I’m finally into the swing of this thesis enough that I can spend (as I did today) a solid six or eight hours on it without get­ting dis­trac­ted by other things. I dis­covered a couple of things: it’s becom­ing harder to work out how to store my mar­ginal mus­ings that I…

FREE TICKETS TO BLISS. This Sunday night. Talk to me… I was plan­ning to go out tonight maybe, because every­one is going to Gol­gotha. But instead of a head­ache, I now feel even sicker. Stom­ach ache. Woozy. Yerch. Can’t even con­cen­trate enough to work instead.

Go here, read what zara­bee has to say about new ways Aus­trali­ans have of deal­ing with spam. Neat.

It’s all hap­pen­ing. Today, while I tried in vain to work on my thesis, the phone rang incess­antly, I found myself nego­ti­at­ing a pos­sible deal that may end up with me and a friend from Sydney run­ning a magazine com­pany, I sud­denly decided I need to have a Seder meal…

[cross-posted in ] It’s not often a film makes you angry at your­self for not having done enough. Osama is the first fea­ture film made in post-Taliban Afgh­anistan. Des­pite the title, it is not about Bin-Laden. Rather, it uses the figure of a young girl diguised as a…

Went to the key­note of Empires & Ruins last night at ACMI, with Okwui Enwezor talk­ing about the role of the artist as pro­du­cer in a time of crisis. It was good but not amaz­ing. He was most engaged when talk­ing about African artists and the dif­fi­culty of speaking…

Was think­ing today about study­ing his­tory in high school and won­der­ing how they’ll teach this war, which primary sources they’ll use, what ’causes of the war’ will be accep­ted in Year 9 essays… and what they’ll call it. I star­ted think­ing “the first gulf war” and…

Just got back from a dance class with folk-hero Kristina Olsen. Fun but I can’t feel my feet now. And there wasn’t any tango. I wanted tango. I’d be just as bad at that as all the other dances I’m bad at (apart from belly­dan­cing) but it’d be fun. Anyhow, quick further…

Just updated my home page as any of you actu­ally read­ing this on the home page will notice. So, as you do, I then did a vanity search on Google to see what came up on my name these days and whether my new home page is still at the top (it’s not, the “about” page is…

I always forget how little I actu­ally like the writ­ing pro­cess. I like research. I like inter­view­ing. I love feel­ing import­ant and saying “Hi, I’m a journ­al­ist call­ing on behalf of (pub­lic­a­tion).” I even like tran­scrib­ing inter­view tapes. I fall in love with what…

Someone explain to me how this actu­ally man­aged to be pub­lished in this day and age. Racist and homo­phobic in one hit, this pur­ports to be a fash­ion page from Details, April 2004… Of course, I’ll have to con­firm it’s real before slam­ming it in the thesis… The…

An old acquaint­ance, Michaela Led­widge (Jamie Walker’s cousin, for those of you scratch­ing the heads) has just received a £150,000 grant to make her inter­act­ive, mul­ti­th­read film idea a real­ity. That’s POUNDS. Wow. Go Michaela! As for me, art­icles going well, rent’s…

I was sift­ing through some old poetry e‑mails trying to find some details about an upcom­ing fest­ival when I spot­ted some­thing I’d missed. Bruce Beaver appar­ently died on Feb­ru­ary 17 (see John Tranter’s SMH obit­u­ary here). He was a great poet and a lovely man. He was a…