Despite Katy’s worried rumblings about the prospect of future Richard Kelly projects after the Donnie Darko Director’s Cut, I’m still naively looking forward to Southland Tales. Okay, so I haven’t seen the Director’s Cut yet, but Stifler and Sarah Michelle Gellar in a musical of the future? What’s not to like? It starts shooting any day now…
Watched Brian Wilson on Tour, which was a horrible letdown: badly shot snatches of video footage, edited to kill all qualities of presence in the performances. Compared to my memory of Wilson’s Australian tour, the DVD feels like a dinky alternate universe in which everything sublime has been flattened, and in which the palpable, collective sense of affection for Brian that was expressed in the concert experience has been replaced by endlessly looped soundbites of fawning celebrity friends. A great shame.
Saw Georgina Naidu’s solo show “Yellowfeather”, which was part of the (disturbingly auto-orientalist) Orientation festival of Asian performance at the Sydney Opera House. Some points:
Evidence of the globalisation of discourses of ethnicity: Indian and other South Asian cultures are now being categorised in Australia as “Asian” — in contrast to the UK, the term “Asian” in Australia has pretty much always been reserved for East Asian/”oriental” cultures.
Georgina Naidoo’s physical comedy of embarrassment was fantastic. In my crude, un-PC terms, “Yellowfeather” is a “coming out as an ‘ethnic’ in a white world” story, full of identity crisis, which is why I think it’s less effective when it attempts narrative resolution — as with classic “gay and lesbian” coming out narratives, it ends with a triumphant, euphoric dancefloor epiphany that attempts to inscribe a newly comfortable politics of identity, under which all is reconcilable.
You’ll love this, Camel: there’s a great moment where the protagonist reads The Buddha of Suburbia, and this changes everything — she sees herself in popular culture for the first time, and she runs around, shrieking “that’s me! that’s me!”. Unlike the cheesy dancefloor ending, and as I’ve noted before, I don’t think this moment of recognition is one in which identities are neatly inscribed. Indeed, perhaps South Asian fans of Hanif Kureishi from the UK would be surprised at how much the “BoS moment” means to people who aren’t white in general, around the world.
There’s no way I can say this without seeming dodgy, but it was interesting to see how woggy Naidu’s performance flavour was. (In Australia, “wog” is a racist epithet for various Mediterranean peoples that has been reclaimed in common usage by those communities.) Don’t ask me to explain where this impression comes from — it seemed to be inflected in different layers of narrative and performance. Lena noticed it too. Is it that the cultural vocabulary for “talking from below” about one’s ethnicity in Australia has been set by Italian, Greek and Lebanese migrants, to be then taken up by other communities as they emerge? On the other hand, I’m fairly sure I’m not simply mapping a stereotype of what a “loud woman of colour with a sense of humour” could possibly be (i.e. “woggy”), but perhaps there’s an aspect of this at work, too.
So it was very stimulating. Meanwhile, in the larger context of the festival, the cultural politics of self-exoticisation await further investigation…
