august was insanely busy for some reason, and i can't remember what i did last month particularly...i'll try...

books:
stardust by neil gaiman
gorgeous!

(i think it's only 'book' singular this month...i'm sure i read more than that but can't tell you what it was)

movies:
many i intended to see but didn't.

cultural input:
the pearl fishers
absolutely beautiful, tingly-sensation music. sitting two rows from the front which was good because you could see everything onstage, but bad because you couldn't read the surtitles (had to guess the intricacies of the plot, which seemed to be much more homoerotic than i remembered) and you could see the streaky finger marks in the lead guy's fake tan. other than that, wonderful!

sydney symphony
went with the lovely jackie menyhart to this concert, which was conducted by tan dun and featured his water concerto and the crouching tiger, hidden dragon concerto. jackie had issues with the solo cellist, who was a very 'dramatic' and tight-leather-clad young woman with long curls she kept tossing all over the place, but she played very beautifully. the water concerto was amazing (the first two rows had to wear raincoats), and involved three percussionists 'playing' huge bowls of water, using cups, gongs, hands, whatever. very impressive (jackie didn't have issues with the solo percussionist; she thought he was quite cute).

saving henry and crowds
saw this last week at the studio at the opera house with brett, em and bek. interesting. crowds was lots of fun - short, quirky and a very good use of soundscapes. saving henry was less successful i felt, and not just because the subject matter was a little unsettling (about a young boy who had been sexually abused after his mother's death...cheery!). first off, it was billed as "an intensely poetic ballet", but there wasn't really anything you could call ballet in it. angus cerini was very arresting and strong onstage, but there were huuuge gaps in the flow of the piece, it didn't seem to go anywhere, i kept wanting to fall asleep (okay, i was very tired), and the stage manager's calls could be heard very clearly in the audience. as bek said "when there's about to be a really suspenseful moment in a piece, i don't want to know that lx cue 32 is standing by!" so not particularly great, but glad i went anyway, for certain moments, and for crowds.

not quite as highbrow theatre moments:
knock on wood
bek and i, led by sympathy and insanity, agreed to help my uncle out with a show he was invovled with. he is heavily into amateur theatre and having been involved with university theatre in the past i suppose it would have been churlish of me not to have offered my assistance when he was desperate for a musical director to step in at the last minute. oh, such altruism will never be displayed again in such a fashion, i can tell you.

i managed to avoid going to rehearsals and didn't even find out the name of the show until the dress rehearsal. then bek and i spent three evenings at the ryde-eastwood leagues club, cueing the house band (in various states of inebriation) while my uncle and various poppets performed this show onstage. i can't say much more about it than that, as the memories are already sinking into oblivion, but suffice it to say that on our way home one night we developed a cocktail that captured the very essence of the show: midori and passion pop over a lite beer shandie.

class.