Monday, October 24, 2005

PR - Restricted Magazine

Benito's latest bag is as Arts Editor of Restricted Magazine. Here's the blurb from www.restrictedmagazine.com


"For every street press magazine that is printed in this world a tree falls in the Amazon, a fairy flaps its wings and a very cute puppy....DIES!!"

Restricted will be a monthly DVD magazine distributed free like any street press, but with the key difference being that you won't have to read.

Just pop it on, sit back, pour yourself a cold one, light up, and watch it.

Each issue will feature live interviews with musicians, actors, filmmakers, writers and other sundry pop culture personalities, as well as the hippest short films and cutting edge music videos.

It will also contain a guide to gigs and venues in Sydney, as well as theatre and film reviews.

Issue One will hit the streets February 1 and will be accompanied by a huge launch party at "Restricted's" warehouse HQ.

It's still early days but we've done some interisting filming with our cutting edge team of Gypsy Journalists and tech crew, including a wacky weekend with the late Vicous Hairy Mary in their latest incarnation as the Circus Monoxide Big Band, as well as the furry freak show that was Madame Lash's birthday performance party at the soon to be defunct Kirk which featured such acts as The Porno Puppets From Prague.

We're lining up some big name for the first issue so keep alert, and possibly a little alarmed.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

rant - in my dream 1,004

So this ex-girlfriend and I are travelling across America on this extra long bus with ironing-board like beds in them…

…the old woman in the bed below is still angry because, in an earlier part of the dream, a friend of ours attacked her with an ice cream. This attack evoked a stronger reaction from the authorities than anyone was expecting, so she went into hiding in the desert on a camel with my Aunt Marie.

So, we’re on the bus with ironing-board beds which are far more comfortable than you’d expect – it’s two to an ironing board you see, and somehow it fits my ex and me…

…anyway, there’s this other Australian on board. He’s a young guy, maybe twenty, with a Prince Charming bowl cut and a Nirvana t-shirt. He may even be that runaway whose mother threw a garbage bin through our window and was later using undergrad Black Magik (stolen locks of hair, etc.) to stalk Julia-who-lived-under-the-stairs in our place in Balmain in the early 90s, but possibly not.

Either way, in this dream he’s an aspiring MC, but the Cali locals, whilst quite encouraging at first in that surprising way that Americans often seem to be, are finally less than impressed with his talents, as are we. He continues regardless, while the driver calls a stop and all split to the loo or the local diner.

Meanwhile, I’m suddenly back in Oz.

I’m watching a documentary about music and movie stars who have said at times they’d like to move to Australia and, despite the fact that none of those caught on film, including Johnny Cash, Eartha Kit, and that actress from that show with the single-mum black nurse (Julia?), had carried out their threat (the latter two had secretly had affairs and even fallen pregnant here) I was employed by the government to encourage a more famous level of migration, like a kind of Hollywood brain drain to the Northern Beaches or something… whatever.

I was against it personally, though I was more than happy to take DIMIA’s dirty money. Nonetheless I was doing little in the way of encouragement, partly out of opposition, particularly since no one had told me how to encourage movie stars to move to Australia as yet, but mostly because I was too busy lazing around the beach myself to do anything but analyse my dreams…

…then I was body surfing on a cliché picture postcard Sydney beach, like an idealised blend of every holiday in Avoca combined with an somehow idealised and clean Coogee, Bronte and Tamarama blend.

I dizzily stop body-surfing after being mildly dumped a few times as the waves this day are really quite enormous. Then I’m at the shop attempting to purchase something I know only as ‘Breakfast Bubble Gum,’ to which they keep offering me cans of Coca Cola, whilst I convince someone whose brother’s life I apparently saved as some point to pay for. Then End… of What I Can Remember.


Suggestions?

Friday, October 07, 2005

Rant - In My Dream 1,003.

So in my dream I’m dreaming I’m an old woman. The old woman is dreaming that she’s an even older woman. Who herself is dreaming she’s an Irish Italian failed writer in Sydney. I’m not sure who’s most disappointed; me, the old woman, or the older woman, but whatever.

In this dream I’m a terrorist, or at least I help terrorists, or at least somebody thinks I do or am, or something like that. I get caught anyway, though I’m not sure what for, possibly helping someone escape. Someone who's a terrorist, or at least somebody who helps terrorists, or at least who somebody thinks helps terrorists, etc.

Anyway, my colleagues and I, who at this point are all female, and in their late twenties, and wearing khaki camouflage jumpsuits like me, are chased through some sandy ruins. Myself and one other escape, and find a portal into some kind of suburbia, where we think we’ll be safe. But we’re wrong. Suburbia, or at least this manifestation of it, has SWAT team cops on every corner, as well as be-suited ASIO agents. There’s no escape, so we just wander through them and happily accept our fate.

Now we’re in a Balinese courtroom, awaiting trial, except there doesn’t seem to be any security guards around. We just politely wait, never considering escape. It all really hits me when I go to the bathroom. It unisexual, and the uneven floor is filled with many undoored loopy layers of long, rivering urinals, like it was designed by M.C. Escher and Gaudi. There’s a woman casually sitting on one toilet bowl/loopy blue ceramic trough thingy, and an elderly Indonesian rice farmer straining against a corner, in need of a little fibre obviously. My biggest concern is if this is what the courtroom loos are like then how weird are the urinals in the actual prison going to be?

Did I mention that, in my dream, I’m eating the pines from a pine tree? No? It’s a week before Xmas, and all is quite loud. They’ve just set up the pine tree in the mental hospital on a Greek island where I’m incarcerated, and I’m explaining that it’s an old Greek custom to eat the pine leaves, though secretly we’re cheating and eating store-bought pines which we gathered before the shops all closed, us canny bastards us.

So, in this dream, in short, I’ve been committed because I’m madder even than Greeks, and perhaps for my involvement in sexy terrorist fantasies, or perhaps for eating pine leaves in Gaudi’s Balinese urinal, or perhaps because, like all reality, I’m just a character in an old woman’s bad dream… whatever.