MAN ABOUT TOWN

That's me, on the left, with the lovely Michelle Bennett from 3RRR in the middle, and a friend of her's on the right who's name I can't recall beside her. The pic was taken by a photographer from Beat at the opening of the 3rd Melbourne Stencil Festival a couple of weeks ago.

Can you tell that I didn't have a lot to do at work today...? This is obviously only a partial and unfinished list, and it's very US and UK-centric at present. I intend to expand on and update it in the coming days and weeks, and will also add links as time permits. I should also add that these films are not presented in any special order, only as they came to me, as I trawled through my memory and a couple of handy websites. I invite you all, oh my loyal bloggers/readers, to contribute your own films in the comments section, below. There's plenty that I've missed. Happy viewing! Updated: Monday 5th June 1. Brokeback Mountain dir. Ang Lee , USA , 2005 This film surely needs no introduction. A poignant, subtle and evocative film about two young farmhands in the American midwest, it explores their uneasy attraction towards one another; the ramifications that relationship has; and its impact on one another, and their families, as it plays out over the following dec...

Come and watch the teams - I'm playing for the Megahertz again this year - fellow bloggers welcomed as barrackers!

Fifty years after she first appeared in comics, the character of Batwoman is set to return – as a lesbian. Crime-fighter Kathy Kane will re-appear in July, in the new series 52 , whose first issue was published this month by US company DC Comics. The character, who originally appeared in 1956, became Batman's ally in his fight against evil but was always in his shadow. The new Batwoman is described by the New York Times as a “lesbian socialite by night and a crime fighter by later in the night.” Ironically, it is believed the character of Batwoman was originally introduced to the DC Universe in order to stifle the rumours of Batman and Robin's homosexual relationship. I've linked to the NYT article, which is a detailed look at new representations of cultural and sexual diversity in comics, but you need to be a member to read it: membership's free though, folks. Now, all we need is for Batman and Robin to finally come out!

Just home from seeing a preview of the remake of classic fright-fest The Omen . Am utter waste of celluloid. No frights, no chemistry between the actors, uninspired cinematography, bland direction by John Moore, and an almost exact re-write by David Seltzer of his original screenplay. Give it a miss, folks, it was laborious and tedious. Leaving the cinema, my friend Cerise and I went out to a Japanese restaurant on Swanston Street for a quick bite. No sooner had we ordered than the waitress asked hesitantly, in broken English, if I knew the name of the song currently being played on the in-house PA. It was George Michael singing 'Careless Whispers.' The fact that I knew that was far scarier than the film I'd just suffered through!

Nothing to see here, ladies and gentlemen. Move along please, move along. You have to read that line aloud in your best English copper's voice for it to work, really. And no, it has nothing to do with the title of this post. This is what happens when you start writing the first thing that comes into your head... It's been a relatively quiet week for me, for once, discounting a job interview on Tuesday, and Friday night, which went from being a quiet night on the couch to a night of sheer decadence, following a phonecall from a mate, Christos. I was going to stay in. Instead, the night involved the consumption of wine, attending an exhibition opening, speed, Vietnamese food, a taxi ride, more speed, dog patting, a Siamese cat, the Laird, more friends, cocaine, cider, conversations about blogs, late night walks, another bar, fond and drunken farewells, the Peel, yet more speed, and being turned down by a cute piece of trade who I'd offered a drink to (silly boy doesn't kn...

My best friend Martin moved to Sydney last year with his boyfriend, who, I discovered today, is unwell. Huge hugs for you Martin, and fervent hopes for a swift and full recovery for your bf. I feel so utterly helpless down here, 1000 km away. Don't hesitate to call if you need me to come up: I'll be there the same day. love always, Richard xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxoooooooooooooooooxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I first saw this contemporary queer Irish rom-com that deals with the gamut of adult sexuality, straight, gay, lesbian and bisexual, at the opening night of the 14th Melbourne Queer Film Festival back in 2004. I just finished re-watching it 15 minutes ago. Written and directed by Liz Gill , it's a patchwork exploration of the loves and lives of a disparate group of Dubliners, including committment-phobic, gay, bike courier Red (a puckish Keith McErlean ); his best friend Angie ( Flora Montgomery ), a lesbian TV journalist; and the philandering, straight, university letch and lecturer Tom ( Sean Campion ) whose schtick ensnares many a young student, including - albeit briefly - the fiesty, unfettered, bisexual Clara ( Fiona O'Shaughnessy ). At only 85 minutes long, Goldfish Memory too often races through its complex and constantly rearranging set pieces of love and lust, resulting in a series of sketches rather than fully developed scenes, but its energy and enthusiasm can...

No, this isn't a post about me and oral sex: get your minds out of the sewers, and back to the gutters where they belong, you naughty, naughty children. According to the Tasmanian newspaper The Mercury , a new US series about a gay rockstar and his entourage called Him and Us , that was set to star English actor Anthony Head ( Giles from Buffy ) as lead character Max Flash has been cancelled. Damn. The series would also have featured former Sex And The City star Kim Cattrall, with Mick Jagger reported to have been lined up to make recurring appearances. The pilot's Executive Producer was Elton John, who also contributed the theme song for the show. Oh well. There better be a damn good reason the network didn't pick it up - sounds like a fun idea for a series to me!

2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival ARTIST REGISTRATIONS OPEN For 19 spring days and nights, Melbourne will burst with creativity and excitement as the 2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival hatches from a winter cocoon for our 24th year. The Melbourne Fringe Festival combines public art en masse as independently produced events in performance, circus, comedy, cabaret, music, dance / movement, visual arts and beyond transform the city's cultural landscape with three weeks of the most contemporary arts in Australia. Registrations for the 2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival OPEN on 29 MAY 2006. Melbourne Fringe invites artists to be part of the annual celebration that knows no creative boundaries. For the full Festival facts, registration details and artists' information forums visit www.melbournefringe.com.au, call the Melbourne Fringe office on 03 8412 8788, or visit our offices at 25 Easey Street, Collingwood between 10am and 5pm, Monday to Friday. Artist Registrations CLOSE at 5pm on 16 JUNE 2...

It's been quite a hectic week, now I think about it... Monday: worked at 3RRR on a grant application. Fringe Board meeting postponed so had a rare, quiet night at home and was in bed by 10pm. Tuesday: media preview of X Men III: The Final Stand in the morning (significantly less character development that the first two films, much less satisfying dramatically, several scenes where events clearly only happened so that they could be resolved in as flashy a manner as possible). Worked at MCV in the afternoon. Tuesday night dropped into Martin Tighe's Ronald Ryan exhibition at Hogan Gallery on Smith Street; I'd hoped to interview him on my show this week, but the Breakfasters beat me to it, curse them! ;-) It's a good exhibition - mixed media, a distinct sense of humanity and pathos, and Tighe's trademarked three-dimentional canvases. Wednesday: At MCV again, today working on a cover story about Geelong cops apparently confessing to entrapping men at local beats...

GYPO [Force Entertainment] This intelligent, well-crafted and understated British drama is a masterful addition to the Dogme school of film-making, a movement founded in Copenhagen in 1995 and dedicated to creating a ‘pure’ cinema, as opposed to the Hollywood-style cinema of empty spectacle that dominates theatres world-wide. Dogme directors swear to uphold a ‘Vow of Chastity’, whose rules include shooting only on location, hand-held camera-work, no soundtracks save for where such music occurs naturally on location, and an avoidance of superficial action such as murders and gunfights. The movement’s best-known directors include Lars von Trier and Harmony Korine, while its films include Lone Scherfig's Italian For Beginners and The Idiots . Jan Dunn’s Gypo (a pejorative British term originally used to belittle Gipsies, now also employed to describe refugees in the U.K.) is Britain’s first Dogme film. It screened earlier this year at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival to great acclai...

I've just come home from the opening night of Bell Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . To say I was underwhelmed is a serious understatement. To say I was frustrated, bored, and insulted by John Bell's latest production is closer to the mark. It's rare that I walk out of a play. I did so tonight, and I've had no qualms in doing so. Having never seen a live production of Romeo and Juliet I hoped for a production of this play that evoked adolescent dreams, the instant passion of true love's aching desire, and a sense of tragedy. I got none of this. Instead, I saw a play that was over-directed, stagy, artificial and contrived. Ham-fisted and forced attempts at humour littered the production. Painfully obvious attempts to modernise the production were dropped in without reason. The poetry of the text was suffocated beneath mechanical and trite staging. Case in point: the feud between the Capulets and Montagues was presented as antagonism between wogs and skips, but w...

Yesterday's guests on SmartArts were: 9.10AM Thomas Jones – SEND THE UNSENT project As Thomas describes it, he is "compiling a book comprising of letters people have written but never sent for whatever reason." It reminds me of the Post Secret project, but in letter form instead of postcards. Letters written by people to ex-lovers, dead parents, fan's idols, the driver of the car who killed your child; a gamut of emotional experiences in written form, reprinted for you to read: insights into other people's emotional states that might let you know that you're not the only person to experience such powerful feelings. A large percentage of proceeds from the book will be going to the Beyond Blue Foundation. I think it sounds like a great project. If you'd like to submit your letters, you can contact Thomas via sendtheunsent@hotmail.com - drop him a line and tell him I sent you! 10.00am 3rd annual Melbourne Stencil Festival I caught up with Festival Directo...

On Saturday morning I dreamed I had captured Dick Cheney and tied him to a chair located on the rear veranda of a house in Northcote I've never seen before. I was planning to kill him, except that I was overcome with guilt/remorse/oh the humanity of it all, and chucked the AK47 I was carrying into a strangely flooded Merri Creek. I wonder what this means? On Sunday afternoon I went to see the film Kokoda , in which I saw someone splattered with Angus Sampson's brain, a scene I found slightly disturbing, as I know Angus through Triple R, and really didn't need to see what the inside of his head looks like... Catching a tram home on Friday, heading up Collins Street towards Parliament, I had a sudden flashback to a wet, windy, rainy night in 1990, when I was working at the Victorian AIDS Council, and had walked into the city, my greatcoat flapping like wings behind me, to see a Comedy Festival show. The wild weather exhilarated me and I laughed with my face tilted up into the...

DEUTERONOMY 22:13-21 If it is discovered that a bride is not a virgin, the Bible demands that she be executed by stoning immediately. DEUTERONOMY 22:22 If a married person has sex with someone else's husband or wife, the Bible commands that both adulterers be stoned to death. MARK 10:1-12 Divorce is strictly forbidden in both Testaments, as is remarriage of anyone who has been divorced. LEVITICUS 18:19 The Bible forbids a married couple from having sexual intercourse during a woman's period. If they disobey, both shall be executed. MARK 12:18-27 If a man dies childless, his widow is ordered by biblical law to have intercourse with each of his brothers in turn until she bears her deceased husband a male heir. DEUTERONOMY 25:11-12 If a man gets into a fight with another man and his wife seeks to rescue her husband by grabbing the enemy's genitals, her hand shall be cut off and no pity shall be shown her. EZEKIEL 16:48-49 tell us: "This is the sin of Sodom; she and her s...

A new production by Kage Physical Theatre explores masculinity through the language of dance, says Richard Watts . MELBOURNE’S KAGE PHYSICAL Theatre Company is renowned for a style of dance theatre that is rich and raw in its physicality and its humour. Headlock , their latest production, appears to be moving into grimmer territory. The piece explores the complex physicality and sensitivities of masculinity, and is set over the first 24 hours of a young man’s prison term. “We really wanted it to be a story about family connection,” director and Kage co-founder Kate Denborough explains. “Gradually the original cast of five whittled down to a cast of three, and became three brothers. The production is told, or seen through the eyes of the middle brother.” The original concept for Headlock was “an exploration of the physicality of Greco-Roman and pro- wrestling,” Denborough says. “Because of that we were working with an all male cast right from the start, and then also we had various sto...

A new grassroots campaign to combat HIV infection has been launched in Melbourne, reports RICHARD WATTS . “Rising levels of HIV in the gay community threaten us individually and as a group,” says Paul Kidd, the editor of Positive Living , in a widely diseminated e-mail. “I don’t want us to be subject to increased levels of government interference in our sexual lives, criminalisation of unprotected sex or restrictions on sex venues. That’s why I’ve joined Rug Up for Winter .” Rug Up for Winter is a new grassroots campaign that urges gay men to take the initiative in combating the rising tide of HIV infections, instead of assuming that such actions are the responsibility of AIDS Councils and similar organisations. Based around the use of such technology as SMS, e-mail and a website, the campaign aims to sign up 10,000 gay Australians to a simple, three-step plan to combat HIV infection. The idea for Rug Up for Winter grew out of a discussion Kidd had with his friends about the rising r...

Ganesha goes to town , Jacinta Ryan, gouache on paper. 9.10am Lili Wilkinson from the Centre for Youth Literature was the first guest of the day. She joined us to chat about www.insideadog.com.au ‘Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.’ - Groucho Marx Australia now has its first website for teenagers to share their enjoyment of books and reading. www.insideadog.com.au , developed by the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria, is a world first that provides a forum for teenagers to talk about books and promotes young adult literature... 9.30am Director Gregory Pakis joined us to chat about a charity screening of his feature film The Garth Method (82MIN). Proceeds go to Amnesty International. When/Where SAT MAY 13th 5:30pm SUN MAY 14th 6:30pm The Old Colonial Inn, 127 Brunswick St Fitzroy (near Gertrude St), VICTORIA SYNOPSIS: In 2001 unemployed actor Garth Petridis was imprisoned for one of the most unusual crimes in Au...

Walking to work in Richmond this morning through the Fitzroy Gardens: gold and umber leaves bright against the emerald grass and the steel-blue clouds; the air crisp, not so much biting as gently nibbling at my ears. Tonight: walking into the city for an exhibition opening at the National Gallery at Federation Square. Detouring to kill half an hour through Birrarung Marr; 'marr' meaning the north bank of the river, 'birrarung' meaning 'place of mists'. Occasional cyclists whizzing past in the gloaming; gravel scrunching deliciously beneath their wheels. The last gold of sunset glowing on the light towers of the MCG. Courting couples hugging each other for warmth and affection perched on benches overlooking the river. Deborah Halpern's sculpture Angel transplanted from the moat of the NGVI in St Kilda Road to the Yarra bank, gazing out over the river with wondering Cubist eyes. Walking through the Federation Bells as they ring and roll and chime their frac...

The R.E. Ross Trust Playwrights’ Script Development Awards 2006 are now open for entry. Over four years the R.E. Ross Trust Script Development Awards have fostered Victoria’s theatre industry by providing support to Victorian-based writers for the development of their play scripts. The total annual prize money is $30,000 with applicants eligible to apply for a minimum of $3,000 and maximum of $10,000 per year. One of the award winners will also be selected to participate in the creative development program of the 2007 National Playwrights’ Conference. 2004 winner Anthony Crowley believes the award brought his work to an international audience. ‘If not for the support of the R.E Ross Trust, the script of Shadow Passion would not have reached a suitable level of development to take to New York. The award allowed me to explore visual and thematic issues that facilitated a very productive reading at New Dramatists,’ he said. To be eligible to enter applicants must be must be ...

Melbourne Fringe is seeking applications for a Production Manager to work between May and October 2006. The Production Manager will deliver the North Melbourne Festival Hub venues for the 2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival, manage production staff and budgets. The Production Manager will also support Producers and staff with technical advice across all Melbourne Fringe events. The link to the full PD on our website is below. Deadline for applications is 6pm Friday 19 May. http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/corporate/2006/takingpart/jobs

I've decided to start spreading some interesting rumours about myself, seeing as nobody else seems to be up to the job. Here's a couple of creative but utterly untrue tidbits to get you going: Last year I was involved in a passionate but destructive relationship with a Collingwood footballer. Last month I secretly started dating a woman, but am totally in the closet about the relationship in case word gets out and my artfag reputation is ruined. I own every album Kylie has ever released, and all her singles, but I pretend to loathe her music in order to maintain my streetcred. Several years ago, while working at Dream nightclub, I responded to a question by two cops doing a walk-through by saying, "I'm sorry officer, I can't understand a word you said; I don't speak fascist." I am a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party. Anyone else care to spread some juicy rumours about me? I've been far too boring of late to get up to much that's gossip-wort...

Running to catch a tram in the city this afternoon, I see a woman of 55 or so being shoved out the door into the street, followed by an abuse-screaming junkie harridan, scrawny arms flailing, who then swings several punches at the other woman's face. When I try and intervene her fat thug of a boyfriend shoves me backwards. Both then reboard the tram spitting curses, and depart. I, meanwhile, am left to comfort the older woman, who turns out to be a poet I vaguely know through the Melbourne spoken word scene. She's crying, and crouched on the road trying to pick up her scattered belongings. Her lips are crimson with her own blood. Luckily she was more shaken than hurt, although I stayed with her until her boyfriend could drive in from Brunswick and pick her up, just to make sure she was going to be okay. Apparently the blue started because she asked the junkie's boyfriend to move over and stop taking up the entire seat. Karma, you junkie mole. I hope the next time you stagge...

I've been drinking a new bottle of French absinthe that I purchased a few days ago. So far its made me spruik wildly outside the Town Hall while profering free copies of The Pun , lounge decadently while listening to approximately 15 new release albums and CD's that I'm considering playing on my RRR show tomorrow, and it's given me some really, really intersting dreams (involving superheroes, South-East Asian mammals they have psychic connections to, and lizards). Oh yeah, and a hangover. Mmmmmm, absinthe.

I'm sure many of you already know and love the Icelandic band Sigur Rós , but if by some wild chance you aren't familiar with them, here are a couple of opportunities to correct your sins... The delightful clip for ' Hoppípolla ' from their most recent album, 2005's Takk... The clip for ' Glósóli ', also from Takk... The video for ' Untitled #1 ' (aka ' Vaka ') from the album ( ) The absolutely enchanting clip for ' Viðrar Vel Til Loftárása ' from Agætis Byrjun . This one makes me cry. And finally, the clip for ' Svefn-g-Englar ', also from Agætis Byrjun . This one makes me cry too.