(For Friday) I have chosen to speak to you publicly This is not an address a letter a collection of ideas I can now present I have nothing to say to you and so I pray You have said to me Ask and it will be given Seek and you will find My darling Just knock The door will be opened to you Oh we are raging at this door I have slept up against it The tomb is closed I have been looking You are the lost thing Are you so small Yeshua That I could drop you like […]
A spoken word film. Part 3 of 3. Anna’s journey. San Francisco.
Part 2. Marla’s Journey. A spoken-word film.
There was once a man sentenced to capital punishment by the state. The authorities decided to kill him for political reasons, because he undermined their laws with effortless and controversial leadership. They were afraid of a revolution, and afraid of being deemed irrelevant. They managed to convince the governor of the region to approve of the execution, claiming it would apparently please the people, and help cement all their positions of leadership. The governor questioned the prisoner, demanding he explain himself, but the man stayed silent. The governor had heard that this convicted man had in fact encouraged and cared […]
A spoken word piece and short film, from our road trip through a wintery California. Part 1 of 3. ‘California: The Search’ by Anna McGahan. Timothy’s Journey. Featuring Mt Shasta, Redding, Yosemite National Park. Music by Timothy Coghill All footage shot in California, January 2015. Footage is of the ‘Dream Big’ Road Trip generously gifted by Visit California, in conjunction with the 2012 Heath Ledger Scholarship presented by Australians in Film.
Let’s talk about sex. And I’m quite serious. Not just ‘Let’s talk about not talking about sex’. This is a conversation, not a monologue. But a lot of people in my life who know about my convictions and choices have been challenging me on them recently, and I have loved it. We need to have these debates. We need to be open. What we don’t need is to impose our personal convictions on any other human being – but it is loving and constructive to try and understand. There are a lot of voices, a lot of opinions – and […]
This is a story that only a few people have heard. It is sensitive, but it is a small part of a huge victory. This year I turn 27. It has been ten years since I started Year 12 as a nervous sixteen-year-old. Ten years. This is significant, because I never expected to live past that year. When I was fourteen, I started to get sick. Though the illness was mental and emotional, my physical deterioration was by my own hand. It was almost a game in the beginning, an experiment with my body that spiraled into addiction. It wasn’t long before […]
A spoken word piece. For 2015, my friends.
We were in class, Monday night. I’m halfway through my second subject on The Imagination. We were gathered around a tiny projector, linked to our teacher’s iPad, with two disposable water bottles as speakers. It was dark and strangely cosy, tucked in a little room refurbished from the 1920s, oblivious to the craze below on Hollywood Boulevard. We were watching two filmed examples from a play called ‘Fences’, by August Wilson. At the beginning of the scene, a young man, stricken, comes to his father: CORY: Can I ask you a question? … How come you ain’t never liked me? […]
‘Love is a fire It burns everyone It disfigures everyone It is the world’s excuse for being ugly.’ Leonard Cohen I have been in Los Angeles for two and a half months. There are thousands, upon thousands of actors in this city. When I first came over two years ago, I was warned about it. The ‘LA Days’, when all you do is cry. The diet fads. The ‘rules’. The years spent driving freeways. The endless visa conversations. The shallow culture, the emptiness – and yet the simultaneous creative ferocity. The lines of young people coming over for a […]