Thanks for your comments – much appreciated and very welcome.

(And you have beautifully demonstrated the immediacy of the form with a correction of sorts, perfectly self-referential and sometimes awkward. Thank you.)

One piece of feedback coming from the forum via an email stated that SOYP has now been included in the invite list for shows at The Sydney Opera House on the strength of Stephen Crittenden’s article AND she claims she’ll be “milking it for all it’s worth.” And that’s fine. The questions for her devotees is has she/her blog changed since her identity has been revealed?

Perhaps a bit more didactic analysis from “a teacher’s perspective”? perhaps? I wouldn’t know. I don’t read her. For the same reasons wouldn’t buy a Big Mac.

Anyway, thanks again for your response – and I’m glad you liked the song. It shows just how epic, international and delightful a simple song originally recorded by an Australian can be… and just how hypnotizing conviction can be.

Para #1, Line #4… I got distracted in the middle of editing the comment… Meant to write: “As soon as I say that, I’ve outed myself”, or “As soon as you say that, you’ve outed yourself” or “As soon as one says…”

Well what does one say?!

Hard to know how to respond to the micro-culture-war/storm-in-a-blogspot tone of the debate that Stephen Crittenden’s article helped whip up. I don’t really want to give more oxygen to the “shit-on-your-play” rhetoric: it’s not fearless; it’s just sloppy. But as soon as I say that, I’ve outed yourself as an inner-city caffe-latte sipping, vaguely left-progressive wanker, so… I like what you, Jana and many others have said online and would have been interesting to hear your voices at the Belvoir gig (though I couldn’t make it anyway).

Far more important, however, is the You Tube clip above featuring the charming netherlandians covering “You’re the Voice”. Gob-smackingly cringe-worthy and yet strangely addictive. Love it. Love their hair and bonhomie!

All best wishes,

Paul

My pleasure. In this theatre community, we have a problem acknowledging our elders sometimes and I just wanted to say that I have taken a lot of my inspiration from things you have said, perspectives you have shared with me – and things you have written.

I also feel grand blogger commeraderie – because we know what it’s like to be constantly and actively engaged with the community – and sometimes abused for mis-spelling things or ignored by mainstage companies – or our legitimacy is questioned.

I have also recently been abused by one indie company for not wanting to attend their production – the reasons I have cited are personal (mainly that I need time to do my laundry and I need to earn money and only a new Australian play will seriously jeopardize either of those life necessities).

I sort of think a syndicate of diverse bloggers could cover and do cover more than the print reviewers… mainly because we have very distinct voices, backgrounds and perspectives and tastes. but further more – I always fear an us versus them mentality. I really like the print reviewers (as people first especially that charming Jason Blake and that literary sentence sculptor Cameron Woodhead).

I do believe in a curated life – and what you choose makes your life – what we choose to pay for, support, doo, makes our life and world. And frankly I don’t choose Shit on Your play, nor do I choose McDonalds, or American accents, or to see yet another production of The Maids, or to spend time with people that make me feel bad about my spelling or my hair. Life’s too short.

I was going to go and sit with the masses at that panel discussion. I didn’t feel so strongly about not being asked to participate. But that said, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable commenting from the stalls in such circumstances. Could I have restrained myself well enough to stay silent? Anyway I got a better offer of a way to spend the afternoon – more fun! I am curious as to what was discussed among that group people. Which is odd when I have little interest in the views on any topic of some on the panel.

Anyway, I am just doing some private soliciting here: I have just put up a post on my site – some if which is dedicated to a few thoughts I might have sgared at such a forum if I had gone along. This is a note to Augusta’s readers who rarely check me out – why would you when my posts are so occasional and random.

Something I left out of the piece on my site is the simple screamingly obvious fact that print media is dying – we bloggerscare almost the present and very very soon the future. And at this point theatre audiences, professionals and hangers on should understand that we don’t get paid – we give of our time and we do the best we can with that constraint. That situation won’t last forever – and so if the theatre industry wants its practice noted for history, it will have to find a way to support people like us. The most obvious answer is for us to be recognised as necessary players by the Australia Council – and I can hear the howls of protest coming from ‘practitioners’ if money for the arts – that generally went to them – was diverted to the people they love to hate most.

At the moment we are doing charity work and so I say to all those people who ‘expect’ us to cover their work, please understand we bloggers, all of us, are already seeing and writing about more shows than we can properly handle.

And for those of you who live in Sydney, note the team spirit among Sydney bloggers – ‘all for one and one or all’ – apart from Jane Simmons who I call ‘the woman who shits in her own handbag’. I think it is a shame for a blogger who publishes ill-informed often unhelpful crap to be the trigger for a forum of the sort conducted at Belvoir the weekend before last. Funny isn’t it how sensationalism is still the primary magnet for those who pretend they want to know more about something.

Thanks Gus for putting your head on the chopping block on behalf of the team. We will help you glue it back on.