PULP: ISSUE 15 2024 by PULP magazine

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.

Editors

Design

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.

Issue 15, 2024

Senior Editor

Kate Saap

Huw Bradshaw

Simon Harris

Justine Hu

Sonal Kamble

Lizzy Kwok

Lameah Nayeem

Simon Harris

Justine Hu

Presidential Foreword

Hi everyone,

It is surreal to think that Issue 15 will be the last under the leadership of the current editorial team. I wanted to firstly congratulate Alex and Kate and the entire PULP team, Huw, Justine, Lameah, Simon, Lizzy, and Sonal for their outstanding efforts over the last year. PULP is at the heart of showcasing and celebrating student creativity and it would not be possible without the team putting heart and soul behind each edition.

The USU has seen a number of internal changes that will inevitably impact how our members get to experience campus, this includes appointing our Interim CEO, Michael Bromley in April who will work with the team to refresh our strategic plan.

We also had our Festival of Creativity earlier in April with various programs and activities, music and art for our members to participate in. It is a wonderful initiative in recognition of our rich and diverse student culture. The opening of the Disability Community Room in Manning House is also a welcome sign for many in our community who need an accessible autonomous space.

The Board has been working to actualise some of our hopes in alleviating cost of living concerns by working closely with management and our counterparts at the University to reduce food prices, have more accessible resources and advocacy for causes like Fair Fares.

As my term as President comes to an end, I am incredibly proud of all that the USU has been able to achieve in the years that I have been a director. The USU is a unique organisation, and the experiences that it provides to its members is unlike any other. It has been the privilege of my life to be a very small part of it.

Thank you all for continually engaging so enthusiastically with the USU. Take care of yourselves!

With love, Naz

Senior Editor’s Note

PULP Magazine has flown off stands this year, all because of you; our readers, our comrades, our spreaders of misinformation.

ISSUE 15 is a culmination of all our efforts over the past year. We have grown into our new space in the Wentworth building, and I have lost many games of pool.

Thank you to Alexandra Frost, PULP Coordinator extraordinaire, for helping the ambitious vision of some uni students come to life. Thank you to Robyn Matthews, Christopher Lowndes, Jane Coles, Jess Reed, and the rest of the Marketing, Publications, and Operations teams at the USU. Thank you to my friends and family for being the perfect sounding board for my shitty ideas (and your honesty). Thank you to our contributors, I know pitching is scary and you have been so brave to give it a go; the magazine wouldn’t be anything without your words.

PULP Magazine has worked with SEED Print Group over the past year to get the magazine into your hands. Not without the help of Spicers for supplying the paper of pages you flick through. It has been a pleasure, they are amazing.

To Lizzy, Huw, Simon, Justine, Lameah, and Sonal, after only one year working together I am indebted to you for life.

Keep reading, think critically, pussyfoot around.

Please make my cookies from ISSUE 10.

Love forever, Kate <3

We designated a little space to talk about PULP, its past, and its future later in the mag, so I’ll keep this short and sweet. If you’re actually reading this editorial, thank you. Each edition I spend a little too long perfecting them and always forget that it gets lobbed in with the preamble and often skipped over. Anyway, I’ll just say a few quick thank you’s to the people that made it possible and made it great. Then I’ll be on my way.

Cheers Alex, for always having our back and making everything possible. Massive thanks to Barnes, Cameron, Tom, and everyone else from the warehouse. Thanks to Jona, to Charlie, to Isla, to Marlow, to Ty. Thanks to everyone in the USU who fought like hell to make PULP happen. Thanks to our predecessors, who taught us everything we know, and to our successors, who we hope to meet soon. Thanks to Otogo and Tony Leung. Thanks to SURG and Verge, to Honi and Vertigo, to Bonnie and Rhea, to Simon and Garfunkel. Thanks to all the first years who were brave enough to send their work in, and to all the PULP vets who we find when we reveal names in the pitch spreadsheet time and time again.

As we contemplate our team’s end, I can’t help but think of our beginning. We would be nothing without everyone who believed in us from the start, everyone who came to our very first launch event, and everyone who’s stuck with us until now. If you’ve been dutifully collecting PULP issues for your bookshelves since Issue 1, or picked up your first copy yesterday, your ongoing support has meant the world to us. We hope we’ve been able to give you something to cherish, whether it be an artwork that still floats behind your eyes long after you’ve finished reading, or a line of a poem that you refuse to forget.

Goodbyes come in many forms, but for you, dear readers, here’s this: we love you.

Pulp Issue 15

The Quiz

1: In medicine, what does the acronym BBL stand for?

2: In Australian sports, what does the acronym BBL stand for?

3: What are the five boroughs of New York City?

4: Which Shakespeare play opens with “a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning”?

5: What astronomical body is known colloquially as a ‘shooting star?’

6: The first James Bond film, Dr No, takes place on which Caribbean island?

7: Who was John Howard’s predecessor as Prime Minister of Australia?

8: What is the only national flag to feature a firearm?

9: The English word ‘Lesbian’ derives from which Greek island?

10: The Velvet Underground’s debut studio album was made in collaboration with which other musician?

11: What Russian city was formerly named Leningrad?

12: Rappers Big Boi and André 3000 make up which hip-hop duo?

13: Which British scientist and author coined the term ‘meme’?

14: In The Lord of the Rings, Moria is a location built by which race of people?

15: In video games, the term Souls-like derives from which game?

16: Casino Royale (2006) villain Le Chiffre is scarred on which part of his body?

17: In The Wizard Of Oz, what does ‘Hunk’ the Scarecrow seek?

18: Hawkeye and Trapper are characters from which television series?

19: What prevents ‘This Charming Man’ from going ‘out tonight’?

20: 90’s Dub hit ‘Dub Be Good to Me’ samples both The Clash and the soundtrack of which 1968 Western?

As my time as editor comes to a close, I want to present with this photo review some prose.

I am reflecting now on the statement that accompanied the original photo review. In curating your photography I was searching for a way to quantify a hunch that the prevalence of phone cameras is conditioning us to photograph a certain way. I think it has been this way for a while.

In my thinking about photography, an idea I am trying to understand is this way in which our collective unconscious photo process seems to congeal into something that is discernible. Not on the locus of subject, or a style, or a “look” but rather the collective mood that we create. If analog photography is characterised by an inherent instability owing to its complicated and fragile chemical process, what is so unique about phone photography is its seamlessness; its automatism, the way picture taking has honed in on everyday marvellousness.

In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that, “What makes the first photographs so incomparable is perhaps this: that they present the earliest image of the encounter of machine and man.”1 I think here we see how this encounter has recursively intensified as images have become so profane that we ourselves come to embody camera-sight, snapping up the world into bite sized compositions.

In opposition to style, I am interested in mood. If style is particular to form, mood is more general and universal. I’m not sure if the mood of photo review has a name, but in between the crunchy pixelation and peculiar-yet-everyday subjects something arises for me when I sit down to curate from the submissions.

It has been a privilege to look at your pictures, an insight into your camera rolls, your lives.

Love, S

1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1982 p. 678

Photo

Thank you to:

George Em Charlotte

Soleil

Lucius KC Izzy Bowen

Alyssa

Photo

Photo Review

Photo

And What unholy flower Blooms in the shadow Of heaven?

Unseen by no face of God

Or by any unknown mortal audience, As I arch my back And watch how shapely My shadow has become, As I shave my face And cherish the sacred Image of my new reflection, As I wear my dress

And feel the murderous gaze of Pilgrim, pedestrian, and panopticon, As my body crosses the intersection But my spirit watches me From the window, As all things around me

Wither with the ghostly glow Of streetlights and windshields, As I look above and find Stealth bombers circling The rocking cradle, As I look below and find Sinless beggars circling The shining city on the hill, As I look ahead and find A world made according to an image So blank and pitiless as the screen, As I behold the spectral fluorescence Of every single breathing thing

Entering and departing each other, As my feet forgets the earth And my soul becomes one With the symmetry of the universe, And with all the strength This ancient body can gather, I weep and whisper:

“I will not confine this world As it has confined me. I would sooner suffer A thousand centuries Than enter oblivion In this coffin of skin.”

And What unholy flower Blooms in the shadow Of heaven?

Bring your lovely hands here And tear me limb from limb, And find that no flower remains a flower When it has left your garden. I look all around me

And find my petals

Disfiguring and distorting, Wilting yet becoming anew: Becoming flesh, fish, and fowl, Plastic bags, price tags, and power lines, Cookie wrappers, catalytic converters, and cups of tea, Debris and detritus, junkyards and wastelands, High rises, skyscrapers, Babelian towers, Aged care homes, zoos, maximum security prisons, Styrofoam and shopping centres, stupas and stelae, Psych wards, monasteries, public toilets, Coins, credit cards, Opal cards, banknotes, bible verses, Braille and binary, alphabets and algorithms, Reels, shorts, online friends and crucifixions, Every line of code, every single pixel, Each mote of dust and microplastic. We are merely flowers Sprouting from the remains Of roadkill.

And What unholy flower Blooms in the shadow

Of heaven?

Even as all the world’s Pilgrims carve their shape Upon the naked body Of this grassless earth, Even as every hand Is clasped in prayer, Even as every church Is built in my memory, I will not wait for eternity, I will not stop for death. I command the universe: No hour shall be forgotten And no sinner shall weep, I have found freedom And freedom Has found Me.

Harriet Hosmer, Beatrice Cenci

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting

Joseph John Kagsawa

Luke Brown is a mixed-media artist. He currently works in the film industry as a mould-maker at a Marrickville creature effects studio. In the time he can get away from the job, he works primarily with ink, gouache and linocut. Often in his art, he also incorporates felt marker, correction fluid, and other materials that draw on salad days of tagging school walls and maths textbooks. Luke employs a practice of subconscious composition, aiming to create pieces without planning or sketch work.

When he’s not painting, drawing, and printing, you can find him lounging on a vinyl lawn chair, enjoying a Coopers Green while getting his tan on.

Luke Brown

Centaur murderer

Luke Brown

Poach Egg

Throwing petals off the balcony

As I go round and round

I like to see them whip through the breeze

Trace the pictures they draw

And it gives me something to divine meaning from

Or imbue meaning into

Tell me your pretty name so I might write you a portrait

And it’ll keep me sweet and dizzy and young

Til the new moon comes blankly swinging

And I’ll twirl round and round til my mouth is full

Cos movement draws the eye draws us closer

Peeling petals apart

Big gulps so I’m clean and eager over again

Until you’re good and happy

Play a song so I might dance to it

Play a game so I might forfeit

Here’s another funny story I say

I say here’s another joke

And peals of laughter curl round my shoulders

Harden on my cheeks

Wet my stomach

My name tickles the dark of your mouth

It swims in my ears through the honey-night

Oh, let me be the dummy

And I’ll teach you how to smoke

Show you all the bits you wanna see

Draw a bath of candle wax so we might play in it

Grow old and stiff and gentle

Play guitar so I might sing

Just play something

Funny faces in the black sky

I’m a carcass of fire

I wanna course through you like a virus

So you’ll want another turn again and again

And I’m feverish waiting

Sewing petals into picture frames

I’m fucking pulling out my hair

But you can’t touch me

Cos I’m in love.

Hating (critical thinking) is essential to culture.

A perfect Sunday consists of scrolling through various social media feeds and rattling the bars of the iron cage when shown content that is tone deaf, wildly incorrect, or needs to be erased off the face of the earth with the creator censured for life. We were more charitable in the early days; we just kept scrolling, or, at most, checked the comments to see if people agreed that the post was stupid. A voice echoed in the back of the mind: If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

It would be a disservice to the internet if we continued to allow mediocrity to slide.

Who are we to deny ourselves the pleasure of helping someone reflect on their digital footprint? We are slaves to the algorithm; as much as we keep hitting uninterested, Big Tech knows we have masochistic tendencies.

We are not condoning hate speech, cancelling, or the like. We are arguing the case for you to spend at least five more seconds thinking about the posts the algorithm is showing you in a world where we overproduce and overconsume content.

Pre-Twitter, those interested in arts and culture relied on critics in large publications to tell them what was valuable to go and experience. People would check the Sydney Morning Herald every Thursday to know which movies were worth going to the cinema for. Yesterday, someone most likely pirated Her (2013) because an anonymous cuck on Letterboxd gave it five stars and they thought their one-sentence review was clever. Taste has always been arbitrary, but critics have always been the arbitrators.

“Ours is not an age of intellectual self-confidence, and among the intellect’s modern functions, the criticism of culture is scarcely regarded as one of its most indispensable.” — Giles Gunn, Irregular Metaphysics and the Criticism of Culture (1987).

The public needs criticism. In The Function of Criticism (1984), Terry Eagleton laments that the critic is a repairer of the ‘public sphere’. The critic’s role is to observe and aid the public in understanding and engaging with culture more effectively; they are a disseminator of abstract information, and we trust them to tell us honestly what is worth our money-time-energy. As Bruno Latour points out in An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto” (2010), criticism has done “a wonderful job of debunking prejudices, enlightening nations, and prodding minds”. Seeds planted by critics foster discourse over coffee, the lens which we should view The Sopranos with, or why Andrew Scott’s Hamlet is perfect.

Criticism falls short in the digitalage because our reality has become delusion. We have lost the tangibility of culture because it moved into our pockets. We watch whatever we want, see any painting we want, listen to whatever music we’d like at the very instant we desire. There is an apparent inaccessibility of journalism, even with

kate and justine

the world at our fingertips. The most valuable critique is behind a paywall, and users would rather not oblige. It would be remiss to disregard the importance of our more egalitarian information services, however we do not want to sign up for your mediocre fortnightly Substack newsletter to read lukewarm-takes: just send us a voice note instead. The form of mid-20th century poor-takes came as flippant in-conversation comments that blew off with the wind. People who continue this behaviour embed poor-takes on the internet forever. Do not let their stupidity slip through the cracks.

The accessibility and connectedness of online information renders the careful thought of the critic obsolete. An eminent example of the modern critic (or lack thereof) is the Sydney Food Influencer, who articulately describes the food as “so yum” and the restaurant having “great vibes”. The reel is immediately saved and we go to that very restaurant the next day, inevitably disappointed. We have long been aware of Instagrammability but these food reels exemplify the framework of “vibes” that now uphold our generation’s cultural critique. The lexicon of our ‘critics’ has devolved into vague impressions, waiting for the affirmation of a moral ground from which to disagree, forgetting that you can hate something just because.

These vibe-core anti-intellectual hyper-moralised post-critique reelspilled chronically online positions feed into the decline in media literacy and comprehension: case in point, every Twitter thread ever. When everyone in the world has an opinion equally platformed, our ability to discern authoritative, credible voices becomes a difficult task. It is simply our duty to arbitrate taste back into the world. Good criticism involves identifying the why. Looking to understand your subject’s point of view and assessing the efficacy of the statement they are making. In

the polluted sea of misinformation, miscommunication, and missing the point, exercising critical thinking is what enables us to evolve like the fish that flopped onto land and grew legs. The current zeitgeist of anti-intellectualist discourse exemplifies a worrying aversion to critique, shielded by the invincible defence of “let people enjoy things”. When all culture is considered “good” (media, arts, food), the existence of any standard is nullified. If everything is good and nothing is bad, then good means nothing at all. We ought to think critically about the rise of the alpha male/ trad wife dichotomy or why being a ‘26 year old teenage girl’ should get you strange looks.

We’re begging the question now, so why should we be haters?

The hater emerges as the modern critic. Critics anchor cultural and social discussion, whether you agree with them or not. These individuals uphold steadfast moral, aesthetic, and cultural principles, holding creators/institutions accountable for their output in the world. (See select commentary Youtubers, keyboard warriors, and Slavoj Žižek.) When we have all become creators, why shouldn’t we all be critics, too?

As Giles Gunn establishes in Irregular Metaphysics and the Criticism of Culture (1987):

“Cultural criticism is no mere complement or supplement to other, more established disciplines of inquiry, but the foundation for that general revaluation and transvaluation of established values which must go on in every age.”

Criticism is a regenerative cycle, always subject to further critique, in and of itself. In our age of digital connection, social media fosters an apparent sense of community, importing an implicit obligation of concession to the views

that are imposed through content. For Eagleton, the discourse of bourgeois public sphere is formed almost exclusively in relation to the means of exchange, rather than the means of production.

A laissez faire attitude to culture is not one which enables its own understanding and development. As content is forced down your throat by the algorithm, it thinks you agree with whatever you’re being shown. Reclaim your net-agency, do not let Big Tech tell you what to like. Use your right to the comments section as a means to get up on your soapbox. That’s what it’s for!

Engaging in criticism (disseminating ‘hate’) as a means of communicable exchange is what builds our cultural and social depth. The more you hate, the deeper you go.

We rest throughout the week. Stolen pockets of time here and there. Our two-hour lunch break between classes on Tuesday. Our Thursday afternoon runs. Saturday nights with the girls. This time, to us, is sacred, yet we can’t remember the last time we’ve dedicated a full day to rest. We struggle to remember distinct events as they occur, each “thing” passes into the next and becomes an endless gradient of fleeting occurrences.

We ask our siblings, peers, lovers, when was the last time you rested?

What do you mean by that? They say.

We fear we don’t know how to rest anymore. What is rest, anyways?

dreams

rest activity

sacred

Across human cultures and history, time has been experienced and conceptualised in a multitude of ways. However, under the Late Western Empire, time is understood as commodity and currency: we spend time, we waste time, we quantify time in terms of countable units: hours, minutes, and seconds. We speak of time as fact, an unvaried and measurable quantity. With a digital planner, it is possible to pre-ordain one’s entire day. Perhaps more worryingly, is our capacity to “optimise”. The modern clock has quantified our days, encouraging us to do more rather than to rest and to embrace the empty spaces of time. When time becomes mere information — that is, sequential units understood as fact — it loses its naturalistic quality.

When it comes to rest, we distinctly do not mean the time spent recuperating to work later, but something different. Work is not the reason we need to rest, and the two must be kept separate. Rest should be an all encompassing point of closure, a period of tranquillity and quiet where we stop chasing one sensation to the next. Rest occurs in a space where time is ordained. Rest considered in this way proposes an alternative structure of time, one where time is allowed to become untrue, transcendent, and contradictory.

The word rest is derived from the Old English ræst, then raestan of Germanic origin, meaning league or mile, and referring to the distance after which one rests. Rest in this original sense is understood as a state of completion. One travels a period and rests, but this does not presuppose further travel.

In music, rest is defined as a period marked by the absence of sound. Music requires rest, empty time from which new sound can arise. Music without rest is merely noise. John Cage’s 4’33” is a modernist composition that instructs performers to not play their instruments for all three movements of the piece. But 4’33” negates the purpose of rest by making it an activity. In typical modernist vein, Cage makes rest profane. Once again, rest becomes something to do.

Likewise, God, the Christian composer of the universe, required rest for his composition in the book of Genesis. In the beginning, the universe is at rest, there is nothing but a formless void from which the void of Earth arises. For the next six days, God creates. He is dedicated to the creation of the tangible — days, nights, trees, moons, and humans alike. Then, God rests and sanctifies the seventh day. Rest is integral to the creation story; without it, there is no creation. It is precisely rest that brings about the conclusion of all creation.

In the Disappearance of Rituals, Byung Chul Han offers an illuminating critique of our cultural attitude towards rest. When we blur the temporal boundaries between work and rest, we render the sacred as profane:

“God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. It is the essence of the creation. Thus, when we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine.”

The Sabbath too, calls for silence. When the Sabbath is celebrated, German philosopher Franz Rosenzweig says we must rest “from the everyday chit-chat” and learn silence and listening. On this day, the absence of sound allows for tranquillity and internal reflection. Furthermore, we evoke the primordial image of the caveman. For the caveman to go into a place to rest was to exit the world, pass through the mouth of the earth and dwell somewhere entirely separate before returning.

It is in caves and in shelters that we record humanity’s earliest artwork. Then, later, art is subordinated for religious purposes in Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues. In these spaces, the eye is meant to come to rest on the art. To luxuriate in its meaning while one communes with the sacred. There is an intrinsic link between the sacred, rest and art. Robert Smithson, in an interview with Allan Kaprow, professes that, “... I think I agree with Flaubert’s idea that art is the pursuit of the useless…” (What is a Museum, 1967) Art arises from a state of spending time without aim. Doing nothing without technology. To be clear it is only in a state of rest that dreams arise.

Now, we live amidst constant noise. We take the metro everyday, and scarcely do we see people sitting in silence; earphones or headphones as a sign of voluntary closure to the external world. Silence has no place in the digital world, but rest is only possible in spaces of silence. Of course, it is technology that has made us perpetual consumers; eyes affixed to the screen. The phone invades our space of rest. Considered by many an extension of the arm, the phone is a tool of constant distraction that makes the art of rest impossible.

This is not a call for a return to the divine or the premodern, we only aim to contrast what is now common sense, with what has now become radical. Similarly, in the age of technology, the solution is not to renounce the phone in order to create the adequate space for rest. It is to achieve some sort of independence from it.

Simon Harris & Lizzy Kwok

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) suggests rest in a similar manner to premodern religious sites. The sculpture has no direct “purpose” other than as a site of reflection and contemplation. The spiral shape suggests alternate modalities of time, specifically a “spiral time”. A time that cirles and returns without aim or accomplisment. The eye wanders over the sculpture, coming to rest at the centre then unfolding back and in again. To come to rest at the centre of the jetty is a point of closure for the eye which can then move onto the next.

Simon Harris & Lizzy Kwok

In Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (1951), he writes: “Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time.” There is something quite radical about the Sabbath in its sanctification of time. But also something so simple and paradoxical: if six days a week “we seek to dominate the world”, then why is it so difficult to dedicate the seventh day to “dominate the self”? Why does a practice so ancient feel radical, or even countercultural now?

The slow death of rest may have begun alongside the death of God. In Nietzsche’s Gay Science (1882), where he famously pronounces “God is dead”, he meditates on the disappearance of rest in his own time:

“… Already one is ashamed of keeping still; long reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in hand, as one eats lunch with an eye on the financial pages - one lives like someone who might always ‘miss out on something’. ‘Rather do anything than nothing’ - even this principle is a cord to strangle all culture and all higher taste…”

By the death of rest, we mean that today, time bears no unique meaning. Under our current regime of time, there is no rest, only varying degrees of doing. The development of increasingly accurate clocks has made all time quantifiable, commodifiable, and spendable. Days blend into each other and are deprived of their distinctiveness. Rest is therefore defined by its purposelessness and lack of value; rest is the ultimate anti-activity, the antithesis of work, which demands that we produce and do tirelessly. In this sense, to embrace rest as ritual is in a way, anarchic. It proposes a new temporal structure that threatens the established order of modern society designed to engineer a world of capital-producing workers. We find it difficult to rest because we don’t live in a community which embraces the creation of empty spaces for rest. We live in a capitalist society that fails to ritualise the practice of rest. There is

always more work to do, you hear people complain. 9–5, five days a week: but controlling employers expect a prompt email response at 11pm, or you take up a couple hospo shifts on the weekend (costs of living crisis). You work and study full-time, six days a week: but by Sunday you’re so tired and overwhelmed this sacred day of rest is spent rotting in bed, a slave to the algorithm.

It is difficult to change our conceptualisation of rest when the cultural hegemony informs us that our primary purpose is to work and produce. Optimisation, production, and ceaseless performance trumps all other values. But what if we did spend one seventh of our lives living on a different time?

We would need to embrace rest as a ritual. To borrow the words of Byung Chul Han, who uses a Hegelian phrase, rituals are “symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world.” They represent the values upon which a society chooses to live — a form of transcendence distanced from the self. When we live according to rituals, we develop a community without communication. In other words, rituals, in their drumming repetition and sameness, reveal what communities value without explicitly communicating anything. Rest is possible on the individual level, but perhaps it is more important to be apart of a community that values rest, and the creation of space for lingering and contemplation.

Of course, various cultures and religions have experimented with the Sabbath for millenia. The Jewish Shabbat, of course, is famously associated with a list of do’s and do-not’s: do clean your home, do take a bath, do prepare an extravagant family meal; do not use technology, do not work or engage in the 39 categories of labour.

Whatever this ritual may entail, is completely up to you. We simply leave you with these ideas, and hope that we can progress towards a new social morality of time. To embrace rest as ritual means to rest with intention. To mark time for time to flow without the tyranny of the clock.

to rest is to exit the world

Simon Harris & Lizzy Kwok

There is an art to looking into mirrors; it is an extremely subtle undertaking. If I look too long, I am self-absorbed, narcissistic. I apply makeup or adjust my hair, and a gnawing thought begins to form somewhere at the base of my skull, knocking for some safe entry. I am not doing this for myself, but for someone else entirely. Looking back at my reflection, I am reminded of Atwood’s ‘The Robber Bride,’ of the performativity of it all: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

The body has become a recurring metaphor in our privatised obsession with the search for identity. Think Susan Sontag’s ‘Illness as Metaphor,’ or Elaine Scarry’s ‘The Body in Pain.’ Fiona Wright touches upon similar subject matter in her essay, ‘To Run Away from Home.’ She says, “...the body and the home [being] linked is nothing new, of course…it is the thing that carries, or houses, our rational, remarkable minds —it is the home, that is, for who we are.” Perhaps some ontological truth might be sought here then.

Several problems arise in applying this line of thought to the question of locating “agency,” however. If the subject is defined by their body — a malleable, transient thing — then the semantic meaning ascribed upon it is just as fluid. In the case of women too, who are vested with some agency but continuously subject to objectification, the body becomes a vessel onto which the concerns of the zeitgeist are projected as well as our own.

Wright’s essay suggests that an innate desire for selfimprovement is born from this instability, a need to metaphorically “renovate” the body in a fashion similar to remodelling homes: “Transformation, desire and fantasy are also at the heart of the way we talk about changing our bodies, about dieting and fitness, renovating our physical appearances.”

A woman’s body is at war with itself then, powerfully impelled to change by the constricting impetus of societal conformity. We are told too many differentiating accounts of what is expected of us, how we should behave, what responsibilities we must undertake, and so on. As a result, we become estranged from our bodies and consequently, ourselves.

I look into the mirror once more. If I learn further forward and look dangerously close, I might find some kernel of authenticity reflected in my eye, my nose, my mouth. I might be able to say with conviction that that is who I am, that is me.

In her novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Christina Stead critically engages with such questions regarding female identity politics through her characterisation of Catherine Baguenault. In one such instance, she presents her brother Michael with two portraits of herself painted by two different men. The first depicts her as a “worn, crazy, young gypsy,” and the other as “an emaciated naked woman lying dead on the quays.” There is a disturbing psychoanalytic transference that Stead denotes here. The paintings become a physical manifestation of the artists’ own subconscious hostilities towards Catherine, subjecting her body to

punishment as a response to her desire to live beyond the constraints of societal convention and domestic confinement as a “vagabond queen”. Michael’s response only serves to expound this objectification further, with his misconstrual of the art perceived as Catherine merely navel-gazing, he asserts: “Her vanity was intense.” Whilst Stead herself may not have identified with the label of feminism, her writing was fundamentally progressive and raises important concerns surrounding women’s lack of bodily autonomy under patriarchal directive.

Nearly one-hundred years on I am sitting at my desk reading Wright’s essay — a far more personal and confessional account that reads as dissimilar from Stead’s structurally, but responds to much the same ontological anxieties. Anecdotally, she describes the inherent disconnect she felt between herself and her body when she first began to suffer from anorexia: “Whatever my body had become, I no longer knew it. It was no longer safe, no longer forgettable, no longer my home.”

For Wright, the monotonous routine of caloric restriction, of obsessing over the minutiae of dieting became a means of reclamation and control over her own body; something she felt no longer belonged to her. Writing, I suppose, may serve a similarly cathartic process. Within the feminist canon, literature has become a source of potential power and escapism for women to revalorise and reinstate their identities.

Fiction in particular has allowed for the destabilisation and radical subversion of self-limiting socio-political expectations. Women have found new ways to clearly inhabit space beyond the confines of the real world — though limited to paper. There is a typical literary form that critics and readers alike have begun to associate with this movement, too. I wonder what first springs to mind for

diaries

Hooks

Angelou

Sontag

Plath

Beauvior

Ernaux

Glück

others. For me, I think of a few things in particular: These are all reflections of a deliberate stylistic shift towards the linguistic use of the self-referential ‘I’, the signifier of identity, of subjective truth. Wright’s essay is just one of many texts that reflect a broader cultural progression, one that seeks to assert female identity through the process of signification.

I sit cross-legged before the mirror yet again. What do I see? I see a face. Is it me, or some Other? Am I confusing myself with my mother? Who am I? I look around desperately, searching for someone to ratify this image, but I am all alone. A kind of hollowness blooms within my chest — manque d’être — a lack of being. Jacques Lacan’s damned “Mirror Stage.” Dylan Evans describes it as such:

“The baby sees its own image as whole [...], and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which is experienced as a fragmented body; this contrast is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with its own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens the subject with fragmentation, and the mirror stage thereby gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image [...]”

At the risk of infantilising myself, I will admit that I feel as though I am still trapped within this psychoanalytic stage. I wonder if other women feel this too, if it is perhaps the primary reason why some of us are driven to write, to contribute to a tangible literary body; something that is fixed, something we can control and manipulate, something so

unlike our own fleshy bodies. I suppose what I am trying to get at is that there is something to be said for picking up a book and resonating with its subjects, fictional or otherwise. Catherine Baguenault, Fiona Wright; they are just two of the many individuals present in writing that reflect a greater collective of dissociative women operating under patriarchal institutions. As readers, there is some solace to be found here, we are offered a collective identity within this locus of writing, in its publicising of shared personal experiences.

In one of his many seminars, Lacan famously asserted that “all sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.” I like to think of the body of feminist literature this way, as a mirror much bigger than the one that sits in the corner of my room, one that collates and reflects the experiences of other women, one so large and sprawling it cannot be measured. I stare into it, and the eyes of other women stare back. I see myself reflected in them.

Perhaps you may disagree with me and say that a collective identity is not the answer, it is simply too anaphorous, its direction too vague. I should think, however, given the issues touched upon in this entry, the reduction of female agency to a collective “we” is a tentative step in the right direction; it is making a virtue out of necessity.

Alexa Hansen Weeks

Watching Men Wrestle: Sport and the Female Gaze

I don’t watch sport. I have never especially cared for sport. Not weaned in a household where sports viewing was configured into the family ritual, it’s never possessed any nostalgic significance, nor connoted any broader social marker that felt substantial to my identity. Perhaps more significantly, the world of sport-viewing is one from which I am ontologically closed from –– beers and banter with the boys simply the reserve of men. Sport is a space where the male gaze in some form is projected onto itself. Any representation of the feminine is inevitably a projection of male fantasy: a busty ring girl or cheerleader, providing brief entertainment during halftime while the men get down to business.

Historically speaking, sport has been an institution of patriarchy; a male ritual that sanctions the homo-erotic competition of man against man in a charged battle of supreme virility. In the western imagination, the athletic events of fourth century Athens or Roman tournaments have been configured into a fetishised mythos of the creation of western democracy. Guided by the Protestant work ethic, the athletic body, moulded to both aesthetic and functional excellence, becomes a symbol of perfection. On the field, the battle of man against man for supremacy hypothesises the tenets of ideal masculinity: strength, grit, strategy. The apotheosis of nature and civilisation: a proto-Ubermensch.

But sport is also play. It is a hobby; simultaneously liberation and orthodox. Johan Huizinga theorises ‘play’ as a voluntary ritual spatially separate from ordinary life that, while governed by rules, possesses a palpable liberatory quality. We make civilisation through play, Huizinga thus proposes. In this sense, Christopher Lasch has argued sports harks upon ‘the freedom, the remembered perfection of childhood, and marks it off from ordinary life with artificial boundaries.’ For men,

the enjoyment of sports harks back to boyhood; playing as a child with peers, with fathers. To both watch and participate in sport is to revel in the play element of culture, operating within a matrix of rules and guidelines without any substantial consequences outside the parameters of the game itself.

Play has never represented quite the same thing for women. If liberal feminism’s cinematic opus Barbie (2023) had one substantial thesis it was that play symbolises not simply a release for women, but one in which our life aspirations are cemented for perpetuity. From dolls houses to plastic kitchens, play grooms women for their future as predestined by patriarchy. Of course, sport for men poses the same challenges as a pedagogical tool of development. Sport is at the heart of patriarchal socialisation. You only need to look to American pop culture’s obsession with high school to know that the apex of the social hierarchy is the Quarterback of the football team. Sporting success in youth is an investment that continues to pay dividends throughout adulthood.

While the FIFA 2023 women’s world cup showed to the world that women are actually not bad at sport, sport can never possess the same cultural cachet to women. Women cannot benefit from the cultural capital of being a ‘Senior A Footballer’ at seventeen well into adulthood as men can, uttering wistful what-if’s at a long gone professional career well into their thirties. Instead, despite the success of Matildas, Baby Boomers everywhere could hardly contain their disappointment that our girls in green and gold were “l-e-s-b-i-an-s”.

Rather than celebrated as beacons of achievement, the athletic female body is an object of grotesque fascination. While male athletic achievement is an aesthetic ideal immortalised in the Hellenistic visions of Greek sculpture

up to the fake-tanned contorted bodies of bodybuilders, female athleticism is an object of horror. From Serena Williams to Simone Biles, the media can’t seem to contain their disgust when female bodies that dedicate their lives to reach athletic optimisation don’t fit the warped and emaciated ideal of Western beauty standards.

This role of the gendered body in sport inevitably extends to the debate of inclusion. While armchair pundits such as Joe Rogan love to cry hysterically at the degradation of sport through the inclusion of transgender athletes, what is implicit here is that non-cis, male bodies can never function within the same social paradigm that phallocentric sport exists in. It’s not that women aren’t as interesting or that there is a hoard of transgender women scheming to undermine women’s sport, the fundamental issue is that inclusion of the non-male destabilises the distinct social relations that are at play in sport. Women’s sport can never play the same role socially as it can for men.

Yet, no matter how far I feel removed from the world of sport, this critical theory loving, man-hating feminist can’t help but find quiet pleasure in watching the bordering erotic visions of beefy men fighting for the win on the field. My gateway drug was ‘RugbyTok’ (as Senior Editor of this publication, Kate Saap has coined it): intoxicating visions of striating quadriceps, broad shoulders, and unreasonably short shorts gracing my screen. From there, it was a series of prolonged glances at the NRL game on at the pub before taking it all the way and watching a live AFL game. Local pro wrestling seemed like the next logical conclusion. And it certainly exceeded all expectations.

Some might describe wrestling as ‘fake’ sport; that wrestling, choreographed and predetermined, defeats the point of sport as an actualisation of the liberal work

ethic. But for both its participants and the viewer, deep gratification originates from the very nature of the spectacle itself (and no, I am not just talking about just their muscles). As Roland Barthes makes the case in his 1952 essay ‘The World of Wrestling’, ‘the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle.’

The climax of the night was the heavy weight showdown between Otis ‘The Grub’ and reigning champion Tyson ‘The Kingmaker’ Gibbs. A much awaited rematch between the two rivals. In a promo video for the showdown, Gibbs appears on camera, wiping stage blood off his hands from an unnamed opponent to give Otis a message: “I said I wasn’t going to negotiate with terrorists, and showing up on Saturday night means that I’m not negotiating with terrorists: it means I am doing what terrorists need, and that is to be wiped off the face of the earth”.

Despite the fascinating ideological implications this has for the Australian Wrestling Superstars (AWS) universe, Gibbs effectively set the tone for the calamity that would ensue. Indeed, tensions started high and only got higher, when previous tag team competitors Kings of KO (Gatt and Abott) who had earlier defeated The Australian Mega Powers (Lee Morrows and the Bachelor), tried to get involved from the sidelines, much to Otis’ chagrin.

Undermining the very rules of its operation, the event’s meta-awareness of its own role as spectacle granted it warrant to push the event out of the bounds of the form. Sportsmanship was forgotten as the ring descended into Dionysian revelry. As referees and security attempted to intervene as competitors pushed the bounds of regulation, Ashfield Polish Club

descended into orgiastic bliss. The Australian Mega Powers entered the ring to even the score with a six man tag team fight. Brawling in every corner of the ring, this was more than a series of staged punches and percussive slaps, but body was posed against body in a physical comedy that rivalled that of Looney Tunes

As the dust began to clear, the night ended with Otis delivering a formidable ‘go to sleep’ move on Gibbs ––launching Gibbs’ body from a fireman’s carry on his shoulder over onto his knee. Far from the heroic wrestling described by Homer or the Bible, AWS at Ashfield Polish Club was a true act of decadence. Admittedly, I

expect; would it be another sausage party of cultural references deliberately alien to me? Instead, I was met with a diverse crowd ranging from seven to seventy, Inner West creative types to local families. Perhaps in part of this extreme extravagance, the show’s camp refusal of taking itself too seriously meant it could exist outside of the institutional demands that I have felt has excluded me from true sports enjoyment. Among the crowd, Kate and I were not alone in our very open appreciation of beefcake against beefcake, fighting it out for supremacy.

Don’t take sports too seriously. Look at beefy, sweaty men.

Nik Kosmas, Reclining Figure

Mia Retallack

Creative Direction

Lexi @_iluvlexi_

Photography

Linh Chi Dinh Trinh @bylinhchi

Photography Assistant

Danny Rispler @dannyrispler

Talent

Elizabeth Cao @cacaobean

Olivia McDacy @livmcdacy

Styling

Vittharika Khchao @vittharika

Lexi @_iluvlexi_

Hair + Makeup

Lexi @_iluvlexi_

Bts.

Mel McDacy @melmcdacy

Veronica Wenn @veronicaawenn

Sascha Z

collection 001.

Creative Direction

Lexi @_iluvlexi_

Photography

Elle Hioe @14strk @styledbystrk

Styling

Elle Hioe @14strk @styledbystrk

Makeup

Lexi @_iluvlexi_

Talent

Mel McDacy @melmcdacy V eronica Wenn @veronicaawenn

Bts.

Olivia McDacy @livmcdacy

Fiona Seeto @666r1s1n9

Christian Dior once said that designing clothes is to design a woman’s dream — an idea that was reflected by Mark Gong on the Fall 2024 runway. During Shanghai Fashion Week, Gong gave us 48 looks, each retelling a story of a muse of his own. In this particular collection, he is citing the main heroine of Sex and The City, Carrie Bradshaw, as inspiration. Aside from her fashion moments, long-time watchers could never forget how lovable yet aggravating she was. But, as any main character would, she demonstrated moments of heroism. One instance that was especially relevant to the runway was a scene wherein Carrie visited Miranda during a snowstorm to comfort her following a breakup. This was a relatable moment for Gong, having gone through a breakup of his own. The collection ended up being about his real-life friends who supported him throughout those times. “The idea is that you save your messy self for your best friends and for inside your home, but here they are wearing it out,” he explained.

Conflicting emotions are inevitable while growing up as we often oscillate between the urge to be responsible and irresponsible. It’s a period marked with bad decisions, making the journey towards maturity a tumultuous process. Amidst the chaos, young women still have to confront the world and the harsh realities of life. This inner conflict was expressed sartorially by Mark Gong as each piece adorned on the model's body gives a sense of spontaneity which encapsulates the youthfulness that lingers in early adulthood. Semantically, each piece visualises the messiness and vulnerability that young women often find in themselves.

Enter the models: dubbed the ‘Heartbreak Club’ collection, they sported pyjamas, silk dresses, and fur coats alongside Gong’s signature cargo, denim suits, and mini dresses. Looks were styled to reminisce iconic outfits worn by Carrie Bradshaw, such as the plump fur coats draped over silk gowns throughout the series. The garments

“The idea is that you save your messy self for your best friends and for inside your home, but here they are wearing it out”

were made with primarily straight, oversized silhouettes that strategically revealed the model’s skin. An aura of recklessness was not only expressed through the clothes but also theatrically, as models walked as if they were drunk, falling and stumbling down the stairs — highlighting Gong’s notion of “wearing yourself out”.

Mark Gong F/W 24

The show started with a twist, a black bra worn inside out paired with a black floral satin skirt, completed by a long greige fur coat with brown lining. The pieces are made with fabrics that sit lightly on the skin, clinging effortlessly to the model’s frame. Delicate sheers create a flowy silhouette, highlighting the motion that seemingly pulls the model’s body downward. The contrasting materiality is harmonised through the vertical dynamic of the body, creating a deliberate silhouette that plays with languidity.

This juxtaposition between the inner garments with heavy outerwear creates the impression that the model is trying to mask their vulnerability by layering armour to protect the body. The inner garments are made mostly with silk or sheer fabrics, barely covering their bodies if not for the heavy fur coats or structured wide jackets. Alternatively, some models have their faces obscured by Brenton hats, while others wear dramatic fur boots. These pieces — that conceal a part of the body — were fashioned to have a massive presence, taking the attention of viewers away from the model’s incoherent motion. In a sense, all these pieces express a unifying theme of fashioning the body to enforce

defence. Even so, the sheerly covered body is exposed outwardly, expressing the naivety that such a momentary shield could never truly hide the vulnerable self.

Styling was only a part of Mark Gong’s ability as a designer, but ultimately, what made the show successful was the narrative conveyed by his scientific understanding of creating garments. Equipped with moodier colours alongside heavy oversized leather jackets and blazers, the models are presented as edgier versions of Carrie Bradshaw. The outerwear was made with a mean, wide shoulder structured to protrude outwards from the models' bodies. Formulating an exaggerated silhouette allows Gong to propel the emotional narrative of the show. Additionally, Gong showcases an understanding of materiality. Leather — a typically heavy masculine material, was tailored to unify it with the lightweight fabrics — the more feminine aspects of the collection. On the other hand, brittle fabrics such as silk and crepes were cut to perfection, making audiences forget the difficult nature of such material. A chunky leather jacket would not typically synergise with a pyjama, especially lingerie, but Gong has managed to decipher the code.

“This one,” he quipped about the one model who walked the runway presumably listening to a voice note about her best friend going back to her ex, “she’s just over it, but she still shows up.”

Fashion can be narratively driven, telling viewers stories by treating garments as art. The Heroine in Mark Gong’s runway celebrates youth. Through fashion, he demonstrates a narrative that visualises youth — the beauty of experiencing heartbreak, wasting potential and trying to keep things together. She can be a hopeless romantic drunk on love and equally as capable of madly despairing. However, her sensitivity also bestows the ability to deeply understand others. In life, one can be both the troublemaker and the one giving a helping hand — a dichotomy captured in Mark Gong’s work, ultimately reminding us that being young is art.

Inspired by the Tuvalu Foreign Minister’s COP26 speech dressed in a suit and tie in the middle of the ocean, this photo series explores the idea of ‘business as usual’ whilst global sea levels rise.

Talent Dani Villafaña & Yvonne Tran

Photography Bipasha Chakraborty

Photo Inspiration

Shawn Paul Tan

Bipasha Chakraborty

Beginning in the south of Gyeongseong, what is now Seoul, imperial Japan drove northwards to expand Japanese residential areas in the early 20th Century. Koreans were losing their homes, losing their country, at a table they could not join.

Hoehyeondong.

Namsan. Bukchangdong.

Chungmuro.

Ikseondong.

Bongikdong.

Jeong Se-gwon, a wealthy Korean developer, bought swathes of land to subdivide the property and devise a solution to the Korean exodus: the city hanok. Neither cramped nor sprawling, the traditional hanok was adjusted for the bursting city and encroaching colonialism. In other words, it became the perfect refuge.

“People construct houses, and, in turn, houses reconstruct the inhabitants of them.”

The modern hanok sheltered Koreans in an era where no other institution would. The stone blocks, the wooden beams, the papered doors and tiled roofs became the foundation of Korean heritage as much as they structured the homes themselves. The preservation of Korean spaces, Korean neighbourhoods reawakened the inhabitants to their living, breathing culture.

These clusters of Korean homes between Gyeongbok Palace and Changdeok Palace became the frontlines of resistance: a physical and cultural bulwark against colonial invasion. In time, the area collectively became known as Bukchon – the ‘northern village’ blocking the Japanese advance.

I spent a day floating around Bukchon, where these houses still stand. Perhaps it has become another commercialised tourist trap with little more to do than commemorate a bygone era and aggravate the remaining residents. Yet I visit Bukchon over and over again in my memories.

I see a city with curving alleys and deceptive hills. A weightless fog clings to the skyline, paints the walls blue. I see sparrows cascading like dead leaves and cats enamoured by the warmed giwa. A homecoming and a tourist tracing the history of a Korea under rule. I see houses next to shops, shops next to galleries, and galleries next to homes…

I come back to Seoul, to Sydney, the same greyscapes with pockets of deliberate design. I say this without a shred of architectural expertise, but something about the concrete blockiness of it all tells me that we’ve lost what it means to build a home.

A shelter became a house, a house became an apartment, and an apartment became an investment. The objectives of housing have been reduced to turning over a profit and it seems as though nothing but soulless cities will remain. We push out to Riverstone, Marsden Park, and there’s rows upon rows of grey locked into a merchandisable grid. Shreds of green yield to an ever-inflating house, and I’m not even talking about the prices.

House sizes are increasing more than ever to accommodate our growing aversion to asking our neighbours for a pat of butter. The house is no longer a home; it is a cinema and a library, a private pool and a gym, a childcare centre and an office. Houses have evolved into a multifunctional entertainment complex that precludes the need for investment into public spaces. And with that, the realm of community, social interactions, disappears. We retreat to the privacy of our homes because there is no commitment to building for a collective.

We watched as the rainwater washed over our timber floorboards. The dishwater grey covered every inch of humble turpentine, seeping through the gaps and silently uprooting the house from below. I woke up that morning to my mum, still in her pyjamas, frantically scooping up water out of our bathroom into laundry buckets and my dad in the backyard, completely drenched, investigating the pipes.

My parents bought the place not long after I was born, having outgrown our modest one-storey in outer-Sydney. My dad was dropping off a taxi passenger in the area when he drove past the house on auction. It must have been the burnt-red brick that caught his eye, but the inside was perfect — east-facing windows, understated cream walls, and ample floor space across multiple bedrooms, enough to fit all three generations of the family under one roof. Nevermind the pathetic vertical blinds (that my mum hated) with their plastic joiners which snapped without force, or the fact that the house was situated in the bottom of a valley (which my grandma warned about). It was good enough, good enough for the price at least — and that’s all that mattered at the time.

Like every household, we had rules. One was that outdoor shoes were not allowed inside. That once you stepped in through the front door, you were not to bring in any of the soiled remnants of an unforgiving workday. That by coming home, you agreed to leave at the front porch the indignities, the subtle slights, the mispronunciations, the self-doubt, and the underestimation unashamedly hurled by the outside world. But inevitably, there would be days that even with our shoes removed, the dirt would continue to cling to the soles of our feet, imprinting its ugly expression on the same turpentine floors that other family members would tread. When I was younger, I used to run around the house barefoot but I stopped doing so when I noticed the invisible grime stuck to my feet.

That day, the flood water emerged from within, spilling out from the bathroom drain and sprawling across the living room, into the garage. No corner of the house was left untouched and anything resting on the ground became soaked. the fraying living room rug stained grey-brown from sweat and tea, the stacks of outdated newspaper clippings that my mum held onto for later reading but never did, the grandfather chair, with its fading floral upholstery, which now sat empty the many, many boxes of forgotten textbooks that had been scribbled on and rubbed out so many times that their pages felt rough and sore, left untouched after me.

Not everything we lost would need to be replaced, but it would be the first time we had ever bought seconds of many things.

At the same time, all the dust that had accumulated over the years, underneath our shelves and beneath the dishwasher — it had finally been set free.

With all the furniture removed, the house looked tired. its yellowing cream walls, cracking at the ceiling, its puckering floorboards and gaping skirting, its empty rooms with wardrobes filled with kids' clothing.

Even so, my mum still keeps the bedding intact, just in case any of us thought to visit home on the weekend and stay the night.

A year ago around this time, one Patrick McKenzie (if the desolate halls of USyd even remember that name) penned an article about finding a name for the PULP office. Once again we are at such a crossroads, as we prepare to walk out of another office with no name. It felt good to be out of the rain…

Following on from the legacy of the 2022–23 PULP editorial team was a big task. They were able to establish a presence across USyd campuses, with the beginnings of a new cultural identity. And how exciting! To have another physical publication back on university grounds, where it’s easy to lose hope for the future of student journalism given the current climate.

For us, a lot of things changed immediately. PULP got W I D E R. PULP got weirder. PULP got sexier. PULP’s growth was joined by a community of independent magazines across Eora.

In the time we have published seven issues, Fling, RAG, Booker, Killdeers, and others have emerged on the scene with their debut issue. We congratulate them. When you’re holding 84 pages of PULP in your hands, it may look easy, but these are the guys that really put in the work: without the payroll, without the office, and without that sweet, sweet USU funding. These guys manage to put out issue after issue, for nothing else but love of the game, love of the scene.

I’m looking over the final pdf for Issue 15, and it feels as if time has collapsed and I’m back to last July (poorly) proofing 9. Despite all that has changed, as we agonisingly note in each editorial, little is different. To quote one fictional Scottish statesman, “it’s just another day at the fuck off-ice.” When I write the editorial later, I’ll probably quote McLuhan or Mencken to make us sound a little cool and edgy, despite the fact that any given day at the office will largely revolve around minor gossip, fish soup recipes, Sonal’s favourite fan-fiction, and Kate’s love life. I’m listening to ‘Cemetry Gates’ playing off my laptop as I type. If I peer just a little over my monitor, I can see Simon and Justine playing pool, procrastinating while the wave of layup swells. Justine is winning. Just in front of me, Lizzy is perfectly focused on a Law reading, wrapped up like a babushka in the grey scarf that always sits on the back of her chair. Lameah is editing her Pinterest board, and Huw is writing some drivel about IrishAustralian identity. Keats and Yeats are on your side.

The move across campus was met with a whisper of shock. Change is scary, Wentworth felt so far away. But here, in our den, we have made a home for the magazine. Where to start? We collated a Pinterest board, a clear vision of Mad Men sex appeal. It ended with a three hour long meeting, deliberating on the right rugs for the space and whether or not a Hasbulla cardboard cutout was a good idea (it was not). My favourite decoration is ‘The Vulva’, a Noguchi-wannabe paper lamp. We meet and write in the boardroom, everyone taking their favourite seat. From the corner at the window, going clockwise: Simon, Justine, Huw, Lizzy, Sonal, Lameah, Kate. The centre pile of receipts, reference material, and paper samples are still a mainstay on the worktable. As the office expands backwards into the basement of the Wentworth Building, it becomes

a safe space. Beanbags artfully arranged by Lameah, our resident interior designer, this space feels like ours. We take refuge here in our dungeon — reading Honi between classes, workshopping pitches, recounting horrendous Hinge dates. Behind our growing library is where the magic happens: dj simmo’s decks. Any given day of the week I decide to stop by the office, Simon is there, meticulously curating his next set. And I am privileged to listen.

I love the kitchen. It came with a panini press which we’ve only just started to use. Also an endless supply of Twinings. Also expired frozen pie from the office’s previous inhabitants, and a special gift from last year’s PULP team. Thank you to our Redbull-plug, many early morning classes and nights spent working on the publication have been fueled with your caffeine.

If short, colourful, punchy — pulpy, dare I say — articles defined the PULP of 22–23, it was long form, jarringly monochrome pieces that characterised our own run of magazines from 23–24. We wanted affect. We wanted to see the future. Where the triple spread piece was a rare sight for the last team, you’d be remiss to not spot one in the last couple issues. The idea that we would be able to produce anything near the quality of the first eight issues would be mind boggling to us when we first began as editors: but now that we have come to our own final edition, I feel safe to say, at the very least, that we did a damn fine job. Beyond all these contrasts and contradictions, one thing I want to keep the same is how kind, friendly, and helpful each member of the departing PULP team was to us as we made our baby steps into editorial work. These guys were rock stars to us — and in many ways, still are — yet we never felt a hint of condescension and sourness that we’ve heard is so common to Honi handovers. We hope, bringing in the new team of editors, to continue this tradition, building a new understanding of student journalism that is based on solidarity and respect rather than deceit and petty drama. Following on from the traditions of last year’s team, the office remained an

open space for contributors and friends to connect over all things PULP and publications. I know when I started uni, I would’ve been terrified of entering a space like this. So, particularly for first-time contributors wanting to get into writing or simply to make a couple of new friends, we hope the office has been a welcoming space for you. Now that our pool table has finally been built, drop in for a game.

We also ventured beyond the safe waters of Sydney with our contributions. In Issue 10, we welcomed Northern Ireland based publication Craic Magazine. In 13, we made our way to Montreal. And in 14, to New York City.

Our launch events ranged from raunchy to sophisticated, and we invited all our Facebook friends. It rained a couple times, and we may have encountered some unexpected guests, but it was incredible to see so many unfamiliar faces. People who had no clue of the faces behind PULP, and came purely for a love of the magazine, or just for the bar tab. Thank you. And to all the venues that so generously supported our ambitions: Verge, Lord Gladstone, Hermann’s, The Glebe Hotel; we could not be more grateful for your hospitality and sympathy for our limited student budget. Somewhere through the grapevine, I heard PULP being referred to as the “party society.” If that’s what it takes to bring campus life back to Sydney, then so be it. When isn’t there a reason to celebrate the Arts, anyways?

Our team had quite an unconventional start to the term. While last year’s team had the benefit of shared MECO classes, bonding over the traumas of running an Honi ticket, in addition to years of friendship, none of us really knew each other before PULP. Some of us were brought together

by the social puppet mastery of mutual friends, serendipitous encounters at uni events, or simply, the omniscient word of mouth. I remember meeting Lameah at the Issue 6 launch event last year. She was as inquisitive as ever, our brief but memorable encounter ending with her guessing my star sign (she was wrong but oh so close). At the time, I didn’t realise I knew her already. And also Kate, Simon, Huw, Justine, and Sonal. She wrote about her tits in Issue 4! Anthony Bourdain! Toads! Little did I know, I would see these people almost every day for the next year, and we’d make a magazine together.

I’ll miss our weekly workdays. Maybe even boring meetings when we’re all tired and stressed. Definitely the long, lingering meetings when we brainstorm and dream of the possibilities for PULP: What if we made PULP skinny? What if we made a sticker sheet? What if we printed a clear cover? What if we went to Fashion Week?

It is a privilege to be able to create a print publication in the first place. Exchange students are often shocked they don’t need to pay for our magazine, or even that we get paid for editing it. Unfortunately, universities around the world are becoming increasingly dominated by business-minded management consultants who care more about numbers than people.

But if the transition of PULP to print, and the consistently empty JFR stands mean anything to you, hopefully it offers a glimmer of hope for the future of student journalism and the Arts in tertiary institutions.

The idea of quantifying PULP, even quantifying our short

time editing it, terrifies me. I don’t want to undermine us, I don’t want to glorify us. Instead, I’ll leave it to a friend who often tells me that we’re all just “PMC email job hacks”, anyway. It’s a fair summation. After all, art will not save us But what if that was never the point? What if art and I were just trying to help one another?

As we enjoy our weekly Friday lunch in the warm Courtyard sun, I think about Frank O’Hara in the blistering heat of Manhattan, having his favourite meal of the day. He writes, “the Bar Américain continues to be French | de Gaulle continues to be Algerian as does Camus | Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb | and Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher.”

So, though we bid goodbye to PULP this year, PULP continues to be beautiful. PULP continues to be novel, free, sexy, as do you. The PULP office continues to be nameless, unquantifiable. PULP continues to be PULP, whatever that means to you. Just not your grandma’s orange juice, and definitely not your favourite Britpop band.

Radiate Floor Lamp

This project seeks to deal with the issue of excessive plastic waste by investigating alternative recycling processes outside of the mainstream infrastructure. My exploration of this issue took the form of a light diffuser that was robotically 3D printed in clear rPETG (recycled Polyethylene Terephthalate Glycol).

The Radiate Floor Lamp was designed so that each component of the lamp can be disassembled, facilitating replacement, upcycling, recycling, or proper disposal. This approach minimises environmental harm while extending the lamp’s lifespan and functionality. With a dimmer switch allowing users to adjust the brightness according to their specific space and needs, the floor lamp offers ambient lighting, thereby enhancing its adaptability and ensuring a tailored lighting experience.

The final form of the light diffuser was designed with the manufacturing process in mind. The setup of our robotic FDM printer had a thick nozzle, resulting in layer heights of 2.5mm as opposed to traditional FDM printer layer heights of around 0.1–0.4mm. Thus, there was a focus on featuring and highlighting horizontal patterns to better leverage the aesthetic qualities of the thick layers consequential to the unique manufacturing process.

Eddy Zhang

this is the Passion according to the brewing storm:

I should be used to the winter my beautiful stranger, my blue sun if you’re here, something must be wrong

the world bends under superstition creatures retreat into the earth, distrustful of the very thing that gives them life only the cats come to find me and I’m grateful but there is a dinner party in the next room over, the table is set we must stay warm, stay together but everyone is laughing in the other room so much providence for the boys and girls with silver tongues why so little for the rest?

I pray, I pray for a locket of fire or a blush of drunkenness if I’m being honest when I’m honest, I’m selfish so give me anything all my best words are stolen from the greats god, we’ve had this conversation before each memory a reanimated corpse nostalgia, my most loyal devotee nostalgia, the cruelest necromancer always daring to conjure the face of distant memories but it’s the only one I’ve known long enough to cherish

what do you become when you have no one to love why do I ask questions I never want the answers to?

the infernal clockwork keeps marching it does not care for my unopened gifts not the fruit cakes as they spoil and gilded sweets as they rot

what’s worthwhile in a heart for sale everyone should be ravenous in the winter yet, it’s entombed in letters that stay sealed and a call to prayer that no longer stirs even if I have something in me willing to burn we all know fire casts no shadow

so give me a gift give me anything even an onion so I might weep over something good

I’ve kept myself open to God’s angels I’ve stopped hanging up photographs of you and I they’re afraid of human eyes, you see but I wonder, what good company might they offer if they fright so easily even the words are starting to evade me like rattled spirits and doves snow continues to fall gravity promised me I would fall, too but a ceaseless wind begs to carry me away to somewhere only the stars know while everyone rejoices at the dinner party

I’ve lost all my hair-ties and there is no voice offering to braid my hair with ribbons instead fuck it

I’ve never been the fondest of jazz, but I’m learning so play that piano by ear play it gently

I don’t care if it’s Berlioz that makes me forget the night we share the same affliction, him and I the sickness of life: we fall in love early and easy we keep it as a relic for whatever darkness comes next

when I’m there let me be still while everything spins call it fixity or nothing at all try to get to know me, won’t you? don’t stop until you see bone

there is no seat for me at the dinner party I take no offence winter dissolves as a drawn-out sigh and all I have left is bitter perfume, a wallet filled with more farewells than coins and something resembling pity, or shame, or surprise as I find I still cast a human shadow.

In 1975, the immensely talented and moderately successful Marxist filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, directed Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Inspired by the eponymous novel written by Marquis de Sade, the film follows four wealthy and corrupt libertines who kidnap nine teenagers from rural Italy and subject them to months of torture. Famously, the film was strictly banned in Australia until 1993, and then re-banned in 1998, and finally re-unbanned in 2010. Between these periods, the film was practically never shown publicly and was mostly presented at private screenings by those who happened to own a copy. At a special reprise screening at the Randwick Ritz, I witnessed the movie. It was a showing I promised myself to go to as the film is notoriously difficult to view in a cinema. It was perhaps the most excruciating and sickening experience I ever had in a picture house. However, it was an enlightening experience, to say the least, as it pushed the boundaries of my own understanding of cinema and became crucial to my eventual respect and genuine admiration of Pasolini’s work.

The depiction of the control and perversion of innocent minds proceeded by the cruelty of physical and sexual abuse rendered in the most austere and emotionally void way, spiritually pierced me like no other film had. Some very elaborate set pieces are sickly iconic and are concerningly attractors for the film as it proposes a challenge to thrillseeking audience members. Perhaps, slowly desensitised over decades of progressively more challenging cinema, such audiences seek a strangely nostalgic rush, having been raised on the online horror of viewing scat fetish pornos like 2 Girls 1 Cup or cult objects like Be My Cat and A Serbian Film. Salo, on the other hand, was built far beyond the intention of pleasurable viewing or juvenile cheap dares. Pasolini designed, scripted, shot, and edited the film to transpose the psychological affect of living under Mussolini’s fascist, Catholic society as a

gay atheist. Pasolini was one of the only openly gay creatives in Italy at the time, the other being another master Luchino Visconti (Il Gattopardo, Ossessione). Visconti, although proudly homosexual, was a devout Catholic and defender of the Church throughout his life. Pasolini, on the other hand, was truly an outsider. Not as critically acclaimed as Visconti, though the creator of other culturally challenging works like Medea, Theorem, and The Gospel According to St Matthew, Pasolini’s career lived on the fringe.

A famous interview for Italian TV in 1964 perfectly encapsulates the social pressure and derision Pier encountered. Three suited older men essentially corner the director on the talk show stage, grilling his beliefs. At every turn in the conversation, there are attempts to expose some crude and shallow truth about Pasolini’s filmmaking intentions, obviously hoping to implicate his sexuality and consequential Catholic guilt as some reason for the depravity seen on screen. Intelligently and swiftly answering all questions, Pasolini says:

“I’m not looking for consolation. Like any human being, every now and then I look for some small delight or satisfaction, but consolation is always rhetorical… insincere and unreal.”

Salo, produced years after this moment, completes the vision of the director’s body of work as a complete indictment of the systems, individuals, and rhetoric of oppression that governed his life.

The connective tissue between scenes and the exhaustingly rigid pacing of the film lays the groundwork for one of the simplest and harshest allegories for a tortured existence. To claim my admiration for the film feels odd. However, I would be lying if I denied Pasolini’s intense mastery of the form. The raw syntax of the picture is built to defy everything a movie was often intended to do up until that point in

history: entertain. Contextually, the film sincerely deconstructs the ideological shackles placed upon the untampered mind by fascism and capitalism, and births a cinematic experience that defies the conventional logic of traditional artistic pursuits. It assaults the audience’s consciousness and melts away the expected tension of a melodrama, inducing pure anxiety and panic.

Pasolini cleverly subverts the cinematic techniques of excitement to be in service of pure horror. Subjects of this level of state control do not bend to the will of their psychological and political captors amidst torture and battle. Rather, during the scenes in which the teenagers could otherwise exercise control, they kneel to the unending possibility of the next round of sadistic activity; the stairwell and its door become the symbol of this achingly passive terror. Mostly empty and featured consistently in long takes and composed with perfect symmetry, a recurring shot of a stairwell signifies the beginning and ends of the film’s four main sections, marked also by intertitles: (1) ‘Anteinferno’, (2) ‘Circle of Manias’, (3) ‘Circle of Shit’ and (4) ‘Circle of Blood’. The staircase is grey, sharp, and boxy, and spills into a large living space. The audience quickly learns that this staircase is the mouth of madness set to spew outwards another terrifyingly gleeful middle aged sadist, an image that appears in perfect clarity, always centrally positioned to the audience’s eye. Yet it is not in these moments of madness, abasement, and violence that the film truly marks it’s meaning. It is in the silence, the time spent away from pain. The weight of the regime and the power of the four fascists sinks in at its deepest in the moments, producing a dreadful sense of the anticipation for what is next.

The effect of violence upon the young subjects of the film affected me so significantly that months after viewing the picture, I found that the repetitive sight of the door central to the foot of my bed

conjured memories of Salo’s symmetry and I would be reminded of my body squirming and cringing in the theatre’s cushy seats. The memory of the screening made its way into the deepest crevices of my mind. The patterns of abuse of power and the innate sadism of mundane playfulness in benign social interactions to never ending global conflicts, near and far, felt so much more potent and painful with the image of a cheery lanky sadist stroking the hair of young, traumatised boys and girls. Pasolini weaponises poetry, and for this, cinema was never the same. This consistent recognition of revulsion to my environment turned towards my filmic viewing habits.

A noticeable incline of this type of tortured works I found are considerably more common after the slow, trickling distribution of Salo throughout the 80s. European cinema and the American New Wave movement in the 90s to early naughties were a hotbed for challenging works echoing the influence of Pasolini’s cinema. Coming to mind are the films of Claire Denis and Michael Haneke, austere bodies of work that challenge not just the outlooks of an average audience but the patience and temperament too. Simple allegories exposing contradiction and the hereditary paths towards mutually assured destruction.

In the context of cinema history, Salo is essentially an introduction to a previously untapped version of the human experience. An inversion of the casual expectations of the cinema-going experience very directly places Salo as a trailblazer of elevating the form’s approach to drama and poetry; beyond its release, the picture’s influence is seen in essentially every filmmaking generation to this day. The spirit of defying the status quo of filmmaking,while also the pursuit of profound tales found only upon the fringes and extremes of life.

George McMillan

The Vietnamese lottery ticket — unafraid of maximalist tackiness, beautiful and gauche. My ode to it encrypts its purpose, undermining its role in a generational history of addiction and gambling, recreating its mere aesthetic shell, and only taking what’s worth keeping.