On the radio 10/02/2012
 
Had a nice little chat with Jim Mora for his "best song ever written" yesterday, about the festival and Wake Less. MP3 link is here

Thanks Dad for the idea!
Ralph
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When it comes to activist theatre (if not all theatre) clearly there is a problem of distribution. How can the performance reach enough people to have any kind of effect? Thus, I was intrigued by this video of a piece by L.M. Bogad, which is not only used to expand the audience, but also acts as a step-by-step guide for doing similar action. It would be interesting to know if anyone has followed its example...I mean if it worked for flash mobs...
-Joel
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with apologies to Howard Barker.
1.       You are probably making theatre for the wrong reasons.
2.       Few people go to the theatre to have a bad time and be improved. How will you target them in your marketing?
3.       Poetry may make nothing happen but it lacks theatre’s social aspect.
4.       Shared light is spooky, because look how hard you are working and how still the audience is.
5.    The banks have gotten pretty chummy recently, haven’t they? 
6.       Evolutionarily, it may not be in your interests to be happy.
7.       Nihilism in the elderly is disconcerting, isn’t it?
8.     Truth in the theatre is quite hard to define. 
9.       All that junk food is altering your perception of things.
10.    When the actors are having a bad time, comfort them by calling out things like “its ok! None of it is really happening!”
11.    Try getting up there and helping out. See what they do.
12.   Discussion of Facebook will not, in itself, make the work avant-garde.
13.    All this coffee is making you edgy. Have you added up what it costs you in a week?
14.    Lists can be written more quickly than novels.
15.    If you want to watch people bored at work, there are fast food places where you can do it for free. 
16.    It is more about the asking of questions than about being so presumptuous as to proffer answers, wouldn't you say?
17.     You will see all these things differently in a few years. 
18.    The news media in this country is very emotionally invested.
19.    We are doomed with or without your scholarly concern.  Stop reading those depressing books and go outside, its sunny.
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Where all your Beckett royalties go
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Applications 21/07/2010
 
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Onscreen
So my friend told me how his young nephew, who lives in another city, maybe thinks his uncle is a computer programme. This makes sense. Like all the other applications he is conjured by mouse-click; a flat, jerky man who by some disconcerting charm you can never make eye contact with. So, Picard-like, he points to the screen and asks for his uncle. 

Ode (2010 AD)
Oh! You spirits of far flung friends! I have lost the memory of when you were flesh. Now you blink mysteriously on and off like the lights on a thunderbirds set. Your voices, your faces forgotten; light up your small green circles and appear to me...
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Movie Magic 20/05/2010
 
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Look! Links to the short vids we made last year for the Mashpit website:

Our Recent Status Updates
When Facebook goes bad.

1001 Things You MUST Do Before You Die
There was one of these they made us cut out, and a few I'm quite suprised they let stay...

Binge News
We never found out who this boy was, he was just a miracle which appeared

Hard Night Panda 01, 02 and 03 
Its not the drinking, its how we're drinking...
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"I was unfaithful. I had affairs. I cheated. What I did was not acceptable," said Woods, looking composed and speaking in a steady voice. His wife, Elin, was not with him. (full story)

Tiger Woods has taken a break from his golfing career to perform a solo version of Forced Entertainment's landmark 1994 piece Speak Bitterness, in which the guilty take turns to take the blame for everything. Ok, so even if this isn't the actual intention (lord knows its hard to find and speak in one's own voice as an artist), Woods' performance is best read as a homage. Its all there: from the queasy, duplicitious exploration of sincerity, motives, justifications and the need to confess, right down to the garish blue background. The desire of the performer to tactically humble himself gives a stong element of ritual to this type of theatre. Look at the faces of the audience, playing the game with him, fully illuminated and there to be spoken to directly.

As for coming back to the PGA Tour, the planet's best golfer said: "I do plan to return to golf one day. I just don't know when that day will be. I don't rule out it will be this year."

Great dissection of what on earth is going on here (and with MPs in NZ, and guilty celebrities everywhere) in the New Yorker.
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Fantastic. I love stuff polls, even the more sensible ones like the one shown above. Who needs boring old Radio New Zealand when we've got this calibre of news info-tainment and logical mind of Michael Laws at our fingertips. (Oh god I'm so ashamed.)
-Ralph
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