VOL 83 EDITION 3
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Contents
03
ORCHIECTOMY
THE PAST Connor traverses the implications of his recent testicular cancer diagnosis through Pavement lyrics
by
C onnor W ei g htman
16
BO B
14
BROW N
E x odus
ASCENDS
Memories Suicide
Stare in to the fascinating mind of
Three Pelicans who’d rather not be
Bob Brown as he considers the way
named expose their past relationships
the Japanese pronounce ‘jellyfish’
and
by
L achlan K eeley
b
10
y
consider
V
their
bleak
futures
arious
20
P O L I T I C S A S
U S U A L
A young Peli-chik is torn between the strength of her convictions and the amoral allure of her conservative counterparts b y
INSIDE 05 ED/PREZ 06 SPORTS SCIENCE: BOUNTYGATE IN PAKISTAN 18 BAD MEDICINE: MEMORY SPASMS 21 PIVOTAL NOBODIES
z oe
kilbourn
22 PATCHES: HUNTING FOR REVENGE
POLITICS
MUSIC
FILM
BOOKS
ARTS
07 ZEITGEIST
44 REVIEWS
08 TONY BUTI
26 DATING W/ MARNIE: BACHELOR OF THE YEAR
09 AUNG-SAN hero?
34 ROASTIN’ TURKEYS: COOKING UP A POLITICAL BIOPIC
38 REVIEWS
24 WEAK LINKS
30 PROMOTION WEEDING OUT THE CRITICS: ARE SAN CISCO REALLY PERTH’S BEST?
40 STEPHANIE LAURENS: A phd in romance
45 Percival the poet
28 CONSERVING FILM AFTER THE FIRES 46 HOWL
12 TWEETING ABOUT TWITS: A MOCK PARLIAMENT TWITTER FEED
32 REVIEWS
36 REVIEWS
41 Cathy Kelly 42 Temptation: The Romance Bookstore
Pelican vol 83 edition 3
Quarantine The Past
04
Contributors
CREDITS
Grace McKie Grace McKie didn’t have time to put much effort into her self-description for this edition and why should she? In between ballroom dancing, a Science Arts degree, a whole bunch of work for the University Club and a mountain of incredible artwork for places that include displays in public galleries and among the pages of the confusing and otherwise unenticing Colosoul Youth Mag she’s managed to find time to produce a wonderful cover for this magazine. Quite frankly, you should already know about Grace, and Grace is appalled that you don’t. If you don’t: shame on you. For those who wish to enquire about artwork to be done by the wonderful Grace, please contact her at mckieg02@student.uwa.edu.au.
Josh Chiat // Editor Wayne Chandra // Design Alex Pond // Advertising Grace McKie // Cover Art Camden Watts// Art Director Alice Mepham // Film Editor Alex Griffin // Music Editor Lachlan Keeley // Arts Editor Yvonne Buresch // Books Editor Richard Ferguson // Politics Editor
Illustrators//
Sub-Editors //
Grace McKie
Yvonne Buresch
Alice Palmer
Simon Donnes
Kate Prendergast
Richard Ferguson
Yashi Renoir
Alex Griffin
Ena Tulic
Lachlan Keeley
Camden Watts
Alice Mepham Lizzy Plus Kate Prendergast Gideon Sacks
Contributors// Marnie Allen
Zoe Kilbourn
Ellie Baker-Young
Alexandra Leonzini
Darcie Boelen
Zev Levi
Yvonne Buresch
Patrick Marlborough
Josh Chiat
Keaton McSweeney
Kevin Chiat
Alice Mepham
Kanishka Dayaram
Eunice Ong
Simon Donnes
Lizzy Plus
Sarah Dunstan
Romany Pope
Richard Ferguson
Kate Prendergast
Alex Griffin
Tom Reynolds
Trent Howard
Gideon Sacks
Lachlan Keeley
Mark Tilly Connor Weightman
PROOF READING AND/OR EDITING SERVICE Completing a doctoral, masters, honours thesis or major paper or an article for publication? Top outcomes require that your work be presented in a fully professional manner. For quality proof reading and/or editing at reasonable cost call or email Bruce McCallum at:
9446 4470 or bmccallu@iinet.net.au Fee subject to consultation with the client and an up-front quote.
The views expressed within are not the opinions of the UWA Student Guild or Pelican editorial staff, but of the individual writers and artists. And sometimes not even them. We take no responsibility for any perceived offence caused by one of our writers. If you wish to contact us you can send an email to pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au.
Bruce McCallum, Economics (Hons.) UWA, MA (Econs.) Princeton. Former Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of Management, UWA and former senior public servant in both Canberra and Perth. Extensive relevant experience.
Communist Corner
Obama’s favourite number: Selected as lucky charm.
PELICAN
06
Sports Science BOUNTYGATE IN PAKISTAN Chip Johnson Saeed wears Nike’s new invention, the clerical coat. Top quality protection from ‘natural justice’.
$10 Million buys name on list. $524 Billion buys strikethrough.
As far back as Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson, who wisely chose to adopt the “(unofficially) NO BLACKS ALLOWED” policy of the National Association of Base Ball Players in his stance on Reconstruction, American Presidents have stolen ideas from the sports world to fill their policy holes.
What Do We Need To Know?
Illustration by Alice Palmer
On the uncovering of the New Orleans Bounty Scandal*, when the alarm bells rang for the National Football League, the light-bulb flicked on for President Barack Obama. Now, the Republican governments of years past have been able to maintain a more covert operation against undesirables, simply paying set sums to hundreds of thousands of “Defensive Tackles” to track down their targets or “bounties”. The secret here is that the NFL and American Governments have both been employing bounties on specific players for years, though they’ve contained the negative connotations coming from such a term, preferring to use the phrases “match” and “war”. The bounty can be implied but it’s never stated. That’s what makes the actions of both New Orleans Defensive Coach Gregg Williams and President Obama so abhorrent. The ridiculousness of the $10 000 000 hit placed on Pakistani Islamic leader Hafiz Saeed is only equalled by the sheer stupidity of Williams who, while in front of a recording independent documentarian, simply announced the cash for injury trade to his defensive line. *In which NFL team New Orleans Saints’ Defensive Coach Gregg Williams got caught offering extra money to his defenders to injure specific opposition players. This is a bad thing.
WHY IS THIS SUCH A BAD IDEA? New Orleans picked some god damn awful targets if they were seeking to avoid any sort of blowback. No-one in the upper reaches of the game wanted to see a popular white quarterback like Eli Manning taken to the cleaners by a string of no-name defensive underlings. On the other hand, Obama really has chosen his targets well. Muammar Gaddafi and Osama Bin Laden are both people with severe public disenchantment from their previous indiscretions. When we caught up with NFL Network Reporter Paul Burmeister he was adamant that Obama had made the right move. “After a series of foul play, suspensions and downright arrogance in the Endzone, I think the average football fan had just gotten sick of Osama and Muammar. It may be a slight on our fans as a whole, but most of them couldn’t wait to see those guys out with ACLs or Severe Spinal Damage.” The Saeed move, on the other hand, is a fairly strange one. Unlike Gaddafi and Bin Laden, Lashkaret Tayyiba (LeT) leader Saeed is primarily known for coaching the players of the 2008 Mumbai offensive, something that only Indians really care much about. With the General American Empathy For Foreigners Index at 0.1398087, its lowest rate since the 1980s, the American people could hardly be expected to throw their support behind an action such as this. While the LeT has been on the American list for quite some time, the irresponsibility of simply announcing the bounty rather than dressing up the search for Hafiz Saeed as part of a larger conflict appears to have worked against Obama, especially with so few of his fans willing to support the bounty system that he wishes to implement amongst his “Defensive” Line.
WHY DON’T PAKISTAN JUST CLAIM THE BOUNTY? Hafiz Saeed holds a very special position in Pakistan, being able to mobilise enormous forces of ANGRY EXTREMISTS to protest against the government at any point in time. Because of that he gets treated very seriously by the Pakistani frontline. In fact, he’s been somewhat of a quarterback in the Pakistani team structure of late, with the Defensive Tackles coming in from the flanks of the Pakistani government to buffer the American attempt at getting to Saeed. Pakistan, still looking to gain the upper hand in a titanic struggle with India, can ill afford to lose the terrific Saeed at this point in the game. He may be dirty, but he’s one of the best players they have: A man with the power to arrange and execute large scale attacks. His actions may be dirty, and certainly illegal, but as of the moment, the Pakistanis stand to lose more in local fan outrage by removing him from their team than they do keeping him in there. If large sections of the public still want Saeed and the LeT calling the shots, every Pakistani government (“more progressive ones” like Benazir Bhutto were also beholden to this) must make concessions with them to ensure their safety, regardless of America’s tactics.
SO WHAT OF THE BOUNTY There will always be room in two of America’s great pastimes (football and international conflict) for the time-honoured bounty. The issue is instead with telling people the bounty exists. For as long as we’ve watched these two spectator sports the bounty has always been there: Just don’t be like Williams or Obama and tell the whole world – they don’t want to know.
Zeitgeist: Zeitgeist
kim
07
kIm
bAng
G n ba
Tom Reynolds (@tsareynolds)
what’s the deal with North Korea?
Are you a yoof of today? Perhaps you feel it’s important to appear informed on “issues” and “things”. Maybe you suffer chronic ADD from playing Angry Birds and trawling for gossip about Karl Stefanovic on Twitter. Maybe you just can’t be fagged glancing at the cover of a newspaper? Wait, I don’t mean fagged that way, I mean it in the unnecessary and archaic way my mother uses it whenever I’m visiting – but without the awkward afterthought-apology... Anyway. In this edition’s Zeitgeist I’ll clasp you hand in clammy mitt and take you for a stroll past the latest headlines from the wonderful People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. Friends, citizens, victims of Stalinist purges – lend me your ears. I come bearing tidings from the Hermit Kingdom: a land of mythical production quotas, rolling blackouts and socialist self-sufficiency in hunger. North Korea has been living the Soviet dream since 1948, when Kim Il-Sung was positioned by the Soviet Union to become their man in Korea. Fortunately this involved complimentary lessons on how to actually speak the
local language, given he was born and raised outside Korea for 26 years. Unfortunately, the Korean War shortly kicked off after his appointment and rattled on until 1953. Fast forward through the Cold War and North Korea is doing quite well, in fact it’s richer, better educated and healthier than the South. However, in 1991 the USSR imploded and with it the bulk of the North Korean economy. Queue the rolling blackouts, periodic famines, and chronic goods shortages. In 1994 Kim Il-Sung died, though quickly appointed the “eternal president”, which made North Korea the world’s first and only Necrocracy. His son and beloved marionette, Kim Jong-Il, stepped up to the podium in his platforms and lived life like a cognac swilling 18th century French lord until his death in 2011. In the course of his duties he was attended by “pleasure squads” of virginal women, abducted a Japanese film maker and his wife – forcing them to make a communist version of Godzilla – and, after 50 years of research, developed North Korea’s first nuclear weapon. Kim Jong-Un, the youngest of Kim Jong-Il’s sons, is the new Kim on the block. To celebrate the 100th birthday of his great grandfather the North Koreans recently attempted to launch a “weather satellite”, which is currently reporting on the weather from the bottom of the Sea of Japan. This latest blunder resembles a humorous punch line to a sadly continuous thread. As a consequence of its last twenty years of autocratic non-leadership, life in North Korea is pretty awesome, if awesome is measured by being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Periodically threatening to obliterate Seoul, shooting into South Korea and/or resuming nuclear research is North Korea’s favourite national pastime. Rockets also happen to be a convenient and Americareaching means of quickly delivering nuclear bombs. Although North Korea maintains the world’s fourth largest military, its navy is outdated and its airforce undertrained (owing to concerns about pilots literally flying away), and without food, fuel, significant allies or money, nuclear weapons are one of the few trump cards the regime has to play.
Coincidentally, these events usually come with a request for petrol, food, fertiliser, or medicine. Keep in mind Kim Jong-Il is reported to have spent up to $800,000 purchasing fancy French cognac, and blowing $20 million on luxury mercedes-benzes (about a fifth of the value of requested US aid). The Democratic People’s Republic is a fairly bleak place, unless you’re a Kim. North Korea has the bomb, and they’re pursuing the means to deliver it to San Francisco, Anchorage and Honolulu. So I’d like to make a controversial suggestion at this point. North Korea should keep them. It’s a useless weapon. Under what conceivable conditions would the regime use it? The North lacks the military and economic capacity to occupy the South, and its pre-emptive use would guarantee an autonomic nuclear-reflex from the US. The only conceivable use would be an act of revenge, perhaps in the dying days of the regime the last Kim standing may try to take out Seoul, Tokyo or LA, but this is extremely unlikely. In the event of imminent collapse the North’s nuclear facilities will be the first priority for bombing and/or special operations – and even if the regime were able to launch a missile their technologies are so grossly outmoded and their launch numbers so tiny their missiles would be easily intercepted from across the border. There is no positive outcome for the regime to use the bomb, but a regime that feels secure against the asymmetric might of its neighbours is more likely to act rationally rather than desperately. The history of North Korea is the history of an isolated and defensive regime one meal away from widespread famine. Yet even then the regime has persisted. Honestly if the Korean War and twenty years of slow starvation haven’t shut down the regime, it seems unlikely collapse will come soon unless there is space for dissent to ferment, either internally or externally. A regime willing to compromise from a perceived position of power seems more likely to deliver than a regime obsessed with dayto-day survival.
Politics
08
BUTIFUL:
In Conversation with Prof. Tony Buti MLA Richard Ferguson WA Parliament House is a building that seems to ensure that you feel quite small. However, Tony Buti is a man who seems to be undaunted by the grandness of it all. He has been in parliament for only two years but he strides with the confidence of a schoolmaster purveying the halls. Perhaps, having entered the parliament at 49, it is the fact that he is a lot older than most first-termers. Whatever it is, he is obviously a man comfortable in his political skin, and a man who rarely entertains the idea that he will be a mere opposition backbencher for long.
Illustration by Yashi Renoir
Prof. Buti led a comfortable life as a lecturer of law at UWA and has written a series of books, with topics ranging from sports law to the Perth Mint Swindle. To enter a parliament that is largely ignored as part of a party that is reviled would seem to be the last choice for a man of such high esteem. However, Buti grabbed the opportunity in 2010 when he replaced ALP juggernaut Alannah McTiernan in the state seat of Armadale. “I had harboured feelings, ambitions, desires to enter politics for a long time,” he tells me. “It was really a question of time and opportunity... but when the opportunity arose to run in the area I grew up in, it was too good to refuse.” I saw before me a man who had played a long waiting game, one that many politicians are too impatient for. One theme that has run through the course of Buti’s life and many careers has been his involvement in Indigenous issues. Buti described this interest blossoming in his youth where, “living in Armadale and going to Kelmscott High School, playing football in Kelmscott, I always interacted with Indigenous people. And, for whatever reason, I was always sympathetic to the plight of aboriginal people.” He would go on to become a barrister for the Aboriginal Legal Service and completed his PhD on the issue of guardianship law in relation to the Stolen Generations. When asked what his main policy advice would be to a Premier McGowan, he returns to his education roots. “I would say we have to go full on and be more creative and spend more money
on the education of young indigenous people.” He highlights the experiment done at the Clontarf Football Academy as a good example. “I would be looking at using sport and music to teach all the disciplines of academia. For example, you could use a game of AFL to teach them maths, science, geography, history etc. I don’t think for a lot of indigenous kids that just sitting them down in a classroom is going to work.” For many new backbenchers, they simply have one key policy with which to set themselves in the minds of the media. Prof. Buti has taken that a stage further by focusing on an issue that doesn’t get anywhere near enough airtime as it deserves. Buti’s local experiences have also held him in good stead in his seat of Armadale. Prof Buti grew up in the electorate and has been a strong advocate for it and the south-east corridor in general. The area needs all the help it can get, being one of the poorest areas in the state. “Because Armadale is a Labor seat, the state government doesn’t seem to be interested. Doesn’t seem to be interested in the south-east corridor.” Buti is no fool, and is aware that an opposition backbencher can only do so much. However, that has not stopped his aptitude for creativity, with his plan for the area focused on moving a government department to Armadale. “That is going to instantly bring 300-400 people into Armadale a day. Whether that is local people getting jobs or people coming in; they need to eat and drink so that has a spin-off effect for local businesses.” It may be a long stretch to implement, but Buti must be congratulated for his vision in an area that is in need of strong leadership. A backbencher rarely gets a chance to access the media megaphone and Buti has been a critic of the WA press’ attitude to both MPs and Parliament as an institution. “Parliament is not covered really. They’re only there for question time and a few other debates. So the public does
not get any perception or understanding of what actually happens inside the house.” Considering he is part of a struggling opposition in a backbench position, it is no wonder that the press corps are rarely seen knocking on his door. Tony Buti is a man bristling with ideas, though he has little space to do anything with them. Whilst he agrees that entering Parliament in opposition is a good and toughening experience, it is clear that he has bigger ambitions. He is currently busy on a domestic violence discussion paper he released in Parliament and “is working on some other policies.” A man like this is not going to be content on the backbench forever and he says, “I see, at least, three terms, and I got in to be a minister. That’s the aim.” With such bold ambition, McGowan and the other ALP patriarchs better take note. Professor Buti will not be sitting at the back of the class for long.
Politics
09
BURMA ON MY MIND: Why Burma Really Hasn’t Changed at All Alice Mepham On April 1st, Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent 15 of the past 22 years locked up by the former junta, won a seat in parliament for the first time. On top of this, her National League for Democracy party secured 43 of the 44 seats it contested, and in the process became the main opposition in a parliament dominated by the Burmese military. Needless to say, the international political community, by and large, were very happy chappies. It seemed that every foreign minister was clamoring to get in front of the nearest camera and praise the nation’s critical step towards democracy.
I hate to rain on this goodwill parade, but the sad truth is that this ‘exceptional progress’ could be reversed just as quickly as it was implemented in the first place. The political optimists are pointing to the Indonesian case as an international precedent. This seems incredibly naive. After all, it took Indonesia almost two decades after the resignation of President Suharto to fully realise constitutional change. It would seem to me that this historical example simply warns us to not get prematurely swept up in all the excitement (although I’m sure the marketers of the upcoming biopic The Lady are hoping we do just that).
Australia’s Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, was so delighted with the outcome he declared he was considering lifting sanctions if the elections were found to be legitimately democratic. This public declaration comes in spite of the fact that many leading figures of Australia’s Burmese community have called upon the Australian Government to keep existing sanctions in place until much greater reforms are underway. Indeed, Burma’s liberation symbol, Suu Kyi herself, has made similar appeals to international policy-makers. Additionally, David Cameron is set to be the first western head of government to visit Burma since these historical elections. On his agenda is a personal visit with Suu Kyi and roundtable discussions with the Burmese government. This is a landmark trip that has been taken by many as a sure sign that Burma is being welcomed back into the international fold.
The steps taken so far towards restoring democracy by the ruling regime have been very tentative to say the least. While the outside world seems to view political change in Burma in rather simplistic terms as a contest between the NLD movement led by Suu Kyi and the governing army, things are actually far more complicated. Various civil wars run rampant throughout the nation and ethnic factionalism means that the domestic enemy shifts with alarming regularity. And if I learnt anything from Rambo IV, it’s probably an unbelievably bloody affair at that. Over-dependence on China is also a massive concern and it’s more than a little disconcerting that China is leading the political push to lift sanctions (they stand to make a massive economic gain from commercial deregulation). Finally, as long as the constitution still enshrines in
perpetuity that the military have the right to 25% of the seats in parliament, Burma can never be truly democratic. Unfortunately, it seems that the regime is in no way disposed to repeal this section. Whilst the international gaze has been firmly fixed on the Burmese by-elections, tens of thousands of Kachins, a long repressed ethnic minority, have been forced into makeshift refugee camps. This displacement stems from the fact that Kachin territory is incredibly rich in natural resources. Despite the lack of coverage, many in the west are all too aware of the opportunities made possible by this cultural upheaval and the current political shift. It’s cynical but, all things considered, it seems the push to welcome Burma back into the Western fold is motivated by economic greed. Hotels in Yangon, Mandalay and the capital Naypitaw are literally teeming with foreign businessmen jostling to capitalise on the burgeoning Burmese market. Seemingly, the opportunities for do-gooders and profiteers alike are almost boundless. From China to the United States, it appears they are all eager to get a slice of resource and foreign trade benefits. It is entirely reasonable that we should recognise the progress that has been made in Burma but let’s not blow our international wad on what is ultimately a bit of political foreplay.
Politics
10
BOB BROWN’S RETIREMENT PARTY Lachlan Keeley
Illustration by Ena Tulic, spread by Camden Watts
Bob Brown is at the hunting and fishing party. It is not the political party itself, but a celebration held by the members of the party, to show appreciation towards Bob Brown. Bob Brown does not regularly fish, nor hunt, unless you mean ‘hunt’ in a sense that does not involve maiming animals in the jungles of Queensland: hunting for the keys to his eco-friendly gaspowered recumbent bicycle; hunting for a cheap second-hand copy of Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career at his local book exchange for his next book club meeting.
Bob Brown remembers the time someone called John Howard an unflushable turd, and makes that sort of suppressed laugh that comes out of your nose instead of your mouth. If you were to try and describe the way it sounds, it would be something like ‘pbrfghgtttl’, Bob Brown thinks. Sort of like a noise a jellyfish would make if it could communicate, and was trying to speak English through whatever passed for its mouth. Bob Brown assumes jellyfish are more adept at speaking in whatever jellyfish language they have and that his own language causes them a lot of pronunciation issues; sort of like how you can’t say L in Japanese. He reflects that trying to say jellyfish in Japanese would result in the speaker producing something along the lines of jerryfish. Bob Brown decides that this linguistic mutation is actually kind of amusing, but refrains from laughing out loud, so as to not appear to be too involved with his thoughts to anyone who happens to be observing him. What would a jellyfish look like sitting on a person’s head? What if it was his head? In silence, Bob Brown ponders the application of mollusc and cnidarian organisms in the context of the fashion industry. No conclusions are reached. But Bob Brown doesn’t let this get him down.
He once used “Hunting for bears” as a joke at a particularly lively dinner party, in reference to a Yeltsin-like situation he once got into in which no bears were actually harmed. There are no bears in Queensland, except for in the zoo (Bob Brown has forgotten if there is actually a zoo near where he lives, and even if there is a zoo, would there actually be any bears, Bob Brown thinks, and if there are, would they be moon bears aka the Chinese strain of bears that are drained for bile and such, or big brown grizzlies, like the ones used in jokes about eating bits of bars?), and he has not been to a zoo for a long time. Although maybe some individual egos were slightly, and perhaps regrettably, bruised by Bob Brown’s piercing and subtle wit, none of them were bears. Do bears bruise? Probably not. Bob Brown is glad that no bears were harmed, because he has a lot of respect for bears; they are noble animals, in his opinion, and he would definitely not like to ever see any harm come to any bears he was acquainted with – although he is not really in good standing with any bears at the moment. He likes to think that there’s a chance he may become acquainted with a bear in the future, and he is pre-emptively preparing for this moment, just in case it comes up. A bear, that is. Bob Brown smiles at someone. He remembers the first time he watched Days of Our Lives, and for a moment he considers the hidden meaning behind the dramatic narration in the opening theme song. He also considers recording his own karaoke version of the theme, and perhaps posting it on YouTube. This could be the start of a new career, he thinks. Bob Brown has always been a big fan of DOOL. He’d love to go back in time to become part of the original Horton family, just for one day, just to see what it’s like to be on a soap. He smiles again, this time at the
wistful memories of what could have been. He then continues to think about soap. In Bob Brown’s hierarchy of television soap operas, DOOL always comes first. The Young & the Restless is second, and The Bold & the Beautiful third. Everything else is gravy – but the kind of gravy that comes powdered in a can, not from actual meat juices leftover in a baking tray. Not great, but still consumable. Bob Brown enjoys this mental analogy.
There’s nothing wrong with exercising the power of your imagination, in his opinion. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sometimes you end up doing both, he muses, but there’s no way that this happens as often as the other two things. Maybe that’s the lesson to be learned today, the lesson that he ought to share with the hunters and fishers surrounding him, holding their glasses of red or white wine and crackers smeared with brie or cheddar or that other weird smelling kind of cheese. Bob Brown suddenly realises the profound thought he discovered just a moment ago has already slipped from his mind. Oh well, thinks Bob Brown, and he smiles again.
Tweeting About Twits
Sign in
Richard Ferguson Politics
Covers Mock Parliament
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2 Apr
Welcome to Pelican’s coverage of the 2012 Arts Union Mock Parliament. Josh owes me a lot of booze for this #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
The night starts with an old man talking about democracy. Everybody sits and pretends to be interested in him #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
The old man is still talking #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
The old man has stopped talking. Parliament begins #uwamockparl #thankfuck
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2 Apr
Motion to support nationalisation of children put forward by Communists #uwamockparl Retweeted by State Magazine
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2 Apr
The Commie Bastard leader, Tom, is handsome. Like a young Stalin #uwamockparl
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Hot leader not speaking. Woman instead. Says children out of control and need state to make sure they are working properly #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Thatcher Hellspawn Party are appalled. Their @PoshSouthAfrican says we can’t nationalise children #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
@PoshSouthAfrican continues. Says parents shouldn’t buy children if they can’t afford them. Where is the good budgeting? #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Communist Lady #2 gets up and berates Thatcher Hellspawn. Says they only care about people who can afford expensive kids #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
@SpeakerArtsPres tells Thatcher Hellspawn to stop screaming. They scream at her #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Parties provide no one else to talk about children nationalisation. Parliament votes that the motion is boring. NEXT #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Motion to stop giving drugs as welfare put by Thatcher Hellspawn #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Thatcher’s @GuyWithGrin speaks. Says it’s not fair for poor people to get drugs for free #uwamockparl
Pelican Magazine @PelicanMagazine @GuyWithGrin tells harrowing story of how his mum had to work hard to get her drugs #uwamockparl
2 Apr
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2 Apr
Commies put forward @FacelessHack29. Says without government drugs, he would never have gotten to where he is #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
@FacelessHack29 continues. Says everyone has god-given right to get high #uwamockparl 2 Apr
@BodyPoliticBlogGuy gets up. Shows us result of drug welfare in his weird speech #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
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Still going. That Gillard Government hands out some good shit #uwamockparl 2 Apr
Time for a break and for your Political Editor to chat up some closeted conservatives #uwamockparl
Pelican Magazine @PelicanMagazine
2 Apr
We are back. @SpeakerArtsPres resigns for a nice job in the private sector #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
@BodyPoliticBlogGuy takes over as Speaker #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Mr Handsomest Tory Ever, @BenWatson enters. Everyone swoons #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Motion to abort Catholics put forward by Sex Party #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
@AngrySexGirl says that Catholics must be aborted to protect the rights of women and gays #uwamockparl
Pelican Magazine @PelicanMagazine
2 Apr
@CatholicTory of Thatcher Hellspawn gets up and says Catholics protected by the constitution. Says Sex Party are ‘evil homos’ #uwamockparl
Pelican Magazine @PelicanMagazine
2 Apr
Motion doesn’t pass. Next is motion to get rid of economic prostitution #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Everyone takes a nap whilst the man from the Free Trade Party makes his speech #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Matt MacKenzie and Matt Woodall do stupid accents to wake people up. Parliament deems @UWAGuildPres Romney impression “shitty” #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Motion is passed. Thatcher Hellspawn Queen makes it clear that she is bored and wants to go home #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
The Commie Bastards make it clear they want to stay and hear the Hippie Party talk about dentists #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
@BeautifulCommunistLeader asks for Thatcher Hellspawn Queen to leave #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
@SpeakerBodyPolitic banishes the Thatcher Hellspawn Queen. The other Hellspawn fly away in horror #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Everyone is shocked. Has @SpeakerBodyPolitic gone too far?! #uwamockparl
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2 Apr
Few Hellspawn left cannot be bothered arguing and let the Hippie Party talk about dentists. Motion is passed #uwamockparl
Pelican Magazine @PelicanMagazine That is all for Mock Parliament this semester. I’m off to drink myself silly in the hope of forgetting the whole fucking experience #uwamockparl
Politics
Pelican Magazine @PelicanMagazine
2 Apr
Quarantine The Past
14
Quarantine the past: Exes Soundz Golden Part I – Cause I’m Empty And You’re Empty It’s over. Your once better half has thrown you out at the gas station on the highway of life – cold, afraid and alone. Except you still have two more years of your degree to finish, so chances are you’re going to run into them from time to time. This chance is substantially improved because amidst the drool of love’s sloppy embrace, you arranged your timetables to match one another, taking the same dreadful electives. Probably something from their now defunct Fine Arts major. You are consumed (and should be!) with the thought of glorious revenge for all the pain and suffering they caused you. Here’s how to do it.
Lectures: The domain of the slippery tongue: Feel free to begin your psychological war games with a parting of the lips. A barely audible remark about their droopy eye, a jab at their pot belly, an insult to something they hold dear, be it The Hunger Games or Dinosaur Porn – all of these honourable and proud tactics are qualities of the chivalrous knight. Arrive early, take the stage and talk about your feelings (and how the bitch in the third row broke them) in a loud and clear voice, projecting from the core. Above all, remain subtle. When approached by them, maintain that you are merely remaining friends despite their insistence a restraining order is a real thing. Leave posters at all entrances identifying their possession of leprosy.
Tutorials: Become a master of passive aggression. Shoot down all contributions they make to discussion using whatever straw man argument you can muster. Imply they’re a holocaust denier, blame them for late publishing of the Pelican, flat out accuse them of liking the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Be sure to end all your remarks with “That’s just, like, my opinion man” and smile at them with the sincerity of a shaken baby. Remain content in the knowledge that while extracting your pound of flesh your grades won’t suffer – you’re contributing to the discussion, so you’re bound to get at least 2 points from the tutor.
Illustrattions by Camden Watts
Labs: Long classes mean the long game. Bring a cat, a metronome and a paintball gun. Rock your head back and forth in time with the beat, filled with disgust, stare at your ex and sing a lullaby. Hand them the cat when it’s over and explain how it reminded you of their inability to meet your preconceived notions of what constitutes love, even if that was just liberal application of casual sex and food. Apply the paintball gun as they attempt to perforate your perfect worldview with heathen logic and/or flee, screaming for campus security. There will be signs of progress. They will withdraw from the class, the university and possibly the state given enough time and persistence. But you must not give up. They must be hunted until whatever Larry David inspired concept of victory you set yourself is met. Then look back and know that you could have just treated them like a human being rather than a Hydra, and your insane quest for vengeance is complete.
Simon Donnes
Quarantine The Past
Part II: And They’re Coming To The Chorus Now…
THE IRISHMAN More emotional masochism. Tall and liberally pierced, the Irishman’s idea of the greatest day on earth was concussing a few people in a circle pit with his elbows and smoking roughly a thousand cigarettes while listening to punk. He and his friends introduced me to the concept of the wilful derro – someone who has a nothing job and is going nowhere not because they weren’t smart enough (they were) or because they didn’t have the opportunities (they all went to Trinity) but because they decided on it as a lifestyle choice. For all that he was quite a sweetie and I attempted to cultivate an interest in punk, seeing as we had NO SHARED INTERESTS WHATSOEVER. I still have a copy of Iggy Pop’s autobiography on my shelf. It has never been opened.
THE YORKSHIREMAN Slightly deranged young man from Leeds whose drug problem resulted in almost complete baldness by the age of 21. He was over here on a backpacking holiday. A wannabe DJ who had read Ginsberg and Hunter S. extensively, he once lived off speed and Cornflakes for a year. Luckily for him and unluckily for me, he was the first guy who ever really showed any interest in me. He was also quite short. THE PASTRY CHEF With his thirty years to my nineteen, the pastry chef was definitely a triumph of the stomach over the brain. We met at work halfway between our respective domains of the kitchen and the shopfront. Already steadily putting on weight from eating half the stock as often as I could, I did a pretty good impression of an inflating balloon when I started going out with him. He enjoyed baking, really loved it. He’d make everything we sold and more, since he’d been in the industry for so long and worked everywhere. He’d been at Phillipa’s in Melbourne, an industry legend, and had taken all the recipes with him when he left. He used to bake at home
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THE RUSSIAN A tattooed security guard who carried a baton and a whiff of organised crime around with him. He had piercing blue eyes and a very negative attitude towards women thanks to a failed engagement. He enjoyed going to Freo on Friday nights and getting into fights on purpose, as though he didn’t get enough of them on duty. The Russian was so clearly and unequivocally a bad idea that I think that may have been the attraction. It ended badly, due to a slight overlap with the Irishman.
for practice and said he was just glad it wasn’t going to waste, although I’m sure my hilarious fawning was a welcome ego boost. He ended up getting a job in the mines cooking bain-marie breakfasts for $100K a year and it turned out he was cheating on me. It would never have worked out anyway. He didn’t read, like…at all. Said he’d never finished a book in his life. Where the hell did I find these people?
Sonny V.E. Cherub
Part III: That I Won’t Eat You When I’m Gone
Suicide has wandered, chattering and waiflike, through the pages of Pelican for decades; let this edition quiver likewise at the sound of his crunching footfall. If you find you can’t get along anymore, for ex-related reasons or otherwise, the UWA campus offers a range of options. First and foremost would be the extensive counselling services conveniently located at the Guild medical centre, where trained professionals can help you with your innumerable neuroses, or, failing that, kickstart your ailing id with Adderall. But, if you’re just a jerk-ass quitter, read on!
Firstly, there’s the REFLECTION POND at the feet of the ornate Winthrop Hall. This tranquil pool is prone to being treated like the River Ganges after Uni parties by full-bladdered he-bros. If you keep your head underwater for long enough, you’re likely to ingest enough urea to cause fever and diarrhoea severe enough for someone to pay attention to you; if you get organ failure into the bargain, brill! You won’t drown in such shallow water, but holding yourself down in such a cesspit is a challenge for even the most masochistic amongst us. For help with getting your fill of urine, get in touch with the UWA Waterboarding Society (last Wednesday of each month at 6pm, Guild Council Room). For double points, leap into the reflection pond from the WINTHROP HALL BELL TOWER – Critical Hit. As they pull your broken, urine-soaked body from the rapidly reddening pond, they’ll know you meant it this time. Another common option amongst those riven by sadness beyond the point of sense (but don’t wish to get their hands dirty or offend their God) is to RUN FOR GUILD ELECTIONS. The mind-crushing banality of attempting to wring support out of disaffected and disinterested undergraduates tend to create an enervating form of suicidal despair typically displayed in those who’ve been
trapped underneath avalanches. Most perish by the end of the third day of polling, exhausted by the long hours and lack of human affection aside from the churlish support of robotic, enthused guild hacks. Survivors tend to enter a kind of dissociative fugue state particular to university elections, characterised by an orgiastic, postideological spree of violence, from which few emerge physically or mentally intact. Up a set of stairs tucked behind the Tav lies the UWA NERD SOCIETY. Like most minorities forced into dirty, cramped nooks by the intolerance and prejudice of dominant society, the geeks value their ghetto. If you mess with their TARDIS or Fruits Basket complete collection, it may be the last thing you lay hands on. A word of warning, though; if there’s one thing MMORPG addicts lack, it’s a sensitivity to extreme and unusual acts of violence. They will search your corpse for medipacks, Rupee and ammunition, and leave it to decompose on their office floor, unaccustomed as they are to creatures who don’t have a respawn clock.
Da Neil Johnstone
Quarantine The Past
16
Orchiectomy the Past Connor Weightman (With some help from Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus) My GP held the ultrasound scans up against the light, squinting. Eventually, he repeated what I had been told half an hour before by a solemn looking radiologist. “It’s still impossible to know, of course, but it’s very likely that it’s a testicular cancer.” I nodded. If I was having actual thoughts at this point, I don’t remember what they were. There was a long pause while the GP looked up phone numbers and made some calls. He looked at me again. “I should add that this kind of thing is very treatable.”
Illustration by Grace McKie
Again, I nodded. Can you treat it like an oil well, when it’s underground, out of sight? I suppose the story really starts 24 years ago, when I was born with two testicles. I am told that this is the usual number. My testicles and I had a pretty normal existence until recently; some good times and some bad ones, but on the whole I mostly just ignored them. Everything changed one day (dun dun dunnn) in the shower when I noticed that my right testicle had grown a little bit in an alarming way. I had learnt about testicular cancer in health class at high school and knew that
self-checking of one’s balls was a good thing to do (and may this article serve as a reminder, dudes). Self-checking had already brought a couple of private scares over the years – after all, it is (quoting Dylan Moran) “searching for lumps in a bag of lumps”. This time felt different though. I was worried.
is good. The histology of my testicle found that the specific kind of testicular cancer it was wasn’t the “best” (that word again) one it could’ve been. I was recommended the option of “precautionary chemotherapy”, which is now going to happen. It’s not the kind of risk you really want to go against.
I’ve got a trigger cut Cancer is a big word. I’ve found that doctors tend to avoid using it, and prefer to sub in more technical terms where they can. Doing this takes the meaning out of the situation, at least momentarily, and also makes the possibilities seem a little more known, as if giving something a very specific name gives it a very specific set of actions and reactions. Language is funny like that.
I’m particularly grateful and lucky (and this needs to be said) to come from a household well-off enough to pay medical bills that I otherwise couldn’t. I’m also lucky I was already living back at home and that I have a family I can tolerate most of the time. I can only imagine how much worse things can be.
As I let people know about what was going on, there was a small thread of disbelief and/ or surprise: Really? But you’re so young! Testicular cancers are actually fairly common, particularly in males of the 18-39 age bracket. It is also one of the best types you can get (if that’s a way of putting it); it shows early and usually responds well to follow-up treatment. My own situation is a mixed bag. A scan suggested the cancer hadn’t spread, which
Loretta’s...scars A radical orchiectomy is a surgical procedure where an incision is made just above a man’s groin, and his testicle is then pulled out by the blood supply, where it is then cut off. I know this because it happened to me, but I don’t know why they call it “radical”. It is a pretty easy operation to recover from; I was out of hospital a few hours after, spent two days on the couch at home and then spent most of the weekend limping around the Perth Writer’s Festival and going out with friends.
When I think about my former life, that now mythical time when I had two testicles, it is hard not to feel a little bitter. I feel betrayed (and yes, I realise characterising my now estranged testicle as an “other” is probably not the best way of dealing with this). The fucker tried to kill me, after all. It wanted too much, and it was ready to take both of us down with it. What did I do to deserve it? So what does it mean, a mistake or two? These are the kind of mistakes no-one can trace. Now there’s a thought, or a pattern of thinking, which is hard to get around. Man, what DID I do to deserve it? How did this happen? I don’t mean this in the spiritual sense, and if anyone wants to tell me otherwise I will add you on Facebook just so I can delete you and make you feel bad. I mean more, “was it something about my lifestyle?” Ergo: Was it the drinking? Those government ads sure seem to think so. Was it the mobile phones? The jeans I wear aren’t THAT tight, are they? Perhaps it was that spent uranium I was using to exfoliate my junk? I ate more cereal last year than I used to – MAYBE IT WAS THE CEREAL. And so on. Waiting forever, waiting waiting waiting waiting... There is also, of course, the perennial worry that things will turn bad at any point in the oncoming future. Statistically speaking I have good odds – but at the moment I have a mistrust of odds, having already been that one who gets testicular cancer. Fortunately I’m already a bit of a hypochondriac, so this can be slotted nicely in to my usual routine. And your jokes are always bad, but they’re not as bad as this “Do you slant to one side, now?” a friend asked. Sure. I am, ahem, Slanted & Enchanted – In My Opinion the best Pavement record. As soppy and predictable as this is to say, friends and family have been great about this whole thing. Telling people can be one of the most difficult parts of it, and it’s hard to know the best way to bring it up, or sometimes whether it needs to be brought up at all. There are concerns – should I warn them first by saying I have bad news? Does that make things seem too dramatic? At some point I gave up and made a party invitation informing people I had one less nut than I used to. I suppose this article is doing the same thing again. The
Quarantine The Past
puns and nickname suggestions I’ve received in return, I couldn’t go without. Keep them rolling. Like a ball. Two States, we want Two States If you happen to lose a testicle, you do have the option of getting a prosthesis put in its place. The night before surgery, my girlfriend and I sat up pondering this very thing.
17
And all the Spanish candles So my right testicle was cast aside like Gary Young; what does it mean to have only one left? The good news is that a second testicle is not a necessary commodity, but more a good insurance policy. The remaining nut still produces enough testosterone, and may also produce enough sperm for whatever it is people need sperm for (although this will depend on how well it rebounds after chemo). I’m acutely aware of the vulnerable position I am now in though; my insurance policy is gone.
The urologist had told me only that I would need to decide before I went under – if I did want one, I would be “sized appropriately”. These are good things to know. I was warned that it would never sit quite like the original did, I would have to “milk it in” over a couple of weeks. Also there would be a slight risk of my body rejecting it.
“
I decided against the prosthetic Cancer is a big word. I’ve found that doctors tend to for a number of reasons. For one, avoid using it, and prefer to sub in more technical there didn’t seem to terms where they can. Doing this takes the meaning be any glow-in-thedark option, or at out of the situation, at least momentarily... least none that was convenient in the time frame. Maybe I should look into that more. It also seemed like a bit of extra effort to take care of/worry about, which is not really me.
”
So far I feel pretty vindicated in my decision. My girlfriend says having one ball suits me. Another friend volunteered the thought “balls are fucking ugly things anyway, I would gladly cut one of mine off” (thanks Nick!). Mostly though, I can’t help but feel that running from the past is an often futile thing – it takes us in its ball-shredding claws and shapes us, well... I’m not likely to forget about this part of mine anyway. I may as well wear it that way.
Quarantine The Past
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The Memory Spasm Words and Illustrations by Kate Prendergast
“So you’re walking down the street, right, humming Concerning Hobbits, and musing with sublime distraction whether a raven is more like a writing desk or a chifforobe. Contentment cosies up to you. A truce has been declared with the world at large. You can exchange a wink with it across a table. Hail it jovially as it sails by on a segway. You don’t begrudge to pass it the salt and pepper shakers. Because you’ve put sugar in the salt. (Hey, the world thought it was sweet.)
And then! All of a sudden! In the middle! Of your reverie!! You’re ambushed. Memory strikes. It springs up like a jackin-the-box and sways gleefully before you. It dives at you from out of nowhere like a cackling crow, which proceeds to joyously buffet you about the head with its wings. From its beak, it drops the lurid slice of the corpse moment memory. It glistens in perfect putrescence. As your periphery topples inward like an Inception skyscraper, garish phantoms thrust themselves into your vision.” The above passage has been transcribed from a journal entry dated October the
38th. This diary was once the property of a Miss Agatha Pumplehump, written during her (alas!) brief stay at St. Humperdink’s Hopspittal for Anything Mildly Wrong. It is the first recorded case of the memory spasm.
Description Going by the medical term of “mentis molestus”, the memory spasm is similar to the involuntary motor tic in that it will “occur intermittently and unpredictably out of a background of normal activity”. Memory spasms also share the Tourettian characteristic of occurring in ‘bursts’ or ‘bouts’. One spasm has the potential to resurrect an entire cavalcade of painful memories prematurely stuffed into their
coffins. However, unlike the Tourette’s sufferer, the memory spastic never experiences the “premonitory urge” forewarning an attack. Onset of the condition commonly occurs during adolescence. Usually at the moment when you step out of the garden into the street - naked - and realise your shame. Because Phyllis has just dropped her potted dwarf bougainvilleas, and has stumbled backwards against the screen door, and your neighbour Greg is dazedly shaking his head, staring at you with a horrified fixation and stammering “you’re wrong. Mate…oh geez mate, you’re wrong.”
•
Lunge-kissing Mother Superior
•
ipping your shorts during abseiling R on year 9 camp. Submitting your peers to the sight of a jerkily looming, prancing-elephant patterned arse.
•
ating a $3.5 million Bio-art exhibit. E (You’d thought putting canapés on a pedestal was a bit uppity.)
•
ot saying the right words at the right N time with the right tone and the right gesture with the right apricot.
•
Generally being an inveterate idiot.
Symptoms Whilst symptoms range from mild to severe, they typically encompass: • • •
A sudden contraction of the features to the central region of the face. Momentary paralysis, followed by involuntary writhing and twitching. transient attack of Coprolalia (Latin A for “faeces talk”), where the afflicted will blurt out an anguished ‘shit!’ or ‘godammit!’ at the startled train passenger across from them.
•
iscellaneous groaning or muttering M in furious undertones vis-à-vis Jason Russell. It is still undecided amongst professionals whether the anti-Kony campaigner cum public masturbator was suffering from a memory spasm during his recent psychotic breakdown. Specialists are currently investigating this possibility − mostly because it means they can speculate excitedly as to what mortifying memory could have possibly triggered the conservative evangelical to give a Pentecostal homage to the Joker. Then again, it may not have been a memory spasm at all. It could, in fact, be a heuristic teaching from God. Telling him he’s a wanker.
Prognosis Remission periods occur intermittently. But short of surgically removing your hippocampus, you can’t quarantine the past, kid. Prevention/ Treatment Assume the “MEH” philosophy. Hit yourself on the head and laugh. The worlds revolve like ancient geese gathering jellybeans in empty kitchens. If you’re taking steroids, head-bonking will be especially effective. This species of people only needs to *palmface* and they’re
wondering what that big, meaty, divided thing is doing in their line of vision. Then again, I’m not sure if they can flex all the way to their forehead. Their method of towelling themselves dry after a shower is to strategically flap a towel about their bodies, samba fashion. Using a red towel is hazardous though- they are likely to become enraged and charge at the mirror. Another viable preventative method is to flee society altogether, and so escape the petty chimeras that crouch in the gutters of everyday life. Become a hill-dweller in Musci. Make papîer-maché friends that melt in the rain. Or piñata friends that burst sweetness when you beat them to death. Because, you would kill them, eventually. How can you let them survive, suffering under the existential paradox that they were born lynched? The best option, however, is anecdotal redemption. Tell a friend about your biology class presentation, where you gravely stated “there are many different kinds of orgasm”, when what you meant to say was “organism”. NI. NIIIII!!! What the anecdote does, see, is make absurd the furtive horror of humiliation. Suddenly - thank god - it all becomes frickin’ hilarious.
Quarantine The Past
Any trauma - trivial or tragic - may later manifest as a memory spvasm. They might include:
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Origins
Quarantine The Past
20
THERE AIN’T NO PARTY LIKE A LIBERAL PARTY Zoe Kilbourn One of the most hotly discussed topics since our Liberal Guild’s inauguration is the installation of a candy bar in the Guild Café. To placate the masses, a disapproving leftie told me. A number of students assume it’s part of the Guild’s radical reshaping of university catering, and the Guild hasn’t refuted the rumour. It’s there to placate the masses, a disapproving leftie told me. “They’d sell drugs if they could,” she said.
The fact is though, that people like the candy bar. I’m not exactly thrilled that Liberty is disenfranchising the Guild and undermining its operation as a union, but on the other hand, the Café is now selling jersey caramels by the kilo. To be clear, the ‘Liberty’ Guild Council wasn’t actually behind the candy bar, it was an independent decision made by Guild Catering. That people would assume otherwise is indicative of a political environment where elections are decided on coffee quality. The Guild Catering Wars are illustrative of a wider trend in the political right: seriously unethical public policy and personal pleasure appear to correlate directly. Willy Wonka, who also made his mark through candy, was an archetypal economic libertarian. Surely there’s no greater form of exploitation than paying workers in cocoa beans.
Illustration by Camden Watts
I love the Labor movement. I also love to get smashed and shake my thing, and I’m haunted by the growing sense that I can never reconcile these two driving forces in my life. I’d always had the impression that the political left was as freewheeling as it was free-thinking, a passionate and exultant counterpart to the uptight Tories sticking to their virgin mojitos and avoiding everyone’s gaze. It seems I was mistaken. Conservatives have come a long way since the po-faced Pitts and Peels of yesteryear. My suspicions were vindicated in an unlikely source – a slim Penguin volume from 1947 called The Conservative Case. Viscount Hailsham, a typical Tory (Oxford, the Bar, army, aristocracy) and Chairman of the Conservative Party, explains that the Right just isn’t that interested in politics. “To the great majority of Conservatives, religion, art, study, family, country, friends, music, fun,
duty… all these are higher in the scale than their handmaiden, the political struggle.” What they’re really concerned with is preventing significant change – the straighteners, if you like, to the enlarging Left. This is why the English Conservatives are so flexible (read: inconsistent) with their policies – not so different from Tony Abbott’s political mood swings (“Why not just have a simple tax on carbon?”). Hailsham goes on to say that of Conservative voters, “The simplest among them prefer fox-hunting – the wisest, religion.” Both these pursuits are arguably unethical, and both undeniably more enjoyable than trawling through Hansards or sitting through Parliamentary question time. The leisure classes have always tended towards the political right, whether it’s the aristocracy trying to maintain their place in the Upper Ten Thousand or business owners frightened of Big Government. Once the status quo is restored and profit preserved, it seems that the wealthy and powerful are less interested in the betterment of a nation than in the ephemeral trappings of conspicuous consumption. Once large-scale profiteering is justified with notions of “Liberty” and “Laissez-faire”, so is a guilt-free manipulation of the divide between rich and poor. We can push our worries about bad working conditions out of the way and get on with the real stuff of life – shameless hedonism. Over the past few months I’ve spent some time with UWA politicos, particularly our current Liberty overlords. Young Liberals tend to be beautiful, dapper, and articulate. They also throw a damn good get-together. I’ve toasted the monarchy with them while higher-minded lefties protested during CHOGM; I’ve gone out drinking
with them when other lefties were out debating. Young Liberals are overwhelmingly commerce students; ECOMS is the faculty society to join if frivolity’s your thing. This is not coincidental. I naturally leapt at the opportunity to join a group of Labor partisans at the Aviary last summer. I approached it as another opportunity to socialise, this time with people who share my political affiliations. What I walked into was a short debriefing session. A clique of very dedicated Laborites name-dropped local senators and discussed their meetings with union bigwigs. Misreading the situation, I took the opportunity to sample an Aviary martini while everyone else stuck to lager. I spoke for fifteen minutes with a major Young Labor player, who was not impressed that I didn’t know any of Mark McGowan’s policies. Then I spilt my drink. I was, of course, not invited to their next event. This is in spite of the fact I included my details on the mailing list. The general consensus is that if you’re going to have a good time, someone has to suffer, whether it’s the proletariat, hunted foxes, or those overworked legal non-entities, Oompa Loompas. But it doesn’t have to be this way. UWA’s own Bob Hawke broke records for the longest term as an Australian Labor Prime Minister and the shortest time taken to scull a yard of ale; Friedrich Engels himself had an unabashed fondness for heavy drinking and lobster salads. It’s unfortunate we’re compelled to denigrate champagne socialism when, ideally, a successful socialist system operates to improve general contentment. Awareness of flawed social conditions and striving for better ones shouldn’t preclude anyone from the pursuit of happiness.
IN THE PELICAN in the
Quarantine The Past
22
STRANGE RUMBLINGS Confessions of a cheap imitator
Illustrated by Camden Watts
Patrick Marlborough (Papa Patches)
Cold thoughts on this balmy Fremantle night. It is 3.15 in the morning and I am being kept up by a vicious fight taking place between my neighbour and his girlfriend. He is a psychic healer and, naturally, lives on the border of destitution and fraud. I can hear his girlfriend screaming “BULLSHIT BULLSHIT” and hurtling his $10,000 African tom-toms across his living room. Just another night in.
I am onto my seventh Carlton Draught. Egad! Why do I drink this pig slime? Ah…yes…it is probably due to some perverse deep-seated desire to appoint myself – in all my middle class comfort – as a brilliant victim of the mainstream: as the glorious freak, something to be aspired to and sit in awe of. It is definitely not because it only costs $5 for two standard drinks…. On most lonesome nights I turn to my old friend, the Pelican. But tonight, it is the reason I am so drunk, huddled on the corner of my overstuffed bookshelf intermittently sobbing. There was an article in the last edition by a Ms Sarah Pallister that has caused me to doubt the very meaning of my being. It was referring to my great idol, Dr Hunter S. Thompson, and how I and some others at this paper are just pale imitations of this god-like cult figure. I’d be weeping at his grave if his ashes had not actually been fired into the stratosphere from a giant cement fist…but now I am left to reflect…reflect on myself, Ms Pallister, and the man I wish I was, Dr Thompson. Firstly, Hunter taught me to shun passive-aggression, so I’m going to say “fuck this crazy cunt” up front. I resisted reading Hunter S. Thompson for years. Drug use and alcoholism bored me, and I couldn’t stand the circle-jerk cult of personality that surrounded him. I made a point of avoiding Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, but my obsession with the canon of American literature led me to Thompson’s work eventually – first up,
Hell’s Angels. The book seized my mind and left me in tiny pleasure fits for weeks. It is one of the most coherent and stylistic pieces of narrative non-fiction in the American canon. I spent the next year reading everything Hunter S. Thompson had ever published – Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail being a personal favourite – but the book that affected me most both as a person and a writer was The Proud Highway; a collection of his letters from 1955-1967. There are countless anxieties present in Thompson’s work, but if there is one that dominated The Proud Highway, it is the anxiety of influence. Thompson spent the first 30 years of his life struggling to find his authorial voice, and spent the next 30 years struggling to maintain it. As a young man of 21 (ho-ho I am 21 and old) he would stay up typing The Great Gatsby over and over to “master the rhythms”. Anyone who has read The Rum Diary will recognise that its greatest flaw is its desire to sound like Fitzgerald; probably what kept it from being published for 35 years. Thompson writes angry missives to friends who accuse him of impersonating Henry Miller and J.P. Donleavy. As a young journalist, Thompson openly imitated H.L. Mencken. But it was ‘Papa’ Ernest Hemingway that he clearly aspired to be – a driving force behind his rapid fire prose and obscene gun collection. & like the sorry quasi rebellious chump that he was, Thompson made a visit to Papa’s grave. [FUCK! MY FUCKING COMPUTER HAS JUST RESTARTED AND I’VE LOST 600 FLAMING WORDS OF BILE!!! I FUCKING HATE THESE MISERABLE COCKSUCKING THINGS!!! BACK TO PAPIRUS I SAY!] Thompson didn’t really find his authorial voice til his early 30s with Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and (the superior) Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail. He was at the forefront of one of my favourite movements in American literature, ‘new-journalism’, a time when journalistic prose
So where does that leave us Gonzolite impersonators? Are we just washed-up used cars salesmen with our oversized pants around our ankles, pumping our flaccid appendages into a headstrong wind? Perhaps. Personally, I have never looked to the Thompson that was filled with drugs and cynicism as much of a role model. Thompson was an incredibly sincere man, one whose prose was more conditioned to his
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Selah, Sarah. I end my lengthy drunken ramble, wet with tears and the juices of my own masturbatory sense of self-worth and originality. And anyway, when I get dead drunk and swear and grope at women far out of my league, I am not trying to be Hunter S. Thompson. I clearly want to be Bukowski.
Although I recognise Ms Pallister’s article as more of a tedious swipe at people she dislikes than a critical interpretation of influence, I also recognise that it is almost impossible for someone else to completely comprehend the effect of one artist upon another. Therein lies the beauty of enjoying someone like Hunter S. Thompson. As to whether Dr Thompson would have hated me and other
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! Do el i n’t p bec n m writ ause ubli y p e sh a o a p p f it wer e r a iss-w e f ! I g a eak in! lost ull I wa of resp 600 sn’t fire o nse wor able got and d s to this that brim reca seco ston now ptur nd e ! YO e it and rate U R , so HO s h y OT it t PE ou’v TEN o d YOU e e a l w JEW AR ith E H PR APP ICK Y! You , I rs w ith love Pat , ches to
acolytes, I don’t doubt it. I’m not one for large threateningly aggressive jocks, so I doubt I would have enjoyed his company much either. But that is irrelevant. I’m not afraid to call myself a Hunter junky, I’m glad he has impressed on my life and work as much as he has; even if that initial wave broke and rolled back some years ago.
Patches,
omed to your Over the years I’ve grown accust In light of a vile rants and vicious putdowns. substitute it recent spiritual awakening, I’ll ached package with grace. Please find in the att can Suicide a revised form of last year’s Peli y of Fiesta, a Kit. Within is contained your cop a membership Smith and Wesson 645 handgun, ification of card for WA Young Labor and not of O’Connor at your pre-selection for the seat the 2013 General Election. Hope you get better, Josh
Quarantine The Past
sensitivity to human suffering than any great desire to consume substances. Like Thompson with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, I have tried to hide from the good Doctor’s influence. But like a psychotic ex-girlfriend who is threatening to fuck your father, Hunter keeps working his way back into my life and writing. And I don’t mind. If there is one thing I learnt from editing Pelican last year it is that every young writer is impersonating someone. It is easy to be self-righteous and cynical about it, but I’d rather have people impersonate the balls and pride of Thompson than the common complacency of a bad zine-publishing stuck-up blogger.
23
peaked due to writers such as George Plimpton, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and of course, Thompson. But Thompson’s unique authorial voice would plant the seed of his own downfall – as the exaggerated and highly fictional doings of Raoul Duke garnered a demanding cult following that drove Thompson to become a pale impersonation of his former self. A husk, as he’d say. As Thompson and Duke began to conflate, his writing suffered. The Curse of Lono is a pitiful throwback to his former glory and I will never forget the feeling of disappointment I felt on finishing his final book, The Kingdom of Fear.
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Dating With Marnie
26
PELICAN BACHELOR OF THE YEAR:
MEET THE BACHELORS with Marnie Allen
LACHLAN KEELEY
THOMAS REYNOLDS
Age: Middle Earth
Age: 1987
Occupation: Learned Bum
Occupation: Durex Sales Representative
What’s your vice? Asparagus-infused Cigarillos
Hobbies: Sassing, watching the Russian remake of The Nanny, making faux Grindr profiles for heterosexuals
Fun fact: I was once suspended from Facebook for posting goat porn on Gossip Girl: Albany‘s page.
Whose nomination would you revoke for Pelican Bachelor of the Year? Richard Ferguson. I went on a date with him once and he spent the entire time either speaking incoherently in Celtic or text messaging his mother. He is the worst.
What do you look for in a woman? Convenience and a R.S.A certificate
Name your number one deal-breaker in a relationship: If you’re a guild president, gangly, acne-prone or povertystricken…NO DICE.
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Quarantine The Past
28
Conserving Celluloid:
Film Preservation Alice Mepham
lapse photography and dissolves in other films, but undeniably this loss deprives us of access to our past.
It’s ironic that at a time when the film industry is set to be entirely overhauled by digital technology that the interest in film preservation has grown exponentially.
So how can we explain this loss? Surely the studios would have been inclined to catalogue and store their own hard-earned toil? To be fair, to a certain extent, they did attempt preserve and index their creations. However nitrate film, the standard before 1950, was highly combustible and this led to more than a few infamous archival fires, not to mention numerous cinema blazes resulting in multiple deaths.
Hollywood heavyweight Martin Scorsese heads the National Film Preservation Foundation. Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg all sit on the Film Foundation’s board of directors. Hell, even George Lucas (yes, the very same man who insists on retrospectively raping his own films) serves on such a council.
Illustration by Camden Watts
So why, now that the traditional medium is essentially dead, are we suddenly supposed to give a damn? Is this renewed vigor for safeguarding borne of legitimate concern, or is it simply another self-congratulatory jerk-circle? Here are some facts. It is estimated that only 20 percent of feature films made prior to 1930 actually survive today and of those produced before 1950 less than half still exist. Perhaps one could mount the argument that the ones we lost along the way simply weren’t worth preserving. However, try telling that to the Academy. We know that actor Emil Jammings won the first ever Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the film The Way Of All Flesh. Alas, we’ll never be able to actually see his performance, as all copies of the film were lost.
Prior to the 1970’s ‘wiping’ was a widespread phenomenon. Essentially it involved erasing and reusing old tape to record new material and after several uses destroying it. In recent history, no one has come to regret this custom more than the good ol’ BBC. At the time the Beeb cited both the cost of the film itself and subsequent storage as the driving rationale behind this. In the process they lost many episodes of Doctor Who, Sykes and Bob Dylan’s first acting appearance in the 1963 play The Madhouse on Castle Street. Needless to say, this was a catastrophic lack of foresight Is this renewed vigor for safeguarding borne on their part, and they have since had to establish the BBC Archive Treasure Hunt in an of legitimate concern, or is it simply another attempt to recover lost productions. A move self-congratulatory jerk-circle? that has had mixed success.
“
Obviously, it would be incredibly naïve to assume that all of our discards were of such quality and cultural significance, but one can’t help but feel we lost more than a few gems in the cinematic refuse. For instance, almost all of film pioneer George Méliès’ 500 films were destroyed during his lifetime. Sure, we can still find his technical innovations such as multiple exposures, time-
All of this, I suppose, is forgivable. You can insulate your archives and projection rooms with all the asbestos in the world, but that shit’s still gonna burn. Likewise, you can count on the thrifty to exploit your junk for a buck or two. Shit, look at the spate of copper theft in Perth over the last few years. If there’s money to be had from something lying completely dormant, like, oh I don’t know, a copper state war memorial or some signals, some ingenious fucker is going to pounce on it. I can reconcile myself with all of this; it’s the widespread practice of ‘wiping’ that still hurts.
Aside from being incredibly flammable the other downside to nitrate film was that it contained a particularly valuable resource: silver. Given that the majority of films stored in archival buildings were hardly accumulating value, it seemed logical that the silver should be extracted. After all, in a time before revenue from DVD sales and distribution rights, precious metal was far more valuable to studios than the images contained within. In fact, some authorities outside the
studios themselves cottoned onto the intrinsic worth of archival film. For instance, do you recall that George Méliès geezer I mentioned earlier? Well, the French Army decided to confiscate and melt his prints during World War I to retrieve the silver. Tragically, the rest ended up as raw material for boot heels. Martin Scorsese was so pissed off by this he decided to make a film declaring his undying love for the man. It won a lot of Oscars for technical innovation. Take that you surrender monkeys.
”
The point is, this bygone tendency to discard without thought of the future seems eminently strange in an age where even prior to production studios are already planning the DVD, cable, and internet-streaming release of their respective projects. Today we have great heritage models in place, but the question remains, is the product actually worth saving?
Politics Club US 2012 Presidential Election Do you like politics? Are you overjoyed by Obama, or rejoicing in Romney? Then you should join the UWA Politics Club at our speakers’ session on the 2012 US Election with US Consul General Ms. Aleisha Woodward and UWA Professor David Denemark. As President Obama nurtures a grassroots campaign to spread his message, Romney is trying to shore up support in a divided Republican Party. The stage is set, so come on down Tuesday May 15 1-2pm to Fox Lecture Theatre to hear more.
HSS Ball and Awards Night Step Right Up as the 2012 Health Students’ Society Ball & Awards Night Carnival is coming soon! This spectacular wonder will be in town for one night only; Saturday 2nd June. Be mystified from 7:30pm at the Forrest Centre Atrium.
Music Students’ Society UWA Chamber Music: 10th May Featuring Mendelssohn’s String Quartet and Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet. Composition Concert: 24th May Featuring new works by student composers. Both concerts are in the Callaway Music Auditorium at 730pm Tickets at the door: MSS members FREE, non-members $10 Music Careers Night – 16th May - School of Music, Tunley Theatre Guest speakers; Shaun Lee-Chen: WASO Violinist, Neville Talbot: Percussionist and manager of Tetrafide Percussion Ensemble and Sarah Brittenden: Mezzo Soprano with WA Opera and Concerts Co-ordinator at UWA.’ MSS members Free, $5 for non members
Pelican artwork! Are you an artiste of unparalleled brilliance? Contact new Pelican Art Director Camden Watts at pelicanartwork@gmail.com to see how you could get involved and hone your talents on the way to becoming the next R.Crumb!
UWA’s Atheist & Skeptic Society Are you an atheist, a skeptic, a freethinker or just interested in topics surrounding these ideas? Then come join UWA’s Atheist & Skeptic Society for discussion and laughs Mondays 11–12 in Reid Library Cafe or Wednesdays 1–3 in the Tav! Find out more on Facebook: facebook.com/uwaass
BlackSTONE SOCIETY The Blackstone Society has a range of events and initiatives available for the remainder of this semester. On the 11th May, the Ashurst Law Dinner Debate will pit law students and professionals against one another to decide whether ‘the world would be a better place without lawyers’. Tickets can be purchased online at http://www.trybooking.com/BJRO. In addition, Blackstone has a number of other upcoming volunteering and educational initiatives that may interest students. For more information please visit our website at www.blackstone.asn.au.
Tickets ($110 members, $115 non-members) are available from www.trybooking.com/BIAO or from committee representatives. Contact Sophie (president@hss-uwa.org) for more information. This will be a night full of magic and fun not to be missed! Three course meal, drinks and entertainment provided. This is an 18+ event. Find us on Facebook!
Health Day What do you do when you’re feeling stressed? Where would you go if you were sexually harassed? ‘Health Day’ is run by fourth year health promotion students aiming to answer questions like these and target issues of Mental Health and Sexual Health on campus. Come down the Oak Lawn on Tuesday 8th May from 12-2pm for a range of fun activities and to find out more!
National Campus Band Comp Entries are now open for the UWA heats of the 2012 National Campus Band Comp! To enter, go to guild.uwa.edu.au/ncbc and follow the instructions.
UWA JUGGLING CLUB
Do you have the balls to juggle? The UWA Juggling Club practices every Friday afternoon at 1pm on James Oval and we are eager to meet new jugglers of any skill level. If you are interested in learning we have experienced performers who can teach you. We don’t stop at just juggling balls either; we also do diabolo, poi, stilts, unicycle, contact juggling and plate spinning. See you this Friday!
Entries close Friday 15 June
What’s Happening
Happening
UNIVERSITY DRAMATIC SOCIETY “Cruise” by James Cohen (Book) and Jackson Griggs (Music) is an upbeat original musical. Set aboard a Cruise ship in the 1970’s, four couples attempt to outrun themselves. Either dreading the past or the future, they find solace aboard the ship free from the conventions of dry land. Premiering at the Dolphin Theatre on May 7th and running till the 12th, The University Dramatic Society is proud to present “Cruise” as the first production in the 2012 program. Tickets available on Oak lawn 12-2pm every day. Or at http://www.trybooking.com/Booking/ BookingEventSummary.aspx?eid=23694
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What’s
WINTHROP SINGERS “As dusk descends on the evening, twenty-six black-clad figures gather to perform a centuriesold ritual. Come witness the Winthrop Singers perform a choral Evensong every Thursday this semester at 6pm in St Thomas More College chapel. All are welcome. More information at www.winthropsingers.com”
Music
30
Are San Cisco the best band in Western Australia? Alex Griffin
The Bakery; a Thursday in April. The nominations for the WAM awards are to be officially announced. The room teems with industry heads. Drinks are flowing, dudes make embarrassing, Hathaway-and-Franco-at-the-Oscars speeches. Names start to roll. Cogs turn: Eight nominations each for San Cisco and Split Seconds. Five for Voltaire Twins. One could be convinced that all is well and holy with Perth music –God is in his heaven, all is right with the world. P’haps not. Despite all this defiant triumphalism (read a WAM press release and you’ll see what I mean), there’s a growing malaise at the centre of the milieu that no one seems willing to address; the stiflingly uncritical nature of the way music is discussed in public – something that has the potential to have serious repercussions. What do I mean? It starts with yer street presses. As Josh “Chuckles” Chiat discussed in these pages last year, the street presses aren’t exactly a hotbed of thought. Drum, X-Press and The Wire all circulate virtually identical information with regards to local (and other) music, all filtered through the same banal, enthused perspective. Gig reviews tend towards an unreflective promotion of anything or everything, regardless of whether it’s closing Supafest or opening at Gignition. The closest thing to a sustained, independent, considered thought is Ben O’Shea’s column in The Wire, and I feel uncomfortable attaching an
adjective here that’s even vaguely synonymous with ‘criticism’. I am certain that thought abounds in those offices, and I am certain there is an audience willing to engage with it; yet, there appears to be no place for ideas in the most widely circulated sources of music journalism in Perth. Perhaps out of fear of losing adverting revenue, they neuter themselves completely. All that occurs is tame, unthinking promotion and regurgitated copy. As such, we are left with a complete blanket of critical silence about music from precisely the people who should be responsible for provoking discussion about it. Y’might look to social media or the internet for informed and sustained critical discussion, but it hasn’t come up yet, even though the almighty dollar doesn’t way as heavily upon the net as it does the street presses. Rather, the uncritical tone set by the street press seems to have set the template for how discussions by Perth music sites occur (unless you’re lurking the Perthbands forum, in which case may God have mercy on your soul). Facebook has seen a flood of banal pages devoid of identity, all purporting to be the sole champions of !PERTH MUSIC! acting essentially as link hubs for anyone and everyone to submit their music to be celebrated by virtue of the fact that it is music. Websites either don’t engage heavily with local music, or focus on uncritical spotlights of Perth bands that are as bland as they are friendly.
The epitome of unthinking assent is SixThousand, where everything at least ten degrees left of the mainstream is indistinguishably saluted. Admittedly, 6T doesn’t purport to be anything more than a Lonely Planet guide for the hip suburbs of Perth, but the message is equally fierce to that of the street presses; everything you see here is good. The entire conversation in the public, written sphere around Perth music neither asks questions nor provides opinions nor criticises. It either interviews or reports. It promotes. The driving principle behind all editorial decisions seems to be ‘sell’, ‘display’ or ‘encourage’. Heck, stuck in the middle of a 90s revival as we are, irreverence hardly gets a look in. “Hey,” you interject as you impatiently tug on your Tame Impala tote, “what’s the issue with promotion predominating over criticism?” I was getting to that! Firstly, promotion is ultimately a one-way street. It doesn’t engage, relate or explore; it tells, and it sells. While criticism searches for ideas and substance over immediacy, comfort and cash, promotion thrives upon limiting the conversation between art and audience beyond conjuring a positive response. All becomes surface in the promotional sphere; you either like what is being sold to you, or you don’t, thus becoming irrelevant to the pitch. Writing about art is simplified to reducing music to signifiers (read a street press review that doesn’t meekly talk about what a band sounds like as
Music
31 opposed to the impact or ideas they have and I’ll buy you Coke) and as such, reduces art to a commodity with certain static characteristics. Secondly, promotion is exclusive, and depressingly so. It goes where the money is. Criticism permits everyone an audience, but promotion is by nature selective about where it shines the spotlight. That is to say, whatever is most palatable to the many gets the most attention. To become relevant in a promotional cycle, it’s necessary to kowtow to these mechanisms of promotion by becoming attractive to it. If one wants to be noticed, it’s more vital to create something which welcomes acceptance rather than creating something which necessitates a reaction (i.e. something interesting). A preponderance of the promotional mentality forces the banal and immediate into the popular consciousness, and forces the challenging and interesting out, refusing to look for what doesn’t attract fast (hey, triple j). Sure, promotion is necessary for anyone to make a living from music, but it’s still merely a necessary evil. Though people gots to get paid – and there are always going to be people in the music industry who are more Kim Fowley than Kim Gordon, sluicing off their cut to keep the wheels of art moving – where promotion predominates over criticism, promotion sends those wheels straight and unswervingly to the middle of the road, which is the most exclusive place of all. There are people who will always exist on the fringes of things no matter what, but the existential hopelessness of the unheralded artist only tends to get amplified by an uncritical, unsearching media, or even snuffed out altogether. Consider it; existence of The Drones would never preclude the existence of something like San Cisco, but the existence of San Cisco might well preclude the existence of something like The Drones. The stifling promotional cycle stifles individual innovation in terms of artistic and organisational creativity, as the path to success and recognition narrows to a pin-sized mention in GIGS OF THE WEEK on SixThousand. Most vitally of all, we deserve better than an artistic sphere dominated by a promotional cycle beholden to commercial interests! Criticism is important, vital and beneficial to any artistic community, and by extension, the community at large. The reality is that, like two fat men perched hundreds of meters above the ground on the
opposite ends of a see-saw where the base of said see-saw sits on a narrow cliff, art and criticism need eachother. Art aims towards a reflection of things; the role of criticism is to tell us whether it’s being done well, and to place it within wider frames of reference. Art makes the letters, and criticism builds the language. Without criticism, there is nothing to reflect upon the shape of things past, present and to come, to shape and inspire as well as informing. The consequences of a barren critical landscape are more severe than one might initially imagine. That criticism is so sparse in Perth is troubling in itself. The most valuable piece of advice you’ve ever been given didn’t tell you that you were doing just fine the way you were going. Art needs to be a dialogue between inspiration and reflection; a public that simply nods assent to whatever its artists do isn’t a worthy audience, no matter what the art is like. Criticism is entirely a productive thing; criticism is caring. Nothing suffers by it except mediocrity. The reason people idealise the parlour of Gertrude Stein, or the squats of NYC circa ‘77 is the fact that these places were clusterfucks of people telling eachother what they thought. Talented as they were, they didn’t agree, and they were all talking to eachother; criticising, proofreading, hectoring, dismissing, appreciating. Criticism is all about debate, and debate is the most fertile ground for the cross pollination and the exchange of ideas there is. Criticism leads to hybrids of innovation and the development of creativity and ideas; a mature, reflexive, exciting culture. A lack of talent isn’t an issue, and it never is; what is at stake here is the environment we are creating for the talent in Perth to develop. If the conversations coming from the media here around music don’t even remotely provoke, suggest or question, then we’re less likely to have artists capable of doing the same. Criticism forces
Simon Collins, The West Australian Music Editor and Golden WAMi Nominee. Somehow.
the clash of differing opinions and worldviews, engaging people to reconsider their responses by likening one thing to another, and suggesting new ways of seeing. Promotional culture isolates art from art, like how products on a supermarket shelf are demarcated from one another insuperably. Criticism throws the entirety of art into a mess to be played and contorted, with the sole aim of coming to deeper ways of understanding. The more distant to debate we are, the smaller the ideational gene pool will get and the less spontaneous and creative our art will be. Besides, if we continue to be stuck in these blind, unthinking ways of viewing music, Perth ends up avoiding what makes the illusion of Other Places (i.e. the Emerald City of Melbourne) tantalising; instead of building a more open, proactive culture, we end up entrenching a reactive, stolid one indentured to constantly toeing the queasy, limiting intersection of commerce and art. After all, critical institutions like Melbourne’s Mess+Noise –publications that drive agendas and ideas instead of following them – became important not through consistency, innovation and character, but a certain fearlessness and discrimination of judgment. A reasonable, well-informed publication equipped with a desire to ask questions and spark debate (while engaging with a reader’s mind instead of their wallet) will find a steady rapport with an audience, no matter where. Our local music press has no rapport with any kind of audience, because the information it gives is only temporally relevant. One isn’t required to think, learn or react, so it can’t be enjoyed or used to any greater purpose than a gig guide or to find out what Bon Iver likes so dang much about Perth. Robust, public, critical perspectives are one of those rare, powerful things that can bring maturity and reflexivity to a society. If commercialism dominates the way music or art is spoken about, a pernicious, atomistic relativism develops, to the point that there’s little profitable exchange of ideas in the public sphere. If Perth is going to produce worthy pieces of art in the future, we require a press which is bold enough to ask questions and to provoke responses, rather than merely reporting what has already occurred.
Music Reviews
32
Perth
M. Ward
Kynan Tan
Young Magic
Babes, Water, Waves
A Wasteland Companion
Raetina
Melt
Self-released
Merge
Listen/Hear Collective
EMI
Perth, named for their hometown, have debuted with an impressive set of ambient electronica. Like Seekae without the glitch, or a hungover Decoder Ring, songs alternate from quirky instrumental ambient pieces (conjuring the image of girls in frilly dresses blowing bubbles in the park), to grittier work.
So, a little about M. Ward. He’s a Portland singer/songwriter who’s released a bunch of albums: some solo, some with actress Zooey Deschanel, and some with supergroup Monsters of Folk. A few of those albums have been critically adored, and as such you’ve probably heard his music in the odd episode of Grey’s Anatomy. It was probably quite pleasant, perhaps to the point where you didn’t even notice it. But while this kind of ear-pleasing Americana is M. Ward’s bread and butter, A Wasteland Companion is so heavy on aimless folksiness that it becomes grating.
Raetina is the first full length album by Perth based sound artist Kynan Tan, whose work experiments with electroacoustic atmospheres and glitchy textures. I’ll admit my first impressions of Raetina were rather bleak, as I found the music difficult to connect with. It felt as though there was little structure in the music, which appeared to be nothing more than digital fiddlings that were totally experimental and unconventional.
This album is the equivalent of getting a Chinese character that you don’t understand tattooed on your back. Young Magic, comprised of two young Aussies and an Indonesian-born vocalist, got together while individually travelling through Europe and America.
In terms of mood, Babes, Water, Waves begins reflective and ends there, but is not without dark, brooding moments. ‘Won’t Stop’ is a strong indicator of the rest of the record, slowly unravelling warm, pleasant shapes. Highlight ‘Seesaw’ is an amusement park in the clouds, and the atmospheric ‘Get Out of Bed’ strongly resembles the analogue spaciousness of Boards of Canada, oozing with dirt-crusted synths. This abrasiveness sets perth apart from their contemporaries, as they consistently experiment with their approach to arrangements and production. That said, there are problems with the execution; there are lots of beats to love here, but sometimes songs err on the side of ADHD, jumping between themes quickly and losing the thread that made them stand out. The more patient songs that follow the same thought process from the first beat to the last really shine. With greater focus, perth are set for brilliance, but as it stands, Babes, Water, Waves is a solid debut album that will be lapped up by fans of ambient, electronica and downtempo sounds.
Trent Howard
7.0
The album’s opening track ‘Clean Slate’ is the highlight of the record; it’s a quietly beautiful number, which makes good use of Ward’s so-so voice and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Unfortunately, the remaining eleven tracks fail to match it. Though the piano heavy ‘Primitive Girl’ is boppy, and ‘Sweetheart’ is sugary enough to please fans of Ward’s work with Deschanel, the songs here don’t provide anything to sink your teeth into. While nothing here is downright terrible, Ward’s songwriting is almost uniformly unremarkable. As boring as the gently picked guitars and whispered vocals become, it’s Ward’s attempts at “rocking out” that are the album’s real weaknesses. ‘Me and My Shadow’ is a mess of different styles and half-baked Dylan-isms, while ‘I Get Ideas’ is so predictable that it comes off as lazy. Fans of Ward’s earlier records may manage to get something out of this, but they’re likely to be the only ones.
Keaton McSweeney
4.0
The suspense-laden, haunting tracks were quite alienating and difficult to unpack; however, subsequent listens revealed to me the intricacies of Tan’s compositions, and led me to appreciate the stark otherworldliness of Raetina as something akin to genius. Much of the record, particularly ‘Skeletal (frame+axis)’ is strikingly reminiscent of the cold sonics of videogame chiptunes, like the bleepy Mt Moon theme found on Pokemon RBY. Though the reference points for the songs here are invariably electronic and robotic, the unfolding, graceful manner in which Tan uses beats and loops throughout the album provides his overtly digital approach with a warmer, human quality. The use of wailing vocals complement the ghostly tone of the album very effectively in tracks such as ‘Woken/ Under Streams’ and ‘Itadakimasu’. Raetina is definitely not an album for getting your groove on, or even a tranquil listening session, as listening to it is the music equivalent of watching a surreal sci-fi, but I would recommend the album for anyone interested in experimental music.
Gideon Sacks
8.0
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what their debut album sounds like; three sheltered Aussie leavers, shoehorning the superficialities of foreign cultures into their lives to make themselves feel like they’ve experienced the world. Everything here is so contrived it’s difficult to listen to. Opener ‘Sparkly’ has Coldplay written all over it, quickly deflating hopes that there’ll be anything original within Melt. The disingenuous, hollow nature of Young Magic’s approach to injecting some world-weariness in to their songs is demonstrated by ‘Slip Time’, which is a poor and facile attempt to depict the experience of using drugs. Elsewhere, ‘You With Air’ embarrassingly attempts to portray white suburbia as ancient and tribal. ‘Yalam’ sounds like it was a lot more fun to play than it was to listen to, and ‘Jam Karet’ enlightens with a worldly, eternal set of high school wisdom. The rest of the album is replete with more empty platitudes and a consistent ambivalence toward the idea of “tune”, before closing with ‘Drawing Down the Moon’, which is a song they may as well have ripped from any Café del Mar compilation. That is to say, it’s good music if you’re not listening.
Zev Levi
4.5
Music Reviews
33
Quarantine The Past
Nicki Minaj
Scott & Charlene’s Wedding
Xiu Xiu
Parenthetical Girls
Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded
Para Vista Social Club
Always
Entanglements
Universal/Young Money
Bedroom Suck
Polyvinyl
Tomlab (Originally realeased 2008)
Top Comments
Appearance: The colour of rustic dirty dirt-rust. Pours with an excessive amount of head, but the texture is great. Really great. So full of sediment that it may actually be opaque, possibly due to live fermentation and mono filtering. May have actually been brewed in a warehouse.
With less of the grating buzz of their first LP Knife Play and even more electropop than 2010’s Dear God I Hate Myself, it seems like art-pop weirdos Xiu Xiu might have delivered their most accessible record to date. That isn’t to say it’s an easy listen, though; as the cover art of a throbbing, pore-engorged tattoo suggests. This is another album about rawness, pain and scars that never heal.
Everyone wants to be Burt Bacharach, but those game enough to try generally come up short (cf. Sean O’Hagan). After all, when it comes to influences, outright mimicry is an admission of failure; it is what you take from the past and add to your own worldview that counts. Pizzicato Five took Bacharach and added themselves (i.e. bein’ sprightly and Japanese); Jim O’Rourke added Being a Jerk. Parenthetical Girls marry the swing, nous and bluster of Bacharachian chamber pop to tortured, elliptical narratives about emotional and intrapersonal breakdown, before burying them under neoclassical dissonances and electronic debris. Genteel, eloquent chord structures and baroque melodies vainly disguise the horror of feeling ill, like makeup over bruises. Like their cousins and collaborators Xiu Xiu, Parenthetical Girls take bad troubles (abortion, suicide, rape, child abuse) head on and in hand, and raise equally troubling questions: how does one deal with the past? Can one use the past to become better, or changed? Is it even possible to move on when one devotes so much to dealing?
The f*ckin hook Mannnnnnnnnnn . I love this f*ckin song . i could listen to this and beez in the trap ALLLLLLL day cjmonique1 22 hours ago
I miss old school like Tupac he sang about our communitys. Nicki Minaj is singing about Beez in a trap? Pedram Takiporian 5 minutes ago
I would fuck the dog shit out of that crazy bitch randleqgod in reply to tannazjp 13 minutes ago
I saw Nas and clicked the link, otherwise I wouldn’t be anywhere near this track rtd1995 1 day ago
11
the 9 dislike is does that d’ont understand kiki ujyhftgd 3 days ago
this is a really beautiful song, the synth piano in the chorus is sick. talking bout me, you talking about me?! selinaaalion 2 days ago
fkn grous song. been trying 2 download it from frostwire but my frostwire is fucked. has anything happened 2 frostwire recently? is it the limewire of 2012? SuperEssendon2000 8 hours ago
Aroma: Melbourne, on another sticky breezeless summer day. Also, the smell of rain. Inevitable rain. More than a hint of sweat. Tears of resignation. Taste: The first sip is an intoxicating tumble forward, and it only picks up momentum from there. Very basic, almost cliché-like elements combine to make something quite refreshing. Notes of ‘Rejected’ and ‘Find a Way’ are not really to my taste, but ‘Footscray Station’, ‘Back in Town’, ‘Epping Line’ sit very nicely with me. A dull bitterness lingers throughout, probably due to copious amounts of angst being left in the boil. Feel: Over two years old but has aged fine, probably due to reliance on the traditional “do it how you fucking want” mentality rather than style-of-the-month bandwagon. Enjoyment is certainly aided by a heavy dose of volume.
Musically, Xiu Xiu are more digestible than ever, and occasionally fun. With empty metallic drones aplenty, ‘Hi,’ ‘Honey Suckle’ and ‘Smear the Queen’ all flirt with out and out synthpop, and shadows of softer Xiu Xiu classics ‘Sad Pony Guerilla Girl’ and ‘Fast Car’ abound in ‘Factory Girl’. However, that accessibility is tempered by the darkness of the lyrics; Always is flush with dark, seething imagery, reaching levels of subversion so far unexplored by the Xiu Xiu catalogue. The allusions to abuse that we have come to expect from Xiu Xiu remain, but there’s also a willingness to tackle more topical themes, particularly in ‘Gul Mudin,’ which describes the life of a 15-year-old Afghan who was murdered for fun by American soldiers.
zachsavagedrums 1 day ago
Perhaps the most beautiful track on the album is ‘Born to Suffer.’ Upbeat background sounds that wouldn’t be out of place on a toy keyboard permeate lyrics that hint at both animal testing – “Oh bunny rabbit, jaundiced by the bummer of habit”- to suicide (“If God won’t come I’ll go to him”). More than a decade on from their debut, Xiu Xiu show no signs of turning down the pain or the honesty, or running out of fascinating ways to express them.
Josh Chiat
Sarah Dunstan
chris brown ruined it FUCK!!!!! dfbvfgb 14 hours ago
omg talk about a h8er! i am sooooo inspierd my dis song!
Overall: It is good that this has been made available for consumption again. It can be kept and stored for use in years to come. Priced at a very standard $16.90, and most readily acquired through the internet.
alexia vereen 19 hours ago
cover of this song on my page guys! Check it out please, appreciate it :) zachsavagedrums in reply to nreece98 1 day ago
cover of this song on my page!!!!
6.0
Connor Weightman
7.5
8.0
The past is a dominant theme on another level aside from the lyrical, as Head Parenthetical Zac Pennington has a curate’s ear for using the melodic frameworks of past works to inform and expand on his themes. Take the magnificent ‘A Song For Ellie Greenwich’; it quotes liberally from the Bacharach standard ‘Close To You’ while relating a taut, distraught narrative of pregnancy and loathing (“just like me/they long to see/you on your knees”) to queasy, devastating effect. If that wasn’t meta enough, the song is named for the woman who wrote ‘Be My Baby’. It’s never simply the events of the past coming back to haunt these songs; it is a jumble of melodies, images and names combining to show at once the effort, and the impossibility, of completely quarantining the past.
Alex Griffin
Secondly, the strict timeline cannot be applied to the basic dramatic structure of a script. The greatest biographical scripter of all time, William Shakespeare, was not a man to be burdened by historical facts as his Macbeth shows. In fact, there was only one witch (not three), and the real Macbeth had a relatively long and peaceful reign unlike the instant and bloody end he experiences in Shakespeare’s account. Whilst one would always advise adding historical accuracy to the mix, one should not worry too much about putting big dollops of it into the mixture.
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At last, we are able to put our beautiful biopic into the oven for a long roast. When choosing the setting for our oven, my suggestion is to put it on for one period of time only. Peter Morgan’s greatest gift to the biopic world has been the focus on one period of time in a biopic subject’s life rather than a full sweep of their life. The best example is his film The Queen, which focuses on Her Majesty’s reaction to the death of Princess Diana. In this one week, Morgan and actress Helen Mirren create an exquisite character study of a political icon at her most vulnerable.
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Before we put this biopic in the oven, it’s important to thinly layer it with the right amount of historical accuracy. The reasons we say thin layers is due to the fact that no screenwriter can be expected to fully adhere to the timeline of events. Firstly, it is impossible to know all the details to the private conversations of politicians, especially those who existed before any sort of record was kept.
As with all stuffing, one requires a good stuffing utensil and none better than a seasoned screenwriter. Peter Morgan, the current culinary god of the biopic kitchen, is always a safe bet. His Tony Blair trilogy has provided some of the best biopics of the past fifty years. With this sprinkling of star power and screenwriting, your biopic will be reeling in both the critics and customers in their millions.
es
Instead, it is better to add a lower profile ingredient. Malcolm X is an example of how taking the less famous and more controversial option can lead to a huge market. One can imagine that if Spike Lee and Denzel Washington had chosen to make The Martin Luther King Story it would have been far more sentimental and less original in its take. Originality of the subject is the key to making this dangerous recipe a major success. Layer liberally over the skin of your turkey.
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Bias
Intr
igue
Counter this with Phyillida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady (AKA Maggie Thatcher For Dummies – Film Ed.), which swept through Margaret Thatcher’s life without exploring any aspect of it in a decent way. Setting the biopic to one period of time lets the subject and their story simmer beautifully, avoiding the overcooked “life story” angle.
Impersonat
ion
Finally, the biopic is ready to come out of the oven and be set at the cinematic table for the political junkies to feast over. The final touch is a light crumbling of impersonation. For any biopic actor, they are mainly judged on whether they captured the essence of the famous person they are playing. It is indeed important for the actress to look and sound like the political figure, but it is more important to capture the essence of the character than to merely do a mimic of them. I return to The Iron Lady, a film where Meryl Streep perfectly captures the voice and look of Thatcher. However, she does not induce the same feeling of authority and domination that Thatcher had, with Streep transforming her bellow into a shriek. Instead, I would advise that people watch the BBC film Margaret, where actress Lindsay Duncan provides little mimicry but captures the terror and desperation of Thatcher’s character. Impersonation is important but to overdo it is to ruin a perfect dish.
d ng sone Sea enwriti e r c S
Biographical films are the fine cuisine of the political junkie.
Originality Acc
ity ebr Cel or Act
ura cy
Our kind gluttonously consumes the lives and secrets of the politicians we devote ourselves to and nothing gives us a bigger fix than the political biopic. In one short film, we can satisfy our political hunger whilst receiving a seal of approval from the cool kids of Hollywood for our geeky obsessions. More often than not, these super-sized political works have left me with indigestion, after absorbing their dollops of caricature and the bitter taste of bias they leave in one’s mouth. However, occasionally there comes such a rich, succulent, accurate biopic – a mature character study – that I’m left begging for a sequel I know can never come. The following recipe should act as a guide to all cinematic chefs who wish to serve up such a delicious political biopic.
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Every recipe needs a secret ingredient. For the biopic, it is originality. In both subject and story, the biopic’s makers must contend with the fact their story has probably been told a million times before on both the big and small screens. Recognition is a highly overvalued component of the recipe and is often overused. Take the case of Elizabeth I of England, a woman who has amassed a collection of 22 films about her. Whilst some amazing performances have been garnered by the likes of Glenda Jackson and Quentin Crisp, there are only so many “I have the heart and stomach of a King” monologues one can hear before they start cheering for the Catholics.
With this secret ingredient lying at the bottom of our bowl, it is time to force in a bit of that Hollywood magic to make our recipe sparkle. Whilst in many genres mega stars are becoming less welcome, the biopic thrives on them. They are the stuffing of this biopic turkey, a perhaps unnecessary part of the meal that we nevertheless lap up. Many political junkies spend their nights casting their political heroes, hoping that some starlet will show as much interest in those dowdy Prime Ministers and Secretaries of State. In some instances, the casting is perfect, such as Helen Mirren and James Cromwell as Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip respectively. However, unorthodox choices can be made, such as the choice of American Meryl Streep to play Margaret Thatcher when actresses like Emma Thompson could have done a fine job.
Ea
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Film Reviews
36
The Pirates: Band of Misfits
This Must Be The Place
American Pie: Reunion
Director Peter Lord & Jeff Newitt
Director Paolo Sorrentino
Starring Hugh Grant, David Tennant, Salma Hayek, Brendan Gleeson
Starring Sean Penn, Frances McDormand, David Byrne
Director Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg
Featuring the voice talents of Hugh Grant, David Tennant, Brendan Gleeson and Imelda Staunton, and made by Aardman Animations (the studio behind Wallace and Gromit), this movie could have been amazing. The trailer is amazing. The movie is really quite shit. Not so shit it’s awesome, like The Room or Barbarella, but just ordinary everyday kind of shit. The trailer/movie quality disparity with Pirates isn’t as bad as Sucker Punch but it also doesn’t have the hot chicks in schoolgirl outfits to make up for it. Pirates is filled with jokes which are funnier if you describe them to someone than if you see them, and this applies to the whole movie, actually. It doesn’t have the charm of Wallace and Gromit or attention to detail in background humour (eg. punny names for characters and businesses). The closest thing I could spot in Pirates was a sign reading ‘D.K. Ying Dentistry’. Hurr hurr. I know picking at plot holes in a kids’ movie is about as socially acceptable as peeing in a swimming pool, but it bugged me that it’s never explained why Pirate Captain – that’s the character’s name – became a pirate since incredibly posh voices (like Hugh Grant’s) are not what you usually associate with pirates. On top of this, Charles Darwin, Jane Austen and the Elephant Man feature in some weirdly jarring cameos leaving me unsure just who Aardman think they’re aiming this film at. Pirates is ok but if you don’t have a free pass just wait until it’s on TV.
Yvonne Buresch
4.0
With David Byrne providing the score, This Must Be The Place provides an often cringingly blunt view of American culture and its landscape. Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, who found fame in 2008 with Il Divo, creates a wonderfully bizarre portrait of a man’s journey through boredom and guilt into belated adulthood. Once again, Sean Penn manages to create another complex and endearing character in Cheyenne, a tired ex-rock star with more than a passing resemblance to Robert Smith. From cute giggles to blank looks, you can’t help but be amazed by Penn’s ability to deliver such a detailed and authentic performance. The beautifully clean and intimate cinematography takes you on a slow, yet enjoyable journey with Cheyenne on the search for his estranged father’s persecutor from Auschwitz. The distinct juxtaposition of the childlike, snail-paced Penn with a Nazi-revenge plot provides many strange encounters and awkwardly surreal moments. Oh, and then David, my white-haired man-angel appearing as himself, performs ‘This Must Be The Place’ halfway through (I counted four different versions played in the film; one by an adorably fat child). His heavenly voice and, albeit short, presence in the film, makes for a wonderful digression. However, the entirely unnecessary subplot of a missing son and semi-adopted daughter does not. Who are these people? Why am I supposed to care? Sorrentino’s latest offering will leave you feeling equally delighted and bemused. Sure, you’ll probably be left asking where the fuck this place exactly is, but Cheyenne’s delightful odyssey is a thing of perplexing beauty.
Romany Pope
8.0
Starring Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Chris Klein, Alyson Hannigan
American Pie: Reunion is an incredibly unambitious film. Willing to coast along on its audience’s nostalgia for the first film, Reunion feels like a lost artefact from a time capsule filled with Bill Clinton jokes and Limp Bizkit albums. Reunion is only really worth your time if you’ve got a nostalgia hard-on for the first movie. The plot is pretty rote, all of the main characters from the original American Pie are returning to East Great Falls for their high school reunion. They all have mostly uninteresting side-plots which are resolved by the end of the film. The marital difficulties of Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) is a generic sitcom plot that doesn’t earn it’s resolution. Another low point is the ludicrous subplot featuring eighteen-year-old Kara (Ali Cobrin), who’s determined to lose her virginity to Jim, her former babysitter. The subplot climaxes with a creepy sequence where Kara gets naked, catatonically drunk and has to be sneaked back into her parents’ house. Basically it’s an excuse for a seedy mid-film T and A show. But hey, you totally see Jason Biggs’ penis. Gender equality, everybody! The cameos are far more entertaining than the main cast. Eugene Levy is funny and actually manages to inject some pathos as Jim’s Dad. John Cho’s return as MILF Guy is the funniest joke in the movie. Chris Klein is a hilariously bad actor, and there’s some funny digs at his infamous leaked Mamma Mia audition.
Kevin Chiat
4.0
Film Reviews
37
Delicacy
Director Peter Berg
Director Stephane & David Foenkinos
Director David Cronenberg
There’s this perfect term you can use to describe the Cronenbergian approach to cinematic violence: ‘clinical gore’. It helps that many of his films feature hospitals or doctors in some way: “psychoplasmics” specialist Hal Raglan (The Brood); Dr Paul Ruth, head of Consec’s “Scanner Section” (Scanners), the twin gynaecologists, Elliot and Beverly Mantle (Dead Ringers), and - of course - good ol’ Dr Benway (Naked Lunch). From Shivers, to Crash, to his newest work – A Dangerous Method – every film crafted by David Cronenberg has treated the trauma that takes place within itself clinically. Seeing as A Dangerous Method is film about the birth of modern psychoanalysis and the subsequent teething problems that occur between its two figureheads, I think it would be fair to say that Cronenberg has not deviated from his regular themes, nor approach. Which is not just a good thing, but a great thing. There is only one significant flaw in this film. Luckily, it only lasts for about the first 20 minutes of the film and then its ugly head is generally obscured for the remainder of the runtime. Of course, I’m talking about Keira Knightley’s attempts at Serious Acting – i.e. her idea of how to portray a person with serious psychological trauma. Which involves her moaning and pointing her chin at the camera. And stuttering. That’s about it. Of course, when you’re acting next to Fassbender and Mortensen, it’s easy for anyone to look bad, but FUCK, man. Also, this was a pretty good movie and stuff. David Cronenberg is the greatest living Canadian. PEACE!
Starring Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Brooklyn Decker, Liam Neeson, Rihanna
Starring Audrey Tautou, Francois Damiens, Bruno Todeschini, Melanie Bernier
Starring Viggo Mortenson, Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley
Lachlan Keeley
Battleship
Going purely by the film’s title, it’s fairly self-evident that Delicacy aims to be a sweet rom-com. Clearly, it has all the key ingredients of a proven saccharine winner: the whimsical pixie in Audrey Tautou, a swag of goofy indie tropes and a timeless princess-frog courtship. However, what ultimately comes out of the oven is a half-baked and inconsequential affair. Helmed by siblings Stephane and David Foenkinos, Delicacy follows the journey of gamine Parisian, Nathalie (France’s sweetheart Audrey Tautou) who finds her life unexpectedly thrown into disarray when she is widowed after three-years of marital bliss. In an effort to dull the pain, Nathalie throws herself into her mundane job as a business executive at a Swedishowned firm. Several years pass, during which she fends off numerous advances from her predatory boss (terrifically portrayed by Bruno Todeschini) until one day she bizarrely ends her mourning by placing an entirely unexpected kiss upon the lips of her awkward Swedish co-worker Markus (comedian turned thespian Francois Damiens). Completely taken aback, but utterly enthralled, Markus immediately falls for his superior and predictably the remainder of the film is dedicated to their gawky courtship. Surprisingly, it’s the oafish Damiens that steals the show. Whereas Tautou seems to be going through the motions (her character grates far more than she charms) her duck-footed co-star endears with his vulnerability and ungainliness. Certainly, your heart still skips a beat when she bats her big brown eyes at the camera, but there’s something lacking there that you can’t quite put your finger on. Ultimately, the film isn’t delicate; it’s plain timid. Where Delicacy should soar, it’s too hesitant, too impassive. Sure, we all love a bit of soft foreplay, but sometimes it pays to be rough.
7.0 Alice Mepham
5.0
THEY DIDN’T SAY
“YOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP” ONCE IN THIS ENTIRE FUCKING
MOVIE
MIS S !
Alice Mepham
Illustrated by Kate Prendergast
A Dangerous Method
0.5
Books
American Dervish
38
Ayad Akhtar
7/10 The title American Dervish is revealing of the myriad paradoxes explored in Ayad Akhtar’s debut novel. Written with a confident simplicity, the smell of a ‘migrant-in-new-country’ premise is misleading. Instead, Akhtar creates a rich world with provocative questions and complex characters. Think more Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and less Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi. Hayat Shah, a child on the cusp of puberty, is brought to both a spiritual and sexual awakening by family friend Mina, a beautiful woman repressed by Islamic patriarchy but unwavering in her faith. His father Naveed is more inclined to see religion as a business for hypocrites while his mother Muneer, a Freudian neophyte, is more immersed in her husband’s infidelity than piety. Add a Jewish love interest into the mix and you have a party. Unfortunately, some characters outside of the immediate household tend to read like stereotypes, incongruous with the complex issues explored. Nevertheless the world of Islam within the household is illuminated by vivid struggles between spirituality and ideology, faith and logic. READ IT WITH: Tea and compassion. I felt the poignant sting of my own tussle with God.
Pure BEST BIT: The beauty of belief; surrendering to the unknown can bring as much relief as finding answers.
WORST BIT: The characters sometimes risk slipping into stereotypes, especially peripheral ones. The mother is annoying.
by Kanishka Dayaram thinks Anne Shirley was the catalyst for her love of books. Something about them redheads.
Run Fat Bitch Run Ruth Field
9/10
BEST BIT: Ruth describing her complete emotional/ motivational meltdown, proving she’s actually human.
If you’re like me and have no self-control, lack the motivation to lose those few extra kilos and find running the equivalent to a slow and painful death via suffocation, I definitely recommend this book.
WORST BIT:
“RUN, FAT BITCH, RUN!” is the tough-love mantra obsessive runner Ruth Field suggests you scream at yourself to push through the unavoidable pain, tiredness and apathy that comes with the act of running.
Reading the many hellish descriptions of running. How do people do this?!
According to Field, you first make friends with your ‘inner bitch’ – the voice that won’t replace “fat” with “curvy”, or “ugly as fuck” with “interesting features.” Then you take up her eight week running plan. This is handy for anyone, of any fitness level, though it’s also clear you shouldn’t berate yourself to the point you cause severe psychological damage and want to go drown in a pool of chocolate fudge. This just leads to gaining even more weight. So, did this book actually make me run? No. However, it almost did, which says a lot.
by Ellie Baker-Young is a nerd. She LOVES Dr Who and reading. She also loves to eat..
Julianna Baggott
6/10 Pure is intriguing, dark and twisted. I appreciate that world building, background and atmosphere were, and needed to be, established. However, it took me about two-thirds of the book to be absorbed, and this information was often extracted tediously. Told from multiple points of view, readers can see the plot-lines entwining and coming together. It sheds light on the plausible future of nuclear bombs and the self-destruction of the human race in a digestible manner for young adult readers. Violence and consequences aren’t mellowed down for the target audience. Unfortunately, the motivation for one of the main characters that spurs the plot of the novel is irrational: A boy in the safe haven of a DOME decides to venture out into radiation and post-apocalyptic wilderness because he suddenly believes, without concrete evidence, his mother (presumed dead for years) is alive! READ IT WITH: Dinosaur chicken nuggets and an appreciation of dark foreshadowing.
Sex Drive - In pursuit of female desire Dr Bella Ellwood-Clayton
Humans being fused to animals/objects as a result of the blast. Characters actually die.
WORST BIT: The use of third-person present tense makes it sound childish.
by Eunice Ong has a penchant for dystopian novels because it makes her life seem better in comparison.
BEST BIT: The section on pregnant eroticism.
3/10 My boyfriend was worried when I brought this book home, interpreting my every move as a wild sexual desire that needed to be tamed. I think he was worried that I wasn’t ‘fulfilled’ in the bedroom and had to seek advice from a sex self-help book. What I failed to tell him was that this book was written for post-menopausal women seeking help for their sexual dysfunction anxiety. It has an incredibly conspicuous cover with large black font on a bright yellow background. Strange looks from the man sitting five metres away from me on the bus proved there is no way of hiding it – if you must read it do so in the comfort of your home. It’s probably the most boring book I’ve ever read. It’s filled with sex facts I already knew and dated philosophic models explaining our sexual desires in Freudian terms. In short, there were not enough pictures or positions to hold my attention. I would suggest something more exotic like Kama Sutra or D’Angelo. READ IT WITH: Your mum and dad.
READ IT WITH: A jar of cookies. If they’re still there at the end of the book, you know it’s worked.
BEST BIT:
WORST BIT: The women’s anecdotes: I now know Iris from Melbourne, 67, masturbates twice a day without fail.
by Lizzy Plus is the Pelican sexetary. Her favourite position is the Kinky Typewriter.
Etgar Keret
BEST BIT:
Keret’s world is located somewhere between Kobo Abe’s bizarre dreamlands, in which men grow radishes from their lower legs, and Roald Dahl’s tales of domestic horror. The significant thing about these stories (and what makes them all the more enjoyable) is that the majority of the protagonists are regular people; individuals like you and me, who just happen to be having bad days. You know, the kind where you decide to pull a mysterious zipper in your boyfriend’s mouth and accidentally remove his skin from the rest of his body. READ IT WITH: Some rock salt bagels – they’re fucking delicious and only $1.80.
8/10
WORST BIT: Insert a bad joke about Judaism here, ha ha ha!
7/10 X-Men: Season One is the second in Marvel’s new graphic novel series retelling their superheroes’ earliest days. It’s the sort of thing which could be a bore with nothing new to say. Instead it’s a fun, poppy re-imagining of the 60s’ X-Men which actually feels modern. Dennis Hopeless is a newcomer to superhero comics, but here he demonstrates that he’s got an excellent grasp on the teen superhero voice. Hopeless makes the smart choice to centre the story around Jean Grey, we’re introduced to the X-Men through her. The story focuses on the teen angst of the original five X-Men, but always has one eye on the larger ‘mutants as other’ political metaphor. Jamie McKelvie was a brilliant choice as artist. His teens actually dress like modern teens, he’s as adept drawing action as he is at character moments and he makes the original X-Men costumes look retro-cool. Matthew Wilson’s work as colourist also helps give Season One it’s pop-art shine. It’s like First Class but with a better class. READ IT WITH: Good girl-pop on in the background. I’m thinking Robyn or The Pipettes.
As the author herself puts it, The Snow Child is about “the joys and sorrows of a lifetime.” Based on the European folktale of the same name, Ivey’s rendition tells the story of Jack and Mabel, a married couple seeking refuge and a fresh start in the Alaskan wilderness after their failed attempt to have children. There they discover new friends, hard times, and a small girl, who seems to be as much a part of the wild as the trees that surround their isolated cabin.
BEST BIT: The descriptions of the sprite-like Snow Child and the rugged beauty of the Alaskan wild.
WORST BIT: Mabel being a whiny face.
While some of the tropes that are displayed in Ivey’s Snow Child are well trod, Ivey’s enticing and graceful writing style and poignant insights into her characters is a joy to behold. This is particularly true in her descriptions of the Snow Child herself, keeping her identity both grounded and surreal.
by Lachlan Keeley just obtained a lot of enjoyment out of J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Sound-Sweep’.
X-Men: Season One Writer: Dennis Hopeless Artist: Jamie McKelvie
Eowyn Ivey
A dog being a man’s best friend (wink wink).
7.5/10 Speculative fiction is the Diet Coke to science fiction’s Coke – people try to make out that one is better than the other, though they’re essentially the same thing. Etgar Keret is an Israeli author whose newest anthology, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, contains a group of stories that mark the place where humour and horror crash into each other. It’s a strong collection of writing, regardless of whatever sophisticated umbrella term someone decides to label it as on Wikipedia.
Books
Snow Child
Ivey is to be commended for her debut novel, her own Snow Child being just as magical, haunting and harrowing as the renditions that came before. READ IT WITH: A cup of warm cocoa, somewhere cold enough to see your own breath.
by Mark Tilly an Arts graduate with a schizophrenic tendency love some things whilst hating others..
The Orphan Masters Son BEST BIT: Between McKelvie’s indie-girl aesthetic and her strong narrative voice, Jean Grey has never been more crushworthy.
WORST BIT: The ending works from a character standpoint, but doesn’t quite deliver on the kicking super-villain butt side of things.
by Kevin Chiat reads comics, talks about comics. That’s about it.
Adam Johnson
BEST BIT: Johnson’s bold prose.
9/10 The Orphan Master’s Son takes the culturally impenetrable and fashions it into a complete reality. Set in North Korea this superb novel is equal parts political thriller, coming-of-age narrative and traditional romance. The fusion is magnificent as Johnson manages to explore the misery and violence of the rogue nation and the acts of love made impossible under such circumstances. The narrative unrolls with amazing empathy; the Kim Jong Il that we encounter is no Team America marionette. In fact, everything seems authentic, even the absolutely absurd. Likewise, there’s a documentary-like realism to all of the novel’s characters. However, whilst Johnson has clearly done his research (he speaks with the soul and savvy of a local), it’s his magnificent prose that ultimately prevails. Fast-paced and fantastical it leaves you completely enthralled. Every once in a while, a book comes along that reminds you of the simple pleasure of reading. I can guarantee that The Orphan Masters Son will be the greatest North Korean love story you’ll ever read.
WORST BIT: The romantic sub-plot overstays its welcome at certain points.
by Alice Mepham once made out with a hotdog.
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Suddenly, a Knock on the Door
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BIOCHEMISTS AND THROBBING MEMBERS: ALEXANDRA LEONZINI’S CONVERSATION WITH
Stephanie Laurens is unlike any other romance author out there today. With a PhD in Biochemistry and over 40 novels to her name, she produces clever and engaging Regency romances that just make you want to curl up in a ball of happiness and forget all the nasty things this world has to offer, like the Thai pasta at Reid Café. There are few things in this world I enjoy more than a well-written romance novel. Food’s great and movies are fine, but a long, complicated, heartfelt and deliciously corny romance novel will always leave a huge smile on my face. To say I’ve read hundreds is no exaggeration – if it has heaving bosoms, throbbing members, and maelstroms of sensation, I’m there. My friends think it’s hilarious and refuse to understand; strangers either stare or refuse to look me in the eye when I read them in public; my mother sees it as definitive proof that I need to find a husband – everyone’s a critic. That’s why, when given the chance to interview THE GREATEST HISTORICAL ROMANCE AUTHOR OF ALL TIME, somebody who would no doubt “get” my obsession with romance, I jumped at the chance. Armed with her latest book, The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae, and my parent’s landline I sat down with Stephanie Laurens to discuss her writing process, the importance of authenticity in historical romance and much more.
Congratulations on the success of your new book. It’s a #1 NY Times bestseller. This is an achievement that any author would be proud of, but this is the 26th time you’ve topped the list.
Well it’s still a huge achievement to even be on the list 26 times. Most people wouldn’t even consider it possible and yet you’ve done it. Is it still exciting to realise you’re on it?
Well, I haven’t topped it.
Oh, yes. Absolutely. Once you’ve hit it you want to keep hitting it, and really your publishers are expecting to kind of get you in there.
You haven’t? It’s really, really hard to get on the #1 slot because of course there’s all these other authors out there like John Grisham and Nora Roberts and so on who tend to hold the number one spot.
How long is your writing process from inception to publication? Inception is usually a long, long time back. That’s one of the things about me, I often have my stories
Books
41 rolling around in my head for anything up to 10 years. The stories sort of gradually mellow in my brain for a long time and then when I actually come to writing them I have at least a month’s worth of outlining, and then it takes me about two months to write the manuscript the first time. Then I have at least another month of literally deconstructing the whole thing and strengthening it and editing. This new book is the nineteenth in a series – were you aware when you began this series that it was going to be so long? No. It was supposed to be six, and then it rolled into seven. And then it was eight and nine, and ten – it just went on. A lot of it was because that’s what readers like. I was writing what I liked. Not everyone can do it. There are a lot of authors who don’t like doing a long-term series. Do fans write to you and request specific stories? Fans want this guy, want to know his story, and that often happens and has happened quite a lot in the past. I still get some readers who have finished certain books and ask “Oh, are you ever going to write a book about this character?” and I can email them back and say, “Actually, that’s already been written and this is the title” and they go off and find it. That’s one of the things about my sort of work; it doesn’t go out of print. My books that I wrote 20 years ago are still being reissued all over the world. Books don’t die. Particularly romance. That’s what I like about it – it’s a brilliant form of escapism. That’s what it’s designed for. It’s like any other genre fiction. Genre fiction is entertainment fiction and that’s why, particularly in Australia, people get confused because they think fiction is fiction is fiction and it’s not. There are actually at minimum three different discrete groups of fiction writers and that’s how you define it: what the intent of the author is. There are literary fiction authors who are very, very definite in what they’re doing, and there are general fiction authors who are usually all about a subject, like
Tim Winton. But genre fiction authors, we’re all about the story and that’s quite a different thing. The writing, the way we’re published: everything’s different. But of course, readers in Australia don’t know that because they don’t see it. There’s very little genre fiction published here. People like me are published through general fiction houses. You don’t even have genre fiction publishing houses in this country. And yet there are heaps of Australian romance authors. Oh yes, yes. Even crime authors and so on. There are authors who you’ve never heard of here who are actually doing very well in places like Germany. I was there two years ago and reading Australian authors I’d seen in passing here who were translated into German and huge over there. Yes, that’s right. Romance is huge all over the world, and in fact it’s a lot, lot bigger in Australia than the Australian publishing industry knows because of course most of it is done online. No romance readers these days are going to be bothered trying to gets books from here. You were a professional scientific researcher before you became a novelist. What really propelled you to become a romance novelist? Well it wasn’t anything to do with the science. What happened was, I ran out of books to read. I was actually doing grant requests at the time. In terms of writing it is a very dry sort of subject matter and I needed a regency romance to read in the evening. In those days, the late 80’s in Australia, there were only two brought in per month and I’d read both of those. I didn’t have one and so I fired up the computer and just started writing my own just for me. I still write that way. Is it very important for you to create an authentic setting given that it is being viewed through a romantic, rose-coloured lens? Yes. It’s very important that it feel authentic to the modern reader. That’s not necessarily the same
as being absolutely, critically, 100% historically accurate because sometimes when you do that, that doesn’t feel authentic. That just feels clunky. You have to understand that for our type of story-telling historical background is just like the scenery on a stage. Your characters are playing out in front of this scenery, so your scenery has to be evocative in the same way a really go period production on a stage would have to be. You’ve created this authentic Regency background but your female characters are very modern. Is it important for you to create strong female characters? I think it’s just that they’re the only characters I have the patience to write. I don’t think I could bear to read (and you must remember I’m writing what I’d want to read) wimpy female characters, therefore I’m never going to write a wimpy female character. What is your reaction to people who say that romance is not a legitimate literary pursuit? When you were starting out, did you find that when you introduced yourself as a romance novelist you were met with resistance?
Not usually. You have to remember I was a very, very senior researcher. I had a PhD; I’d had it for 20 years when I started writing. I mean, I don’t expect people to be that stupid, certainly not to my face. I think it’s actually only, oh, what’s the best word for it? I call them the Literati – those with literary aspirations of themselves who think they know, and they don’t, and all it’s really showing me is their ignorance. I’m not the sort of person that most people want to come and be ignorant in front of. That’s very understandable. I don’t inspire fools to come and talk to me [laughs].
Cathy Kelly:
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IRISH EYES ARE SMILING There must be something in the water in Ireland because along with fellow Irishwomen Marian Keyes and everyone’s-mum’s-favourite Maeve Binchy, Cathy Kelly is a bestselling author of chick-lit novels. Pelican’s Alice Mepham spoke to Cathy about being a newspaper Agony Aunt, knocking Dan Brown off the top of the bestseller list and their mutual love of Little Women.
Have you received much criticism for being a writer of genre fiction as opposed to literary fiction? How do you deal with that sort of stereotyping? Yeah, you do get that a lot. There’s somehow this belief that if your writing is ‘genre’, specifically commercial, it’s bad – which is silly, because it implies therefore that the millions of people who read it are morons. A lot of people use the words ‘formula’ and ‘churn’. I used to take issue with that but I don’t anymore. Writing by women seems to come under the most criticism, just because it’s easy to read. But it’s actually an amazing skill and I’m not necessarily praising myself here! They’re using everyday language to craft this incredible writing about a whole range of subjects, which is a phenomenal thing. You initially started writing as a journalist with The Sunday World with a stint as an Agony Aunt. What prompted the shift into fiction? I always say ‘I was a writer who became a journalist’ rather than the other way around. I always wanted to write. I just never thought that I could do that as a job. So, after school I did a twoyear course in journalism, the only course offered in Ireland at the time. When I finished that, within six months, I had a job at a tabloid paper. It was very difficult because I’m a complete softie. You know, asking things like: “How did you feel when these horrible things happened to your family? Can we please have a photograph?” And it’s amazing how people react when they see the camera. You’re like, “Oh gosh please don’t smile.” It’s just so cruel. I eventually segued into features. You know the issues behind the stories: poverty, drugs, domestic abuse. After the old agony aunt left they offered me the position. I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t feel I had the experience. They insisted, so I said I’d do it for three months and ended up doing it for five years. Being an agony aunt was great although it is a bit like doing a PhD in human behavior.
During this time I had a few aborted attempts at writing, but my partner urged me to keep trying. So instead of prescribed fiction I began to write what I would like to read and it all went on from there I suppose. You usurped Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling on the UK overall bestseller list in 2005. Did you ever envision that kind of success? Firstly, that was for about all of two weeks! Secondly, God no! Who does? I was terrified! Giving up my day job was incredibly difficult, I felt like I was taking a big step into the unknown. I still do. Given your passion for writing, which writers did you have an affinity with growing up? I remember when I read Little Women for the first time and absolutely identified with Jo. In fact, so much so that in my first novel I actually had a character named Jo in it. I was tomboyish and I was always writing. It also made it feel possible that you could write a book because it was so modern. I moved onto adult books when I was about 11. I’d steal my mother’s library card! There wasn’t really the great range of young adult writing that there is today. It was Enid Blyton up until a certain age and then it was Judy Blume. That was it. What was the inspiration behind your new book The House on Willow Street? I just thought it might be interesting to write about this open warfare between two sisters, but when I began writing the book the characters just refused to do that. Perhaps it’s because I have such a wonderful relationship with my own sister, it all felt very strange. I waited for it to pass, but I had to go back and rewrite quite a lot. You start off with one idea and it goes completely wrong and you end up writing a different book. I find that happens quite a lot!
Finally, would you recommend that students with a knack for writing pursue a similar path? Well, journalism is very hard. Print is dying. Papers are losing money; they’re losing advertisers. They’re outsourcing and sending copies to be edited by four blokes in India. I was reading the other day about a computer program that can use the information about a sports match and knock up a fairly reasonable piece. That’s horrendous. However, when you write a novel it’s so much more bare. It’s a bit like taking your clothes off and running down the street naked. That’s what I compare it to and I wouldn’t do that normally!
Books
TEMPTATION:
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THE ROMANCE BOOKSTORE Christina and Veronika are two young women who own a specialist romance book shop in Subiaco. Pelican’s books section editor Yvonne Buresch and in-house romance reviewer Alexandra Leonzini chatted with them about how they got into the romance business, what they think about feminists and how a typical romance reader might not be who you’d expect….
Did you always plan to open a romance bookshop? What did you study?
fantasy”. There is one where she’s actually a lawyer who eats bad people’s brains in the alley.
to B. The middle is the unpredictable bit, how we get to B.
Christine: I did Computing and Mathematical Sciences at UWA.
C: The majority of the zombie novels I know are humorous though, otherwise they’re just too dark and too creepy.
C: And it’s not necessarily idealised because there are enough conflicts in it to make it worthwhile, otherwise it’s a boring book and it won’t sell.
Veronika: I went to Curtin. I’m a Multimedia and Graphic Designer.
V: And gross!
Had either of you worked in a bookshop before setting up this one? V: None whatsoever. I decided to do this when I went to Melbourne and saw a similar bookshop. We became friends with the managers and decided we wanted to do a similar thing here. Yvonne: You don’t stock Mills and Boon novels. Why is that? V: The thing with Mills and Boons is that it’s a starter, it gives you a taste of romance before you read a full length romance. You mean like a gateway romance? V: Yes, Mills and Boons actually have lighter story lines and they are sexually and emotionally less intense than full length romances. You can then graduate from there and start to read full length romance. Do you see any trends you don’t like? Has the Twilight craze affected what sells here at all? C: We do stock paranormal romances. Since Twilight there are a lot of authors trying to do the same thing. Do you get anything really off the planet, like zombie romance? V: We do actually! Some of them we call “urban
Romance novels are becoming increasingly popular with younger women. Do you think the stereotypical idea of the middle-aged housewife romance reader still holds true? C: (There are) more younger readers, but there’s really no stereotypical type of romance reader. More and more guys are reading it. There are quite a few guys who come in here, actually. V: There are quite a few managerial-types who come in here, bankers… C: I used to have a customer who was a politician. She got into office and then I never saw her again! Have you encountered any criticism from feminists you meet? At friends’ BBQs for example, when you meet someone for the first time? C: Yeah, sometimes they give you a weird look and then you explain what it is and they’re like, “Oh ok, I didn’t know that” and then they’re a bit more open to it. Sometimes we give them a book and then if they like it they’ll buy more. V: They seem to think that all romance is just like Mills and Boon and it’s all very sweet and very lovey-dovey and there are no problems with the relationship at all. But the thing with romance is it’s all about the journey. We know a romance has to have a happy ending but it’s how we get from A
I read one recently were there was a single mother with three jobs, which you don’t think of as a typical romance heroine. C: Maybe 40 years ago. V: I think it’s a reflection of what’s happening in society. I have a collection called As Time Goes By which has romances from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s and it’s really interesting because you can trace second wave feminism – suddenly the heroine has a motorbike! And in the ‘70s they’re like “ok, we’re including Arab sheiks in everything now” and these girls go out into the desert and get kidnapped. Whereas in the ‘60s it’s like “I’m a housewife and my husband doesn’t love me…” V: Even when I started reading romances, when I was 16, the women were still very submissive. In the ‘90s it was still very much the submissive woman who stayed at home, but fast forward to now and the women have become very feisty. Temptation the Romance Bookstore is located at Shop 13 Crossways Shopping Centre 184 Rokeby Road, Subiaco Ph: 9388 8535 www.temptationbooks.com
Arts Reviews
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4.48 Psychosis
Mood Theatre company @ Subiaco Arts Centre Lachlan Keeley
If your theatre experience has ever been lacking in the ‘making you feel like complete fucking shit’ department, then you should probably attend a performance of a Sarah Kane play. While all of Kane’s earlier plays – Blasted and Cleansed especially – touch upon a lot of horrible experiences, especially the collapse of relationships, debilitating depression, and other general unpleasantness (generally involving anuses being penetrated by foreign objects), 4.48 Psychosis forces all this stuff to the forefront, pushes it to breaking point, and then vomits all over your face for good measure. I believe Kane was labelled with that frustratingly vague term that became in
vogue at some point in the 90s – “inyer-face theatre” which was stupid and reductive and only ever really applied to one other Mark Ravenhill play anyway (Shopping & Fucking, which is a pretty controversial name for a pretty shinedup turd). If Kane has to belong to any specific sect of theatre, then she belongs in the theatre of catastrophe – her work shares many similarities to that of Howard Barker, not only in form and style, but also thematically. Many of Barker’s plays are about the ritualistic nature of relationships (not just sexually), and the inevitable decay of everything (ever), which are all also major thematic concerns of Kane’s own work, including 4.48 Psychosis. So, anyway, despite my previous comments, I’m going to be kind
of reductive here and say that this is a play about feeling terrible and not being able to do anything about it. This performance took place in a small, cramped stage at the Subiaco Arts Centre, which served well to physicalise the already uncomfortable intimacy contained within the script of the play. Whether or not 4.48 would be more confronting if you saw it by yourself is debatable, but having people pressing against you from all sides while four actors yell about cutting themselves and medical prescriptions and not knowing how to have friends, while they’re stumbling around on a stage covered in random chalk scrawl about suffering, is kind of intense.
Speaking of the acting, the four actors did an excellent job with what Kane provides in the script. It’s awkward to approach the direction of this play, since there are no actual characters listed in the script – just ‘voices’ that speak in no assigned order. There are no set directions, no scene changes, no instructions other than just the way in which the words flow from the page. It’s a stream of consciousness, basically, and formally, that fits in with what the play is actually about: the chaotic state of the mind of a person unable to sleep at 4.48 in the morning, trying to make order of their disturbed mind.
UWA Poets’ Corner:
Bringing Poetry Back, Yeh!
Alexandra Leonzini At the weekend, at the corner of Mounts Bay Road and Hackett Drive, something pretty awesome happens: UWA’s Poets’ Corner! Making use of the large digital sign that sits there so elegantly, this poetry initiative from The Cultural Precinct, with the help of Trove and the UWA Guild, is a place where poets can showcase very short works. How short? Quite short: 21 characters of 3 lines for a total of 63 characters, to be exact. Challenging? Indeedy! Worthwhile? Of course! Your work will be published for all to see – it’s something to proudly put on your CV. (See, guys, poetry is fun). Best of all, anybody can enter! Who doesn’t want to say that they’re a published poet? Nobody, that’s the
answer, absolutely nobody. Send your submissions to trove-cp@uwa.edu.au with ‘Poets’ Corner’ in the email subject heading and prepare to claim your glory! Remember, if you do get rejected, there will be oppurtunity to get feedback on your submission so you can re-submit with success. If, however, you are selected, as some as you talented folk will be, you will be rollin’ and others will be hatin’. Poetry’s sexy, yo! Word!
Do: Be original. The fine people at the Cultural Precinct are well read enough to know that “All the world’s a stage” is not an original line.
Now, I’m well aware that I possess the creative flair of a dead raccoon, but being the nice-sort-of-gal that I am, I thought I’d help you out with some poetry do’s and don’t.
Do: Avoid clichés unless you do them REALLY well. Get witty people to look over your stuff and agree that it’s well done before submission.
Don’t: Unleash your potty mouth for the world to see. While I love swearing as much as the next drunken sailor, even I know that “Motherf**ker, doneyc**k, sh*t, c*nt, b**bs” will not be published. UWA’s got enough publicity issues…
Don’t: Feel like you don’t have anything to submit. You do. Look within yourself
and listen to the poetry of your soul. Or take drugs. Either is appropriately poetic. Do: Make it fun. This is a chance for you to play with words and realise how fun they can be. EMBRACE IT! Don’t: Use it as a possible outlet to break up with your Boy/Girlfriend. We like the sign. The sign’s expensive. If the sign is smashed, you’re buying a new one. Well, that’s it. I have nothing else to offer you. Run free, write poetry, submit and stay sexy. You never know, you might enjoy it.
Illustration by Camden Watts
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Arts
Written by Bill Marlo, Illustrated by Alice Palmer
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