Unextinction As far as I can tell there are two reasons for Jurassic World: reboot the franchise and make a lot of references to past giant-monster movies. It’s entertaining, certainly, and pretty much gets right into the whole running-and-screaming thing, but what I really enjoyed were the references to King Kong, Jaws, etc. That must have been fun for the filmmakers. I think I need to see a French movie, as a palate cleanser, before Ant Man comes out.

Rock Opera One of the great failings of rock ‘n’ roll, especially in its days of aspiration to being “classical”, i.e., the 1970’s, was the Rock Opera. This was, I think a fundamental misunderstanding that all music is folk music, and that rock was, essentially, no different from anything ever written by Mozart or Beethoven or Monk or Parker or whomever you’d like to distinguish the forms as superior/inferior over the ages or just last year. If rock did anything different from classical it was to keep it short, and if it did anything different from the blues or jazz it was, well, to make it more broadly popular for a moment than the form that it was ripping off. One thing that appears to be true, however, is that the overarching category of “rock”, but which encompasses pop music generally, has not actually changed in form in any significant fashion for the last hundred years, effectively since jazz became popular. Nevertheless, it’s no less effective, no less evocative than it ever has been, and is now more artistically representative than ever before. Today, going to a musical stage production, watching a television show, listening to the soundtrack of a movie, you’re very likely going to hear material that is or is more akin to rock ‘n’ roll than ten or twenty years ago, because pop music is at this time more universal than at any time previously. That’s not a bad thing. At least not for most of us living today. Whereas once the ability to play an instrument or sing accompaniment was an important factor in social behaviour, that isn’t true, and hasn’t been for at least fifty years or more. More significantly, we have, since the 1980’s, at least, imbued our lives with our own personal soundtracks, to the point where we can hardly stand, it seems, to be without the appropriate music the appropriate time. Which brings me to B-Girl, a one-act musical production, just finishing up at the Sydney Opera House. It’s the story of a housewife who retreats into fantasies of glam-rock stardom, and it’s a production that deserves a much broader audience than just the basement playhouse of the SOH. I’ve seen a lot of mainstream and off-beat theatrical productions over the years, and I truly believe this one could very easily be the next “Hedwig” or more. I think there are some tweaks yet – as I understand it, some of the more “theatrical” effects had to be abandoned, due to technical issues (and let’s all be grateful for lessons learned from Broadway’s attempt at “Spiderman”, eh?), and their reintroduction could help. Mainly, I’m concerned with getting the spine of the narrative more firmly established before the rest is fleshed out, but it still works, as-is, and that’s important. This is a production that can go far, and with a little push, further still. I’d love to see it at BAM, and it’s almost “Next Wave”, but might need just a little more to get there. Meanwhile, I’m sure it will do well on its global tour, when that comes, including NYC, but Berlin, London, Paris, the world. I am very enthusiastic about this show.

Insane Mad Max: Fury Road is MADNESS! It's beyond good. ZOMG! Tom Hardy channels all the best of Mel Gibson, Charlize Theron is the best two-armed actress playing a one-armed hero you could ever hope for (and more), and George Miller has finally made the Mad Max movie he's always wanted. Unmissable. Yes, it's one big car chase with really loud music and practically no dialog, but it all works, all hangs together. While it feels at first as if it's started in the middle, it has: in the middle of the ongoing heroic epic of Max Rockatansky in the wastelands of the petrochemical-based capitalist extremities when it's finally all gone to hell. And redemption is only possible by sacrifice, which Max enacts to the purest merging of Joseph Campbell and the New Testament, a Moses/John the Baptist merger to Imperator Furiosa's Virgin Mary/Jesus combo. Yeah, a Jesus motif, as so often happens in the movies, but in full action hero mode to boot, driving out the money changers, or the crazy dictatorial war lords controlling the water, anyway. I may not have left this one as jazzed as from a Bourne movie, and more deaf, but it was still an absolute thrill ride.

Weekending So this weekend was, effectively, the end of the Vivid Festival, in Sydney, and although we didn't get out to see the lights, per se, I took advantage to follow up on a birthday present of two years ago, to engage in a little photographic instruction, from Photo Workshop Australia, in shooting at night. Vivid was a great opportunity to pick up a few techniques, although the course wasn't so much in the hows and whys as it was just about getting good shots. Some of which, I think, did indeed turn out o.k. Unfortunately, I didn't think to enroll B. in the course, which I'm sure she'd have enjoyed, but we headed up to the Blue Mountains on Saturday to have a weekend away in the start of the cold. We ended up in Mount Victoria, a bit further on than we usually go, due to booking late for the holiday weekend, but also to have a go at some of the bushwalks we hadn't previously attempted, down the other side of the ridge. We hardly saw anyone else, something very unusual up there, and that was an added attraction. The walks weren't hard, but they weren't all that easy, either, if maybe a little shorter than we sometimes attempt. Very nice scenery, too, including a "bush ranger's cave", a cleft of some considerable depth and notable dryness, from back in the day. Later, Mount Wilson offered a bit of cascades.

Stateless The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, is putting forward, at the behest of the most extreme right-wing of his party, a proposal to remove Australian citizenship from dual citizens found to have engaged in terrorist acts, most particularly of going to the Middle East to join ISIS, but without a judicial hearing. The Immigration Minister would be able to judge whatever evidence or allegation and strip such persons of citizenship, effectively removing them from access to the legal system and any hope of redress. Worse, the fascists are proposing that birthright citizens should also be subject to the removal of citizenship, rendering them stateless. I don’t use the term “fascists” lightly. This is exactly how they have positioned themselves politically, making citizens servants of the state, rather than the other way around. This is a bad plan, all up. There is no value in removing people from the rule of law. It makes much more sense to expand the rule of law, if such was necessary (and it isn’t; the law we need are already in place), to embrace them, and hold them accountable properly. It is cowardice, pure and simple. Hysterical fear-mongering cloaked in the flag, and pandering to racists. Andrew Nikolic must be the stupidest man in Parliament.