew won a myotherapy session with a hilarious friend of mine, and I paid for the raffle ticket that won it. So anyway that will be excellent when I get around to booking it.

So well done Timmeh. It was an excellent night although trivia depresses me because people think I read a lot and know about Literature. I know nothing. I hereby resolve to read one of the classics next. It's about time I got serious about this reading business.

Either that or I'm going to read this other (much breezier) book that I've had my eye on, and I'm going to not read the classics EVER and then tonight I will go and see Polanski's Oliver Twist and I will get all the Jane Austen books out on DVD and I will listen to an audio tape of Nabakov.

Writing is hard. It just is.

Maybe for some people it isn't. But for me, it's like being locked inside my own head and realising it isn't any different from the last time I was in there. Also, there's not enough room to move. And there aren't any windows.

Last night I finished Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman. Pretty funny book. He talks about writing actually. He's trying to decipher a paper written by a sociologist. It's complicated. He says:

'So I stopped - at random - and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read".'

I love the downright contempt he has for the arts.

Although, that's not entirely fair. He does desire to use art in order to translate science to people:

'I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world... It's analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run "behind the scenes" by the same organisation, the same physical laws. It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside: a realisation that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is.'

See? Told you he liked science.

Those atoms. They're beautiful things.

That's it from me. I've got to get out of this room.

Happy Monday, everyone!

I logged on to our website this morning and found one of our new photographs was on rotation as the homepage photograph - an extreme close-up of two enormous iced vo vos. Most alarming. Paul the Website Superman must have deemed them (sensibly) to be worthy of placement as a central motif for Standing There Productions - the end result of course being that I'm kind of hankering for an iced vo vo with my morning cup of tea.

Yesterday I went to a play reading at The Fairfax Theatre in Melbourne. The reading was of a play called Asylum, by Kit Lazaroo, which won the Wal Cherry Play of the Year. Two Standing There Productions Peeps were taking part in the reading: Tim Stitz (who has been in everything we've ever done) and Carly Shrever (who was in People Watching). Both Carly and Tim were (guess what) excellent, as usual. I then went to ACMI to watch a whole heap of AFTRS short films, including The Birthday Boy, which I had never seen before. I went alone. This detail is important because had I not been alone, silent, with headphones on, in a booth tucked away in a corner, maybe they wouldn't have locked me in by accident when they closed for the evening.

I had to rush up to the guy just as he was pulling this enormous wall closed over the section I had been sitting in. Adds a whole new level of fear to moviegoing, let me tell you.

Then last night I attempted to go to a show called Vaudeville X, which I had called up about earlier in the day and they had assured me I would get a seat. Due to the fact that "someone" had told me the wrong thing on the phone, they didn't have a seat for me. I walked there in the freezing cold, hung around waiting for thirty minutes, and then was offered a "standing-room" ticket for TEN DOLLARS. What a sweet deal! Or, to put it another way, what a great excuse to go home and watch The Society Murders on TV.

Anyway, so my attempt to have a culturally interesting day was thwarted by people attempting to lock me in buildings and other people trying to charge me to stand up for an hour to watch musical theatre. Next weekend I think I'll go to the footy.

In other news, Penny Tangey's show Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, which was on in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and which was directed by someone who almost spent the night at ACMI last night, has entered the Australian vernacular. Go here to see how Penny's show is a measure of the zeitgeist, in that nerds being hip, cool and happening is the simple, undeniable truth. This was reiterated last week when I received a flurry of phone calls from people telling me to watch Catylist, because there's a young girl on it who is partaking in a maths quest and who declares with heartbreaking honesty that she finds maths tables more interesting for the walls of her bedroom than posters of hot guys. In other words, Kathy Smith lives.

Very busy today and so let me just use this space to tell everyone about the new photos on our site.

Paul, the Website Superman, has posted a few more shots on the homepage (namely one of me and Rita) as well as a bigger range of photos rotating at the top of the page.

If none of those look familiar, that's because quite frankly you haven't been paying attention. If the photo looks like someone slightly nerdy doing what appears to be a maths olympiad on stage, that's a photo from Kathy Smith Goes to Maths Camp, which is the show by Penny Tangey (directed by me) from the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

If the photo looks like it's other people on stage, particularly if those people are wearing Green T Shirts with "People Watching" on them, that's because those photos were taken (now this is fairly complicated) on the set of our play, People Watching.

If the photos are black & white, they are OLD, which means they were taken on the set of the Really Useless Theatre Company show, The Dinner Party.

For BRAND NEW EXCITING photographs of the recent cast and crew screening of our film, I Could Be Anybody, go to the "Current Production" menu, and then select "Screening and Success"

Any questions, see me after class.