BEAUTY, THE MYSTERY OF THE AGES

What is beauty, how do we come to see it, what gene triggers it or is it picked up through the oohs! and aaghs! of our parents which act as signals for our brain to register what they admire. Of course all this admiration can also progress onto believing you are the most beutiful being in the world and rely on your looks alone to get on in the world. Some of the most beutiful people are also the dumbest and I won’t go anywhere near blonde jokes at this point.

Technically these days its called BMI or Body Mass Index the indicator for beauty. Some like a BMI of 1 others of 50. The bigger the BMI number the more skin you’re likely to be fitted into. Last decade it was wafer thin girls with DD chests, today its buxom beauties with DD buttocks. Who pursuaded us that we should move from admiring what God gave us over to what Botox and Breast enhancements. Why did we move from a set of natural lips to those more likely to be a sexual attraction for a chimpanzee. Are those thick red lips just a visible stand-in for more exciting times.

The beauty of art is one of the hardest to pin down. We all admire (insert your own diety) well constructed rainbows or sunrises and sunsets but what makes some of us think a black background with one little white dot in the middle is preferable to the Moaning Lisa. That somehow the Pietre in Rome is more perfect than a concrete garden gnome, who probably has a bigger donk anyway. Art is most definately in the eye of the beholder and while some of us see the beauty in a lump of clay others see beauty in a dollop of poo.

Once upon a time all the world had were objects you banged, blew or bowed, the drum, rams horn and lute. Over the years these instruments began to proliferate into a thousand weird and wonderful inventions from the mournful trombone to the rattling lagerphone, stringed boxes under the chin up to those derivatives you stuck between your legs. The more instruments that gathered together the bigger the noise and the more varied the music from the gentile Bach to the boisterous Wagner.

Today we have as many forms of music as their are instruments and it is getting harder to work out what you like best. The reverberating feedback of heavy metal down to the lonely harmonics of the mouth organ, from country music to cuntry music, from rock and roll to middle of the road. (See sidebar). We have rock-a-billy, hill-billy and used to boil-a-billy, headbanging, rock opera, opera, light opera and bloody Gilbert and Sullivan. What tells our brain that any of this is good shit or do we just listen to all this crap because someone we admire or is more important than us does?

Beauty in the animal kingdom is used not just to look pretty, its a means by which women get men into the nest and vice-versa, attracting your girlfriend either by an extravagantly useless collection of feathers as with the peacock ‘Hey baby I’ve got more than the Follies Begere’ or by the simple act of dropping a blue milk-bottle seal into your bower. ‘Come to my room…..baby and look at my trinkets’. There’s the rhino with the biggest horn at either end or the tusks that elephants try hide from poachers, the range of bizarre male behaviour in the animal world is beyond counting and this applies to the human ones around you as well.

On a sad note however is the way that we have altered domestic animals like cats and dogs to suit us rather than their potential mate, the bizarre and cruel designs of dogs to the incredible range of cat furs all to make us happy and that in many cases lead to the early demise of the pet through its sheer incapacity to live its life naturally (see sidebar.)

A dog is a dog, a cat is a cat and a chicken is for dinner. We don’t mixup their genes and we should just let them be companion we want them to be.

SIDEBARS

* Middle of the Road Music is usually that noise coming from lifts but to me it means putting it in the middle of the street and letting a car run over it.

** Don’t get us started on the pet dressing up caper, althouigh occasionally I put a warm coat on my mutt. But far worse than that are those humans that believe that ‘Tinkles’ is actually their ‘Baby’. If I had a child that came out all covered in black fur I’d be inclined to run from the room and cut my own penis off.

GABRIEL'S HORN

Every year the musical purists of Victoria get the opportunity to come together for a series of concerts inaccurately called ‘Organs Of The Ballarat Goldfields’. We say inaccurate as a great many recitals are held with not a Organ in sight. To be correct it should be called ‘Organs of the Goldfields and other Musical Indulgences’.  It is however the rare chance for the Carngham Uniting Church at Snake Valley to show off it’s wonderful instrument believed to be the largest village pipe organ in the State.

Just like old people, old instruments like pipe organs give a bit of a sigh every now and then, fall over and go silent for short periods of time. Some years they lose bits of pipe just like partial dentures and cannot give full voice to the pieces they wish to sing. As a result of this their had to be a few changes to the published program to exclude music requiring those few notes. Alas on top of this the Japanese violinist Miwako Abe was unable to appear due to the ground being shaken from under his feet a few months back. Fortunately at the last moment one of Australia’s top quasi-plumbers stepped in and impressed everyone with his ability to blow some extraordinary sounds through the twists and turns of a lot of brass tubing.

I only recognised three of the dozen or so numbers in the repertoire (mainly due to the fact that classical purists seem to prefer music written 500 years ago) but the programme suited those who like to sit quietly, stare at the high, beamed ceilings and just drink in the sound. That is until the Finale.

Of the several pieces he blew - from sweet dirges to awakening blasts - his parting party piece was a stunning number composed, I think, by Aaron Copeland which required a well-tongued eight notes a second that would have made Jean Simmons (of K.I.S.S) absolutely green with envy. If you have dribbled your fingers along a piano keyboard it would approximate the dexterity of this mans vocal appendage, and even at that speed was able to enunciate clearly each and every note. It’s disappointing to think that we don’t seem to be able to find anyone in Linton just as adventurous and daring to be different for the sake of the town. The result of his Finale left both myself and the rest of the capacity crowd (two performances were required) breathless and standing for his ovation.

Whether you like or dislike the scream of a trumpet, cornet, bugle or flugelhorn and even if you have to shade your ears from the sound of an organ the right piece of music on the right instrument be it electric guitar, bagpipe or bongo drums music brings joy to our sometimes mundane world in ways we don’t always expect.

Prior to this I attended the Minerva Space at the Ballarat Mechanics Institute (a little hidden gem) for Sydney-based ‘Ironwood’ to perform two Mozart Quartet pieces.( #428 for Strings and #478 for Pianoforte). It stunned me to realize that this group (complete with a 1791 Piano carted down from the Sydney Conservatorium) came to Ballarat to perform one concert of two pieces of music taking just over an hour to complete. It was worth the ticket price but what a waste of expensive resources.

In the end one doesn’t have to travel far and the ticket prices are minimal so we would recommend that you book a front row seat for next year at Snake Valley. Imagine being able to go to church with not a priest in sight. It’s like going to heaven and not having to put up with Jesus.

THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS

Forget Monty Python, forget Borat and you can even forget The Young Ones. The Ballarat National Theatre recently finished a record-breaking run of 10 performances at the Courthouse Theatre of the play 'Suspects'. Originally a drama, then a comedy-drama and recently re-written as one of the funniest escapades I have ever witnessed. I say record breaking because after every performance the sets had to be reconstructed and all the props replaced before the next show. The logistics must have been a nightmare for all concerned but the results superb.

The programme described the show as simply 'A murder mystery with a new twist'. What transpired was a fairly mundane 'faux Agatha Christie mystery' written by Giles Cole. It was certainly comedic and the twist was absolutely ball-tearing thanks to the temperamental direction of the agonizingly precise Julian Oldfield.

Starring Neil Furdem, Pam Maiden, Peppa Sinclair and John Daykin with the police team of Fred Fargher, Emile Freund and Paul Ford.

A murder occurs. A man has fallen to his death from a third floor window apparently in a painting accident. The two ex-wives of the murdered man lounge around the set delivering their lines between mouthfuls of take-away food. The detectives, a quasi-Midsommer Inspector and his Sergeant, arrive to begin the investigation. A bit a American slapstick intrudes as a bird keeps shatting on the police every time they put their heads outside the window.

As each scene progresses and the mystery unfolds the entire cast, with food constantly in their hands  appear to be gaining weight in each scene. The  grieving widow and the leading detective lock horns, arms and mouthfuls of food while she is interrogated. In one corner of the room a bedroom door is partially opened by the Sergeant and empty food containers tumble from it. He kicks them back and carefully closes the door again. During the interrogation the Inspector and his Sergeant begin to share the increasing amounts of food appearing on various flat surfaces. This is gluttony at its best.

Even during interval the show does not quite with its Montyesque stupidity. The audience remaining behind, and that was almost the entire auditorium, as very few went out for Choc-tops, Jaffas or a Pee were entertained by what appeared to be a completely impromptu Punch and Judy performance through the open windows of the apartment by a pair of socks.

After interval the audience is confronted with a living room full of piles of take-away food and the players continue to try and deliver lines through mouthfuls of food with the obvious consequences. Not once yet has a member of the cast broken character confronted by their own mishaps and laughed or giggled. By now the players have almost doubled in size thanks to some innovative costume inventions which allow them to expand at the same time as the actors apparent waistlines.

Finally the actors reach morbid obesity and can just manage to get through the various doors around the set only with the help of another actor and with all the squeaks of a party balloon. As they move around buttocks and breasts of both genders manage to begin unsettling the apartment. Pictures go askew, doors won't open because of the rubbish piled behind them, and the various knick-knacks such as ornaments and pictures get knocked over, cups and plates get broken because they can't be put down and general mayhem ensues. At one point the Sergeant ends up on his back after sliding off the lounge and like a stranded turtle continues to deliver his lines perfectly. The actors still do not giggle or laugh, they deliver all their lines with perfect accuracy. At the climax of the play the wife is arrested for murder and the entire cast ends up having to push each other through seemingly narrowing doors. By the end all the actors resembled clothed Weather Balloons.

The curtain call has one rolling in the aisles as the seven impossibly obese actors come back on stage entirely devastating the set leaving nothing standing with the exception of the stage manager and sound desk operator who have been working backstage keeping things going and the stage falls into final darkness.

The sight of what transpired will stay with me forever. This leaves me with only a couple of questions unanswered. What possesses women to sit in the front row and knit during the whole performance or forget they are not at home and discuss  with each other who they think the murderer is 'out loud'.

Surely they can't beat this one. Ballarat National Theatre – Keep your eyes open for their next production

GYPSY

A MUSICAL FABLE

So said the blurb from the Ballarat Arts Acadamy.

I had heard all about this Styne-Sondheim musical based on the book by Arthur Laurents but had never seen the show or the movie. So it was that I chose to go to the last performance of the programme in fact I had never been to the Post Office Box Theatre either so it was a totally new experience for me.

Having been to ‘Singing In The Rain’ and being impressed by that totally professional presentation I was keen to see what else our local ‘big smoke’ could come up with. Considering that most regional centres cannot field even one performing group I was not expecting that Ballarat could have more than three Top Class Theatre Groups.

I was, I suppose, not expecting much from University Students even though those august institutions seem to be the breeding ground for most of our comedians graduating predominantly from the Faculty of Law. The only other group of funny people coming from the legal profession are politicians who also seem to like performing in that long-standing show called ‘Question Time’.

Anyway, as I was saying, I was not holding my breath for a top notch show. The 10-piece orchestra at least for the Overture played a bit like a drunken burlesque troupe and was, in my opinion at the time, a bit rough but as the feet began tapping and the singing burst out upon the audience it seemed that the orchestra blended seamlessly with the on-stage cast and by the third scene Megan Adair (Gypsy Rose Lee), Lauren Baistow (Rose) and Bramwell Lancashire (Herbie) fully transported me into the world of Gypsy Rose Lee and lost my feeling of just being a spectator. (Bramwell Lancashire? Now what a mighty fine stage name that seems to be. It sort of reminds me of Berlington Bertie from Bow.)

Even though the Post Office Box Theatre is not really the best showcase for a fully cast musical it did present some challenges which were quiet ably solved by Douglas Iain Smith the Set Designer and the Director Terence O’Connell.

On the negative side I have one question for show-people who might read this article. Why is it that second-hand smoke from cigarettes is excluded from the theatre only to be replaced by first-hand smoke from a machine creating the atmosphere?

Finally I am still horrified that these students are brain-washed to believe they are professional and are banned from participating in local amateur productions. Because of this many of them will progress no further than a Pet Food Commercial.

In the film industry in America young people will even appear in porn movies so as ‘to be seen’ and the potential of a lucrative acting career. Very few ever make it past the casting couch and so they open themselves up to all potential avenues of employment.

To make our students believe that they should only ever appear in ‘professional productions’ closes them off from the opportunity to make a name for themselves and ‘be seen’.

What is better an ordinary job with a reasonable living and building a career in acting, or an acting job for three months a year if lucky and a part time job at Subway where you could be artistic with sandwiches but live in poverty?

It is still true that if you can’t do it you teach it. So we end up with a whole host of unemployed actors teaching others how to be unemployed actors.

PLAYING WITH THEIR DANGLY BITS

NEVER IN MY LIFE did I ever imagine walking into the Box Office of Her Majesty’s and asking the kindly box office lady for two tickets to watch two guys play with themselves.

Yet a month or so back there I was with dollars in hand and a grin on my lips. The Ancient Australian Art of Genital Origami.

PUPPETRY OF THE PENIS !!!

So exclaimed the sign over the Marquee outside the theatre. World famous! They’ve performed in front of the ‘crowned heads’ of Europe! 2 men 2 dicks and 2 much spare time. With all the double entendres splashing around I was quite relieved when there was no sign that said ‘Come one come all’.

A week later and there we were, thankfully in row 14, two guys behind thirteen packed rows of  women, all women, all ages and sizes, some with binoculars, a few women with probably less well-endowed husbands with telescopes.

The only spoilly bit of the show from my point of view was the excruciatingly loud head-banging music at the start. If there was going to be a lot of head-banging on stage why did we have to listen to it as well.

While we waited I was reminded of the only other time I’d paid to see anybody’s naughty bits. It was back in the 60’s in King’s Cross when I was taken to a strip club and from the front row was given an extraordinary view of what a woman could do with a banana both peeled and unpeeled.

Last Christmas I was outside what I thought was the same club and there stood maybe the same doorman. Intrigued I stopped and asked the guy if the girl was still performing with her bananas. His response was ‘Yes, but now she’s doing the same act for the old guys in the nursing home where she lives.’ He went on to say that now she’s on a pension the old guys have to pay for the bananas.

The show started and brought me back to reality. A local comedienne pulled off a few reasonable jokes about guys and there dangly bits and lots of sniggers about what girls get up to in bed but nothing that you might not hear in any pub amongst a group of happy women.

I won’t go beyond the bit where Simon Morley and David Friend come out in lengthy robes and perform their warming up exercises for I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you going to see them yourselves. A large video screen gives you all the close-ups you need, a bit much for us men but of great delight to the women with the telescopes.

The Bulldog, The Wristwatch, The Eiffel Tower, The Windsurfer, The Pelican and the Atomic Mushroom. These were just some of the many and varied tricks the two men performed to the ooohs! aaahs! and ouches! of the audience. On leaving the theatre there was a long line of women waiting to buy books, DVD’s and other penisphanalia so much so I had to wait 15 minutes to get the guys autographs.

I would recommend the book. It explains with pictures quite clearly all of the tricks that one can do even in the comfort of your own bedroom and much to the delight of your partner.

The only thing that I felt hard was the bloody old seats at the venerable old venue. Yet another thing Ballarat Council can’t get right. They can be hard-nosed but do we need to be hard-arsed.

ANOTHER YEAR ANOTHER BUM NOTE

It is really easy to knock in this rotten little rag and very hard to praise but we’ll try. It was a year ago today when I last wrote about the Royal South Street Society. How time and tiny feet fly when you’re enjoying yourself.


This year instead of sitting through the Tap, Ballet and Tantrums I opted for the Bands and Orchestras for the Eisteddfods. Well worth the money too. $10 for a whole afternoons entertainment is pretty good value, but I did miss the Choc-tops and Jaffas.

As I sat through several sessions of this years crop of budding Krupa’s, Armstrongs and Gillespie’s I was intrigued by the hundreds of musical pieces I had never heard before. Do they play obscure showband pieces so as to make it harder for us to determine their quality of musicianship (i.e. is it harder to pick the bum notes) or is there a whole music back-catalogue just for Schools?

My deductions were found to be correct when one of the Grammar schools burst into their rendition of the theme from the film ‘Man From Snowy River’. To be as kind as I can I found it difficult to differentiate the sound coming from the stage as 51 musicians or 51 newborn Brumbies neighing in panic mode for their mother.

But they soldiered on regardless oblivious to the judging panel trying to bore pencils through their brains.

They were replaced by a Junior High Band, who shall remain unmentionable, giving us a variation of Gustav Holst’s ‘Planets’ in a way totally different to the Universe that God had created.. At one point the angelic look on the Flugelhorn player changed dramatically after she realised that the notes she was blowing into it were certainly not the same ones supposedly coming out the other end.

A short interval was then taken to enable the volunteer Ushers to be replaced by several First Responders removing members of the audience who had committed suicide. I didn’t think it appropriate that a member of the audience should commence to sing -

‘there was blood on the saddle,

there was blood on the ground,

there were great big buckets of blood all around’.

After the performances resumed each succeeding ensemble was an improvement on the former until by the end of the show things were actually beginning to improve considerably. Maybe all the earlier groups were just the warm-ups?

At the risk of being called a chauvinist I did find that the male conductors tended to play safer pieces while the women seemed to conduct music that was more ‘bitchy’. The men were also superior when pretending they were puppets from ‘Thunderbirds Are Go’.

A hint to the kid on the Xylophone in Group Act #6. If the whole band dresses in black from head to toe why on earth were you the only one wearing red and white striped socks. The stage looked like a scene from 'Where's Wally'. A marvellous moment ensued when a young trumpeter let loose with such professional dexterity that it was glaring obvious that great musicians are not created, they are just born that way.

The Final Act had to be the best performance of the lot. The best presented the best musical selection and the happiest faces, except for the few brief looks of contempt at the reed section when they let out little untimely, ill-tuned and high-pitched squeaks.

But who am I to complain when I can’t even fart in tune. All I can say is that love them or hate them you are certainly missing out on some extraordinary performances from contestants young and old.

May I suggest that when you get home tonight Google Royal South Street on the Internet and sign up for email notifications for next years performances. I can assure you that despite the acidity of this story you will spend many a delightful afternoon of quasi-professional musicians, dancers, singers and actors at their very best.

You know you want to.

URINE TOWN WAS NO PIDDLING LITTLE SHOW

Every now and then we have the pleasure of sitting through a show that is fascinating in many different aspects. I recently took a young person to their first ever ‘live’ musical show. Up till then their only experience was to a Circus In Geelong. Inundated with technological marvels that insinuate themselves into our lives we forget sometimes that there are real people out there doing real things for real entertainment. Must we have to live in virtual worlds when our own is far more fascinating than any video game.


The 2010 Graduating Music Theatre Performers from the University of Ballarat recently performed ‘Urine Town’ as professionally as anyone who has trodden the boards of the Regent. From ‘Overture’ to ‘Finale’ the audience was totally captivated. I won’t name the performers who stood above all the others because such a list would mean having to name them all. The goodies were so gaggingly good, the villains were really venal and even the camp guy was gay. The laughs came exactly as intended by the writers. I’m am constantly amazed that these young performers can remember every line of dialogue, every word of a dozen songs and every one of the 4362 dance steps for two hours. A couple of times there were brief pauses in the dialogue but I was unable to ascertain whether this was for laughter or effect, or for a few seconds the mental thought “Oh s**t what was my next line”. Maybe the show went a few seconds over because of this but that was another few seconds of pure, unadulterated enjoyment. Who would have imagined (other than The Astonisher) that having a Pee could be so entertaining?

Tomorrow you may meet them serving behind the counter at a whitegoods store, checking out your groceries or making an appointment as a doctors receptionist, one of them might even test you for your Drivers Licence, but for a couple of magical hours they successfully transported us to another world. As I said to the young person at the time “you don’t need special glasses for this is the ultimate in 3D ”.

Keep your eyes open for even more performances from our talented local actors and musicians. Buy a ticket now for ‘Singing In The Rain’

What a pity that we can’t utilise the talent we have in Ballarat better than we do. A site to put into your favourites http://www.hermaj.com/