Little Running Bear

7:15pm, 31 March, Powder Room, Melbourne Town Hall

First night of the Festival is a trial for any comedian but for someone who’s never performed in Melbourne before I can only assume it’s a bit terrifying. We can be a harsh audience but we can also be incredibly forgiving. The thing is, we don’t even know what we’re going to be like until confronted with some poor victim on stage, suffering from jet lag and unsure why this room that seemed so very roomy moments ago is now an airless sweat-pit.

Zoe Lyons did a couple of things to get us onside early. She wore all black and displayed a knowledge of tram lines that would rival many locals.

It’s a cheap trick and we fell for it. Just as well too because she has a terrible poster and a worse show title. Putting the word “clown” in the title is like polar rejection to a city populated by citizens afeared of juggling.

So, audience on-side, Lyons moved into a series of stories about failing to overcome issues of low self-esteem. By way of snuggies, Van de Graaff generators and nudist beaches.

The details make all the difference in Lyon’s delivery. Whether she uses the whole stage to set a scene or just a tiny hand gesture, the audience is with her. She’s a great performer with some solid material but we’ve been spoilt in the past and I just wish she had pulled out something amazing because I left wishing to be more enthusiastic than I was and that’s not fair to anyone.

Someone understands what I mean by that but probably not you.

I wrote this review on my iPhone using the WordPress app, while on the train home from seeing this show followed by Roisin Conaty.

My friend, Dr Patrick, introduced me to this challenge / mindfulness system he has. Every year he picks 100 songs that have had some impact on him. No two songs can be by the same artists.

The way he does it is to just drag a song into a playlist for that year when he hears it and it strikes something in him. It sounds simple enough.

I’m often driving when listening to music and I found myself repeating the name of the song I wanted to add to my list until I got to traffic lights and then scribbling it into my Moleskine to be added later.

I have the added problem of having different sets of music on my desktop at home and my laptop. So I started just placing the songs in Evernote and tagging them for the list.

I’ve just finished putting it all together. I didn’t get to 100. I only got as far as 20. Each to their own, I suppose. The list is in no particular order, or maybe it’s in chronological order. Who can remember?

If you’re wondering about the SXSW Showcasing Artists albums, every years the South by Southwest festival releases a sampler of hundreds of songs from artists appearing at that year’s festival. It’s a great and free way to get a whole bunch of new music. It’s all released as torrents so you can usually find it around months after the festival.

There were these action figures when I was in grade 6. Called GI Joe, these were essentially military dolls with a hint of invented story behind them: nationally non-aligned villains; an endless supply of imagined weapons and vehicles.

Now they’ve made a film based on those action figures. The plot follows what you’d expect but just to spice it up a little, I’m going to program it in basic:
10 print 'exposition'
20 print 'explosions'
30 goto 10
Hit Break after about 110 minutes.

The thing is, though, with all those explosions and all that exposition there isn’t any time left for character development. Actually one character does have some kind of emotional journey but he’s a villain so it lasts about 5 minutes before he’s stripped of anything resembling humanity including clothes.

The title of the film is ‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People’. Step one wouldn’t necessarily be ‘make a bad film’ but I’m sure it couldn’t hurt.

This film reminded me so much of Ben Elton’s dreadful ‘Maybe Baby’ in its poor direction and terrible story development that to think about it much more would only serve to make me angrier.

I haven’t read the book and now I never will. The characters had little to no development and there were so many travelogue type establishment shots of New York that there was a moment I thought the director must have gone to the Ed Wood school of using found footage but he had obviously never graduated.

I could go on but I think you get the point. Avoid this film.