This week's madness has included: a not-at-all-healthy-sounding cough; a hangover the size of a small lorry; forty-two hours without sleep; the writing, in under twenty hours, of two load-bearing assignments totalling five thousand words; The Hayloft Project's A Soldier's Tale and floogle's Ollie and the Minotaur; the critics panel at the Emerging Writer's Festival, at which I rocked up late, spoke too fast, and, I'm sure, sounded terribly arrogant (I will be doing the same today at a panel on ideas); Rolf Binder's 2005 Bull's Blood; homemade poppy seed cake; and Alessandro Baricco's Silk. I imagine next week's madness will be somewhat similar.

I have some reviews (of opera, theatre, etc.) in the pipeline, but university, that old chestnut, must take precedence for the next little while. So far this semester it hasn't, and this oversight has been reflected in my less than satisfactory results...

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, p.851:

How will we know if our earthly paradise is coming to pieces, if we don't know how it was put together? It was the human mind that got us this far, by considering what had happened in history; by considering the evil, and resolving to avoid its repetition. Much of this evil, alas, was in the mind itself. The mind took account of that too. The mind is the one collectivity that the free individual can thrive in: which is lucky, because live it in he must. Even within ourselves, there are many voices. Hegel, when he said that we can learn little from history, forgot about Hegel, author of the best thing about history that has ever yet been said. He said that history is the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself.

Most wine storage options cost thousands of dollars. One doesn't, but it is useless and ineffective. This option is the bedroom cupboard, and while my own seemed to be working quite well for a time, it has recently begun to disgorge a series of overheated, thoroughly cooked reds, each bottle of which is testament to the inconvenient truth that home cellaring rarely works. Last week I opened a Pinot Noir, which, or so I assured myself at the time, was corked, a single bad apple in an otherwise good bunch. Had I been more clued in to such things, I would have identified the tip of an iceberg; as it were, I mistook the iceberg for an ice cube, and I my effort at cellaring is going down as a result. Today I opened a Durif and a Malbec, each of them cellared not twelve months ago. Only one of them was in any way drinkable, and even then only barely. And even then only because it had been insulated to some extent in newspaper for a couple of months. A shame, to be sure, and a lesson to be learned.

My life is densely packed at the moment, and I haven't been able to write much as a result. I hope to post more over the next couple of weeks, but be warned in advance that my posts are likely to be much like this one: short, inconsequential, probably wine-related, overly verbose, and, in the the end, apologetic. I have a few things in the pipeline (a couple of articles, a couple of reviews), but otherwise I am waiting for a term deposit to mature so I can buy a plane ticket out of here, and then...

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, p.569:

When we call a critic deadly, it should be because he knows about life, and will not accept its being falsified. [Alfred] Polgar was suspicious of the theatre, which he called "a charlatan that works real magic." His love for it was an intelligent love. He tested it against the world, not by its own standards. Hence the permanent validity of his mocking advice to a bad critic: "Take aim, let lose. And when your arrow sticks in, draw a target around its buried point. That way you will score a bullseye every time."

The last couple of weeks have been weeks of sound of fury: I was made redundant (I am, finally, no longer employed by the National Australia Bank, and I received a $12,360.76 payout to soften the blow); I started working in the wine store of a two-hat restaurant in South Yarra; my grandmother died, and I returned home to deliver the eulogy; Ali came to visit (we went to Guys and Dolls, in which a girl I went to primary school with pulled Lisa McCune's hair); and now I am desperately seeking a new house mate, in light of Sarah's rapidly approaching departure to Ascot Vale...

Marco Luccio, The Statue of Liberty, 2008

John Ancher, Opening Address, Marco Luccio's Cityscapes of New York, Steps Gallery, 62 Lygon Street, Carlton, April 1, 2008:

Marco Luccio, urban artist, tells a city's story through the edgy medium of dry point. His prints accentuate joie de vivre through the exuberance of the mark-making. In New York, he explores the geology of that city's unique architecture. Fissures in facades and exfoliation of the built fabric are celebrated. The metropolis as quarry. In the frantic web of Luccio lines, the nerve endings and tendons of hard materials are always exposed. Arteries of habitation pulse and dreams of another brave new world are challenged.

Luccio infuses the iconic with the imaginary. In his prints, New York is touched by Atlantis, Piranese, Cecil B. DeMille and the archeology of film sets. The sense of place he captures is remarkable for its individuality. New York has rediscovered its mythology in these images. [...] The dry points in this show, gestural and inventive images of a city we all instantly recognise but are seeing here afresh, represent the medium at its most persuasive.

'Peg o' My Heart', written by Alfred Bryan, composed by Fred Fisher:

Peg o' my heart, I love you
Don't let us part, I love you
I always knew, it would be you
Since I heard your lilting laughter
It's your Irish heart I'm after
Peg o' my heart, your glances
Make my heart say, how's chances
Come be my own, come make your home
In my heart

Peg o' my heart, I love you
We'll never part, I love you
Dear little girl, sweet little girl
Sweeter than the Rose of Erin
Are your winning smiles endearing

Peg o' my heart, your glances
With Irish art, entrance us
Come be my own, come make your home
In my heart

It was not an audience of cinephiles; indeed, it was not the usual film festival audience at all. Oscar Redding's The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark was about to have its world premiere at the 2007 Melbourne International Film Festival, and the city's theatre-makers, theatre-goers, and even a few of its theatre critics, had flocked to the RMIT Capitol Theatre in their air-kissing, turtlenecked droves.

While I had not been around at the time of A Poor Theatre's well-received 2004 production of the play, which Redding had staged with little money in an abandoned shopfront on Sydney Road, Brunswick, I had heard very positive things about it from people in the know. Nevertheless, I was feeling dubious about its cinematic reincarnation. The last thing I was in the mood for was two hours of theatre pretending to be cinema.

My latest piece, 'The Rest Is Static: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark', appears both online and in print in the latest edition of RealTime