Greetings and welcome to my arts and entertainment blog.

Like a good many people striving to carve out an existence on this water logged sphere I lead a relatively average life with a relatively average day job down here in treacherous Australia, where just about everything that doesn’t walk upright wants to kill you. I subscribe to escapism as a legitimate form of reality, I enjoy oxymoronic humour and I live vicariously through others, others being anyone with an even remotely less average life than my own. So what does this mean…

Firstly, it means I’m very passionate about the all the ways in which we bipeds apply and express our creativity, entertain one another, or use movement and sound to communicate and educate. The rituals if you like, the veritable sensory feasts that draw us like moths to the flame, with an expectation that we’ll be temporarily transposed or even transcended to times, places, realities or parallel dimensions we would otherwise never experience or may not even wish to. At times I find it hard to believe all this guilt-free pleasure is perpetually available for sometimes no more effort than depressing your index finger or the price of admission.

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. “

Thomas Merton

Secondly, It means I’m regularly inflicting my passion on family and friends with little regard for their interest, level often clogging their social networking timelines with my impromptu reviews of the movie I’ve just taken myself to see, the latest Netflix or HBO original content series I’ve lost a weekend of my life binging on or, as a season ticket holder, recounting my evening at the Opera or the matinee Ballet. You can imagine the perplexed or indifferent responses the latter receive when you have brothers, who as a result, have now fated you to becoming that ‘crazy old cat lady’ in the family everyone will eventually avoid but ineviatbly lever off for the obligatory humorous anecdotal stories at family gatherings.  On the flip side for my beloved brethren and the rest of the clan, there is never a shortage of books, music, movies or TV at their fingertips, and like Bill Collins or James Lipton I can deliver a synopsis on just about anything at short notice. I can provide the life story and credit history of a cast, regurgitate quotes and lyrics at will, tell you where a musical score was recorded and even tell you why a particular lighting arrangement was used. That’s right, I’m ‘THAT’ person, the one who watches the audio commentaries and reads ‘The making of…’ books. For me, it’s as much about the creative process as it is the end product.

“…there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst…”

Lester Burnham: American Beauty

Lastly, as I was fortunate enough to have my passions nurtured from a very young age, both at home and during my formal education, and since I’m grateful to the creatives who mainline caffeine and work 23.5 hours a day just so they can indulge in their passion to entertain me, I like to get behind any initiative which supports and promotes our arts and artists. Australia is not a populous nation and funding for the arts is not on par with Europe and the US. Much of our talent goes abroad because that’s where the opportunities and the cheques are. To this end I have included a “Trust the talent” page (work in progress) and will, wherever possible use this site to promote local talent and provide links to, or information on, arts programs in support of building a strong, self sufficient and sustainable entertainment industry here at home. Lets make Australia a place Hollywood wants to come to. After all, It’s perfectly safe here, snake and crocodile wranglers are like McDonalds and Starbucks, they’re on every corner! Additionally, there are many international programs and initiatives doing amazing work and achieving great results that I feel we could learn and benefit from, which I will also reference on here and, until we can facilitate the retention of our own talent they will continue to be sources of opportunity and growth for our artists.

“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the alter of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and  having worthless dreams.”

Yann Martel: The Life Of Pi

So, in order to relieve those who are burdened with the manifestations of my passions, and find new ways for me to indulge and expand them, I have created this site. I will post reviews, release and performance dates, production updates, quotes and anecdotal stories, and anything of interest related to the spectacle that is the arts and entertainment industry. They will be my own thoughts and opinions, riddled with bias of course because that is human nature and like everyone I have my favourites that I will shamelessly promote, however I have no desire to, nor do I see the need, to be destructively critical or engage in hurtful gossip about anything or anyone  as this is not the intent of the site.

In closing, I do hope that everyone who visits the site finds something of interest or at the very least something that simply amuses you for a few minutes. I particularly hope this is the case for anyone who’s reading this as an avoidance tactic because you’re supposed to be doing something else right now. Umm don’t look now but your boss is behind you… Time for your Jerry McGuire moment “cue the goldfish!”, “action!”.

Enjoy!