CORPORATE CANNIBAL

Farewell, my lovelies

2011-12-29T16:11:00.001+11:00

And so, dear reader, on that exultant note I must advise that this blog ends on the cusp of a new year.

There will be no more entries of a Thursday morning.

It has been an interesting and highly educational experiment. I hope you enjoyed the journey as much as I did.

Thank you for coming back each week.

Live long and prosper.

Dmetri Kakmi

The Artist

2011-12-29T16:03:00.002+11:00

Some time ago, a friend asked me to define ‘joy’.

Quite spontaneously I said ‘Singing in the Rain’. I was speaking, of course, about the 1952 movie starring Gene Kelly. The friend was surprised because I have a low tolerance for people who break into song and dance at the drop of a hat. Truth be told, I was surprised by my utterance too. But when I thought about it, it made sense.

Stanley Donen’s film doesn’t put a foot wrong, so to speak. It is a pitch perfect, exhilarating and utterly joyful movie about the end of the silent era and the rise of sound cinema. No matter how many times I see it I am astounded by the film's many accomplishments, especially Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor’s dancing.

The point, I suppose, is that Singing in the Rain makes me glad to be alive. Its optimism blots out for a short time the varied agonies of life. The one other film that has that effect on me is Frank Capra’s 1936 masterwork Mr Deeds Goes to Town.

And now, I’m glad to say, we can add The Artist to the list.

This delicious concoction is directed by Michel Hazanavicius and it is a largely silent, black-and-white movie about the decline of a silent matinee idol and the rise of a sound starlet. That is really all there is to it. To be honest, I went in expecting froth and bubble. But its pleasures are many and varied, and the emotional spectrum it covers, the highs and lows, and everything in between, are to be applauded.

Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, a preposterously dashing matinee idol with a pencil-thin moustache and a cute little dog that will remind many of Asta from The Thin Man films. One day on the set Valentin must perform with ingenue Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo). As they do take after take of a particular scene, we and they begin to realise that something important has happened: they have fallen in love. But times are a changin’ and with the advent of sound the type of movie Valentin makes falls out of favour. He, of course, refuses to speak. He is an artist, above speaking. Like many of his cronies he believes that sound is not only vulgar but a flash in the pan. The public will return to silent movies once their curiosity has been satisfied. They don’t. And as Peppy Miller’s star rises, Valentin finds himself out of a job, a down-and-out bum living on obsolete pride and alcohol.

I won’t say more about the plot except watch out for the sequence that features Bernard Hermann’s ‘Love Theme’ from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I haven’t experienced this kind of gut-wrenching emotion in a year of movie going. I hope you will be as astounded by Dujardin’s transformation from Douglas Fairbanks to Gene Kelly to, hilariously, Maurice Chevalier. And I hope you will be as thrilled as I was by the two intrusions of sound that happen at key points in the film. They are clever insertions that also make perfect sense in terms of character psychology.

Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo in The Artist

At one stage, possibly in the final half hour, I looked away from the screen and because I sat at the very back of the auditorium, I saw a full house lean eagerly toward the screen, utterly entranced. There was no talking and no fiddling with mobile telephones. And there above our heads floated that impossible anachronism: a black-and-white screen with no sound, except Ludovic Bource’s orchastral score.

Before my eyes was the full effect of this wonderful and possibly most influential medium of the twentieth century: cinema. Not a single word had been spoken by the actors and yet the images were so rich and eloquent, so redolent and suggestive of all that completes a human life. I was reminded of Gloria Swanson’s dictum in Sunset Boulevard: ‘We didn’t need words. We had faces’, and I felt terribly glad to be in the auditorium that night to witness such a thing.

I have no hesitation in saying that, for me, The Artist is the movie of the year.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

2011-12-23T17:18:00.000+11:00

BluBra

2011-12-22T10:10:00.000+11:00

All power to Egyptian Women protesting after one of their own was beaten and stripped down to her blue bra by the post-Mubarak military regime. May you succeed in your endeavours, ladies.

Marlene

2011-12-22T09:54:00.001+11:00

The essence of mystery is what remains unseen, hidden, or obscured from view. If too much is revealed too soon the audience loses interest; its appetite has been slaked. If on the other hand the revelation takes place by degrees, under strictly controlled and manipulated circumstances, the artist whets the audience’s appetite and keeps it wanting more. This is the guiding principle of striptease and there never was a greater striptease artist than Marlene Dietrich.

I am not being disrespectful. Take a look at the Jean Louis creation Dietrich wore during her cabaret appearances in the 1950s and 60s. It is a skin-coloured transparent sheath encrusted with clear crystals. The fur casually slung over one shoulder and romping behind her on the stage merely enhances the fact that the star appears to be bearing her breasts to the audience (in fact there was a foundational neck-to-thigh garment beneath the dress that shaped Dietrich's aged body into that of a young woman). In the 1930s costumier Travis Banton offered tantalising glimpses of the star from beneath layers of hats, fascinators, feathers and boas. Jean Louis daringly updates the image, while deploying strategies that coyly preserve the enigma. It is a bold move.

At almost sixty Dietrich knew what she was doing when she sashayed onto the world’s stages wearing that souffle. As Josef von Sternberg’s creation, she was a master manipulator of image, lighting, costume and disguise. Hers was a breathtaking reinvention that reinvigorated a career and kept the legend alive long after its use-by date.

Notoriously tightlipped and skittish, Dietrich went to great lengths to preserve the legend. She was rarely seen in public after her heavily veiled appearance in the 1979 film Just a Gigolo and she threw out red herrings about her origins faster than a Hitchcock film. The many biographies that flood the market fail to yield an ounce of information that have not been pawed by eager hands over the years. Aside from Sternberg’s own autobiography, I have always comes away from these books wanting more. Oddly enough the one time we feel we get close to the Sphinx is when she does not appear on screen at all. I’m talking, of course, about Maximilian Schell’s documentary Marlene.

Filmed in 1983, almost ten years before the subject died, this is a masterful piece of filmmaking that draws you into the vortex of multilayered, shifting perspectives. At the core resides an inalienable personality: Marlene Dietrich. And even then we are never certain where reality ends and fantasy begins.

The cleverness of this searching 91 minutes comes from the way Schell, a Swiss actor and director, turns a handicap to triumphant advantage when his unruly subject refuses to be filmed or photographed during a protracted interview conducted in her Avenue Montaigne apartment in Paris.

‘I’ve been photographed to death,’ Dietrich tells Schell in tones that would not be out of place in Scarlet Empress. But I can’t do a documentary without showing you to the people, he pleads. It will not be exciting. ‘I’m not contracted to be exciting,’ Dietrich snaps. ‘I’m contracted to talk about my life.’ Just as often, in answer to one of his questions, she tells him it’s all in her book. Why should she tell him again?

To say that she was uncooperative is an understatement. The only time we see her is in old clips and concert appearances. In a desperate bid, Schell gets around his intractable subject by recreating her apartment in a studio, right down to the last detail. Cameras furtively glide behind doors, peek through cracks, linger in corridors as Dietrich’s voice rises and falls over the image, haranguing, chiding, mocking and humiliating.

Her dismissiveness, her refusal to play along, and the incessant disgruntled mutter reduces an entire life to a vast stretch of grey rubble that resembles bombed-out Berlin. Her early performances are ‘kitsch’. The Devil is a Woman is ‘nonsense’ and ‘Dreck’. She refuses to so much as look at a clip that shows Sternberg’s mastery of form. Hoots of derision follow praise of one kind or another. She has nothing but contempt for Emile Jannings, sex, feminists and the cult that has built around her. Only a select few escape demolition: Sternberg, Burt Bacharach, Hemingway, Rilke and Orson Welles: ‘You should cross yourself when you say his name.’ Most of all Dietrich hates sentimentality in all its manifestations. ‘Kitsch’ and ‘sentimental’ are words that crop up repeatedly.

It is a difficult and puzzling film to watch if you love the early performances and the phantasmagoria Sternberg built around his star. And yet it’s oddly fascinating, too. The mumbling and barking that seeps from the room sucks out all the air and replaces it with a vacuum. After a while you feel like you are in danger of suffocating. The lambent young woman who appeared in Blonde Venus and Shanghai Express has been possessed by a demon hell bent on reducing every bit of celluloid to ash. Astounded laughter is the only sane response, while wondering at Schell’s extraordinary patience. Even so I found myself peeking round the corner with the camera crew, hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman who is present in absentia. At one point, Schell loses it and storms out: ‘You should go back to Mama Schell and learn some manners!’ she barks behind him. Two days later he comes back for more.

It is possible that Dietrich abhorred the idea of being filmed in old age more than Greta Garbo and very possibly she meant it when she said that her private life is nobody’s business, even her own: ‘I’m none of my own shitty business,’ she croaks at one point.

Ultimately, however, Schell wrestles the narrative out of her hands and brings it back on track. More than anything else, Dietrich represents the spirit of Berlin, streetwise and spirited. Schell understands this well and he uses it to great advantage as he closes in on his prey. His persistent though gentle probing and underhand manipulations of the star allow a heretofore hidden humanity to emerge from beneath the well-preserved carapace. Schell does this by reciting a very sentimental nineteenth century poem. It was Dietrich’s mother’s favourite and Dietrich begins to chant along with Schell. At this point, despite her earlier pronouncements about sentimentality, Dietrich melts into sobs. It’s a heartbreaking moment and the perfect ending to possibly the greatest film made about a legend.

Dietrich, like Valentino and Garbo, belong to an age that deified The Face. This was a time when capturing the human countenance on film plunged an entire audience into a deep swoon from which it was impossible to recover. The face, in those days, represented an ideal that was as close to perfection as you can get. This faculty has been lost in our age of cinematic ‘realism’ and cosmetic surgery — the last time a director and a cinematographer conspired to raise a star’s face to exultant states was with Ava Gardner in The Flying Dutchman. Possibly the only entertainer who understands the value of giving good face today is Grace Jones. The Black Venus, like Dietrich, knows that sculpting the face with light and allowing the play of human emotion to flash across its planes, is a craft of the highest order. It can mythologise a mere mortal. That’s why in early films the star’s appearance on screen was often delayed or revealed by degrees, a pale sliver with lambent eyes, there to shine for a brief moment before plunging into obscurity.

Ava Gardner in The Flying Dutchman

By refusing to appear in Schell’s film, Dietrich does the unspeakable: She withholds the all-important money shot. Her Berliner nous told her that the illusion would shatter the minute the audience saw the face as it is now, with the marks of old age upon it. Her masterstroke is in not giving in to expectation. As the credits roll one realises that Dietrich has given her final and possibly greatest performance — a kind of meta Dietrich that, like god, can be heard but never truly seen or understood. Thus the legend lives on.

Stoppard and Gaiman at the Atheneum

2011-12-18T09:10:00.008+11:00

Tom Stoppard

Writers should be read and not heard. There is no reason why a writer shouldn’t speak, of course. Except that the gods created him to write his thoughts, not utter them aloud. If push comes to shove most manage to be mildly amusing, but generally speaking writers are not that interesting to listen to.

This occurred to me last Friday evening while listening to Tom Stoppard and Neil Gaiman in separate conversations at the Atheneum Theatre in Melbourne. Judging from the packed house, both men are the objects of cult-like adoration and audiences eagerly lapped up the mana that spilled from the stage.

To be honest I didn’t know much about either one of them. I have a passing acquitance with Stoppard’s plays and film work and I’ve only read three of Gaiman’s books — in my humble view, The Graveyard Book is the perfect children’s novel. So it was interesting for me to sit back and watch and listen, not only to the men for whom we had gathered but to their adoring fans as well.

Stoppard had the full house. Gaiman fell just shy of that. Nevertheless, his was the more fervent following. He received a pop-star’s reception and from there on, his every utterance was greeted with approving hoots and howls. It occurred to me that he could have read the telephone book from end to end and the reaction would have been the same.

Admittedly, Gaiman was charm personified. Like a well-rehearsed actor he was affable, self-deprecating, agreeable and brimming with amusing anecdotes. He said all the right things and played his part to perfection. But, for reasons which I won’t go into, because I sat with my eyes closed and depended largely on my ears, I had the blind man’s perspective; and, as fiction would have us believe, that puts one at an advantage. One can learn a great deal simply by listening to what is uttered and how it is uttered.

My overall impression was that, at this stage in his career, Gaiman has a well-oiled performance in place. He wheels it out, throws a switch and lets it play to the end. The word that kept coming up in my mind as I listened to him was ‘lubricious’. He knows how to oil the machinery and his all-too-willing audience is happy to go down the slippery slope with him. The one other time I’ve seen such a smooth operator was when Dave Eggers spruiked his product at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

A friend who was with me on Friday night said he felt like his pocket had been picked by Gaiman. I wouldn’t go that far, but I know what he means.

Neil Gaiman

Stoppard was another kettle of fish altogether. Unlike Gaiman he was not in possession of an ego. Nor did he have the benefit of an interviewer who knew how to ask a pointed question and withdraw with grace. Even so, he made a good fist of it, despite claims to feeling discomfited when speaking about his own work. While the woman who pretended to interview him laughed like a fish wife, Stoppard cast his net as wide as possible and hoped to snag a subject he could run with for any length of time without running the risk of boring his audience. Judging from the rapt silence the audience was anything but bored.

Stoppard was at ease while talking about stage craft; at his best while speaking about his early childhood and, most intriguingly, when he mentioned the possibility of writing a fictionalised autobiography about the kind of life he might have led had circumstance not made it necessary for his family to flee Czechoslovakia. Anyone who has been uprooted could relate to that.

Stoppard does not have tabs on himself. There’s a gentle reticence about him and a healthy realisation that this is a mug’s game after all. Beyond a certain point, it was obvious Stoppard knew he had become part of the book-chat industry that pumps more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than a paddock full of cows weened on beans. I came away Friday night knowing why I do not enjoy attending writers festivals: There really is nothing more tedious than a writer talking about himself and her craft. Surely it’s much better to allow the work to speak for itself. Besides, as an editor and a writer I know you can’t really trust anything a writer says about his work. Generally speaking, they’re the worst judge of it.

Wodehouse said that the dullest speech he heard was an author talking about how she wrote her book. He concludes by saying that a simple apology was all that was required. Stoppard could have apologised for Shakespeare in Love and Brazil, and Gaiman could have apologised for American Gods. The rest is silence.

Ladies Who Write

2011-12-15T09:43:00.000+11:00

Antigone Kefala

Get ready…

Get set…

Go!

The Australian Women Writers 2012 Book Reading and Reviewing Challenge is on and you are invited to take part — especially if you’re a man.

The purpose of the exercise is to spend a year reading and reviewing and, in the words of the blog, ‘celebrating’ women writers in order to counteract the gender bias in reviewing and social media newsfeeds.

Fair enough. Whatever gets you noticed in this rough and tumble industry, I suppose. But is the challenge really necessary? Are women who write in this country doing it rough? Are they being read less because they lack a bait and tackle between their legs? Are they being neglect on the reviews pages because their books don’t have that distinctive masculine musk under the fly jacket? And are women under represented because they don’t wear the same underpants five days in a row while they work on a new manuscript?

We can’t be too surprised that statistics on the AWW blog pronounce a resounding ‘Yes’. However, a casual glance at the newspapers, magazines, journals and various electronic media I read (and I read very widely indeed) would have you believe the answer is a distinct ‘No’. On the face of it, women appear to be getting as good or as bad an airing as the men. So what’s all the bellyaching about?

Frankly, when I see a woman who writes clutching a latte at the Moat cafe and bemoaning her sorry state, I want to pull down her muffing top and say: ‘Shut up and go write a good book. That’s all you will be remembered for in the long run.’

For me it’s a matter of perspective. If middle-class Australian women, who apparently have the luxury to write a book on their well-charged laptop and not be stoned for their efforts, feel they’re being crushed by the wheels of patriarchy, they should spend a year in Mogadishu. Then they’ll find out what oppression really smells like. And then, maybe, they will appreciate how easy life is for them in our flyblown shores, where they can write to their heart’s content and tour to promote their emulsions. But I suppose in our over-indulged society there is more cache in striking postures of victimhood than getting on with the task at hand.

Fiona McGregor

The first irritant is the verb ‘celebrate’. I don’t mind reading nothing but books written by women for a year — okay, actually, I do. But why does my year of reading have to include public jubilation followed by a goat sacrifice? Why can’t I just sigh contentedly after reading Flannery O’Connor or Fiona McGregor? No, it must be followed by a bacchanal and possibly rending to pieces of at least one male author who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘Celebrate’ stinks of New-Age burbling. Get rid of it. That word is probably why many men stay away from books written by women; they think most of them are too busy celebrating to bother with crafting a well-told tale. I bet Karen Blixen didn’t lie around memorialising all day. No, she was too busy creating gem-like stories.

My real bugbear, however, is the term ‘woman writer’. What is that? ‘Woman writer’. Is that someone who manipulates the keyboard with her vagina? This solemn epithet has the whiff of old-world feminism. In fact, its linguistic implications counteracts the AWW’s aims, which presumably are about inclusion. It shoves women in a box and keeps them there. Before you pelt me with stones, let me say that it’s not that women shouldn’t be glad to be women. Go right ahead. Be glad about something that was imposed on you by outside forces. But first recognise that writing is about a shared experience of humanity. I bet Peter Carey doesn’t think of himself as a ‘male writer’. His penis doesn’t go near the computer. He merely hopes to transmit universal experience to the reader.

Sonya Hartnett put me in my place very quickly when I called her a ‘woman writer’, and rightly so. Like AWW, I meant well. But, without realising it, my choice of words was creating distinctions and creating hierarchies. And in our all-inclusive, non-judgemental age that’s a definite no-no.

The question is this: at a time when most run away from the ghetto of epithets like ‘black writer’ and ‘gay writer’, why would women choose to segregate themselves in this manner? The unlucky sod who once called me an ‘ethnic writer’ had to pick himself up off the floor. Another who kindly suggested I take advantage of the fact that I am a ‘gay writer’ discovered that gays hit back — and not just with a handbag.

You are a writer or you are not. Gender doesn’t come into it. If the work is good it will float. If it’s not, it will thankfully sink. That’s all there is.

Susan Hill

One of the AWW’s complaints is that men don’t read women. I’m a man and I read women. My favourite Australian novel is Tirra Lirra by the River. The book that made me want to be a writer is To the Lighthouse. If I were to name a writer who is an inspiration, I would say Susan Hill. (If I could write one book as perfectly balanced as The Beacon, I’d die happy.) I prefer Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler. I happen to believe that Susan Johnson is a more penetrating novelist than Alex Miller, and I would rather read Sonya Harnett than Tim Winton. Beverley Farmer should be published more often and Antigone Kefala is without peer in this country. Kim Wilkins is more to my taste than Ian Irvine. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is superior to Michael Moorcock and there was a time when all I read was Anne Rice, Poppy Z Brite and Nancy Collins. I would rather read Virginia Hamilton Adair and Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry than Luke Davies.

Yes, but you’re an exception, I hear you say. My reply: the glass is half full, not half empty.

Admittedly, AWW and the newly created Stella Prize have a point. Women are poorly done by when it come to awards. Quite frankly, Stella Miles Franklin would turn over in her grave if she could see what is being done in her name. It’s ironic that the Miles Franklin Award website announces their patron’s struggles as a woman writing in the early years of the twentieth century, while pointedly ignoring women who write today. The last time a woman won the Miles Franklin was in 2007. Alexis Wright deserved it, but I bet that decision was not informed by aesthetics alone. Meanwhile Alex Miller is lauded right across the board.

Beverley Farmer

The truth is no writer has it easy. At some point, all writers struggle in the face of resounding indifference. Why should women or gays or blacks or people with bucked teeth get preferential treatment? I speak from experience. I’m a wog poof who finds it difficult to publish in this country and continues to do so even after I published numerous essays that are studied in universities around the world and a book that has been published both here and overseas to critical acclaim. A newspaper editor once advised me to adopt ‘a normal’ moniker if I wanted to be published in Australia. I bet Tara Moss never got that.

Did I start a website to complain? No, I did not. My only confidante is the martini glass at five in the afternoon. And a daily grind at the computer.

Now, woman writer, stop kvetching and write something worth reading. Believe it or not the world is on your side...

RIP Gilbert Adair - 1944-2011

2011-12-10T08:53:00.002+11:00

Best known for his novel and the film that was made from it Love and Death in LA, Gilbert Adair was a novelist, film critic and theorist of the first order. Hardly anyone knew his name and, as he famously said, ever read him. But for those who knew him he was a priceless gem in a sea of mediocrity. His quiet but sharp and lively intellect was the perfect antidote for our bombastic age (Chuck Wendig take note).

Read Adair's film book Flicker, and you too will become a life-long fan.

Thanks for all the wonderful books, Gilbert. Rest in peace.

Bergdorf Goodman Collection

2011-12-08T09:52:00.002+11:00

Okay, so, twice in the last couple of months I've desperately wanted to fly to New York and indulge myself. The first time was to go to the Fashion Institute of Technology to see the Daphne Guinness exhibition; the second time was brought on by this enticing collection of images from the latest Bergdorf Goodmann catalogue.

I mean, really, you can't go past a truly great suit and how about that amazing homburg! I want!

To the friends who live in New York (you know who you are), if you really love me you will go straight to Messrs Bergdorf Goodmann's store and buy me that hat. Remember, I take a small size. SMALL, I say...

Two button grey suit by Isaia

The homburg with pheasant feather and French grosgrain ribbon

Suit by Ermenegildo Zegna

Suit by Ralph Lauren

Attack the Block

2011-12-08T09:25:00.001+11:00

A protest movie disguised as a science fiction horror movie, Attack the Block is the most energising, affecting and genuinely clever film of the year.

Best of all it boasts a central performance by John Boyega as Moses that is riveting. Quite honestly, I haven’t been this intrigued by a black actor since Sidney Poitier took to the screen in The Blackboard Jungle in 1954. Largely silent throughout the film, Boyega has the maturity, commanding presence and charisma of a seasoned performer, even when the script makes him do over time with cliches. If he doesn’t go on to great things, this planet is seriously racist.

Okay, so you want to hear about the plot. Well, it’s about a bunch of mostly black kids who fight off nasty bitey critter aliens (they resemble the toothy furballs from the 1986 movie Critters) in a London council estate. That’s it. Not much to it, but watching it made me think of why I prefer horror movies over any other genre and why I fail to be impressed by most offerings these days. Yeah, I know, old fart. It’s because the best horror movies have a social context. They are about something. Horror is a metaphor, rather than an excuse for cruelty and sadism.

It’s only when Attack the Block is over that you realise it is an 88 minute treatise on KRS’s (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Nearly Over Everyone) song ‘Sound of da police’. And that’s no mean feat because it’s an angry rap about the widening gap between rich and poor, social injustice, racism, and police brutality.

John Boyega

If that makes it sound like hard work, it isn’t. The movie is a breathless rollercoaster ride from start to finish, with some nuanced scenes and fine characterisation. It being an action/comic outing, it goes without saying that it also boasts some stand-out comic performances — look out for Luke Treadaway as Brewis and Alex Esmail as Pest. As a matter of fact, the latter reminded me of Kelly (Lauren Socha) from Misfits, and he similarly has you in stitches even as he shamelessly plays with your emotions. The largely unknown cast of commission flat dwellers and druggy gang members is so utterly convincing that you believe they live the lives they have been chosen to portray.

It’s hardly surprising Attack the Block is as excellent as it is. Big Talk Picture is also responsible for Shaun of the Dead. Good but admittedly not as good as Attack the Block. Don't keep an eye out for the Hollywood remake. The special effects will be good, but nothing else will come close to being as fine as the original. You’d think Hollywood learned something from remaking Ring, The Eye, Black Water, Rec, and any number of other ‘foreign’ films. But, no, they haven’t…

Writers and editors on food

2011-12-01T15:56:00.000+11:00

Over at my favourite food blog, A la mode Frangourou, author Sophie Masson had the great idea of asking writers and editors to contribute a favourite recipe for the Christmas season. I'm not going to tell you what I imbibe. You will have to pop in to her blog to find out.

Warning: You may not like what you find.

Fernando Pessoa's Multiple Personae

2011-12-01T09:57:00.000+11:00

Fernando Pessoa

The peculiar achievement of Fernando Pessoa was to have invented the polyphonous modernist poet -- not the studied, multi-media social creature one encounters in cafes and literary festivals, but the archetype of the intensely intellectual, aloof and arrogant rebel in clerk's clothing, who out of a combination of disorder and control helped to set the cultural standards of the Portuguese nation.

For most of his uneventful life Pessoa wrote under four other names. Not pseudonyms, but heteronyms: that is to say, dramatic voices that were uniquely individual but maintained an interrelationship, the core identity of Fernando Pessoa, from which sprang all the others

How this occurred is a story in itself. The three voices erupted spontaneously in 1914. As Pessoa reports in Always Astonished, ‘I went over to a high desk and, taking a sheet of paper, began to write ... And I wrote thirty-odd poems straight off, in a kind of ecstasy whose nature I cannot define ... I started with a title “The Keeper of Sheep.” And what followed was the apparition of somebody in me, to whom I at once gave the name Alberto Caeiro ... My master had appeared in me. This was the immediate sensation I had.’

As soon as he had written the Caeiro poems, Pessoa grabbed another sheet of paper and wrote six poems under his own name as an act ‘against his own nonexistence as Alberto Caeiro.’ This was followed by the awakening of Alvaro de Campos, as Pessoa sat at his typewriter and proceeded to write the ‘Triumphal Ode’. He does not mention this in his letters, but the first six poems by Ricardo Reis also bear the same date. Much later he wrote the two volume diary The Book of Disquiet under the semi-heteronym of Bernardo Soares.

To read his account of the appearance of the distinct personalities, one would think Pessoa either an inspired genius who, in one day, managed to solve the problems of all modernist poets, or a schizophrenic.

I will argue that these epiphanic voices were more than just an intellectual exercise aimed at modernist objectivism; that, in fact, Pessoa embodies the perfect example of the classical battle between the Apollonian and Dionysian principals present in all great Western art, and the inevitable compulsion to adopt a series of personae, or masks, to express this schism.

Born in 1888, Fernando Pessoa appears to have been a mild-mannered clerk who lived and worked in Lisbon until he died in 1935. He developed complex theories on the psychology and aesthetics of literature aimed at the future development and emancipation of what he considered Portugal's buttoned-down conservatism. A conservatism, I maintain, also present in Pessoa himself.

Pessoa’s heteronyms have distinct personalities, biographies, temperaments, philosophies and writing styles. To a preface of his works Pessoa writes: ‘I don't know if he [Pessoa] is the author of these books -- ever had a single personality or ever thought or felt except … through a fictitious person who could have these feelings more than he himself ever could.’ This effacement is again echoed in the poem, ‘Suddenly a Hand’. And I can feel my life -- how on a string/of Unconscious abruptly tightening/I am, by some nocturnal hand controlled./I feel that I am no one, only a shade/Of a face I don't see, being in its shade,/And in nothing exist as the dark's cold.

As in cases of multiple personality, when the alternate voices begin to speak they seek to suppress or heap scorn on the original voice. So was the case with Pessoa. In the many convoluted and complex notes and conversations between the various personalities, Fernando Pessoa is often derided. Alvaro de Campos is known to have said, ‘Fernando Pessoa was there, but it was as though he was not. Pessoa feels things but doesn't react, not even inwardly.’ In a letter of 1915, Pessoa wrote to a close friend that he is ‘forever alien to myself and with no central core inside me.’

What was Fernando Pessoa afraid of? What was the void he often refers to? I would argue that it is nature with a capital N. The mysterious, dark and dank void once filled by the pagan rites of Dionysus and the Great Earth Goddess, Cybele, with their accompanying collapse into chthonic night and mercurial sexuality. Christianity, with its hard-armoured Apollonian sky worship, had failed him. But, thankfully, it had also failed to completely bury the paganism present in all great artists.

The answer, for Pessoa, was to give voice to Alberto Caeiro, known as ‘The Master’ and worshipped by all the other personalities who claimed to be his disciples. Alberto Caeiro's voice was not pagan, ‘It was,’ says Alvaro de Campos, ‘paganism itself.’ The poems of ‘The Keeper of Sheep’ aim at a total objectivity that is ‘more Greek than the Greeks’ (R. Reis). Reading these poems one is struck by their blasphemy and anti-religiosity. Caeiro rears a head that is both primal and untamed, there is a total absence of sentiment or self in these poems of metaphysical absorption in Nature. As Ricardo Reis observes in his introduction to Caeiro's poems, ‘He sees things with the eyes only, not with the mind. He does not let any thought arise when he looks at a flower.’

There is ample metaphysics in not thinking at all.

What do I think about the world?

How should I know what I think about the world?
If I were ill I would think about it.

What idea have I about things?
What opinion do I have on causes and effects?
What meditations have I had upon God and the soul
And upon the creation of the World?

I don't know. For me, to think about that is to shut my eyes.
And not think. It is to draw the curtains
Of my window (but it has no curtains).

From, ‘There is ample metaphysics’.

What Alberto Caeiro's poems constantly refer to is the collapse of personality in the face of all-absorbing nature. Mankind's retreat to primal pre-existence; the abdication of self.

To a contracted, modernist personality like Pessoa's, forged in the eye of personality-obsessed Western culture, the manifestation of such a pagan, epiphanic voice must have been at once exhilarating and terrifying. Keeping the latter in mind, we can understand his retreat to the civilised, urbane safe-ground represented by Ricardo Reis.

Ricardo Reis was a doctor living in Brazil. He was a short, shrewd fellow, cleanly shaven with dull brown eyes. His verse was metrical but unrhymed. For Pessoa Reis was the closest he could come to being a pagan without losing identity. He worked paganism into an ethical doctrine, a way of living in the modern Christian world without suffering so much. His odes are highly sophisticated, exact and graceful with an element of sadness at the shortness of human life. Unlike Caeiro and de Campos, he totally excludes the Dionysiac elements in paganism. His voice remains even, cool; emotion does not enter to despoil the picture. He was a pagan of the suburbs.

Apollo's chariot has rolled onwards
Out of sight. The dust it raised
Has stayed behind, filling with subtle
Mist the horizon.

That calm flute - it is Pan's - launching
Its clear-cut tones on the idle air
Has added sadnesses to the gracious
Day that is dying.

From ‘Apollo's Chariot Has Rolled’.

Whereas I respond to Reis' precision and neoclassicism, I am not so keen on his polite, urbane view of nature as nurture. Like Wordsworth he is deluded into the Rousseauist view of nature as benevolent mother and teacher, completely overlooking the dark, destructive undercurrents acknowledged by de Campos and Caeiro. In de Campos especially, the two extremes of nature often clash in the Dionysiac arena. Reis would have us believe that polite restraint and a hovering on the edges of the grove are enough to keep the ambiguities of nature at bay. Again, this passivity reflects a Wordsworthian sensibility. In Wordsworth’s case, Coleridge, with all his sexual ambiguities and daemonic vision, was the corrective. Whereas Reis languishes in passive receptivity, the dreamlike visionary qualities of de Campos’s odes and the self-effacing epiphanies of Caeiro free Pessoa to explore Dionysian swirling liquidity.

Reis' extremism is countered by the more sedate tones of Alvaro de Campos. While still maintaining his Sensationist sensibilities, de Campos veered toward expression based in the impulsive expression of self completely lost in subjective experience. For him sensation is all, but not things as they are, but of things as they are felt. Or, as he himself has written, ‘to feel everything in every way.’ He never questions, he only feels. His poems are as free of judgment as they brim with undisciplined sensation, so that he writes of a town as he would write of the country; applies the same principles when writing of evil as he would of good. As Ricardo Reis has observed ‘Alvaro de Campos has no shadow of an ethics; he is non-moral, if not positively immoral...’

The retired naval engineer living in Glasgow wrote in free verse and is said to resemble Walt Whitman most of the three. But he does not possess Whitman's camaraderie, he stands outside and alone from the crowd. His tone is overwrought, at times almost hysterical in his bid to give himself brutal sensations such as cruelty and lust.

I am nothing

Never shall be anything

Cannot will to be anything.

This apart, I have in me all the dreams of the world.

…

I have made of me what I had not the skill for,

And what I could make of me I did not make.

The fancy dress I put on was the wrong one.

They knew me at once for who I was not and I did not

expose the lie, and lost myself.

When I tried to take off the mask,

It was stuck to my face.

When I got it off and looked myself in the glass,

I had already grown old.

I was drunk, was trying in vain to get into the

costume I had not taken off.

I left the mask and went to sleep in the cloackroom

Like a dog that is tolerated by the management

Because he is harmless

And here I am, on the point of writing this story to

prove I am sublime.

From ‘Tobacconist's’

The tone is definitely that of a man walking normal streets and living a passionate life in a modern metropolis. So, de Campos, while maintaining Caeiro's freedom of expression, is not so removed from everyday experience as to be totally alien to Pessoa's tightly coiled personality. He dares to voice the sadomasochistic impulse manifest in maintaining identity in the face of nature's brutal disregard. Ricardo Reis will bring these disparate characteristics even closer to that of Fernando Pessoa.

The laundress at the pool

Pounds clothes upon stone truly.

Sings because sings, is grieving

Because sings because living;

Therefore is cheerful too.

If only I could ever

Succeed in doing with verses

What she does to the clothes,

Maybe I might lose

My destinies, their diverseness.

There’s a great unity

In -- without any thought,

And half singing, maybe --

Pounding clothes really…

Who launders me my heart?

From ‘The Laundress at the Pool’

Finally, Pessoa emerges with a masculine resoluteness initially lacking in his verse. His ritualistic self-abasement in the hands of Caeiro and de Campos integrate the Dionysian with Reis' Apollonian linearity. In the second verse of ‘The Laundress at the Pool’ he finally acknowledges the Mother Goddess's eternal realm of liquid nature and her capacity to alchemise personality. As shown in Euripides' Bakkhai, the god of ecstasy triumphs by adopting ritual masks that unveil inner truth. Pessoa's innate understanding of this gave us the many voices and brilliant poems that have made him one of the twentieth century’s great poets.

Free Writing

2011-12-01T09:50:00.000+11:00

Like many writers I am often invited to make an appearance at festivals or contribute to magazines. Upon initial, more often than not pathetically grateful, acceptance I am told that unfortunately there is no payment. This happens even when a festival or literary journal receives a government grant. Inevitably I go along with this even though something inside prickles and makes the hackles rise.

I am not alone in this. I know many writers who ‘contribute’ their time or work. So much so that now it is a industry given that writers will work for free. It is even more alarming that editors and organisers are not in the least embarrassed or ashamed to ask us to do this. The end result is that we can expect no more than to spend years honing our craft and then give away writing for little or no payment whatsoever.

What other industry expects its members to work for free? Do we expect a plumber or a cabinet maker or a dentist to work for nothing? Does a mechanic contribute her time for no pay? Of course not. And yet editors, publishers and many arts organisations expect writers to contribute an essay, a short story or a poem for free. And we bow our heads and accept the situation as though there is no alternative.

Several years ago I received an email from a newspaper asking if they could reprint an essay that had appeared elsewhere. I consented and asked what renumeration to expect. The answer was that they do not pay for reprints. More recently, I consented to speak at a literary festival for free. Imagine my outrage when I discovered the festival received a government grant and there was a $10. 00 entrance fee to the session in which I appeared. Another time I was invited to launch a book at a literature festival. When I turned up, the door bitches wouldn’t let me in until I paid an entrance fee — an invited guest who was there to perform a function had to pay to enter.

Dear writers, why haven’t we staged an uprising? Where is the revolutionary spirit for which many of us are known? Why do we not put our collective foot down and refuse to contribute writing for free?

The answer is simple. We rationalise this state of affairs by telling ourselves that any exposure is better than none. We need the break, we tell ourselves, and we don’t really expect to make money from writing; we do it for the love. But I tell you literary journals and festivals would not exist if we said ‘No’ more often. Writers, with all their insecurities, tend to forget that the organisations that thrive on their efforts are beholden to them, not the other way around. Publishers, magazines, journals, newspapers, festivals would not exist without the writer.

Nor do I want to hear that small literary journals are struggling to survive in this hard climate and can’t afford to pay contributors. If you can’t pay then don’t publish. Go plant radishes. Only please do not insult writers with platitudes; do not exploit their weakness and need.

The cold hard facts are these: Editors and arts administrators are taking advantage of writers who need a break. Each time a newspaper, magazine or journal publishes writing for free they are basically saying this piece of writing has no value. It offers nothing to the cultural discourse and I the editor am riding on the back of that writer or illustrator or whatever it may be by getting my name on the imprint page as the editor of a journal.

We need a turn-around. Till now, it seems to me, the needs of editors came first. Now the writer needs to step forward and claim her due. Why not? Like I said, magazines and journals would not exist without our hard-won efforts. So, from now on, when you see a call for writing to a literary journals that does not pay, send them an insulting letter. Write about the magazine and ask readers to boycott the thieves who blatantly steal your work and expect you to hand it over without a fight.

Will it happen? I don’t think so. When I published a variation of this piece last week (and then promptly took it down because I was threatened with a law suit), I received emails from writer friends who said I was being too harsh and unfair. One person called me 'an extremist'. That tells me a great deal. It tells me that writers are so used to getting screwed by editors that they now conspire in their own oppression. So be it, but I am no longer playing along. My policy is: No pay, no publish.

Mercan Dede Istanbul Quartet

2011-11-24T11:02:00.000+11:00

Mercan Dede

Towards the end of his life poet W H Auden visited a Russian orthodox church. Even though he didn’t understand what was being said he knew what was going on during the service and received solace from the ceremony.

It occurs to me that Auden’s creed of listening without understanding is probably the best guide to the Mercan Dede Istanbul Quartet concert last Sunday evening at the Melbourne Arts Centre. Not being able to understand the Turkish words and phrases that sprinkled through the air and dropped like pearls into the pool of gently wafting musical sounds didn’t matter. If anything the experience of not understanding added depth to the enjoyment.

Turkish-born Dede claims to create a universal language by combining folkloric and Sufi music with ambient, electronic sounds with his synthesiser. This exploration of music and art’s power, he claims, reveals the many dimensions of our interior lives.

Judging by the enjoyment levels of the wide-ranging audience he could be right. The concert was a sell-out and the auditorium was packed to the rafters with young and old, Turk and non Turk, world-music aficionados and hippies in equal measure; and if the spontaneous clapping, whistling and gyrations in the aisles are anything to go by, everyone had a great time.

I went to this concert partly because I love Middle Eastern music fused with electronica and partly because I needed a Turkish fix. It’s been a long time between drinks and I was not disappointed. Right from the start when the oud wailed and wept in the deep silence of the auditorium I was in a trance. My pleasure was utterly fulfilled when the baglama and the drums joined the chorus. By the time Mercan Dede, whose name comes from a fictional novel, took his place behind a table weighed down with synthesisers and various other instruments I and many around me were wiggling in their seats, ready to jump up and dance.

Performing, he’s nothing but a white light, simultaneously self-effacing and assertive; a guiding principle and a non-presence amid the musicians who take their cue from the master and vie with him and one another in a free for all jamming session that is also surprisingly controlled and cohesive, always returning to its centre and purpose: to transport the listener outside of himself and to make her listen to something or someone other than herself. Dede then picks up the ney, a flutey reed, and you are suddenly inside the Sufi tekke in the middle of Istanbul, watching a whirling dervish turn into a celestial wheel.

The concert had a hippy dippy techno love fest feel that was both charming and endearing. Rather than sitting down and clapping politely at the end of each song you felt you ought to be standing and sabring the darkness with a glow stick. Sure enough the night came to a spectacular end with the appearance of what can only be described as a human disco ball.

A tall sharply angular young man wrapped in black and white robes and a turban began to slowly, tentatively rotate in the middle of a fixed light. The outer black robe parted to reveal the white garment underneath. It unfurled and billowed, opening up like a pristine lily lifted up by a breeze. He stopped turning and the flower closed its petals. After repeating this movement two or three times, he removed the black robe to reveal a resplendent white robe with two equidistant parallel blue lines along the lower half. When he began the sema by turning continuously to the music, the robe opened up and became an undulating mass reminiscent of a cloud or smoke or an exotic flower. Caught between stillness and movement he seemed a ballerina on a music box. When the auditorium was plunged into total darkness the luminous blue lines on the skirt became smooth wavelike motion in the pitch, hypnotic and camp theatrics all at once. Rather than a sema in the traditional sense this was a demonstration of transcendence, submission and grace that walked a fine line between sincerity and self-conscious performance. It was very moving and a marvelous way to end the night.

As I walked through the balmy night to my car, I thought: Trust a Turk to wear the best dress in town...

Nar-i Ask, Mercan Dede

2011-11-16T17:20:00.000+11:00

I am going to see this guy next Sunday night at Melbourne's Art Centre, and thought I'd share one of his songs with you. Turkish ambient Sufi...

Wu Xia, Peter Ho-Sun Chan

2011-11-16T09:28:00.000+11:00

In the same way that Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas spoiled me for subsequent Bollywood films, Zhang Yimou’s Hero shut the door on all other martial arts movies. They are both such fantastic examples of their respective genres that few others manage to scale the same heights. Wu Xia changes all that for martial arts films.

Peter Ho-Sun Chan, who is responsible for The Eye and Bodyguards and Assassins, obviously believes in putting his money on crowd-pleasers and he doesn’t disappoint with this one. It’s such a gobsmackingly enjoyable film that you really do come out of the cinema with a big smile on your face, and it’s far more successful on all levels than the subplot laden and unwieldy Red Cliff.

If you are familiar with David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, you do, in a sense, know what happens in Wu Xia. But not really. Plot similarities don’t necessarily denote remake, reinterpretation or reimagining. A dramatic situation can serve as a leaping-off point to explore uncharted territory in a filmic or visual manner and to push the emotional boundaries. Wu Xia (the Chinese word for a genre of fiction about the adventures of martial artists) does all of that and is an entirely new beast. I even venture to say that Chan improves on Cronenberg’s offering by turning his film into multidisciplinary martial arts epic for people who like their art to come with a bit of kapow.

By turns thrilling, philosophic and melancholy, this lush looking film is a peculiar mix of old-style detective story, noir drama and the forensic procedural police drama — there are plenty of shots of ruptured bloodstreams and traumatised nervous systems that will remind you of CSI-style hyper-kinetics. Chan, however, delves deeper by exploring themes such as redemption and the consequences of an inflexible nature. In fact, if the movie is about anything it’s about having the ability to yield and to bend like a reed in the wind. Those who are inflexible in the story line pay a heavy price.

The drama is set in a Chinese village in 1917 and presents a story about a killer (Donnie Yen) who breaks with the past and begins a new life as a family man and paper manufacturer. He gives himself away, however, when he kills two bandits who attempt to rob a local store. The investigating detective (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is a fastidious, tenacious fellow and he smells a rat. How can a mere papermaker singlehandedly kill two dangerous bandits so utterly and conclusively? The massive internal injuries are the give-away. The detective’s extensive knowledge of physiology and acupuncture leads him to believe that the papermaker is a highly skilled martial artist and, furthermore, a notorious murderer by the name of Tang Long. What ensues is not so much a cat-and-mouse game as a dance of death, which leads to some very fine suspense sequences — particularly one in a gloomy forest. As the two men circle one another like reticent lovers, each one afraid of the potential in the other and yet intrigued by the inevitable outcome, the ground shifts so that following the law to the letter becomes if not evil then something less than desirable. Meanwhile, the desire to atone for past misdeeds gains heroic status and almost exonerates the wrongdoer.

Given the subject matter, Wu Xia is a surprisingly understated film, though when it hits its stride it becomes positively operatic — look out for the The Bad Seed ending. For the most part, though, scenes are muted and underplayed to emphasise the contemplative life. These elements are helped by Lai Yiu-Fai and Jake Pollock’s dreamy cinematography and Chan Kwon-wing and Peter Kam’s non-intrusive musical score.

Donnie Yen and Takeshi Kaneshiro in Wu Xia

Another highlight for me is Tang Wei as Donnie Yen’s wife. Hers is almost a silent performance with very little dialogue. Even so she imbues the part with such apprehension and fear for the future that she steals every scene she is in.

It goes without saying that the fight sequences — all choreographed by Donnie Yen — are excellent, though hardly central to the storyline. Yet each one is pure ballet, a show of aerial dynamics and skill that takes your breath away even as the image is slowed down for the viewer to contemplate one of the film’s contradiction: beauty and ugliness are different faces of the same coin; one cannot exist without the other.

But for sheer exhilaration one sequence stands above all others and is, in fact, a mini film within a film. This is when Takeshi Kaneshiro returns to the scene of the crime and recreates the first fight sequence in slow motion so that we see where every blow and footfall landed and the damage is could potentially cause. It’s a marvellous bit of film-making and I guarantee you will rewind to watch it again and again.

Sisters Brothers, Patrick De Witt

2011-11-16T09:20:00.000+11:00

Two killers, Charlie and Eli Sisters, travel the continent to kill one Hermann Kermit Warm. They do not know why they must do this and they do not think to ask. They simply obey, as they always have, the Commodore’s orders. Along the way they experience life as never before, or rather life affects them, each for different reasons, in ways that would have been unimaginable before this juncture. By the time they meet Warm, something has shifted inside the brothers, especially Eli. Do they blindly follow orders or is this the time to think for themselves and take charge of a wasted and brutal life?

In his second novel, DeWitt, we are told, reinvigorates the Western and creates a cross between Deadwood and Don Quixote. The definite biblical overtones are not mentioned. The novel is certainly picaresque and lively in its depiction of character and situation. What it lacks is the television series’ Shakespearean overtones and Cervantes’s recognisable social milieu. For the first 150 pages or so the journey and the banter between Charlie and Eli invigorates and amuses. Then the episodic nature of the novel becomes burdensome and forced — what weird situation can DeWitt come up with now? — and the storyline drifts into ever more predictable situations. By the time the brothers meet Warm and his accomplice Morris, interest has waned and one is reading by rote; the interest picks up once Warm and Morris exit and the brothers confront their maker and the whole ends poignantly if predictably in a return to Eden.

There is no doubt De Witt writes with vigor and energy; he is very funny and has an endearing eye for the absurd. Even so the novel fails to hold the attention and it’s difficult to know why. It wasn’t until I finished reading The Sisters Brothers and began reading Stendhal’s The Red and the Black that I realised why DeWitt did not stay with me for longer than it took to close the book: his novel lacks the detail, the dirt and grit of life; the immersion that’s required if we are to read for more than a mere pastime is not there; we are always outside watching with a detached eye. As amusing as Charlie and Eli are we don’t really know them the way Stendhal illuminates Julie Sorel. In the end The Sisters Brothers comes across as playful irony and it’s hard to understand why it was shortlisted for the Booker.

Big West Festival

2011-11-12T07:28:00.000+11:00

I am a guest of the Big West Festival. Here are the details:

Truth and Consequence

Real stories, real people. On this non-fiction panel three authors reveal their distinct approaches to telling it like it is.

Nathan Mullins is an ex-cop, exsoldier in Afghanistan, ex-security consultant and an Australian Aid International volunteer. He has drawn from these experiences in his books How to Amputate a Leg… and Keep Your Head Down.

Mischa Merz is a journalist and author of The Sweetest Thing – A Boxer’s Memoir, and Bruising, gripping accounts of her life as a champion female boxer. Her writing
has appeared in Meanjin, The Age, The Sunday Age, The Herald Sun, Inside Sport and various magazines.

Writer and editor Dmetri Kakmi revisits the Turkish island of his birth and the events that drove his Greek family to migrate to Australia in his haunting first book, the memoir Mother Land. His essays, articles and reviews have been widely published in newspapers and magazines.

Moderator: Michael Gurr is a director, broadcaster and playwright. His
plays include Julia 3, The Simple Truth, Jerusalem, Shark Fin Soup, Sex Diary of an Infidel and Desire Lines. Michael has won four State Literary Awards for Drama and his memoir Days Like These was shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier’s Literary
Award. He regularly appears on radio and is a judge on ABC television’s Strictly Speaking.

Venue: Sun Theatre, Ballarat Street Yarraville
Date: 21 November, 6 PM
Price: $10.00

There's heaps of other stuff on as well, so check out the festival's website for the full program.

Two Documentaries

2011-11-10T09:00:00.000+11:00

Bill Cunningham, New York

The primary enjoyment of the fashion documentary isn’t so much the opportunity to gawp at gorgeous clothes. Though that is pleasure enough and well worth the price of admission, I go for the hoped-for glimpse at the crazy cats that make the fashion industry what it is. Without them and their visionary style of insanity there would be no such thing as fashion. The business of making clothes is about odd-ball characters; at least that’s what emerges in Valentino: The Last Emperor and Lagerfeld Confidential. Though I could have done without the reptilian Anna Wintour in The September Issue, even that film qualifies because of the luminous Grace Coddington’s presence.

And so it is with the affectionate portrait of Bill Cunningham, the street fashion photographer for The New York Times. Cunningham has been a genial presence on the fashion horizon for as long as anyone can remember. Coming from a working-class Catholic background, he began in the 1950s as a milliner. Despite his background or possibly because of it, he was thrown from an early age into apoplexy by the sight of a beautiful dress, and followed his calling despite family opprobrium. Jumping from one magazine to another and never once compromising his eye for beauty, he slowly built a formidable reputation as a man who could spot nascent fashion trends and introduce them to the world months in advance. As the repellent Wintour says in the documentary, ‘he sees things on a fashion runway most of us miss.’

Cunningham has a roving, egalitarian eye. As one of his subjects observes, he mixes with high and low and everything in between but he does not separate or categorise. To him everyone is on the same playing level, one giant and very colourful human tapestry. The thing I love most about him is his utter contempt for celebrities with their free dresses. ‘Who cares?’ he scoffs on seeing Catherine Deneuve, choosing instead to photograph true originals like Anna Piaggi, Carmen Dell’Orefice and Patrick McDonald, or the black kid on a skate board.

Cunningham, now in his ninth decade, is obviously held in high regard by all who rub shoulders with him. But no one knows much about him. They know he’s lived in a tiny apartment in Carnegie Hall since the 1950s; they know he sleeps in a cot on the floor; that he does not accept money for the work he does; that he dresses in the same blue workman’s jacket he buys at the Bazar de l’Hotel de Ville in Paris, and that his bathroom is in the hallway. Beyond that, nothing. He’s a mystery, a cypher, a man who lives purely for his work.

And this is where director Richard Press is at his best. Slowly, in an artfully meandering way, he zeroes in on his subject and hits the mark when Cunningham and the audience least expect it. He does this first by contextualising Bill Cunningham, the legend. We see the last stand in his Carnegie Hall apartment, a space that once teemed with artists and is now partitioned into sterile offices. Cunningham is the perfect gentleman as photographer Editta Sherman, who lived down the hall, takes sly digs at him; self-effacing as the late Iris Apfel and Brooke Astor sing his praises and oblivious as a Frenchman calls him ‘the most important man in the world’.

In this manner we see Cunningham’s special gift and elusiveness — he’s as shy as a virgin in a bath house, as fleeting as a gazelle in the forest. The man is a contradiction: an ascetic in tune with the modern world, yet also out of step with it; a product of a bygone era and yet very much in tune with the zeitgeist. At one stage the very stylish Iris Apfel says of herself that she is the world’s oldest teenager. The same can be applied to Bill Cunningham. Despite the advancements of age, he is enthusiasm personified and sees possibility everywhere. Like many an artist Cunningham knows what he wants and lives almost entirely in his head, with only the end result in his sights.

The sting in the tale comes when Press pulls out the pins and asks, in a rather deferential way, if Cunningham has ever been in an intimate relationship and to talk about his Sunday church-going. And here I’ll stop because you have to see this bit of footage to understand why this fashion documentary is also one of the most deeply moving character portraits on our screens at the moment. The response makes sense of everything that came before it.

The Triangle Wars

The beauty of Rosie Jones’s excellent documentary about a struggle to save a community from politicians and developers is that it rises above specificity to achieve universality. Whether you care about the specific cause or not, and I certainly did not, what holds your interest is the classic story of the will of the people against those who think they know better or who put self-interest before all else. From these beginnings came the French Revolution and the Arab Spring, and that’s what makes this Australian documentary timely. Tribesmen fighting for their parcel of land in the decimated Brazilian Amazon could watch The Triangle Wars and relate to what is essentially a David and Goliath battle.

In 2007 the seaside council of St Kilda in Melbourne gave developers the green light to build a garish shopping complex on its famed foreshore. The people said no it’s too big and unwieldy. Come up with something else. The council board said it’s fine and before you know it there’s a bitter, acrimonious media storm no one could have foreseen. The electorate against besieged politicians who grew more and more pallid and anxious as their bastion of ultimate control is invades by an angry and just mob. Given that the ringleader, photographer Serge Thomann, is a Frenchman it’s surprising the guillotine did not feature during some of the more heated confrontations. It has to be said, though, that heads roll in a metaphoric sense.

It’s not spoiling anything to say that three years later the people won and many odious councillors and a despised CEO were out the door, reminding us that politicians are elected to represent the will of the people, not their own. I just wish someone would tell Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard that.

Producers Peter George and Lizzette Atkins filmed for a period of years before Rosie Jones came on board as editor and director. It was her unenviable task to make sense of the many hours of footage available and prepare a coherent narrative with the play of egos and personalities on the battlefield.

The focus falls squarely on charismatic Serge Thomann on the side of good. On the side of evil is sartorial disaster and councillor Dick Gross and what can only be described as the half-witted developer Steve McMillan — honestly, the vaingloriousness of these two has to be seen to be believed and there is a particular pleasure in seeing them crash and burn. This is where the filmmakers are at their best. Far from taking sides, they extend an even hand to everyone, allowing the talking heads to spar and put forward the point of view they represent. Given enough rope someone will hang himself, and many do just that. The filmmakers don’t have to lift a finger; just stand back and watch the fireworks.

At a crisp 90 minutes, the film covers a lot of ground — it’s almost an epic, spanning many years, with a cast of thousands and high emotion on all sides — and it’s beautifully shot in energising colours by Michael Williams. Ultimately it’s the battle that stays with you and the question: What price progress? No wonder it was Best Australian Documentary at the Antenna International Documentary Festival.

RIP Loulou de la Falaise - 1948-2011

2011-11-06T12:44:00.000+11:00

Fashion fixture, jewellery designer, muse to Yves Saint Laurent and darling of left-bank bohemia dies at 63. Travel well, Loulou. You were a one-off...

Zombie Boy for Dermablend

2011-11-04T10:41:00.000+11:00

Okay, so we all know I'm a little obsessed with Rick Genest, aka Zombie Boy. Maybe it's my inner goth finally coming out of the closet. In this terrific photo shoot his incredible tattoos are covered by Dermablend with amazing transformative results. I still prefer him with the tats though...

Cosmogony and Freud in William Friedkin's 'Cruising'

2011-11-03T09:32:00.000+11:00

This essay first appeared on this blog early in the year. It had to be taken down for a variety of reasons and is now back up again. Apologies to those who've already read it.

For over two decades, William Friedkin’s controversial film Cruising (1980) has been that dark and unspeakable thing: a film so reviled by critics and audiences alike that it has virtually disappeared from discourse about 1980s American cinema. And yet, together with Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980), it is one of the most intriguing Hollywood films of the era. It is also one of the more pithy studies of homosexual desire to emerge from the studio system.

On its release, at the initial stages of the eighties puritanical, anti-sex, anti-pornography crusade, Cruising received a very public stoning from which it never recovered.
Written and directed by Friedkin, Cruising is a classic undercover cop scenario. Pacino descends into Manhattan’s underground S&M gay world to find a killer who is butchering men. Very quickly he finds himself embroiled in a dark, forbidding and weirdly alluring world that could be his undoing. As Pacino moves deeper into this world, he becomes nervous and disoriented. His relationship with his girlfriend (Karen Allen) disintegrates. Finally, with the help of his cynical boss, Pacino lures the killer into a tryst in the park and stabs him. Pacino returns from the ‘netherworld’ to his girlfriend, but a disturbing event occurs: Pacino's gay friend Ted is brutally murdered. The film leaves open the possibility that Pacino, tainted by his contact with the S&M world, is Ted's killer.
I have always maintained that the film’s murky suggestiveness and ambiguity, its refusal to provide clear-cut answers, has prevented a clear understanding of its archetypal themes. The masterstroke of Cruising is that it reinterprets The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), through a mirror darkly, and then blends myth and fable with Freudian psychology. The resulting cocktail is a very potent mixture.
If we are to understand Cruising we must see it as a reinterpreted myth. Through its various personae the narrative manifests the struggle of the pagan gods in a modern, urban setting. In as much as he makes inverse use of The Wizard of Oz, Friedkin takes Dorothy Gale (gay icon Judy Garland’s most fondly remembered role) and tumbles her through a looking glass. Along the way Dorothy undergoes radical sex change and pops out in the phantasmagoric elsewhere of late-seventies hedonistic Greenwich Village as Steve Burns, a tormented man of ambiguous sexuality.
In her new incarnation, Dorothy’s apparent bubbly innocence is shown to be either a ruse or an unconscious impulse. Once he has relocated the character from Kansas to Manhattan, Friedkin proceeds to amplify Dorothy Gale’s repressed desire for another life ‘somewhere over the rainbow’, and her rebellion against conformism and overbearing authoritarianism. In Cruising these impulses create the psychic link between undercover cop Steve Burns and the serial killer he is assigned to hunt down.
Names play a critical function in fiction. The name given to a character communicates important information about his or her function in a narrative. In Dorothy Gale’s case, her surname conjures the big wind that carries her away. Steve Burns burns in his bed, yearning for something he’s not even aware of. Both characters are swept out of their safe, stultifying homes by external events and dropped in a never-never land, a dream of endless possibilities and bizarre permutations. But dreams can harbour nightmares.
When the job is first offered to him, Steve Burns is ostensibly motivated by ambition. But his overenthusiastic response when he is asked if he’ll take the case – ‘I love it!’ – hints at deeper currents.
Immediately following this scene, we find Burns in bed with his girlfriend Nancy, presumably post-coitus. She is asking about the new case he’s been assigned to, but out of necessity he can not reveal much. In the background we hear the strains of classical music. This is a pivotal moment in the film, just before the winds of change whip Steve Burns out of the life he’s built for himself. The storm warning comes in the form of Nancy saying, ‘You’re father called today.’
The classical music continues in the background but now a discordant, menacing drone underscores the soundtrack. We’re being led by degrees into Steve Burns’ psyche, trawled by hidden currents. Pacino’s lambent eyes hint at hidden torment. His face is a rigid mask. The very word ‘father’ has pierced him to the core. Even his breathing is affected. Oblivious to this Nancy says, ‘I had no idea you were that ambitious.’
‘There’s a lot about me you don’t know,’ he responds. It’s the silence and Pacino’s eyes that speak volumes during this close up fringed by darkness. ‘Such as…?’ she enquires. Her question is left hanging in the air as the image of Pacino’s face dissolves into the next. A yellow cab pulls up and Steve Burns steps out into Greenwich Village. He is already attired in the costume of a late 1970s gay clone.

Dorothy’s Oz is a matriarchy, ruled by good and bad witches. In this feminised universe, it is telling that Dorothy’s destiny is in the hands of the only male figure of authority, the all-powerful Wizard of Oz. If she is to regain her former life, Dorothy must find him. But it is he who is being tested, not her. Traveling along the yellow brick road, Dorothy encounters the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow, three men who are a combination of eunuch, court jester and empty threat, beholden to her. Finally, even the great Oz himself is exposed as a fraud, his power an illusion. Dorothy realises that she alone commands her destiny.

Cruising on the other hand is a patriarchal pantheon from the beginning. (Aside from Mother Nature in the Central Park sequences and Nancy, there is no significant female role in the film. There are only feminised men.) The hurricane that sweeps Steve Burns over the treetops comes in the form of a spate of brutal killings. In his quest, Steve Burns leaps from one patriarchal structure to the other, from the shadow of his invisible father, to the police station ruled by steely male figures. There is even a yellow cab (‘follow the yellow brick road’) to take him to Greenwich Village, a bohemian gay ghetto. Assuming an alias, Burns descends into the ultimate all-male club: the leather S&M underworld. Here, against his wishes, he becomes an apostate to heterosexuality and melts before the avatar of masculinity.
At the conclusion of L. Frank Baum’s Oz series of books, Dorothy finally gets her wish and becomes queen of the kingdom beyond the rainbow, a process which is facilitated by her natural outgrowth of her substitute family in Kansas. In the regressive world of Cruising, however, Steve Burns, unable to break with his father-haunted past, is absorbed by the identity of the-now-captured killer and is transformed from reluctant leather queen into an ogre hungry for male flesh.
It’s interesting that in gay parlance ‘a friend of Dorothy’ is code for a homosexual. This key phrase opens the door to a utopian society, a kind of Shangrila for gay people. This mythical elsewhere is glorified in the song ‘Go West’ by the Village People, which was also covered by the Pet Shop Boys. In relation to Cruising, we glimpse a pale imitation of this utopia in the night-time cruising scenes filmed in Central Park. Here men openly interact in a shimmering half-world, restlessly pacing the lit paths, their fragile paradise surrounded by immense darkness. They are innocent children gamboling in a meadow, unaware or possibly ignoring the fact that a troll hides under the bridge.
Unlike the rainbow of colour and lush score that washes over the whole of Oz, Friedkin limits his palette to a range of icy colours and underlines it with Jack Nitzsche's synthesised score. This creates a Manhattan that is weighed down with lassitude and ennui. It is a place where anything could happen as, all through the film, things keep popping up from the depths to face the startled light.
The half-transvestite men in minimal make-up, dressed in shiny leathers, long blonde wigs, and caps, remind me of the feminine-identified male followers of the god Bacchus, parading through the streets of ancient Athens at the height of bacchic celebrations. Their high-heel boots, click, click, clicking on the dark pavement like a timepiece, is an invitation to view the mystery play that unfolds as Steve Burns surrenders to inevitable yearning.
Cruising takes father-fixated pathological homosexuality to dream-like states by trapping its characters in a hallucinatory, purgatory world – the perfect environment for the cosmic battle that is to come. As the plot unfolds we learn that the killer is as beholden to a father figure as his adversary/psychic twin Steve Burns.
The ghost of patricide towers over Cruising as it does over Greek myth. Zeus, the father of the Olympian gods, cast his Titan father Cronus and mother Gaea into eternal chaos so that he may reign as sovereign ruler over heaven and earth. Following on from that, Oedipus killed his father, took his kingdom and bedded his own mother.
Ancient Greek drama reminds us that each new generation is built on the bones of the previous one. To achieve full maturity, the child must break with the parent, even if it is by force. To remain in the shadow of Mother or Father is to be forever thwarted. Alfred Hitchcock made this eternal struggle the basis of Psycho twenty years before Friedkin.
The two omnipresent, omniscient fathers in Cruising are Cronus manifest as overriding ambition and bigotry. Their respective sons are modern-day counterparts of Zeus in his Ganymede boy-chasing phase. And the towering high-rises of Manhattan, a Mecca for gays, is a re-imagined Mount Olympus. This conceit allows Friedkin to explicitly conflate cosmogony with the sexual act so that each same-sex encounter literally becomes a clash of the Titans. We see this in the sequence when Pacino finally comes face to face with the killer. The slow stripping down and the drawing of knives is played like a weirdly erotic seduction to the death.
One of the complaints voiced about the film on its release was that the heterosexual love scenes are depicted tenderly, while the same scenes between men are brutal and unemotional. But this is not an accurate reading. It seems to me that the scenes between Pacino and Karen Allen are cold and remote. Even as they lie in each other’s arms, they are alienated from themselves and each other.

It’s true that when two men come together in the film the scenes are often framed like gunfights from an old Western movie. Hands and feet move in a silent, tense ballet. The world goes silent, as if holding its breath. The men’s movements are odd, disjointed, as if their bodies do not belong to them. Transgression crackles in the air. Legs become columns; nipples become dark eyes. Hands and lips wander in tremulous worship. And when bodies collide, there is thunder – the guttural grunts emitted by the participants.
The film acts as a metaphor for something larger and outside the social sphere. We are not watching two human beings coming together; these are Titans and Olympiads, fathers and sons, clashing beyond time and space. The murky, nebulous, half-lit environs in which they consummate their courtship support this observation. We’re in a primordial realm, pre-creational and formless. Furthermore, the first killing reached even further back in time to encompass Egyptian mythology. The knife-wielding killer might have been the god Set, dismembering his brother Osiris, before scattering his body parts across the face of the earth and creating the universe with his scattered semen.
Unable to break free of the looming figure of the Father, the central male characters in Friedkin’s drama remain emotionally and psychologically frozen, incapable of maturity. They are trapped in a vicious circle of having to kill living effigies of the adored and despised in the hope of gaining autonomy that never comes. If Psycho’s Norman Bates was a Mummy’s Boy; then Steve Burns and his killer double is a Big Daddy’s Boy. I mean this literally and metaphorically, since the hierarchies in the gay S&M world pivot on ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’, ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’, ‘daddies’ and their boy-toy ‘sons’.
In as much as it is a meditation on the overbearing influence of the Father, Cruising also delves into the nature of ambition fueled by guilt and the fear of failure. Every killing in the film is motivated by a desire to appease and repel the unapproachable, godlike father. The dead men are burnt offerings, but they do not bring peace or solace. In the mind of the killer, the Father can never be satisfied. He will always want more. ‘You made me do it,’ is a refrain the killer repeats as he stabs or penetrates the flesh he desires and is repelled by.
After the trial by fire, Steve Burns returns to the apartment he shares with classical-music-loving Nancy (Nancy boy?), but he has become an exile from heterosex. He may even be carrying a pollutant, a contaminant. The Wizard of Oz imposes on Dorothy Gale the dictum that ‘home is where the heart is’. But Steve Burns is made keenly aware that once you leave, you can never go back home again, especially once your eyes have been opened to the outside world. Too much knowledge can be dangerous.
In the closing moments, it is suggested that Burns may have infected Nancy with wonder lust. As he shaves, she tries on his cast-off leathers. In mirror shades, leather cap and jacket, Nancy resembles the half-transvestite hustlers at the beginning of the film. In the end we’re left with Steve Burns contemplating his face in the bathroom mirror, his eyes a black void. In the recesses of his mind is the soundtrack of another life, the sound of footsteps approaching, keys jangling, high-energy disco pumping in gay bars and sex clubs. Cronus has won the battle this time. His son Zeus is cast out, to fight another day.
Fade to black.

Jonte 'Moaning'

2011-10-29T13:11:00.001+11:00

Forget Lady Gaga. This is Jonte, son of Grace Jones.

Media outings

2011-10-28T08:10:00.001+11:00

My essay 'Gays on Wheels' appears in the current issue of The Moose and Pussy magazine.

Leo's Fantasy

2011-10-27T09:15:00.000+11:00

'I always get an erection whenever I see a picture of a woman pissing into a man’s mouth.' Leo

Leo's Fantasy by Andres Serrano

In 1997 the provincial town of Melbourne, Australia, was host to one of those fly-by-night scandals that made international headlines and managed to send any civilized human being remaining in the city running for the hills.

Under intense pressure from the Catholic Church, and after a weekend of vandalism perpetrated on American photographer Andres Serrano’s poignant ‘Piss Christ’, the National Gallery of Victoria closed Serrano’s retrospective exhibition, which had only been open to the public for two days.

What seemed to be lost on the public, media and commentators alike was that the exhibition featured a far more provocative and sacrilegious image: ‘Leo’s Fantasy’.

Having spoken to Serrano some time before his arrival in Australia, I found out that the photograph was taken in the Netherlands after a certain ‘Leo’ confessed to Serrano’s assistant that he was aroused by images of a woman urinating in a man’s mouth. Ever the provocateur and adventurer, Serrano said, ‘Why not? We do requests.’ Serrano also mentioned the incident to the famous ‘Happy Hooker’, Xaviera Hollander, who blithely quipped, ‘No problem, Andres. I think I know two people.’

The resulting photograph is, to my mind, an unforgettable image, aesthetically pleasing and pornographic all at once. Had I seen it in a porn magazine I do not think it would have had the impact it did. But hanging in the brightly lit, pristine gallery space, attended by Melbourne’s chi-chi Chardonnay-sipping set, it seemed to violate every rule of human decorum and decency. In an exhibition hung with images of the Ku Klux Klan, decomposing bodies, sperm ejaculate and a man swallowing his own prick, that is saying something.

Other than the photographs of the decomposing dead, ‘Leo’s Fantasy’ was the only image that, apart from giving me the nervous giggles, utterly captivated me. It was very exciting. I was hypnotised by it and kept coming back to scrutinise the canvas.

The representation of ‘Leo’s Fantasy’ symbolises woman’s dominance over man in the sexual sphere and the fusion of popular culture and high art. In 1982, while visiting the Vatican in Rome I chanced upon Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiece, the Pieta. Combined in the image of the sorrowful, nurturing Virgin Mother giving up her son is the sensuous richness and the slender, wiry torso of Christ as he dies in her arms. With his eyes closed, no trace of pain remains in his dreamy face.

Remarkably, the Virgin is so young looking she could be his younger sister. The universal symbolism is obvious in Michelangelo’s remark that he drew in the love of stonecutter’s tools with his wet nurse’s milk to create this exquisite sculpture. It is not surprising therefore that he carved his signature onto the strap that crosses, and presses very tightly, the Virgin’s bosom. It is a supreme example of sacred and erotic art, showing the dominance of the Mother in Western psyche and the constant traffic between pornography and high art.

Andres Serrano by Nicolai Klimaszewski

It is startling therefore to stand before ‘Leo’s Fantasy’ and see the same dreamy look, the same trust in the man’s face as the dominatrix, straddling his face, squirts a fragile, translucent thread of urine into his thirsting mouth. Placed beneath her tight and tawny vaginal lips, he has become a receptacle for her waste, his sustenance. No icy cold drink for this guy. He wants the real thing straight from the hot mineral source of creation.

With its high contrasting warm skin tones and blue background, the picture manages to combine elements of trust, tenderness, brutality, humiliation and desecration. It seems to me a subversion, an anti-Pieta. As in the best S & M tradition, the faceless dominatrix, one hand on hip and the other harshly gripping the man’s hair, towers over her helpless submissive. Like animals that demarcate their territory by urinating on a designated spot, the dominatrix shows her supremacy by peeing in his mouth. In the viciousness of her stance, she is scornful, triumphant, unassailable, yet nurturing. He is her property, her toilet.

Her golden shower is his ablution. It is the immersion in her secret essence the acolyte lives for. As he drinks from the very wound that brought him into the world, he perhaps subconsciously knows that he still seeks the motherly ‘heats of the kind one does not talk about,’ as the poet Rimbaud observed during a meditation on the incestuous impulse.

Like ancient tribes who ate the organs of relatives or heroic enemies in the hope of absorbing their strength, by swallowing the dominatrix’s urine the postulant hopes to draw on her strength, but also, like a good slave, to please. He is wallowing in it. The more debasing his torment, the more he is assured of his mistress’s pleasure. There is something touching about the streams of urine that run down his neck, to gather in the hollow of his shoulder and stain the rock he leans against because you know he wants all of that good stuff. His order is: ‘No urine spilled!’

Junya Watanabe for Comme des Garcons Winter/Fall 2011

2011-10-27T09:03:00.000+11:00

The southern hemisphere is moving into its reluctant summer and these heavy woollens are completely inappropriate for what lies ahead, but it's hard not to stop and admire Junya Watanabe's fabulous jackets and trousers for my favourite design house.

Detail is everything...

And for when you want to make a splash down at Coles or Target...

Skin Deep, paintings by Anita Mertzlin

2011-10-20T09:16:00.000+11:00

Skin, a covering, a containment that defines the shape of the subject. A membrane that acts as a barrier between exterior and within. A defence, but also vulnerability. It can be cut, pierced, peeled and bruised, usually having the power to heal and restore itself, sometimes leaving scars. It is through skin that we perceive the passing of time in both ourselves and others.

Here then is an exhibition about some of life's journeys from the perspective of a still-life artist -- some personal, but all in some way connected to concepts of surface and skin.

The exhibition is on until 29 October 2011 at fortyfive downstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne.

Wolf Creek, Sonya Hartnett

2011-10-20T08:01:00.001+11:00

The title to Greg McLean’s 2005 film refers to Wolfe Creek Crater in Western Australia. The 300 000 year old meteorite crater measures 850 metres across and is one of the largest in the world. Situated on the edge of the Tanami Desert, the landscape is dry, harsh and a long way from anywhere else. Should you scream no one will hear except possibly the birds and the lonesome winds. And that’s exactly why Mick Taylor (John Jarratt) has made this his hunting ground; his lair is at a nearby abandoned mine. But in the outback ‘nearby’ could be five hundred kilometres away. It is easy to vanish and never be found. Enter three young tourists from Sydney, a broken-down car and the stranger who steps out of the dark to offer a helping hand — and a ticket to hell.

Such are the ingredients that make up Wolf Creek, the film. Fans of the genre are well used to them; they are eye-rolling cliches that were old when The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977) were made. What is new here, as novelist Sonya Hartnett points out in her new book about the film, is the introduction of the Australian landscape and notions of malevolent mateship.

MacLean, Hartnett argues, uses these tropes to tap into urban Australia’s worst fears about the dry interior. White settlers had an ambiguous relationship with the outback from the start. Far too many explorers vanished never to be seen; and now we have Ivan Milat and Bradley John Murdoch, lone men who, like the innocuously named Mick Taylor, rise out of the pitiless land to rain terror on the heads of the unwary.

At first I was surprised Hartnett chose to write about this film; surely there are better Australian films to write about. On closer inspection, however, it made sense. Violence or the threat of violence is always immanent in her work. Uncanny personages predominate -- think of Thursday's Child and you will see what I mean. Her body of work, I have argued elsewhere, is composed of novels that could be labelled ‘Australian Gothic’. In the introduction to this book, she notes that ‘Australian Gothic … is not a perfect fit. It wants to be called something simpler, reflective of the sullen blandness of its heart. Something scornful, to mute the arrogance. Something like two-bit antipodean horror. And so to Wolf Creek.’

'Two-bit horror' is a good description for Wolf Creek. It is below par horror; nowhere near as effect as Lake Mungo (2008) and Triangle (2009) for instance. Yet Hartnett is convinced otherwise and she does an effective job in convincing the reader. In one of the book’s finest moments, she uses memories of a childhood visit to a holiday farm to set the scene not only for an understanding of her own novels but also for the kind of creature that haunts Wolfe Creek Crater. It’s a chilling observation about the national character, one that is borne out in films such as Wake in Fright (1971). Another fine moment comes when Hartnett takes a break in her scene-by-scene breakdown of the film to look at the quiet subtleties and the careful layering of image that for her make the film a superior product. Also explored are the ethics and morality of using real-life events to tell a fictional story.

Hartnett obviously sees more in Wolf Creek than I do. It has to be admitted that her sharp prose, dry humour and careful reading of character and scene almost convince. Ultimately though the film is too bland for me, too much on the surface. There is not enough delving into character and motivation — or maybe there is and we should simply blame the baleful influence of landscape. Nor, in my view, is the film’s mood as fully realised as it is in say Wake in Fright and The Proposition, the latter being a remarkable film about the nature of violence released the same year as Wolf Creek. Like all good criticism, however, Hartnett’s book entices the reader to return to the film and to see it with new eyes. I was tempted. Then I remembered the scene where Mick Taylor cuts Liz Hunter’s spine and thought that maybe Walt Disney’s Snow White is a better option. Even so, we have Wolf Creek 2 to look forward to.

Karma Collective 9

2011-10-14T08:08:00.000+11:00

There's a very ebullient, spiritedly argued piece about Asian steam-punk at Jay Kristoff's blog. It's called Calling Bollocks and you must read it, even if like me you don't give a fig about steam-punk. The point of the piece is good, strong, engaging story telling. Not giving a damn about genre and its varied expectations but going along because the story thrills you to the core -- it's what I've been arguing for years with editors and publishers who tell me they don't know how to read fantasy or horror manuscripts. I just say 'Read it and if you like the story, if it's well crafted and the characters grab you, then it's good.' There is no other criteria.

Talie Helene came across a variation on this at a conference. It seems an avid male genre reader lumped all women genre writers in the one bag and thought they were interchangeable. Talie Helene is Kirstyn McDermott and vice versa. Talie responds eloquently in The Writer & the Critic & the Profile of Women in SpecFic.

Die Laughing

2011-10-13T08:02:00.000+11:00

I have a love-hate relationship with comedy. It’s not that I don’t get comedy or that I don’t have a sense of humour. Quite the opposite. It’s just that, more often than not, I am serious. Or try to be. By the same token, I am an absurdist who sees the ridiculous in everything, even the most appalling and horrific situations. This often results in accusations of bad taste and ill judgement. But I can’t help it. The minute people get earnest, my mind veers towards farce. You could say I fully subscribe to the adage that laughter is the only response to life. I also believe that absolutely nothing is sacred in comedy. It’s open slather. Holocaust? Bring it on. Child abuse? Give it to me!

Even so, there is a part of me that shies away from laughter. There’s something about the action that is frightening. A little voice always hovers in the back of my mind, reminding me that he who laughs now will cry later. I’ve no idea where that comes from, but there you have it… Laughter is followed by guilt and expectations of punishment. A psychologist would make a good meal out of that. For the moment, however, let’s just call it a paradox and move on.

This is a long-winded way of telling you that I have been watching a lot of comedy lately. Or rather I’ve made myself watch a lot of comedy because it’s the only way I know out of an impasse. You see, I’ve had a two rejections for short stories I submitted to magazines; and, to be perfectly honest, I am in utter despair. Rather than basking in my own mediocrity, I’d rather plunge a knife into my heart and ending it all, except my partner is away at the moment and I’m scared the two dogs will eat my face and I will be unrecognisable by the time he comes back to find a desecrated corpse, a la Jane ‘The poodle ate my face’ Mansfield.

So, while I’ve been contemplating suicide for the first time since I was seventeen, I stumbled across an article about Japanese (or was it Indian?) workers who attend half-hour laughter sessions every morning before work. One person starts laughing. That gets the rest of the group going and before you know it you have a cavalcade of hyenas. Once they’ve had a good guffaw they go to the office and get on with shuffling papers in a sane manner — and hopefully no one will bury a machete in the human resources girl’s head. There is a lot that can be said about the sad state of affairs that makes such a gathering a necessity, but that is outside the province of this piece.

The point I’m trying to make in this ramble is that I have been doing a similar thing at the end of each day. Because I’ve been in the dumps, I switch off the computer, make a martini or six and sit down to watch an episode of Bewitched or Frazier on TV. These two classic American sit-coms are the perfect antidote for stress — and they temporarily dampen the urge to don a hockey mask and stalk a magazine editor. They even make you see the folly in rampant pyromania. Almost...

Good witch Samantha and prissy old Frazier are good for a titter, but I needed a serious belly laugh after the second rejection. It made sense, of course, that I turn without hesitation to bumbling Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun. Yes, I’m afraid I have a very childish sense of humour. I mean I appreciate classic Hollywood screw-ball comedy as much as the next martini-sipping sophisticate. My default position, however, is the kind of juvenile comedy you see on The Three Stooges, The Munsters, and in movies like Naked Gun and Flying High. Okay, I’ll redeem myself by throwing in Marg Downey’s turn as the SBS announcer on Fast Forward and Rosalind Russell’s Auntie Mame. And who can forget Gina Riley’s Eleanor LaGore?

The great thing about depression is that I have discovered there is nothing like a good laugh. It’s so cathartic. Please excuse the crude simile but it’s like having a good shit or the mother of all orgasms. And just in case you think I’ve gone overboard let me remind you that comedy, laughter, was considered by Rabelais to be as close to scatology as you can get. Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin believed that early Russian humour worked by reminding the human of ‘humus’ — of soil and shit. Laughter starts as a burbling somewhere near the bowels. There is a good reason why we say ‘I pissed myself laughing.’

Laughter, I believe, reminds us of our basic side. It is an animalistic response to life. Laughter, like the sexual urge, is uncontrollable. When you laugh uncontrollably you are outside the boundaries prescribed by those who seek to control. That is why the church aligned comedy with sex and tried to curtail the very act of laughter — ironic given that religious doctrine is absurd and terribly funny.

I never really understood why some comics need to swear or talk about bodily functions until I sank into deep depression. Now I know. The basic ingredients of comedy are activities that connect to life as a whole: eating, defecating, urinating, copulating, giving birth, the size and shape of genitalia, and dying. This is how comic duos work. Abbott was brainy and Costello was bodily. Samantha was the brain in the family and her mother Endora was pure impulsive body. Jerry Lewis’s body harboured Dean Martin’s cooly observant brain. Moe was the brain and Curley the recalcitrant body. And Larry was… what the hell was Larry?

Following on from that, most comic routines turn hierarchies upside down. For instance, a fool can be a king for a day and a king is reduced to a pauper. A common prostitute can live a life of luxury and marry a rich guy who will respect her, and so on. Bakhtin’s theory of laughter is popular. It says that laughter is human, healthy and therapeutic (it stopped me from slitting my wrists on a cold spring night). Like a good horror movie, laughter is a safety valve, allowing us to let off steam. It is also popular. It is not snobbish. That’s why three isolated people sitting in a cinema will not laugh at a comedy. But a packed house will. Comedy says we are one and the same. We are in this together, come what may…

Media outings

2011-10-13T07:53:00.000+11:00

My essay 'Auschwitz Shoes' appears in the September issue of Centre News. It is published by the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne.

'If Memory Serves Me', an essay about the writing of Mother Land, is in the September issue of Writers Queensland magazine.

A poem from 'Perrier Fever' by Pete Spence (Grand Parade, 2011)

2011-10-08T09:17:00.000+11:00

there is a mountain of solitude on the hill
occasionally it comes to us in a moment of eagerness
we find little peace under the avalanche
and would like to push it all upward
away from the pressing urgency of noise
the grit we bathe in
and then one day perhaps
through pumice suds
frosted obsidian windows ajar
the panel of sky
the chalky turmoil
we call "the light of day"
we see
THIS WAY UP
stenciled
near the summit of the hill!

Hamlet As Nietzsche’s Dionysiac Man

2011-10-06T12:44:00.001+11:00

Hamlet’s actions and motivations have either been compared to the ‘unnatural’ drives of Oedipus towards his mother, or he has been charged with the adolescent’s inability to navigate his way, in mature fashion, through the dense forest of choices pressed upon him during the course of his ordeal in the dim corridors of Elsinor.

These interpretations miss the deeper metaphysical undertow of the themes in Shakespeare’s great play. Not surprisingly, Nietzsche in his famous dialogue, The Birth of Tragedy, cuts straight to the chase when he pinpoints Hamlet’s dilemma, or rather inaction, to his awakening into Dionysiac truths denied the rational mind.

For Nietzsche, Dionysiac ecstasy while ‘abolishing the habitual barriers and boundaries of existence, actually contains … a lethargic element into which all past personal experience is plunged.’

When the individual returns to the mundane, he sees reality as ‘repellent’. For Dionysiac Hamlet, catapulted into his trance by the extremity of his situation, the curtain of everyday existence has been torn asunder. Like Ray Milland’s The Man With X-Ray Eyes, the vast daemonic forms of the cosmos Hamlet perceives on the periphery of the rational mind drive him insane. The door to the material world has been forever closed to him, but neither is he of the intangible world. He is cursed to linger in the empty corridors between worlds. In effect, as Nietzsche states, he has ‘truly seen to the essence of things, [he has] understood, and action repels [him]; for [his] action can change nothing in the eternal sense of things’.

Fear of nature abounds in Hamlet, the random, inexplicable horrors of life, the shattering of illusions. These themes are ever-present in Western art and are dear to modern writers and filmmakers. Like E. M. Forster’s mysterious Marabar Caves, which render Mrs Moores speechless in A Passage to India, and Hitchcock’s Mrs Brenner who is incapable of words after witnessing nature’s uncompromising barbarism in Dan Fawcett’s pecked-out eyes in The Birds, once Dionysiac initiates have seen beyond the ‘veil of illusion’, words and actions are more than useless; they are obsolete because there is nothing left to say or do. At this point one either regresses to a pre-existent state, like Edgar Allan Poe’s Gordon Pym, or renounces the society of men.

Life depends on an illusion of order. That’s why the shattered crockery unhinges Hitchcock’s Mrs Brenner after the birds descend on her well-ordered house. When she can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again, she becomes an invalid, retreating to the security of her bed—another womb.

Likewise with Hamlet, the chaotic universe of impulses swirling beyond his control and comprehension kill his desire for action because, Nietzsche reminds us, ‘action depends on a veil of illusion’. Hamlet is no longer a man of action; he may not even be a man. In fact, Lady Macbeth’s taunt to her equivocating husband may well be addressed to Hamlet: ‘Are you a man?’

Hamlet of the abyss may well be the first existentialist hero who has been so affected by the ‘horror and absurdity of existence’. He, in turn, bequeaths it to an entire post-World War I generation. Think of Conrad’s Kurtz screaming ‘the horror! The horror!’ at the end of Heart of Darkness and you are not far from Brian De Palma’s Body Double, which ends with the voyeuristic antihero, who has seen too much, perilously teetering between a raging torrent and an open grave. Out of this chaos, Nietzsche points out, is born art – for only through the alchemy of art, the sublime illusion of art, can the horror and the absurdity of existence be tamed and redeemed.

Karma Collective 8

2011-10-01T11:00:00.000+10:00

How and where does the author draw inspiration? This is a perennial question asked by many aspiring writers. It's a difficult question because there is no one answer. It's different for everybody. Most of my ideas, for instance, come while I am asleep. I usually wake up at 2.30 a.m. with a sentence, a paragraph or a cast of characters running through my head. For Paul Burman inspiration struck one harrowing morning in northern Greece. The problem is he is still Searching for the Story that may lie buried within a harrowing real-life event.

As a writer I spend a lot of time either sitting at the keyboard or walking around in a dreamy haze. People think I am unhappy. Truth is when I am in the middle of a project, such as I am at the moment, my waking hours go into thinking of ways to make this or that scene work, how to build that pitch, how to approach this bit of dialogue. I have one tippy toe in the real world and a foot and half in my imaginary world. It's true: most of the time I am misery guts because I am trying to jump over one hurdle or another. Some days I think I will never be happy again. In short, I am distracted. There but not really there. Then I sit at the keyboard, like I did for two days this week, and everything flows out in perfect harmony. I am blissed out and totally happy to pour out an extra-dry gin martini at five to celebrate the day. Louise Cusack knows how that feels. That's why she wrote Writers, Happy for No Reason.

Fashionisto

2011-09-29T09:36:00.001+10:00

Rick Genest, my favourite undead person, is on the cover of Schon magazine! This image proves once again that inventiveness and creativity does not always come from galleries. It comes, as it always has, from fashion designers, stylists and models.

If there is any doubt in your mind about that, have a look at this Grace Jones retrospective, which coincides with the release of her new album Hurricane Dub.

John Harwood: The Ghost Writer

2011-09-29T08:53:00.000+10:00

When John Harwood burst onto the scene in 2004 with his first novel, few could have predicted his unmitigated world-wide success. Yet that is exactly what happened with The Ghost Writer. The auspicious debut was followed in 2009 by the equally acclaimed The Seance. By all accounts it was a remarkable arrival for a man who was almost sixty years old. The Seance is a modern take on the penny dreadful thrillers of the Victorian era. It was unputdownable and thoroughly enjoyable; each time I picked it up I felt like a kid huddling down on a rainy night with his favourite book. I was so impressed that I rushed out to buy its predecessor.

The Ghost Writer is a series of stories within a story. As each tale unfolds, the protagonist Gerald Freeman is led closer to a horrifying family secret and his own doom. To say more about the plot would be to spoil things for the reader.

I had very little sympathy for Gerald. He is the kind of sheltered mummy’s boy who gives in to romantic delusions all to easily and very nearly gets his comeuppance. If he’d shown a bit of common sense and been familiar with his Henry James and Charles Dickens, he would have been instantly alerted to his destiny by the names of the two women who guide him through the course of the narrative and yet remain invisible. An alert reader will know very quickly what is going on and what type of trap Gerald is unwittingly walking into. What remains is the outcome.

Altogether there are four ‘fictional’ stories arrayed through Gerald’s narrative. Each one reflects on his family history and current state of mind in ways that is uncanny. The tales were written long ago by Viola Hatherley, an old woman who obviously had her eyes and ears open and wished to convey to future generations the wickedness that can spring to life in families. The problem for me was that after the first couple of stories they ceased to interest me. One of them, ‘The Revenant’, is too long. By the time I finished reading it, I’d forgotten where we were up to in Gerald’s life. I knew I was hopelessly lost when I began to confuse the characters in Viola’s stories with the characters in Gerald’s real life. The unfortunate outcome is that Viola’s stories hijack the narrative from Gerald and, beyond a certain point, the stories are not that interesting. Had they been shorter, more compact and focussed, say like an M R James tale, they would have worked in tandem with Gerald’s narration, one adding to the tension of the other. As it happens they end up battling for ground and end up in a no-man’s land. In the end neither wins. I lost interest in the book long before the end and persisted only because I held out hope it would improve. The climax in the old house is gripping but even there we are let down by a plot point that should have had more screen-time, shall we say.

As I say, far more successful is The Seance. It’s tighter, more compact and therefore more suspenseful and ultimately more thrilling than its predecessor. The plot, once again, focusses on strong female characters. They are the pistons that drive the engine and underpin, in this case, male weakness and avarice. Once again, the less you know the better. Aside from pointing out the story involves a mysterious mansion and a medium who is used for nefarious ends, I won’t say more. The whole is couched in a touching love story that highlights humanity over sensation. What is worth saying is this: Harwood truly understands the subtleties, shifts and nuances that go into the making of a suspense story. It is this that makes The Seance so cosily familiar and yet so very enjoyable.

Much has been made of the fact that Harwood revives the traditional ghost story made popular by M R James and Algernon Blackwood. This is true to some extent. The remark also shows a lack of understanding of James’ and Blackwood’s work. Working with the short story, theirs is an compact yet rich body of work. They understood that an effective ghost story is a matter of brevity and control. It can’t tarry for long. It must be short, sharp and quick, like a sudden shock and its aftermath. That’s one reason why Susan Hill’s ghost stories work so brilliantly. As a novelist, Harwood’s canvas is larger, broader. He is an elegant writer and yet his greatest talent is as a kind of literary magpie; he picks the eyes out of the gothic novel. Anyone who is familiar with the ghost story and popular Victorian novels will be delighted and even alerted to plot permutations by the many nods and echoes in The Ghost Writer and The Seance. And yet you couldn’t accuse Harwood of mere plunder. He’s too fine a writer for that. He belongs to that cadre of literary authors who delight in the ghost story and the possibilities the genre affords. His common ground is Henry James with a dash of Varney the Vampire.

Karma Collective 7

2011-09-24T09:18:00.001+10:00

My friend Marc McBride loves zombie movies. But, aside from Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Soavi's Dellamore Dellamorte, I don't understand their appeal. All that sitting up, shuffling, moaning, groaning and ravenous munching. I'm like that first thing in the morning before my Turkish coffee. Why would I pay to watch someone else do it? Cameron Rogers has obviously given the subject more thought than I have and came up with what appears to me an interesting reading of the genre and why zombies keep bursting from their graves. Take a peek at Zombies: There's a reason you like them and you'll see what I mean. Though I can't quiet come at Fight Club as a zombie movie.

Meanwhile the intriguing Talie Helene looks at the ups and downs of the blogging phenomenon in Sunday Morning Blood Jet Blogging. She's as ambivalent about it as I am.

And here is Cameron's very clever breakdown of why Fight Club is a zombie movie: Zombies: The first rule of Fight Club is, well, brains.

Treaty, Yeah

2011-09-23T09:28:00.000+10:00

The first fact I learned about Australia when I was a boy in Turkey was that the distant continent was occupied by black-skinned people. They were, my teacher told me, the first Australians and they had lived there for many thousands of years. Soon after, a relative who migrated to Melbourne wrote to tell us another astounding fact: A long fence separates the red continent in two, he wrote. Whites live on one side and blacks on the other, and the two never meet. If you get close to the fence, blacks through spears and kill you.

I tell this story because it shows the oppositions that exist in this country about race relations: acceptance on the one hand and denial on the other. Sometimes both exist in the one mind. This ambivalence, the yawning chasm between the two factions, is a breeding ground for hopelessness and apathy. The situation is untenable and it makes having a worth-while debate about current moves to write Aborigines into the constitution almost impossible. It’s even more difficult to convincing the average Australian to give a damn. And yet it’s something that must happen if the country is to move ahead with a semblance of self-respect.

How is it possible to build a nation on democratic principles, one that acknowledges and supports basic human rights, and not acknowledge in your body of fundamental principles the first occupants of your country? It’s even more shocking that two sections of the constitution make it allowable to discriminate on grounds of race.

The point of the current debate, such as it is, is to whip up enough public enthusiasm and support that will allow lawmakers to write a preamble to the constitution that acknowledges the first Australians.

Why is a debate necessary? It’s a no-brainer. Aborigines were here first and they ought to be written into the constitution as such. It’s as simple as that. Any other option is racist and criminal. Are we South Africans? Are we Israelis? I certainly hope not. Because if we belong to that noxious company we have no right to preach human rights to China.

It takes a referendum to alter the constitution, I hear you say. But honestly, I can’t see the Australian people stepping up to the plate. Too comfortable. Too apathetic. Too ignorant and too dismissive of Aborigines. An entire race has been put in the too-hard basket and is about to be tossed down the well.

Politicians must lead in this matter. If that sounds unconstitutional, let me say this: Sometimes it takes a politician to show the people the right way. No debates. No votes. Just change the damned thing and put an end to constitutionally backed racism. But where is the politician who will take on this onerous task and make it her own? He or she does not exist in this country. Too cowardly and too busy kowtowing to their masters, big business.

Now, let us suppose 2013 has come and gone and by some miracle indigenous people have been written into the constitution. Hot on the heels of that, sections 25 and 51 have been struck out. No more discrimination on racial grounds. What next?

Kangaroo, by Bobby Barrdjaray Nganjmirra

The next step is to teach Aboriginal histories within the larger context of white Australian history. Australians of all stripes are woefully ignorant about the people they share this country with. We make positive noises about dot paintings and Dream Time but aside from that we know fuck all. And care even less. Most of us know nothing about the differences that exist between Aboriginal cultures, traditions, languages and histories. We just lump them all in one basket and go ‘Oh, they’re all Kooris’ or quickly and awkwardly acknowledge the traditional owners of this land before moving to serious business.

This attitude makes it easier to distance and discriminate against a people. Ignorance breeds contempt and fear. It dehumanises and makes it easier to shove some one aside in the race towards dubious progress. Education is the key.

That is why I say Aboriginal presence and cultures ought to be hardwired into the DNA of every school child. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders enrich this land and every human being that lives here. Quite aside from that, we can’t for one moment forget that they are human beings who deserve respect, consideration, compassion and to have autonomy on their own soil. We cannot afford to treat them like Palestinians.

My family came to Australia in 1971. Three years later I became a citizen. Even so, I did not feel I could rightly call myself an Australian until 2008 when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd extended an apology to Aborigines. That symbolic gesture was a defining moment for me, a turning point. Despite what cynics say, its effects are unquantifiable because they touch the core of what it means to be human. Rudd’s impassioned, beautifully worded speech did not change everyday living conditions for most Aborigines — healthcare and education are still appalling — but it did acknowledge their suffering in the hands of whites and offered a new way forward. It gave people back some pride and dignity. Changing the constitution to acknowledge Aborigines as first inhabitants of this country and getting rid of sections 25 and 51 is the next step. Every thinking Australian ought to support it and encourage politicians to do so as well.

Sleeping in the Forest: Stories and Poems by Sait Faik

2011-09-22T10:04:00.000+10:00

Sait Faik

Who is this man Sait Faik, and why is he still revered in Turkey today? What is the immortal legacy that manages to chime across the centuries and speak to us with such unerring clarity?

When Faik died in 1954, he left behind a glittering, serpentine body of work that assured his place in the Turkish literary pantheon. Although he also wrote poetry and journalism, he is best remembered for his eccentric narratives and short stories about people who, like Faik himself, lived peripheral lives in the glorious contradiction that is Istanbul. This, together with the fact that Faik stole the flame of literature from lofty heights and brought it to the streets in a vernacular language, assured his reputation as a visionary of the pen that manifests once in a generation and lights the way for the future. He was, if you like, the Orhan Veli of the short story. He spoke of everyday feelings and experiences to the voiceless proletariat. It is no wonder, Istanbulus gather every May on Burgazadasi, Faik’s island home in the Marmara, to commemorate his short but productive life.

In Sleeping in the Forest professor and poet Talat S. Halman, the man who has probably done more to introduce Turkey’s literary heritage to the world, brings together a representative selection of Faik’s work from a variety of disciplines. Here the reader will encounter short stories, poetry, court reportage and part of a novella. It is an impressive, often surprising and always beguiling collection. It is hoped that aside from bringing ever more readers to sit at Faik’s feet, critical discourse will at last recognise the revolutionary nature of this extraordinary man’s work and accord him the privilege of international recognition.

After reading this collection, a reader’s first observation must be that, like many of the greats, Faik was ahead of his time. His achievements in the elliptical, highly personalised and slyly shifting narratives he produced can only be recognised and properly understood in hindsight. The reader begins to see that, as a homosexual, Faik crossed boundaries and challenged conventions in his personal life as well as on the page. As we will see, he was a gender bender as much as he was a genre bender.

Faik's island home in the Marmara, Burgazadasi

As Süha Oguzertem’s informed introduction points out, Faik did not subscribe to generic forms of writing. Nor did he opt for creating socially acceptable literature. He started with a clean slate and made it up as he went along. To begin with, he will often wilfully appear in his own stories; he might be the detached narrator, a distant observer, the active participant, and sometimes he might reminisce about a deeply affecting experience or relate a story he has heard second hand. As in lyric poetry, it is often not clear whether we are listening to the author’s actual voice or a projection, a persona. Some readers have found this style irritating and confusing, and have laid charges of carelessness and laziness against Faik. But this seemingly anarchic style hides a febrile and flexible mind, one that is in complete control of every subtle shift in nuance. He knows exactly what he is doing. Those that make their peace with this erratic style and persist with Faik will find him bracing. They will soon see that the flouting of conventions are a means to a lexical and temporal liberation that has the potential to bring the reader closer to subjective experience.

Faik often reports directly from life, inserting himself into the picture, stepping in and out at will, gliding silently like a camera, only to obstreperously intrude, or shift tense in the middle of a sentence and speak to one his characters. When you take all this into account, you realise that, in many ways, he was the first gonzo journalist. He preceded the new journalism pioneered by Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson in the 1960s by almost three decades, while bringing new immediacy and modernity to the short story. If a writer in an Anglophone country had achieved half as much, his praises would have been trumpeted from the hills. Yet few in the west are even aware of the name Sait Faik, let alone know about his innovations in fiction. Let us hope that this excellent collection with its insightful introductory essays will remedy that criminal oversight.

In the end, however, what remains is the legacy. Humanity, deep feeling, and compassion were hardwired into Sait Faik’s sensibility and it manifests in his every utterance. Whether it be a sensual reverie in a forest, an Armenian fisherman coming home late at night, a Greek girl trying to make the best of a tough situation, or urchins eking a life on mean streets, it is the poetic beat in each syllable that tweaks the heart strings and stimulates the mind. Faik loved Istanbul, a city that housed the world in all its varied complexity. His stories pay tribute to that diversity even as they cast a jaundiced eye toward the mindset that brought its demise. When you read Faik, you read a true original. What comes through is a man who loved people more than flags. He was a utopian visionary whose democratic principles manifest in a tragicomic song about people with dirt under their fingernails. The transforming magic of his waywardly meticulous prose makes them and their city shine.

Turkish techno

2011-09-18T18:23:00.000+10:00

Okay, boys and girls, it's time to top up that lychee martini, strip off and pump up the volume. Long live Turkey.

Man on Wire

2011-09-15T09:46:00.000+10:00

In the early hours of 7 August 1974, Philippe Petit strung a wire across the two towers of the World Trade Centre in Manhattan and for forty-five minutes walked back and forth across it. Throngs gathered beneath to watch and applaud the brilliant feat. It was, in the words of his girlfriend Annie Allix, ‘astounding, beautiful’. The world rejoiced to see it even as authorities gathered to arrest the man whose dream it was to ‘own’ the towers before they were even built. Petit read about the proposal to erect the towers while growing up in a French town. One day, he thought, I will traverse the space between these buildings as though on a cloud. The amazing thing is that he did just that.

Philippe Petit had his accomplices but none of it would have come to fruition without his monomania and dedication to a single purpose. It seems his life was an arrow that led him to a collision with the now legendary towers — the towers that almost thirty years later would be the stage for a horrific and mind-boggling acts of vandalism.

Made in 2008, seven years after the twin towers fell to terrorist rage, the makers of Man on Wire are aware of the symbolic value the buildings carry and the implications behind Philippe Petit’s accomplishments. Whether they intend to or not, they create a compelling link between Philippe Petit and Osama bin Laden. In many ways, the film is a delicate tightrope act that could at any moment teeter into a void of random and contradictory meanings and implications. None more so than this: Man on Wire might be about Philippe Petit, but Osama bin Laden is an invisible presence in every frame. It is this that makes James Marsh’s fine documentary so forceful and, in the end, so affecting. But perhaps Marsh’s finest achievement is that he rescues the twin towers and redeems a horrific act by bring to mind a fundamental truth: the human imagination that dreams up horror is also also capable of transcendent beauty.

Watching Man on Wire is a disconcerting experience. The viewer located in a post 9/11 world is privileged with knowledge that is not available to Petit in 1974. This information lends the Frenchman’s innocence and optimism a disquieting air, even as it turns the towers into a house haunted by an as yet unrealised atrocity. Every shot of the twin towers, the empty stairwells, the descent into the basement car park, the erection of the girders, a plane flying overhead, echoes with what we know will happen on a fateful morning in 11 September 2001. You feel like a seer looking into a future you would much rather not know. In that sense, the towers act as a magnet for opposing forces: creation and destruction; beauty and ugliness; joy and rage. Art and politics.

If you could make a documentary about 11 September 2001 from Osama bin Laden’s point of view, it would follow the same trajectory as Man on Wire. There is the charismatic visionary, the fixation on the World Trade Centre, the desire to conquer it, the intricate planning, the reconnaissance, the gathering of accomplices and information, the lies and deceptions, the artfully forged papers, the tensions between members of the group, the rehearsals, the training, the trial runs and observations, the disciples willing to sacrifice themselves on the altar of one man’s dream. Following a night of tense anticipation, it all comes together in the early stages of the morning as people go to work. An awe-inspiring spectacle erupts in the sky and brings the city to a halt. In the word’s of the policeman who arrested Philippe Petit, ‘It was something you knew you would not see again. A once in a life time opportunity.’ And so it was with 9/11.

Philippe Petit arrested in New York.

The principle that links Petit and bin Laden is that they are both performance artists, daring visionaries who dreamed of the impossible and made it happen before the eyes of an astounded world. The difference between them, the yawning chasm, is in the response each man elicits from the viewer. Petit’s walk on a wire inspires awe and joy, while bin Laden’s aeroplanes bring paroxysms of fear and horror. It’s tempting to say that these opposing states turn one man into an angel and the other into a demon; but, really, they are different facets of the same coin. One walks on clouds, while the other buries the living. They are the same yet oppositional forces that dwell, as in a Grimm’s fairy tale, in two ephemeral towers that mirror one another. Petit’s wire is the umbilical cord that links one man to the other as much as it links the two pulverised buildings.

When Man on Wire ended, I leaped on You Tube and watched footage of the twin towers’ inexorable slide to the ground. It’s something I’ve not been able to do since it happened a decade ago. Monstrous as this may sound, I found myself admiring both men. It takes courage, daring and vision to do what Philippe Petit did. The same courage, daring and vision drove Osama bin Laden into attacking his enemies in such spectacular fashion. No matter how odious his crimes, we must admit that it takes a brilliant strategist to think of such a thing and pull it off so successfully. The big difference, as I say, is in the aftermath. The post-Petit world rejoiced to see man reach so very high and dazzlingly achieve; the human race bathed in his success. By contrast, bin Laden trails mourning in his wake and showers the rest of us with gore. If Man on Wire is about anything beyond its immediate subject it is man’s contradictory nature and the fine line that exists between creation and destruction.

Marithe + Francois Girbaud Fall/Winter 2011

2011-09-15T09:34:00.000+10:00

The southern hemisphere is moving out of its freezing winter months into spring, but I can't resist highlighting this truly wonderful collection from my favourite husband and wife team Marithe + Francois Girbaud. The best jacket I own and a pair of brilliant shoes come from them. I respond to their use of fabric, colour, shade and subtle use of detail to bring life and excitement to a garment.

Look in particular at the jackets and vests in these pictures, and also at the shoes and socks. They're really quite something and despite it being the wrong season, I'm tempted to rush out and buy some new clothes right now!

Here's werewolf boy with a terrific jacket; check out the socks.

I'm not really into denim but the top cranks my engine; how good are the shoes?

Karma Collective 6

2011-09-15T09:17:00.000+10:00

When I still worked for a major publisher, there was talk about what editors could do to enhance the electronic versions of our books. People talked about adding interviews with the author, a chapter from the next book, that sort of thing. It was all rather innocent and naive and unimaginative, I thought. And then someone mentioned adding a soundtrack to a novel. By that I mean footsteps, wind in the trees, thunder, screams ... a fart, that kind of thing. Someone even suggested a laugh track. This was admittedly for a particularly funny and gruesome gothic novel I had edited.

I am at heart a traditionalist when it comes to the book and the word. I don't even like contractions and keep expletives to an absolute necessary minimum. When it comes to 'enhanced books', it has to be said I don't approve of intermediaries. It's like having a pontiff come between a worshipper and his god. To me a soundtrack interferes with an author's direct communication with a reader. It also short circuits a reader's imagination and therefore stops an individual's total immersion in a text. In short, book soundtracks are a gimmick invented by desperadoes keen to rake in more bucks.

Anyway, this is all by way of saying Louise Cusak puts the argument very elegantly indeed at 'Enhanced features for e-books'. I don't think they are enhanced features at all; they're a hindrance and ought to be done away with. And the person who came up with the idea ought to be stoned in the city square and their vital organs sold to the highest bidder.

While I am being a good Samaritan, may I direct your attention to Lucy Sussex's blog where she succinctly quotes Fergus Hume on crime writing. He makes a compelling case and I later thought maybe this is why my beloved Agatha Christie is so easily dismissed by a great many literary critics.

Failings of a health-care system

2011-09-09T15:05:00.000+10:00

Life is a shop of horrors. We can never be sure when an atrocity will be doled out and upon whom it will be visited. We can only wait and see. More often than not we are taken unawares and wonder at life’s random cruelty.

I am philosophical in the face of natural disasters, such as flood and earthquake. But I am confounded when man is cruel to man. I’m not speaking about tyrants like Chauchesku, Assad and Gaddafi, amoral cretins who turn on their own people and perpetrate astounding cruelties in order to hold on to power. Callousness is in the nature of a tyrant; we expect no less from them. But how to explain acts of cruelty committed by normal men and women in every day life? I’ve been plagued by this question since yesterday.

A friend called to tell me that his partner had had a small stroke. Knowing that the patient was covered by private health insurance, he was rushed to a nearby private hospital. On arrival the insurance company refused to support the claim because the patient suffered from a pre-existing condition. Had the fine print been consulted, they were told, they would have known that. And because he was not covered by private health insurance in this instance, a man who had just suffered a stroke was turned away by a private hospital. He was then driven to a nearby public hospital and instantly admitted.

This makes my blood boil. I find it difficult to comprehend. So much so that my brain almost short circuited when I heard it: A man who suffered a stroke was told by a private hospital to go elsewhere.

The brain reels from such a horror. You hear it and you think: How is this possible in a city like Melbourne? What sort of a scum-bag and low-life would do such a thing? The doctors and nurses and receptionists who committed this brutish act must have ice running through their veins. They are reptiles who failed the first test of civilisation: Compassion.

I have been working under the misguided impression that hospitals, doctors and nurses exist to care for the sick and ailing. In a civilised society, a person’s well-being comes first. Other considerations are secondary. It seems I am mistaken. Insurance companies will evade their responsibilities as easily as private hospitals. To my mind this is no different to being assaulted on the street and no one coming to your aid. Only it’s far worse because a doctor has sworn to care for the sick.

This cruel disregard for life is a symptom of rampant capitalism and its hand-maiden, amorality. It’s how the Australian government can play Russian roulette with the lives of refugees and how coal seam gas mining is allowed. Today hospitals don’t exist to care for the sick; they exist to turn a profit. And like any cold-blooded capitalist endeavour there is no telling how low they will sink to satisfy their imperatives. Obviously, the hour of the wolf is upon us.

'Zombie Boy'

2011-09-08T09:30:00.001+10:00

Given that the theme this week is horror in all its shapes and forms, I thought I'd post these wonderful images of 'Zombie Boy' (aka Rick Genest). These were taken in February for a Thierry Mugler fashion shoot, as styled by the remarkable Mr Nicola Formichetti.

In high school, while my friends lusted after Farrah Fawcett-Majors, I secretly dreamed about going out with The Creature from the Black Lagoon; I thought he looked so spiffing in his black rubber suit and he had a way with his flippers. Had I known about Zombie Boy, I might have been tempted to be unfaithful. He brings out the inner Goth in me.

And so, this post is for all the Goths in my life. You know who you are...

Victorian Premier's Literary Awards

2011-09-08T08:03:00.002+10:00

This week I attended a function at Melbourne's wonderful Regent Theatre in Collins Street to celebrate the announcement of the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. It was a particularly thrilling occasion for me because, aside from being Laura Harris's date, two of the books I edited at Penguin were shortlisted in the young adult category: Doug MacLeod's The Life of a Teenage Body-snatcher and The Three Loves of Persimmon by Cassandra Golds. Both novels are discussed here.

Cassandra Golds

As it turned out, a visibly nervous Cassandra took out the big prize and there was champagne all round. I look forward to your next novel, Cassandra.

2 Horror Movies

2011-09-08T07:51:00.001+10:00

I saw a couple of terrific horror movies this week. Next Door is from Norway; Feng Shui is from the Philippines and has been called the scariest horror movie to come out of that much-maligned cinema. To my sensibility, Next Door is the most intriguing and the one that succeeds best as a psychological thriller. Feng Shui is throughly enjoyable but follows a predictable haunted-house path. What makes it interesting is the subtext.

It’s difficult to talk about Next Door without giving away too much. The least you know about it the better. I will, however, say this: it opens with a break up. Ingrid dumps John because of maltreatment. After she packs her belongings and leaves, John is coerced into helping his insistent neighbour Anne into moving a heavy piece of furniture in her next-door apartment. The problem is she wants it moved behind her door. John is sealed inside Anne’s apartment with Kim, a young woman who likes to play rough. Very rough.

Levels of sexual violence and frankness are exceeded and some sequences are difficult to watch. Performances are superb, particularly from Kristoffer Joner as John, but the thing that makes the film memorable is the way the director and writer Pal Sletaune cleverly uses corridors, glimpses through doorways, and an endless series of rooms with locked doors to represent a disturbed mind. You won’t have any trouble guessing what has happened. The journey is enjoyable if harrowing nonetheless. Critics who compare Next Door with David Lynch do the film a disservice. Sletaune’s film is simpler, more pared back and oddly more honest and therefore ultimately more moving than most of Mr Lynch’s impressive ouvre.

Feng Shui is a different kettle of fish altogether. Director Chito S Rono is not as accomplished as his Norwegian counterpart. His plot is a bit more wayward and possibly overworked, but he still manages to crank up the scares and make the hair stand as one nasty after another invades a cosy middle-class home.

Feng Shui is as hysterical as Next Door is underplayed. A family of four move into a gated community. The wife, Joy, finds a bagwa on a bus and takes it home. She hangs it above her back door to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck to her new home. Luck floods in but so does misfortune. It turns out the bagwa is cursed and Joy pays a heavy price for every bit of fortune that comes her way. As the death toll rises, Joy becomes ever more hysterical. Honestly, I haven’t heard an actress scream this much since Fay Wray in King Kong. My ears were bleeding by the end and I was glad when she lets off her final cri de coeur in the el-shocko-horror climax. But did the film really need a set-up for a sequel, Mr Rono?

As I said, what is interesting about Feng Shui is the subtext. Despite the Romero-inspired zombies and phantoms, the film is really an exploration of guilt in the Philippines’ newly risen middle-classes. The more money the Ramirez family makes, the more possessions they acquire and the more western they become, the more heavily they pay. Even high walls and armed guards cannot keep out the poverty that awaits them as they turn their backs on family values and tradition. That’s why the first few to die and invade the Ramirez home are menials. Joy and Inton may have plenty in the bank but they are impoverished in heart, mind and soul—at least he is and she too is on the way. The only way to avert evil is to reject good fortune and be content with what you have. It’s a reactionary, anti-capitalist message that put me in mind of the Indonesian film The Forbidden Door. There is also an element of xenophobia in the way the film literally places the blame at the foot of the ghost of a Chinese concubine.

All this makes for an interesting glimpse into a culture I know little about. The only thing that really bothered me is this: what did Joy and Dina see in the utterly repulsive Inton? They are both beautiful, intelligent and resourceful women. Surely they can do better for themselves. But maybe the Philippines, like Russia, lacks reliable men.

Karma Collective 5

2011-09-04T08:13:00.000+10:00

Who knows where certain elements that suddenly crop up in a book or working manuscript come from? Blind inspiration? Collective memory? The subconscious? I often wonder. Paul Burman touches on this often curious part of the creative process in The Green Man a.k.a. Leafy George. As a pagan, I remember being fascinated by Leafy George in Paul's excellent novel The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore. In this intriguing piece Paul conflates his creation with E M Forster's Howards End.

I will be perfectly frank: I've never really understood the fantasy genre. All those hairy people waving swords and riding scaly reptiles; magicians casting hockey spells. I just don't get it. So I guess I'm talking about quest fantasy novels. They just don't appeal to my sensibility. I love reading a strong horror and supernatural novel. But high fantasy... I just can't bring myself to be too interested. Having said that I do love reading fantasy stories that maintain one foot on a recognisable world and use that as a leaping off point. Stories like Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Elidor, The Owl Service, Red Shift and so on.

So I was immediately interested when I stumbled across this short piece by fantasist Michael Pryor. It's called Why I Write Fantasy. Take it away, Michael. Enlighten me...

Mother Land 2

2011-09-01T11:37:00.000+10:00

Okay, so I've been keeping this pretty much under wraps for the last three years. It's now time to unveil the sequel to my first book Mother Land. I resisted going down the well-trod path but ultimately I gave in to the many readers who begged me to to write about what happens to the family when they arrive in Australia.

Like the first book, the second instalment is a slightly fictionalised memoir. The big difference this time is that I am publishing under a pseudonym. The Vampire Dimitri is more honest about my true nature and what I get up to at night. It also goes into detail about us mad, impetuous ethnic people with olive skin and compelling eyes. I'm not in love with the cover. When the publisher first showed it to me I said, 'Look, I really can't see myself salivating over a buxom babe with lippy,' but he said this image will sell more copies so I gave in to his greater wisdom. Hope you enjoy it, guys!

Farewell to the Rainbow Warrior II

2011-09-01T09:27:00.003+10:00

This for Ross Buchanan

It’s often said that a hero is the shortest-lived profession on earth. True enough. Who remembers yesterday’s fleeting heroes? While Australia celebrates the latest national idol, a cyclist, a more significant figure has been largely overlooked: the Rainbow Warrior II.

That’s right, as of 17 August 2011, Greenpeace’s iconic war horse has been decommissioned. And it all happened with very little fanfare. Yet this earliest and most vital symbol of the burgeoning environmental movement ought to be remembered and celebrated. In an age where there is little difference between government and multinational corporations, the two incarnations of The Rainbow Warrior showed what can be achieved by hardcore determination and perseverance in the face of obstacles.

The Rainbow Warrior I was built in 1955 as a trawler named Sir William Hardy. It served the UK’s Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food until 1977. She was then acquired by Greenpeace and refitted for her true destiny: a fearless sea maiden who acted as a thorn in the side of governments and corporations for forty-four years. Her initial role was in leading the protest against seal and whale hunting. But it was her charge into nuclear testing that saw her riding the high wave.

In 1985 The Rainbow Warrior was in the Pacific campaigning against nuclear testing. In May of that year, she evacuated 300 Marshall Islanders from Rongelap Atoll, which had been polluted by radioactivity by American tests. Her subsequent journey to New Zealand to lead a flotilla of yachts against French nuclear testing at the Mururora Atoll brought her the fame and notoriety for which she is noted. Such was her status as a symbol of resistance that at midnight on 10 July 1985 she was blown up by French intelligence services. One activist lost his life and the perpetrators served a mere two years of a jail term. The trawler was damaged beyond repair and was scuttled off the coast of New Zealand to act as a dive wreck and artificial reef. From the ashes of The Rainbow Warrior I came a second ship named Rainbow Warrior. It is this ship that is currently retired.

As a twenty-four-year-old, I remember seeing The Rainbow Warrior on the news. At that time my environmental concerns were non-existent. But I had a sense of justice and kicking against the pricks. The Rainbow Warrior, with its trademark rainbow and peace dove on green hull, embodied those virtues. That mad old trawler was a potent symbol of resistance. That’s why I never believed it when opponents claimed the ship was powered by mad hippies who want things their way. The crew aboard The Rainbow Warrior I and II were, to my eyes, warriors themselves. They were small people with big dreams and even bigger cojones. They dared stand up to governmental and corporate interests. It really was a David and Goliath scenario and I was enormously impressed by the vulnerable-looking hull, pitching and tossing in the wild seas as it took on commercial whaling trawlers and warships.

The wooden dolphin Dave was in front of the bridge.

Times moves on and things change. It’s no longer 1985. The activist fervor and idealism of the 1970s has been transformed and the world is more corporatized than we could have envisaged. Even Greenpeace has changed. Rainbow Warrior II has now been handed over to Friendship (NGO). It will be turned into a floating hospital to provide vital healthcare for the people living in the coastal areas of Bangladesh — it’s a fitting journey for a true champion. Even so, I look forward to seeing Rainbow Warrior III rise from the ashes of its sister later this year.

Beauty and the Beast

2011-09-01T09:11:00.004+10:00

Jean Cocteau was a remarkable dream-maker and the kind of mystic seer rarely encountered in world cinema. I hesitate to call him a filmmaker because, although he made a handful of superb films, the appellation is too limiting for him. Jean Cocteau at his height was a Renaissance man who dabbled in anything that fueled his prodigious artistic output. Far from being a dilettante, he excelled at everything he touched. In his sixty years he painted, drew, sculpted, wrote, designed sets, and made five films that are classics. Cocteau’s name is often linked with the overused noun ‘genius’, but we cannot begrudge it in his case. By all accounts such was his talent that others willingly sacrificed themselves for the sake of his artistic vision.

Cocteau’s films are more about dream immersion, a hallucinogenic phantasmagoria that is akin to dreaming with your eyes open, than conventional cinematic narrative as it is understood today. Beginning with Blood of a Poet in 1930 and ending with Testament of Orpheus in 1960, he directed five outstanding films that imbue the craft with an aesthetic sensibility that is elevated to ecstatic levels. In his world anything is possible and nothing is denied. Such was the force of his imagination that he precedes David Lynch in the creation of unease and foreshadows David Cronenberg in new forms of body horror. In that sense, he was the first to show us that even horrible things have their own kind of beauty.

This is best observed in Beauty and the Beast (1946), the classic tale in which a ghastly exterior hides a noble soul. The film is a retelling of fairy tale that takes on an existential awe as one beautiful image after another cascades before the eyes of the audience to end in a joyous eruption, a cavalcade of tactile cinematography, inventive camera placement, sensuous editing and physical special effects. From start to finish, the film is an orgasmic outpouring that erupts across the screen in slow motion and leaves you feeling overjoyed.

The story is familiar and does not need retelling. All we need bring along, we are told at the start, is a child’s sense of wonder. And you will need it because the film takes many risks. It’s one thing for a modern adult audience to sit through a myth, but another to accept an unabashed fairy tale. Our age is far too cynical for the moral code of a fairy tale, and possibly even when the film was released in the post-war years its reception could not have been predicted. Cocteau would have been aware of this, which accounts for the playfully knowing opening sequence involving a clapper.

Beauty and the Beast works and the reason is this: Beauty might possess a moral rectitude that’s hard to take; and the Beast’s nobility might test our disenchantment, but they both have a down-to-earth peasant practicality that breaks down the guard and alleviates skepticism; the dialogue is very matter-of-fact. It’s surprising how much righteousness you can accept when the characters behave and talk like people who might steal your wallet.

This sober approach feeds into the film’s other strong point. Despite being set in a recognisably Christian age, the film is a pagan celebration in which inanimate objects possess a vital life force. Thanks to Henri Alekan’s cinematography, it’s easy to believe the forest is alive, that paths open and close of their own accord. Similarly, the rain and the wind that guide the unwary traveller to the Beast’s domain teem with unseen life, and even the very air is blessed with a voice; thanks to the production design by Christian Berard and Lucien Carre it’s no hard chore to believe in a universe governed by magic and that the corridors between worlds are free of nature’s laws.

Josette Day in Beauty and the Beast

When the film ends, individual scenes stand out. Beautiful Josette Day as she glides in slow motion through the Beast’s castle for the first time (her close-ups are a revelation of macquillage and lighting). The moonlit corridor with the billowing curtains. Beauty emerging from a crack in the wall. The watchful caryatids in the fireplace. The living candelabrum. The Beast smoking from every pore after a bloody kill. And of course the final sequence when Beauty and The Prince fly through the air in a discord of flowing garments and billowing clouds. Even the opening credits have their own charm.

The only problem I have with the film is that I can’t believe Beauty would chose a primped-up ponce like The Prince over the noble Beast. Both parts are played by Jean Marais, but Cocteau’s muse looks better in hairy mask and his voice is beautifully calibrated to capture every anguished note uttered by the pained creature. As The Prince you just want to tell him to wear less make-up. But this will not stop you from bathing in the film’s hypnotic rituals.

An Epic Tour of Life's History

2011-08-26T17:46:00.000+10:00

I saw a clever and moving video collage in Scientific American magazine today, and I wanted to share it with you. It's 13 minutes long so set aside some quiet time. Enlarge the image and turn up the volume; the soundtrack is remarkable.

Nang Nak (Miss Nak)

2011-08-25T14:02:00.002+10:00

Set in the lush jungles of Thailand, Nang Nak tells the story of Nak and her husband Mak. Mak goes to war and Nak dies during childbirth. When Mak returns many months later, Nak is there with her child, ready to welcome Nak back and go on living as normal. Only the villagers know the truth and those who cross Nak’s lovelorn yet vengeful spirit pay a heavy price. The ending is bloody and surprisingly moving.

Released in 1999, Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak was the most popular film to be made in Thailand. It won’t set the world on fire in terms of film-making but it will captivate those looking for something outside the bounds of Hollywood. Aside from the haunting imagery and strong sense of atmosphere, it has a story deeply informed by Buddhism animism and notions of ‘impermanence’. Man tangles with nature at is best and most vicious. One is not higher than the other; they are equals in a losing battle. You see this best in possibly the film’s most shocking scene, in which an old woman’s corpse is ripped apart by monitor lizards. The seasons and the vacillations of the natural world play a vital role in the story and the way the destiny of the two young lovers unfolds. In the end there is only submission to wheel of life and non-attachment. The lurid imagery and kinetic camera work create a sense of the force of elements even as they reinforce the idea of things moving on and never standing still.

When I was growing up in Turkey, popular legend had it if you looked between your legs you would see a ghost. Imagine my surprise when Mak does just that in a pivotal and brilliantly edited sequence — watch out for the snaking arm that reaches through the floorboards to grab a fallen lemon — and realises he’s been living a hideous lie. The horror is alleviated by the fact that Winai Kraibutr as Mak is a clothes-optional kind of guy.

Karma Collective 4

2011-08-25T08:44:00.005+10:00

Over at Vampires in a Sunburnt Country, author Jason Nahrung finds comfort where I can only find horror. 'Up the critique without a paddle' is about authors testing their work on a 'crit group' before presenting it to a publisher. I'd rather put my neck in a noose, but Jason derives much satisfaction from the process. I'm willing to concede, however, that he makes some good points.

One of my pet hates is the Oxford comma. If you don't know what that is, there is no reason why you should. It's an irksome comma placement that used to be the baine marie of my loife when I worked as an editor at Penguin Books. Seeing it in a sentence was like a knife stuck in my ribs, and I go to great lengths to avoid it when I write. For more information about the Oxford comma, visit the ever-reliable Patrick O'Duffy, who will inform and fill you with laughter: 'Who gives a fuck about the Oxford comma?'

And really I couldn't go past this gem about rotten reviews of famous books over at Larry Buttrose's blog.

Flannery O'Connor

2011-08-25T08:31:00.000+10:00

Flannery O'Connor

‘Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.’

So, with characteristic flair for character and setting Flannery O’Connor begins a tale in her particular style of American Southern Gothic. Present in this half paragraph are her trademarks: mordant humour, pathos, irony and a compassion that holds the proceedings from tilting excessively into the grotesque.

O’Connor’s short stories and two novels are primarily pieces of rural American observation about ignorance, race and religiosity. In all of the stories characters meet at the juncture of these three volatile roads and confront their own inner demons, whatever they may be. Her setting may have been limited but, like Emily Dickinson looking out her window in Amherst, O’Connor spied a variegated universe from her veranda. Perhaps because of her own battle with Lupus, there is a cool detachment and a pitiless, yet pitying, hawk’s eye at work as she soars over the isolated communities she depicts, exposing with a singular lack of sentiment the secret workings of the human heart and mind.

Evil, for O’Connor was not an abstraction. The evil in O’Connor’s stories, the bad things that people are capable of doing on a casual and everyday basis, resides within the human frame. It rises to the surface through chinks in the barely civilised armour when the inner core is somehow perverted or twisted toward a singular aim. When this happens, the perpetrator takes on biblical proportions; the retribution doled out is harsh, sudden and unforgiving. Everyday folk are inevitably caught unawares and their carefully nurtured world is unhinged, turned upside down and brought to the brink. In some of her stories – I am thinking primarily of ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ and one or two others – there is the impression that the universe has turned sour and it is indiscriminately pouring its motiveless malignity down on humanity’s head. But this is rare and unusual for O’Connor. It is usually people, wolves in sheep’s clothing, that prey on people in a manner that can leave even the hardiest reader feeling exposed and insecure, especially if you read, as I did, her entire oeuvre back to back over one summer.

I began with her astonishing 1955 novel The Violent Bear It Away. Hooked, I rapidly moved on to her first novel Wise Blood (1949) and capped the whole endeavour with The Complete Stories (1971). At the end, I emerged shaken and oddly invigorated. In her too-brief life, Flannery O’Connor wrote two novels, two short story collections and two books of essays. Comparatively speaking it is a modest output. You soon realise, however, that, as with all good things, with O’Connor it is a matter of quality over quantity.

From the beginning to the end of that summer, I saw a unique world-view emerge and I began to realise how O’Connor’s short stories feed the novels like a lifeline yet still manage to hold their own. What I mean to say is that I believe Flannery O’Connor is a short story writer first and a novelist second. That is not to say that the novels are not accomplished, they certainly are, but it is to say that Flannery O’Connor thought primarily in terms of the condensed tale. Within this framework one sees a stylist mature through strict application and discipline of form – for example, read O’Connor’s first short story ‘The Geranium’ and then follow that up with the reworking of the same themes and characters in ‘Judgement Day’, written just prior to the author’s dead, and you will see what a very long way she travelled in such a short amount of time.

O’Connor’s short stories are not subservient to the novels. They are not an adjunct. She did not write them because she was filling in time while waiting for the next great idea for a novel. They exist because O’Connor had to get them out of her system in terms of a miniature reflection of the world she observed. The economy of having to get down to business taught her to observe Graham Green’s wise maxim that ‘If it’s worth saying, it’s worth saying briefly.’ When she transferred this dictum to The Violent Bear It Away, she caught lightening in a bottle.

The short stories are O’Connor’s novels in a tighter form and the novels are the familiar themes given room to breathe and stretch their limbs. The novels grew out of ideas she first set down as short stories. (In fact, early drafts of both the novels are in The Complete Stories.) When O’Connor wrote in the short story form, she was literally and metaphorically holding up a mirror to the small religious communities in Georgia that nurtured her talent and proved to be her life-long inspiration. Like those isolated hamlets, the short story form is, after all, about brevity and compactness – a hermetically sealed order that exists within the blink of an eye, yet still manages to capture the essentials.

O’Connor wrote tales that impose a subjective landscape of dread and menace upon the mundane geography of the American South. In her pragmatic universe, bad things happen to good people. And evil is what men do. Circumstance or an innate calling has brought these undisciplined people to an impasse and they cannot turn back. Their innards are coiled and the only outlet is to paint the world in their own image. For them it is a prerogative, a calling, and a mission from a deity that knows neither forgiveness nor compassion. They do not need an external supernatural agency to inspire them. They are barbarism, blind Faith and Retribution itself, at once pitiable and terrifying. Whether they are children marching out of the dark forest to make a joke of a lifetime’s work, an embittered man emerging out of a serene sunset bearing a flaming, tar-filled heart, or a woman committing a gross offence through pig-headedness and ignorance, they do so in the knowledge that childhood is the garden in which good and evil begins, and it can be a terrible place.

Perhaps in all of recent Western literature there is only William Faulkner and Australian novelist Sonya Hartnett to equal Flannery O’Connor’s harsh, uncompromising vision. The three writers have much in common. Not least is their talent for knowing how to offer redemption via the medium of writing itself rather than through obvious, predictable channels. They possess the ability to dissect the human condition through a series of economical and flawlessly constructed linguistic pivots and pirouettes that startle the eye, even as they restore a reader’s faith in a tale artfully told. When you finally set aside one of their books, it’s not the horrors you recall but the alchemy of the word, the beauty of expression, that elevates the subject matter to the level of human sufferance in the eyes of the storm called life.

Narcissus

2011-08-19T15:29:00.000+10:00

The myth of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who was entranced by his reflection, fascinates me. It probably has something to do with the fact that I am repulsed by my looks and am therefore intrigued by anyone who has a love affair with the mirror. I first came across Narcissus in Ovid's Metamorphosis.

Narcissus is the son of the river god who seduces a nymph. Worried about the child's future, the nymph consults a seer. He tells her that the child will live to an old age so long as he does not look at himself. As he grows up, many fall in love with Narcissus but he rejects them. The nymph Echo falls for him too. She becomes so distraught when he turns his back on her that she fades away, until she is nothing more than a plaintive whisper. The goddess Nemesis casts a spell on Narcissus so that he falls in love with his own reflection. Stopping to drink at a pool, he becomes so transfixed by what he sees in the water that he forgets to drink and dies. In one version of the myth he turns into a flower.

This early depiction of Narcissus is taken from a Greek vase.

It's believed Caravaggio used it as the basis for his famous painting on the same subject. It dates from round about 1597-1599.

This photograph is from a Spanish fashion magazine. It shows model Jon Kortagarena in a pose that would be familiar to Narcissus. It's interesting to see how archetypal images crop up across time and place and are reinterpreted for a new age.

Karma Collective 3

2011-08-18T17:22:00.001+10:00

For those who have a fondness for food, I recommend author Sophie Masson's scrumptious blog A la mode Frangourou. It's full of delicious recipes that mix Australian with French influences.

You might also like to check out this outpouring about the power of book covers by author Doug MacLeod. It's called Cover Story. Doug's current novel, The Life of a Teenage Bodysnatcher, is an honour book in the Children's Book Council Awards. It was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Awards, and the Prime Minister's Awards. It's a rip-roaring Victorian farce about all things deadly, brutish and nasty. It's also terribly funny and would make a terrific film.

The Fabricated Man, an exhibition by Peter Allan

2011-08-18T14:12:00.001+10:00

Military jacket

It has been asserted that at the end of the 18th century, men surrendered their right to be considered beautiful, becoming austere and ascetic in sartorial expression.

Has the male body in fashion been freed from those traditional confines in recent decades? Has it become a canvas for the reclamation of masculine beauty?

Mankini

It was once said, ‘Clothes maketh the man.’ It may now be said ‘The ideal body maketh the man’ and clothes accentuate, reveal or conceal the body. The body is fashion.

While recent and ongoing changes in masculinities may be interpreted as crisis, they have conversely been viewed as indicators of liberation and experimentation or tropes of marketing.

Organza suit

Polarities have begun to appear in the expression of masculinity in fashion. Are we seeing an acceptance of diversity or the creation of limited stereotypes?

As the rapid redefinition of the male body in fashion becomes global, it becomes imperative for the impact of new and changing male archetypes to be acknowledged and questioned within the loci of menswear design and scholarship.

The Fabricated Man project addresses these issues and responds to these questions through the production of speculative, experimental menswear prototype garments.

Print apron

The Fabricated Man: Masculinities and Fashion is on at the Guilford Lane Gallery in Melbourne until 31 July.

On a more practical level, readers might also like to check out the following article on men's fashion: Top trends for guys in Arts Hub.

The City of Se7en

2011-08-18T08:22:00.000+10:00

When you finish watching this film you want to proclaim it as the one true mirror of urban existence to come out of Hollywood since Brian de Palma's Blow Out in 1981. You want to tell everyone, your friends, family and colleagues, regardless of their comfort level with the thriller genre. This is a film that looks like it created itself, a film that breathes and thinks through its celluloid pores as it reflects the nihilistic turmoil of the western world.

The last time director David Fincher entertained us he was on a remote, wind-swept planet directing Ripley’s demise in Alien 3. I remember thinking at the time, how unfair the negative criticism was towards his spooky, ambient contribution to a popular series that, despite initial resistance, managed to put the wind up me.

Se7en, like classic novels that transcend time and culture, has taken on a life of its own. Through the cumulative impact of design, deliberate limitation of colour, sound and music, the film manages to become a living entity that asserts its bleak world-view through the dense shadows and faded tones that populate every frame. It is one of those rare cinematic experiences that invites the eye to travel across the screen, to linger over and scrutinise the minutiae of crumbling apartment buildings, peeling walls, dark staircases, scant light on furniture and anonymous, rain-swept streets. We have a sense of a city on the brink. But not like the cities in Blade Runner or Johnny Mnemonic, no; they are stylised, glamorous, multicultural streets of a future metropolis that maintain a romantic veneer. The miasma that envelops the diseased heart and mind of Se7en seeps through the pores to the surface, much like the odours emitted by alcoholics or the city in Bad Lieutenant (1992). The city of Se7en, through its anonymity and relentless claustrophobia, is a nest for the dark angel stalking its streets.

An initial comic note, that quickly evaporates, is struck early on when we discover that the apartment occupied by detective David Mills and his wife is built on top of a subway. Whenever trains go by, which is every ten minutes, the building almost vibrates itself apart. Objects move by themselves, furniture shakes, glass rattles. This family home built on unstable ground displays a tenuous existence that could, at any moment, shake itself apart, as indeed it does. For this very reason the film hits a barely acknowledge nerve -- a nerve at the base of humanity: that our existence as social beings living rational lives is a false construct; civilisation is an illusion, a fortress built to keep nature's barbarism outside the city gates.

And this is why the film succeeds. By concentrating so intensely on symbolism and hypnotic pictorial elucidation, a murmuring half-world of splintered humanity desperately clinging to notions of good and bad, the viewer is drawn down a spiral, a vortex, if you will, of relentless, almost uncomprehending horror and fascination where we confront our darkest selves in the film’s subterranean levels. It's not for nothing a recurring image sees the detective protagonists shining torches in the darkness searching for clues, a potent metaphor for their condition and quest.

We are now in the basement of the city of Se7en. A psychopathic killer is methodically working his way through the Seven Deadly Sins, his victims are otherwise random figures put before him for the Day of Judgment. As in Sylvia Plath's poem, "In Plaster", where an "ugly and hairy" inner self claims dominion over the "whiteness and beauty" of the outer, socially conventional self, it is here that the film touches its core. John Doe, the classic American good citizen, family man and patriot, shows us what seethes beneath the veneer that protects as well as hides an instinctual core.

The psychopath is created by a lack of socialisation. As represented here, he is alienated from his social context. His physical environment is a bizarre recreation of his internal world. Alone, without history and adrift from normal social connections, he moves outside time and space. To heighten this perception, for at least half the film, John Doe remains invisible. In fact, we begin to wonder if he is real at all; and if he is real, perhaps a devious supernatural force is at work through him. When he finally manifests, for quite some time, he appears in silhouette, shadow, reflection, a demon without fingerprints and a cunning personality.

Although the film pivots on Christian concepts of retribution for sins committed, the Grand Guignol execution of the punishments is pagan theatre; a wallowing, an orgasmic delight in savagery and cruelty. As John Doe points out, there is no reason why he cannot enjoy his job. With its emphasis on torture and severed limbs, this reveling is a pre-Christian response to atrocity, which finds its way, time and again, into some memorable Christian isography. It demonstrates that, after two thousand years, Christianity has not managed to defeat humanity’s inherent paganism, even among its own ranks.

I maintain that Se7en, like the novels Interview With The Vampire and The Songs of Maldoror belongs to the decadent mode, where dismemberment and mutilation take on mystical, transformative qualities. In this light John Doe resembles Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. Both men are driven by the ultimate goal of self-transformation. In the case of Buffalo Bill, the aim was to rise anew from the gross male flesh, which he despised, as the idolised woman that resides in his psyche.

John Doe, on the other hand, seeks to turn himself into a dark angel, dealing out vengeance with a sword. He is God's Word made flesh. With his calm, detached manner he is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There’s a scary inevitability about him. His carefully orchestrated actions form an aria of pain. Like pro-lifers he is driven by deep moral imperatives, not mere vindictiveness or petty vendetta. Which is why he is a more engaging figure than Hannibal Lecter, who was simply flexing intellectual muscle while expanding culinary tastes.

Of course, the vision of himself as an angel of retribution is only a symptom of John Doe's madness, which is reinforced during the final dialogue between himself and Detective David Mills in the police car; and, again, during the climax of the film, which simply cancels him out like the banal flesh and blood evil that he is. Finally, it is his actions which resonate and affect the lives he has touched.

When it is over, Se7en resonates. It stays with you like an idle thought not yet framed. For weeks you remember the rooms in which hangs a pall of darkness, not transient darkness but a darkness that is itself overlaid with darkness; a shroud that over time acquires an immanence that manifests as a monstrous allegory of our times. This is unmediated actuality in all its randomness, inconsistency and multiplicity. This is the disorder of life as seen by Se7en.