little girl's games

I've been playing the addictively haunting game The Path a bit lately. I love it in all its lolita emo babygothness and I want to plug myself into the scariest part of our upstairs hallway, turn all the lights off and let the wolf get me again and again. But I'm a busy girl this week with kino kabaret shoots to organise and red rattler installations to create so at this stage I've been playing it on trains with Ax instead.

I didn't pay for this game- it was a sneaky present from the girl coz she can be gorgeous like that- but for once, I would have gone out of my way to pay for The Path. I haven't ever been driven to spend my coin on games- I imagine this is mostly because when we were kids, my brother would bring them home while I was off in my room with my head buried in a book, so having new games loungeroom-delivered meant I never thought to buy them. And honestly, I didn't really miss the playstation, the gameboy or the xbox when I left home. It scares me how much I've been missing out on by not paying attention to this kind of storytelling.

moral of this fairytale: gaming is a lot more fun when you don't have to fight your obsessive gamer-genius little brother for the controller.

Being (over?) familiar with indie filmmakers and musicians and those who voraciously consume their creative spawn, this new little obsession has sparked my interest in our geeky cousins, the indie gamers. I was poking around on the Path's creators Tale of Tales' website, and was not entirely unsurprised to see that their next project Fatale is inspired by Oscar Wilde's Salome. As soon as you start toying with a notion, suddenly you'll see it everywhere. We're currently in pre-production for a Salome project shooting in spring.



Lucien Lévy Dhurmer's vision of “Salomé”, as featured on Tale of Tales. This painting nails what I love about Salome stories- the consuming eroticism of the young girl who is more in love with victory than any man.

Just one last bit of image stealing before I run off to Kabaret tonight- this is the sisters of The Path reimagined by the talented Sarah Lomba as bears. Cutesplosion much? (via Game Set Watch)

night by avatar

There was no single photographer at our latest Punk Monk happening; instead, an unplanned and informal parlour game of pass the camera began early in the evening and continued on into the night. From this fractured diversion sprung some seriously lovely documentation.

After the obligatory photo set from Monday night's Algae Rhythm 0.03: TURN ME ON DEAD MAN was posted online yesterday, an interesting phenomenon began to mushroom in the land of the punk monks. Everyone's online avatars started appearing in the mysterious monotone of our conspiracy-themed gathering.

It's interesting to me that in one night, through the multiple visions of our friends and colleagues, almost all of us found an image of ourselves that fits the avatar criteria of representing a personally (if momentarily) idealised version of our faces.

And so, here we are. Some of the Punk Monks, and a few of our nearest and dearest, captured as we want to be seen.



























NB: if you want a full account of what went down at our third Algae Rhythm, shift your browsing eyes to AWOL monk.

turn me on, dead man

(GD cred to the always arousing Matt Ravier)

After a long two weeks of sitting in dark theatres soaking in the varied delights of the Sydney Film Festival, it's time to stretch your shapely legs out of their cramped State Theatre position and join together to see your friends, lovers and artful colleagues in full colour.

Tonight is Punk Monk Propaganda's third Algae Rhythm intermedia installation evening. Curators for AR 0.03 include Punk Monk's own Dermot McGuire, Kino Sydney's resident vivacious pin-up Karina Libbey, and film academy darling and conspiracy theory junkie Kathleen Williams. RSVPs are tight at The Corner Shop and places have all been filled for this suspicious inquisition into pop conspiracy and the questionable history of common knowledge. But we love a mysterious stranger. So get in contact if you're intrigued and you want to come and play in the night.

naked pink walls

On Saturday night we took a night off from SFF to have a winter colour festival of our own. My flatmate and I wallpapered our kitchen with our local newsagent's generosity and invited our most creative art-jamming friends in to splash some paint, glue, and imagination around in an attempt to make some soul to hang on our naked pink walls.

Bear was in vintage form as documenter and muse, and you can see and read it all from her angle here.

gunshots, gingham and greed

SFF kicked off with with a really tasty pilgrimage to Mother Chu's Vegetarian Kitchen. The miso sauce tastes like delicious gravy which I've been craving SO badly since I went vego, even more so now that the weather has turned London on me. Need to go back and check out the rest of the menu when I have more than half an hour to reverse-vomit my food. I was in a really inexplicable panicky rush before dinner; must have been generously taking on some of the opening night stress that was blowing over from George Street and the State Theatre.



We skipped the feel-good footy flick to check out The Agony and The Ecstasy of Phil Spector, and from all reports, we didn't miss out. I only heard a couple of cheerful reviews of Looking for Eric, but most people I spoke to seemed dissapointed.

Spector, on the other hand, was brilliant. I haven't laughed out loud that much in a film in a really long time. I love the feeling of being in a packed cinema and hearing all the different kinds of laughs explode at once. Spector is an incredible character with perfect comic timing, and I found his celebration of himself above all others completely endearing. The documentary itself was well paced, but i found the onslaught of information at times was irritating. If I'm reading a quote, I don't want to be listening to a voiceover and listening to a pop tune vocal at the same time. I also would have liked to have seen a bit more older footage of Spector himself rather than the media circus surrounding his trial. The constant court CU montages annoyed me after a while. Having said that, I loved the film overall, and walked out convinced he was innocent. You can taste test the first few minutes of it here.

We then made our way down to the water to see Bluebeard. A few smashed champagne glasses and a choctop disaster later, we sat back to enjoy Catherine Breillat's interpretation of the classic fable. I'd read some really good things about this film; that it was a feminist reimagining, that the director was known for dealing explicitly with sex and violence. I was expecting a glistening black fairytale told through a little girl's horrific imagination, but I was disapointed. It wasn't a feminist reading at all; if anything there was a glaring commentary on the equality of evil between the sexes. I liked the script but the art direction felt at worst forced and distracting and at best undercooked to me. I quite enjoyed the two gingham-aproned narrators but I thought that the cuts to them could have been more elegant and their inclusion in their storyworld more fantastical. The blood-skating scene missed the mark completely for me. The blood wasn't dark enough, the child wasn't sinister enough, the corpses weren't abject enough. Corpses were a bit of a problem in this film, apparently. The dead father was visibly breathing while they mourned him, which is always distracting. However, on the most part, this felt like a well acted film that in the end was poorly captured.

We collected our thoughts at Tank Stream, which is surprisingly quite nice on a Wednesday night, before we got word that OVSS was all go and we made our way over to the always horrific Est for the afterparty. The crowd was for the most part distinctively lame. Wall to wall boredom with a little bit of celebrity shine glittering about the place. Though there was this really cute girl in a ninja turtles shirt who wanted to hold my hand all night. Vic and I threw some punk technicolor on the dancefloor inamongst the superdrunk suits. And the CC and dry from the open bar lifted my post-Bluebeard funk fairly quickly. I'll augment these tales with some pictorial evidence just as soon as I decide which pictures contain the least litigious looking champagne sluz.

flying bombshell

for a little over a day, my best friend was back in town and we hid from the rain and we ate savoury things at small tables and the world felt normal again.

i woke up and it was winter

I don't think I turned my lipstick red radio off between 1996 and 2003. Led Zeppelin and the Doors ruled the cars and the backyard. Jethro Tull played in the lounge room when no one was practicing the piano. 702 chattered constantly from behind the jug in the kitchen. Aretha Franklin pumped out of the family room over the vacuum cleaner. And in my room, the little red wireless on the floor by my window was constantly tuned to Triple J.

Mid way through last month, the Lucksmiths, one of the bands that played to me in my bedroom while did important teenage things like cutting out shapes for my wall collages and writing passionately all over my inflatable chair with permanent marker, announced that they're doing a farewell tour in August. I'm going. Band wakes slay me. Is that perverse?