Bret Easton Ellis: then and now

I was rather disturbed when I felt myself relating to the protagonist of Bret’s latest book, Imperial Bedrooms. I got what he meant when his character Clay would be in the ‘zone’. But that was early in the piece before he got really scary and freaky. I think he’s supposed to be this really laid back, laconic author with a wife and kids in real life, but in fiction he lets his inner psychopath well and truly loose. I bought Less Than Zero, at the LaTrobe Uni bookshop in Feb 1988, and thought I was so cool reading this great new book, in my first year of Uni, by this promising new author. Who knew that the sequel would be closer to Easton’s other book that goes around in a plastic mac. Or was that the point? All that self-centred nihilism has to end up somewhere, hurting someone.

East side girl watches West Side Story

I saw West Side Story last night at The Regent. It was an accurate and succinct rendition of the Romeo and Juliet-styled musical. For my money, the music and dancing were the draw cards. Leonard Bernstein’s music is catchy and memorable – I was still humming “Somewhere” over my hot chocolate après le show. The highlight was the performance by Alinta Chidzey as Anita. She was dynamite and the audience reaction showed that they agreed with me on this point. The parts of Maria and Tony were good too, even when Julie Goodwin sang Josh Piterman under the table – man that girl has a powerful voice!

Thought car-pooling to the city would be reasonable. We hadn’t bothered to factor in the rest of this town venturing in to the CBD for a multitude of other forms of entertainment (mostly sport). That paled in comparison with our attempt to leave. A car park with only one entrance and the entirety of the mostly middle-aged audience wanting to leave said car park en masse proved ridiculous. The anxiety of crawling along like a stoned snail in a car with an almost empty petrol tank, mixed with discovering "Crisis in Criticism" by Maurice Berger, in the back seat, made those 45 minutes pass quicker than one would think.