Aw Yeah!

FUNDRAISER!

The Caravan of Dooom fundraiser,

Friday August 20th, 7pm till late. $7.

289 Lygon St, East Brunswick. 

Enter via Zombie Dance Lane.

Join the Caravan of Dooom for one last show-biz cash-grab blow off before they hit the road for warmer climates on their first National tour!

Featuring extra- special guest bands and performers, this will be a night of colorful carnie chaos, in the elegant trash-bag decor of DIY East Brunswick venue Cat Food Press.

The metal-studded musical line up includes all-boy dirty psycho grunge stalwarts The Filthy Bourgeois, playing their first show in over two months! Joining them will be the sweet new sensation of all-girl flouro surf punk outfit Swimsuit Dynamite. Stabby Stabby Kill Kill will be bringing their dark comedy sludge rock to the stage, and opening it all will be the belt-tightening foot stomping blues of new Melbourne resident Mojo Juju, performing a steely solo set.

Peppering this musical feast with moments of awful genius will be a collection of the finest cabaret, sideshow and circus performers from beyond the Fringe, including new face Little Miss Rampage, sideshow stalwart the Great Gordo Gamsby, finely tuned vaudi-villain  Porcelain Punch, and with disruptions, explosions and experimentations from your dreadful hosts the Caravan of Dooom!

With a speakeasy set-up, and an early evening barbeque, this send-off for Melbourne's favourite circus pranksters is a night not to be missed!

Itinerary

After a lot of time spent behind a keyboard, I am proud to announce the the Itinerary for the SAVE THE UNICORNS tour of the South East Coast this Summer.

 It promises to be massive, exhausting, rewarding (if not financially), dangerous and fucking exciting. Don't miss out on your chance to See one of our shows as we come through your town. And pass it on - repost this tour onto your many variations of online enslavement NOW NOW NOW!

Mad Love, (buyatshirt)
RUIN

Daaahn daadadaaaa

daaah dadadadadaaaahnn daaadadaaaa....

 ITINERARY

AUGUST

20^th – “Caravan of Dooom Fundraiser” at Cat Food Press, 389 Lygon St, East Brunswick, MELBOURNE. 7pm – 3am.

Feat. The Filthy Bourgeois, Swimsuit Dynamite, Mojo Juju, Stabby Stabby Kill Kill, The Great Gordo Gamsby, Little Miss Rampage, Porcelain Punch, The Caravan of Dooom and more.
$7 on the door. More info from www.caravanofdooom.blogspot .com

21^st – “Victorian Roller Derby League Benefit” at the Bendigo Hotel, 125 Johnston St, Collingwood, MELBOURNE, (Caravan of Dooom at 6.40pm.)

SEPTEMBER

3^rd – Northern Rivers Hotel, LISMORE, 9.00pm – 2am
Feat. The Blush Foundation, Shiny Shiny, Space Tapes and Analougalicious
$15 per ticket

5^th – The Great Northern Backroom, BYRON BAY, 8.00pm – 11.30pm
Feat. The Blush Foundation, Shiny Shiny, Space Tapes and Analougalicious
$17.50

10^th – 13^th – “Good Clean Fun” at Out the Back, Metro Arts, 109 Edward St, BRISBANE, presented as part of Brisbane Festival 2010’s BF10 UNDER THE RADAR.
Bookings via Moshtix 1300 438 849
http://www.moshtix.com.au/good-clean-fun

16^th – Memorial Entertainment Centre, BATHURST, as part of the Bohemian Masquerade Ball.
More info from http://thebohoball.com/tour.php

17^th – Hotel Gearin, KATOOMBA, Blue Mountains, as part of the Bohemian Masquerade Ball.
More info from http://thebohoball.com/tour.php

22^nd, 24^th, 25^th – “Good Clean Fun” at the Red Rattler Theatre, 6 Faversham St, Marrickville, SYDNEY, presented by the Sydney Fringe.
Tickets and more info via http://thesydneyfringe.com.au/shows/good-clean-fun

25^th – The Vanguard, 42 King St, Newtown, SYDNEY, as part of the Bohemian Masquerade Ball, presented by the Sydney Fringe.
Tickets and more info via http://thesydneyfringe.com.au/shows/bohemian-masquerade-ball

30^th – Festival Club, as part of This Is Not Art, NEWCASTLE.
More details from www.thisisnotart.org (whenever they get their website updated that is…)

OCTOBER

1^st –The Masonic Lodge, NEWCASTLE, as part of the Crack Theatre Festival at TINA.
More details from http://cracktheatrefestival.com/ (see above)

6^th – 9^th – “Good Clean Fun” at Bar Open, 317 Brunswick St, Fitzroy, MELBOURNE, as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Bookings via www.melbournefringe.com.au or 9660 9666

10 – 12^th – Secret Tour Afterparty…

Brisbane, Sydney, Newcastle - watch yo self!

We've been hard at work here in the Caravan of Dooom HQ, fending off the shit eating bore-o-crats, and planning world domination. It's pretty exciting - 9 towns, 6 weeks, 5 festivals, 3 motorcycles, 1 caravan, Millions of cigarettes, tons of wheatpaste, shitloads of posters, 7000 kilometres, 2.5 nervous breakdowns, no budget, dozens of clothes pegs, 3 replacement jock straps, hopefully no police contact, 1 criminal record, 33 amazing sunrises, 24 laaaate nights, 1000's of stunned onlookers...

At least those are the projected figures. Yes that's right denizens of the underground - the DOOOM IS COMING! We're about to release our tour itinerary very soon, and it's gonna be red hot. Taking in the Brisbane festival, Sydney Fringe, TINA in Newcastle, Melbourne Fringe and the Bohemian Masquerade Ball, this is gonna be a hell of way to kick off summer. We're gonna tear the South East coast a new arsehole, so if you're a fan of the absurd and unusual, keep your eyes peeled.

Incidentally we're also looking for places to stay in Brisbane and Sydney.
The Ad: Comfortable, cheap, accommodation sought by motorcycle touring 5 piece circus group.
Warehouses, farms, large driveways or gardens all applicable. Will bring own bedding and killer sense of humour. Plus very good at cooking kangaroo steaks and cleaning up after ourselves.
Contact caravan.of.dooom(at)gmail.com

And we also want to find some peeps to help us put up posters in advance of our shows in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.
The Ad: Dedicated wheatpaster sought to assist in world takeover attempt by incendiary circus pranksters. Requirements - ability to make wheatpaste, and good knowledge of local postering spots. Preferably able to see in dark, and come fully equipped with anti-cop radar.
Payment to be made in form of favour owed by nipple sucking, booze hound circus from hell. To be called in at any time and in any form. All dares accepted, all responsibility denied. (Free t-shirts also available for the faint-hearted)
contact email as above.

We'll be uploading more info very soon.
Keep your eyes to the horizon...

GOOD CLEAN FUN wrap up!

Holy bejeezus!
What a Weekend!
So the show was rip-snorting success - thank you to all the wonderful and supportive people who came out to see us. We mean every word at the end of the show - it's your interest in independent theatre and creative communities that keeps us running.
An for the those of you who didn't make it, it was a shame not to see you there, but there's no hard feelings about it really. You might just get playfully mugged, or something.

The show itself went off almost without a hitch - i certainly consider it a success when no peformer or audience or crew member has been physically injured. Trust me, it happens more often than you think, and it ain't pretty. There were a few bungled bump-outs, quite a bit of drinking, but most spectacularly on Friday night a member of the audience interrupted the show to give her perspective on what is permissible in humour, and things that it isn't ok to laugh about.
She was talking about a routine which reads something like this:

1.     “Ladies out there – have you lost someone in War? I understand that this is a sensitive topic, so lets get straight into it. Perhaps it was your boyfriend, your husband, your father, your son or even a girlfriend (I’m into that). There are many ways that they could have died in service of their country. Perhaps they were killed by a bullet, or perhaps it was a knife, or falling out of a truck, or from a roadside bomb, or in a covert action, or from friendly fire, or in a helicopter crash, or a plane crash, or a suicide bomber, or from depleted uranium, or terminal depression or…. Whatever. I have just the thing for you. When you are falling into sweet slumber (what is slumber? Whats that mean? My mate works in the slumber industry and if you hippie fucks mess with him I will be mad! They have families damnit! Oh.. Slumber as in sleep”) you must notice that there is a jagged empty hole of darkness in the bed next to you. Well suffer no longer, with my patented Hot-Water-Bottle-With-A-Heart-Beat. Drift off to sleep just as though your loved one has returned. Available now for only 25.99. Thank You."
Light fades as he finishes, and returns to Clown.

jjjj (yes that's right we had a script for this show!)

The above monolouge is delivered as though the slightly stupid salesman is reading from cue cards in the audience and recieving prompts and reprimands from a manager via an earpiece.

N  

      Now when we developed this piece the unspoken idea was to mock those who make a profit from warfare. A moronic sleazy popular culture type (as played brilliantly by Wazzadeeno Wharton-Thomas) fallen on hard times, finds himself selling an equally inane product. The references to warfare and the pain and distress it causes to the families of people who have died "in the service of their country" - a phrase that should send shudders down the spine of any audience member, were included because it exposes the reality of the ugliness and disaster that underpins such consumer culture. The hot water bottle is a symbol for the things that we are offered to make it all go away. A ridiculous effort because nothing can take away from the pain of losing someone or being injured in a stupid game of political violence.

      However the lady on Friday night who chose to speak up in possibly the most awkward moment of the entire show, didn't appreciate that irony, parody or sarcasm can be just as effective as political tools as any enraged and righteous ranting speech. In fact when i went down stairs to speak with her and her friends after the show they said as much. One of them tried to suggest that when we used the word parody, that we could replace it with "laugh at" and then stated that any sentence with this substitution just goes to show how mean and horrible our humour really was. To me this really seemed to demonstrate how seriously misunderstood the tools of irony, mockery, parody and satire are to any political movement. I think that perhaps that their thoughts on this had been colored by themselves and their opinions being made fun of. A thicker skin and a quicker repartee might be in order. Another made an impassioned plea for me to understand that humour and laughter actually serves to disperse energy which could be better used elsewhere. 

      I was quite stunned by this last point. Although it has some merit, to adopt the idea that laughing about things makes the world a worse place is pretty foreign to me. Her point, i think, was that it breaks that tension which builds up in a person over the concern for emotionally intense issues. I agree, but i think that the release of that tension is generative, not wasteful. To make someone laugh about a political or emotional issue should be to break the frost over the fertile soil which will produce action and thought. In doing so you seed in them a feeling that change is possible - the opposite of what you are thought to think. And in my experience, any comparison between political humour and a political speech will show you that humour contains so much more potential to reach out across intellectual boundaries, and interest a greater number of people. Funnily enough (pardon the pun) during the activist's speech at our show she was heckled by the crowd who told her to "shut up" and "get off".

      In a world of over-consumption and apathy, the careful examination of one's role as an entertainer/performer should lead to an inspiring realisation that we hold the keys to people's energy. Nobody that doesn't already agree with you wants to listen to a moralistic, hell-fire speech about what's right and what's wrong in the world. More to the point, this approach seriously lacks respect for people's diversity of opinions in our culture, and in doing so it becomes a dangerously fundamentalist way of thinking about radical politics. Honestly, everytime i hear someone describe a complex issue as being "fucked" i want to scream! To qoute from a political nemesis, Andrew Bolt, perhaps it's time that these people moved out of their "black-clad Brunswick ghetto's of hate". It's a prison baby.

...

     

B   But that incident is only part of the weekend, and i'm glad i got to speak with the above mentioned women, because it was a stimulating conversation, and after all isn't that what Art is designed to produce?

     Well that, and nudity.

      And speaking of nudity...! Flap! played on Sunday night after our final show. For many years Jess has proclaimed that her ultimate ambition is to get the audience nude. In one of her songs, she quite explicitly demands that "I need your help/I know that you'll oblige/come here and take off my dress".  

    
      On sunday we did just that. It started when I got invited to the stage to sing my favourite song "Poor Man" with them, dressed in a gigantic gold sequined star costume that we use in our show. And then somehow after that (we believe that it was a combination of pre-rehearsed strip tease, Theodore slapping Wazza, and some form of pheromonal chemical mist which descended over Bar Open) Wazza and I both appeared to be nude... Strange.

  
      But it certainly wasn't to be just us having all the fun. One after the other men and women began frantically losing their clothes, flinging them overhead with delight. I even saw my old housemate Jeremy, who might be described as what one would call a "Dandy", shirtless with a mad grin from ear to ear. Penises, bushes, breasts, sweaty skinny chicken legs a-flying we DANCED like maniacs, knowing that this was a night like no other.
     

B   But who says we should have all the fun. Wazza and I decided to give the sheepish, wholly entertained, but slightly bemused Band a little help, who were still fully clothed. We started with Eamon to little protestation. The drummer made the count, dropped the sticks, upped from his stool and downed his pants. Drummers never wear shirts for very long anyway so he was fine. The double bassist Marky Mark was a little trickier - it's a big unweildy instrument to negotiate a pair of pants and buttoned shirt around. Wazza and I, naked as the day we were born did our best to get him nude though, not realising that Mark's elderly parents who farm sheep near Shepperton had made the trip down for the show and were politely sitting at the back watching the whole proceedings. One can only imagine their comments after the show. "Yes dear, very good - does that happen every night?" and "when can you play in Shepparton next?"

       And then it was Jess' turn. I'm not exaggerating about her proclaimed love of nudity. But she did seem a little embarrassed, and that's fine. But when she started singing "Dress", there was little that we could do to resist her impassioned urges to "take off my dress". So we did!

      I can just see the headlines:

      A Nude Flap! ends Good Clean Fun! with a Fleshy Bang! 

   

H   Hooray! Thanks again to everyone who came to the show. Thanks to Elise and Greg who did our lights and sound respectively. Thanks to Bek, our OHnS (Oh Hell No! Shit!) officer, Stage manager, resident Wine Drinker and friend. And thanks to Luke, the booker at Bar Open, who somehow i managed to talk into this crazy thing in the first place. Cat and Wazza sucked his nipples in reward i believe, so he got his.

      Fucking Rock n Roll you crazy lovers,

      mad love from the future!

      Captain Ruin

(

T)

Such Is Life photos

I couldn't not share these with you. Some plucky punk got close enough to the stage to catch a few great moments of our show recently at the Such Is Life DIY Punk festival. This year it was held outside of Laverton in a large abandoned warehouse, in the middle of a field full of drunken tented punks. We were on first for the afternoon at 5pm, and it was a challenge to draw the "audience" in with anything but blasting crust punk music. A challenge that we solved by roaring through the campfields on our motorcycles, screaming "Show starts in 15 minutes! Get up you crusties! The Caravan of Dooooooooom!" and doing tire slides in the thick grass.
It seemed to work ok.

We busted out a raucous show to a crowd of initially bewildered but then thoroughly entertained and inspired Punks. Punks are hard to impress you know? They're like judgemental hipsters, but dirtier. If it's not crust it's dust, as the saying goes. Actually i just made that up, but you get what i mean.

Anyway, thanks to whoever snapped these, and catch you all sooon at GOOD CLEAN FUN!

Not long now!

GOOD CLEAN FUN!

Dear Friends, Family and Lovers,
Ladies, Gentlemen, and the rest of you.
Holy God Fuck!




We at the Caravan of Dooom are super-over-excited to announce the premiere of our brand new show, GOOD CLEAN FUN!!!!
Playing at Bar Open from the 13th – 16th of May, GOOD CLEAN FUN is a whirlwind of absurd visions from a world gone mad, presented in an immersive, anarchic theatrical space which blurs the boundaries between audience and performer.
Always a bastion of low-skill, high-energy performance, the Caravan of Dooom is quickly developing a reputation as Melbourne’s favourite circus pranksters. They have become well known for their outlaw/outsider approach to both circus and performance art, drawing their own lines in a crazy scribble so that they can attempt to cross them. Fresh from appearing at Falls Festival, Big Day Out and the Adelaide Fringe, in their first full length Melbourne show for 2010, they present a absurdist, punk, sideshow-comedy like no other.

And for GOOD CLEAN FUN they’ve invited some of Melbourne’s finest musicians to join them after the show each night so that the raucous, wild party can continue in a mass communal dance frenzy. The line up:

Thursday 13th – Puta Madre Brothers, The Filthy Bourgeois
Friday 14th – Clairy Baby Browne and the Bangin Rackettes, Tusk
Saturday 15th – The Melodics
Sunday 16th – Flap!

Doors at 8 each night, Show at 8.30 sharp, followed by bands from 10. There is limited numbers for each show, so get in early to avoid disappointment!




Tickets are available only on the door – $15, or $30 with one of our brand spanking new, Fair Trade, Glow-in-the-mutherfuckin-Dark Caravan of Dooom t-shirts! They're terrifyingly good!


So if you’re hankering for some performance art with a sense of humour, dangerous acrobatic feats by untrained acrobats, terrifying sideshow stunts and absurd comedy to tickle your special laughter place, then come down to where the Fun is Good and Clean!

GOOD CLEAN FUN by the Caravan of Dooom
13 – 16th May at Bar Open, Brunswick St, Fitzroy
All tickets $15, $30 with a t-shirt, available on the door
More Information available from www.caravanofdooom.blogspot.com
All Media enquiries to Pansy Crack
0439 208 351 or caravan.of.dooom@gmail.com