What i did on my holidays, pt. 2: Adelaide Part 2 (also long, also with pictures).
Right, i'm bored again, so time for more holiday-related journalling.



So, I left off about half way through the Adelaide Fringe. The first half of the festival was crazy hectic for me, but things calmed down quite a lot after that.

I spent a few enjoyable evenings hanging out with other techs from Fringe and the Gardens; here's a nice chap called Ben playing pool;



I went to see more shows, too; a pretty good Burlesque cabaret show called Tarnished, an excellent acrobatic circus comedy act called circus trick tease, and a play in a proper theatre called maestro, which was very good; somewhat intense holocaust-survivor piano-teacher/pupil drama type thing, with a good dose of humour thrown in. I think it's being made into a film at the moment, so that might be worth seeing when it eventually comes out. I also saw my friend Bec's show, which is coming to edinburgh this year and I'd recommend seeing.

Just about the point I was running out of shows to see and getting a bit sick of the fringe, I got shipped off to Port Augusta, a very small town about 300km North of Adelaide, for Desert Fringe. The concept of the event is to take a bit of the fringe to regional Australia for a weekend; not just acts but an element of the spirit as well, with a bunch of free events and various local and national acts. Port Augusta is basically a crossroads town, with the road leading from Adelaide through there to Darwin and Perth. We were put up in rather plush rooms designed for travelling workers, which had the incredible luxury of a wee kitchenette and laundry in each apartment; very welcome after a month in a youth hostel. There were a lot of bike police staying there, which made the inwevitable late night outdoor techy parties fraught with danger, but South Australia has lax laws regarding certain substances so we were fine...

It was great fun, and I got to be much more technically hands on than I had previously. What with knowing a bit about video projection, I got the... challenging... job of setting up the projectors for the opening event. This had two main elements; the projection one was a 5 minute architectural animation, where the artist had animated video to fit onto the lines of the building, so elements were contained within window frames, or were painted onto the building's different textures. Lining up 3 projectors into a single screen is pretty hard anyway, but here I had to do it in perfect sync to the building... It worked anyways, but yeah, tough!

here's a video of it, and here's a pic;



The whole thing was nearly destroyed the night before the event, when the sprinklers unexpectedly turned on right next to our projectors. Lacking anything handy to put over the top of them, I ended up resorting to standing in front of one of them in order to save the projector from being soaked... I didn't expect to get wet shoes in the desert, but never mind...
Anyways, that all went fine on the day. The other element of the opening event was a thing called Car-cophony, which was a sort of musical soundscape designed to be played on multiple car stereos in rough unison; we had 17 cars, which all started at roughly the same moment, and synchronised flashing lights and beeping horns with the music. The overall effect as very impressive, with the sound washing up and down the road in a rather pleasing manner.

Anyway, during the actual show itself, my job was working as the sound engineer. We had some excellent acts, notably the fairly famous tripod (warning! annoying flash website!), who were teh "big act" for the weekend and the excellent Juke Baritone and the Swamp Dogs; they describe themselves, fairly accurately, as "Tom Waits with a hangover at a Screamin' Jay Hawkins gig in New Orleans, playing music by Muddy Waters, Danny Elfman and Mike Patton...then you're getting close to a hint of Juke Baritone & The Swamp Dogs. " They have a song called Bill Hicks. They were a pleasure to work with and I loved their music.

Here's a pic from the gig;



It was great fun to do, really hard work because we had some 7 or 8 acts each night in the Fringe Club alone, which was a free open air gig in an old barracks courtyard. Choirs, bands, comedians... and we were also running gigs in the theatre next door, which meant I had to run from a soundcheck for one thing to a gig in another venue and back again. On the second night I had an insanely bad hangover too, having drunk until some silly time in the morning, which meant that during the first show of the day I was struggling to not vomit or fall asleep on the sound desk; said show was the Casio Brothers, the kids hip-hop show... still, it was all worth it.

As well as the various musical things we had a rather good amateur theatre show; apparently a piece that had come about from some sort of drama therapy group, but it was really charming and well put together. It was an oddly structured piece, with 3 women all called Karen being questioned by a 4th about their lives, and giving monologues on various subjects, a fairly uplifting one about death being the most memorable one. The end of the play nicely turned itself on its head, with the questioner revealed to be a 4th Karen, and being questioned in her turn; this was the point the 4th wall was humourously breached with references to drama therapy. It was certainly an amatuer show, not the greatest acting I've seen, but it's good humour and self awareness rather made up for all that.

Anyway, as well as work, which admittedly took up most of my time in Port Augusta, there wer a couple of fun excursions. The first one was a group trip to the best Indian restaurant i've found in Australia. Oz doesn't have a big subcontinental population, so Indian food is fairly rare, and often pretty crap when you do find it; oddly most curry houses seem to be run by Chinese folk. There's a big asian population here, and a massive Greek one; there are more folk of greek descent in melbourne than anywhere in the world outside Athens. There's a lot of italians too, who are colloquially referred to as "wogs"... oh yeah, and there's a brand of cheese called "Coon" which you can buy in any supermarket. Anyway, here we are at said restaurant, just outside the town;



That's Dave, the production manager, on the left, and Sophie who gave me the job on the right. She told me she thought I might have a nice scottish accent so she thought she'd give me a job. (obviously there was the cv and references, but...). We ate outside. So yeah, that was pretty nice.

The other excursion was to the desert, a half hour or so outside town, with these two lovely ladies, Stanners on the left and Mags on the right;



They took me out to see the stars, properly. Out in the desert, where there's not insane levels of light pollution, the stars are utterly breathtaking. You can see the milky way clearly with the naked eye, and an extraordinary nuumber of stars. I took a couple of very long exposure photos - 30 seconds - but they didn't come out. Possibly i left the lenscap on. I'm hoping to see the same sky on my imminent road trip, it was a breathtaking sight.

The road back to Adelaide held some impressive sights, too. We made a couple of stops on the way; one for fish & chips in Port Pirie, where we found a Barnacle Bill's restaurant in a lovely converted church. Easily the best bit of the trip back was the Locheel monster; it seems someone from Lochiel decided it was a good idea to build a tribute to Nessie out of disused tyres and piping on a salt flat... here I am riding it, along with two comedians who we shared the car with...



Salt flats are tasty, by the way.

I still had a few days in Adelaide after that, but they were pretty uneventful; I drank free booze at the festival awards party, had a few drinks with new friends, some of whom I've since seen again in Melbourne, some I'll be seeing in Edinburgh I hope, and some I hope to see in Adelaide next year, when I plan to return. It was a great month with some awesome experiences and memories that will stay with me forever I hope. The work related ones just reaffirmed how much I love my job sometimes, and even the non-work related ones were down largely to the great people I've met doing the work I love.

yay, and stuff. So, still to come, melbourne comedy festival and after, and actully a wee post about my first month here and where I'm living and stuff.