Pages

Saturday, January 14, 2012



For three weeks, 21 days, the Sydney Festival makes the city alive and buzzing with a rich array of guru music, arts , manuchao entertainment and outdoor events.

The chief appeal of theatre is its capacity to bring people together – a room or an oval or an opera house – in real space and time. I Am Eora did this for Imrich Media Dragons, Tony and Tina to boot with the the best seats in the house. As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. I Am Eora is crammed with images and contradictions. The theatre at Carriageworks is big, and they used it to full effect, with lots of movement, sound, and lights. SOON after the quiet opening of this show the extraordinary Jack Charles interrupts the cast from the back of the auditorium: "You can't go back to traditions! You have to move on!" And move on is certainly what Wesley Enoch's show does. They all took part in the early struggle between the Eora group of nations, who inhabited what is now called the Sydney basin, and the white settlers. Part concert, part savagely ironic dance spectacular and part story telling The stage was filled with reflections of moving water and stylised fish, as the Stiff Gins (Nardi Simpson and Kaleena Briggs) and a glamorous Wilma Reading - appropriating, in a shimmering purple gown, the traditions of the pop diva - celebrate strong black women. I Am Eora (I am of this place) breaks new ground in contemporary Australian performance, telling the stories of Sydney's Aboriginal continuity in a celebration of its heroes. There is a very funny routine by Elaine Crombie as a bride, and an appearance by politician Linda Burney, reperforming her fine inaugural speech as the first elected black woman to speak in the NSW parliament. Frank Yamma sings the moving She Cried. Towards the end Charles, as Bennelong the conciliator, comes back and speaks in his golden voice, full of rhetorical emotion. There is a projection of a midden behind him - the piles of shells built up over thousands of years that were ground up to make the mortar that built Sydney. How will our children know where they are? he asks, of us all.
In a nutshell, it was a mix of dance, music, theatre, and projection art, with a cast of Aboriginal performers from across the country. It was meant to be a modern manifestation of the spirit of some of the big figures in Sydney’s Aboriginal past. How will our children of Velvet Revolution know where they are?
I don't make it my job tracking trends in odd sounds but big bands are in judging by the mixed audience last night at the Enmore where everyone wanted more and more brass … Wielding flying bohemian fiddles and accordions in formation with cimbalom (hammered dulcimer) and wearing tacky nylon suits and battered trilbies, Romanian Taraf de Haïdouks join forces with Macedonia's Koçani Orkestar to bring us Band of Gypsies. The violins, cimbalums and accordions of Taraf de Haïdouks battle it out with the brass and percussion of Koçani Orkestar. They drew on dragon and vampire type traditional gypsie music, urban Balkan pop, medieval ballads, oriental brass band music, Turkish influences and even a touch of Bollywood for Malchkeon

Six impossible things before or after dinner Big Days of our lives - Like a seed of the mustard tree
Sharing changes the way we work together. Politics has accelerated to light speed over the past year, as 7 billion people connected through 6 billion mobiles, share their frustrations, aspirations and strategies for dissent. Sharing is a two-edged sword: it makes everything more efficient by making people much more potent. It's getting hard for any government to push its people around.


So when you borrow your neighbour's mower this summer, remember it's just the beginning. We live continuously connected lives, and our possessions are beginning to reflect that. In a few years we'll have forgotten that there was a time, before tomorrow, when sharing was hard.


A shared future will connect society; Love most important ingredient to kitchen memories The aromas of my mum’s kitchen are floating in the Cold River : [ More on Sydney Festival ; The best seats in the house Finders Keepers at Carriage Work ]
• · There will be a political sex scandal in Canberra in 2012. There'll be one in Washington, too. And probably in Sydney. What predictions came true this year for you; Andrew Clennell - Bruce Hawker, the long-time Labor strategist, says the best thing O'Farrell could do over the next three months is a comprehensive reshuffle to bring in some fresh blood Boring Barry on a very slow boat ; Google On OO’FFarrell
• · · The Beatles are not only the greatest pop group in history but may also be able to teach you tons about how to get ahead in business…and what it takes to survive. That post leads off our small business roundup today with plenty of other resources about how to make your small business great. What the Beatles Could Teach Small Business ; What is happening now is the revenge of the market. A high literary culture, utterly divorced from economic realities, was artificially propped up for fifty year. Everything Old Is New Again - Commentary Magazine
• · · · Bohemian Tash is having having two shows in February. One in Sydney with fellow artists Ruby Jackson and Andrew Dixon. ‘Postcards from the Fringe’ is showing at Kaleidoscope Gallery in Dank Street, Sydney. I will post more details closer to the date. Postcards from the Fringe ; Woody Guthrie on New Year's Rulin's ; I Top 10 Need-to-Knows About Social Networking and Where It’s Headed - The importance of social networking in today’s online experience cannot be overstated. Social networking is the most popular online activity worldwide accounting for nearly 1 in every 5 minutes spent online in October 2011, and reaches 82 percent of the world’s Internet population, representing 1.2 billion users around the globe t’s a Social World
• · · · · Atlantic - The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods Ari LeVaux: Chinese researchers have found small pieces of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice. The Nanjing University-based team showed that this genetic material will bind to proteins in human liver cells and influence the uptake of cholesterol from the blood. We are eating not just vitamins, protein, and fuel, but information as ; This article details the networked production and dissemination of news on Twitter during snapshots of the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions as seen through information flows—sets of near-duplicate tweets—across activists, bloggers, journalists, mainstream media outlets, and other engaged participants. The Revolutions Were Tweeted
• · · · · · It is often better to travel than to arrive, particularly with a good book in hand. How travel broadens the mind; Don't Mess With Taxes; Meaning discovery engine Be Spacific links for solid research; Vrbov and Wordnik is a new way to discover meaning ; Writer's craft is now a ghost in the machine