I’ve seen the full range of student works and showcases, from raw first year pieces through to the big graduation show. I’ve borne witness to an increase in ability, flexibility, maturity and performance quality, in both the physical and mental sense(s).

I’ve enjoyed (and suffered through) a number of professional works as well, and most recently have had the privilege of watching my newly-graduated friends (and loved one) mould themselves to the desires and whims of upcoming and established choreographers in a series of creative developments.

Not bad for someone that has less than an ounce of sober dancing ability/inclination…

I occasionally joke that I should become a dance critic, to ensure that my occupation is, at least in part, symbiotic with Storm’s dance trajectory. Or better yet, learn to compose music for dance pieces, using hitherto undeveloped musical (and computer) skills and patience.

But writing about dance is hard – it’s ephemeral, dynamic, highly variable – depending on the performers’ mood, or yours – subjective, interpretive, self-indulgent, and not always malleable into a world of words. To be a critic is to know, be involved, informed, opinionated, insinuated in a world of dance… and dancers. At the same time, in order to critique it is necessary to lose many of the elements of being a casual audience member – a lack of knowledge and preconceptions, a casual apathy towards the finer details, an absence of the need to manufacture/force/share an opinion.

And on the absence of any evidence whatsoever – and judging purely from what I’ve read from local food critics – there’s a foreboding sense that with criticism comes a inflated sense of self-importance, a (perceived) bestowal of the title of ‘Arbiter’ of good and bad dance. Fuck that…

But on the other hand, if I’m gonna be doing this for the foreseeable future, then maybe I need to ask Dance “What have you done for me lately?!?”

Now where’s that drum machine??

Pick an image that best describes,
The passing days, the passing time;
Falling sands or falling tides,
I guess we’re getting old;
I guess we’re getting old.

Life has fun she paints my face,
With deepened lines in carbon trace
All my rats have run their race,
This sucks, I’m getting old;
This sucks, I’m getting old.

Autumn’s changes come and go,
Crops are reaped and then re-sown.
I’ve come to grips, i’m letting go,
Of this fear of getting old;
Of this fear of getting old.

I’ve been watching crow’s feet stride,
Across my cheeks from side to side
But as long as you’ve come for the ride,
Who cares about getting old?
Who cares about getting old?

(12/02/2012)

For a 2 year cycle around my university exchange, I collected new countries (25 to be exact) with zest and zeal – so much so that I was convinced I would surpass my (much) older brother’s tally of countries (then sitting at around 40 odd) and dreamt of such (unfinanced) lunacies as cape-to-cape odysseys, books on the inhabitants of no-mans-lands, working for the UN headquarters in Bhutan, or similar.

Then, and to this day I can’t really explain why, it stopped. A couple of forays each to India and the United States (the latter already tallied) were the few notches in an otherwise unworn international travel belt for 8 years… 8 years!

I say I don’t really know, but I think I do… It all boils down to fear: a fear of dying; a fear of not being in control.

And I think that’s interesting… I’m far from being ‘over’ my fear. I won’t be catching an overnight bus from Cambodia to Thailand, or jumping on a small wooden boat that wouldn’t've met Elizabethan safety standards, but I am here, taking the first steps to some happy middle ground. When a fear of death is your biggest issue, I think you’re luckier than most…

So here’s to being back on the horse, irrespective of what’s gone right, wrong, or downright chest infected. Here’s to the tens of thousands of people that lost their livelihoods to the monsoonal rains; to the tourists that get drunk on $1 beers and watch games of football from a world away; to the hookers across the street trying to lure said tourists; to the touts offering everything from motorbike rides to marijuana; to the hard working, honest, smiling people that have the wealth of others rubbed in their face every single day; to the swathes of kiwis heading home after 2/3/5 yrs in London; and, most importantly, to the Wallabies tomorrow.

Fear is healthy when it keeps you alive. Fear is unhealthy when it stops you from living…

A set of eyes and a day to wander this intriguing place have enabled me to make a few additional observations:
* some middle-class Vietnamese like to drink their coffee/tea/what-have-you against a backdrop of mind-drummingly loud techno music;
* it’s very hard to get clarification on whether ice has been made from purified water against a backdrop of mind-drummingly loud techno music;
* there are so, so, so many motos and scooters here. Given the apparent laxity of helmet safety regulations, helmets have become more fashion than function, with a plethora of styles and colours gracing the noggins of all and sundry.
* if you want to stop traffic, you’ll need more than a minor car/scooter accident. Limping or not, you’d better get the hell out of the intersection, pronto, so the many, many fashionably-helmeted scooter riders can barge, weave and/or beep a way through.
* the Vietnamese didn’t think it pertinent to silence the underlying audio when dubbing foreign films/tv-shows. This makes for an rather grating viewing experience, much like an annoying friend speaking over the top of everything you wish to hear… in Vietnamese. I can imagine the linguistic pendulum of annoyance swings both ways mind you.
* War is a horrible thing: a grotesque, warped, tragically photogenic beast…
* and lastly, 60′s decor hasn’t aged a jot

Another day, another lesson; so here’s to what tomorrow brings…

(Pics for the post here – http://www.flickr.com/photos/10612898@N02/sets/72157627677875235/)

What was historically a 7-7 1/2 hour drive becomes an 8-9 hour negotiation process. Every gadget, game, trinket, lolly, book, and iota of parental attention is carefully shared between siblings, sold to the highest bidder where the currency is tears – real or hedged. It’s a place where the monotony of kid’s jingles is suffered for the sake of silence and relative piece and quiet – Delila, if I have to hear about Henry’s bucket one more time, i’ll throttle him with stone for sharpening the dull hatchet to cut the straw to plug the hole!!

And it’s a place that you wouldn’t trade for the world… in an age where my nieces will likely have more virtual friends than real, it’s comforting to be able to pass what is an otherwise dull(ish) trip with the goo’s, ga’s (and occasional shrieks) of the baby, the “Yesssss” of delight as the eldest rides on the back of an Angry Bird to a new high score, the story telling and ‘kiddy’ maths from the back seat, and the “Uncle Jimmy, do you like my singing?” from the middle car seat. It’s the passing of corn thins, the sharing of tic-tacs and the shoulder rides to and from the Macca’s playground that make the trip an enjoyable experience. Then there’s the chance to catch up on recent history and future plans, the backseat driving lessons and the other oddities that contribute to another successful trip home.

And that’s why, as a childless spinstero, I would elect to pass over 8 hours in a car, compared with a quarter of that in an aeroplane. And while I would prefer that ear-splitting shrieks be conspicuous by their absence, it’s a take a sip, take a skull proposition – all or nothing; tears and smiles.

Happiness is hearing your 4 year old niece choosing to play your favourite (somewhat obscure) folk singer on the ipod while passing time between stops, getting a carefully chosen tic-tac presented on a grubby finger, getting a cheeky smile between fits of restlesness…

No, we’re not there yet…

After a few shambolic attempts at recording a song with the vocals – and due consideration of a colleague’s best attempts at constructive criticism (“Don’t give up your day job”) – I decided I’d play around with a little bit of vocal-free guitar. And Raindrops in May is the result… 3 Simple playthroughs, overlaid and marginally time-shifted. The absence of further editing is pretty evident I’m sure you’ll agree. But you know what, who really cares…?

Anyways, I hope you like it.

[display_podcast]
(http://www.jameses.org/mp3/raindrops_in_may.mp3)

So I guess I’d better explain the idea of 30×30, so the bombardment of all things 30×30 makes more than minimal sense. In the lead up to my birthday, I thought I’d like to get something out of the coming year, rather than treat it like a placeholder for the ‘rest of my life’ or a stop-gap for the remainder of my Perth residence. Importantly, I wanted to regain a sense of self that didn’t revolve around my work, which holds a pretty close rein on my 0830-1800 waking hours and which, at times, is less than motivating and fulfilling.

Birthday’s are convenient arbitrary ‘start dates’ for all manner of things, and 30, being the clean slate for a new decade, seemed as reasonable a place as any to start.

So I thought, well why not try and do 30 lots of 30 different things…?

900 things* sounds like a lot to do, but really that’s only 3 or so ‘things’ a day over the course of a year. So many elements of life are incidental and considered trivial (or not even considered) and really take no effort to do – drinking a coffee somewhere for example, or trying a new beer. Others take more effort – doing 30 charitable acts or seeing 30 live music performances – and others are damn near impossible – 30 days of 6am starts (for the non-parents out there).

But the hope is that each ‘thing’ will constitute a single stroke in a painting, of a year, that will become more than a placeholder and which contains some interest and meaning, if for no-one more than me…

And so, please, pull the rip-chord if you feel it necessary. Eject, run-away, skedaddle, vamoose, and literally unsubscribe from the mailing list if the tedium of multiple blog posts over the last week has already taken its toll. I probably won’t write up every one of my 30x30s, but I will be writing up a few, and so perhaps the best way to approach it is to – whenever fancy strikes, and it may never – jump on the blog and hope that one of them is mildly interesting. After all, one of the categories is “Things Friends/Family suggest” and so there’s an opportunity to help me in my endeavour…

The 30×30 list is here and will continue to be accessible from just under the title of my blaarg. I do hope you find something over the course of the next year that proves to be mildly interesting or entertaining and look forward to hearing any feedback.

If worse comes to worst, my blog will simply continue to be the wrong-turn in the Google pick-a-path adventure for some odd term searches (‘public circus‘, ‘motorbike in traffic‘, ‘skinner box‘, ‘savoury scones recipe‘ and, by far the most popular with around 16,000 views… ‘gizmo‘ (oddly enough, the Korean term for ‘gizmo’ also ranks highly) ).

Oh the relevance of my work

^ At least that’s how I remember it. It may be poorly recollected or falsely attributed but the sentiment remains.
* Some things may count in more than one category and so the real count should actually be a bit lower. Eg, the short film I posted the other day, was a New Thing (never made a movie-whatsit), Short-film and Haiku in one blog post

In the middle of Summer, Perth had around 30 consecutive days of +30C days, with a few ~40C days thrown in for good measure. On one of the latter, we had the pleasure of almost 100 per cent humidity thanks to a cyclone hovering off the Northwest. As we sat around, hot and bothered – very frickin’ hot and bothered – it felt like the skies might actually crack. And they did.

For about 20 minutes, during which I got the footage below, Daisy danced around like a loon and we showered, fully-clothed, under the rain-chain, it was bliss. Cold, refreshing bliss. And then the rain stopped, the heat and humidity returned and by 11pm that evening it had a relative temperature (where humidity is factored in) of around 41C.

So here is the short film. And a haiku (well close enough) for you.

http://youtu.be/XUCr6zREpbQ – The music was recorded tonight, using part of a song I’d done for a piece of Storm’s previous choreography.

Perth is blessed with beautiful stretches of yellow sand, crowded with people on days >40C and reasonably quiet besides. If you’re able to avoid Scarborough, Cottesloe, Trigg and a few of the other more frequented beaches, you should be able to catch more than a few (often little) waves, without having someone’s armpit, foot, surfboard colliding with your person underwater.

Personally, I love Autumn for swimming in Perth. You have some remnant swell – whipped up by a day or two of squally Sou’westers – on crisp blue-skied days with a good few hours of light off-shore breezes. Thanks to the Leeuwin Current, water temperatures are quite pleasant, but still brisk enough to wake you from your weekend lethargy/hangover.

I’m glad to start my Beaches 30×30 with Brighton Beach as it is, by far, my favourite and most frequented stretch of sand in Perth. Our ritual usually commences with a coffee, purchased at 33 Degrees South (if we’re lazy or in a hurry) or Milkd (if Storm’s overly vocal) and enjoyed on the 15 min drive west along Scarborough Beach Drive. Scarborough Beach Drive also happens to be home to all of the large retailers/car-yards/light commercial vendors who are able to afford the hefty rents that proximity to IKEA, the city and the ‘burbs brings. This can slow the trip down, and add some frustration as over-eager mergers, swervers and right-across-double-lane-turners abound on Saturday mornings.

That said, once feet hit sand and the sparkling blue is in front of you, little else matters. Hangovers disappear or rapidly diminish once that first wave of water courses over your head and neck. Small barrels offer the opportunity to fill the rather-sizeable void of “Look at Me!” with which I (and others) have been gifted/lumped. The vista provides for sneak-peeks of Rottnest Island across the channel and the many large carriers plying their trade in and out of Fremantle Port.

The only downside of Brighton Beach is the sad necessity of leaving it once tummies rumble/skin cooks/squinting eyes tire and the realisation that our clothes haven’t washed and hung themselves sets in. Argh, back to reality…