MAN ABOUT TOWN

I've decided to get with the hirsuite crowd next month, and have signed up for Movember. Come Saturday 1st of November, I'll be shaving myself smooth then seeing what sort of hairy growth I can encourage on my upper lip over the following weeks. And yes, I promise to post photos as we go so you can track the development of my brand new mo (I'm thinking a waxed, melodrama villain style mo might be the go, but that might be too ambitious: we'll just have to see what I can cultivate in the time available...). The money raised by Movember is used to raise awareness of men's health issues and donated to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (PCFA) and beyondblue - the national depression initiative. The PCFA and beyondblue will use the funds to fund research and increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer and depression. Did you know: * Depression affects 1 in 6 men....most don't seek help. Untreated depression is a leading risk fact...

Sad news, but not entirely unexpected: after three years in the TARDIS, David Tennant will step down at the end of 2009. Still, at least we have the Christmas Special this year, and four more specials next year before he goes... And over here you can see the follow-up interview in which Tennant reflects on his involvement with the show, and talks about what's still to come. So, who would you like to see as the next Doctor? Any takers for Russell Tovey...?

What does the Malthouse Theatre have in store for the first half of 2009? Michael Kantor spills the beans. “It feels like it’s a season that is attempting, in some way, to respond to a very unstable world,” Michael Kantor says of the first of his two Malthouse Theatre seasons for 2009. “There’s a big focus on making sure we’ve found space to wryly sit back and laugh at ourselves.” Kantor, the Artistic Director of the Malthouse, has programmed nine productions for the first half of 2009, including three world premieres of new Australian works, and three Malthouse Theatre commissions. Central to the season is playwright Tom Wright’s Optimism , a reworking of the classic satire Candide by the French writer Voltaire. “This great story … was a satire about the nature of optimism, and yet 350 years later we’re sitting thinking ‘How can we continue to feel optimistic?’ It’s still the same question, because there’s a natural desire for optimism,” Kantor says. “It’s something that’...

As you might know, I've moved over from editing the weekly LGBT newspaper MCV to heading up a brand new fortnightly arts and entertainment magazine called CANVAS . It's both an arts magazine and a gay magazine, but it's not capital G gay. Think of it as an arts magazine with a queer sensibility, if you like, rather than a magazine about gay art. Quite apart from the fact that there's not enough gay art out there to warrant such a narrow focus, my guidelines for the inclusion of anything in CANVAS are about quality, not sexuality. If it's good art, I'm interested. Two issues of CANVAS have been published to date, and so far the feedback from both the arts sector and the queer community has been extremely positive. The new issue hits the streets this Thursday, so please check it out - especially if you're a fan of contemporary Australian fiction... And hey, if you run a gallery, or an artist-run initiative, or maybe a theatre company, please please please thin...

Thanks to excellent film blog My New Plaid Pants , I've just discovered that producer par excellence Christine Vachon has greenlit a new film called Kill You Darlings , which is based on a little known murder that helped catalyse the birth of the Beat Generation: the 1944 killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr , the youth Kammerer had ardently pursued (read stalked) for several years. Both Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were connected with the murder, indeed Kerouac was jailed as an accessory after the fact; an event which he touches on in both his first novel, The Town and the City, and many years later in The Vanity of Dulouz . Interestingly, a novel which Burroughs and Kerouac co-wrote about that murder, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is about to be published by Grove Press next month. Yeah, daddy-o!

Let's get one thing clear right from the start. My first ever international media junket was paid for by the 2009 World Outgames , with money provided by Wonderful Copenhagen , the city's official tourist body. In return for flying me over for a crash course in cultural tourism and putting me up in an ideally-located boutique hotel, they want me to place articles about Copenhagen, the Outgames and the games' major cultural event - the OUTcities project - in both the LGBT and mainstream media. So I plan on doing just that. However, that won't stop me being frank and honest about my time there. If I had any negative experiences, trust me, I won't hold back from blogging about them. But I don't think I really have anything bad to say about Copenhagen. My all-too-brief time there was, in all honesty, fan-fucking- tastic . I so didn't want to leave. Anyway, that disclaimer aside, here are some impressions - and the occasional photo - of my four all...

Some three weeks ago, my already hectic life went supernova. It was Tuesday September 23, the Melbourne Fringe Festival was in full swing, and I'd just put that week's issue of MCV to bed. Dragging my weary self home, I found an email from the City of Melbourne waiting for me in my inbox, asking me to call a certain number ASAP. One short phone call later, I learned I'd been nominated by the committee steering Melbourne's participation in the OUTcities project (part of the cultural stream of the 2009 World Outgames ) as their journalist of choice to participate in a three-day press tour to Copenhagen, the games' host city. Copenhagen had suggested a journalist from The Australian , but the steering committee had suggested me, given my strong ties to both the queer and the arts communities. To say I was flattered would be a major understatement. But more importantly: would I accept the nomination? Damn right I would! There was just one problem: the press tour was sc...

Airports, during stop-overs between flights, are a curious Limbo; full of - on the one hand - bright-eyed and excited tourists about to disembark on a Great Adventure (tm); but also the sunken-eyed, haunted-looking travellers like me, who are caught in the closest I've ever experienced to a black hole while awaiting a transfer between Hong Kong and home. Still, it could be worse. The cute early-20s something guy near me just slumped onto the bar and started sobbing. Either that or snoring. It's hard to tell. Maybe I should buy him a drink and find out? Hmm. No. Unshaven and sunken-eyed as I am, I probably look more like a serial killer than a prospective shoulder to cry on, let alone a romantic knight in shining, slightly jetlagged armour. But anyway. Copenhagen was fantastic. A beautiful city, populated by warm and lovely people. I can't wait to go back. That said, given that I expressed similar sentiments and wishes about A) Glasgow, B) Dublin and C) Amsterdam in 2005, an...

Flying out of Tullamarine shortly after midnight after a frantic afternoon trying to put the editorial content for issue #1 of Canvas to bed is perhaps not the best way to kick off a four day media junket to Copenhagen, but is (perhaps appropriately) indicative of the manic nature of my life... So after four and a half hours sleep and a 14 hour day at work, I had an eight hour flight to Hong Kong (for a 45 minute stop-over: so frustratingly close to where Kerryn, an old friend lives, but completely unable to contact her - besides which, it was 6am local time when we landed in Hong Kong and I didn't think she'd appreciate a phone call at that hour!); and then another 12 hours to London for a one hour stop-over (again, so frustratingly close to another friend, Rick) before a quick jaunt across the North Sea to Copenhagen. We got in at 7pm local time, and within 40 minutes I was checked into my hotel in the centre of the city, just around the corner from the main square and a fiv...

Mea culpa, mea culpa - the insanity which has been work over the past week and a half (ie creating a brand new fortnightly LGBT arts and entertainment magazine from the ground up within a single week) , plus planning for a very short notice trip to Copenhagen tomorrow (which I had less than a fortnight's notice of!) means that I haven't had time to blog regularly. For that matter I haven't had the time to see as many shows as I'd planned to either, dammit. Enough with the excuses though... THE LIST OPERATORS This two-man comedy show, built around a series of lists such as '10 alternate ways to start the show' and 'Members of the audience we'd like to do 'sex' with' was funny, engaging, and only very occasionally strained. Matt Kelly and Rich Higgins are already strong performers, with good rapport and an excellent 'warmly daggy' and 'sardonic straight man' vibe going on: given another year or two honing their writing and perf...