PULP: ISSUE 13 2024

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PULP is published on the sovereign land of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, as well as Indigenous members of our creative community. We respect the knowledge and customs that traditional Elders and Aboriginal people have passed down from generation to generation. We acknowledge the historical and continued violence and dispossession against First Nations peoples. Australia’s many institutions, including the University itself, are founded on this very same violence and dispossession. As editors, we will always stand in solidarity with First Nations efforts towards decolonisation and that solidarity will be reflected in the substance and practice of this magazine.

Sovereignty was never ceded. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

Senior Editor Kate Saap Editors Huw Bradshaw Simon Harris Justine Hu Sonal Kamble Lizzy Kwok Lameah Nayeem Design Simon Harris Justine Hu Cover Simon Harris The views in this publication are not necessarily the views of the USU. The information contained within this edition of PULP was correct at the time of printing.

This publication is brought to you by the University of Sydney Union.

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President’s Foreword Welcome back to the Semester 1, 2024!

On behalf of the USU, I would like to welcome all our new and returning members to another fun filled and exciting semester! I hope you all enjoyed the activities and programs across a jam-packed USU Welcome Fest earlier in the year. For us, Welcome Fest is a fantastic opportunity to reflect on the significant impact of our services and programs that facilitate a vibrant university experience of our members. The rest of the semester is looking exciting with our usual programming of Day Trips, student performances, free food initiatives and USU Board elections.

The USU is celebrating 150 years of serving students and we are honoured to continue that legacy of being Australia’s oldest and largest independent student-led organisation. I look forward to seeing you all across the semester and if you ever need anything please do not hesitate to reach out to me at president@usu.edu.au.

Wising you all a safe and happy year ahead!

With love, Naz

Senior Editor’s Note This is the year that I finally climb to the top of Observatory Hill. You have to start somewhere, I’ve been training. Railway Square, up Broadway, cross every path in Victoria Park, then cycle all the way to Belmore and back — why not — up the stairs at the New Law Annex, through USYD campus to the Forest Lodge Hotel, have a schooner, play the slaps, back down Parramatta Road (the long way), to finally get to the PULP office in the Wentworth Building. It only takes me about 15 or so.

Barely break a sweat.

I like to meander, but I need to get better at wandering without purpose. I aspire to be the eponymous character in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1951). He pussyfarts about in the forest for longer than a non-absurdist would. Except I have all my teeth, so sucking stones isn’t an option for me.

In the near future, I promise I’ll pussyfart the day away in Lane Cove National Park (leaving the stones alone).

What I’m trying to say is you should try something new.

PULP Issue 13 is about taking in the world around you and thinking about it. Do some critical analysis! You might have some fun or see something grey.

Thank you for reading PULP. Come swing by the office, we have a pool table. If this is your first semester: welcome to the University of Sydney!

Nothing would be possible without the editors.

Love always, Kate <3

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Editorial

Editorial As I give a final look through Issue 13, I think of all the things we’ve lost along the way. Not only articles and pitches, but ideas, connections, feelings. Moments, opportunities, beliefs; the way I once viewed my place, the way I once viewed my home: all lost. Just as it was in Issue 9, Sydney is changing again. It is humid and gloomy. It is bitter and disillusioned. Not even the Young Labor geeks seem to believe in their golden boy anymore.

Culture in the abstract fragments and crumbles, but even more so, Cultures are oppressed, pillaged, defaced. Our government sells munitions to those who seek the end of cultures. Where it isn’t actively destroyed, culture eats itself alive. Genres disappear. Recipes are forgotten. Another grey house goes up. The year of the Dragon becomes the year of the Ouroboros.

It makes sense to feel such a way living in Australia, a place culture comes to wilt and die on a beautiful beach. The Sunday after this issue reaches your hands, thousands will flock to Sydney’s handful of decent Irish pubs, attempting a fleeting connection to any culture that is not Australian (whatever that means). I don’t blame them: it’s what I’ll be doing too.

As I think of all that has been lost I struggle to tell what remains. While it seems we can only have what we can touch, there is a world that belongs to us; in the past, in the future. As I write this, I affirm my belief in the future, that this document will make it to layup, to the printers, and back into my hands as a sleek, glossy magazine. I think of the people who will pick PULP up and feel — as I felt, years ago — that this is a place where something true to them, something real to them, can be expressed, printed, held.

Though much is taken, much abides.

Enjoy Issue 13.

Love, Huw, Simon, Justine, Sonal, Lizzy, Lameah

Editorial

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Pulp Issue 13

1. The Quiz p. 1 2. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE GIVE ME A HANDLE p. 2 3. Pulp Photo Review III p. 3 4. Supermarket Doomscrolling p. 9 5. Sacred Body Designs p. 11 6. Praying Hill p. 13 7. Postcards from the North p. 17 8. 쎄쎄쎄 (sse-sse-sse) p. 19 9. A Raga’s Journey in Satchidananda p. 21 10. Fran Williams p. 23 11. Hall of Mirrors p. 29 12. 21st Century Epitaph p. 31 13. Franki Bonnano p. 33 14. Greyness p. 37 15. Reduce/Enlarge100%PaperSupply5AutoDetect p. 41 16. biết về đâu p. 43 17. this collective beinghood p. 45 18. EnPeeSee p. 49 19. The Real Emo p. 55 20. The A word (Authenticity) p. 57 21. The pulse within these threads p. 61 22. Notes on Diva Worship p. 65 iv 4

submit your phone pictures for the issue 14 photo review. dm @pulp.usu email pulp@usu.edu.au v5

The Quiz 1: As of 2024, who is the youngest winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay?

YOUR NAME: ..............................................

?

14: What were Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea known as the ‘Four Asian Tigers’ for?

................................................................................................... ...................................................................................................

15: Who wrote “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”?

2: What is the national flower of Wales? ................................................................................................... ...................................................................................................

3: Who is the first Australian footballer to score a world-cup 16: Which Olympic sport involves the terms stone, hammer, and button? hat-trick? ................................................................................................... ...................................................................................................

4: Name three countries whose national flag features an eagle. 17: Where might you find “two cats in the yard” and a “vase that you bought today”? ...................................................................................................

5: Maroubra Beach is notorious as the territory of what gang? ...................................................................................................

18: Sidney Nolan painted his Ned Kelly series with what ................................................................................................... unconventional type of paint?

6: Ivy Day is observed in remembrance of which prominent ...................................................................................................

Irish politician?

19: Ian Flemming’s 1953 novel Casino Royale inspired which ................................................................................................... cocktail?

7: Gregory Peck plays a submarine captain in a 1959 ................................................................................................... adaptation of which Australian novel?

20: The Thick Of It documents a fictionalised portrayal of ................................................................................................... which British Prime Minister’s government?

8: In the Animal Crossing series, is the primary currency ...................................................................................................

Gems, Bells, or Rupees?

21: Of the 89 International Bartenders Association official ................................................................................................... cocktails, which two contain four words?

9: Which album did David Bowie release between Station to ...................................................................................................

Station and “Heroes”?

22: A Russian painter, tennis player, and film all share which ................................................................................................... name?

10: Which Sydney university is named after a Scottish ...................................................................................................

Governor of NSW? 23: George Martin, Eric Clapton, and Billy Preston have all ................................................................................................... often been credited with what informal title?

11: ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’ belongs to which group of 14 ................................................................................................... paintings?

24: Which invasive species was introduced to Australia in ................................................................................................... 1935?

12: Jupiter has how many moons: 64, 95, or 29? ................................................................................................... ................................................................................................... 25: R.E.M. and The B-52’s both hail from which U.S. State?

13: Béchamel sauce always contains which three ingredients? ................................................................................................... ...................................................................................................

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@

@

CAN SOMEONE PLEASE, GIVE ME A HAND(LE)!

My hands crackle against the dry paste at deep dive required, no running through a a ubiquitous house party. In the process I mutuals tagged to find me. We meet. You accidentally desecrate a makeshift shrine know my Instagram, there is no wild goose chase. to cultural mononyms.

Bjork. Madonna. Beyonce. Cher.

I don’t know a single person’s name at this party.

I peel my hands off the collage, a final applause to the stars. I approach.

“Oh I love your @, it’s really cool.”

Only their instagram handles.

“Thanks Em O’Brien, I gave it to myself” (I’m a first name, last name person) But they know mine, I’m @emm.obrienn on Instagram, the double m and n are not fooling anyone.

What am I saying about myself using my government name as my Instagram handle as a young twenty something?

I’m predictable. An open book.

Instagram handles follow the same naming conventions as a bulletproof password needed for your bank. At least five characters, one special character, one bonus point if you use a number in place of a l3tt3r, and most importantly UNIQUE!

Confession: I’m a little scared that once I change to an obscure Instagram that I will lose my username forever, as another @emm.obrienn fulfills her next evolution. But also that I will lose a part of myself, my past usernames scattered like horcruxes throughout the world wide web. Admittedly, I have never been good with change; I cried when my grandparents painted their walls from pale blue to white.

I’ve been @em_obrien21, I played around with @0.0.0.obrien but I wasn’t in love with the shape, then finally @ emm.obrienn, where we rest today. Not Instagram handles are the new frontier; a complete personal revolution in my own branding, as the snapchat username a form of advertising yourself; an iconic tag; a brand. I’m an easy search I created at age 12 was @em.obriien.

Where have I come in 10 years? I’ve on Instagram, unlike many of my contemporaries. There is no mystery, no only changed the letters I double in my Emily O’Brien

usernames; so, been there, done th@t.

I haven’t yet reached icon status like that of @Bjork, @Madonna, @Beyonce, @Cher, to have a mononymic instagram handle of @ Emily; it’s already taken anyway.

Do I have a pun on my name? Use a larger name that includes a variation of Em or Emily? Frame one of my interests? Swap letters for numbers in my name? Take out the vwls? Or take inspiration from the name of a major road or geographical landmark close to where I live? I just want someone to tell me what to do, what would be cool, have zest, but more importantly MOXIE! What will pique people’s interests, cultivate my mystique, allow people to develop a parasocial relationship with me?

How should I evolve?

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Pulp Photo Review III

Photo Review iii

Photo Review iii

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Photo Review iii

Photo Review iii

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Photo Review iii

Thank you to:

@4nibenq, Hamish, James, Jayden, Josh, Justine, Natarina, Soleil, Tingjen, Zahra Photo Review iii

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welcome radiant light, fish eye. strolling through your air conditioned crevices i lose track of time sauntering through fluorescent tunnels

neatly lined with grids of hypnotic blue and beetlejuice red, a manmade escarpment, marked by endless weaving turns

funnelling into smaller hidden alleys of funfetti pink and plastic yellow. confectionery when life seems to dull at its sharp, unfriendly edges, i find solace in the rainbow road, eyes glazed, head empty, enamoured by colourful rows of sweet, candescent gems. i reach into your steady fuzzy arms, i crave your warm numbing embrace, laced generously with strawberry candy floss, sour gummy drops, peanut butter munchies, and fruit salad jelly lollies. your cookie crumb coated, caramel cream filled, chocolate dipped top understands me when no one else can.

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supermarket doomstrolling

fresh meats what is the value of a limb or the price of a soul? i wonder how many hands have held this pound of flesh, now packaged tightly in a cling-wrapped plastic tray, stacked one on top of the other, a back muscle next to a hind leg next to a raw red rib. the dismembered beast, reconfigured to rectangular blocks laid bare on this refrigerated shelf. exsanguinated, singed, and dehaired treated meticulously until what’s left is a hollow carcass, whose dry bone, white like an iridescent pearl is not precious enough to see the daylight. all to be summarised, as a tenderloin steak, worth twenty-four dollars. laundry & cleaning what would i do without you you coddle me soothe me heal me feed me clothe me clean me indulge me

you teach me all the ways to scrub, soak and wipe away my sins with bottled peroxides and calcium carbonates. rid myself of my sweat and blood, peel off my oil and grime, mask my humanness with the lactic smell of freesia and artificial cherry blossom so i can feel myself again. to be human, is to be sterile. to be human, is to be a supermarket stroller.

goodbuy, tomorrow? sunrise or nightfall, your neon beams draw me in, like a mayfly tethered to the moonlight. your laminated floors are worn, marred with the scars of yesterday. your metal racks are weary, carrying the weight of the world.

spices and jams from faraway continents, preserved fruit and tinned fish, fresh herbs and crushed nuts,

some ripped, dented, and bruised but resting ever so gently, on your haphazardly stocked walls.

Susanna Pang

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stroke

swells

shimmer

present

after

in

of

informing

stroke

a

a

our

after

vastness

star

being

stroke

of

in

establishing

the

ocean

a

positionality

lines

a

constellation

in

they

flickering

everglowing

everything

are

leaf

an

within

alive

in

incomprehensible

flux

bound

a

beauty

a

and

forest

listen

tapestry

divided

of

these

always

independent

dancing

strokes

weaving

and

trees

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in

interdependent

the

the

time

Sacred Body Designs

Lucien Noel

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Praying Hill

According to legend, the Corsican flag’s representation of a Moor’s head has its origins in the 13th century when a young Corsican woman was kidnapped by Moorish slavers. In managing to free her, her fiancé triggered a battle between the two sides as a result of which the Moorish leader Mansour Ben Ismaïl was beheaded. His severed head thus became a symbol of Corsica in remembrance of the victory.

Myth has it that the Moor’s eyes were originally covered; in 1760, General Pasquale Paoli reportedly ordered that the blindfold be raised, stating: “The Corsicans want to see clearly.

Freedom must walk by the torch of philosophy.

Won’t they say that we fear the light?”

Tom Martin

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Le jardin des curiosités (the garden of curiosities) is a park in Lyon’s Fifth arrondissement with a panoramic view of the city from atop the Fourvière hill. In the garden are six sculptures bearing inscriptions that suggest ways to contemplate the “real,” the “absent,” and the “imagined.”

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Praying Hill

Tom Martin

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I Summer

II States

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Dear K. Far North Queensland is lovely and so lush, I couldn’t imagine, And I miss you.

And when it is too hot to not swim, And a flock of seagulls fly lazily To a searing chip, Think of Cairns, And my air-conditioned heart, wishing On a photograph of home.

Nick

III Swimmers

Dear M.H. FNQ is incredible. I haven’t felt this peacefulness in a while: My eyes are rubbed raw As pink dirt Between the woody mountain And the stinging sea.

Nick

IV Photos

Dear R. FNQ is breathtaking. I am free and inspired by bright greens.

We passed Tully, exposed to rain, saw sugar steam Fly over the green, and tasted the sweet Drops through the window And camera screen.

Nick

Dear M., D., & L. FNQ is dreamier than I imagined.

To think, I ate oranges and didn’t know They tasted like sunset from Castle Hill.

To know, I steamed broccoli and couldn’t feel Their fronds cover and cook Borderline Beach.

Nick

Postcards from the North

V Lullabies

Dear V. There are many beautiful birds in FNQ, They sing with their hearts and loudly.

It’s beautiful to sleep with their song: As the kookaburra snaps a death adder In its jovial jaws, so the olive-backed sunbird Cleaves the humid night with its Flavourful song.

Nick

VI Mountains

Dear M.L. FNQ is very pretty! Am warm and relaxed.

The emerald hills speak their own language, of Semaphore or scent I don’t know, but I suspect if they are bilingual, it is with The language of the vigorous sea.

Nick

VII Storms

Dear J. You’ll be delighted to know that As we reached Tully, it began to rain.

Pressure is so low up here that Clouds beach themselves like seals or gibbons Over the green hills, And deflect their floating tails On the sky’s pools.

Nick

Nicholas Osiowy

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‘쎄쎄쎄 (sse-sse-sse)’ is an homage to the intergenerational love that weaves a cultural tapestry, harmonising the South Korean traditional lullaby ‘반달 (ban-dal)’ and its hand gestures to nurture deep familial bonds in its simplest form. https://vimeo.com/870154781

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쎄쎄쎄 (sse-sse-sse)

Estelle Yoon is a queer, Korean-Australian visual artist currently practising on Gadigal land. Yoon explores notions of family, time, memory and nostalgia through her core mediums of analogue photography and filmmaking, in pursuit of the philosophy of wabisabi which expresses simplicity, beauty in imperfection, and transience.

Estelle Yoon

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Improvisation is the act of conjuring for the instant, an adventure in entropy. Possibilities melting on the tongue that sings, electrifying fingers on keys, making lips on the mouths of brass instruments quiver. Eternity and perpetuity in all its vastness are revealed to the artist, who is continually tying together threads of frequencies. The improvisatory mode of music has long existed in multiple cultural contexts, with Western ornamentation in the Baroque period paralleling the improvised gammakas of Carnatic Indian classical music.

Improvisation is at the core of Jazz, a genre spanning eras. It’s hard to imagine an alternate universe where this arcane ritual does not exist, and music would be all the poorer for it.

classical tradition by devotional odes. Carnatic concerts were spiritual odysseys conducted in age-old stone temples enshrining intricately carved idols robed in silk finery and lavished with garlands, preparing the gods to be enraptured by human imagination.

The performer, with a command as forceful and intoxicating as the temple idol, captures the rapt attention of audiences. In sitting before the vocalists, flute-players, nadaswaram-blowers, finger-drummers, and tanpura-pluckers, the audience succumbs to the soloist, who acts as both the creator of sound and destroyer of silence — a god-like In Indian classical music, improvisation is a core tenet: the raga, a curve of note positions, forms the feat. Instead of the garlands of flowers primordial fabric from which artists weave sounds. placed by a priest on the idol’s neck, Modal jazz is also unburdened by the constraints of the soloist through improvisation set chord progressions, instead meandering through weaves their own ragamalika, garland of ragas, in a manner as mysteriously a scale like the raga. This is the closest glimpse of infinity afforded to us: “when you go this way, you ordained as the arrival of spring and can go on forever,” said trumpetist Miles Davis. It is as incomprehensibly beautiful as the this unpredictability that paralyses the listener with flowering of its buds under moonlight. ecstasy. In Artificial-Intelligence-esque rhetoric, the Like the saris draped on idols, silk musical possibilities branch like fractals. However, ponnadais (fabric shawls) woven with when listening to Davis, who complained of classical golden thread adorn the shoulders of performers, given to them in gratitude. musicians being robotic machines, one collapses at the altar of human creativity. Only humanity’s elusive spontaneity can express the human condition Like the flute-playing god Krishna who held the entire universe in his mouth, the through its imperfection. Davis’ trumpet has often virtuosic TR Mahalingam ‘Flute Mali’ been described as ‘voicelike’, for its vibratoless timbre and modal hypermobility. In Carnatic music, drew from this abyss majestic scales steeped in divinity. His genius is revered this voicelike style is called gayaki, evoked with

by Carnatic greats, called an incarnation baroque intricacies called gammakas. Like the of the cosmos itself with a timbre like jazz band, Carnatic kacheris (concerts) are the layering and enmeshing of multiple improvisers. the whisper of God. The enigma’s talents captivated a throng of fans who The musician’s creativity is holy, enshrined in could more aptly be called devotees. He Greek mythology as the three muses of Delphi gifted to the world concerts and deserted them at whim, famously playing for who formed the three chords of the lyre, or as the Lord Muruga in Tiruttani temple the instruments wielded by the Hindu gods.

Seated on a blooming lotus, Saraswati holds her for eight hours ceaselessly. Mali in his veena close. The gods are enraptured by music, drunken troubled genius was eccentric.

He sometimes bewitched in the Indian

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A Raga’s Journey in Satchidananda

philosophy, we traverse the Hindu god Shiva’s tall snowy repeated the same piece for the mountain, are steeped in Bombay’s mystique, concert’s entire duration, confront Coltrane’s own grief, and are finally taken to the Village Gate in New York. In this stopped pieces halfway, or simply jazz club an ambience thick with haze like sat in silence frustrating the audience who waited several hours just to hear a incense cloaking poojas, the last track ‘Isis few notes before he fled. As his disciple and Osiris’ is recorded live. Sounds of harp, testifies, “Mali says he sees god within the trembling Arabian oud, the droning Indian tanpura, and intoxicating bass collide like five minutes of playing — he thinks it is meaningless to continue after that and the tops of trees intertwining in a canopy. It naturally follows that indo-jazz fusion projects stops”. Mali frowned upon the state of Carnatic music, having had a prolonged have emerged: take Miles Davis’ American collaborators, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, or sitarabsence from the Chennai scene after player Ravi Shankar’s indo-jazz fusion in his 1962 expounding one raga flawlessly at a album Improvisations. kacheri (concert) and abruptly leaving in spite. “Carnatic music has become I observe the Chennai Carnatic music scene from commercialised and unethical,” in his words, with rigorous rules suppressing my plastic chair in kacheri venues washed with clinical fluorescent lights. As the tanpura drones, creativity.

I hear the shuffling of an older population’s bare feet across tiles which almost echo the coolness Improvisation has long operated as of the temple’s black floors. Even as times change, a counter to commercialised forms the music still evokes the listener’s rapturous awe. of music. Soaring in the midst of the What is still sacred are the traditions that persist in American civil rights movement, jazz the craftsmanship of instruments, the rebirth of ragas led by Black musicians was a political in every permutation of its notes, the mathematical act of resistance. Soundtracking the complexities of rhythm which seem to communicate pursuit of political freedom was improvisatory freedom. John Coltrane’s with the very logic of the world. What is still sacred ‘Alabama’ was a wordless cry of anguish is the temple-pillar-like stance of improvisation in today’s sonic landscape, otherwise short-circuited with following the bombing of a church momentary blisses. Aside from the observable trend of in Alabama by the Klu Klux Klan. two-minute skeletons of songs made to house TikTokThe other freedom that music granted Coltrane was spiritual, first with A Love viral hooks, I note the emergence of new improvisatory Supreme recorded in one studio session. modes like the DJ set, which often blends improvised In this seminal album and the following, and pre-mixed layers. Lengthy forays on melodic themes are interspersed with percussive beats and bass sections OM, Meditations, and Ascension, such as in the Trance genre. Sweat and ritualistic dance in Coltrane’s avant-garde freeness darkness consecrate the boiler room. It’s no surprise that constructs a staircase to heaven. John artificial intelligence makes composing on computers easier Coltrane’s meditative improvisation with machine improvisation, analysing existing music undoubtedly inspired his wife Alice using machine learning and pattern-matching to create Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda, created after his passing. Its title is apt, variations on these samples. Musical improvisation the album takes the listener on a spiritual doesn’t just follow humanity into the future, it resuccitates older fragments of music, giving it journey like a pilgrimage. Beginning with an education in Indian a new life in a new work. A never-ending ebb and flow, improvisation’s hypnosis endures.

Kuyili Karthik

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Fran Williams

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is a Painter based in Montreal who has Achieving strong liminality is like recently completed her undergraduate landing a coin on its edge: a difficult degree in Studio Arts with a major feat, but the effect is impossible to in Painting & Drawing at Concordia substitute. The pursuit of liminality is University. Fran’s work deals with the the main guiding aspiration in her work. liminal middle-space of the abstraction/ She values the creation of art that can be figuration dichotomy. While she misunderstood and likens the experience considers herself an abstract painter, of such work to watching clouds, her works often suggest letters or text reclining on a lawn and comparing what without becoming readable language. we see.

Similarly, figures seem to appear but fail to coalesce into representational forms.

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Fran Williams

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Fran Williams

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What to expect when you’re expecting an assassination from the Venetian CityState In our public memory of French history, there are a lot of it-boys to be known. JeanPaul Sartre (emo it-boy), Napoleon (famous short king), Louis XIV (purveyor of fancy furniture and amazing nicknames), Claude Monet (hay bale fan), and of course, both Dylan and Cole Sprouse (honorarily French after performing in the 2010 Disney sitcom masterpiece that is Season 2, Episode 28 of The Suite Life on Deck: “Breakup in Paris”). But I think there should be one more added to this list: Jean-Baptiste Colbert. With little to no expertise nor research, I can definitively say that this little known financial advisor to Louis XIV was supremely iconic and almost entirely responsible for the creation of Versailles’ iconic Hall of Mirrors.

I think we all collectively know something or other about the Hall of Mirrors, but what if I told you there was a very (partially) dark, sick and twisted (whimsical and wacky) history underpinning these mirrors.

One that literally, no one, ever, in the history of a singular poll I put up on my Close Friends story has heard of. This scandal has everything: mercury poisoning, stabbings, roofies, gun fights, bribes, duels, hair care, glassmaking, and an old world secret service with data mining capabilities that would make the CIA jealous. But to understand the storied history behind what is essentially a corridor chock full of mirrors, we have to meet the head of hair behind it all: JeanBaptiste Colbert, financial advisor to the stars.

All you need to know about Jean-Baptiste Colbert can be said in exactly three sentences. He was a bit of a wacky loner from a Jesuit College. He wanted to do tax reform. And he wanted to make his big break in the Billboard Hot 100 Political Advisors to Louis XIV. Colbert was a strong pragmatist in a Parisian court that, to put it very lightly, had gone batshit crazy for mirrors. Versailles was hooked on mirrors 29

Hall of Mirrors

assassinations were in vain; Colbert The whole two year period between won, figured out how to make mirrors, Colbert’s initial idea to get Venice’s and saved France a metric fuck-ton of mirrormakers to defect, and the death money. But what makes this ending so of a good chunk of them by poisoning is marked by abject tomfoolery. I think unsatisfying is that Colbert never got to see the product of his scheming. He died it would be impossible to recap every in 1683, less than a year before the Hall part of the Venetian Secret Service’s of Mirrors was unveiled and became fights to get their mirror makers back one of the most famous rooms in French so I will give you, dear reader, two of the most unserious highlights. Highlight history. one: Venice planted several Italian and French courtiers near the St Gobain glass Why does no one know about this? I making factory who convinced La Motta think our public remembrance of the One thing you should know about Venice in the 1600s: they did not mess over six months that his apprentices and renaissance, baroque, and rococo period about with their mirrors. While mirrors rivals were getting paid more than him, is so eclipsed by all that art and stuff that we forget the darker parts. Colbert, then supplied him with a gun, leading are commonplace today, from around the 1300s the small island of Murano in to a gunfight between La Motta and his apart from committing hair crimes, Venice held up the Venetian economy as apprentices in the factory, which broke also committed heinous atrocities and every mirror they had created and nearly instituted slavery into France’s colonial the only place that knew how to make the mirrors, fuelling the lucrative Great killed La Motta. Highlight two, and by system. The Venetian Secret Service far the silliest one: many mirrormakers was iconic but they also blackmailed, Mirror Addiction. Apart from mirrors threatened, and killed artists in the name and rivers, Venice excelled in espionage contracted mercury poisoning in the of state control. All in all, what we can St Gobain workshop and went insane. and did almost anything to protect learn from the great 1667 mirror making Several reports were released of the secrets behind its mirrormaking scandal is maybe you should probably technology. The Venetian Secret Service mirrormakers spending hours staring confusingly at their own reflections and not kidnap artists or have gun fights in was such a sophisticated espionage rooms full of highly valuable glass. speaking gibberish. Somehow no one network that I quite literally could figured out that mercury had anything not find a single name of any agents In a pretty grim world, looking back at to do with their madness, and the involved in this scandal. In fact, the identities of Venice’s Council of Ten, the Parisian court feared that looking in your these silly, forgotten histories reminds us of our own insignificance. Human reflection for too long causes insanity. controlling body of the secret service, Cue the hundreds of baroque paintings history is so encompassing and dense are still highly disputed and unless an of mirror madness and general public archeologist finds some old Venetian that everything we do, no matter how fears of turning into an actual Narcissus. important we think it is, is just a spec business cards, we will never know how many agents of the secret service of sand in the end. Smuggle state Everyone remembers where they were secrets, contract mercury poisoning, there really were. But back to mirrors. in early 1667. In Paris and Venice alike, start a gunfight, make art, get killed: but The Venetian Secret Service did have news began to ripple around that out of whatever you do, do not ever, ever trust some nice anti-mirror-whistleblower nowhere two mirrormakers died from incentives, like letting all the lowly a guy with a shag mullet. mirrormakers into high society gathos. “maybe natural causes we think maybe.”

As far as the assassinating part goes, But more often Venice protected its every source I’ve looked at is pretty mirrors in less than nice ways, like divided on whether the mirrormakers stabbing any potential dissenters and were actually assassinated. As I said to leaving them dead in a river claiming my friend after losing a decent chunk they were eaten by salamanders of blood, “causation doesn’t always (bonkers). Because of the Venetian imply correlation.” It is widely agreed Secret Service’s efficiency and lack that there definitely was foul play afoot, of qualms with murder, mirrormaking was a solely Venetian gig. That is until but even if the victims just ate some bad full-time French menace and part-time ambergris, the rest of the mirrormakers haircare influencer Jean-Baptiste Colbert scrambled back to Venice in fear. The worst part is that Venice’s last ditch came into the picture. and the Great Mirror Addiction of the 1660s was haemorrhaging francs from France’s economy. In the Great Mirror Addiction Colbert found not only his dream economic reform to save France from collapse but also his way into being best buds with the mirror addicted King (who famously covered his mistress’ bedroom from floor to ceiling in mirrors). Play the Succession theme, cause it’s time for Colbert to go crazy.

China Meldrum

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Your body is not your own.

It is the captive of all skin Not yet fossil and not yet flesh, Not yet named and not yet born, Not yet memory and not yet eternity.

Your body is yours only When you pay for it With your warmest blood, With all the peeling tissue Of your wilting meat, With all the naked terror Of your writhing limbs, And the trembling shape Of your tiny shadow.

And I still remember it: Everywhere the ceremony of waste was screaming its song In cathedrals of commerce and cruelty, The soul of every animal listening to a world gone quiet, Every insect now a spectator of their second death As their loving hands broke my body like eucharist And lowered it into this concrete carcass of a city, They etched upon my tombstone an epitaph: “Yesterday I lost both of my limbs, But now I sleep with four.

I lost both of my antennae, But now I am human.

I lost both of my wings, But I’m still human.

What am I?” And here you will find me, Palms opened for the overcast sky, The pavement bruising my knees, Asking under human tears, Under human breath: “O god of loneliness, How many times have I died here already?

How much of my life Will these years take from me?

How many years from my life Will this country take from me?

I will always be a stranger here,

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21st Century Epitaph

Even in the closeness of it all, I have only become A stranger to myself.

How happy I would be To be a prisoner Of another skin.

O god of loneliness, I beg of thee: Please Let me be A cockroach Once Again.”

Cursed we are above all creatures For wishing to be flesh in a world of apparitions.

Cursed we are above all creatures For making offspring out of Handfuls upon handfuls of dust.

Cursed we are above all creatures For worshipping the working day, As we crawl out of our houses, Domiciles, and shelters, Public housing commissions, And great ocean garbage patches, Every suburb is a cemetery, Every neighbourhood a catacomb, Every building is a tomb, Every room an unmarked grave.

Cursed we are above all creatures For we know this to be true: This is the end of all tomorrows, All eternity has died for today.

Cursed I am above Every breathing thing, For I am forbidden fruit Of forbidden seed, For I am unknown skin Of unknown breed, For I am a child of exile Waiting to be interred, For flesh I am And to flesh I will return.

Joseph John Kagsawa

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Absurd Anger Vtu[yov (←) Me (I) Alchemy God

Delirium

Truth

Titanium

I don’t want one thousand words Screaming at a black hole I used to be one This sky is raining diamonds And this soil, It’s fruitful it tells me it longs to be held in suspension with base metals I want to be a coil Ascension as a repercussion for my sins This ego I bare is traceable This life is beautiful You and I are not Sheep’s milk inhibits fertility Ovarian mimetic my arms are fruiting buds hiding from the sun I have no head It’s fantastic I just love to play I can’t help myself *Kisses frog* There’s so much beauty in the illogical; My wand is broken Uncanny and pervasive by nature The fool as the beginning tipped arrow to the heart of childlike wonder Imploding on itself like it knows itself My wand won’t fix itself Franki Bonanno

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Greyness

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buildings but think of the fact that cars are all grey, footpaths grey, roads grey, the sky greys over, public space full of grey. I am also thinking about the iconoclasm of this style, how it is a rejection of ornamentation for “pure forms”, abstract rubbish, arbitrary Much of architectural criticism and arrangements that jut and cut into history draws on the exemplars of architecture. Narratives are constructed the space around them. I think here it is important to comment on the by comparing and contrasting the Le minimalism of the modern period, how Corbusiers, Koolhaus’ and Hadids. few of these buildings are intellectually Those who have defined the image of Architecture through each age. However, beautiful but this is to do with specific this approach to capital “A” Architecture and precise balancing of elements, forms, and culture. The greyness is a excludes that everyday architecture, degraded version of this. the realistic, mundane, and vulgar

There is little detail or anything life affirming in the structure of the bus stops themselves. Rather the design of the bus stop is secondary to the vibrant and contrasty media display. The bus stop is designed and produced not by an architect or designer, but by QMS media, an advertising company!

The grey is the fog of war, an obscuring tone, muddy but smooth. Grey warships are hiding in the distance. It is possible to obscure any construction method behind the smooth grey finish that is often used in contemporary buildings.

Housing estates on the edge of Sydney and megamansions in its richest suburbs architecture that you encounter everyday blend together into one grey middle; true The world, the real parts that we interact as you walk the city. This kind of luxury in this city is the heritage homes, with are simplifying, emptying out of architecture is difficult to historicise and the classy, vibrant, rich, beautiful ones analyse through the interplay of specific detail. where nothing new can be built. figures and the influence of specific The grey is sleek, slickening the space buildings. Realistic architecture does Grey as decay, tooth and hair. Why are not occur in this manner, it arises around it adorns. The facades of buildings are we adorning so many surfaces with undoubtedly the “walls” of outside space us from much less grand arrangements this degree of neutrality, a degree of and the grey lubricates the outdoors, between developers, individuals, banks, temporariness, stillborn buildings that smoothens it for you to move through engineers, and construction companies. are born aged so that they may avoid it and not linger. The grey subject is In this piece I aim to explore a hunch, looking so. one that never rests outdoors.

The a phenomenon that I have noticed “greygime” is one of anti-sociality, occurring around me as I walk the streets Grey is cheap, grey is temporary. it wishes to make the outside devoid of my city. I want to talk about what I The buildings of Greyness are a kind of life.

This is another kind of hostile would call Greyness. of totally rationalised architecture, architecture that now seeks to not just informed more by the price of building push the disadvantaged out of the city Greyness is a pervasive phenomenon systems available to subcontractors but also normal city dwellers as well. in contemporary Sydney buildings. than any sense of aesthetic beauty. Most Where does it seek to push them?

I’m sure you have noticed it too. The new homes are built by developers By making the outside a non-space, monolithic towers in Green Square and for the open market. Greyness is the we are forced into the interior of our Alexandria, suburban developments commodification of buildings into grey boxes.

While our exteriors are on the edge of the city in Bella Vista sellable assets that are designed not for monochrome, our interiors, our digital and Norwest, or a new complying worlds are psychedelically vibrant and anything but the maximisation of profit development in Willoughby or full of colour. Content is rich and vibrant from land. Grey is a concealer, cheap Chatswood. Greyness is everywhere. to draw your gaze, grab your attention, bricks poorly laid with shitty mortar Greyness is both vernacular and and keep you focused into the world of work, timber frames that are barely held pedigreed. While there are many advertising and consumption. together. Watching the YouTube channel material and economic reasons for the Site Inspections gives a small glimpse greyness, this phenomenon calls for a On City Road, the bus stops have into the Australian building industry, deeper exploration into the lack of spirit recently been replaced by the greyness. walking you through many buildings and life that the grey represents.

These new bus stops perfectly exemplify that epitomise the Greyness, pointing this desaturation of outer space for the out parts of construction that do not By greyness I do not just mean saturation of abstract space. The bus comply with the National Construction the colour, but a total desaturation stops are severe simple steel structures Code. It seems from watching these phenomenon. Here I am focusing on with anti homeless sectioned benches. videos (obviously, they are a small Simon Harris

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feeling. System B may pay lip service Many public spaces that have resulted from the greyness lack life because they to the user, but is more concerned with quantitative means of design, building are predetermined spaces. Shopping systems, profits, and abstractions that centres are grey boxes that repel from the outside, and only serve desire on the have little to do with the real. This is what is most concerning about the inside. In a Westfield, nothing outside greyness, its poverty of life. Just as how of consumption can occur. Any other many of the world’s agricultural centres activities are policed and monitored. face degraded substrates for growing In a sense, the space is already full crops, the greyness is leaving our cities of activity, so self referential in its impoverished with little space for life to program and intended activity. Or we grow. Beautiful buildings do truly grow, consider the contemporary plazas they unfold over time as they emerge, Today it seems that people are uncertain of Green Square and the Chatswood with modifications by the builder as she of what they truly desire for a home concourse; these are overexposed or building. People might choose grey greyscapes. Spaces that pay lip service makes. It is not the materials that are for its ability to hide grime and wear, to public space while constructing their at fault but our bankrupt process that is shaping space. or for its “modern” look. Both of these own publics through hard, lubricated, reasons seem to be abstract ideas from uncomfortable surfaces and antithe world of images rather than the real. homeless fittings. Real Life requires the This is not an attack on the colour grey, only the extent to which grey is a poor Necessarily, all finishes age and wear possibility of a chance encounter with choice for a house/building in general. through time. The nature of ageing is the other, a shady tree, a comfortable how a material becomes saturated by park bench, a public colonnade. In these Rather, I am trying to interrogate this unrelenting sameness that is imposing water, and ground away by wind. Every overexposed greyscapes, the other is shade of grey can become a deeper, more forced out, forced into the shadows on itself on my city. As housing prices aged colour. I ask my parents why they the edge. In terms of housing, the hyper- skyrocket and the only homes that are built are luxury grey ones, there seems think people pick the grey: they say it is individualised way we treat property just a trend, a passing fad. I think there means that no-one feels any obligation to to be a poetic connection between is something deeper here in how people contribute to the street as a public space. the two. Hegel wrote in a preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right choose finishes and materials based on the images they see in home design This leads me to wonder if the Greyness “When philosophy paints its grey in magazines, or on social media. The act is ripe for Détournement, that situationist grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only of picking based on an image, how you method originally for the rerouting of recognized…” Here grey in grey refers identify with what is necessarily abstract capitalist culture into expressions of a to grey as the tonality of the conceptual, and disconnected from the true feeling superior radical one. The notion here the abstract, and the unreal. Greyness and experience of space, inevitably is that dominant culture contains the for me is this abstraction of the real leads to this streamlining of the home conditions for its own negation. It is world, the outside world, into a space as a product. Greyness is inexpensive, certainly true that for most buildings, that is fundamentally unalive. Grey and developers are a cynical breed who the materials remain the same: wood, is the street becoming a space only aim to maximise profit above all else. concrete, brick, tile, plaster, insulation for movement and transportation, not Building is part of humanity’s essence, etc. In terms of the lifelessness of the a place where romance and life can but to build well is a process that grey — and I do mean lifelessness in occur. This is not about the colour grey contradicts the desires of capital, which its most harsh insinuation — this is a are for profit and speed. The greyness result of the total system that produces it. but the fact that grey represents cheap, produces artificial spaces, spaces Christopher Alexander describes System temporary buildings that are harming the environment for shortsighted gains. conceived through image and sold A and System B as opposing forces in through image. They have nothing to do his book Battle for the Life and Beauty This is not about the colour grey but the fact that I know not everyone wants to with the reality of building and that is of the Earth. System A is the method possibly why they always end up feeling for creating life affirming architecture, live in a grey lifeless city, and greyness so temporary, cheap, and ultimately architecture that is slowly developed and is eliminating the space where the life I built according to the needs of the user in want to build can take place. lacking any soul. a way that results in an organic unfolding of space that is in accordance with sample) that the greyness is cheap, decaying, and completely temporary.

These buildings are the inversion of gentrification, buildings that are so cheap, yet expensive, they can only lose value. These buildings are more asset than structure, signifiers for a mortgage value that is to be traded up for the next best thing. When a building becomes something else, it ceases to be a space for dwelling in the most romantic sense.

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Greyness

Simon Harris

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Luca Leggo

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* Ăn

* I find

she has told me to eat

pleasure just looking into

jasmine rice grains twirling wontons reminding me of our time curling pastries pressing down * fingers gold rings minced prawn underneath * this food makes me feel rested I never leave tired I never leave — Cabramatta * ông ngoại never saw my flat ornaments settlers walls with children of war within he will be gone parts of myself dissolved the chả giò are unfolding my bad

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you I am imagining the star in front of my eyes is where your spirit will be mum says she would love if ông ngoại would come back to see her she would never be afraid of him but I am afraid but maybe it will be beautiful lingering homesick * half of me belongs squatting on plastic stools charring squid on grill nets singing karaoke eating bánh mì realising the French bread we took we liberated

biết về đâu

* the Viet Cong killed my great uncle my ông ngoại shuttered at my Hồ Chí Minh shirt wartime in our minds we share a name: Nguyễn Hiếu Minh *

I say my words belong to you ––––––– when I say I am longing for you I mean my longing rests between my soul and the clouds

the stars all things in the air that are suspended there is a part of me that understands you you speak to me awaiting the sounds of home from my mouth * I will wait for you in this life who love dearly call you their hearts their actual love there is something you begin to embody that is theirs

there is something in you that reminds me of coconut trees liberation longing I hear the sounds of motherland in your words you bring me home * biết về đâu \ forearms veins eyes

brown

Nha Trang your hands that cast fishing nets off wooden boats at sunrise are now my hands writing in English telling settlers what tattoos mean biết về đâu a bird on branch a fox in mountains needle and squid ink * longing peace in life/wartime | wartime lingering

three generations | these words mean love/wartime our own existence boat people con em I show love in language you cannot understand * ông ngoại dried squid beer thuốc lá blurred tattoos on bronzed forearms * I will be missing without my mother/she will feel lost when you are missing / con ––– mẹ ––––– you speak in tones like strings plucked forget love ăn cá kho tộ canh chua

and brother’s cancers and Phú Yên you had left * water man fisherman twenties inked scars in skin musician our arms look the same your existence living in these vowels I write words wielded like gun like net * life brought to existence through violence displacement the learning of a European language to create disconnect between settler-child and immigrant-parent * ngủ ngon ông ngoại ngủ ngon con.

* no love in this language I write to upset to absolve your mother’s

Jayden Nguyen

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‘a body is the capacity to form new relations, and the desire to do so’1 Ian Buchanan

Science demarcates the boundaries between species. These boundaries are typically drawn between those that reproduce together and those that cannot.2 This has proved limiting for the categorisation of microbial bodies — the bacterial do not fuck, they split. Any delineation between microscopic bodies is attributable to a mutation, a generational genetic translation downwards. From one, to two, to four, to more. Slight shifts in embodiments eons ago emerge in the lives of the next split. My skin crawls with cellular coding imbued with splits gone awry. This split with mutation becomes a physical division — a pulling apart — in loss, not just of the other but of oneself.

A split requires the relinquishing of self to another and for another. A corporeal communion: we offer our bodies as bread, our blood as wine. This occurs not out of a masochistic self-maceration, but an evolutionary understanding that there is an instability in our surfaces, an unsureness in where we begin and end. This corporeal giving can be understood as a ‘bad debt’. Bad debt, coined by Moten and Harney, refers to a giving of oneself without the expectation of return, a refusal of ‘the balance sheet’.3 This deliberate ‘bad debt’ is a refusal to participate within the close-market society, a refusal to participate in the debt-credit cycle, where economic mobility is contingent upon the taking on of ‘good debt’ to the benefit of corporations and governments. It is a refusal to take beyond our means a promise to give beyond our means. Bad debt cannot be forgiven, only “forgotten to be remembered again”.4 It is an entanglement of selves who owe each other not in reciprocity but in relationality; it is “a debt you play, a debt you walk, and debt you love.”5 This corporeal debt stitches us back together; an undergarment for our undercommons.6 This stitch complicates the boundaries of our beings up against another’s, the blurriness at the site of surface friction.

Immunologist Burnet explains that ‘the nonself’ is anything that triggers an immune response, and anything that doesn’t trigger this response must be part of ‘the self’.7 The body is an enmeshment of cellular collaborations, microbial minglings and concurrent contemplations. A ‘self’ is indeterminate and immeasurable. For Thomas “a good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts.” A human’s cellular landscape is 90 percent bacteria and 10 percent cells derived from bacteria, an embodied temporality of bacterial pasts and presents; ‘the “human” that we know now, is not now, and never was, itself.’8

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this collective beinghood

Hannah Lawrence

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47

this collective beinghood

Gastroenteritis can be caused by a virus,9 bacteria,10 or protozoa11. A virus relies upon infection to procreate, assuming control of the host cell whilst bacteria split and protozoa may split or reproduce. A parasite is any being that uses a host for its benefit at the hosts expense; known as ‘parasitism.’12 These infectionates are in symbiosis with one another. They become a parasite in performance and follow after one another; a virus becomes a bacterial infection allowing for a protozoa.13 They make room for one another; a microbiotic-mutualism in defiance of the Very Large. When infecting the body, these microbes bury themselves in the walls of the gut, releasing toxins or taking over and purging the life from each individual cell in the wall.14 This damage to normal functioning causes disruptions in the normal digestion of foods and subsequent imbalance of the by-products of the unconsumable; excrement, urine and gas. This imbalance, accompanied with a bodily urge to purge the toxins exorcised from the microbial parasite, can result in the expulsion of the contents of the stomach through the inbound orifice.15 Head down cold floor. It is just us. You don’t let someone watch you vomit. I don’t let someone watch me vomit. It is all too intimate. There is everything that is me, in me, and everything that was me, in front of me. It becomes a cycle of life and death; a visceral answer to the question of post-life; I watch myself dilute into the sewers.

Our bodily boundaries, or surfaces, are illusory; a perceived beginning and end; relying upon human vision as the arbiter of truth. Meraud writes that the surface is an accretion; ‘a localisation of densification, of multiple images/elevations/layers cohering in that moment of perception.’16 The individual cell, bacteria, mind, funghi, nerve, disappear amongst this density; retreating from visibility behind a wall of symbiotic collaboration stitched so tight they are indistinguishable.

In the chaos of the destruction of boundaries, my skin finds reprieve in the security of the bathroom tiles. She is an agential actor upon my body that is external rather than internal. A lifeless companion to my quivering. My insides squeeze up against each vulnerable opening of my body, attempting escape. Sweat, spit, piss, shit, bile, heat. My body crawls out of itself. These tiles are a counterforce; she is a cold affliction to an attempted body excavation. The cold sinks into my blood, moving over parts of me it may not even touch. She holds me and coalesces me back together, the spread of chill forces my senses to calibrate. In return, I wipe the tiles clean. Stroking her like she stroked me, softly and slowly. A return to consciousness in mutuality. She is now an extension of my collective being, an undoubtable recipient of my microbial outpouring and provider of re-collectivisation. Her capacity to aggregate parts of me beyond her surface prompts my speculation of the solidity of her surfaces. I wonder of its fluidity, of the many microorganisms that contain her and that she contains. As parts of myself are forced to flee, perhaps her own beinghood becomes mine and mine becomes hers.

She lets herself go limp to hold me and I am indebted.

Endnotes 1 Ian Buchanan, “The Problem of the Body in Deleuze and Guattari, or, What Can a Body Do?,” Body & Society 3, no. 3 (1997): 83.

2 W. Ford Doolittle, “Population Genomics: How Bacterial Species Form and Why They Don’t Exist,” Current Biology 22, no. 11 (June 5, 2012): 451, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. cub.2012.04.034.

3 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 63.

4 Harney and Moten, 63.

5 Harney and Moten, 64.

6 See Stefano Harney; ‘those places that are not recognised, not legitimate, among those people … doing something that we neglect or vaguely understand as not really fitting, not really contributing. It’s the undercommons [where] one is always welcome to come and join’ Stefano Harney on Study, interview by Tim Edkins, Video, July 2011, loc. 2:52-3:18, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=uJzMi68Cfw0; as quoted within Matthew Houdek, “(An) Allegory of the Undercommons: A Rhetorical Slipstream into the Fugitive Temporal Horizon,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 53, no. 3 (May 27, 2023): 354, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2023.2200701 7 Frank Macfarlane Burnet, “Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease,” 1940 as discussed in; Thomas Pradeu and Elizabeth Vitanza, “49The Self-Nonself Theory,” in The Limits of the Self: Immunology and Biological Identity, ed. Thomas Pradeu and Elizabeth Vitanza (Oxford University Press, 2012), 72, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199775286.003.0003.

8 Cary. Wolfe, Zoontologies : The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xiii; as quoted in Hird, “Microontologies of Self,” 84.

9 “Viral Gastroenteritis Fact Sheet,” NSW Health, 2022, https://www.health.nsw.gov.au:443/Infectious/factsheets/Pages/viral-gastroenteritis.aspx.

10 Saud Bin Abdul Sattar and Shashank Singh, “Bacterial Gastroenteritis,” National Library of Medicine: National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2023, http://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/books/NBK513295/.

11 “Parasitic Causes of Prolonged Diarrhoea in Travellers,” Australian Journal for General Practitioners 41 (September 27, 2012): 782–86.

12 Melissa Murray, “What Is a Parasite?,” The Australian Museum, 2020, https://australian.museum/learn/species-identification/ask-an-expert/what-is-a-parasite/australian.museum/ learn/species-identification/ask-an-expert/what-is-a-parasite/.

13 Dalia S. Ashour and Ahmad A. Othman, “Parasite–Bacteria Interrelationship,” Parasitology Research 119, no. 10 (October 1, 2020): 3145–64, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-02006804-2.

14 Christina Quigley and Xi Jiang, “Gastroenteritis,” in Metabolism of Human Diseases: Organ Physiology and Pathophysiology, ed. Eckhard Lammert and Martin Zeeb (Vienna: Springer Vienna, 2014), 137–42, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-0715-7_22.

15 Quigley and Jiang.

16 Tavi Meraud, “Iridescence, Intimacies,” E-Flux Journal, 2015, 9.

Hannah Lawrence

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49

NPC

Ben Shelley

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NPC

Ben Shelley

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NPC

A person can never truly leave their childhood behind. Gentle friend or grief stricken wound, it accompanies our whole life, often trying to pursue us, usually catching up with us. On this path begins the steep path of adolescence and the formation of the adult whereby the person becomes belonging to a group, a community, a place by adopting the right codes, image and uniforms which manifests itself with a desperate eagerness to the ego.

Ben Shelley’s debut fashion collection was necromancy at work. Childhood imagination — strangled dead from this codified, mundane and despairing task of appropriating (dressing) ourselves — was revived.

The accompanying soundtrack was a lurid, off-beat amalgamation of sound recordings, old-timey ragtime and spoken work. The effect it provided was palpable, the awkwardness of the music reflected the atmosphere at the beginning of the show. The music was not loud enough to rid the space of its silent and weird intimacy. But this did not detract from the overall impression of the show.

In fact the opposite was true. As the first look came into view and everyone in the room started to grin, a couple people even giggled. The attitude shifted as people came to understand the show as something not to be intimidated by, but to relate to wholeheartedly.

Unlike many of the other subversions The collection consisted of a series of fashion and fashion spectacle seen of neo-soft toys brought to life in the from the current ilk of ironic and form of trousers, jackets, shirts and ‘silly’ fashion designers yearning for a various accessories. Models wore childhood lost in the fruitless endeavour plush headwear and each carried a of reality. I spent my childhood outside soft toy while walking, which either of the reality which appeared dull to characterised or complimented the looks. me, too codified, too transparent, this In an ode to Comme and the reification too is what BEAST also achieves. of the absent body, asymmetrical Ben’s collection plays with menswear pockets and extended sleeves were not to expose some collective false prominent in many of the garments. consciousness within the fashion world Both the enigmatic symbols such as obsessed with archetypes and its own circles, squares, swirls and polka dots history of garments, but simply shows were puffed up and found in many of garments as if they were born from the accessories and constant references some. His approach, which could either to animalistic forms seen in headdress, be the figure of bricoleur or saboteur, bags, scarves, ties and other pieces spoke seeks out the imaginative traces hidden to the fundamentally folkish quality that in everyday dressing. imagination contains. “The headpieces” Text by Finn Mcgrath as Ben recounted, “naturally formed https://theamericanflagswebsite. themselves out of me.” blogspot.com/

Ben Shelley

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Boy bleeds into internet microtrends, and new tie-wearing youth who lack knowledge of post-hardcore proclaim themselves emos. Yet Y2K-romanticists’ engagement with the scene — which had been suspected dead — has given us I myself am not sure where the line back My Chemical Romance, Johnnie is drawn. Nevertheless, if we assume Guilbert of My Digital Escape on emos’ unanimity on which artists represent the scene, we may move onto Youtube, and countless fifth-wave emo musicians. If casual enjoyers can only an in-group pastime: criticising the lowest of the low (i.e. “posers”). Lyrical bolster a market catering to “real” emos, is it worth being bothered by them at angst and proximity to mental health all? taboos facilitated emo circles a couple of decades ago. Today, winged eyeliner Ultimately, it’s about contradiction. and black double grommet belts seem Once a culture founded by the alienated enough to constitute belonging, with “goth” and “punk” being thrown around and misunderstood is shared with At its core, the discussion is one of mainstream audiences — “preps”, if in place of “emo”. genre. Musical ancestry provides neat you will — it is a jarring shift. When frameworks for things such as goth, the senior yearbook editor defaced my As we walked past an Emo Night at which developed subgenres after its rawr XD by attaching a period to its the Burdekin, my millennial uncle British birth in the ‘70s. Likewise, metal and its categories have diversified suggested that the alternative is ‘mostly final letter, part of me was relieved that a fancy dress theme now’. If there is no the phrase was still relatively unknown. considerably since the late ‘60s. At denying that current trends transformed Regardless, it seems an obvious blessing the expense of its preservation, emo to have resuscitated the emo scene pre-existing niches into a less nuanced lacks the same modern understanding. without giving a stronger pulse to Offshoot bands like Hawthorne Heights #aesthetic, we should instead ask society’s contempt for anyone requiring are deemed too pop-punk, while Death ourselves why we’re upset. antidepressants or a therapist. Whether Cab for Cutie is decidedly too indie. the subculture is rendered obsolete by A new internet is merely a catalyst for Those who claim otherwise may be norms that started in the 2000s. Twenty- outsiders’ acceptance of it is irrelevant sentenced to online responses like this odd years ago, posers were the laughing to me. Like other Gen-Z teens, my own isn’t emo lol and pinkerton is literally immersion began with introductory stock of MySpace; mislabelling and indie rock [crying face emoji], among media — the same media condemned stylistic appropriation are not recent other expert opinions. The argument by a more weathered alternative coterie. things. However, there is a positive must be ceded in part; I Write Sins Not My stance remains the same: in spite of correlation between the dissemination Tragedies bears little resemblance to an individuality complex, I will continue of subcultures and the density of self-pitying guitar riffs propagated by people who misidentify with them; the to thank posers for saving emo as it Rites of Spring. But just as early rock flatlined. revival of cultural icons like Fall Out has aged into its modern counterpart To quote an infamous copypasta, ‘“Real Emo” only consists of the dc Emotional Hardcore scene and the late 90’s Screamo scene’. What was once a thriving teen subculture has since been lost to the passage of time, leaving only traces of its existence: adult disapproval, stereotypes about choppy, side-swept bangs, and a lot of rockish woe-isme music. However, 2000s nostalgia maintains its momentum. A question of authenticity arises — has a new wave of emo been saturated by posers? The answer to this is yes, and we should be grateful for it.

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in spite of purists, so too should emo.

We cannot imprison sounds in a 1990s chamber when their echoes continue to reverberate into the present.

Real Emo: A defence of posers in the year 2024

Lola Herath

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A curious phenomenon has arisen in Australia — something in the sizzle, something in the lines around the block and between the awkward umsand-uhs of a declined card. One that’s noticeable every time you eat out: on menus and window signs, in the group chat discussing where to eat, in Google reviews heaping praise and citing faults.

It’s in the mouths of the sous, the maître d’, the other diners, and maybe even your own.

objectives: one as a marker of a quality ethnic and cultural experience via food and the dining experience, another as a marker for our own willingness and aptitude to experience cultures and food from beyond the one in which we are currently in.

the Chozzie trenches, ascending ranks above the Kung Pao chicken orderers of the world.

At risk of sounding like a culinary centrist, both mindsets are flawed.

The former relies on the propagandistic fallacy of national dishes, which is a relatively new phenomenon for most cultures. Prior to WWII, the main gastronomic concern was getting enough food. In early 20th-century Thailand, Pad Thai was engineered as a governmental effort to galvanise patriotism and export soft culture. The combination of sweet, tangy, savoury, spicy flavours was So what is authenticity? Is your favourite designed to capture Thai cuisine in a digestible, easily-exportable way… and food authentic? Does your favourite it worked! Considering how few Thai restaurant serve authentic food?

Could you be authentic food? Why are people regularly consume Pad Thai in the homeland, authenticity with a basis Australians so obsessed? in traditional roots has been, and will be, undermined by ancillary forces.

Perhaps the cultural arena of modern consumption most occupied with The latter archetype treats ethnic food authenticity is food. Australian food adventurers have made it their mission as a fun experience akin to an escape to identify which random combination room. For a temporary fling, foodies can of characteristics signifies authenticity. satisfy their cravings of otherness, where “ethnicity becomes spice” that “liven up Everyone seems to have an intrinsic sense of it, often based on nothing more the dull dish that is mainstream white society”, as bell hooks put it. Not to than “just the vibes.” Take a Chinese The Oxford restaurant for example, one may expect imply trying new cultural foods should certain senses to be activated: sights of be discouraged of course; the issue is Dictionary itself in the search. Authenticity attempts time-worn menus, smells of fragrant defines authenticity as the property of to create a safe space for those who beef sizzles, and feels for a dingy being genuine, true to origin, legitimate, wish to access a cuisine in its ‘truest and interior. What were once defects have or consistent with the person or realest’ form, for those whose palates are become validating markers of good, real object’s history and typicality. In this already safest.

Chinese food. semantic sense, discourse on authentic food exclusively entails whether its In such culinary crises, perhaps you For some, finding the most authentic ingredients are legitimate. Think the could turn to official bodies and versions of the most popular dishes of a horsemeat scandal of 2013 — an culture is the goal. Their search begins their attempts at regulating formal, authentic beef sandwich is one that and ends at dishes that are synonymous undisputable authenticity. The contains beef that is really beef and Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana with a country — like sushi for Japan bread that is really bread.

(AVPN) enforces a system to defend and tacos for Mexico. Others go off the Naples-style pizza. Armed with course. They challenge themselves to Of course, what people really mean is clicky pens tucked in their apron pocket, avoid these dishes, instead deriding whether the food they are consuming the association’s representatives visit them as the normie order in search of is accurate to what they would expect more niche fares. Saying your favourite pizzerias worldwide to verify if they to find in its country of origin. As a concept, food authenticity has multiple Chinese dish is pork tang yuan signifies follow the correct Neapolitan process. to the masses that you’ve been through A pizza should have a diameter less

The issue, however, is that attributes used to measure such ‘accuracy’ are often arbitrary, varying across dishes, cuisines, restaurants, chefs, and contexts with no real rationale. Vague and pervasive — the concept’s applicability Authenticity and the notion of true authentic foodways. rolls on a butter wheel across the bread of our culinary experiences.

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The A word (authenticity)

than 35cm. The cornicione (rim) must be raised, soft, and golden. The dough should only be rolled by hand. It cannot be frozen or vacuum-packed for sale — the rules go on. As of 2023, there are eight AVPN-certified parlours in Sydney and 19 in Australia. So the model of certifiable authenticity exists, but when was the last time you dined at Aperitivo on account of their AVPN status?

Just down Norton Street, Bar Italia is venerated for being just as authentic while serving Napoli pizza without a certification. Regulated authenticity remains only a niche interest among diehard purists, so surely this can’t be what the populace means when they say authentic food.

Sometimes what is meant is far more insidious. Beneath the TimeOut-fueled ho-hums about decor and menu exists the lives of people making our food.

ask if our food has been prepared the same way as it has been traditionally or This nature vs. nurture debate is thwarted typically in the region the dish is from. by systems of oppression that ultimately Sometimes, we can taste it — a lo mein platforms white experts. Seeing a white prepared in a sauteuse might lack wokhei; other times we can feel it, the beef chef making your Pad Kee Mao at the local bistro might be disconcerting, but in the same lo mein may not be velveted but might still be tender and fatty. what about at Long Chim in the CBD where the Pad Thais are $36? The owner, David Thompson, the most prolific and Authentic preparation methods and tools are mystified by gastronomic hegemony. recognisable authority figure of Thai Chefs and cooks who can prepare food cuisine in Australia, is a white man. with non-Western methods and crockery Thompson’s expertise in Thai cuisine are seen as masters of some kind of is impressive (it better be for $36) but foreign local Thai chefs are seldom given the same opportunities for notoriety. While culinary art. In foreign food is legitimised by foreign cooks, foreign food is “elevated” by white cooks who know how to play the authenticity game. that “being Thai is an advantage.”

Outside the ‘staff only’ area, the hunt for authenticity reaches the restaurant floor where even fellow customers must play their prescribed roles. When the tandoori In the slow deterioration of the White restaurant is frequented by South Asian Australian Policy, food service was a necessary path for many immigrants in regulars, that’s when you know it’s really authentic. No longer is ‘where search of economic freedom. As more recipes expatriated, onshore consumers are you really from’ appropriate to ask, but ‘where do you really eat’ is fine developed a fascination for the entwinement of exotic food and exotic and worthy of investigation. The ethnic the customer’s supposed knowledge is cultures. A dish is regarded as most back of authentic when the connection between intrinsic and infinite, but still accessible house, the food and people — product and producer from outside observations. time-weathed — are most tangible. In particular, the chef who doesn’t speak We expect the dining experience to be owner’s presence at the restaurant, or any English, smokes a cigarette with no enough of a slice of life of the respective hands and with foreign tools serves me lack thereof, is sought out by diners to convey a sense of homemadeness and a culinary destination, but not too much something with flavours and textures I personal attachment to the food served. that we as diners feel foreign. could not imagine making myself in the way that they do.

Such a mindset panini-presses the The authentic package even includes vast heterogeneity of immigrant-run other employees and the kitchen, who Perhaps he velvets his meat with a restaurants, relegating thousands of themselves bear cultural meaning on starch and soda — ingredients I can the basis of their race and ethnicity. The unique eateries under one outdated only intuitively bake with — or maybe stereotype. expectation that the dish and the chef he grills my dish in great nướng claws. should be of similar origins is strongly However, this kind of preparation rarely Behind the square and stainless-steel held yet unevenly applied. Palisa defines the dish. What if I had prepared veil of the garde manger, a subliminal Anderson of the Chat Thai dynasty a Lo Mein with the traditional egg marker of authenticity is found within has a Ratatouille-esque ‘a great artist noodles, prepared beef of the traditional can come from anywhere’ stance: “one the tools and methods involved in typical cut and variety, and vegetables of the creation of food. When we are doesn’t have to be of Thai origin to the appropriate flavour. I have seasoned master Thai cooking” but she concedes questioning authenticity, we might Hugo Hay and Long Huynh

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cuisine and in their search, returned to No suburb is more emblematic of this the old town of Cabra. phenomenon than Cabramatta.

Now heralded as the Viet-enjoyer’s Here, the smell of fermentation and cigarette smoke float through the halls of must-do day trip, it’s easy to assume this the many arcades and plazas; some with is where true authenticity still thrives — but there are caveats. developer-Orientalism chic complete with red hip-and-gable roofs, others with Equally a symptom of orientalism more Arial Bold signs than a community At Dong Hoa, a quaint Viet eatery near as much as professional admiration, notice board, plastered on top of flemish the end of John Street, chef Lan busies authenticity demands this mystique herself frying the perfect Bánh Xèo. brick. The sounds of grandma trolley for the othering of the kitchen space.

Authentic food demands the kitchen be wheels and a cocktail of K- and V-pop Donning a baseball cap over her hair net (just like my aunties in Vietnam), othered in two ways: once as a place of tunes permeate the air as laboriously she takes a moment away from the wok work and another as a cultural mine for handmade staples like nước chấm sit to chronicle her culinary history. She in jars at takeout windows ready to be our stomachs to extract from. first learnt how to cook in Vietnam but sold. Northern, central, and southern underwent retraining after migrating, These cultural mines are of no shortage Viet cuisines sit alongside one another beside the ornate Pai Lau designating the “wherever I go, I adapt.” Gesturing in Sydney. Pockets of the city have towards the wall decked out in prints of central business district. It’s clear why become synonymous with certain menu items, she elaborates: “how I make cuisines. Chinese in Haymarket; Korean the suburb is revered for its authentic it in Vietnam is different to how I make Viet-ness. in Strathfield; Indian in Harris Park; it here, but it’s all still very Vietnamese.“ McDonalds in Macdonaldtown. Drawing After the Vietnam War, refugees and gastro-boundaries for easy mental and Back in Vietnam, restaurants similarly migrants settled into Cabramatta, intestinal digestion allow Australians don’t maintain such reverence for to benefit from enjoying the flavours of Cabramatta West, and Fairfield in authenticity. Often, deliberate attempts exotic, while prohibiting it from mixing Sydney and Richmond, Abbotsford, are made at innovating recipes from and Footscray in Melbourne. As they with, and tainting, white Australia. turned to food service, the Vietnamese the too-familiar, too-authentic casual These communities, despite accessibility, flavour palate became more accessible bistros that abound the streets. “We want and eventually, popular among non-Viet to explore what to add and subtract to are rarely engaged with genuinely by traditional recipes to make it our own,” other Sydneysiders, especially those in Australians. Bánh mì (initially called says Thanh, co-owner of Shamballa, pork rolls), vermicelli salads, and Phở Char-Grill-Charlie’s side of the reda vegetarian restaurant in the heart became staples for working people rooster line (the gap between the two of Saigon. Sitting beneath a massive Sydneys is an age-old tale, only partially and students at lunchtime, eventually exposed brick wall, he explains their aim expanding into the city and the innerunpacked here). city. This proliferation normalised Viet to meld “imported Western flavours” with Viet classics to bridge a culinary cuisine as a part of daily options for The engagement they do receive is Australians but left it ripe for hyperwarmed and potentially well-intended distance: “if we recycle the same recipes, commercialisation. but ultimately fetishising. The stock the world will never discover new from the grocer may spill onto the street, flavours.” their patrons might speak a language you By the early 2000s, city suits and career restaurateurs seized the cuisine. Branded The search for authenticity demands wouldn’t expect to hear next door, but as both ground-breaking yet nostalgic, that dishes are replicated exactly as they this isn’t any different from travelling through the CBD. Though there is extra capitalists leaned into stereotypical were in the motherland at a fixed point work going on here, the enclave is still wartime aesthetics and sold-off Viet in time. Yet, restaurants — both here and viewed as a slice of country rather than classics to the mass public. Roll’d there — are constantly evolving, some rebranded rice paper rolls as Soldier an adjacent community. The enclave taking on influences from neighbours, Rolls™ and industrialised the Bánh remains a place to experience the others even developing flavour profiles Mì as pre-made, pastry-boxed catering to appeal to Western tourists (many of culture, cuisine and life of somewhere else without having to go, rather than our slices. Neither are made with the same whom are Australian!). neighbours worthy of the respect given care or quality as family-run bakeries.

Jaded, foodies yearned for richer, crafted The reality is that authenticity is fluid, to English-speaking ones. flavours of first wave Viet-Australian continuously assessed and reassessed as it all similarly, but I haven’t used a wok. It would seem absurd to say I have not made Lo Mein, but could it be appropriate to say that the dish I have created is in un-authentic Lo Mein?

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The A word (authenticity)

demonstrate that I accept them and their food as relative to my own.

There could be a case made for the pursuit of authenticity as a selffulfilment exercise, particularly for diasporic and migrant communities The current system of authenticity is looking to find identity in a new home. at best, ill-conceived, and at worse, oppressive. So how should we conceive Yet, the current model of authenticity is not conducive for this. This is an of it instead? entirely different search altogether. Once It’s not radical to suggest getting rid of the walls of authenticity have fallen, the pursuit entirely. Deeper appreciation we can rebuild practices to facilitate this longing: food based in community, of the food we consume can only rather than concepts. be possible by assessing it on other qualities. One of which can still be how To dismantle these walls, we ought accurately replicated it is to a certain to value the food. The freshness of its place and time. But imposing that as a ingredients; the complexity of its flavour standard no longer serves us any use, other than lending some cultural capital profile; the way the fat, the skin, and the meat of an hours-braised Hong Shao Rou to your friend who boasts their $1 melt under your teeth and tongue; the baklava in Fairfield. way the pungency of mắm tôm interacts with the chewiness of the bún.

Some think it’s too late, the Pavlovian response Australians have on our We ought to value the restaurant. palates and wallets is too ingrained in How it contributes to the surrounding gastronomic culture. The same culture community; if it sponsors a soccer team that attempts to highlight cultures in the depths of suburbia; if they throw and cuisines of people outside of the in an entrée for free; or gives away extra Australian hegemony, but it can only food when no one is in. ever serve those within the hegemony.

The markers of authenticity are only We ought to value the people behind ever in effort to capture the tastes and textures that define someone else’s food; the food: the creativity and skill of the kitchen hands; the way the chef slips and never the experiences, practices and weaves like a boxer between the flambé customs of how it is eaten. As a diner, you only need to worry about respecting and the rangehood; the consistency of your caramelised onions and the someone with your wallet rather than cleanliness of your plate — steamed, with your actions. scrubbed and shining. The way the Consumers that value authenticity over waiter puts your cutlery down; the other, more important indicators of the attentiveness of the host when you’re properties of food, are engaging in virtue grabbing the check; and the way auntie smiles as you leave and as you enter signalling. If it’s true that I am what I eat and I choose to eat authentically — I when she remembers your name. am trying to demonstrate that I am a Don’t go hunting for something exactly respectful and worldly individual and that I care deeply for the community that like somewhere else — you won’t find it. Try to find what’s right in front of you I am engaging with culinarily. I wish — what’s been brought from someone to deny the same cuisine with dishes else’s table to yours. that may have been modified for an Australian palate and instead demand food cooked in their image, perhaps to And say thank you. history, location, and behaviours shift.

As food scholar Panikos Panayi writes, “people are misguided to think there is a single authentic version of anything.”

Hugo Hay and Long Huynh

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There’s resistance within these threads.

There’s love within these threads.

There’s hope within these threads.

There’s life within these threads.

These stitches crisscross and flow with stories of the people; the love and the history they created. This fabric holds the labour of the farmers who weaved it and the care of the woman who threaded art into it. This fabric is draped on the people who create life and fought against those who tried to take it. These stitches remember the resistance and the fight among the people who wore them.

The life and the fight will live within these threads forever.

The pulse within these threads The rich tradition of Tatreez (‫زيرطت‬, Palestinian embroidery), finds its origins in rural areas in the 1800s, eventually evolving into a widespread practice across the region and among the diaspora since 1948. Initially tied to rural attire, embroidery now permeates Palestinian culture, showcasing the intricate beauty of its heritage. This art form was passed down for generations — mothers would teach their daughters, one needle and thread at a time, to string mosaics of colours and shapes into various garments, to create pattern combinations that tell a different story about land, belonging, love, and resistance.

The traditional Thobe, a loose-fitting robe, is one of the main canvases for the art of Tatreez. Decorated with detailed embroidery, this clothing is hand-stitched with arrangements of 61

threads and symbolic motifs. Some pomegranate skins utilised from the designs lean more towards abstract land surrounding Jaffa. For instance, red geometric shapes such as chevron or dye is produced from common native the eight-pointed stars, which was often plants like madder and insects including used for identification of background. kermes and cochineal. Blue dyes come Other symbols were pulled from the from the commonly found Indigo plant flora and fauna of the land, such as the in the Jordan Valley, which was used cyprus, palm tree, or most popularly, the to produce many nineteenth and early embroidery of S-shaped leeches given twentieth-century dresses to ward off their use to heal the sick in ancient the evil eye. The use of red, purple, medicine. These traditional patterns indigo blue, and saffron reflected the often communicate something about ancient color schemes of the Canaanite the woman wearing them. They reflect and Philistine coast. The Islamic green various facets of her personal identity — and Byzantine black were later additions social status, regional identity, marital to the traditional palette. status, and even economic status.

Much like the Thobe, other famous Tatreez has always been about the land Palestinian garments have deep and from the land. Not only does the historical roots to the land. The embroidery hold symbols of nature such Keffiyeh, a traditional headdress as the blossoms plains of Bayt Dajan, originates from the country’s Bedouin but fabric dyes are also derived from communities and local farmers where natural items such as grape leaves and they were used as a practical garment The pulse within these threads

to protect wearers from the harsh meaning “catastrophe”, where an and revolutionaries often wrapped the desert environment. The garment is estimated 700,000 people fled or were keffiyeh around their faces to avoid woven from lightweight cotton and expelled from their homes. With a large identification and arrest. Yet, when the blanketed in symbolic imagery: fishnet segment of the population forcibly British banned the scarf, as a national patterns representing the connection displaced from the region, the Nakba protest, most Palestinians began between Palestinian sailors and the dispersed and fragmented the growing wearing it to make the identification Mediterranean Sea; bold lines signifying fashion sector and every other element of rebels impossible by the authorities. the trade routes that go through of Palestinian society. Hundreds of During the 1970s, the keffiyeh gained Palestine; and intricate leaf patterns Palestinian towns were depopulated, prominence when Leila Khaled, a mirroring the resilience of the olive and thousands of Palestinians lived revolutionary freedom fighter and tree, which serves as a representation in refugee camps. What was once member of the Popular Front for the of the Palestinian people’s rich identity, a communal practice that allowed Liberation of Palestine, wore it as a culture, and unwavering spirit.

Palestinian women to embroider headscarf and encouraged Palestinian garments for themselves and others women to do the same, fostering a sense Palestinian Tatreez and garments have became an abandoned luxury due to of solidarity. It was worn most famously been an important form of resistance constant displacement alongside a lack by Yasser Arafat (former President of and political expression for centuries. In of time and supplies. the Palestinian National Authority) 1948, at the end of the Arab-Israeli war, when he addressed the UN General the withdrawal of British forces resulted Similarly, much like Tatreez embroidery, Assembly. Continued importance was in Israel declaring independence the keffiyeh has a long history of being gained during the Intifada in 1987 and and engaging in war with Palestine. synonymous with Palestinians and their again during the Second Intifada in 2000 This led to the mass displacement of demands for sovereignty. During the when people in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestinians, or the Nakba (‫)ةبكنلا‬ British mandate of Palestine, rebels Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Ramla Khalid

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and Yemen wore the scarf to show solidarity for Palestinians against the Israeli occupation. Worn by Palestinians and their global allies, this iconic scarf serves as a tangible expression of unity and resistance against oppression. Its core significance remains deeply rooted in the preservation of cultural heritage, the promotion of awareness, and the cultivation of a collective identity shared by Palestinians. As people around the world protest for the rights of Palestinians living under constant attacks from Israel, they donned the keffiyeh — a symbol of Palestine.

The visual language of the practice changed, resulting in Tatreez patterns becoming simpler. Various patterns and imagery were lost over time and their meanings displaced. One of the main reasons behind this includes environmental degradation caused by increasing settlements, meaning that some local symbols and iterations of Tatreez patterns are now extinct in tandem with over 400 villages that have been ethnically cleansed. Still, many women continued to wear their thobes or carry them on their backs as a statement of the continuing existence of the villages they had been expelled from or became extinct. Today, Tatreez patterns are worn by people in the diaspora, becoming a symbol of Palestinian identity, heritage, and displacement.

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Palestinian women continue to create radical roots utilising artful Tatreez embroidery techniques and fashion to push against Israeli occupation.

During the occupation, the women would at times stitch escape routes that protestors facing the occupation army could rely on to survive. In 1967, when the flying of the Palestine flag was banned by the State of Israel, women began embroidering the flag and its colours through their clothes as a sign of resistance, this was identified as the ‘Intifada dress’ .

Although much of the organic practices of garment making and Tatreez embroidery have faded over time due to the genocide in Palestine, attempts to keep these practices and stories alive remain. Over the years, these practices have become an important source of income and independence for the diaspora, especially in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon where many Palestinians are banned from various professions. Formal training academies and centers are in small numbers attempting to exist to give Palestinian and Syrian artists displaced to have a space to learn and teach the practices for not only financial freedom but to preserve the art and the stories being lost.

The pulse within these threads

In 2021, UNESCO added Palestinian embroidery to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognizing it as “a widespread social and intergenerational practice in Palestine,” a symbol of nationalism.

Following the development, The Palestinian Heritage Centre in Bethlehem inaugurated a Textile Conservation Studio to preserve Palestinian thobes and other heritage fabrics and to provide training for conservation and restoration.

From the river to the sea, one day Palestine will be free. And the woman of the land will come together once again to weave art and love into the fabrics. To create new history and bring the flowers of the land back to life. To pass down the story of resistance, of strength, and of love to the children who listen. Until then these threads hold the remembrance of Palestine and its people. These threads remember the life and the fight of the people forever.

Ramla Khalid

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It’s 2010. The doctor has ordered bed rest for my rapidly worsening strep throat, and I am aimlessly flipping through the T.V. I land on MTV, as my speakers emit the deep resonant notes of a harmonium.

The camera pans from a sign that says, “Blue Films presents Sheila ki Jawani” to Katrina Kaif, the titular Sheila. Bathed in soft purple lighting, She is recumbent on a plush, spinning pink bed, surrounded by pillows, candelabras and billowing gauze curtains, with nothing but a thin, silk sheet covering her glowing skin. Her hair? Perfectly done, in loose waves that spill onto her shoulders. Her make-up?

Barely there, accentuates her naturally gorgeous features — high cheekbones, long eyelashes and glossy lips. The video cuts, and Sunidhi Chauhan’s vocals kick in. I know you want it but you’re never gonna get it. Tere haath kabhi na aani. Kaif is now surrounded by male background dancers dressed in tight, ripped black tank tops and gold face paint, all vying for her attention. She dodges the advances of the male lead, Akshay Kumar. Instead, asserts, Kisi aur ki mujhko zaroorat kya? Main toh khud se pyar jataun (Why do I need another, when I can love myself?).

“ Notes on Diva Worship

I was enraptured.

This was my introduction to the Diva, a woman who knows exactly who she is and what she wants, and who isn’t going to settle for anything less. The Diva has captured the hearts, minds and the undying fidelity of the Homosexual for time immemorial. Whether that be Leonardo da Vinci dedicating 13 years of his life to capture the mystical beauty of the Mona Lisa, or Elton John and Andy Warhol’s tributes to the glamorous and misunderstood life of Marilyn Monroe. Afterall, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a Homosexual, in possession of a good familiarity with the zeitgeist, must be in want of a Diva to Worship.

These notes are for Susan Sontag.

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Notes on "Diva Worship"

1. Diva invokes the Latin divus, ‘divine’ or ‘godlike’. These are women described not in adjectives, but large-sweeping sentiments and rapturous annunciations of their sheer raw talent. They are not simply good, nor great. They are supreme, unparalleled, cunctipotent.

2. Originating from opera as the prima donna, literally ‘first lady’, the Diva emerged from the all-male acting troupes of the 16th century. Inhabiting the roles of goddesses and deities, it would have been a disservice to refer to these women with anything less than this epithet. Nothing else would have captured their other-worldly talents. One of the earliest acolytes of the Diva, 19th-century French critic Théophile Gautier writes of her as “thrice gifted”, a sacred fusion of song, passion and beauty that commands deep reverence and veneration.

3. As the Diva began to enter the popular lexicon in 1883, Adelina Patti, a coloratura soprano, cemented herself in the popular consciousness as the definitive prima donna.

She was the most recognisable woman in the world, second only to Queen Victoria, with unparalleled wealth, status and freedom. However, her conduct began gaining traction, as reported in The Youth’s Companion in 1887 which outlined an exchange between Patti and her manager. He had objected to her exorbitant performance fees, greater than that of the annual salary of the US president, to which she retorted, “Very well, get the President of the United States to sing for you, then!” Described as a spoiled diva in the magazine, instances such as these resulted in the pejoration of the word. She, the Diva, is arrogant, demanding and self-involved.

”

4. Therein lies the contradiction. If it were not for Patti’s shrewd business acumen and her ability to gauge her true worth, she would not have achieved the heights that she did. What draws the Homosexual towards the Diva is the metatextual narrative; where others see her as a high-maintenance nightmare, the Homosexual sees her for her talent and dedication to not just her craft, but also herself. There is undeniable power in a good song, a good show, and a good performance, and there is unquestionable courage in unapologetically embracing herself in the face of criticism and delivering excellence.

5. To borrow the words of one of the most preeminent Divas alive today, Beyoncé, ‘Diva is a female version of a hustler’. The Homosexual is drawn to the Diva because he sees her blood, sweat and tears, where no one else does. Thus, the hustle is a fundamental process in the formation of Divadom. The Diva must have faced some backlash, controversy, or hurdle. This may be due to institutional forces, like when Taylor Swift was denied the right to buy her masters, external actors, when Deepika Padukone’s turn as the mythological Queen Padmavati incited nationwide riots from right-wing groups, or entirely selfinflicted, as witnessed by Ariana Grande’s most recent flirtation with homewrecking and her seeming lack of remorse for it. If the Diva’s ride to the top was smooth and effortless, her metanarrative will not speak to the Homosexual. It is this struggle that draws empathy from the Homosexual, who resonate deeply with the oppression and ostracism. Therefore, when the Diva acts out, it makes reports of unreasonable requests and bad behaviour so satisfying. As writer Christina Newland put it, “It’s fun to watch women who’ve worked for their power and money get to behave in silly, petulant ways with it.”

6. Beyond seeing their own fight against pervasive hierarchical structures within that of the Diva’s, Diva Worship becomes a fundamental tool in both identity and community formation for the Homosexual. As academic Jimmy Draper explains, Diva Worship helps Homosexuals both “relate to each other” and “empower themselves”. From

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Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland, to Arethra Franklin and Diana Ross, and nowadays, from Michelle Yeoh to Charli XCX. The Worship of these Divas, then, becomes vital for survival. It creates threads of shared histories, secret languages. A codex only decipherable to those in the know.

7. Prior to Stonewall, Worship of the Diva was also a means of escapism to cope with the realities of their marginalised romantic desires. When the diva is being wooed on screen or professing their love publicly, the Homosexual can vicariously live through the Diva, romancing dashing heartthrobs like Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, and Gene Kelly. More recently, one sees Posh Spice, whoring out her superstar athlete husband, David Beckham, through her Instagram account. On the contrary, with the growing acceptance of same-sex love, the Diva’s lifestyle takes centre stage in these Homosexual fantasies. For instance, the nomadic modus vivendi of Dua Lipa, who seems to be permanently on vacation.

8. When the Diva wields her accrued power and utilises it in service of the Homosexual Agenda, she further endears herself to the Homosexual. From AIDs activism by old Hollywood Starlets like Elizabeth Taylor, to Lady Gaga taunting the Russian Government for its draconian stance on LGBTQ+ rights, the Homosexuals feel indebted to these Divas for embracing them when the zeitgeist does not.

9. Notedly, all Divas are not Allies. Case in point, Azealia Banks. A permanent fixture on gay playlists the world round, it’s difficult to resist the urge to groove to her infectious, transcendental beats. It is more difficult, however, to ignore her track record of homophobia. From calling a flight attendant the f-slur to accusing gay men of appropriating horse culture for their use of leather straps and ketamine, Banks’ often positions herself against the interests of the community, including supporting avowedly anti-queer politicians like Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. Yet, the Homosexual is still drawn to this Diva, particularly her assertiveness and rebelliousness; a black woman unapologetically taking up space. Alternatively, her inclination towards messiness and drama directly appeals to the Homosexual sensibility.

10. There is no male equivalent for the Diva. While the masculine divo exists, it was never adopted by the Homosexual masses. From Elton John to Troye Sivan, none of these artists inspire anywhere near the often militant loyalty and dedication the Homosexuals feel towards their Divas, despite their art directly speaking and relating to the queer experience.

This is a direct product of gay misogyny. As the Homosexual does not shed his privilege under dominant patriarchal structures, there is pervasive ridiculing and demeaning of fellow femme-presenting, non-masculine individuals within the community, a product of the preoccupation the Homosexual man still has with traditional notions of masculinity.

Hence, when male artists adopt and embrace the Diva aesthetic, high-femme and camp presentation, it spurns rather than attracts the Homosexual.

11. The Diva is often a victim of gay misogyny herself. The history of Diva Worship is riddled with instances of Homosexuals turning on their Divas when she fails to meet their expectations. For instance, writer Brian O’Flynn narrates how gay men would attend Judy Garland’s concerts, and, despite knowing the precarious mental state she was in towards the end of her life, would ruthlessly heckle her for being too drunk to finish her performances. Another incarnation of this was the gossip and tabloid culture of the late 90s and early aughts, where notable Homosexuals, like Perez Hilton, would routinely bully

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Notes on "Diva Worship"

and shame Divas, leading to multiple public breakdowns, from Amanda Bynes to Britney Spears. This has morphed into the gay stan culture of today. One minute anonymous Twitter accounts may shower superlatives and praise on their chosen Diva of the week, whereas the next, they are equally as invested in tearing that very same Diva down.

12. At its most extreme, the Worship manifests problematically. When the fanatical Homosexual develops a parasocial attachment, it leads to deleterious encroachment into the Diva’s innerworld. This ranges from overreaching and unwanted speculation regarding the Diva’s intimate life, and can stretch as far as doxxing and outright stalking. At this stage, the Homosexual no longer sees the Diva as a living, breathing woman, but as a product to devour. A true devotee remains radically empathetic, and most importantly, knows his limits.

13. For the neophytes seeking a Diva of their own, an assorted list of deities canonised in the Pantheon of Divadom: Mariah Carey Cher Sophie Anderson and Rebecca More, “The Cock Destroyers” Tracy Grimshaw Faye Dunaway Gypsy Rose Blanchard The Green M&M Nicki Minaj Jennifer Coolidge Tiffany “New York” Pollard Björk Hatsune Miku Lois Griffin Mia Goth as Pearl Joan Didion Rekha Michelle Visage It’s hard not to be drawn to a Diva. It’s hard not to root for a woman who bends the will of a misogynistic system that, at each corner, tries to wear her down. It’s harder still not to root for a woman, who, in the face of insurmountable odds, ascends to maestra on her own terms. In doing so, she becomes an icon. A manifestation of the culture. She, the Diva, transcends her personhood and becomes a beacon of identification. But, more vitally, I like to think of her not as a reflection of our struggles on the margins of society, jockeying for acceptance, but rather a projection of what we can ultimately achieve. What I, a little sore-throated, bed-ridden queer pre-teen dreamed to be — strong, self-possessed, and most importantly, comfortable in my own skin. In Kaif, beyond the glamour, I saw radical self-acceptance, a blueprint by which I could learn to embrace myself in the face of ostracism. Kisi aur ki mujhko zaroorat kya? Main toh khud se pyar jataun.

And for that, I will forever Worship at the altar of the Diva.

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Simon Harris Lizzy Kwok

Sonal Kamble

Lameah Nayeem

Huw Bradshaw

Justine Hu

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Kate Saap

The Editors

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Absent: Emily O’Brien, Franki Bonanno, Ben Shelley, Fran Williams, Luca Leggo

Lola Herath

Kuyili Karthik

Nicholas Osiowy Ramla Khalid

Jayden Nguyen

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Estelle Yoon

Joseph John Kagsawa

Contributors

Long Huynh

Hugo Hay

Hannah Lawrence

China Meldrum

Lucien Noël Mihir Sardana

Tom Martin Susanna Pang

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The Quiz Answers 1. Ben Affleck 2. The Daffodil 3. Sam Kerr 4. Mexico, Egypt, Serbia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Albania, Montenegro 5. The Bra Boys 6. Charles Stewart Parnell 7. On the Beach 8. Bells 9. Low 10. Macquarie University 11. The Black Paintings 12. 95 13. Flour, Milk and Butter 14. Economic growth 15. Gertrude Stein 16. Curling 17. Our House 18. Enamel paint 19. Vesper 20. Tony Blair 21. Long Island Iced Tea, Sex on the Beach 22. Andrei Rublev 23. Fifth Beatle 24. Cane Toad 25. Georgia

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A new exhibition by HOSSEI

14 Feb – 24 April

Verge Gallery Jane Foss Russell Plaza, 154 City Road verge-gallery.net Photo credit: Jacquie Manning