Brag#733

JESSICA CHASTAIN: "I THINK WE LIVE IN A BROKEN SYSTEM" DREAM WIFE ON THE PERFECT PASH

HOCKEY DAD PUCKING UP

ALSO INSIDE: HAPPY GILMORE, A TRIBUTE TO MARK E. SMITH OF THE FALL, LOWTIDE, CALEXICO, A MOUNTAIN SOUNDS GIVEAWAY AND MUCH MORE!

09 FEB

QUDOS BANK ARENA

PA R A M O R E . N E T FU E LE DBYRAM E N.COM

TICKETS LIVENATION.COM.AU

PRESEN TS

2018

Celebrate the talent behind the talent.

It’s time to recognise those who stand behind the artists and celebrate their genius, dedication and creativity.

LOCATION:

SYDNEY CRICKET GROUND DATE:

TUESDAY 27TH MARCH 2018

Head to theindustryobserver/awards to reserve a table thebrag.com

BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 3

in this issue what you’ll find inside…

6-8

4

The Frontline

6-8

Hockey Dad are having so much goddamn fun

9-11

The Fall in 12 of their best songs

12-14

Altered Carbon

25

Jessica Chastain is sick of being spoken down to

The BBQ, A Futile And Stupid Gesture

26

Nocturama, Lady Bird

15

Mission Hill

27

Godless

16

Three Bilboards, I, Tonya and The Greatest Showman

28

Game On

29

Out And About

17

The Watcher

30

Kardajala Kirridarra

18-19

Sweet Country, The Good Place

31

Lowtide

20

Fringe

32-33

Dream Wife

21

Happy Gilmore

34-35

Calexico

22

Swinging Safari

36-37

Four of the best books about musicians

23

The Letters Of Sylvia Plath, Piercing

38-39

Sounds Like, The Defender

40-41

Gig guide, Drawn Out

42

Gig guide, giveaway

43

Snaps

22

xxx Hockey Dad photo by Tom Healy

24

“I was really scared when I first went to the States. I was just freaked out by the place.” (6-8)

12-14

“I think we live in a broken system, a broken society.” (12-14)

24

the frontline with Nathan Jolly, Tyler Jenke and Bianca Devino ISSUE 733: Wednesday February 7, 2017

HAVANA BAD TIME

EDITOR: Joseph Earp joseph.earp@seventhstreet.media PRINT EDITOR: Belinda Quinn belinda.quinn@seventhstreet.media NEWS: Nathan Jolly, Tyler Jenke, Bianca Davino

So if you did a Venn diagram of readers of The BRAG and those who enjoy sipping $22 cocktails by the Ivy Pool, the two circles would be so far apart you’d need a satellite to fit them both in the same frame. Nevertheless, it is still somewhat upsetting to hear that The Ivy is going to be demolished, and replaced with a 55-storey hotel. According to Sydney’s number one pub, club, and hotel buyer/renovator/tikimotif-purveyor Justin Hemmes, this was always his masterplan upon buying the place in 2004, and he’s already made a pretty penny on the purchase. He bought it for $22 million in 2004 – recent estimates value it at $65 million with that figure likely to skyrocket – should this development be approved, which it will, ‘cos Sydney bloody loves high-rise developments and hates nightlife. A spokesperson from Merivale contacted us, stating the project “is still many years away.” Until then, let’s listen to DJ Havana Brown.

ART DIRECTOR: Sarah Bryant PHOTOGRAPHER: Ashley Mar COVER PHOTO: Tom Healy ADVERTISING: Josh Burrows - 0411 025 674 josh.burrows@seventhstreet.media PUBLISHER: Seventh Street Media CEO, SEVENTH STREET MEDIA: Luke Girgis - luke.girgis@seventhstreet. media MANAGING EDITOR: Poppy Reid poppy.reid@seventhstreet.media THE GODFATHER: BnJ GIG GUIDE COORDINATOR: Belinda Quinn - gigguide@seventhstreet.media REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS: Arca Bayburt, Lars Brandle, Tanja Brinks Toubro, Alex Chetverikov, Allison Gallagher, Emily Gibb, Emily Meller, Adam Norris, Holly Pereira, Daniel Prior, Natalie Rogers, Erin Rooney, Anna Rose, Spencer Scott, Natalie Salvo, Aaron Streatfeild, Augustus Welby, Zanda Wilson, David James Young Please send mail NOT ACCOUNTS direct to this NEW address Level 2, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046 EDITORIAL POLICY: The views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher, editors or staff of the BRAG. ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE: Carrie Huang - accounts@seventhstreet.vc (02) 9713 9269 Level 2, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046 DEADLINES: Editorial: Friday 12pm (no extensions) Ad bookings: Friday 5pm (no extensions) Finished art: No later than 2pm Monday Ad cancellations: Friday 4pm Deadlines are strictly adhered to.

Published by Seventh Street Media Pty Ltd All content copyrighted to Seventh Street Media 2017 DISTRIBUTION: Wanna get the BRAG? Email jessica.milinovic@seventhstreet.media PRINTED BY SPOTPRESS: spotpress.com.au 24 – 26 Lilian Fowler Place, Marrickville NSW 2204 like us:

THE BRAG

4 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

Lorde’s refusal to play a concert in Israel has led to a lawsuit actioned by concertgoers in the country. Back in December, authors of the New Zealand’s The Spinoff, Justine Sachs and Nadia Abu-Shanab, published an open letter in which they requested Lorde to reconsider her decision to perform in Tel Aviv this coming June. Her refusal to play was met with widespread praise and criticism from many, with Israel’s ambassador to New Zealand announcing he’d like to talk to Lorde about a compromise, and a full-page ad being taken out in The Washington Post which called her a “bigot” for her choices. Now, the Israeli concertgoers who feel they are hard done by in regards to this cancellation have filed a lawsuit in a Jerusalem court against the authors of The Spinoff that allegedly convinced Lorde to reconsider her decision. As Stereogum notes, the lawsuit appears to be the first filed under an antiIsrael boycott law. It remains to be seen what the outcome of such a lawsuit will be.

CITY WONDERLANDS Have you ever been to the Big Banana in Coffs only to screw your face up and say, “Well, it’s biggish, but I could build a bigger piece of fruit, say The Massive Mango, if only I had the resources, and the permission to plonk it in the middle of Hyde Park”? I thought you had. Well, the City of Sydney’s excellent Art and About program is looking for submissions of works, performance pieces, murals, whimsical sculptures, and everything in-between to help transform the city into the psychedelic wonderland we all want it to be. You don’t have to live in Sydney to apply, and if

OH LORDEY

successful, you will be adding vibrancy to one of the best cities on the goddamn planet.

You can submit your expression of interest via the event’s website. Good luck (and if it’s just a giant dick, probably don’t bother).

CALLING IT QUITS Despite telling Aussie fans last year that they were planning to come back for another tour real soon, it seems that even the best laid

plans can fall by the wayside, as evidenced by the fact that LCD Soundsystem have been forced to cancel this month’s Aussie tour. After being scheduled to kick off their four-date tour of Australia next month alongside Nick Murphy (AKA The Artist Formerly Known As Chet Faker), it seems that “unforeseen conflicts” are to blame for the cancellation according to a statement from Frontier Touring.

RETURN OF THE PUMPKINGS The iconic Smashing Pumpkins frontman, Billy Corgan, has taken to Instagram, revealing a photo of himself hooked up to an IV drip, topped off with a caption that hinted he wanted to spend his “remaining time … making peace with God”. After sending fans into disarray, Corgan has again taken to Instagram to update fans on his current life happenings, which thankfully don’t involve any more hospital trips. Corgan has since revealed that the band were in the studio with Rick Rubin. The band’s reunion with the original lineup was teased months ago; however, it was announced that original bass player D’arcy Wretzky was not invited to join in the festivities, and she has since expressed disappointed she wasn’t asked to join them.

Billy Corgan xxx

follow us:

@TheBrag

Lorde

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Team Hurricane

Mardi Gras Film Festival Feb 15 - Mar 1 2018

ON SALE NOW queerscreen.org.au

A Moment in the Reeds

SUN 18 FEB 5:00PM

SUN 18 FEB 7:00PM & THU 22 FEB 8:30PM

Winner of the most innovative film award at the Venice International Film Festival, Team Hurricane is an immersive, experimental look at several young girls’ friendship over one summer.

In A Moment in the Reeds, director Mikko Makela captures the splendour of a Finnish midsummer and the rush of an intense romance in one of the most sexually charged films of the festival.

Susanne Bartsch: On Top

Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution

TUES 20 FEB 7:00PM

TUES 27 FEB 8:30PM

Picking up where Warhol left off, Susanne Bartsch: On Top tells the story behind the enduring icon of the New York alt-art party scene. Join us for a post screening event curated by DJ Sveta!

Take a roller coaster ride with some sexy butch-dykes and gay skinheads in Queercore. This empowering trip through queer counterculture reminds us we can all create our own reality and find our tribe.

Black Divaz

The Substitute

WED 28 FEB 6:30PM

WED 28 FEB 7:00PM

Black Divaz goes behind the glitz, glamour and hot glue guns of the inaugural Miss First Nation pageant.

Over five steamy days contestants will battle it out in fierce challenges that will see each contestant stretch more than just their wardrobe choices.

From Teddy Award winning Taiwanese director Zero Chou comes The Substitute, a fun take on modern romance, that sees charismatic internet celebrity Nicole, and shy Lu, battle it out on the judo mat for the win and possibly more?

EP LAUNCH 16 MARCH 2018 OXFORD ART FACTORY (GALLERY BAR)

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BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 5

COVER STORY

HOCKEY DAD

Hockey Dad Are Having The Time Of Their Fucking Lives

By Joseph Earp thebrag.com

COVER STORY

“WE DON’T REALLY HAVE MUCH TIME AT HOME ANYMORE. SO ZACH JUST WRITES ALL OUR STUFF AT HOME IN A ROOM BY HIMSELF

LIKE A SADBOY.”

BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 7

FEATURE

“WHEN WE HAD A DRY STREAK, WE STARTED A

JOKE PUNK BAND TO JUST GET IT OUT OF OUR SYSTEM. WE WROTE SOME PRETTY GREAT SONGS THOUGH. WE WERE JUST MEANT TO BE WRITING SONGS THAT WERE JOKES.”

B

illy Fleming is hurting. The 21-year-old drummer for rock band Hockey Dad is trying to lower himself onto a couch nestled in an attic above Wollongong’s Rad Bar, an iconic venue owned by his band’s manager, Daniel Radburn.

But his legs aren’t co-operating, and he winces, his brow furrowing underneath his customary baseball cap.

“We played a cricket match the other day,” he hisses, his voice uncharacteristically low and hurried. “I’m still paying for it.”

Next to him, his co-conspirator and Hockey Dad’s vocalist and guitarist, Zach Stephenson, runs a hand through his hair. It’s hot up here – the air con and fans have had to be turned off for the sake of the dictaphone that sits on a table in front of the pair. And there’s this faint, irritating buzzing sound, persistent and low, that Stephenson eventually decides must be emanating from four pinball machines packed into the tiny room.

But despite all the heat, and the pain, and the noise, Stephenson and Fleming seem singularly unfussed.

In fact, by the conclusion of the interview it becomes clear that even if one of those pinball machines in the corner blew a fuse – maybe the antique-looking KISS one that occasionally interrupts the interview with the riff from ‘Detroit Rock City’ – setting the whole room on fire, Stephenson and Fleming would look on the ensuing chaos with maybe a smirk at most.

“We don’t really have much time at home anymore,” Fleming says. “So Zach just writes all our stuff at home in a room by himself like a sadboy.”

“I’ll just sit in my room and write things on Garageband and see what works,” Stephenson says, nodding.

“Then I’ll send it to Billy and go, ‘What do you think?’”

“I’ll usually say, ‘Needs a bit of work, that’,” Fleming ribs.

“And then before we actually record anything, we jam it out – we see what works. We used to write together, just jamming in the shed. But we don’t really have time for that anymore. And if it doesn’t click within that first half hour of writing it, we just leave it. We’ve gotta be enjoying it.”

It kinda sounds terrifying, that way of working – simply surrendering yourself to your own nebulous artistic impulses. But for Stephenson and Fleming, it works out just fine. It’s how they penned their debut album Boronia, a collection of springy riffs that owes a debt to a whole litany of rock and roll touchstones – The Ramones, Nirvana, Tumbleweed – but also sounds distinctly, invigoratingly unique. And it’s how they put together Blend Inn, out this Friday, a gorgeous riposte to the second album curse that has a charm and colour all of its own.

And anyway, the duo have their own novel way of fighting off writer’s block.

“When we had a dry streak, we started a joke punk band to just get it out of our system,” Fleming says.

“We wrote some pretty great songs though. We were just meant to be writing songs that were jokes.”

“They ended up turning out good,” Stephenson chirps.

“They turned out great,” says Fleming.

“I’ve never been able to strenuously write a song for days,” Stephenson continues. “It’s always been if I can’t write it that day, it’ll just sit in Garageband. The feeling’s gotta be there from the start. You’ve gotta be stoked to be playing it. If you’re writing it and it just feels like pushing shit up hill, you’re never gonna get it anywhere.

“There’s not much you can really do when you’re having a dry streak. Even if you try and push yourself to do it, you’re never gonna write anything good during that time.

You might as well just enjoy the time off while your brain does its thing and then come back when you feel like it.”

“If you push yourself, it just feels like a job,” Fleming says, shrugging.

“Great!” says the KISS pinball machine over in the corner: someone’s bumped it, so now it’s chattering away to itself absent-mindedly, lighting up in complex patterns. Stephenson and Fleming look at each other, their eyebrows shoot up, and then they burst into raucous peals of laughter – the discomforting heat and Fleming’s pain is long forgotten.

W

hen the pair started out, they were teenagers. They were in a band before Hockey Dad, a four-piece made up of them and two mates, spending their time entering “shitty” band competitions, and trying to sneak into Rad Bar before it was Rad Bar, back when it was Yours And Owls.

“When we were grommits starting off in a band, that was the most you could do – play at the band comps,” Fleming says. “There wasn’t really much ticking over. But then we hit at just the right time – there was suddenly something blossoming.”

“This place kicked it off,” Stephenson agrees, gesturing around at Rad. “It’s definitely helped,” says Fleming. “Now there’s so many bands in Wollongong. They’re still popping up – all these grommits, they’re just coming up out of nowhere.”

Those early days feel like a lifetime ago to them now – all that time they spent playing sets in RSLs and bowlos on a Thursday arvo, trying to scoop up listeners out of crowds more interested in watching telly and sinking piss. It’s what they call the “Shannon Noll run”, playing a bunch of those venues.

“We’re done playing three 45-minute sets,” Fleming says.

“Although the positive is, you start off playing three 45 minute sets in bowlos, then your career goes like this.” Stephenson holds his arm out straight, pointing up, mimicking a peak. “Then, before you know it, it’s doing this,” and the arm shoots out again, this time point straight down: the decline. “But that’s alright, because then you’re back playing pubs and you’ve already got your catalogue sorted.”

Fleming laughs. “It can be fun though, playing those gigs,” he adds.

“Yeah, in the beginning I was shitting myself,” Stephenson says. “But I was better at guitar then than I am now.” He thinks for a minute. “If anything, we’ve decreased as a band.”

“WE’VE NEVER BEEN IN A POSITION WHERE WE’VE

REGRETTED PUTTING OUT A SONG.

EVERYTHING WE’VE PUT OUT HAS HAD A PRETTY GOOD RESPONSE.” 8 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

thebrag.com

FEATURE

“IT’S KINDA A

BLESSING IN DISGUISE

“I WAS REALLY SCARED

WHEN YOU WRITE THE ALBUM A YEAR AHEAD OF RELEASING IT. THEN YOU JUST HAVE A WHOLE YEAR TO SIT WITH IT.”

I

t’s a little while later, and Stephenson and Fleming are poking around an army surplus store. Stephenson wants a boiler suit he can wear onstage; he feels like it’ll complement their live aesthetic perfectly.

He’s standing there amidst rows of camo uniforms, and arrows, and bows, and firestarters, leaning up against a pole, sunglasses in his hand. And it’s like, maybe for another band this would seem weird, kicking around a store like this one early on a Tuesday morning. But Stephenson doesn’t appear to care.

Not that the pair are totally unruffleable. Those first couple of tours they did of the States freaked them out – Stephenson in particular.

“There were a coupla rooms in the States where we were like, ‘Shit, we should probably turn it up,’” Stephenson says. “I mean, I was really scared when I first went to the States. I was just freaked out by the place. But now –” He interrupts himself; thinks for a moment. “Actually, I’m still scared.”

“At least we’re old enough that beers help,” Fleming chimes in. “When we were starting out, you couldn’t even have that. You’d have to drink a Coke and hope for the best.”

“And it’s fun not being from the States,” Stephenson says, perhaps trying to make himself appear as though he feels better about the whole thing than he actually does. “People are really curious about you, and how you talk. You can really mess with people.”

“We just never really had any expectations,” Fleming says. “We just got thrown into the deep end. We were never going to the States and thinking, ‘Oh, we have to do this; we have to nail that show.’ We just took it all as it came.”

There are no boiler suits in the store. Stephenson stops to look at a pair of rubber waders, but you can tell his heart isn’t really into them. “It didn’t matter what the shows were like in America,” he says, absentmindedly. “We were just having a lot of fun.”

“Every show is so much fun,” Fleming says.

“Regardless of the show itself, it’s still fun. We’re still doing it somehow. It was a trip then. It still is.”

thebrag.com

WHEN I FIRST WENT TO THE STATES. I WAS JUST FREAKED OUT BY THE PLACE.”

T

he pair wrote and record Blend Inn a while ago. They’ve been sitting on it, waiting for the prime time to drop the thing. And even now, they look back fondly on the recording process. It’s the moment when everything simplifies itself for them – when they can finally start to see the forest for the trees.

“The work is really fun,” Stephenson says. “You have the songs. All the hard stuff is done.”

“You’re not trying to run a wheelbarrow uphill,” says Fleming. “It’s just not creatively strenuous. You know what you want, and now you get to find it out and sort it out. I could do that shit for a long time.”

“Happily,” Stephenson adds.

They’re not really sure how the record is going to be received. Of course, they hope that the fans who have supported them so far will continue to do so – that the scores of young people who made Boronia a hit will flock back to them again. But even if that doesn’t happen – even if every single Hockey Dad fan in the country suddenly and irreversibly soured on the group – well, Stephenson and Fleming have come to terms with that too.

“It’s kinda a blessing in disguise when you write the album a year ahead of releasing it,” Fleming says.

“Then you just have a whole year to sit with it. The fear’s there – you’re hoping it isn’t crap.”

“But there’s nothing you can do anyway,” Stephenson says.

“No,” Fleming nods. “You’re not gonna pull all the vinyl copies out of existence.”

“It costs too much money,” Stephenson says. “You just let it go.”

Anyway, they’ll only really get a sense of what fans think when it comes time to play the new songs live.

This time around, they won’t have long to wait, either.

“Once we put out the album, we’re gonna play a festival the week after or something,” Fleming says. “It’ll be interesting to see the whole new set – it’s gonna be the whole new album. So if people aren’t listening to the album, it’s gonna be a bum show.”

“It takes a really long time to decide how you feel about the album anyway,” Stephenson adds. “It took a whole year before we were like, ‘Oh people really like the first album.’ If the people don’t like it they’re not gonna come up and tell you they don’t like it anyway.”

Fleming smiles, contentedly. “We’ve never been in a position where we’ve regretted putting out a song.

Everything we’ve put out has had a pretty good response.”

I

t’s noon, hot, and the boys wanna go for a surf. They’re getting ready on the grass in a carpark, rubbing down their boards with wax. Stephenson’s has Moe from The Simpsons on it, along with a quote from the show, printed in shaky black handwriting: “I’m a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt and my but smells and… I like to kiss my own butt.” Fleming’s has “HD” on his – Hockey Dad. It’s on the back of his arm too, near his elbow, a little black tattoo about the size of a thumb.

The air’s very still. There’s an ice cream van just up the hill, in which sits a bored teenager, staring at his phone. And over in the distance there’s a smoke stack, pumping a thin line of black fog into the air.

Photographer and friend of the band Tom Healy takes a few snaps of the pair – them leaning against their ute, posing with the boards, eating an icecream. They haven’t gone unnoticed – a pack of grommits nearby spots them, and starts hopping about excitedly.

“It’s the Hockey Dad boys,” one bellows to the other.

“Hockey Dad!” It’s time to say goodbye. Stephenson and Fleming have walked out to the rocks, close to the surf.

Healy’s already in the water, snapping away with his rubber-cased camera, and he’s still snapping as the pair jump in, laughing as though they could do all this for the rest of their lives. Which, come to think of it, they probably will.

Where: Metro Theatre When: Friday March 15, Sunday March 25 With: Boat Show, Dear Seattle And: Blend Inn is out Friday February 9

BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 9

FEATURE

Hex Enduction Hour:

THE FALL IN SONGS

12

By Joseph Earp

“How the fuck are you meant to honour the life of someone like Mark E. Smith?”

1.

‘Industrial Estate’

Live At The Witch Trials, The Fall’s full-length debut, is so chiselled and one-minded as to resemble a mission statement. Smith was a devoted acolyte of Iggy Pop and The Stooges, and Pop’s intent and leanness is all over the record, from the wormy opener ‘Frightened’ to the abrupt shriek of a closer, ‘Dresden Dolls’.

But it’s ‘Industrial Estate’, the album’s sixth track, that most neatly encapsulates Smith’s worldview. In his wonderful autobiography, Renegade, Smith notes that his bandmates wanted him to beef up the song’s lyrics, which initially were just the words “industrial estate” barked over again. So he did, a little: in the finished version of the song, he sings “yeah, yeah industrial estate.”

2.

‘How I Wrote Elastic Man’

3.

‘The Classical’

4.

‘Hip Priest’

As well as being a punk devotee, Smith hoovered up as much country music as he could get his mitts on – he worshipped at the altar of Johnny Cash, and admired the man’s whiskey-soaked rebel spirit almost as much as his groundbreaking use of a driving, steam train-like rhythm section, a sound he nabbed for the pitch-perfect ‘How I Wrote Elastic Man’.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Hex Enduction Hour, The Fall’s 1982 masterpiece, is so fucking good – it was written as the group’s last record, designed to be as bright and brief as the sulfur flash of a matchstick. “Hey there fuckface!” Smith screams on the opening track, ‘The Classical’, his lips sucking around the words. “Gotta message for ya!”

Another essential Hex Enduction Hour cut, ‘Hip Priest’ is eight long minutes of rising dread – a kind of shamanistic chant that builds to a deliberately, distinctly unsatisfying finale (perhaps it’s little wonder that the song was used to great effect in Jonathan Demme’s sinister The Silence Of The Lambs.) But for all its horror, the song is one of Smith’s most autobiographical. “He is not appreciated”, goes the song’s refrain, sung in loopy falsetto, a cry of despair and for attention from one of the most obliquely talented lyricists of his generation.

“As well as being a punk devotee, Smith hoovered up as much country music as he could get his mitts on.”

10 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

S

tay in the media for too long and you can get agonisingly used to eulogising your heroes. Since I’ve been at the BRAG, I’ve written tributes to some of the people who have altered the direction of my life: Bowie, Le Guin, Cohen, Prince.

But how the fuck are you meant to honour the life of someone like Mark E. Smith? Inherently suspicious of anything resembling the patronising or the pretentious, the man would have hated a waffly obituary, or some long-winded wankfest on the nature of his legacy. So sure, I could write an essay about how say Smith saved my life when I was a teenager (he did), or how The Fall’s Hex Enduction Hour set me on the path to my current career (it did), but fuck that noise. With Smith, you’ve got no choice to go back to the source – to the music.

So here for your reading pleasure are The Fall’s 12 most essential songs: a cluster of entry points for newcomers, and a road map for pre-existing fans taking the now melancholy-tinged journey through the band’s back catalogue.

We might never get another Fall record again, but what a goddamn treasure chest Smith left us with.

“Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Hex Enduction Hour, The Fall’s 1982 masterpiece, is so fucking good – it was written as the group’s last record.”

5.

‘Room To Live’

6.

‘Papal Visit’

7.

‘Eat Y’Self Fitter’

8.

‘Bombast’

9.

‘Victoria’

Smith goes country again. ‘Room To Live’ is an unholy mishmash of Townes Van Zandt’s lilting melodies and the grungey, depraved nonsense The Fall had become well known for by that point. It’s a snake writhing through the cut hair and gel on a barber shop’s fl oor – messy, hideous, but possessing of a certain sick style.

For all the occasionally mystic and esoteric elements of Smith’s work, sometimes the man could get right down to the point. What’s ‘Papal Visit’, a noise collage stuffed into the middle of Room To Live about?

According to Smith: uh, the pope visiting. As you were.

“EAT Y’SELF FITTER! UP THE STAIRS MISTER!”

By 1985, Smith was just beginning to fl irt with structure – out of the delicious spiked primordial soup of his early work was emerging some semblance of order, and This Nation’s Saving Grace is probably The Fall’s most mainstream release. Not that it’s the kind of music yer nan would be into – ‘Bombast’ is a noise rock masterpiece, with Smith’s yelpy voice emerging from the centre of the mess like a scorpion’s tale.

Not strictly a Fall song, ‘Victoria’ is a cover of one of The Kinks’ best known singles. But even though Smith might not have written the tune, he made the thing his own, his whiskey-thickened voice making a sly mockery of Ray Davies’ patriotic, nostalgic anthem. “Victorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrria” indeed.

thebrag.com

FEATURE

10.

‘Dog Is Life / Jerusalem’

By the late ’80s, Smith felt as though he was stagnating. He had long been suspicious of the music press, not to mention the young upand-coming bands that considered him a pariah, and now and then started thinking about packing up the music business all together and starting afresh in a whole new career.

But instead of jumping ship entirely, Smith instead jumped artistic forms, making the totally unexpected (yet oddly fitting) transition into ballet. In 1998, with the help of the famously transgressive choreographer Michael Clark, he wrote music for a bizarre art piece-cum-theatrical-experience-cum-dancework called I Am Kurious Orange. Inspired by the work of filmmaker Vilgot Sjoman, best known for the sex-stuffed masterpieces I Am Curious (Yellow) and I Am Curious (Blue), the work featured dancing baked bean cans, flashes of flesh, and Smith’s distinct, soot-smothered sound.

Of all the tracks he wrote for the performance, ‘Dog Is Life / Jerusalem’ is the most unique. Based on a William Blake poem, and some eight minutes in length, the track is a spongy mini-masterpiece, that reignited Smith’s musical urges and had him back in the rat race of the record business within a year.

11.

‘Ride Away’

12.

‘Fol De Rol’

It’s not exactly that Smith was resistant to change – he was just resistant to fucking about for the sake of it. Still, over the decades of The Fall’s lifespan, slowly and surely his style began to warp and change, till by ‘Ride Away’, the lead single of his 2005 record Fall Heads Roll, the winning sound of electro was beginning to creep in. The track’s a Giorgio Moroder tune dipped in LSD, and left without water in the desert for a few days. It’s beautiful nonsense, and I fucking love it.

There’s nothing particularly final about New Facts Emerge, The Fall’s 2017 record and the last project they’d ever write together as band. It’s no Blackstar; no wide-eyed stare into the great maw of eternity, nor a melancholy-tipped series of recollections. It’s just a Fall record – a messy, beautiful pile of scrap metal, anchored by long, driving tracks like ‘Fol De Rol’ and the excellently titled ‘Couples Vs Jobless Mid 30s.’

But there’s a kind of beauty to that. New Facts Emerge isn’t a full stop, cause The Fall aren’t over. They’re not dead; they’re not done. They never will be. This shit goes on, eternally – as persistent as sickness, and taxes.

God bless you, MES, you old fucker you.

thebrag.com

▲

“By 1985, Smith was just beginning to flirt with structure – out of the delicious spiked primordial soup of his early work was emerging some semblance of order.”

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arts in focus

Jessica Chastain And The Freedom To Be Flawed

By Allison Gallagher

J

essica Chastain has, over the past decade, carved an impressive legacy portraying some of the most strong-willed, complex women on the silver screen. Her Golden Globe-winning performance as CIA intelligence analyst Maya in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty saw her powerfully bring to life a character whose fierce determination – at times, to a fault – drove many of the film’s most compelling moments.

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The authenticity and heart that Chastain brings to these roles is what makes her one of the most fascinating actors working in Hollywood today. And she continues to do so in her starring role as the titular character in the newly-released Molly’s Game.

The Aaron Sorkin-helmed film centres around the true story of Molly Bloom, a once-successful competitive skier who, throughout much of the 2000s, ran arguably the most exclusive, high-stakes underground poker game in the world. Her games in Los Angeles and later New York attracted a clientele of some of the wealthiest men in America – elite businessmen, Hollywood actors

and sports stars – before her arrest in 2013.

In addition to his writing the screenplay, Molly’s Game is also Sorkin’s directorial debut.

It follows some of his best work in the past decade spent writing captivating, fleshed out characters based on real-life figures, such as Mark Zuckerberg in 2010’s The Social Network and the eponymous Steve Jobs in 2015.

Sorkin has said Chastain was an obvious choice to play Bloom, noting that the two share a wry sense of humour and a strength that doesn’t require playing tough.

And for Chastain, getting to work alongside Sorkin was largely what drew her to accepting the role in the first place. “I think he’s our industry’s greatest wordsmith,” says Chastain. “He’s a political filmmaker, he’s an idealist, he creates characters that inspire you and lift you up.

For me, they inspire me to be smarter than I am, and funnier and braver than I am. So much of entertainment today is lowest common denominator, and I love something that makes you want to lean up towards something. It’s enlightening.”

As part of her preparation for the role, Chastain met Bloom face

“Before I played Molly, when I first started Googling her, I had a lot of judgment against her – and I’m so upset at myself for this – for the way she presented herself.” thebrag.com

FEATURE

Molly’s Game

“I was able to study her in person, which is a strange thing to say.

You have to be vulnerable to allow a person to study you like that.” According to Chastain, the openness and generosity that her real-life counterpart showed her is largely responsible for the representation of Molly that is shown onscreen.

Chastain says part of the process was also about understanding Bloom’s actions and appearance, specifically within the context of a woman vying to be seen – and hold power – in a traditionally male-dominated environment.

“I learned a lot by playing this character”, she explains.

Molly’s Game

to face and was able to spend a considerable amount of time researching her. “It’s an incredible gift when you’re playing a real person to have them be open to letting you study them. I love doing research, so she was open to that. She was available to me; we spoke a lot on the phone.

“Before I played Molly, when I first started Googling her, I had a lot of judgment against her – and I’m so upset at myself for this – for the way she presented herself. The clothes she wore, the makeup she wore, the photos she took – I kind of dismissed her because of it.”

Chastain says that over the course of getting to know Bloom, understanding the real person behind the Vanity Fair photos and

“I love playing a character where we show their flaws.”

‘Poker Princess’ headlines was vital. In a world that often refuses to grant women personhood beyond their sexuality, actively choosing to wield that sexuality can be one of the only avenues available to women to hold power.

“When I met her and begun talking to her I realised we live in a society where women are most valued for their sexual desirability. So, for women who feel invisible, there’s a way for them to feel like, ‘Okay, I’m going to finally be paid attention to, I’m going to be listened to, I’m going to become this in order to find power.’

“The fact that I had judgement against that was really confronting to me, and I wanted the film to explore that. I wanted the film to see that transformation Molly makes, and understand that it Coriolanus

comes from the players; her boss literally saying, ‘Ugly shoes, ugly dress,’ and her realising that in order to be taken seriously she needed to put forward this sensuous visual.”

Lessons Learnt The journey that Chastain made from judging Bloom to understanding her is mirrored by her lawyer in the film, Charlie (Idris Elba), who is initially reluctant to take on Molly’s case as a result of her salacious tabloid headlines.

As Chastain points out, there are two times in the film when Molly is told by a man that she is not dressed appropriately. The first is by her boss telling her she’s not dressed sexually enough, then later by Elba’s character, telling her she’s dressed too sexually upon their first meeting.

It’s a visceral representation of the strict tightrope women are forced to walk everyday in society – simultaneously shamed for both prudish and provocative

appearance. As the film progresses we see one-dimensional criticism give way to genuine empathy – the depth and conviction with which Elba plays his character and the chemistry between him and Chastain is powerfully human. In a lot of ways, Elba’s character is a vessel for the audience’s journey that occurs over the film – towards the end, despite all previous misconceptions or premature judgment, it’s near-impossible for Charlie – or the viewer – not to empathise with Bloom and her choices.

In addition to meeting her in person, Chastain’s research into the role also included being taken into the kind of underground poker rooms that Bloom ran, often filled with men who knew her through playing in her games – what Chastain refers to as being “invited into the man cave”.

“I didn’t want to just come at the film and at Molly from her telling of who she was, because who we are today is very different to who we were ten years ago,” Chastain explains. “I met with players who played in her game: they took me to a New York poker game and I observed it. I was invited into the man cave that was these poker rooms and that was very helpful.

A lot of those players knew Molly, and I talked to them about their experiences of being in the rooms

“For me it’s very important to show female characters as complicated, flesh-andblood human beings and not a one-dimensional stereotype.” thebrag.com

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arts in focus

“The largest protest in the history of the United States is called the Women’s March and I love that.”

Zero Dark Thirty

“This myth that women don’t get along: I think we’re tired of it being fed to us, that women don’t work well together, that women fight or are catty with each other.”

Miss Sloane

with her while she was running the game, and I learned a lot about her through that as well.”

‘Man cave’ is an accurate descriptor for the rooms, which appear in the film as dens of male hedonism. Some of the film’s most interesting moments come from seeing Chastain’s character navigate the bastion of masculine bravado that the poker rooms hold; in many ways, a microcosm of society’s ugliest displays of male chest-beating.

Seeing Molly hold the cards (so to speak) in this environment brings with it a certain empowerment – her choices, be they good or bad, are made autonomously. It’s a welcome relief, particularly following Chastain’s comments at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival where she served as a jury member, critiquing the passive portrayal of women in films.

Watching Chastain’s character in Molly’s Game, one can’t help but be subtly reminded of her other potent performances as confident and fierce, flawed and complicated human beings. “I love playing a character where we show their flaws,” she says.

The Freedom To Be Flawed As Chastain notes, while the imperfections and flaws of male characters are treated as a given and their depictions onscreen often praised, women in films are rarely given that same space to be complicated. Instead, attention is predominantly focused on the onscreen romances that are assumed to be innately tied to the narrative for female protagonists.

“I find that for years we’ve had movies about men where they’re

Tree Of Life

very complicated characters and we see their emotional flaws.

We see that they’re loners and they’re heroic for it, and we root for them. I’ve noticed that whenever I play a character like that in Zero Dark Thirty, or Miss Sloane or Molly’s Game I get questioned about whether or not it’s a realistic portrayal of a woman because she’s not in a romantic relationship. I find that question kind of infuriating.

“As Aaron Sorkin said so beautifully at a Q-and-A for Molly’s Game, no one ever asked him that question about Brad Pitt in Moneyball.

For me it’s very important to show female characters as complicated, flesh-and-blood human beings and not a onedimensional stereotype.” Indeed, that there is no contrived romantic subplot driving Molly’s

“I think we live in a broken system, a broken society.”

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Game is solely to its benefit, allowing an insightful, threedimensional look into Bloom’s character.

2018 follows a year that saw the film industry take massive strides against misogyny, sexual harassment and gender inequality. Men in positions of power within the industry were openly called out for their misconduct towards women, movements like #metoo gained widespread media attention and there was discussion sparked about gender pay disparity within the film industry. Chastain, whose feminism is interweaved with her professional life through everything from the roles she takes to the way she actively uses her platform to challenge misogyny in press interviews, says she’s noticed a visible change.

“It’s kind of an incredible thing I’m noticing happening. I really felt it a year ago at the Women’s March in DC. The largest protest in the history of the United States

is called the Women’s March and I love that. I think it’s the first time women are collectively saying this normalisation of abuse is not appropriate, and we’re not going to navigate that anymore.

“I think we’ve been taught at a young age that it’s just something you have to deal with: wage inequality, being careful of what you wear... This idea of women having to navigate an unhealthy society. I feel like it’s the first time women have said they were not going to do that anymore – they’re going to stand against it.

“I think we’ve seen it unfold in many ways, such as women coming forward speaking about abuses of power. I hope to see it continue – I think women are feeling very protected and stronger as a unit. This myth that women don’t get along: I think we’re tired of it being fed to us, that women don’t work well together, that women fight or are catty with each other. I’ve never experienced that in my life and

I’m ready to move away from that fictionalised idea of what a woman is.”

For Chastain, understanding that intersectional struggle can only be confronted by women coming together in solidarity with one another is central to fighting against oppression and inequality. “It’s divide and conquer,” she says, referring to the lateral violence that patriarchal structures have used to keep women from collectively challenging oppression.

“Kings would do that with their commoners – the way that someone holds onto power is to create in-fighting. I think we live in a broken system, a broken society – and when one person is victimised we all are, and we have to acknowledge that. But when a group of people who have been abused and victimised combine their powers? It’s a very difficult thing to suppress.”

What: Molly’s Game is out in cinemas now thebrag.com

arts in focus

FEATURE

Mission Hill:

The Hipster Simpsons

T

he late ’90s were a strange time for animated sitcoms.

Much like at the start of the decade, when music labels were signing every grunge band they could get their hands on in the hope of discovering the next Nirvana, television studios were snapping up any prospective cartoon in the hopes that it would be the next The Simpsons. This is how we got Family Guy, along with an animated version of Kevin Smith’s Clerks.

What makes Mission Hill worth your time is that, even with its cartoon wackiness, it’s a clear and honest portrayal of what it feels like to be in your early to mid-twenties; learning responsibility, proper maturity and trying to figure out your place in the world. It just gets what that period of your life is like: dating, working shitty parttime jobs to keep the lights on, and aimlessly hanging around with your friends.

None of these series really stood a chance of toppling the yellowskinned, four-fingered empire; most of them were lucky to last a single season. But there were a select few that, despite being unceremoniously cancelled, are worth digging up and giving your full attention to. Originally airing in 1999 on The WB (home to Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Dawson’s Creek), Mission Hill is such a series.

The short sell for Mission Hill is easy: it’s the hipster version of The Simpsons, likely due to the fact that its creators Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein were alumni of the long-running animated sitcom. Joining Simpson’s writing staff in 1992, their credits include episodes like, ‘Lisa Vs Malibu Stacy’, ‘Who Shot Mr. Burns’, and ‘Bart Vs Australia.’

The Mission Hill staff also included other The Simpsons writers, such as Dominic Polcino, a talent who’d later go on to write for Rick And Morty.

Set in the fictional ‘burbs of a city (an amalgamation of hip neighbourhoods like Williamsburg, Wicker Park, and Silver Lake), it follows the life of slacker Andy French, a wannabe cartoonist who works at a dingy waterbed store. His life is interrupted when his über-nerd younger brother, Kevin, is forced to move in with him and his roommates.

On top of its strong writing and voice cast, Mission Hill also has an eye-catching animation style (designed by Lauren MacMullan) that was reminiscent of the independent comic books of the time – especially Daniel Clowes.

Coupled with a striking neon

nt “With such inconsiste y pect an airtime, it’s hard to ex d build an show to leave a mark ithout a an audience, with or w igree.”

Simpsons ped

[TV] Chris Neill unearths an un derrated, canned ’90s cartoon created by the screenwriters behind The Simps ons

colour palette, this gave the show a unique visual identity.

Mission Hill took the smart social satire and quick-wit of The Simpsons, along with its sincerity and emotional depth, and refocused it to a demographic that had been excluded by the show.

Think about it: everyone in The Simpsons is either in elementary school, in their mid-thirties or older.

Apart from the Squeaky Voiced Teen and Otto, there are no characters that upholster the pivotal period of young adulthood – it was a demographic that most other animated comedies at the time ignored as well.

In one episode, Andy tries to get more cartoon work and suffers through the special type of hell devoted to trying to keep afloat while being hit by unrelenting job rejections. Kevin, obsessed with getting into Yale, drives himself to near insanity trying to get a perfect SAT score. After losing his job, Andy ends up dumpster diving behind the dollar store to keep himself and Kevin fed with a canned mystery meat called “Skunch”, which contains eight essential forms of marrow.

The plan was to age the characters as the series progressed, with each season representing a different year in their lives. Through ten seasons we’d track Andy’s rise from starving indie cartoonist to becoming the creator of a popular animated series – much like Matt Groening’s own career.

There are a few anachronistic moments (one episode has a scene in a ska club and there’s another that revolves around MTV’s The Real World) but similar to The Simpsons, Mission Hill has a sense of timelessness to it. If it were set 20 years ago or even yesterday, one could still relate to Andy getting trapped in a conversation with a guy who calls himself The Republican Vampire (“I follow Marilyn Manson, but I obey Rush Limbaugh,” he barks.)

There’s a chance it even managed to be ahead of its time, with the series’ pilot episode including an onscreen kiss by a gay, middle-aged couple, and making it one of the first shows to do so on network TV. Its episode dedicated to the couple’s backstory managed to win a GLAAD award for its positive, non-stereotypical portrayal of the couple, and it truly proves to be one of the highlights of the show.

Mission Hill wasn’t cancelled because of its writing, but because The WB severely mishandled its marketing and airtime. Seven episodes were aired sporadically on the network between September 1999 and July 2000, with the final six appearing on Adult Swim two years later. Mission Hill developed a small cult following after it was rerun on Swim, but by then it was too little, too late. With such inconsistent airtime, it’s hard to expect any show to leave a mark and build an audience, with or without a Simpsons pedigree.

If you’re looking for a cult classic, nostalgic for The Simpsons but don’t want to rewatch the ‘Steamed Hams’ bit for the umpteenth time (also written by Oakley and Weinstein), or are just after something funny, you could do a lot worse. Unappreciated in its time, Mission Hill is one of the most genuine slice-of-life comedy series you’ll ever watch, animated or otherwise.

“It’s a clear and honest portrayal of what it feels like to be in your early to midtwenties.”

thebrag.com

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arts in focus

FEATURE Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Three Billboards, I, Tonya and The Greatest Showman: Favourably Flawed [FILM] Tim Byrnes reveals why we desperately need morally ambiguous characters on the screen – now more than ever

A

n overly pessimistic Nick Cave song once opened with the lyrics, “People, they ain’t no good.” I have to disagree. In reality we know people are neither wholly good, nor simply bad – and that’s no matter what Hollywood’s pantheon of stock standard heroes and villains might try to tell us. After all, it’s when a film gracefully unpacks the flaws of messy, morally fluid human beings that a deeper and more nuanced story emerges.

Writer and director Martin McDonagh often returns to these morally ambiguous characters: his 2008 film In Bruges followed the guilt-stricken Ray (Colin Farrell), a hitman burdened with remorse after accidentally murdering a child, and in the director’s latest Southern gothic comedy-drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, its characters are full of a similar complexity.

A result of that complexity has seen the film be met with controversy. Sam Rockwell’s Golden Globe-winning and Oscarnominated portrayal of the hottempered police Officer Jason Dixon has drawn ire from some members of Three Billboards’ audience: Dixon is openly racist and hostile towards the towns’ African American residents, submitting them to slurs and threats, and he even gains notoriety in the small community of Ebbing for torturing a person of colour in custody.

Harrelson), encourages the hooligan to come to the aid of grieving mother and protagonist Mildred (Frances McDormand), and while he makes amends for his treatment of white townsfolk, the same can’t be said for the folk who are subjected to his racist

But, despite all that, Dixon doesn’t come out of the film looking like a hero. In fact, there are no heroes in this film. Even the grieving Mildred pushes boundaries to get her daughter’s murder solved, publically shaming police by erecting three billboards that in sequence read: “Raped while dying. And still no arrests. How come, chief Willoughby?”

“The film isn’t about good and bad, left and right.

It’s just trying to find the spark of humanity in people – all people.”

Worse still, as far as Three Bilboards’ critics are concerned, Dixon has somewhat of a redemptive arc. Dixon’s superior, Chief Bill Willoughby (Woody

ideologies.

The timing of such a character arc feels particularly anachronistic, too: redemption for a character like Dixon feels like a slap in the face for some after last year’s #OscarsSoWhite campaign.

“I don’t think I redeem [Dixon], or forgive him, or try to make him a hero because the point is that there are no heroes or villains,” explained McDonagh to The Guardian. “The film isn’t about good and bad, left and right. It’s just trying to find the spark of humanity in people – all people.”

That selfsame spark is similarly under examination in I, Tonya,

also out in Australian cinemas now. The brash and outspoken ’90s figure skater Tonya Harding (portrayed by Margot Robbie, perfectly cast) explains to the audience that she was stigmatised by US Olympic officials who disliked her bulky, unfeminine trailer-trash image – an image that only worsened after her suspected attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan, a skater who had the gentle swan-like skater aesthetic that said American officials unequivocally desired of their skaters.

I, Tonya makes the case that Harding was much more than the person she was portrayed in the media. Each character in the film proves to be an unreliable narrator, with the story changing each time a new side of the tale is presented, and although Harding believes herself to be the victim, her pushy, chain-smoking mother argues she’s ungrateful and rude.

Margot Robbie in I, Tonya

Hugh Jackman in The Greatest Showman

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thebrag.com

Indeed, every single character moves from wholesome to demonic, and leaves the audience to navigate through a distinct moral haziness.

Harding herself compounds this haziness: “There’s no such thing as truth,” she says at one point, glaring at the camera. “Everyone has their own truth”.

I, Tonya has an advantage over Three Billboards in that it’s based on true events and draws on multiple points of view to nail Harding’s contradictions, and her complexity.

And yet that McDonagh created such complex characters out of thin air is impressive – his film could have easily been a flop, submitting to the haphazardness that defined the P.T. Barnumcentred musical-biopic The Greatest Showman, a film that completely failed to bring its real characters to life.

After all, Showman retells the life story of Barnum (Hugh Jackman), a charismatic man with a penchant for tall tales and big dreams, and – at least as far as the film is concerned – a figure of great charity who helped outcasts find selfacceptance. It matters little to that film’s director Michael Gracey that Barnum was also downright exploitive, profiting from hoaxes at the expense of those portrayed as his friends – Gracey erases all of his hero’s flaws, leaving only a man with a big heart.

In actuality, Barnum regularly mistreated his ‘oddities’; in one case he charged an admission fee to see a public autopsy for a woman he falsely claimed to be 161 years old. And if it wasn’t for the musical sequences, Showman would be totally dulled by its flat characters – it’s a disservice to Barnum’s bizarre and morally dubious life.

Ultimately, we don’t need characters to have concrete moral superiority, or to be completely hated to enjoy the material presented in front of us. In fact, we need more morally ambiguous characters to frequent the screen. No human is stagnant, nor are our journey’s fixed to the moral compass (or lack thereof) we are born with – we all grow and change, moving backwards and forwards.

Seeing characters that defy our expectations is what adds colour to a narrative.

What: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and I, Tonya are out in Australian cinemas now thebrag.com

new to strea ’t s m a

By The Sea

g in

“No human is stagnant, nor are our journey’s fixed to the moral compass (or lack thereof) we are born with.”

W h

arts in focus

Turbo Kid

WITH JOSEPH EARP nightmares manifest n entertainment circles, 2018 may always be themselves in reality, much to the remembered as the year Netflix won over the critics. consternation – and later nerveAfter all, some mere eight months ago, the company shredding despair – of his adopted was getting booed at the Cannes film festival, French parents, Jessie (Kate Bosworth) critical bodies were locking movies that premiered on and Mark (the criminally underrated streaming services out of awards, and Netflix originals Thomas Jane). were treated like little more than straight to video, bargain bin time-wasters.

It’s interesting to come across a

I

Now, Mudbound, a so-so American epic about racial disharmony and PTSD picked up by Netflix during the 2017 Sundance film festival, is an awards heavy-hitter, and its Director of Photography, the inimitable Rachel Morrison, is the first female cinematographer to ever get nominated for an Oscar. Netflix proved it had populist appeal a long, long time ago – now, finally, the critical establishment is falling into line.

Not that Netflix doesn’t still drop a stinker or two – case in point being the bizarre and misguided The Polka King, available to stream now. A Jack Black vehicle about a glorified retirement home cabaret act who manages to swindle himself a small fortune via his gullible audience of octogenarians, the film never quite decides what it wants to be.

The Polka King

“I’ll say it unashamedly here and now – I fucking love Stan.”

horror film about a supernaturallyplagued child where the little troublemaker isn’t the antagonist – Cody is largely unaware of the fall-out of his dreams, and is written by Flanagan as a true moral innocent. And sure, some of the effects are a little cheap, and the drama does get a little bit messy in the latter half, but there’s so much to love here – even the super saccharine finale somehow manages to land.

Now over to our ole mates at Stan. The local streaming service never really gets the love that it deserves, either from critics or from the majority of punters, so I’ll say it unashamedly here and now – I fucking love Stan. If a deranged murderer with hard-to-follow motivations broke into my house, held a gun to my head, and asked me to pick between Netflix and Stan, well, I’d cancel my subscription to the former before I could blink.

“A Jack Black vehicle about a glorified retirement home cabaret act who manages to swindle himself a small fortune, The Polka King never quite decides what it wants to be.”

There are splashes of Coen Brothers-esque dark humour; Charlie Kaufman brand meta jokes; and a kind of arch, dry slapstick that owes a lot to both Richard Linklater’s excellent Bernie (also available to stream on Netflix) and Steven Soderbergh’s Behind The Candelabra. It’s odd, it’s not very funny, and it never comes together. And considering it has been helmed by Maya Forbes, the writer-director behind the underrated Infi nitely Polar Bear, chalk this one up as a genuine disappointment.

Indeed, this fortnight, Netflix wins more credit for its post-release acquisitions than its original content. First up in that particular pile is By The Sea, an unfairly critically mauled drama directed by Angelina Jolie. It’s a hammy, deliciously overcooked throwback about a middle-aged couple (Jolie and then real-life husband Brad Pitt, both of whom spend the 122 minute running time playing the proceedings like a strange mix between pantomime and Federico Fellini melodrama) who find an unusual – and potentially dangerous – method to keep their struggling marriage afloat.

Like Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven stripped of all semblance of irony, it’s high camp weepy nonsense, and I love it.

Also a little uneven, but also very much worth your time, is Before I Wake, Mike Flanagan’s longdelayed horror freak-out. Shot in 2013 but pushed back some five years, the film centres around a young orphan, Cody Morgan (Jacob Tremblay, best known for his star-making turn in Room) whose

Part of that is thanks to the sheer niche appeal of some of the titles Stan picks up. To whit: over the last few weeks, the service has been slowly stocking up on hard-to-find, gloriously remastered prints of Akira Kurosawa classics. If you’ve never gotten into the Japanese master, now’s your chance – Stan streams Stray Dog, an excellent crime classic; Throne Of Blood, a psychedelic take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth; The Hidden Fortress, famously the inspiration behind George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy; Ran, King Lear run through a blender; and The Bad Sleep Well, a noiry mini-masterpiece. You should watch every one of ‘em.

On the considerably less highbrow front, Stan are also offering horror nuts like myself the chance to catch up with a classic from the back catalogue of vampire/nudie master Jesus Franco. She Killed In Ecstasy is a lean, mean little exploitation picture, full of sex, and blood, and psychedelia.

I’d never seen it till last week, and I feel remiss for letting it go under my radar for so long – it’ll have your brains running out your ears.

“She Killed In Ecstasy is a lean, mean little exploitation picture, full of sex, and blood, and psychedelia.”

Ran

She Killed In Ecstasy

Following in Franco’s legacy, also available for streaming, is Turbo Kid. I caught this bizarre slice of Montreal-made pot brownie at the Sydney Film Festival a couple of years ago, and was worried that maybe it wouldn’t stand up on rewatch – its humour is very niche; its rough edges made deliberately visible.

But I needn’t have worried – it’s still a whole load of ugly, goopy fun, a post-apocalyptic mix of horror, scifi and knowing humour. All you really need to know about it is this: Michael Ironside tortures a man by feeding his guts through a bicycle’s gears. Get on it! ■

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arts in focus

FEATURE

Sweet Country: Confronting The Past [FILM] Michael Louis Kennedy talks to Sam Neill, Warwick Thornton and Bryan Brown about one of the most exciting Australian films of the decade

S

et in the blistering outback outside 1920s-era Alice Springs, Sweet Country is one of the most potent Australian films of the decade. The second full-length feature by celebrated director Warwick Thornton, the film has already swept through the Venice and Toronto international festivals to great acclaim, picking up the Premio Biasto d’Oro award at the former.

It tells the story of Sam Kelly, played by Hamilton Morris, who makes his big screen debut. Kelly and his wife work unpaid on the property of Fred Smith (Sam Neill), and while Smith is a comparatively benevolent man of God, the Indigenous people of the region work for him as slaves.

The film opens as Sam and his wife are briefly “loaned” to a belligerent newcomer, a World War One veteran called March who treats them with contempt.

When an Indigenous boy flees his property, March pursues the escapee onto Smith’s land and opens fire on Sam and his wife, before being killed by Sam in self defence. Sweet Country

then becomes a chase movie of sorts, as Sam flees across the breathtaking and brutal outback planes, pursued by the police.

Just as the conditions prove punishing for the characters, the cast also found themselves at the mercy of the Red Centre, with Neill recalling that locations were “beautiful in the morning, beautiful in the evening, and pretty shithouse around midday.”

As a result, Thornton was conscious of the strain placed on the film’s cast and crew. “In the heat of the day we didn’t have the luxury of a three hour nap. We just had to keep working, because of the lower budget and requirements of time,” Thornton explains.

by the benefits of the location.

“When you’re doing these sort of movies and you’re in Alice Springs, or any other place out in the middle of the country, you get in the car in the morning to drive to the set and you’re sort of loving being there.

You’re not driving through the traffic in Sydney.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Neill.

“There are mornings where you think, ‘Oh my god, this is just incredibly beautiful’ with the light coming up. Or a storm would come in, and you’d see a rainbow and just roaring mud and rain.”

“You play the scenes as truthfully as you can and the complexities will come.” will come, as it’s all added up in how people view that character.”

Neill agrees. “The trick is not to judge your own character, otherwise you’re doing a sort of judgemental performance. You’ve got to inhabit that character. A year later you can look back and think he’s a man of compassion and belief, but also foolish.

There’s nothing duller than a twodimensional character.”

During filming actor Bryan Brown, who plays the relentless Sergeant Fletcher, was bitten by a spider and had to be hospitalised. In spite of such setbacks, Brown maintains the set was pretty easygoing. “Otherwise it was a snack,” he says.

Both Neill and Brown play characters who are morally layered, and completely at odds with the natural environment.

“I thought my character was playable,” Brown says of the sergeant. “I didn’t read it and think, ‘Who’s this and what’s he doing?’” Nonetheless, when pressed on the question of playing a complicated soul, he admits his approach erred significantly towards pragmatism.

Sweet Country is also the first release directed by Thornton that he hasn’t written. “Right at the beginning I was kind of like, ‘The writer is all knowing, all good’,” Thornton explains of his process.

“If it was written that it was a red tea cup, I’d say, ‘It has to be a red tea cup’. And then by a week in I was like, ‘Oh I don’t give a shit, I’ll do whatever the bloody hell I want.’”

And in any case, Brown believes any difficulties were far outweighed

“You play the scenes as truthfully as you can and the complexities

Indeed, it was abandoning the strictly adherent approach that he

credits with allowing him to “spend more energy as a director making a better film from an amazing script. Every point of making a

“By a week in I was like, ‘Oh I don’t give a shit, I’ll do whatever the bloody hell I want.’”

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FEATURE

“In the heat of the day we didn’t have the luxury of a three hour nap.

We just had to keep working, because of the lower budget and requirements of time.” connection to country. “This story was their families’ story,” says Thornton. “Their grandparents worked for free all their lives and that was the only way they could actually stay on country and be connected to the land and to the spirits that they believed in.”

It’s similarly personal to Thornton.

“I’m Kaytej, a tribe from about 200 kilometres north of Alice Springs, and my mother was born under a tree ... to a white pastoralist and an Aboriginal woman. And my grandmother worked for free, so it is my story.” movie is about raising the bar.

When they write the script that’s the first level. And when you shoot the script, that script needs to become images better than the script. And then when you edit the film, those images need to turn into something better than what you shot.”

Another significant directorial decision was to cast first-time actors for all the Indigenous characters from the Alice region in an effort to reinforce their

And with that personal connection came responsibility for authenticity – not to mention a “responsibility to not get too angry. It’s a time and a place, and you need to balance all of that sort of stuff and a responsibility to actually make intelligent cinema. You’ve got to balance all the characters, and give people reasons for being; reasons to make those choices.”

What: Sweet Country is in Australian cinemas now

The Good Place: Good, Good Stuff [TV] The stellar Netflix comedy series challenges what it means to be virtuous and good, writes Brooke Gibbs WARNING:

spoilers lie ahead

T

he Good Place is not your average Netflix series. If you’re a lover of puns, Friends and watching something that stirs up your insecurities while carefully and precisely testing whether or not you’re a good person, then this NBC comedy is definitely your (admittedly rather bitter) cup of tea.

journey towards becoming a better person, Tahani (Jameela Jamil), a wealthy philanthropist who cared more about fame and being ahead of her sister than helping people, and Jason, an amateur DJ who died by suffocating in a safe during a botched robbery attempt.

“It’s a series that puts your existence into perspective.”

A single-camera comedy centred around the exploits of the recently departed Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), a poor soul who accidentally ends up in The Good Place (heaven) rather than the hell she was destined for, the show follows the deliciously unlikeable hero as she decides to become a better person in order to keep the mistake hidden from afterlife architect, Michael (Ted Danson).

But then everything gets flipped on its head.

In the season one finale, we learn that Eleanor isn’t actually in The Good Place. She is, in fact, in The Bad Place, the twist forcing us to re-evaluate everything we’ve learnt about the characters – particularly Michael.

See, it turns out he’s not actually a Good Place architect, but instead a demon enacting his own unique torture methods on unsuspecting souls, and bringing four dead humans to a fake Good Place in an attempt to make their lives a living hell. He might have first presented as a bumbling, jolly old man, but before too long his joviality sours and becomes something more sinister. A particularly conniving kind of sadist, Michael pulls apart the faults of our heroes life on Earth and uses his understanding of their weaknesses to manipulate them, convincing Jason (Manny Jacinto) he’s a silent monk and partnering Eleanor and Chidi (William Jackson Harper) together as soulmates.

Each time Eleanor discovers the truth about the Good Place, the memories of Michael’s subjects are wiped, creating a fresh new power dynamic each time the characters meet again. Chidi conducts lessons in human ethics, which also become valuable to the audience and create an engaging and intellectually coherent discussion about Kant’s maxim on lying (that to tell a lie is absolutely wrong, no matter the case), the trolley problem (would you kill one person to save five?), and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (a philosophical novel that favours free-will over determinism).

What makes this show stand out from your usual Netflix original series is the messages it leaves in its wake. Unlike your typical comedy series that might prompt a chuckle and very little else, The Good Place has you questioning who you are and what mark you’re leaving on the world.

What makes you ‘good’? What makes you ‘bad’?

Where would you end up if you were a character in the show?

“The Good Place has you questioning who you are and what mark you’re leaving on the world.

What makes you ‘good’?

What makes you ‘bad’?”

The Good Place is basically Friends 2.0, and Michael refers to the popular ’90s sitcom throughout the series. The other four humans who “accidentally” ended up in The Good Place are Eleanor’s soulmate Chidi, a highly indecisive ethics philosopher who guides Eleanor on her thebrag.com

Producer Michael Schur (Parks And Recreation) ends each episode with unexpected twists and cliffhangers, which become darker and stranger until they’re completely warped in comparison to the sting in the tail of the opening episode.

You’ll find yourself pressuring all your friends to watch the series, just so you have someone you can discuss the messed-up plotlines with.

The Good Place is in no doubt, one of the best shows currently airing right now – Schur has well and truly outdone himself.

What: The Good Place is available to stream now on Netflix Australia BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 19

arts in focus

FEATURE

Fringe: On The Edge [TV] In the wake of its tenth anniversary, Tara Broughton provides an in-depth retrospective on the J.J. Abrams sci-fi WARNING:

spoilers lie ahead

like flying zeppelins and the stillstanding twin towers – and its own threats. Those monsters who inhabit that foreign world will stop at nothing to ensure that it is their way of being that survives; that they emerge triumphant over the laws of science as we know them. Before long, it is the fate of these two worlds that rests in the hands of Dunham and Bishop.

T

here is something truly remarkable about finding a series that has the ability to both terrify and hook you within the first five minutes of the pilot episode.

And there is something, perhaps innate in all of us, that seeks out the things beyond the human; something tempted to explore the very outer reaches of our moral systems.

Co-created by cinematic genius, lens flare enthusiast and master storyteller J.J. Abrams, Fringe took us to the edge of reality, consistently leaving more questions than answers. It tempted audiences with the paranormal, unproven and the wildly imaginative, and the series holds a district aura of eeriness, as well as an undeniable compulsion to believe in the impossible.

Combine the young and dedicated FBI agent Olivia Dunham (Australian actress Anna Torv), with a dysfunctional father-son duo, the erratic and brilliant scientist Walter Bishop and conman Peter (South Australian actor John Noble and Canadian Joshua Jackson respectively), and then add a dose of LSD, a lab full of bodies and voila, you get the Fringe Division.

Suddenly, the impossible seems more than probable.

Strange occurrences are appearing all over the United States: a child is born and seconds later is found dead as an elderly man with the umbilical cord still attached, while Dunham discovers that a series of nocturnal murders are linked to

a mysterious human experiment.

And it’s through the solving of these cases – and Dunham’s acute mental resilience – that she comes to learn that she possesses psychic abilities.

That’s merely a taste of the series’ shocking first season. Whereas the show does have a penchant for the grotesque (cue the opening scene of any given episode), the remedy is found in the palate-cleansing theme composed by Abrams himself, and the ensuing conspiracy, conundrum and catastrophe. The more you believe you’re beginning to understand the series’ arc and the mythology of the expansive Fringe universe, the more sensible reasoning becomes too illogical, too rational.

Slowly but surely, you learn the truth: there are multiples of everything – and not all of those copies are benign. There’s a war brewing: a war between this world and the one next door, and the elements of known scientific method begin to collide with the less acclaimed notions of fringe science (or pseudoscience), effectively blurring the boundaries set by our own broken and reductive reasoning.

“Its success and value also lies in its genuine connectedness and empathy with and for the human soul.”

While the Fringe team uncovers the threats of a mysterious Doomsday machine and inter-universe battles, Observers (enigmatic time-travellers with the ability to see the future) watch on, occasionally intervening in order to fulfil their purpose: maintaining balance in the timeline.

Fringe is phenomenal not only in its casting or in the wonderful execution of hypothetical science and often

As the series progresses, the very fabric of reality is stretched to the point of tearing, until we can begin to see through to The Other Side.

And those who live on the outer reaches of reality know about us; they see us for what we are. The Alternate Universe is home to its own peculiarities – creations ludicrous ventures into the unknown: its success and value also lies in its genuine connectedness and empathy for the human soul. It does not refrain from tackling themes such as childhood abandonment, forgiveness and sacrifice, and doing so with a wide-eyed wonder lacking in so many television shows.

In its leanest, meanest form, the show reminds us of our own mortality; the broken systems of our own morality. That’s part of the reason why, ten years on, Fringe still lives on through its characters, its mythology and its steadfast belief that the boundaries of the possible really are only a matter of perspective.

Spanning five seasons, Fringe was a series that began as an ambitious and, more often than not, daring police procedural with compelling characters and a barrage of loose ends begging to be tied up. But as the seasons progressed and the characters started to mirror real, believable people, Fringe evolved to become an insight into the chasm of consequence, where the repercussions of our choices quickly become apparent.

“As the seasons progressed and the characters started to mirror real, believable people, the series evolved to become an insight into the chasm of consequence.”

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Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald), Virginia Venit (Julie Bowen) and Happy Gilmore (Adam Sandler) in Happy Gilmore

Happy Gilmore:

Shooter:

Teeing Off S

Happy: Shooter:

ometimes in life, you just let things pass you by. For me, Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore was one of those things. It’s been over 20 years since the slapstick comedy’s initial Ben release, and the SNL actor has Madden asks since become the punchline of whether Adam jokes about people who should Sandler’s low-brow perhaps quit their day jobs. comedy is still worth Unfortunately, the joke rings true: the praise it my exposure to Sandler films received in the have continually been a huge let ’90s down.

However, for Generation X and Y, Sandler was arguably one of the funniest comedians the ’90s had to offer. The financial success of Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore (both of which provided the name for his production company Happy Madison Productions) gave Sander a reputation that allowed him to pen as many flops as he liked.

However, despite Sandler’s bad reputation, when I fi nally got round to watching Happy Gilmore recently, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it’s aged.

Happy Gilmore follows Sandler as the eponymous failed ice hockey player turned golfer (who Sandler based on a friend).

I’ll try not to spoil the plot, but even if you haven’t seen it, it’s pretty obvious where it’s going from the first half hour or so.

And, for the record, you should watch it, even in 2018.

Having no idea of its plot besides the iconic hockey slapshot technique that Gilmore brings to the golf course (a move that serves the obnoxious, infantile, yet generous character extremely well), I found myself laughing a lot more than expected.

Indeed, what allows the film to hold onto its timeliness is the antagonist, Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald).

Without a completely hateable character to bounce off, a lot of the magic in the movie would have been lost.

Contrast Happy Gilmore to Sandler’s more recent flops and it becomes clear that what his later work lacks is a reason to care. Take the case of Jack And Jill, a film

lacking in drama, conflict, and even resolution: why would anyone be interested in watching Sandler crudely dress up like a woman, let alone watch him go through a whole sad comedy routine for some two interminable hours?

Julie Bowen (now know for her role as Claire Dunphy in Modern Family) plays Virginia Venit, Gilmore’s love interest and the tournament’s public relations manager.

She deems Gilmore “a publicist’s dream”, a beacon of light in an otherwise stuffy and pompous sport.

Amusingly, Happy Gilmore also features a cameo from The Price Is Right’s Bob Barker, who plays himself in an award-winning Gilmore and Barker fight scene. Barker insisted he perform his own stunts, having trained in Tang Soo Do karate for decades under Chuck Norris (you can’t make this shit up), a nod to Sandler and co-writer Tim Herlihy’s fine-tuned skill for writing in-jokes.

In many ways, it feels like Sandler has been chasing a film like this ever since it came out, and perhaps he’s yet to grow up since co-writing Happy Gilmore – just read up on his film That’s My Boy and you’ll get the gist of what he’s spent the last little while doing. Sandler has a knack for portraying characters who have frequent violent outbursts: his best role could well be Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 Punch-Drunk

FEATURE

You’re in big trouble, pal. I eat pieces of sh*t like you for breakfast.

You eat pieces of sh*t for breakfast? ...NO!

“Without a completely hateable character to bounce off, a lot of the magic in the movie would have been lost.”

Love, and perhaps worst is Anger Management.

As Harvey Dent once muttered in The Dark Knight: “you either die, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Not sure he was thinking about Adam Sandler, but it’s unfortunately quite relevant here when you consider his later body of work.

For anyone that’s looking to improve their golf game, maybe stay away from this film. Speaking from experience, trying Gilmore’s signature shot on the actual golf course can lead to severe embarrassment. And for those who, like me, haven’t seen Happy Gilmore before, start your 2018 right.

Bob Barker in Happy Gilmore

What: Happy Gilmore is available for streaming on Netflix now

“Barker insisted he perform his own stunts, having trained in Tang Soo Do karate for decades under Chuck Norris.”

“‘You either die, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.’

Unfortunately, for Adam Sandler, it’s a quote that’s quite relevant here.”

Adam Sandler in Happy Gilmore

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arts in focus

FEATURE

Swinging Safari: Time Capsule [FILM] Don’t be fooled by Stephan Elliott’s lighthearted exterior – as Michael Kennedy learns, there’s real darkness lurking underneath it

S

tephan Elliott’s new film Swinging Safari is an insane, Vallium-infused romp through the chaos of 1970s Australia. It’s a maelstrom of beached whales and blue bottle stings, set against the backdrop of a neighbourhood in flux, and in turmoil.

The film focuses primarily on the plight of three families; the

“Shit happens: we live through it.”

Marches, Halls, and Joneses.

Whatever harmony they all might have shared is promptly shattered after the March and Jones matriarchs’ ill fated plan to host a good-old-fashioned key party while the kids are playing upstairs.

And an unexpected conscientious objection from two attendees

brings the party to an immediate close, thrusting the couples’ gripes with each other and their neighbours into the light of day.

For all the heightened comedy and whimsy of the film, there is something almost sinister beneath – a kind of eerie undercurrent that Elliott believes is integral to the story he wished to tell.

“The darkness is what interests me” says Elliott. “The funny stuff is just fine.” And while the film has been widely lauded, that selfsame darkness has not been lost on audiences in test screenings.

“People say that it’s a cruel and it’s a poisonous film, and some people have said that my wit can be quite nasty. But it all really happened.”

The authenticity of the picture is something that Elliott values.

As bizarre as the wash of bad decisions made by the film’s parents gets – not to mention the questionable sexual behaviours that lead to their initial fracas – Eliott is here to ardently assure one that there’s truth to every scene.

“It was uncomfortable,” he admits.

“I was uncomfortable. It was pretty harsh and funny, but I didn’t lie with this one: it’s the first time ever

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I’ve actually not made stuff up – and I’m sorry, it happened. Shit happens: we live through it.”

One aspect of the film that was frequently flagged as problematic in screenings was the plight of the Jones family’s pet turtle, tethered to a hills hoist by a hole drilled in its shell. Despite multiple calls to cut the scene, Elliott is a fierce defender of the turtle’s futile struggle. “I mean, that’s your metaphor,” he says, “that’s your metaphor for the whole film, just going round and round. That’s got a lot of baggage for me.”

The baggage from Elliott’s childhood might have made for a great script, but it meant the film was a long time coming. “It took me three weeks to write it and it took me 35 to 40 years to think about it; to process it.” After amassing decades of anecdotes and ideas, at 50 he finally properly put pen to paper and found the process more challenging than he anticipated.

Nonetheless, the challenge resulted in an ensemble of blisteringly flawed, authentic characters. Elliott believes at the core of his heroes’ poor decisions is a desire simply to be happy. thebrag.com

BOOKS

“Our isolation made really interesting animals, flora and fauna – and I think the people came out just as interesting as the kangaroos.”

“When that cast came on board, specifically with the adults, I said, ‘These are my words, what do you think? Do with them what you want, and if you ever get into trouble, become your parents.’”

When asked what Swinging Safari has to say about modern Australia, Elliott is quick to point to the magic of his own childhood.

“I rode a bike and went to school on my own and sometimes didn’t even make school and no one cared. I came home at 11 o’clock at night cut and bleeding and no one gave a shit.”

“They’re not happy, but they really want to be and in this new consumer age they’re in now they think, ‘Well, I should be happy and everything we’re going to do now is about looking for this happiness.’”

The adult cast, comprised of Julian McMahon, Radha Mitchell, Guy Pearce, Kylie Minogue, Asher Keddie and Jeremy Sims portray the parents with a perfect blend of empathy and spite. The final script was also heavily influenced by the actors’ improvisation, and Elliott trusted his cast completely.

“People say that it’s a cruel and it’s a poisonous film, and some people have said that my wit can be quite nasty.

But it all really happened.” thebrag.com

With all of the questionable decisions the parents make in the film, Swinging Safari becomes in its own peculiar way a statement on how to raise children, and how to foster resilience. “The only way you know that you’re going to fall off a monkey bar is to fall off a monkey bar. It’s how it works.

You’ve got to lose your skin on your knees. You’ve got to lose a tooth. You know that if you jump off there you’re going to get hurt and then you never jump off it again. We now have a generation that are no longer even allowed to jump off there.”

Finally, when asked why Australian audiences respond so well to the sort of kitsch that runs rampant through Swinging Safari, Elliott believes it has to do with our collective – and rather bleak – sense of humour.

“Australians are funny bastards, you know, larrikins. It’s kind of dying now, but there isn’t an Australian around the world who isn’t afraid of making a complete dick of themselves. There’s an honesty there, and a larrikinism that is just so us, and I’m scared now as we’re getting more and more into American culture that it’s just dying.”

In that way, Swinging Safari is an attempt to celebrate the humour and character that Elliott perceives as uniquely Australian – a culture that is changing, slowly but surely. “Our isolation made really interesting animals, flora and fauna – and I think the people came out just as interesting as the kangaroos. Now that isolation is going.”

What: Swinging Safari is in Australian cinemas now

arts in focus

The Letters Of Sylvia Plath is uncompromising reading What: The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940 – 1956 is available for purchase through Allen & Unwin

Ryu Murakami’s Piercing will horrify you What: A new edition of Piercing is out now through Penguin

R

yu Murakami doesn’t seem to mind much if you don’t care about his characters. The controversial drummer-turned-author-turnedfilmmaker-turned-author-again has spent several decades honing his own distinctly cruel, obsidian black style – in novels like Audition, the basis for Takashi Miike’s horrifying film of the same name, protagonists and antagonists alike are used like scalpels, to score and peel back skin.

So perhaps it goes without saying that Piercing, Murakami’s masterpiece, is not for the faint-hearted.

First published in 1994 to the palpable dismay of queasy, easily off-put critics, the book has been reprinted to promote a forthcoming film adaptation starring Australia’s own Mia Wasikowska. And yet whether or not the cinematic version sinks or soars – early critical notices sadly point to the former option – one thing is clear: the 23 years Piercing has spent turning stomachs and expanding minds have obviously done nothing to dull its sharp edges. The lean, almost haiku-like novella still has the power to horrify, and to haunt.

Piercing is almost all plot, and goes something like this: Kawashima Masayuki, a by all-appearances ordinary businessman, finds himself suddenly gripped by the desire to stab his newly born infant with an icepick. Nothing he does seems to be able to shake the murderous thought, and he finds himself hovering nightly above his daughter’s crib, wracked by a kind of existential agony.

Unable to do the deed but unable to free himself from thinking about it, he comes up with a novel solution, one born of a lopsided, cracked thought process that Murakami details with psychiatrist’s remove – if Masayuki has to kill someone, better it be a sex worker rather than his own flesh and blood.

So, Kawashima books himself a hotel room, buys a combat knife, selects a victim, and prepares to cleanse himself of his awful thoughts, only to discover that his sacrificial lamb, Sanada Chiaki, has murderous instincts of her own. And thus begins a vicious game of cat and mouse – a kind of complicated, blood-soaked courtship process that parodies the ‘boy meets girl’ happenstance of Mills and Boon romance novels.

It’s truly disturbing stuff, full of mutilation, self-harm and child abuse. But there is a kind of alien intelligence to its viciousness, something buried in it akin to the gleam of quiet intent that guides a shark. Of course, there will be those who hate the novel – who find it repulsive, and its central relationship between a by turns vulnerable and deranged sex worker and an icy psychopath about as nuanced as The Night Porter’s love affair between a concentration camp survivor and a one-time member of the SS. But for us sickos, it is a sheer, cruel pleasure – as abrupt and powerful as an blade through the eye.

Joseph Earp

Y

ou’re always going to feel a bit like a gravedigger when going through a writer’s collected private correspondence, but The Letters Of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940 – 1956 is even more unsettlingly revealing than most volumes of its kind. Beginning when the acclaimed American poet was a mere eight years old and finishing up some seven years before her death, The Letters makes for uncompromising and frequently uncomfortable reading – by about the halfway mark, one starts feeling more like a thief or an uninvited guest than a sympathetic listener.

That said, the book’s first hundred pages are easier to get through than anything else that follows. In them Plath is little more than a young girl, and her correspondence is fittingly, endearingly ordinary. She writes about her favourite book (A Fairy To Stay), the exploits of her family’s chickens, and includes her early attempts at poetry (in one short verse she rhymes “bluebells ring” with “flowers sing.”) There are no great portents of her poetic ability, or the darkness that she would come to write about: in these pages, Plath is just a young girl, quietly humming her way through life. It’s loveable stuff – but one gets nothing from it that could not be gleaned from reading the musings of any other bright young person at Plath’s age.

Then things get considerably messier – and, by no coincidence, far more interesting for Plath scholars – when the poet hits puberty. It’s then that her distinct worldview starts to form itself out of clay and detritus: a voracious scholar, she begs her mother and friends to send her reading material of any kind, thanking them for the “juicy” envelopes of articles and cuttings they mail her way. And her manner of writing – and, for that matter, of thinking – comes to solidify like so much setting cement. She has a “memory like water”, she tells her mother; she spends time fighting off “ulcer-attacks”; she mourns the “long hard death” of her father.

The figure casting a controversial shadow over the book’s final fifth, is, of course, Ted Hughes. Emerging initially in the pages as a figure of pure light – Plath calls him an “internationally-known poet and genius” when announcing her secret marriage to Hughes to her new brother-in-law – through Plath’s eyes and letters, the man slowly begins to distort and change. By the volume’s end, the cracks haven’t just started to emerge: they’re threatening to swallow Plath whole.

The Letters is not a volume for casual Plath fans – but then, its considerable heft makes that clear from the outset.

And even though reading it might more than occasionally prove tough, awkward going, here and there lie pearls – moments of Plath’s intelligence, skill and wit, fully-formed and gleaming.

Joseph Earp

“The 23 years Piercing has spent turning stomachs and expanding minds have obviously done nothing to dull its sharp edges.”

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arts in focus ■ Film

In the world of Netflix’s Altered Carbon, death is not the end

By Cameron Williams

A

ltered Carbon is set in the distant future where human personalities are stored digitally in ‘stacks’ that look like futuristic pogs.

Remember pogs? They’re back, in Altered Carbon form. A person can become immortal if their stack remains intact, and when people die in the physical world, their stack is put in a new body, also known as a ‘sleeve’.

For that reason, ‘re-sleeving’ becomes like doing a trade-in on a used car for a new one, but economics, class and religious beliefs dictate how people die or are reborn. Wealthy citizens pay for better sleeves, while poor people have to deal with whatever is available in the public system. If you die in your original body as a kid and you can’t afford a fancy new sleeve, you could be re-sleeved into the body of an 80-yearold. Cloning your original body to re-sleeve into is also a possibility, but it’ll cost you. Oh, and if people get murdered they can be re-sleeved to point out their killer, or if their death is an accident they get a new body. And before I forget, artificial intelligence also exists, but they appear and avatars but are considered outdated and lame. Are you exhausted yet?

The Netflix original series, based on Richard K. Morgan’s novel of the same name, pummels the science fiction smarts at

play into a pulpy mess.

The plot focuses on Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman/Will Yun Lee), an elite solider who is re-sleeved and hired by a rich guy (James Purefoy) to investigate the death of himself. Yep, rich people are still massive self-absorbed jerks in the future but the idea is a surreal one: the ability to hire someone to solve your own murder.

Each episode of Altered Carbon lobs up something interesting in a futuristic world that puts digital minds over matter. The major hurdle is wrangling the justification for each piece of technology and the lingo; it’s a decathlon of ideas. Altered Carbon is always setting itself up without progressing the plot, because it gets stuck explaining science fiction jargon without a hope of being saved by its horrible dialogue.

But once Altered Carbon begins to offer concepts to mull over, the show opts to splatter brain matter over the walls. Altered Carbon puts science fiction through the Game Of Thrones filter, and favours gratuitous violence and sex over the hard work of establishing the central ideas of the show.

There’s a softcore quality to the way the sex scenes are shot and the camera leers at as many boobs as it can. For balance, you do see Kinnaman’s butt, which must have its own agent based on the number of times it appears. Altered Carbon may be science fiction

Altered Carbon

“The series pummels the science fiction smarts at play into a pulpy mess.” in spirit, but it has the hormones of a 16-year-old pumping through each frame.

Still, the haphazard way people use their bodies in Altered Carbon highlights the way sleeves are treated like old sneakers.

Debauchery rules because mortality no longer applies and eternity offers boredom, which is when the worst human impulses emerge. The world of Altered Carbon is in favour of the rich, so they have the most fun at everyone else’s expense. And though there are a few times when the gratuitous nature of the show works to its advantage, it reverts to overkill as the series drags on.

It’s sure to launch a 1000 woke takes, but the most fascinating part of the show is that Kinnaman, a white actor, is playing an Asian character

“Once Altered Carbon begins to offer concepts to mull over, the show opts to splatter brain matter over the walls.”

originally played by Lee in flashbacks. Despite what you think of the casting – Lee’s performance is vital to establishing the character, but given he gets much less screen time, I can understand why people will be angry – the show does explain how people can be put in sleeves against their will.

Altered Carbon is more intuitive about what this decision says regarding the setting, rather than the horrid whitewashing most recently found in the blockbuster adaptation of Ghost In The Shell.

Takeshi Kovacs is a witness to a world he didn’t want to be a part of, experiencing it via a white body, and there’s a rage in Kinnaman’s performance that builds on Lee’s work. Altered Carbon is reminiscent of Cloud Atlas in the way a soul can transcend the physical trappings of a body, but it has the technology to explain how it’s possible.

Once you throw in the way religious questions, the nature of the ‘stack life’ and the right to die, there’s

a lot more to consider about how this world is constructed… But then more boobs get in the way.

There are cool ideas within Altered Carbon – you just have to sift through the all the blood, splatter and flesh piled on top. The tech noir feel of Altered Carbon is a tiny saving grace, and there are enough trench coats for it to hang heavily on Blade Runner as a reference point, but that seems like the easiest shortcut to take.

All that said, like Ridley Scott’s iconic film, Altered Carbon, at its core, is a private eye tale with a mystery that’s enticing enough to make it worth binging if you’ve got nothing left to watch.

Be warned though: the constant shift from clever science fiction and schlock is jarring, and Altered Carbon limps though ten episodes that are made to feel like 20.

What: Altered Carbon is available on Netflix now

“The major hurdle is wrangling the justification for each piece of technology and the lingo; it’s a decathlon of ideas.”

Coco

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■ FILM

The BBQ is the worst film that I have ever seen

By Joseph Earp

T

here’s this famous philosophical thought experiment about the nature of knowledge that goes something like this: imagine a woman named Kathy who has spent her entire life locked up in a cell, deprived of colour. Her whole world is black and white – her clothes, the walls of her prison, the food that gets delivered to her every day. She has never seen a splash of red in her life. But despite this – or maybe because of it – she is obsessed with red.

With the help of books delivered to her prison, she studies red: comes to understand everything about it. She even writes an academic paper on red, one so acclaimed that it wins her an award.

Now imagine that the people who have trapped Kathy, whoever they might be, allow her to leave the prison in order to collect the award. They take her to the ceremony with a blindfold on, lead her into the auditorium, and then, when it is time

thebrag.com

arts reviews The BBQ

“It is hard to explain how continually and catastrophically wrong-footed The BBQ is.”

■ TV

A Futile And Stupid Gesture is about as funny as terminal cancer

By Joseph Earp

A Futile And Stupid Gesture

A

Futile And Stupid Gesture is a film about one of the funniest men in contemporary comedy – Douglas Kenney, the godfather of the National Lampoon brand, and the brains behind Caddyshack, Animal House, and a swathe of the most shocking satirical editorial of the seventies and eighties. And yet those expecting the feature film, which debuted at Sundance late last month and was rushed onto Netflix within a matter of days, to be even half as amusing as the works of its subject should steel themselves for disappointment now.

for her to take the stage, whip the covering off her eyes. She steps into the bright lights, dazzled, only to see the master of ceremonies come at her with an award and a bunch of roses. “Oh,” she says, dazzled by the flowers. “So that’s what red looks like.”

The point of the story, crudely put, is thus: the foundation of our knowledge is the world itself. You can’t gain a true understanding simply by abstractly studying something – you have to experience it, firsthand.

I have watched a lot of very bad films in my life. I have sat through Tommy Wiseau’s The Room; through the complete works of Paul Anderson, the CGI-fattened hack behind Mortal Kombat; through every ungodly minute of Michael Bay’s Transformers films. And I have written about these films: picked them apart, and sought to understand them.

But evidently, such study alone could not teach me what depths truly inept filmmakers can scrape. A few weeks ago I watched The BBQ, an Australian “comedy” starring Shane Jacobson, Magda

Szubanski, celebrity chef Manu Feildel, and a bunch of bit players who look as though they have been forced to act at gunpoint.

And about 20 minutes into the film, I had my very own roses moment – the startling realisation that real garbage had hitherto been unknown to me. That I had been blind to how ugly art could be; how vile, and racist, and unwatchable cinema could truly get.

Like Rocky rewritten by Milo Yiannopoulos, The BBQ is what could generously be described as an underdog story. The film follows the exploits of meat enthusiast Dazza Cook (Jacobson) who, shortly after accidentally poisoning his friends and family with off prawns, finds himself entered into an international barbecue competition.

Guided by a grizzled and hard-drinking master chef (Szubanski), he battles an arrogant rival (Feildel), a domineering father-in-law, and the expectations of all that have long doubted him.

Oh, and the French. See, Dazza, loveable, grizzly larrikin that he is, can’t stand poncey Europeans.

Neither can the film’s director and co-writer

“Like Rocky rewritten

by Milo Yiannopoulos, The BBQ is what could generously be described as an underdog story.” thebrag.com

Stephen Amis, it seems – one character outright calls French people “dirty”, and Feildel’s character is a marble-mouthed, horse meat-eating stereotype.

Oh, and then there’s the matter of Dazza’s ancestry.

See, the wise-cracking, dad-joke dropping suburban hero isn’t just any Cook – he reckons he’s related to the Cook; as in, Captain James. Dazza just loves the guy – although, as he hastens to add early in the film, it’s the historical Cook’s “sense of adventure” he’s into, as opposed to what he represents as a colonial power that murdered and displaced Indigenous Australians.

It is hard to explain how continually and catastrophically wrongfooted The BBQ is. One racist, ugly joke follows the other at such an unbelievable clip that you’re barely done picking your jaw up off the floor before you’ve gotta drop it again.

It’s a film that seethes with a barely contained hate; a film with utter contempt for women, for gay people – even for vegans. Everyone is hypocritical, and dumb, and twisted, and weird, except for Dazza and his son, two shining bastions of ’Strayan maleness that succeed just as all those freaks around them fail.

That’s not even to get into the film’s technical issues, which are numerous. Shot on ugly and overcranked digital, The BBQ has all the style and panache

of a snuff film. It’s just so ugly; as pleasant to watch as dental reconstruction.

Cinematographer David Richardson can’t even seem to frame a simple mid-shot – he cuts off characters’ heads, fails to keep his leads in focus, and generally struggles to achieve a level of technical skill you’d expect of a workplace training video, or cheap porn.

Nobody escapes The BBQ with their reputation in tatters, but Jacobson comes off the worst. The man hasn’t been funny for ten years now, and he struggles and whimpers his way through the film like a gout-riddled, sherry-fucked grandpa trying to touch his toes.

Not that it’s necessarily his fault. In its emphatic awfulness, The BBQ feels like the fault of all of us; like some kind of curse wrought upon Australia as a nation.

None of you should see it.

Not one of you – not even those who want it to be some Room-like anti-art masterpiece.

The BBQ should sink without a trace. It should disappear into the folds of our history, and we should treat it like a covered-up crime – calling it to mind only occasionally, with a cold shiver, before going back to the great, thankless work of forgetting it.

What: The BBQ is in Australian cinemas from Thursday February 22

See, with its shrill and shockingly self-indulgent winks to camera, A Futile And Stupid Gesture is about as amusing as terminal cancer, a post-modernist piss stain that ends up insulting its hero just as it tries to honour him.

Screenwriters John Aboud and Michael Colton deserve some credit for at least trying to take a fresh look at the biopic format – attempting to emulate the anarchist impulses of Kenney themselves, they fill the film with lectures delivered to camera, constant in-jokes designed to cover up the exclusion of women and people of colour, and the incorporation of a range of different film formats, chiefly a brief excursion into comic panels.

But not a single one of their gambles pays off, and the sneering attempts at cleverness go entirely against Kenney’s own aversion to anything resembling the highbrow or the pretentious. This is a man who borrowed the perversity of R. Crumb, slathered it in pot brownie batter, stuck a coupla fire crackers up its arse and watched the whole thing blow up in a shower of sex, excess and sadism – why the fuck try to tell his story with jokes more suited for a particularly sub-par straight to video rip-off of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? The film follows Kenney, played determinedly but without much nuance by Will Forte, from his early years as an underappreciated, moody young man, through his awkward blossoming into the unwilling head of a comedy empire, right up to his tragic and unexpected death – and then even further, via a stunningly misguided narrative device that’s not half as clever as Aboud and Colton think it is.

Some critics have described what happens in the film’s third act as a twist, so I won’t spoil it. But between you and me, it’s not a twist. It’s a fucking tragedy, rather akin to watching an Olympic polevaulter break both shins upon landing. No finale has been so badly bungled since the “surprise, it’s 9/11!” twist that caps off Robert Pattinson’s teen weepy turned bizarre exploitation flick Remember Me – which is saying something.

And yet all of this would be forgiven if the film contained a single laugh – just one. An unfunny comedy might have been excusable. But an unfunny comedy about one of our most acclaimed and distinct contemporary comedic voices? That’s just a fucken’ disgrace.

What: A Futile And Stupid Gesture is available to Stream on Netflix now BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 25

ustralia

arts in focus ■ FILM

■ FILM

Nocturama isn’t half as controversial as it might sound

Lady Bird is one of the most warm-hearted films of the past decade

By Joseph Earp

By Joseph Earp Lady Bird

Nocturama

N

octurama is a hard proposition to sell, but here goes nothing: the largely wordless, poetic (read: slow) fi lm follows a group of young radicals who conduct a series of terror attacks across Paris. They blow up a government building; destroy an office tower; and set a statue of France’s bonafi de patron saint Joan of Arc on fire, all with the distinctly casual, unconcerned air that one might give off when taking out the rubbish, or disposing of junk mail.

But the fi lm isn’t really about terrorism. It’s not really about anything, in particular, which maybe makes it sound aimless, or vapid. It’s not that. Nocturama is merely a deliberately blank slate – a fi lm that one can project upon, art as vague as a Rorscach test.

As a result, there will be those who embrace it as a Terrence Malick inspired mood piece; those who see it as a character study of Bret Easton Ellis-style disaffected youth; and those who run from the thing a fucking mile.

“Nocturama’s not really about anything, in particular, which maybe makes it sound aimless, or vapid. It’s not that.”

It’s certainly not easy to love. The fi lm’s real action is done and dusted within the first act – the seeds of their anarchy sown, the group of young terrorists spend the rest of Nocturama hiding out in a shopping mall, traipsing around the deserted space like the resurrected corpses of George A. Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead. They have no real character development to speak of: David (Finnegan Oldfi eld), the de facto leader of the group, is as hard-to-read and emotionless as a gold mask donned in the fi lm’s fi nal third. He’s a sleepwalker, not a radical; a young man who shuffles through life as though 90 years old.

And yet, despite all that makes Nocturama a hard sell, the signifi cant gap between the fi lm’s form and function gives it an odd beauty of its own. This is a fi lm about one of our greatest contemporary fears – terrorism – that is shot in a way seemingly custom designed to send one to sleep; a story ripped straight from the most lurid of headlines and watered down to a thick, soupy paste.

Writer-director Bertrand Bonello is a renowned provocateur – his fi lm The Pornographer is stuffed with some of the most hardcore sex imaginable, and House Of Tolerance, his de facto masterpiece, more than occasionally stumbles over the line separating good and bad taste. But with Nocturama, he has approached the controversial in a fresh new way – not by sensationalising it, but by carefully and quietly underplaying it. Nocturama is the very defi nition of a fi lm not everyone will enjoy, but for the committed, it is full of pleasures indeed.

What: Nocturama is avaliable to stream on Netflix Australia now

26 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

T

here’s been this mistaken attitude develop that Lady Bird, the sole directorial debut of indie wunderkind Greta Gerwig, is somehow simplistic.

Perhaps it’s not hard to see why – the film is admirably, insistently small scale, and its pleasures and heartaches are gentle. But beneath its smooth exterior lies something radical; a kind of roaring empathy, as sweeping as a tidal wave.

A coming of age film set in 2002 and centred around a young self-centred and whip smart rebel named Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (played with aplomb by Saoirse Ronan, she of Atonement fame), the film’s plot is ambling.

McPherson tries out for the school play; falls in and out of love; prepares to make the leap into university and, she assumes, adulthood.

Throughout it all is the

“Lady Bird is a love story, and its ‘will they or won’t they’ ebbs and flows resemble similar beats in romances like David Lean’s Brief Encounter.” somewhat domineering presence of McPherson’s mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf, whose turn in the film has seen her rightfully nominated for an Oscar she unfortunately won’t win), a nurse who nags and nips at her teenage daughter’s heels in a way that will be familiar to all who drove their mums and dads slightly batty while ploughing through puberty.

And here’s where the charge of simplicity comes in: nothing really happens in Lady Bird – nothing but life itself, flowing past like a river of molasses. The humour is lilting and subtle

Lady Bird

“Nothing really happens in Lady Bird – nothing but life itself, flowing past like a river of molasses.”

– laughs are elicited from nods to the period setting, like the blocky plastic computer McPherson’s dad plays solitaire on and an excellently timed Justin Timberlake needle drop. And at least on the surface, the film owes a debt to the sweet, largely insubstantial mumblecore movement of the early thousands; a sub-genre that saw filmmakers like Joe Swanberg, Andrew Bujalski and Gerwig’s own husband Noah Baumbach tackle the life of young New York City intellectuals with charm and a faint dash of precociousness.

But what Lady Bird has that those treacly slices of life never even tried for is a gently subversive sense of gender politics.

See, the film is a love story, and its “will they or won’t they” ebbs and flows resemble similar beats in romances like David Lean’s Brief Encounter, and even the bitterness that fades to swooning love nestled in You’ve Got Mail and Annie Hall.

And yet crucially, this is no love story between a young man and a woman, although the film does touch on that kind of love gently, and with grace.

No. This is a love story

between a mother and a daughter – Lady Bird and Marion are our tormented, struggling couple; a pair who must fight every moment to find the words that express what they really want to say.

Most of the time they fail. Marion shouts and snaps when she means to soothe, and her high expectations – designed to help Lady Bird become “the very best version” of herself – suffocate her daughter rather than inspiring her as they should. And Lady Bird, filled to the brim with the precociousness and selfconfidence that settles on the shoulders of all those who know they’re just a little bit different, is ruder to Marion than she ever means to be.

This too is Lady Bird’s genius. Neither mother nor daughter are without fault. They both care, they both try, and they both fail, repeatedly and messily. Gerwig’s skill lies in her decision to condemn neither – Marion is as accidentally overbearing as Lady Bird is accidentally cruel, and there is clearly a lot of space in the writerdirector’s heart for both of them. Lady Bird might be autobiographical, but Gerwig treats both her own stand-in, and the fictionalised version of her own mother, with the forgiving, endless light all parents have for their children.

What: Lady Bird is out in Australian cinemas now

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arts reviews ■ TV

Here’s why the gritty, violent, and convention-breaking western Godless is making waves

By Daniel Jaramillo

Y

our classic westerns are full of stereotypical roles: cowboys hunting Indians, racial tensions between token blacks and heroic white men, and a stunning absence of women and children. And even on the (very) rare occasion the latter two groups do feature in the plot, it’s mostly to serve as victims to be rescued by sweaty, deserttanned male protagonists.

“Godless manages to stay true to the ugliness and horror of the old West.”

“Set in 1884, just after the American Civil War, Godless tells – in almost magic realist style – the story of a dreadful mining accident that kills all the men of La Belle.”

idea for the plot. “She said, ‘There were several towns in New Mexico where all of the men died in an accident in a single afternoon stranding the women in these places.

And sometimes the women would leave and move on. And sometimes they would stick around and try and make a go of it.’ And I thought, ‘Wow. What a great starting point.’”

Originally written as a feature length movie, executive producer Steven Soderbergh persuaded Frank to develop the screenplay into a miniseries, and the result is markedly more satisfying.

A slower pace proves crucial in telling the story authentically, and gives the audience a chance to digest the plot and understand the characters’ personalities and motivations more deeply.

Godless

“At a time when the representation of race relations and gender conventions is finally shifting towards the progressive, we’re now living in a post-bland-narrative paradise.”

However, at a time when the representation of race relations and gender conventions is finally shifting towards the progressive, we’re now living in a postbland-narrative paradise of longform serial television.

The classic western is being radically reimagined and retold.

The first episode of Godless has a bold opening: a group of horsemen come riding into La Belle, New Mexico, only to discover the aftermath of an atrocity; everyone, excluding women and children, have been left for dead. Set in 1884, just after the American Civil War, Godless tells – in almost magic realist style – the story of a dreadful mining accident that kills all the men of La Belle, leaving the widowed women to take charge of their community and their destinies.

thebrag.com

The story’s catalyst is Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell), an anti-hero who find himself hunted by the infamous outlaw Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels) and his 30-men gang. Frank raised Roy as strong a child and brought him into his family of bandits, but after one murder and rape too many, Roy shoots his surrogate “Papi’s” arm off and steals his money.

Eventually, Roy finds refuge in the town of La Belle, where window Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery) hires him as live-in cowboy on the farm she runs with her American-Indian son and mysterious mother-inlaw.

Frank’s response to Roy’s betrayal is to annihilate whatever town gives him refuge, and for that reason, La Belle is doomed. Not that

Frank particularly seems to care – one of his most intriguing character traits is his fearlessness in the face of death. He’s protected by his belief that he knows the exact whereabouts and means of his passing, and plays that particular hand extraordinarily close to his chest.

Godless also introduces the Buffalo Soldiers, freed black men with military might and a distrust for all who visit their land. They play a minor role, but quickly prove culturally relevant to the historical period of the series.

Showrunner Scott Frank does a stellar job of portraying life in the 1880’s, and Godless manages to stay true to the ugliness and horror of the old West. The show never once attempts to romanticise the period;

instead, it confronts the audience with the violent nature of humanity, and its women have the same levels of agency as its men.

Much to its credit, the characters in Godless are never one-dimensional, and even a merciless villain like Griffin occasionally shows flashes of his humanity – in one episode, he rides into a town where everyone is dying from chickenpox, and helps a struggling teenage girl feed and clean the sick while his men bury the dead.

Indeed, Frank seems determined to break every convention he encounters – his female heroes single-handedly protect themselves against the

male outlaws who are set to obliterate their town, and the show takes a thoroughly contemporary, pro-feminist approach to a predominately male-subjugated genre.

“I had always wanted to write a western. I thought any self-respecting screenwriter at some point has to give it a crack,” Frank told NPR. “And I wanted to do something different that I hadn’t seen before.

And that’s tricky because there have been so many westerns.”

The project came to fruition after Frank was approached

by TV and film researcher Mimi Munson, who has worked by his side for around 17 years; she was the one who gave him the

In true western tradition, the panoramic shots of landscapes and mountains are part of the allure of Godless – but, crucially, the overriding role horses play is actually relatively groundbreaking. Audiences are used to horses telling us a lot about their rider’s human qualities, and yet in Godless, the loyalty horses have to their owners and the trust that is involved in that relationship is genuinely unique.

In that way, Godless provides a fresh take on the western: it modernises the genre, unearthing issues present in the human condition that were true two centuries ago, and remain true to this day. The gritty, violent and wicked series is a must-see for anyone who values highbrow television and quality, scenic storytelling.

What: Godless is available to stream now on Netflix

BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 27

game on

FEB

2018

Gaming news and reviews with Adam Guetti

New Releases With 2018 now in full swing, February has plenty of quality games vying for your attention. First up on Friday February 2 is UFC 3. You can enter the octagon with a brand new animation technology designed to make things more realistic than ever, and the game smacks its way onto PS4 and XBO.

Not too far behind is the revitalised version of Shadow of the Colossus, which isn’t just prettier, but completely remade from the ground up.

You can find it on PS4 from Wednesday February 7.

Should you prefer something more extreme, then check out Monster Energy Supercross – The Official Videogame for PS4 and XBO on Tuesday February 13. Alternatively, PS4 and XBO gamers can also hack and slash their way to victory when Dynasty Warriors 9 hits shelves on the same day.

reviewroundup

Then on Friday February 16, Switch owners are able to catch up on the crazy shenanigans of the Bayonetta franchise when Bayonetta 2 blasts onto the system. The good news is that a download code for the first game will also be included, just in time for the incoming sequel.

Finally, we have the eventual release of Metal Gear Survive on Thursday February 22, which is bound to turn heads due to Hideo Kojima’s lack of involvement. You can pick it up on PS4, XBO and PC to find out just how well it fares.

Review: Dragon Ball FighterZ (PS4, XBO, PC)

By Adam Guetti

Review: Propel Star Wars Battle Drone

I

f you’re a Star Wars fan, there’s certainly no shortage of products to satisfy your fandom’s desires: from VR experiences to robotic droids, the options are plentiful.

Now we have Propel’s Star Wars Battle Drones, and the good news is that they’re truly excellent.

With a $149 price tag, the level of detail is suitably immense.

Each design has been meticulously crafted, and designers have obviously done their best to transform key galactic vehicles into a drone form. Likewise, the packaged controller is a hefty beast that does a mighty fine job of setting the mood – from playing various tracks midflight or barking unexpected orders bound to make you chuckle.

That said, your first few lights are likely to be pretty rough. As with most good quality drones, the learning curve is a touch steep, but thankfully a training cage and flight simulator are on offer to help soften the blows. It is worth noting though that there seems to be an inherent drift with the Speeder, even in a calm indoor setting. However, once you’ve come to terms with the zippy controls, it shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

When you have mastered flight, you definitely have to test the unit’s Battle Mode, capable of connecting multiple drones into a single virtual death match. It all works via infrared receivers on the drone that are able to detect when they’re ‘shot’. Lose all three of your available lives and watch as your valiant warrior gracefully crashes back to ground. The likelihood of having many friends with the same drone is slim, but the thrill is equally satisfying against a single opponent and will help propel this one to the top of your wish list.

We reviewed the 74-Z Speeder Bike, but a T-65 X-Wing Starfighter and TIE Advanced X1 Fighter are also available from major retailers like JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman.

Review: AO Tennis (PS4, XBO)

28 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

Review: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (XBO)

P

UBG has certainly become something of a phenomenon on PC, but XBO owners unfortunately won’t exactly be getting the same experience. While the PC iteration has benefited from a stream of updates, the console port suffers from both stuttering and framerate issues. Controls will be another point of contention, as although the fairly complex setup is difficult to swap onto a gamepad, the sheer restriction of buttons means key elements like inventory management become quite chaotic.

Needless to say, probably best to stick to the PC for now.

3

Review: L.A. Noire (Switch)

T

ennis fans have been waiting a hell of a long time for someone to serve up a current-gen title replicating their favourite sport. Sadly, however, AO Tennis is more double fault than impressive ace.

The foundations are certainly in place, but wooden animations, a lack of key players and a lacklustre Australian Open mode constantly undermine the experience. Perhaps polish in future updates can rectify the situation – otherwise this is for harcore fans looking for a quick fix only.

E

ven though countless games based on the popular anime have already been released, Dragon Ball FighterZ is without question one of the best.

The big plus is that everything looks and feels right at home – almost as though it was ripped right from the show. The team-based, three-on-three fighter sports a comprehensive story mode with an original narrative, while always keeping the complexity of the core gameplay in check. There’s enough depth for hardcore fans without dissuading newcomers, so 4 jump on in.

L 3

.A. Noire was an excellent adventure when it released back in 2011, and this Switch re-release is no different. While it may not pack the visual fidelity of the updated XBO and PS4 versions, it’s an understandable trade-in that allows true portability.

Meanwhile, though some may see the extra motion controls as a gimmick, they actually help provide a fresh experience if you’ve cracked the case once before. This is a more than worthy addition for your catalogue.

4.5

thebrag.com

out & about

Queer(ish) matters with Arca Bayburt

Memes, Dreams and Queens

S

ince the offline world has little to offer by way of gathering spaces for LGBTQ+ women, it’s only natural that the interwebs would step in as a surrogate hang-out for displaced homos everywhere. For the purposes of this particular column however, I’m going to focus specifically on queer women.

“IT ALSO ALLOWS US TO EXPRESS THE SPECIFICITY OF OUR EXPERIENCES.”

I’ve mentioned it before in my past ramblings, but the social habitats of queer women have gone the way of the rainforests. They’re being razed at an alarming rate, so we’ve had to haul ass and find someplace else to live; well, our continuously fragmenting culture did anyway.

I’d always prefer to dwell in the backroom of a random club as opposed to scrolling through queer Tumblr accounts, but I’m not the boss of the world, and I do really dig the camaraderie you can find online. The beauty of it all (and perhaps where it scores an extra point over a physical space) is that the internet not only allows for us to express the diversity of our experiences, it also allows us to express the specificity of our experiences.

Online places like OurChart (which bit the dust in 2008) have been an interesting stop-gap. It remains to be seen whether we’ll ever really have a centralised network of gay shit to flock to ever again – some megachurch of queerdom or the like. Instead, I believe we’ll have lots of little decentralised networks across a bunch of platforms, all communicating in a visual language, in an attempt to connect and experience catharsis. Why else do gays gather together if not to experience catharsis and/or get laid?

Anyway, I’m really talking about memes here. In one of my previous columns for this magazine, I wrote about the weirdo experience of going to the doctor as a gay woman. I was pleased to have finally put into words the strange, twilight zone-esque interaction I’ve had with health practitioners over the years. A friend of mine then linked me to an Instagram account called xenaworrierprincess. One of her posts hit me real hard. I was taken aback by having looked at a picture for all of two seconds, and somehow have it expertly distil the experience I wrote about with a swat-like efficiency that you can’t really get out of reading through 800 or so words.

“A LOT OF FEMMEPRESENTING LGBQTIA+ WOMEN ARE GENERALLY INVISIBLE.” thebrag.com

It starts with the line, “me: sexually active, not trying to conceive, not using contraception,” and is followed with the words “Trained medical professional”, that is accompanied by a picture of woman working out seemingly impossible equations in her mind.

It’s just too good. It’s perfect. I then spent the next hour scrolling through, feeling so uber connected to my fellow gay brethren that I couldn’t stop giggling. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say. I’m always impressed by clever folks who can produce memes that epitomise such a searing truth.

I’m also fascinated by the flavour of some of the humour.

A lot of it centres around mental illness, a big thing in queer communities that we all try to acknowledge, yet continue to suffer through because of the nature of the world we live in. It doesn’t seem to be self-pitying nor is it glamourising mental illness: it’s merely bringing it out into the open and letting others know that their experiences are shared. Like I said, catharsis.

Short of whistling the L Word theme song every time they’re out in public, a lot of femme-presenting LGBQTIA+ women are generally invisible and will have a harder time signposting their sexuality. This has been a longstanding problem, simply because the stereotype of a masculine-presenting woman is the only imagery the cultural mainstream has for “same-sex attracted female.” There’s no room for femmes in this, so they’re edged out or seen as outliers or exceptions – which is a ridiculous myth.

“I’M ALWAYS IMPRESSED

BY CLEVER FOLKS WHO CAN PRODUCE MEMES THAT EPITOMISE SUCH A SEARING TRUTH.”

This is where the internet levels the playing field a little. Most online places skew towards inclusion and tend to actively defy these stereotypes – something that happens less often in real life.

Let’s not forget that most mainstream discourse focuses on men, and that women are almost always the secondary consideration. So, you’ve got a group of people with rapidly diminishing social spaces in real life, and a simultaneously flourishing online presence which allows the deeper, darker, stickier aspects of gay life to be shown off, dissected and worked through. It’s not all about gay marriage and Mardi Gras (both of which usually use gay men as their primary imagery): there are other aspects to queer life for women that are only understood by those who’ve experienced them.

If there’s an Instagram account that manages to transcend all of this crap and bring these women together in a shared fever-dream of the gayest shit ever, then that’s a real winner.

BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 29

FEATURE

Kardajala Kirridarra:

Sandhill Women Augustus Welby learns about the empathic power of music with Eleanor Dixon and Beatrice Lewis

K

ardajala Kirridarra’s ‘Two Worlds Collide’, the second track off their debut record Bardakurru Ngurra, is an apt summary of the artistic journey that birthed the seven-track album.

The Northern Territory quartet, named after a bush woman from sandhills behind the community of Marlinja, sing in a combination of English and the Indigenous language Mudburra, and their songwriting merges traditional melodies and percussion with electronic production and elements of hip hop and dream pop.

Bringing these various musical formats and traditions together wasn’t exactly straightforward, but it’s resulted in a profoundly enthralling record, one that grew out of the personal and artistic connection of songwriters Eleanor ‘Nalyiri’ Dixon and Beatrice ‘Nalyiri’ Lewis. “[The album] is a bit of a reflection of mine and Eleanor’s relationship,” says multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and producer Lewis. “That’s just naturally what I am, that’s just naturally what she is and that’s just what naturally happens when we came together.

“Eleanor [the project’s lead vocalist] has really great music taste. To meet someone in the desert who had really good taste, but who I could also show a bunch more music – and then Eleanor could show me a bunch of stuff that she liked and also take me on a bit of a cultural experience – it was a really nice coming together of different worlds.”

The album was predominantly created in Dixon’s hometown of Marlinja in NT’s central desert. Lewis met Dixon when visiting Marlinja as part of the ‘Barkly Desert Cultures’ Multimedia program and the pair

“THERE WAS NO DECISION TO MAKE

SOMETHING DIFFERENT.” quickly established a mutually enriching songwriting partnership. Released mid-2017, the collaborative album is a truly signature collection of music that sounds contemporary and fresh, yet otherworldly and distinct as well.

“There was no decision to make something different,” says Lewis. “It was just me and Eleanor in a hall in Marlinja, sometimes in the heat, sometimes in the cold, sometimes in the rain; just making music and telling a story. It was Eleanor showing me songs that had cool synth sounds and me trying to replicate that sound. Eleanor’s dad makes amazing clap sticks so we were using them and using all these different sounds from around [the area].”

Kardajala Kirridarra’s songs typically feature pulsing beats and ethereal synths along with a melodic swirl of voices – not to mention both spoken word and rap sequences provided by MC Kayla Jackson. The group’s fourth member is Dixon’s aunty, Janey ‘Namija’ Dixon, who guaranteed an appropriate application of the Mudburra language.

“Sometimes we were writing the story in English, sometimes writing it in Mudburra, then working with Janey who’s the translator and elder,” says Lewis. “Eleanor and Janey would translate it and work on it and help bring it all together.

“We were just being honest and being ourselves. And maybe when you’re not trying to be anything by default

you just make something unique.”

Lyrically, much of the album takes an up-close look at the lives of women, particularly within Indigenous Australian communities. The songs varyingly focus on a woman’s journey in the world, the place of women in society and how they ought to be respected and celebrated.

And it’s this emphatic focus on the feminine experience that proved to be a major creative motivator throughout the writing of Bardakurru Ngurra.

“The first song that we ever wrote together was ‘Abala Barlawa’, which is the first song on the album,” Lewis says. “When we wrote that we were both enamoured with the collaboration. From there, Eleanor talked about wanting to tell story of an Indigenous woman and the cycles of life that she went through and that people go through. So, the whole seven songs are the story of a woman – not necessarily in order.

“It’s an important story and one that probably doesn’t get told that much, because we live in a very strong male society and their stories get told a lot.

So it was a very conscious decision to be writing that journey, and it’s also the journey that Eleanor knows.”

Albums of this kind – a body of work containing honest, detailed and praiseoriented songs about women – are oft underestimated within the Australian music canon. Against this backdrop,

Kardajala Kirridarra’s growing profile is of great significance. “When you hear stories of other people and there’s a deeper understanding, that’s when people can start to learn about each other and create understanding. I feel like that’s when greater empathy and peace and connection can happen.

“You can watch certain issues on the news and it feels so far away, but when you actually hear peoples’ stories and connect with what’s actually happening human-to-human, that’s a really important way that humans can connect and create deeper relationships ... I think that art and music are really good ways of doing that.”

Music is indeed an invaluable tool for spreading empathy, and Kardajala Kirridarra are one of an increasing number of diverse outfits gaining traction in the Australian music scene. That said, Lewis admits to not being overly focused on the political weight of the record during its production.

“When we were making the album I was just having a really beautiful creative time with Eleanor and Janey and Kayla.

Creating this beautiful music out in the desert, I was just really feeling it. And now in hindsight I can see it’s a really important story and I’m really glad that we’re going to tell it.”

What: Bardakurru Ngurra is out now independently on Bandcamp

“CREATING THIS BEAUTIFUL MUSIC OUT IN THE DESERT, I WAS JUST REALLY FEELING IT. AND NOW IN HINDSIGHT I CAN SEE IT’S A REALLY

IMPORTANT STORY.”

30 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

thebrag.com

Lowtide photo by Tajette O'Halloran

FEATURE

“I DON’T THINK THERE WERE ANY PARTICULAR THEMES – IT WAS MORE JUST Lowtide:

Shoegaze Is Not A Dirty Word Allison Gallagher chats to Gabriel Lewis of Lowtide, one of the friendliest people in contemporary indie rock

T

erms like ‘shoegaze’ were first coined by the British music press in an attempt to denigrate the bands born out of the era – criticising the “awkward” stage presence of groups whose eyes were often glued to their stacked pedalboards during live shows.

With the advent of the internet, times have evidently changed. Case in point: Melbourne outfit Lowtide happily embrace the label to describe the lush, texturally-rich sounds that weave throughout the band’s new album, Southern Mind. “I guess when we were first starting out it was a bit of a weird thing, but it is something we identify with,” says guitarist Gabriel Lewis.

“Those shoegaze-influenced characteristics hold the sound together.

There are other elements to our sound, but we definitely draw very strongly from that. I don’t think it’s as much a dirty word these days as it used to be – I think it’s been reborn, and people are exploring and getting excited about it.

They don’t have that recollection of how it used to be a bit of a snide remark. I’d say a lot of bands that associate with

shoegaze these days probably aren’t as afraid to say so.”

Lowtide’s second full-length, Southern Mind is a hazy swirl of atmospheric guitars and lush vocal harmonies performed by Lucy Buckeridge and former member Giles Simon. Songs like ‘Alibi’ perhaps encapsulate the band at their best – enchanting, reverbsoaked guitar lines lock into one another behind a driving rhythm section, while Buckeridge’s sublime voice swims above, at once commanding and ethereal, most immediately recalling the likes of dream-pop icons Cocteau Twins.

In that way, Southern Mind feels simultaneously varied and coherent.

Each song stands solidly on its own – but the album, played through in its entirety, is a gorgeous, dizzying sonic journey.

Lewis explains that the conceptual string that ties the record together was more of a retroactive discovery than a deliberate choice, however.

“There’s a few older ones on there from not long after the last album came out, but I guess most of it was written in the

“I THINK THAT’S ALWAYS BEEN AN AESTHETIC THAT I’VE EXPLORED: THE JUXTAPOSITION BETWEEN QUIET, SUBTLE AND THE BIGGER SOUNDING SECTIONS,

AND HOW THOSE DYNAMICS PLAY OUT.” thebrag.com

last year or so”, says Lewis. “I don’t think there were any particular themes – it was more just ideas popping out, and if they took that’s what we’d work on.

When you piece it all together you drag things out and you can see it become one coherent idea, but I don’t think we necessarily had that going into it.”

The album was primarily recorded at The Aviary Studios in Victoria last winter.

“We had a week in there, and basically the idea was to track mainly drums in a live space and work on bass, and Giles’ Fender VI. It’s always been done like that: I’ll always come back and do overdubs later. It makes life a lot easier than trying to get something in one shot.”

Southern Mind also sees the band continue to explore space and dynamics, opposing moments of ambient bliss with forceful, fuzzed-out rock. As Lewis acknowledges, “I think that’s always been an aesthetic that I’ve explored: the juxtaposition between quiet, subtle and the bigger sounding sections, and how those dynamics play out.” It’s most notable on tracks like ‘A.C.’ or ‘Window’, where instruments are pulled back to create moments of dream-like sparseness before giving way to walls of pummeling sound.

The band recently returned from a European tour that Lewis speaks fondly of. The run of overseas shows included headline dates, festival appearances and sets supporting fellow Australian act Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, and was aided by a touring grant that allowed the band to afford a tour manager.

“What a difference that made. I always go into these things with a bit of

IDEAS POPPING OUT,

AND IF THEY TOOK THAT’S WHAT WE’D WORK ON.” apprehension – there’s just so much that can go wrong. In this case, our tour manager drove us everywhere and did sound for us, so that took a lot of the guesswork out. It meant we weren’t trying to navigate cities ourselves and find parking, things like that. We couldn’t have asked for a better situation: there were really positive crowds, everyone was really enthusiastic. It was excellent.”

When Lowtide first put the word out that Southern Mind had finished recording, it was bittersweet, paired with the news that longtime member Simon had departed the band. Friend of the band Jeremy Cole – who recorded some of their earliest material – has since been filling in. “We’re extremely lucky to have Jeremy onboard, he’s an amazing guy.

He’s been playing a Fender VI and singing, and it’s a perfect fit really. We’ve been really fortunate in that regard.

We’re just playing it by ear really and it’s all happened very smoothly.”

Cole will continue to be a part of the band for the immediate future, including during a run of shows to promote the release of Southern Mind in the coming months.

“We’ve got a tour lined up through March and April. We’re heading up the east coast for some shows and over to Adelaide as well, which is exciting. It’ll be interesting to be back on tour without a tour manager to help us out – we’ve had it too easy. It’s ruined.”

Where: Marrickville Bowling Club When: Friday March 16 And: Southern Mind is out through Rice Is Nice now

BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 31

FEATURE

Rakel Mjöll unravels the myth of the perfect kiss with Belinda Quinn

“WOMEN, OF OURSELVES 32 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

thebrag.com

FEATURE

Kiss It Better Dream Wife:

I

t’s leaning towards the end of Dream Wife’s set at Iceland Airways when vocalist Rakel Mjöll’s starts crying out to the crowd: “I spy, with my little eye, bad, bad, bad, bad bitches.” It’s a call to arms; a moment of avalanching anger that appears somewhat tongue-in-cheek while unapologetically proud at the same time.

“We maybe don’t have anything in common, maybe we don’t know each other,” Mjöll says of calling women punters to the front in ‘F.U.U.’, “but what I’m getting at is that all of us in here are bad bitches.” While young men still get ‘boys will be boys’ when they’re acting up, she says, “it’s so fucked” that it’s often not accepted for women to be bad in the same way: “Women, we have so many different variations of ourselves and the bad bitch is one of them.”

It’s 12am in London when Mjöll picks up the call, and she’s tucked up next her radiator.

Having grown up by the ocean in California, the Reykjavik-born artist lusts to “hug the waves” when Dream Wife arrive in Australia for their Laneway shows. “Being in the water,” she says, “it just reminds that you’re human and that you’re part of this world.”

The three-piece started out at a Brighton arts university while Mjöll and bass player Bella Podpadec were living together. “One night we were out and talking about how much we wanted to go to Canada. We didn’t want to travel without a purpose, so we thought why not make a band?”

They recruited guitarist Alice Go for a performance art show at a Brighton gallery (alongside a This Is Spinal Tap-like mockumentary showcasing their fi ctitious and elaborate backstory), and realised they could take the project further.

Dream Wife photo by Hollie Fernando

Organising their Canadian tour with the help of friends, they played “random shows” at local’s houses: “We became really grateful in a sense. It’s a great thing for a performer to learn from doing, and also from the mistakes that you make,” she says.

Podpadec and Go sport a bright ‘90s underground Berlin aesthetic while Mjöll reminds me of an Icelandic Cher from Clueless; she stands out with a sweet, confi dent and defi antly direct demeanour.

Dream Wife’s melodic progressions pulse to propulsive rhythms, perhaps similar to

“I WATCHED WAY TOO MANY

DISNEY FILMS

AS A KID AND I HAD THIS KIND OF

TWISTED IDEA OF WHAT A FIRST KISS SHOULD BE LIKE.”

an early Arcade Fire number, and often spin out into a derailed punky mess. The band are inspired by DIY artists such as Le Tigre and Bikini Kill, which they combine with iconic pop influences David Bowie, Madonna and Blondie’s Debbie Harry.

Of the political nature of their lyrics, Mjöll says, “We didn’t really think about it to begin with.” Their track ‘Somebody’ poured out of their consciousness with ease. “I was actually quite scared when I released that song. Basically there was a campaign similar to #metoo happening in Iceland.

[The song is] about sexual harassment and sexual assault and it’s also about being judged on your body and gender, and being women in music.”

On the track, Mjöll sings, “What you wore and how you wore it so well / what did you expect would happen,” calling out recurring dialogues that pressure survivors of sexual assault to take responsibility for their perpetrator’s behaviour. “It sort of goes back into understanding that it’s not your fault,” explains Mjöll, “whatever you wear, it doesn’t matter.” She comments on the line “I am not my body, I am somebody,” critiquing industry pressure on artists to cater their body type to unrealistic standards: “[You] should be judged on whatever you give to the table.”

Their single ‘Let’s Make Out’ sees them lean into the title lyric with adolescent playfulness. “With that song, we had so much fun,” she explains. “It’s very cheeky.

It’s strong, it’s powerful, it’s funny and it’s very weird for some people having three women scream ‘let’s make out’ [at them]. It’s intimidating to some people in the crowd.”

Many of the songs on Dream Wife ring with similar young romantic nostalgia.

Mjöll combines cute, yet piecing shrieks with the power of Karen O’s speak-singing on ‘Spend The Night, asking, ”Would you like to spend the night together? I can’t read your mind” and ‘Love Without Reason’: “Let’s be kids and fall in love.”

While her friends were popping their smoochcherries at as young as 12, Mjöll was “obsessed” with having the perfect kiss. “I watched way too many Disney films as a kid and I had this kind of twisted idea of what a first kiss should be like. So in my early teens, I was dodging people at you know, school dances. I waited until my sixteenth birthday, and it was nothing special – nothing special.

That was a terrible idea.” She laughs.

“Like, you cannot plan the perfect kiss. It doesn’t matter who the person is or how perfect they seem. I think one of the worse kisses [is when you’re with someone] who you think are gonna be great and they just give you like, a peck.” She makes a “mwa” pop sound with her lips, and continues laughing.

“And I think kissing shouldn’t be linked with sex; like, making out shouldn’t have to lead to sex at all. You should be able to make out with your friends, make out with everyone you wanna make out with, as long as there is consent, of course.” “[It’s about] having the power to be quite open about it and explore your own sexuality, while remembering that it should just be fun.”

What: Dream Wife is out now through Inertia and Lucky Number

WE HAVE SO MANY DIFFERENT VARIATIONS AND IS ONE OF THEM.”

THE BAD BITCH

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BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 33

Calexico:

The Whole Truth Meg Crawford talks to Joey Burns of Calexico about the U.S. band’s reactionary new record

N

amed after a Californian border town, you can find Calexico’s sound lurking around the midpoint between Tex Mex and desert noir. That said, Joey Burns, the band’s lead singer and one half of Calexico’s core (the other half being drummer John Convertino), insists that each of Calexico’s nine studio albums are different – albeit connected by vague threads.

On the cusp of their 2018 release The Thread That Keeps Us, Burns finds yet another ley line through the Calexico canon. “I guess it’s the people,” he says. “We have this band that’s been together for a while, and this lineup in particular has been together for quite a few years. That consistency is important. It’s also a spirit we all share, being free enough to experiment and reinvent who we are and not being precious with trying to remain one way.

Really, we look forward with each album to finding something new, a new expression, and that spark and drive is, to me, what connects us all from record to record.”

Traditionally, the band has released an album every couple of years, but in the lead up to The Thread That Keeps Us, the desire to be productive was all the more urgent. Reeling from the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election, Burns ached to spread a little love and a lot of tolerance along the way as an antidote to Trump’s noxiousness.

With that imperative, the band has had its nose pressed firmly to the grindstone ever since, either touring or, more latterly, recording.

The band has a hectic touring schedule and a new album to show for it, and politically, Burns sees a glimmer of hope on the horizon. “I feel like this current administration is nearing its last legs,” he reflects. “I feel like it was a case of, ‘OK, let’s let the child have his time’. He’s just about done himself in. He’s really losing control.

“If anything, the statements and actions of this administration have made other people want to get involved and speak up and protest.

I think it’s making everyone realise you can’t take democracy for granted. I feel good about that. I still feel there’s lots of work to do, big and small, and music is still really important.

Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t be buying airline tickets to Europe to go and play shows.

We need each other. That’s the message that keeps coming back to me.”

Calexico makes no bones about the fact that they love to collaborate, and The Thread That Keeps Us is no exception, incorporating musos from across the globe. However, in contrast to their previous album Edge Of The Sun, which featured a special guest on nearly every song, Burns wanted to smash out the latest album and put the spotlight on band members.

“WE NEED EACH OTHER. 34 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

THAT’S TH thebrag.com

FEATURE

“IT’S A SPIRIT

WE ALL SHARE, BEING FREE ENOUGH TO EXPERIMENT AND REINVENT WHO WE ARE AND NOT BEING PRECIOUS WITH TRYING TO

REMAIN ONE WAY.” Take the cumbia tune ‘Flores Y Tamales’, which features Calexico’s guitar player, Jairo Zavala, who is from Madrid. “He’s singing about the importance of bridging whatever differences there are, whether they’re differences of the way of looking at life or philosophy, or differences between us physically,” Burns muses. “We can always find common threads: a meal, a cup of coffee, a bouquet of flowers, freshly hand-made tamales. I love the sentiment behind that song.”

Hearth and home feature heavily on the album too. No surprise then that Burns collaborated with his oldest brother John on the album (as he has done for about the six prior) and that his twin six-year-old daughters had some pretty damn sweet input when it came to content. “You should hear the songs and the stories coming from these kids,” Burns quietly boasts. “For one of the songs, ‘Girl In The Forest’, I was sitting on this couch with my daughters, coming up with this melody and this music. I started recording it on my phone and they started humming along by the end of it. I said, ‘Hey, why don’t we go into the kitchen and we’ll finish writing the song. We’ll write some lyrics.’

“Here I was, trying to pilot this song towards environmentalism and protests, inspired by what was happening a year ago or so at Standing Rock with trying to bring in this the North Dakota pipeline into Sioux land – I was really torn up by that, as a lot of people were.

My daughters really liked that idea, but then they kind of went deeper, and turned to me and said, ‘Why can’t the song just be about a girl who can speak with the animals, all the animals, all of the things in the forest, even the trees’. That’s beautiful. I’m in awe of that openness and clarity.”

In fact, being the dad of daughters has been something that’s been weighing heavily on Burns’s mind in recent times. He ranks the virtue of patience as amongst the best lessons he’s learned during his career, but with his kids in mind he’s now thinking that maybe the ability to listen tops it.

“The ability to listen has certainly come to the forefront, especially in regards to the treatment of women. It’s very important to us that our daughters are strong and stand up and speak for themselves and don’t succumb to any pressures from the past that are male based. We want them to be independent and fierce. I’m continuing to learn how to be a better listener, but I still have lots to learn.”

What: The Thread That Keeps Us is out now through Spunk

E MESSAGE THAT KEEPS COMING BACK TO ME.” thebrag.com

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Rock And Read

In the first of three installments on non-fiction music books, Meg Crawford wipes the dust off four timeless rock and roll memoirs

Grit, Sex and Misfits

When we’re not listening to rock, we’re reading about it. The following memoirs lifted the lid on rock and roll’s excess, mayhem and misfits, and though they mightn’t be hot off the press, they still burn with (at times, heinous) stories to tell.

“Let’s face it: there’s fuck all Patti Smith can’t do.”

The Dirt: Confessions Of The World’s Most Notorious Rock Band

by Neil Strauss

A collaborative autobiography written by members of Mötley Crüe and New York Times journalist Neil Strauss, The Dirt was the seminal work when it came to documenting rock and roll excess. Following the band through their heyday in the ’80s, Strauss encouraged them to pen their own chapters, and the book quite literally dishes the dirt on the big-haired lords of metal.

I’ll be damned if the Crüe didn’t just unapologetically love living – though it’s a shame they didn’t wash more. In one of The Dirt’s more grotesque moments (of which there are many), a member retells a story about how a long shower-less stint while wearing leather strides led him to stick his privates in an egg burrito to counter malodours when chanced with hooking up.

paint ld u o w s s u a tr hether S w g in t if he r h e g d li n o g w in r e th r tt a o fl w a “It’s in such s it lo p t again.” x ir e ] D ’s n e o ü r k r o w [the C e to had the chanc 36 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

Really, it’s a move that’s awfully counterintuitive, yet so obnoxiously rock and roll.

Dirt is a travelogue that captures one debaucherous escapade after another, in particular Nikki Sixx’s bizarre recount of his dance with the devil during a seance. And it seems that the only recurring theme, aside from the usual sex, drugs and rock and roll excess, is that poor Mick Mars is weird as fuck.

Strauss is renowned for being a one-time Courtney Love dalliance, and his fragile male ego is responsible for The Game: Undercover In The Secret Society of Pickup Artists, a tome that taught generations of men to “neg”, and one the ex-sex addict has since expressed regret for. In light of this, it’s worth wondering whether Strauss would paint the band’s exploits in such a flattering light if he had the chance to work on Dirt again.

thebrag.com

Rock And Read

Just Kids

By Patti Smith

Patti Smith’s memoir documents the punkpoet powerhouse’s defining moments, from the heartbreak of giving up her infant daughter for adoption to sleeping rough after dropping out of teachers college. That Beverly Smith, Patti’s kind-natured mother went along with her daughter’s adventure almost begs belief: she sent a teenage Patricia Lee to New York with little more than a waitress’s uniform, despite knowing she’d be terrible at it.

Just Kids unravels Smith’s relationship with lover and famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the infamous Hotel Chelsea: the two are presented as loved-up neophytes living in a romantic idyll, despite being met with hunger and a lack of funds while squatting in New York City’s seedier settings.

Most of the book is a series of highlights, and one of its most impressive moments comes when an androgynous, jacket-shucked Smith gets to work on her debut studio album Horses. Although, from start to finish Just Kids is so damn beautiful that at times you almost can’t bear it; its form has a rare transcendence that requires savouring. Let’s face it: there’s fuck all Smith can’t do, which is why she’s Patti Smith and we are just mere mortals.

Tommy Land

By Tommy Lee and Anthony Bozza

Sure, it’s ghostwritten to hell, but Tommy Land is an entertaining romp through the life of the Mötley Crüe’s founding member, Tommy Lee (I know, we’re back with that ol’ band, but bear with me). Amid discussing his marriages to famous blonde bombshell actresses (namely Heather Locklear and Pamela Anderson), Lee delves into tragedy, recounting how a four-year-old boy accidentally drowned at his home, which, understandably, fucked him up to no end.

siasm is u th n e ’s e e L y “Tomm es him k a m d n a s u o infecti ll fuck.” a s a le b a e k li come off

And then there’s the explicit documenting of his sexual desires in the second chapter, which comes in the guise of well-mannered advice. Lee gives his two cents on threesome etiquette (his strong preference is actually foursomes, so that no one gets left out), the boons of a woman with curves (“Big girls are the hottest, craziest fucks ever,”) sex while driving, and gardenia perfume (“If it were cool to walk around with a gardenia duct-taped to each nostril, I would so that I could smell that scent all day long.”) Lee proves so fired up about the subject matter that this lurid chapter precedes anything about his contribution to the band. His enthusiasm is infectious and makes him come off likeable as all fuck.

Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excess

By Danny Sugerman

Proving that truth sometimes is really stranger than fiction, Danny Sugerman became the Doors’ informal PR guy at the tender age of 12 after befriending Jim Morrison at the beach. By age 17, Sugerman had parlayed into the role of band manager, but wound up in a California state mental hospital suffering with severely excessive drug and alcohol addiction when he reached 21.

Wonderland Avenue was illustrated by Ralph Steadman, the same guy whose eerie and at times terrifying scribbles accompany the bulk of Hunter S. Thompson’s work. The first half of the book is a good trip with cracking insights into life behind closed Doors, while the second half follows Sugerman’s not so glamorous descent into a heroin addiction that nearly killed him.

That said, some of the latter exploits are quite humorous, including his account of Iggy Pop as a houseguest from hell, as well as Sugerman having to head over to the local cop shop to bail Iggy out, only to discover him dressed like someone’s mum – replete with pumps and pearls. After all of the merry flavours of hell to which he subjected his body and mind, Sugerman died of lung cancer while clean and sober at aged 50.

thebrag.com

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Sounds Like…

NEW ALBUM AND SINGLE RELE A SES WITH JOSEPH E ARP

The Grammys are a fucking joke. I mean, they’ve been a fucking joke since their inception way back in 1959, when Henry Mancini won Album of The Year with The Music From Peter Gunn, a glorified collection of jingles written for a B-grade TV show about a private eye.

He beat out Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinata, and honest to god Tchaikovsky for that top honour, starting a timehonoured Grammy tradition of making legendary artists dress up in their best outfits only to sit in a stuffy room and watch as a gaggle of fucking hacks take to the stage and claim awards they don’t deserve.

So yeah, maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Bruno Mars, a man with about as much charisma and ability as a plastic bag full of pond water, beat out Kendrick Lamar, Jay Z, Lorde and Childish Gambino, all of whom were nominated for career-best records. After all, how are you meant to trust an awards body that honoured How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb over Late Registration, The Joshua Tree over Sign o’ The Times, and The Bodyguard soundtrack over Automatic For The People?

Anyway. None of that really has anything to do with this fortnight’s column. I just needed a place to vent.

First up, let’s talk about this fornight’s

Migos

“I dunno, I can’t help but think we haven’t been very kind to Shannon Noll.” biggest disappointment – Migos’ Culture II, out now, an aimless collection of autotuned whoops with nary a banger in sight.

The three-piece hip hop collective’s first release, 2017’s excellent Culture, had a lot going for it, from the year-defining ‘Bad And Boujee’ to a series of perfectly curated features – everyone from Gucci Mane to Travis Scott made memorable appearances.

And sure, Post Malone and Cardi B might pop up on Culture II, but nobody’s heart really seems to be in it. The fire and fury that

defined Migos’ breakthrough has petered out, replaced by a kind of weak, sticky clingfilm sheen; over 24 dull, messy tracks, proceedings warble from the uninspired to the actively insulting.

Equally derivative is Shannon Noll’s Unbroken, also out now. I dunno, I can’t help but think we haven’t been very kind to Shannon Noll. I know his career has experienced a newfound boom thanks to our collective obsession with irony – he’s playing universities now, something that would have been utterly unimaginable five years ago. But his career uptick rather reminds me of this kid I used to know when I was growing up, back in the UK. One time while this kid was running for the tube, his pants fell down, flopping hard about around his ankles and almost tripping him up. A bunch of us saw, and thought it was pretty aces. We didn’t really know the kid, but we invited him to come and sit with us, and laughed about the fiasco for the rest of the ride to school.

The next morning, perhaps fearing that he wouldn’t be invited back into the fold unless he suitably impressed us, the kid engineered his own pants malfunction – we could see him, as he ran, deliberately undoing the buckle on his belt. We laughed again, and again he got to sit with us. This went on for weeks and weeks. This poor kid got our adoration, and our friendship, but the price he had to pay was a daily humiliation in the packed London tube.

Starcrawler

“Maybe it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Bruno Mars, a man with about as much charisma and ability as a plastic bag full of pond water, beat out Kendrick Lamar at the Grammys.”

38 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

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albums

The Defender

Montero

BY HARRY WILLIS In The Defender, the BRAG’s writers make the case for something they feel has been hard done by. This issue, Harry Willis argues the worth of the gooey and aggressive Punisher: War Zone.

“Montero’s Performer is a beautiful, psychedelic swirl – a colourful, lively tentrack record by one of Australia’s most underrated musicians and illustrators.”

You could guess the aggregated top 20 with your eyes shut – it’s got a few Ingmar Bergman gloomers in it, a Tarkovsky slowburner, the horrendously overrated The Leopard. Shit like that. Maybe it’s cause they don’t want to run the risk of being pooh-poohed in public, but most of the big names polled tend to go with horrendously safe picks. They go for a particular type of art: the kind that engages the head; soothes the nerves; puts one in a kind of glorified stupor.

Quickly, cause I’m running out of room, here’s the good stuff: Montero’s Performer is a beautiful, psychedelic swirl – a colourful, lively ten-track record by one of Australia’s most underrated musicians and illustrators. It’s a beaut from start to finish, but ‘Vibrations’ is the stand-out: it’s a 13th Floor Elevators-laced masterwork that has more vim and vigour than psych rock singles released by musicians 50 times more famous than Montero.

Which is fine. I have lotsa time for those films too. But that is not the only mark of greatness. There are films that work in different ways, and yet just as effectively – the kind of pleasures that get referred to as “low-brow” or “guilty”. These films have no pretension about them: they never try to pretend that they’ll have you lolling back in your chair, considering the eternal. They go to work on you the way that candy goes to work on you; in the most uncomplicated, thrilling way imaginable.

The debut self-titled record by Starcrawler is also well worth your time – it’s a messy hair-metal-meets-folk-rock-meets-noise experiment that almost entirely pays off.

There are a few missteps – ‘Full Of Pride’ is a little lacklustre, and some of the tracks feel ever-so-slightly overproduced – but on the whole, this is a mini-masterwork.

Oh, and, lastly, Tropical Fuck Storm have finally dropped ‘You Let My Tyres Down’, a new taste of their excellently titled debut record A Laughing Death In Meatspace.

I saw them play the song live at the end of last year and it turned my face to paste.

Said it before and I’ll say it again: God bless that band.

thebrag.com

E

very ten years, the extraordinarily boujee film magazine Sight And Sound runs a poll in which they ask directors, critics, programmers and writers to pick their ten favourite films.

From that, they extrapolate a top 50 films of all time list, which for 50 boring years Citizen Kane topped, only to be beaten back in 2012 by the equally uninspired choice of Vertigo.

here goes anyway: the vigilante known as The Punisher (Ray Stevenson), still seeking justice after the murder of his family, comes to blows with a horrifying and scarred mob boss named Billy “Jigsaw” Russotti (Dominic West, having a lot of fun), who earned his nickname after a particularly graphic run-in with a glass-crushing machine.

“THERE IS A LOT OF SCOPE TO EXPLORE THE NATURE OF JUSTICE VIA THE CHARACTER OF THE PUNISHER, BUT THE FILM HAS NO INTEREST IN ANY OF THAT.”

Unbroken is the sound of Noll’s jeans sliding down his legs, and pooling around his ankles. Maybe, if you were royally pissed at a pub and ‘What About Me’ came on, maybe, just maybe you’d bop along a little to it. But Unbroken doesn’t have a single ‘What About Me’ – it’s a dirge of subpar Cold Chisel knock-offs with lyrics John Farnham might fart out in his sleep. We took the Noll joke too far guys, and now we are paying the cruel, cruel price.

Also, I realise they’ve been out for a couple of weeks now, but I have to rant about the two new Superchunk singles, ‘Erasure’ and ‘What A Time To Be Alive’. Superchunk are one of the most important American acts of the last 50 years, and they’ve been on somewhat of a high as of late, reissuing their entire back catalogue and dropping a tender magnum opus in I Hate Music.

If their forthcoming record is as good as these two new singles suggest, we’re in for a fucken’ treat.

Punisher: War Zone

“I saw TFS play ‘You Let My Tyres Down’ live at the end of last year and it turned my face to paste.”

Highlight Of The Fortnight: Performer Dud Of The Fortnight: Unbroken

And of those kind of films, perhaps none is more effective than Lexi Alexander’s Punisher: War Zone, a gooey mess of violence, bizarre, straight to camera asides, and some of the most over-thetop performances imaginable. It’s not a "masterpiece" as critics know them, and it never pretends to be – but it takes a different route to that same place.

The plot is bare bones, and is hardly worth going over, but

That’s it. They fight, they fight again, they fight once again, and then one wins and the other loses. There is a lot of scope to explore the nature of justice via the character of The Punisher, a man with a particularly Biblical eye for an eye conception of morality, but Alexander doesn’t seem to care about any of that.

Rather, she spends her time luxuriating in the pleasure of it all – in the stark, surreal cinematography; in the barked dialogue; in the opportunity to go nuts, and risk it all. Russotti’s attempts to recruit a mobster army culminate in a strange, sharply satirical speech, complete with American flag visuals; a late night attack on a house of reprobates becomes a stylish exercise in capturing light and dark.

It’s occasionally nonsense, albeit in the best possible way, and it’s never especially surprising – there is no sense of repercussion, either moral or otherwise. The Punisher mows down a hospital’s worth of goons without batting an eyelid, and if all that murder ever weighs on his soul, we never get to see it. And the intentions of Russotti, an unhinged monster, are as basic as they get: he wants the world to burn.

“THE PLOT IS BARE BONES, AND IS HARDLY WORTH GOING OVER.”

But who fucking cares? None of those dull considerations like plot or motivation matter when the thrills are this primal; when the pleasures are this uncomplicated.

Punisher: War Zone isn’t the Citizen Kane of schlock; it is Citizen Kane. It’s as good; as rewarding.

And don’t let any fucking snobs ever tell you different.

BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 39

g g guide gig g

send your listings to : gigguide@seventhstreet.media

PICK OF THE THE ISSUE

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 16

Snape

The Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

Snape + Sweater Season + Pure Mass + Concrete Lawn 7pm. $10.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 7 Survive + Herzeloyde Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $49.

Shame The Lansdowne, Chippendale. 8pm. $39.

The War On Drugs + Middle Kids

The Enmore, Newtown. 8pm. $79.15.

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 8 Colourfields +

Breakbeats + Ecstatic Melodies Golden Age Cinema and Bar, Surry Hills.

8:30pm. Free.

David Ryan

Harris + Sam Buckingham Leadbelly, Newtown. 6pm. $30.

Hatchie + Dianas + Leroy Francis

Paramore

Waywards, Newtown. 7pm. $10.

(Sandy) Alex G + Brightness The Lansdowne, Chippendale. 8pm. $43.

One of the best pop albums of 2017, After Laughter has a way of seeping into your sub-conscious. Don’t miss your chance to see the unrelenting Hayley Williams about around the stage.

40 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

Baby Blue Golden Age Cinema and Bar, Surry Hills.

9:00pm. Free.

Odette Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $15.

The Stranglers Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 8pm. $91.35.

Odette Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $15.

Timi Temple Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $11.60.

Tim Hart Leadbelly, Newtown. 6pm. $20.

Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes + Cancer Bats Metro theatre, Sydney CBD. 8pm. $62.

Sylvan Esso Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $47.

Sunnyboys + The Celibate Rifl es The Factory Theatre, Marrickville. 8pm. $63.

Sunnyboys + The Celibate Rifl es The Factory Theatre, Marrickville. 8pm. $63.

The Internet + KAIIT Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 8pm. $70.

Grenadiers The Chippendale Hotel, Chippendale.

8pm. $14.30.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 10

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 11

Alpha Wolf + Honest Crooks + Daybreak + Diamond Construct +

Neil and Liam Finn Taronga Zoo, Mosman. 6pm. $103.

Bench Press + Yes I’m Leaving + Shaky Handz + Legal Aliens Waywards, Newtown. 8pm. $12.

Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney. Friday February 9. 7:30pm. $122.

Heists The Factory Theatre, Marrickville. 8pm. $14.50.

Twilight at Taronga – feat: Paul Dempsey + Didirri Taronga Zoo, Mosman. 6pm. $70.

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 9

Paramore + Bleachers

First Light + CC:Disco!

Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 9pm. $25.

Die! Die! Die! + Horror My Friend The Lansdowne, Chippendale. 8pm. $23.50.

Neil and Liam Finn Taronga Zoo, Mosman. 6pm. $103.

thebrag.com

g g guide gig g WITH SCABZ

send your listings to : gigguide@seventhstreet.media

1. Draw you and your band: Protomartyr

2. Draw the cover for your single ‘Poor This Week’:

Protomartyr + Mere Women Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. Friday February 16.

8pm. $39.

OAF is set to host the crème de la crème of contemporary post-punk with Detroit act Protomartyr, whose most recent album combines lyricisms about talking horses, night-blooming cacti, and the Flint water crisis with noisy, chaotic dissonance.

They’ll be joined by Sydney’s ghostly and ever-moving Mere Women.

Sydney act (well, feat. one Wollongong resident) Scabz combine the sonic flavours of Eddy Current Suppression Ring with that of The Peep Tempel, and DIY femmo punk. They sing about everything from the pseudo-progressive liberal Nice Guy to a very true story about vocalist, Von, having to reject Brett Lee entry into World Bar – it’s touching stuff. After the release of their anthemic single ‘Poor This Week’, we asked drummer Lara Chrystal some questions and she drew some doodles in response.

3. Draw your ideal rider: Macklemore Horden Pavilion, Moore Park. 8:30pm. $102.

Sunnyboys + The Celibate Rifles The Factory Theatre, Marrickville. 6pm. $63.

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 13 Evanescence Sydney Opera House, Sydney.

8pm. $100.

Kitty, Daisy and Lewis The Factory Theatre, Marrickville. 8pm. $55.

Protomartyr photo by Zak Bratto

Rise Against + SWMRS The Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park. 7pm. $93.

The White Tree Band Leadbelly, Newtown.

6pm. Free. $65.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 14 Alex Cameron + Roy Molloy

thebrag.com

Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $23.25.

Evanescence Sydney Opera House, Sydney.

8pm. $100.

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 15 Grouplove + The Ruminaters Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 8pm.

WBC Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $11.60.

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 16 Cattle Decapitation The Bald Faced Stag, Leichhardt.

7:30pm. $44.40.

Ross From Friends + Cop Envy + Andy Garvey + Kato Civic Underground, Sydney CBD. 10pm. $20.

Shapeshifter Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7:30pm. $61.60.

Spike Vincent Union Hotel, Newtown. 8pm.

Free.

Tees Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $10.

SATURDAY FEBURARY 17 Twilight at Taronga – feat: Cloud Control + Julia Jacklin + Body Type Taronga Zoo, Mosman. 6pm. $70.

5. Draw your favourite musician of all time:

4. Draw your dream audience:

Genesis Owusu Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $12.60.

Thelma Plum + Tia Gostelow Barangaroo Reserve, Barangaroo. 2pm.

Free.

Thy Art Is Murder + Emmure + Fit For An Autopsy + Justice for the Damned Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7pm. $45.20.

BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18 :: 41

g g guide gig g send your listings to : gigguide@seventhstreet.media

TOKiMONSTA

Have a gig or club listing to get in The BRAG? You can now submit your gig and club listings, head to thebrag.com/gig-guide.

Unwritten Law Factory Theatre, Marrickville. 8pm. $60.

Yon Yonson Golden Age Cinema and Bar, Surry Hills.

9:30pm. Free.

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 18

MONDAY FEBRUARY 19

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 20

Rachel Maria Cox + Hollow States Seymour Centre, Chippendale. 5pm.

Free.

Too Many Zooz Factory Theatre, Marrickville. 8pm. $40.

Primal Scream + Lime Cordiale + SSHH Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 7:15pm. $86.

For our full gig and club listings, head to thebrag.com/gig-guide.

Cog

TOKiMONSTA

Manning Bar, Camperdown. Thursday February 8. 8pm. $35.

Lune Rouge’s glitchy and soft electronica was composed while the L.A. producer (Jennifer Lee) was recovering from Moyamoya, a rare brain disease that causes a temporary loss of ones ability to speak and listen. In her work, she makes nods to Korean cuisine with a sonic imprint similar to that of Flying Lotus, but slightly more poppy.

Cog

Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. Friday February 9. 9pm. $56.

Sydney, prepare to get your horns up. One of Australia’s most established prog-rock acts, Cog, will be out on a national tour to show after a ten-year writing hiatus, where they’ll be making a stop at the Metro Theatre.

free stuff head to: thebrag.com/freeshit

MOUNTAIN SOUNDS FESTIVAL Mountain Sounds 2018 is set to go off like a fish milkshake.

Just check out the lineup: everyone from electro-duo Peking Duk, to alt rock rulers The Preatures, to triple j Hottest 100 decimating titans Gang Of Youths are set to make an appearance. Over two glorious days, from Friday February 16 to Saturday February 17 the festival is going to play home to Australia’s tastiest homegrown talent – it’s gonna get wild.

Wanna head along? Of course you do. And you can, with help from your mates over here at the BRAG. We’ve got two double passes to give away – all you need to do is take a snap of yourself holding this issue of the BRAG, post it to Instagram with A DOUBLE the hashtag #mountainsoundsbrag, and PASS make sure you’re following our Instagram account, @thebragmag. Get on it, hey?

WIN

42 :: BRAG :: 733 :: 07:02:18

thebrag.com

27:01:18 :: ANZ Stadium :: Edwin Flack Ave, Sydney Olympic Park

foo fighters

s n a p s

What we’ve been out to see this fortnight. See full galleries at thebrag.com/snaps

Photos by Ashley Mar