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.
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
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
Pulp Issue 13
The Quiz
1: As of 2024, who is the youngest winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay?
?
14: What were Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea known as the ‘Four Asian Tigers’ for?
4: Name three countries whose national flag features an eagle. ...................................................................................................
5: Maroubra Beach is notorious as the territory of what gang?
25: R.E.M. and The B-52’s both hail from which U.S. State?
@
CAN SOMEONE PLEASE, GIVE ME A HAND(LE)!
My hands crackle against the dry paste at a ubiquitous house party. In the process I accidentally desecrate a makeshift shrine 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 are the new frontier; a form of advertising yourself; an iconic tag; a brand. I’m an easy search on Instagram, unlike many of my contemporaries. There is no mystery, no
deep dive required, no running through a mutuals tagged to find me. We meet. You know my Instagram, there is no wild goose chase.
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 a complete personal revolution in my own branding, as the snapchat username I created at age 12 was @em.obriien. Where have I come in 10 years? I’ve 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?
Pulp Photo Review III
Photo
Photo
Photo
Photo
Thank
@4nibenq, Hamish, James, Jayden, Josh,
Justine, Natarina, Soleil, Tingjen, Zahra
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.
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.
stroke after stroke after stroke the lines they are alive bound and divided independent and interdependent
swells in a vastness of ocean a flickering leaf in a forest of dancing trees the
shimmer of a star in a constellation everglowing an incomprehensible beauty listen these strokes are the present informing our being establishing positionality in everything within flux a tapestry always weaving in time
Lucien Noel
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
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.”
Tom Martin
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
States
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
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
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
‘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
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
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 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.
In Indian classical music, improvisation is a core , a curve of note positions, forms the primordial fabric from which artists weave sounds. Modal jazz is also unburdened by the constraints of set chord progressions, instead meandering through . This is the closest glimpse of infinity afforded to us: “when you go this way, you can go on forever,” said trumpetist Miles Davis. It is this unpredictability that paralyses the listener with ecstasy. In Artificial-Intelligence-esque rhetoric, the musical possibilities branch like fractals. However, when listening to Davis, who complained of classical musicians being robotic machines, one collapses at the altar of human creativity. Only humanity’s elusive spontaneity can express the human condition through its imperfection. Davis’ trumpet has often been described as ‘voicelike’, for its vibratoless timbre and modal hypermobility. In Carnatic music, , evoked with . Like the (concerts) are the layering and enmeshing of multiple improvisers.
Like the flute-playing god Krishna who held the entire universe in his mouth, the virtuosic TR Mahalingam ‘Flute Mali’ drew from this abyss majestic scales steeped in divinity. His genius is revered by Carnatic greats, called an incarnation of the cosmos itself with a timbre like the whisper of God. The enigma’s talents captivated a throng of fans who could more aptly be called devotees. He gifted to the world concerts and deserted them at whim, famously playing for the Lord Muruga in Tiruttani temple for eight hours ceaselessly. Mali in his drunken troubled genius was eccentric. He sometimes
The musician’s creativity is holy, enshrined in Greek mythology as the three muses of Delphi who formed the three chords of the lyre, or as the instruments wielded by the Hindu gods. Seated on a blooming lotus, Saraswati holds her veena close. The gods are enraptured by music, bewitched in the Indian 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 feat. Instead of the garlands of flowers placed by a priest on the idol’s neck, the soloist through improvisation weaves their own ragamalika, garland of ragas, in a manner as mysteriously ordained as the arrival of spring and as incomprehensibly beautiful as the flowering of its buds under moonlight. Like the saris draped on idols, silk ponnadais (fabric shawls) woven with golden thread adorn the shoulders of performers, given to them in gratitude.
repeated the same piece for the concert’s entire duration, stopped pieces halfway, or simply sat in silence frustrating the audience who waited several hours just to hear a few notes before he fled. As his disciple testifies, “Mali says he sees god within five minutes of playing — he thinks it is meaningless to continue after that and stops”. Mali frowned upon the state of Carnatic music, having had a prolonged absence from the Chennai scene after expounding one raga flawlessly at a kacheri (concert) and abruptly leaving in spite. “Carnatic music has become commercialised and unethical,” in his words, with rigorous rules suppressing creativity.
Improvisation has long operated as a counter to commercialised forms of music. Soaring in the midst of the American civil rights movement, jazz led by Black musicians was a political act of resistance. Soundtracking the pursuit of political freedom was improvisatory freedom. John Coltrane’s ‘Alabama’ was a wordless cry of anguish following the bombing of a church in Alabama by the Klu Klux Klan. The other freedom that music granted Coltrane was spiritual, first with A Love Supreme recorded in one studio session. In this seminal album and the following, OM, Meditations, and Ascension, Coltrane’s avant-garde freeness constructs a staircase to heaven. John Coltrane’s meditative improvisation undoubtedly inspired his wife Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda, created after his passing. Its title is apt, the album takes the listener on a spiritual journey like a pilgrimage. Beginning with an education in Indian
philosophy, we traverse the Hindu god Shiva’s tall snowy mountain, are steeped in Bombay’s mystique, confront Coltrane’s own grief, and are finally taken to the Village Gate in New York. In this jazz club an ambience thick with haze like incense cloaking and Osiris’ is recorded live. Sounds of harp, the trembling Arabian oud, the droning Indian tanpura, and intoxicating bass collide like the tops of trees intertwining in a canopy. It naturally follows that indo-jazz fusion projects have emerged: take Miles Davis’ American collaborators, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, or sitarplayer Ravi Shankar’s indo-jazz fusion in his 1962 album
I observe the Chennai Carnatic music scene from my plastic chair in clinical fluorescent lights. As the tanpura drones, I hear the shuffling of an older population’s bare feet across tiles which almost echo the coolness of the temple’s black floors. Even as times change, the music still evokes the listener’s rapturous awe. What is still sacred are the traditions that persist in the craftsmanship of instruments, the rebirth of ragas in every permutation of its notes, the mathematical complexities of rhythm which seem to communicate with the very logic of the world. What is still sacred is the temple-pillar-like stance of improvisation in today’s sonic landscape, otherwise short-circuited with momentary blisses. Aside from the observable trend of two-minute skeletons of songs made to house TikTokviral hooks, I note the emergence of new improvisatory modes like the DJ set, which often blends improvised and pre-mixed layers. Lengthy forays on melodic themes are interspersed with percussive beats and bass sections such as in the Trance genre. Sweat and ritualistic dance in darkness consecrate the boiler room. It’s no surprise that artificial intelligence makes composing on computers easier with machine improvisation, analysing existing music using machine learning and pattern-matching to create variations on these samples. Musical improvisation doesn’t just follow humanity into the future, it resuccitates older fragments of music, giving it a new life in a new work. A never-ending ebb and flow, improvisation’s hypnosis endures.
Kuyili Karthik
Fran Williams
is a Painter based in Montreal who has recently completed her undergraduate degree in Studio Arts with a major in Painting & Drawing at Concordia University. Fran’s work deals with the liminal middle-space of the abstraction/ figuration dichotomy. While she considers herself an abstract painter, her works often suggest letters or text without becoming readable language. Similarly, figures seem to appear but fail to coalesce into representational forms.
Achieving strong liminality is like landing a coin on its edge: a difficult feat, but the effect is impossible to substitute. The pursuit of liminality is the main guiding aspiration in her work. She values the creation of art that can be misunderstood and likens the experience of such work to watching clouds, reclining on a lawn and comparing what we see.
Fran Williams
Fran Williams
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
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.
One thing you should know about Venice in the 1600s: they did not mess about with their mirrors. While mirrors are commonplace today, from around the 1300s the small island of Murano in Venice held up the Venetian economy as the only place that knew how to make the mirrors, fuelling the lucrative Great Mirror Addiction. Apart from mirrors and rivers, Venice excelled in espionage and did almost anything to protect the secrets behind its mirrormaking technology. The Venetian Secret Service was such a sophisticated espionage network that I quite literally could not find a single name of any agents involved in this scandal. In fact, the identities of Venice’s Council of Ten, the controlling body of the secret service, are still highly disputed and unless an archeologist finds some old Venetian business cards, we will never know how many agents of the secret service there really were. But back to mirrors. The Venetian Secret Service did have some nice anti-mirror-whistleblower incentives, like letting all the lowly mirrormakers into high society gathos. But more often Venice protected its mirrors in less than nice ways, like stabbing any potential dissenters and leaving them dead in a river claiming they were eaten by salamanders (bonkers). Because of the Venetian Secret Service’s efficiency and lack of qualms with murder, mirrormaking was a solely Venetian gig. That is until full-time French menace and part-time haircare influencer Jean-Baptiste Colbert came into the picture.
The whole two year period between Colbert’s initial idea to get Venice’s mirrormakers to defect, and the death of a good chunk of them by poisoning is marked by abject tomfoolery. I think it would be impossible to recap every part of the Venetian Secret Service’s fights to get their mirror makers back so I will give you, dear reader, two of the most unserious highlights. Highlight one: Venice planted several Italian and French courtiers near the St Gobain glass making factory who convinced La Motta over six months that his apprentices and rivals were getting paid more than him, then supplied him with a gun, leading to a gunfight between La Motta and his apprentices in the factory, which broke every mirror they had created and nearly killed La Motta. Highlight two, and by far the silliest one: many mirrormakers contracted mercury poisoning in the St Gobain workshop and went insane. Several reports were released of mirrormakers spending hours staring confusingly at their own reflections and speaking gibberish. Somehow no one figured out that mercury had anything to do with their madness, and the Parisian court feared that looking in your reflection for too long causes insanity. Cue the hundreds of baroque paintings of mirror madness and general public fears of turning into an actual Narcissus.
Everyone remembers where they were in early 1667. In Paris and Venice alike, news began to ripple around that out of nowhere two mirrormakers died from “maybe natural causes we think maybe.” As far as the assassinating part goes, every source I’ve looked at is pretty divided on whether the mirrormakers were actually assassinated. As I said to my friend after losing a decent chunk of blood, “causation doesn’t always imply correlation.” It is widely agreed that there definitely was foul play afoot, but even if the victims just ate some bad ambergris, the rest of the mirrormakers scrambled back to Venice in fear. The worst part is that Venice’s last ditch
assassinations were in vain; Colbert won, figured out how to make mirrors, and saved France a metric fuck-ton of money. But what makes this ending so unsatisfying is that Colbert never got to see the product of his scheming. He died in 1683, less than a year before the Hall of Mirrors was unveiled and became one of the most famous rooms in French history.
Why does no one know about this? I think our public remembrance of the renaissance, baroque, and rococo period is so eclipsed by all that art and stuff that we forget the darker parts. Colbert, apart from committing hair crimes, also committed heinous atrocities and instituted slavery into France’s colonial system. The Venetian Secret Service was iconic but they also blackmailed, threatened, and killed artists in the name of state control. All in all, what we can learn from the great 1667 mirror making scandal is maybe you should probably not kidnap artists or have gun fights in rooms full of highly valuable glass.
In a pretty grim world, looking back at these silly, forgotten histories reminds us of our own insignificance. Human history is so encompassing and dense that everything we do, no matter how important we think it is, is just a spec of sand in the end. Smuggle state secrets, contract mercury poisoning, start a gunfight, make art, get killed: but whatever you do, do not ever, ever trust a guy with a shag mullet.
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,
Joseph John Kagsawa
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.
Absurd Truth
Anger Delirium
Vtu[yov (←)
Me (I)
Alchemy
God
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
Greyness
Much of architectural criticism and history draws on the exemplars of architecture. Narratives are constructed by comparing and contrasting the Le Corbusiers, Koolhaus’ and Hadids. Those who have defined the image of Architecture through each age. However, this approach to capital “A” Architecture excludes that everyday architecture, the realistic, mundane, and vulgar architecture that you encounter everyday as you walk the city. This kind of architecture is difficult to historicise and analyse through the interplay of specific figures and the influence of specific buildings. Realistic architecture does not occur in this manner, it arises around us from much less grand arrangements between developers, individuals, banks, engineers, and construction companies. In this piece I aim to explore a hunch, a phenomenon that I have noticed occurring around me as I walk the streets of my city. I want to talk about what I would call Greyness.
Greyness is a pervasive phenomenon in contemporary Sydney buildings. I’m sure you have noticed it too. The monolithic towers in Green Square and Alexandria, suburban developments on the edge of the city in Bella Vista and Norwest, or a new complying development in Willoughby or Chatswood. Greyness is everywhere. Greyness is both vernacular and pedigreed. While there are many material and economic reasons for the greyness, this phenomenon calls for a deeper exploration into the lack of spirit and life that the grey represents.
By greyness I do not just mean the colour, but a total desaturation phenomenon. Here I am focusing on
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 arrangements that jut and cut into the space around them. I think here it is important to comment on the minimalism of the modern period, how few of these buildings are intellectually beautiful but this is to do with specific and precise balancing of elements, forms, and culture. The greyness is a degraded version of this.
The world, the real parts that we interact with are simplifying, emptying out of detail.
The grey is sleek, slickening the space it adorns. The facades of buildings are undoubtedly the “walls” of outside space and the grey lubricates the outdoors, smoothens it for you to move through it and not linger. The grey subject is one that never rests outdoors. The “greygime” is one of anti-sociality, it wishes to make the outside devoid of life. This is another kind of hostile architecture that now seeks to not just push the disadvantaged out of the city but also normal city dwellers as well. Where does it seek to push them? By making the outside a non-space, we are forced into the interior of our grey boxes. While our exteriors are monochrome, our interiors, our digital worlds are psychedelically vibrant and full of colour. Content is rich and vibrant to draw your gaze, grab your attention, and keep you focused into the world of advertising and consumption.
On City Road, the bus stops have recently been replaced by the greyness. These new bus stops perfectly exemplify this desaturation of outer space for the saturation of abstract space. The bus stops are severe simple steel structures with anti homeless sectioned benches.
Simon Harris
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 blend together into one grey middle; true luxury in this city is the heritage homes, the classy, vibrant, rich, beautiful ones where nothing new can be built.
Grey as decay, tooth and hair. Why are we adorning so many surfaces with this degree of neutrality, a degree of temporariness, stillborn buildings that are born aged so that they may avoid looking so.
Grey is cheap, grey is temporary. The buildings of Greyness are a kind of totally rationalised architecture, informed more by the price of building systems available to subcontractors than any sense of aesthetic beauty. Most new homes are built by developers for the open market. Greyness is the commodification of buildings into sellable assets that are designed not for anything but the maximisation of profit from land. Grey is a concealer, cheap bricks poorly laid with shitty mortar work, timber frames that are barely held together. Watching the YouTube channel Site Inspections gives a small glimpse into the Australian building industry, walking you through many buildings that epitomise the Greyness, pointing out parts of construction that do not comply with the National Construction Code. It seems from watching these videos (obviously, they are a small
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.
Today it seems that people are uncertain of what they truly desire for a home or building. People might choose grey for its ability to hide grime and wear, or for its “modern” look. Both of these reasons seem to be abstract ideas from the world of images rather than the real. Necessarily, all finishes age and wear through time. The nature of ageing is how a material becomes saturated by water, and ground away by wind. Every shade of grey can become a deeper, more aged colour. I ask my parents why they think people pick the grey: they say it is just a trend, a passing fad. I think there is something deeper here in how people choose finishes and materials based on the images they see in home design magazines, or on social media. The act of picking based on an image, how you identify with what is necessarily abstract and disconnected from the true feeling and experience of space, inevitably leads to this streamlining of the home as a product. Greyness is inexpensive, and developers are a cynical breed who aim to maximise profit above all else. Building is part of humanity’s essence, but to build well is a process that contradicts the desires of capital, which are for profit and speed. The greyness produces artificial spaces, spaces conceived through image and sold through image. They have nothing to do with the reality of building and that is possibly why they always end up feeling so temporary, cheap, and ultimately lacking any soul.
Many public spaces that have resulted from the greyness lack life because they are predetermined spaces. Shopping centres are grey boxes that repel from the outside, and only serve desire on the inside. In a Westfield, nothing outside of consumption can occur. Any other activities are policed and monitored. In a sense, the space is already full of activity, so self referential in its program and intended activity. Or we consider the contemporary plazas of Green Square and the Chatswood concourse; these are overexposed greyscapes. Spaces that pay lip service to public space while constructing their own publics through hard, lubricated, uncomfortable surfaces and antihomeless fittings. Real Life requires the possibility of a chance encounter with the other, a shady tree, a comfortable park bench, a public colonnade. In these overexposed greyscapes, the other is forced out, forced into the shadows on the edge. In terms of housing, the hyperindividualised way we treat property means that no-one feels any obligation to contribute to the street as a public space.
This leads me to wonder if the Greyness is ripe for Détournement, that situationist method originally for the rerouting of capitalist culture into expressions of a superior radical one. The notion here is that dominant culture contains the conditions for its own negation. It is certainly true that for most buildings, the materials remain the same: wood, concrete, brick, tile, plaster, insulation etc. In terms of the lifelessness of the grey — and I do mean lifelessness in its most harsh insinuation — this is a result of the total system that produces it. Christopher Alexander describes System A and System B as opposing forces in his book Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth. System A is the method for creating life affirming architecture, architecture that is slowly developed and built according to the needs of the user in a way that results in an organic unfolding of space that is in accordance with
feeling. System B may pay lip service to the user, but is more concerned with quantitative means of design, building systems, profits, and abstractions that have little to do with the real. This is what is most concerning about the greyness, its poverty of life. Just as how many of the world’s agricultural centres face degraded substrates for growing crops, the greyness is leaving our cities impoverished with little space for life to grow. Beautiful buildings do truly grow, they unfold over time as they emerge, with modifications by the builder as she makes. It is not the materials that are at fault but our bankrupt process that is shaping space.
This is not an attack on the colour grey, only the extent to which grey is a poor choice for a house/building in general. Rather, I am trying to interrogate this unrelenting sameness that is imposing itself on my city. As housing prices skyrocket and the only homes that are built are luxury grey ones, there seems to be a poetic connection between the two. Hegel wrote in a preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized…” Here grey in grey refers to grey as the tonality of the conceptual, the abstract, and the unreal. Greyness for me is this abstraction of the real world, the outside world, into a space that is fundamentally unalive. Grey is the street becoming a space only for movement and transportation, not a place where romance and life can occur. This is not about the colour grey but the fact that grey represents cheap, temporary buildings that are harming the environment for shortsighted gains. This is not about the colour grey but the fact that I know not everyone wants to live in a grey lifeless city, and greyness is eliminating the space where the life I want to build can take place.
Simon Harris
Luca Leggo
she has told me to eat
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
* I find pleasure just looking into 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
* 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 brown eyes
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 * no love in this language I write to upset to absolve your mother’s
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.
Jayden Nguyen
‘a
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
Ian Buchanan
Hannah Lawrence
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.
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.
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 collection consisted of a series of neo-soft toys brought to life in the form of trousers, jackets, shirts and various accessories. Models wore plush headwear and each carried a soft toy while walking, which either characterised or complimented the looks. In an ode to Comme and the reification of the absent body, asymmetrical pockets and extended sleeves were prominent in many of the garments. Both the enigmatic symbols such as circles, squares, swirls and polka dots were puffed up and found in many of the accessories and constant references to animalistic forms seen in headdress, bags, scarves, ties and other pieces spoke to the fundamentally folkish quality that imagination contains. “The headpieces” as Ben recounted, “naturally formed themselves out of me.”
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 of fashion and fashion spectacle seen from the current ilk of ironic and ‘silly’ fashion designers yearning for a childhood lost in the fruitless endeavour of reality. I spent my childhood outside of the reality which appeared dull to me, too codified, too transparent, this too is what BEAST also achieves. Ben’s collection plays with menswear not to expose some collective false consciousness within the fashion world obsessed with archetypes and its own history of garments, but simply shows garments as if they were born from some. His approach, which could either be the figure of bricoleur or saboteur, seeks out the imaginative traces hidden in everyday dressing.
https://theamericanflagswebsite.
Ben Shelley
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.
At its core, the discussion is one of genre. Musical ancestry provides neat frameworks for things such as goth, which developed subgenres after its British birth in the ‘70s. Likewise, metal and its categories have diversified considerably since the late ‘60s. At the expense of its preservation, emo lacks the same modern understanding. Offshoot bands like Hawthorne Heights are deemed too pop-punk, while Death Cab for Cutie is decidedly too indie. Those who claim otherwise may be sentenced to online responses like this isn’t emo lol and pinkerton is literally indie rock [crying face emoji], among other expert opinions. The argument must be ceded in part; I Write Sins Not Tragedies bears little resemblance to self-pitying guitar riffs propagated by Rites of Spring. But just as early rock has aged into its modern counterpart
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.
I myself am not sure where the line is drawn. Nevertheless, if we assume emos’ unanimity on which artists represent the scene, we may move onto an in-group pastime: criticising the lowest of the low (i.e. “posers”). Lyrical angst and proximity to mental health taboos facilitated emo circles a couple of decades ago. Today, winged eyeliner and black double grommet belts seem enough to constitute belonging, with “goth” and “punk” being thrown around in place of “emo”.
As we walked past an Emo Night at the Burdekin, my millennial uncle suggested that the alternative is ‘mostly a fancy dress theme now’. If there is no denying that current trends transformed pre-existing niches into a less nuanced #aesthetic, we should instead ask ourselves why we’re upset.
A new internet is merely a catalyst for norms that started in the 2000s. Twentyodd years ago, posers were the laughing stock of MySpace; mislabelling and stylistic appropriation are not recent things. However, there is a positive correlation between the dissemination of subcultures and the density of people who misidentify with them; the revival of cultural icons like Fall Out
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 back My Chemical Romance, Johnnie Guilbert of My Digital Escape on Youtube, and countless fifth-wave emo musicians. If casual enjoyers can only bolster a market catering to “real” emos, is it worth being bothered by them at all?
Ultimately, it’s about contradiction. Once a culture founded by the alienated and misunderstood is shared with mainstream audiences — “preps”, if you will — it is a jarring shift. When the senior yearbook editor defaced my rawr XD by attaching a period to its final letter, part of me was relieved that the phrase was still relatively unknown. Regardless, it seems an obvious blessing to have resuscitated the emo scene without giving a stronger pulse to society’s contempt for anyone requiring antidepressants or a therapist. Whether the subculture is rendered obsolete by outsiders’ acceptance of it is irrelevant to me. Like other Gen-Z teens, my own immersion began with introductory media — the same media condemned by a more weathered alternative coterie. My stance remains the same: in spite of an individuality complex, I will continue to thank posers for saving emo as it flatlined.
Lola Herath
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.
Authenticity and the notion of true authentic foodways.
The Oxford Dictionary defines authenticity as the property of being genuine, true to origin, legitimate, or consistent with the person or object’s history and typicality. In this semantic sense, discourse on authentic food exclusively entails whether its ingredients are legitimate. Think the horsemeat scandal of 2013 — an authentic beef sandwich is one that contains beef that is really beef and bread that is really bread.
Of course, what people really mean is whether the food they are consuming is accurate to what they would expect to find in its country of origin. As a concept, food authenticity has multiple
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 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 rolls on a butter wheel across the bread of our culinary experiences.
So what is authenticity? Is your favourite food authentic? Does your favourite restaurant serve authentic food? Could you be authentic food? Why are Australians so obsessed?
Perhaps the cultural arena of modern consumption most occupied with authenticity is food. Australian food adventurers have made it their mission to identify which random combination of characteristics signifies authenticity. Everyone seems to have an intrinsic sense of it, often based on nothing more than “just the vibes.” Take a Chinese restaurant for example, one may expect certain senses to be activated: sights of time-worn menus, smells of fragrant beef sizzles, and feels for a dingy interior. What were once defects have become validating markers of good, real Chinese food.
For some, finding the most authentic versions of the most popular dishes of a culture is the goal. Their search begins and ends at dishes that are synonymous with a country — like sushi for Japan and tacos for Mexico. Others go off course. They challenge themselves to avoid these dishes, instead deriding them as the normie order in search of more niche fares. Saying your favourite Chinese dish is pork tang yuan signifies to the masses that you’ve been through
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 designed to capture Thai cuisine in a digestible, easily-exportable way… and it worked! Considering how few Thai people regularly consume Pad Thai in the homeland, authenticity with a basis in traditional roots has been, and will be, undermined by ancillary forces.
The latter archetype treats ethnic food as a fun experience akin to an escape room. For a temporary fling, foodies can satisfy their cravings of otherness, where “ethnicity becomes spice” that “liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white society”, as bell hooks put it. Not to imply trying new cultural foods should be discouraged of course; the issue is itself in the search. Authenticity attempts to create a safe space for those who wish to access a cuisine in its ‘truest and realest’ form, for those whose palates are already safest.
In such culinary crises, perhaps you could turn to official bodies and their attempts at regulating formal, undisputable authenticity. The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN) enforces a system to defend the Naples-style pizza. Armed with clicky pens tucked in their apron pocket, the association’s representatives visit pizzerias worldwide to verify if they follow the correct Neapolitan process. A pizza should have a diameter less
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.
In the slow deterioration of the White Australian Policy, food service was a necessary path for many immigrants in search of economic freedom. As more recipes expatriated, onshore consumers developed a fascination for the entwinement of exotic food and exotic cultures. A dish is regarded as most authentic when the connection between food and people — product and producer — are most tangible. In particular, the owner’s presence at the restaurant, or lack thereof, is sought out by diners to convey a sense of homemadeness and a personal attachment to the food served.
The authentic package even includes other employees and the kitchen, who themselves bear cultural meaning on the basis of their race and ethnicity. The expectation that the dish and the chef should be of similar origins is strongly held yet unevenly applied. Palisa Anderson of the Chat Thai dynasty has a Ratatouille-esque ‘a great artist can come from anywhere’ stance: “one doesn’t have to be of Thai origin to master Thai cooking” but she concedes
that “being Thai is an advantage.”
This nature vs. nurture debate is thwarted by systems of oppression that ultimately platforms white experts. Seeing a white chef making your Pad Kee Mao at the local bistro might be disconcerting, but what about at Long Chim in the CBD where the Pad Thais are $36? The owner, David Thompson, the most prolific and recognisable authority figure of Thai cuisine in Australia, is a white man. Thompson’s expertise in Thai cuisine is impressive (it better be for $36) but local Thai chefs are seldom given the same opportunities for notoriety. While foreign food is legitimised by foreign cooks, foreign food is “elevated” by white cooks who know how to play the authenticity game.
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 restaurant is frequented by South Asian regulars, that’s when you know it’s really authentic. No longer is ‘where are you really from’ appropriate to ask, but ‘where do you really eat’ is fine and worthy of investigation. The ethnic customer’s supposed knowledge is intrinsic and infinite, but still accessible from outside observations.
We expect the dining experience to be enough of a slice of life of the respective culinary destination, but not too much that we as diners feel foreign.
Such a mindset panini-presses the vast heterogeneity of immigrant-run restaurants, relegating thousands of unique eateries under one outdated stereotype.
Behind the square and stainless-steel veil of the garde manger, a subliminal marker of authenticity is found within the tools and methods involved in the creation of food. When we are questioning authenticity, we might
ask if our food has been prepared the same way as it has been traditionally or typically in the region the dish is from. Sometimes, we can taste it — a lo mein prepared in a sauteuse might lack wokhei; other times we can feel it, the beef in the same lo mein may not be velveted but might still be tender and fatty.
Authentic preparation methods and tools are mystified by gastronomic hegemony. Chefs and cooks who can prepare food with non-Western methods and crockery are seen as masters of some kind of foreign culinary art. In
the back of house, the time-weathed chef who doesn’t speak any English, smokes a cigarette with no hands and with foreign tools serves me something with flavours and textures I could not imagine making myself in the way that they do.
Perhaps he velvets his meat with a starch and soda — ingredients I can only intuitively bake with — or maybe he grills my dish in great nướng claws. However, this kind of preparation rarely defines the dish. What if I had prepared a Lo Mein with the traditional egg noodles, prepared beef of the traditional typical cut and variety, and vegetables of the appropriate flavour. I have seasoned
Hugo Hay and Long Huynh
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?
Equally a symptom of orientalism as much as professional admiration, authenticity demands this mystique for the othering of the kitchen space. Authentic food demands the kitchen be othered in two ways: once as a place of work and another as a cultural mine for our stomachs to extract from.
These cultural mines are of no shortage in Sydney. Pockets of the city have become synonymous with certain cuisines. Chinese in Haymarket; Korean in Strathfield; Indian in Harris Park; McDonalds in Macdonaldtown. Drawing gastro-boundaries for easy mental and intestinal digestion allow Australians to benefit from enjoying the flavours of exotic, while prohibiting it from mixing with, and tainting, white Australia.
These communities, despite accessibility, are rarely engaged with genuinely by other Sydneysiders, especially those in Char-Grill-Charlie’s side of the redrooster line (the gap between the two Sydneys is an age-old tale, only partially unpacked here).
The engagement they do receive is warmed and potentially well-intended but ultimately fetishising. The stock from the grocer may spill onto the street, their patrons might speak a language you wouldn’t expect to hear next door, but this isn’t any different from travelling through the CBD. Though there is extra work going on here, the enclave is still viewed as a slice of country rather than an adjacent community. The enclave remains a place to experience the culture, cuisine and life of somewhere else without having to go, rather than our neighbours worthy of the respect given to English-speaking ones.
No suburb is more emblematic of this phenomenon than Cabramatta. Here, the smell of fermentation and cigarette smoke float through the halls of the many arcades and plazas; some with developer-Orientalism chic complete with red hip-and-gable roofs, others with more Arial Bold signs than a community notice board, plastered on top of flemish brick. The sounds of grandma trolley wheels and a cocktail of K- and V-pop tunes permeate the air as laboriously handmade staples like nước chấm sit in jars at takeout windows ready to be sold. Northern, central, and southern Viet cuisines sit alongside one another beside the ornate Pai Lau designating the central business district. It’s clear why the suburb is revered for its authentic Viet-ness.
After the Vietnam War, refugees and migrants settled into Cabramatta, Cabramatta West, and Fairfield in Sydney and Richmond, Abbotsford, and Footscray in Melbourne. As they turned to food service, the Vietnamese flavour palate became more accessible and eventually, popular among non-Viet Australians. Bánh mì (initially called pork rolls), vermicelli salads, and Phở became staples for working people and students at lunchtime, eventually expanding into the city and the innercity. This proliferation normalised Viet cuisine as a part of daily options for Australians but left it ripe for hypercommercialisation.
By the early 2000s, city suits and career restaurateurs seized the cuisine. Branded as both ground-breaking yet nostalgic, capitalists leaned into stereotypical wartime aesthetics and sold-off Viet classics to the mass public. Roll’d rebranded rice paper rolls as Soldier Rolls™ and industrialised the Bánh Mì as pre-made, pastry-boxed catering slices. Neither are made with the same care or quality as family-run bakeries. Jaded, foodies yearned for richer, crafted flavours of first wave Viet-Australian
cuisine and in their search, returned to the old town of Cabra.
Now heralded as the Viet-enjoyer’s must-do day trip, it’s easy to assume this is where true authenticity still thrives — but there are caveats.
At Dong Hoa, a quaint Viet eatery near the end of John Street, chef Lan busies herself frying the perfect Bánh Xèo Donning a baseball cap over her hair net (just like my aunties in Vietnam), she takes a moment away from the wok to chronicle her culinary history. She first learnt how to cook in Vietnam but underwent retraining after migrating, “wherever I go, I adapt.” Gesturing towards the wall decked out in prints of menu items, she elaborates: “how I make it in Vietnam is different to how I make it here, but it’s all still very Vietnamese.“
Back in Vietnam, restaurants similarly don’t maintain such reverence for authenticity. Often, deliberate attempts are made at innovating recipes from the too-familiar, too-authentic casual bistros that abound the streets. “We want to explore what to add and subtract to traditional recipes to make it our own,” says Thanh, co-owner of Shamballa, a vegetarian restaurant in the heart of Saigon. Sitting beneath a massive exposed brick wall, he explains their aim to meld “imported Western flavours” with Viet classics to bridge a culinary distance: “if we recycle the same recipes, the world will never discover new flavours.”
The search for authenticity demands that dishes are replicated exactly as they were in the motherland at a fixed point in time. Yet, restaurants — both here and there — are constantly evolving, some taking on influences from neighbours, others even developing flavour profiles to appeal to Western tourists (many of whom are Australian!).
The reality is that authenticity is fluid, continuously assessed and reassessed as
history, location, and behaviours shift. As food scholar Panikos Panayi writes, “people are misguided to think there is a single authentic version of anything.”
The current system of authenticity is at best, ill-conceived, and at worse, oppressive. So how should we conceive of it instead?
It’s not radical to suggest getting rid of the pursuit entirely. Deeper appreciation of the food we consume can only be possible by assessing it on other qualities. One of which can still be how accurately replicated it is to a certain place and time. But imposing that as a standard no longer serves us any use, other than lending some cultural capital to your friend who boasts their $1 baklava in Fairfield.
Some think it’s too late, the Pavlovian response Australians have on our palates and wallets is too ingrained in gastronomic culture. The same culture that attempts to highlight cultures and cuisines of people outside of the Australian hegemony, but it can only ever serve those within the hegemony. The markers of authenticity are only ever in effort to capture the tastes and textures that define someone else’s food; never the experiences, practices and customs of how it is eaten. As a diner, you only need to worry about respecting someone with your wallet rather than with your actions.
Consumers that value authenticity over other, more important indicators of the properties of food, are engaging in virtue signalling. If it’s true that I am what I eat and I choose to eat authentically — I am trying to demonstrate that I am a respectful and worldly individual and that I care deeply for the community that I am engaging with culinarily. I wish to deny the same cuisine with dishes that may have been modified for an Australian palate and instead demand food cooked in their image, perhaps to
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 looking to find identity in a new home. Yet, the current model of authenticity is not conducive for this. This is an entirely different search altogether. Once the walls of authenticity have fallen, we can rebuild practices to facilitate this longing: food based in community, rather than concepts.
To dismantle these walls, we ought to value the food. The freshness of its ingredients; the complexity of its flavour profile; the way the fat, the skin, and the meat of an hours-braised Hong Shao Rou melt under your teeth and tongue; the way the pungency of mắm tôm interacts with the chewiness of the bún.
We ought to value the restaurant. How it contributes to the surrounding community; if it sponsors a soccer team in the depths of suburbia; if they throw in an entrée for free; or gives away extra food when no one is in.
We ought to value the people behind the food: the creativity and skill of the kitchen hands; the way the chef slips and weaves like a boxer between the flambé and the rangehood; the consistency of your caramelised onions and the cleanliness of your plate — steamed, scrubbed and shining. The way the waiter puts your cutlery down; the attentiveness of the host when you’re grabbing the check; and the way auntie smiles as you leave and as you enter when she remembers your name.
Don’t go hunting for something exactly like somewhere else — you won’t find it. Try to find what’s right in front of you — what’s been brought from someone else’s table to yours.
And say thank you.
Hugo Hay and Long Huynh
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 (تطريز, 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
threads and symbolic motifs. Some designs lean more towards abstract geometric shapes such as chevron or the eight-pointed stars, which was often used for identification of background. Other symbols were pulled from the flora and fauna of the land, such as the cyprus, palm tree, or most popularly, the embroidery of S-shaped leeches given their use to heal the sick in ancient medicine. These traditional patterns often communicate something about the woman wearing them. They reflect various facets of her personal identity — social status, regional identity, marital status, and even economic status.
Tatreez has always been about the land and from the land. Not only does the embroidery hold symbols of nature such as the blossoms plains of Bayt Dajan, but fabric dyes are also derived from natural items such as grape leaves and
pomegranate skins utilised from the land surrounding Jaffa. For instance, red dye is produced from common native plants like madder and insects including kermes and cochineal. Blue dyes come from the commonly found Indigo plant in the Jordan Valley, which was used to produce many nineteenth and early twentieth-century dresses to ward off the evil eye. The use of red, purple, indigo blue, and saffron reflected the ancient color schemes of the Canaanite and Philistine coast. The Islamic green and Byzantine black were later additions to the traditional palette.
Much like the Thobe, other famous Palestinian garments have deep historical roots to the land. The Keffiyeh, a traditional headdress originates from the country’s Bedouin communities and local farmers where they were used as a practical garment
to protect wearers from the harsh desert environment. The garment is woven from lightweight cotton and blanketed in symbolic imagery: fishnet patterns representing the connection between Palestinian sailors and the Mediterranean Sea; bold lines signifying the trade routes that go through Palestine; and intricate leaf patterns mirroring the resilience of the olive tree, which serves as a representation of the Palestinian people’s rich identity, culture, and unwavering spirit.
Palestinian Tatreez and garments have been an important form of resistance and political expression for centuries. In 1948, at the end of the Arab-Israeli war, the withdrawal of British forces resulted in Israel declaring independence and engaging in war with Palestine. This led to the mass displacement of Palestinians, or the Nakba (النكبة)
meaning “catastrophe”, where an estimated 700,000 people fled or were expelled from their homes. With a large segment of the population forcibly displaced from the region, the Nakba dispersed and fragmented the growing fashion sector and every other element of Palestinian society. Hundreds of Palestinian towns were depopulated, and thousands of Palestinians lived in refugee camps. What was once a communal practice that allowed Palestinian women to embroider garments for themselves and others became an abandoned luxury due to constant displacement alongside a lack of time and supplies.
Similarly, much like Tatreez embroidery, the keffiyeh has a long history of being synonymous with Palestinians and their demands for sovereignty. During the British mandate of Palestine, rebels
and revolutionaries often wrapped the keffiyeh around their faces to avoid identification and arrest. Yet, when the British banned the scarf, as a national protest, most Palestinians began wearing it to make the identification of rebels impossible by the authorities. During the 1970s, the keffiyeh gained prominence when Leila Khaled, a revolutionary freedom fighter and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, wore it as a headscarf and encouraged Palestinian women to do the same, fostering a sense of solidarity. It was worn most famously by Yasser Arafat (former President of the Palestinian National Authority) when he addressed the UN General Assembly. Continued importance was gained during the Intifada in 1987 and again during the Second Intifada in 2000 when people in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco,
Ramla Khalid
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.
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.
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
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?).
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.
“ 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
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
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.
Sonal Kamble
Lizzy Kwok
Huw Bradshaw
Justine Hu
Lameah Nayeem
Kate Saap
Simon Harris
Absent:
Contributors
Lola Herath
Kuyili Karthik Nicholas Osiowy
Ramla Khalid
Jayden Nguyen
Estelle Yoon
Joseph John Kagsawa
Emily O’Brien, Franki Bonanno, Ben Shelley, Fran Williams, Luca Leggo
Long Huynh Hugo Hay China Meldrum
Mihir Sardana
Tom Martin
Susanna Pang
Lucien Noël
Hannah Lawrence
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
