Writings belong of David Finnigan

Extraordinary! DOGMATRON East Coast Tour.

I sound like I’m kidding. I should by rights be kidding. In fact I’m not kidding. My Wolfmother tribute band DOGMATRON will be playing a series of gigs on the East Coast of Australia in June: The Gold Coast (June 18), Sydney (June 19) and Katoomba in the Blue Mountains (June 20).

We were thinking of naming this tour THE WALLS OF JERICHO tour because of the famous battle of Jericho, the first victory in the Israelite’s conquest of Canaan. Then we did some research. From the Bible:

They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys. Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the LORD’s house.

Thanks to research we are now calling this DOGMATRON‘S DESTROY WITH THE SWORD EVERY LIVING THING tour. Contact me if you want to make a booking for DOGMATRON to come to your city, festival or party and destroy with the sword every living thing in it, before taking your silver, gold and articles of bronze and iron and burning your whole city.

DOGMATRON

Who remembers 2006? Was anyone here alive in 2006?

2006. The air was sweeter. The youth were younger. Life seemed just around the corner. Promise sang in the bloodstreams, in the lung cavities; but nowhere did promise sing louder than in the amplifiers of WOLFMOTHER, one of the hardest bands to ever rock the planet with rock.

I wasn’t there. I’m too young to remember what it was like, how it must have felt to hear the voice of whatever Wolfmother’s singer was called blasting through the radio speakers for the first time. But I live on planet Earth, and like everyone else on planet Earth, I live in the reverberations of that colossal rock mastodon. Wolfmother. Where did you went? Why did you go?

Some people tell me that Wolfmother are back - some even say that they were only away for a couple of months tops - but those of us who’ve felt the power of the Wolf know the difference. The new Wolfmother - or ‘Wolf-failure’ as some have dubbed them - are sleek, over-produced and overhyped record company shills. Anyone who remembers Wolfmother’s storming Lollapalooza performance - the gig which led the legendary Mike Patton to pronounce that ‘Wolfmother suck’ - know that the real Wolfmother can never be tamed - never be owned - by anyone.

That’s why myself and two close colleagues formed our Wolfmother cover band: DOGMATRON.  To give you the real Wolfmother experience - uncut, uncensored and untamed.

DOGMATRON: playing at the Youth Earth Symposium on the Gold Coast in June 2009. After that, available for gigs in YOUR city. Bring the power of Wolfmother to your home town, in the form of Dogmatron, today! Contact David Finig with your performance needs to book a slot today!

hate restaurants: it’s a command.

World, world, world. Either you don’t understand, or I don’t understand. Cause I mean I love my scripts - I love them more than you love children, or food - but some I love more than others. Before the elephants reach the beach I love as an actual example of good writing that I can genuinely say I wrote. Chosei: Frozen Shape is genuinely a play that no-one but me and Nickamc and Muttley would ever have come up with.

Hate Restaurants - Hate Restaurants I love in the way you love the thing that you did in between when you should have fallen asleep and when you had to get up to go to your 5.30am breakfast shift at a shitty pancake parlour. I mean I love it, yeah, but I don’t respect it. (Though it does contain one of the best worded lines of dialogue I’ve ever written. ‘As the ancient Sumerians based their diet on barley, so we base our diet, as the ancient Sumerians, on barley.‘)

Maybe I’m wrong, though, because it’s just been picked up for two productions this year: as part of the Virgin Labfest in Manila this June, and as part of an ANU Theatre Society (NUTS) triple-bill of mine and Hadley’s work in October. So, uh… fuck yeah.

fuck YEAH.

from the Canberra Youth Theatre 2005 production

crack theatre festival

Alright, a little news for anyone out there still drifting past this blog. The fact of the matter is that on March 30th, I relocated from the Cancers to Sydney (to follow a girl) and I’ve spent the last month trying to get my head around this city. At present, I’m employed by several organisations (including National Science Week) and focusing all my remaining energy on one project: the Crack Theatre Festival.

Crack is a national theatre and performance festival taking place in Newcastle from October 1-5 as part of This Is Not Art, Australia’s largest media arts festival. This Is Not Art is an umbrella event which includes five different festivals: the National Young Writers Festival, Electrofringe (electronic and new media arts), Sound Summit (independent music), Critical Animals (creative research symposium) and the Crack Theatre Festival. TINA takes place annually in Newcastle over the October long weekend.

Over 2007-8, the National Young Writers Festival featured theatre and circus performers in its growing ‘Crack’ program. Following the 2008 festival, the Crack showcase emerged from the NYWF to form the Crack Theatre Festival, an independent performing arts festival within This Is Not Art. Myself and Gillian Schwab were appointed as inaugural directors for the new festival, which takes place for the first time in October 2009.

The 2009 program includes a performance showcase featuring works and artists from around Australia, a series of critical forums, panels and workshops, and Playground, a massive DIY collaborative performance event open to all comers. Featured performers include physical theatre and puppetry artist Fleur Elise Noble, Black Lung hermaphrodite Thomas Henning and lego-gypsy ensemble Mr Fibby. Dig on the Crack website for more info.

 
Fleur Elise Noble, Thomas Henning and Mr Fibby