Oh! To be Human

I’m about to provide a entertainment review. This isn’t something I’m known for doing. But before I start to explain how good the entertainment was last night, I really have to explain the circumstances and my mood last night to provide the required sense of scale.

After exercising my freedom of expression at a protest about these historically illiterate Canadian racists  at the Aotea Square last night 1, I was reluctantly dragged off in my usual friday anti-social [usual post week of coding] mood to find some food on the way to the Q theatre up the road.

It really was a pity that the future corporate lackeys were getting dressed up in ridiculous costumes from a bygone era and their proud parents were hogging all of the eating and drinking establishments [the damn students were getting capped yet again!].  How often do we have to put up with this nonsense. I’d point out that I usually got the lump of paper for my degrees years after I completed them. Actually after I finally got around to paying the library fines.

So by the time we’d located a table by the inevitable cones denoting the building works down at Burger Fuel and started to wait for a burger [that didn’t arrive before we had to leave], I was starting to get a bit tetchy. Of course the 15 kilos of assorted computer gear [2 laptops, usb screen, mice, power supplies, etc] that was in my backpack from work that I was lugging around didn’t help.

But after a hard day coding followed by some time listening to fools with a sound system, no food or even a soothing drop of alcohol, I was on the verge of saying we should can the exercise of being around the permanent construction site of central city and just go home.

Fortunately I didn’t manage to raise the matter of getting home where there was an uncrowded supply of food, even some booze, and a sofa on which to start to relax. Instead I amused myself  by baiting commenters on this site for a while whilst waiting for everything.

Finally I got reluctantly dragged into the Q and seated for what was billed to me to be a “circus”. It is. But it really wasn’t. It was a combination of circus and burlesque performances performed with some well chosen music. It certainly dragged me off to an alternate world for the rest of the evening.

It was one of the most engaging performances that my jaded and saturated sensibility has seen in a long time. Since I’m nearly 60 [how in the hell did that happen?] my sense of wonder has been reduced to “been there, done that, have the tee-shirt, can we go now” for a very long time.

But this highly choreographed performance with some amazing humans who jerked me me right out of my curmudgeon mood within 15 minutes of it starting.

When you watch freaking vertical dancing way above ground by single and multiple performers who’d obviously stretched their training beyond what this sedentary programmer had thought was possible, set to some well chosen music, and simple non-verbal story lines – then you suspend belief and watch with a open mouth like a child.

I could describe it, but I’d fail to do it justice. Besides, you really have to see it and I suspect  anything else that The Dust Palace decide to put on. Don’t take your kids – they don’t deserve it.

Human is meant to close at the Q Theatre tonight. It is a fundraiser for and by The Dust Palace:-

Human kickstarts a drive to fund a new The Dust Palace circus hub to be opened in 2019. The fitted-for-purpose training and production venue will give kids, the community and artists a collaborative space to build their physical and creative skills. Audiences will be investing in the arts and helping grow the wild and wonderful world of circus performance through ticket sales to Human, donations and patronage.

It is a performance art and well worth the price for my ticket. I am exhibiting a deep regret about wasted money I have shelled out to see absolute crap at the movie theatres recently. If you can scratch up a ticket for tonight then do so. Otherwise hope that they put this one again and you find out about it (their Contact page has a news letter signup).

But overall, it’d be way better value for those fools who’d want to pay to sample the ignorant and shallow slogan laden bile of our greedy Canadian pests, and a much better use of our privilege of freedom of expression.

I don’t get a lot of time to be at the Auckland International Film Festival. But I am looking forward to the single performance I did book. At the Civic watching Buster Keaton in The General.

Buster Keaton, the stone-faced genius of silent-era comedy, at his funniest and most thrilling in an exquisite new digital restoration of the most serenely locomotive movie ever made. Accompanied by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra performing Carl Davis’ excellent score, conducted by Peter Scholes.

That should get me back into the mood to write ultra reliable complex c++ code talking across multiple systems on Monday. Especially since it is a film that I have never seen, meant to be one of his best, and which appears to be performed under optimal conditions.

  1. Joe Carolan was in his usual fine form. Along with the many of the other speakers I heard 2 3, he was busy trying to enrol everyone there into causes of particular interest to him and to few others. While I realise that saying this stuff is important for some, I really wish that they’d stick to the point and get to the point a  whole lot quicker without so much extraneous garbage. Especially on cold evenings when I’m carrying a frigging heavy bag,forgotten to pick up my warm jerkin, and there is no close coffee.
  2. I particularly disliked the legally ignorant and dimwitted speaker who claimed the Labour government should  ban the historically illiterate fools from Canada. The UK had good cause to ban one of the Canadian racist morons because being caught in the act of  handing out racist leaflets in Luton on a previous visit. Our government has to act according to the current law which requires that there be acts or a high expectation of such acts occurring within our jurisdiction. You cannot simply ban a person from entering because they are a raving lunatic or have opinions that they are clearly too young and stupid to be able to justify. Otherwise we’d have to ban most politicians and diplomats for being schizophrenic, and most young entertainers for their insane life styles. Then how would we get cheap entertainment for the media to drone on about?
  3. I was impressed by Marama Davidson from the Greens. I can’t recall ever having heard her speak before. While her speaking appeared to ramble, it was from the heart and sounded to be directly from experience rather than some kind of repetition of principles and ideologies that I learnt by heart decades ago (and didn’t agree with then).

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