The vampire industry spawned by Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) overshadowed his many other novels. Some of them are indifferent but here’s a wonderful line from his The mystery of the sea (1902); the American heroine’s reply to florid wooing by her British suitor—‘You talk like a small book with gilt edges’. Stoker’s theatrical background shows; […]
Tony Clark’s essay for Perimeter Editions’s slim volume on Polly Borland, You, is a fine example of a big statement in a small essay. ‘Any proper study’ of recent Australian art, he declares, ‘would have to examine, in detail, the role of the opportunity shop’. ‘Every significant Australian artist of the last half-century has been […]
‘Fringe to famous’ is an ARC-funded research project examining the crossover between ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’ Australian cultural production since the 1980s. The principal research partners are: Tony Moore: Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University, Australia Mark Gibson: Director of the Film, Media and Communications Program in the Monash Institute for […]
For those who still believed in rock’s outsider mythology, ‘pose’ was a pejorative term. A rejection of the pose in favour of ‘honesty’ was a hallmark of New York’s New Wave underground. In Australia, RAM magazine championed what it called ‘street punk’; an ‘honest and relevant’ version of rock, unadulterated by corporate values. Melbourne’s New […]
Not long ago I found myself standing in a country pub staring at a print of that often-reproduced nineteenth-century engraving of three Australian farm hands carousing in a bar. Backs arched, arms flailing; they were the original wild colonial boys, out on a spree. Arjona’s rock’n’roll rednecks are their great-great-grandchildren, bingeing on Maccas and VB, […]
At All Tomorrow’s Parties (26 October 2013, Palais Theatre, Melbourne), The Scientists took the stage immediately after Television had performed their Marquee moon album. A tough act to follow, so Kim Salmon adopted the only feasible tactic; a fast-paced, high-energy set that demanded the attention of an already-satiated audience in a cavernous theatre. Seven months later, […]
Opening night at the Palais theatre served up a tasting platter showcasing the house specialities of a short film festival. There was the fast-paced-short-with-a-punchline, shots cascading into each other like a row of falling dominoes (Chopper). The gleefully offensive animation with the redeeming ‘awwww’ ending (The video dating tape of Desmondo Ray, aged 33 & […]
Project Space is a modestly-scaled, street-level gallery with a full-width shopfront window. Nolan’s juggling of ambitious and diminutive scale in her work turned my attention to Anna Chave’s trenchant critique of ego and gender in minimalism. (For readers not educated within the Victorian school system, ‘Clag’ is a non-toxic craft glue with a magnificently onomatopoeic […]
In 1998, I was asked to write an editorial for the Melbourne design magazine Name; the issue theme was evolution. The multi-talented Andy Trevillian was behind the magazine, which was stuffed full of fold-outs, pockets, slots and loose-leaf inserts. The last time I saw a copy of Emigré was through glass, a digital image on […]
Sometimes an article comes together quickly as ideas from unrelated reading connect. A news story on the sale of the Zapruder film to the US government reminded me of something J G Ballard had said earlier that year and the piece was done in a couple of hours. A morbid parlor game of the late-twentieth […]