Brag#737

TROPICAL FUCK STORM AND THE END OF THE WORLD IS HOLLYWOOD FINALLY DEALING WITH ITS LACK OF DIVERSITY? ALSO INSIDE:

SARAH MARY CHADWICK, CONFIDENCE MAN, SHANNON NOLL, MIDDLE KIDS, TWO SHORT STORIES AND MUCH MORE

COURTNEY BARNETT WANTS TO FIX THINGS

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LIVE NATION & UNIFY PRESENT

A U S T R A R A L I A N

T O U R

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this month

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what you’ll find inside…

08 ISSUE 737: Wednesday May 2, 2018 EDITOR: Joseph Earp joseph.earp@seventhstreet.media NEWS: Nathan Jolly, Tyler Jenke, Bianca Davino, Lars Brandle ART DIRECTOR: Sarah Bryant PHOTOGRAPHER: Ashley Mar 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 GIG GUIDE COORDINATOR: Belinda Quinn - gigguide@ seventhstreet.media REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS: Arca Bayburt, Lars Brandle, Tanja Brinks Toubro, Alex Chetverikov, Max Jacobson, 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 ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE: Carrie Huang accountsseventhstreet.vc (02) 9713 92692, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046 DEADLINES: Editorial: Thursday 5pm (no extensions) Ad bookings: Last Wednesday of the month 12pm (no extensions) Finished art: Last Thursday of the month 5pm (no extensions) Ad cancellations: Last Wednesday of the month 12pm 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 EDITORIAL POLICY: The views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher, editors or staff of the BRAG. follow us:

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Courtney Barnett photo by Pooneh Ghana

regulars 6 26 29 40 41 70-71 71 72-74

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The Frontline The Watcher The Bookshelf Parent Talk Game On Sounds Like The Defender Gig picks

“Sometimes non-violence just gets nowhere. And I get angry at myself that non-violence is my natural instinct.”

“If your iconography enters pop culture, then you can perpetuate branding without people actually having to watch your movie.”

8-11

Courtney Barnett

12 -14

How Much Shark Should You Show?

16-18

Ru Paul’s Drag Race

19

Fugazi’s Instrument

20-21

Is Hollywood Finally Dealing With Its Lack Of Diversity?

22-25

(Wo)man Power: Sex And Power In The Cinema Of Paul Verhoeven

27

Our Picks Of The 2018 Sydney Writers Festivaly

28-29

Lost In Space, The Bookshelf

30-31

Raw, A Quiet Place

32-33

Unsane

34

Short Story: People Keep Disappearing

35-37

Short Story: The Naggles

38-39

Meet The Future Of Home Sound Systems

42-45

Tropical Fuck Storm

46-47

Shannon Noll

48-49

Confidence Man

50-51

DMA’s

52-53

Parquet Courts

54-55

Eels

56-57

A Perfect Circle

58-59

Dan The Automator

60-62

Middle Kids

63

Don Walker

64-65

Beach House

66-67

Nathaniel Rateliff

68-69

Sarah Mary Chadwick

“[Life is] this weird avalanche, going down to the grave.”

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the frontline

with Nathan Jolly, Patrick Campbell and Bianca Davino

LOOKING BEYOND Lord Of The Fries are well known for their completely vegan menu, as well as being named after a book/film in which children turn savage and murder each other in cold blood. Now they have become the first Aussie chain restaurant to introduce Beyond Meat, the U.S. vegan phenomenon which features both Leonardo DiCaprio and an ex- Macca’s CEO as financial backers. For those interested in the makeup of these tasty abominations, the ingredients are: Water, Pea Protein Isolate, Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil, Refined Coconut Oil, Cellulose from Bamboo, Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Natural Flavor, Maltodextrin, Yeast Extract, Salt, Sunflower Oil, Vegetable Glycerin, Dried Yeast, Gum Arabic, Citrus Extract (to protect quality), Ascorbic Acid (to maintain color), Beet Juice Extract (for color), Acetic Acid, Succinic Acid, Modified Food Starch, Annatto (for color). They are all from Non-GMO Sources, too.

Pineapple Express

LEGALIZE IT

Calling Australia’s current nanny state approach to illicit drugs an “unmitigated disaster”, the Greens leader Richard Di Natale has unleashed the party’s plans to “tightly regulate” the legal use of recreational marijuana – a move he explains would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. “Governments around the world are realising that prohibition of cannabis causes more harm than it prevents,” Senator Di Natale said. “It’s time Australia joined them and legalised cannabis for adult use.” It’s a common sense approach that has been adopted in many countries around the world, as well as in numerous U.S. states. “[The legal issues] drive people away from getting help when they need it and exposes them to a dangerous black market,” he continued. “The Greens see drug use as a health issue, not a criminal issue.” It obviously wouldn’t be a free for all.

Those under the age of 18 wouldn’t be able to purchase weed, and the Government would control the wholesale supply to stores, as well as the issuing of such sale licences.

SOUND OFF Are you the sort of person who, after a long day working in an office, likes to come home and relax with your copy of the BBC’s Sound Effects No. 2? (That’s a real album by the way: $17 and it’s yours.)

If that sounds like you, then the BBC have just made your day after releasing over 16,000 tracks from their sound effects library, free for your personal use. Yes, the BBC have just unleashed a veritable treasure trove of various sound effects online, suitable for close to any situation, mood, or occasion.

That said, sadly if you’re a budding

music producer whose eyes are lighting up as you read this, you can’t use the samples for anything except ‘personal, educational or research purposes’. This of course means that you’re more than free to show your year five students what ‘Woman Yawning’ sounds like, but you can’t throw that one into your upcoming EDM single.

A CELLULOID SHOT IN THE ARM Create NSW, ABC iview and the Western Sydney based creative hub Information & Cultural Exchange have announced they

are looking for three teams of filmmakers to create a series of comedy shorts – and they’ve got $225,000 to share with them.

They’re after three teams from NSW with one key creative from Western Sydney to create series of comedy shorts focused on showcasing talent from the state.

The chosen projects need to span four to six five-minute episodes each, deliverable by the end of December 2018. Each team of filmmakers will receive up to $75,000 in funding for the projects.

Applications are now open and don’t close until Midnight Sunday June 17.

High Fidelity

The Room

YOU’RE TEARING ME APART, LISA Although it is routinely regarded as the worst film ever, to simply dismiss Tommy Wiseau’s clusterfuck The Room as such is entirely missing the point. After all, there is clearly something captivating about the film; enough so that James Franco directed and starred in a feature film based on the making of it, and enough so that the film has been constantly in cinemas around the world since its release 15 years ago, and has made a profit despite its blown-out budget. A lot films, after all, never turn a profit, even those significantly more beloved than The Room. The back story is also entangled in the film’s ethos. Wiseau himself is a mystery: he has never admitted his age, where he is from, or how he managed to fund the multimillion dollar mess. And according to him – and despite his accent – he “is an All-American guy.”

Anyway, if you are yet to witness the wonder, SBS On Demand are currently streaming the film. Even if you think you get the appeal, unless you’ve seen it – you really don’t.

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HIGH FI For music fanatics, High Fidelity is essential viewing. Watching the near-neurotic actions and behaviours of fellow collectors and makers of ‘top five’ lists is a totally cathartic experience and has become a rite of passage for obsessives everywhere. Now, a small screen adaptation of High Fidelity is reportedly in the works thanks to Disney, which will see the gender of the lead characters flipped. The film, released in 2000 was based on Nick Hornby’s acclaimed 1995 novel of the same name, in which John Cusack plays the everyman owner of the store Championship Vinyl. As reported by Deadline, the show will feature on Disney’s soon-to-be streaming service, set to launch in 2019 and original screenwriter Scott Rosenberg in on board to produce. The new streaming service will also see the creation of original Star Wars and Marvel shows.

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6–17 JUNE

FIRST FILMS ANNOUNCED FULL PROGRAM 9 MAY OPENING NIGHT GALA THE BREAKER UPPERERS

I USED TO BE NORMAL: A BOYBAND FANGIRL STORY

WESTWOOD: PUNK, ICON, ACTIVIST

Get your tickets now for Sydney Film Festival’s Opening Night Gala, featuring the premiere of sidesplittingly funny New Zealand comedy The Breaker Upperers, before you hit the exclusive after party at Sydney’s stunning Centennial Hall.

The stories of four Melbourne women whose lives were changed by their love of boybands Backstreet Boys, One Direction, Take That and The Beatles.

Three generations of fans reflect on how boybands have shaped their relationships, faith and sexuality.

The wonderfully eccentric, endlessly inventive Vivienne Westwood is the reluctant star of this fabulous documentary. Westwood considers her history to be “so boring”, but in this she’s wrong: there’s loads to entertain in Lorna Tucker’s fine film.

ROCKABUL

THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST

COLD BLOODED: THE CLUTTER FAMILY MURDERS

Australian musician, journalist and debut director Travis Beard chronicles Afghanistan’s only metal band, where practice sessions are interrupted by power cuts and exploding bombs. As the band risk their lives for rock music, they have to choose whether to stay or go.

Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior, SFF 2014) won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for her latest film, a moving comedy-drama set in a “gay conversion” camp. Starring Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass), Sasha Lane (American Honey) and Forrest Goodluck (The Revenant).

A detailed reconstruction of the Clutter family murders, which inspired Truman Capote’s bestseller In Cold Blood, considered the first book in the true crime genre. A fascinating recreation of the case, directed by Oscar nominee Joe Berlinger.

LEAVE NO TRACE

MUG

SAVE TODAY WITH A FLEXIPASS

LOVE FILM? A delicate drama about a father and daughter who are found by authorities after living off-grid in the wilderness for years. Director Debra Granik, who famously discovered Jennifer Lawrence for Winter’s Bone (SFF 2010), has found another actress of immense talent in Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie.

A bitingly funny satire and Berlinale Grand Jury Prize winner; Poland’s first facial transplant patient awakes to find that – new face aside – it’s his community that’s changed, not him.

The cheapest way to book lots of tickets is to buy a Flexipass of 10, 20, or 30 tickets. Share with friends, flatmates, colleagues, the one you love, or just keep it for yourself!

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COVER STORY

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COVER STORY

Courtney Barnett Wants To Help

By Joseph Earp

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COVER STORY

T

here’s this episode of Queer Eye that’s been on Courtney Barnett’s mind a lot recently. In it, the Fab Five are driving through Atlanta, on their way to change the life of former marine Cory Waldrop, when they get pulled over by a marked police car.

It’s meant to be a gag – the officer who’s stopped them is a friend of Waldrop – but given it’s the show’s culture expert and only African-American team member Karamo Brown driving, the joke’s less funny than it should be. After all, it’s only been two years since the shooting of Philando Castile – only a month or so since the shooting of Stephon Clark – so who feels like laughing at the sight of a burly, sunglasses wearing cop wielding their power over a visibly nervous African-American man?

or that they didn’t normally talk to...” She lets the sentence trail off for a moment; ponders. “I don’t know. I thought it could help things.”

It’s become a bit of an obsession for Barnett, as of late: how she might help things. While writing Tell Me How You Really Feel, the follow-up to her acclaimed debut record, Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, she started to worry that maybe art was the last thing that the world needed. “I was like, ‘What am I saying?

Nothing groundbreaking’. I’m not saving the fucking planet. I wish I was. But I don’t feel like I am. I feel like all I’m doing is making more noise for people’s ears to have to hear.

“It’s really intense,” Barnett says over coffee in a busy Darlington café. “Later on in the episode, [Brown’s] like, ‘As a black guy, I was terrified when that happened.’ He shared his one-on-one stories; he explained to cops, ‘This is why I feel like this.’”

“Sometimes it’s hard, the knowledge that there’s so many people writing songs and making music; so many bands and so many professional session musicians. You’re like, ‘Who am I? I’m just another one of them. Am I even good? Should I even bother?’”

The episode got Barnett thinking. “I just thought if you had everyone do that – if you had everyone sit down and talk to someone who made them angry,

Sometimes Barnett wishes she was more like her partner, the singer-songwriter Jen Cloher. Barnett struggles to get angry; she prefers to think about

“I’m not saving the fucking planet.

I wish I was. But I don’t feel like I am. I feel like all I’m doing is making more noise for people’s ears to have to hear.”

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where people came from, and why they might act the way that they do. Even when she does write songs out of anger – songs like ‘Nameless, Faceless’, Tell Me How You Really Feel’s dead centre – they always come out wrong. “I think that song ended up sounding polite. Or maybe not. I don’t know. It sounds very thoughtful, which maybe isn’t a bad thing. It was definitely born out of a lot more anger, and grappling with the violence and the hatred, and not ever being able to understand it. It didn’t help me figure anything out. But it was on the way to getting there.”

Cloher, by contrast, is a “take no bullshit” kind of person. “I’m a pacifist,” Barnett says with a shrug.

“I mean, it’s back to that big civil rights debate: non-violence versus violent activism. Sometimes non-violence just gets nowhere. And I get angry at myself that non-violence is my natural instinct.

I believe in it, and I think it’s good, but sometimes it’s like that quote – if you’re not angry, you’re not listening. So maybe change comes out of screaming about shit ’til it gets fixed?”

Tell Me How You Really Feel isn’t a political record, per se – not in the way that people talk about Politics with a capital ‘p’. It’s not “the perfect riposte to the Trump era”, or a “damning takedown of our connected world”, or any of those phrases critics like to trot out whenever they detect a whiff of socio-political satire. But it is connected, however tangentially, to the things Barnett reads about in the news; to endangered species, and online comments sections, and random, senseless acts of violence.

“You have to consider those things and be aware of them for sure. It’s a tricky one. Lots of songwriter friends I know have also dealt with the same thing.

It’s like we’re all finding a way to connect with the emotions that are in turn connected with that stuff,

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COVER STORY

“I just feel like there’s so much to learn;

I just feel like I don’t know anything.” which is obviously horrible, and making everyone miserable.”

Not that Barnett has any answers. Tell Me How You Really Feel might be assured and complete, but the musician who wrote it still isn’t. All she can do these days is try, whenever possible, to remind herself that things could be worse; that she is managing, despite the odds. “When you have a friend that’s suffering through something, and they’re telling you all about it, you go like, ‘But you’re great. Don’t think those thoughts about yourself.’ It’s that same attitude. You just have to do that to yourself. When writing the record, I had to go, ‘I’m alright. I’m saying things that people connect with. Maybe this can help someone, somewhere. I don’t know.’

“And there’s no alternative, really, I don’t think. I think I would be much worse off if I wasn’t writing or making music. So that’s all I can think of to do.”

Courtney Barnett photo by Pooneh Ghana

B

arnett likes to read, especially books about the creative process of her favourite artists. She pored over The Letters Of Sylvia Plath last year on tour; Vincent Van Gogh’s Letters To Theo a little before that. “It’s such an intense insight into artistic process. I recognised that manic thing of being like, ‘I wrote the best thing ever!’ And then the next day, they’re just like, beside themselves, and hating everything that they’ve done. It’s so sad. But it’s interesting to see how different people work.”

She buys more books than she can possibly keep up with – Cloher will often shake her head at the stack of unread novels piling up by their bed.

“She’ll go, ‘Are you going to read any of those?’ while we’re there watching a movie,” Barnett laughs.

But Barnett can’t help herself. “I read lots of non-fi ction stuff. I just feel like there’s so much to learn; I just feel like I don’t know anything. And then I get overwhelmed by the fact that there’s so much stuff I’ll never know; all these books I’ll never read and historical things I’ll never understand. I mean, it’s a great thing to learn.

I’ve always been so excited about learning. But it’s overwhelming.”

Barnett has been this way ever since she was little. She loved school growing up – she doesn’t reckon she took a single sick day. “I really liked learning,” she says. “Sometimes I would set myself assignments for my holidays.

Once, I made my babysitter help me with this assignment, and she was like, ‘What is this for?

What class?’ And I was like, ‘It’s not for a class.

It’s just for me.’”

That enthusiasm carried over into Barnett’s great appetite for creativity. She’d dream of becoming a novelist; a poet; an artist. She didn’t even necessarily feel as though she excelled at visual art – she just liked the world, and enjoyed skulking around the art rooms at her Mona Vale highschool. “I felt safe and I felt creative being in that environment. It was a nice feeling.”

Her parents never pushed her to get the best grades, or to start seriously thinking about a job, so she didn’t. “I don’t feel like I ever really worried about it, even though it was always a thing older people were pushing on you in some way,” she says. “I just didn’t think it would be an option to be a professional musician.”

She didn’t necessarily have a back-up, either: there was nothing that captured her imagination or interest the way music did. She’d work hospo jobs as a way of indulging her habit of peoplewatching (“You see a lot of the good and the bad side of people very quickly working that kind of job”), and it helped her make the money she needed to keep writing songs. But she felt no kind of pressure to move out of small-time jobs and into music; she felt no kind of pressure at all, really. “Jobs are just jobs,” she says. “They can be anything. I didn’t think of a career. I just kept doing what I liked doing. It’s not very good advice.” She laughs. “But it worked.”

“I think I would be much worse off if I wasn’t writing or making music.

So that’s all I can think of to do.”

O

f course, that all changed after the massive success of Sometimes – after she appeared on Ellen, and befriended Kurt Vile, and supported Patti Smith, and appeared on a playlist put together by then U.S. President Barack Obama.

Things accumulated; pressure mounted. “Not to complain or anything, because it’s all such amazing things, but when it all builds up, it’s just like...” Barnett bats the coffee between her hands, her face contorted into a mock scream.

A lot of critics have read Tell Me How You Really Feel as Barnett’s way of dealing with fame, and it’s true there are lines that support that narrative.

“Friends treat you like a stranger / And strangers treat you like their best friend” goes a line on ‘City Looks Pretty’, while the chorus of ‘Charity’, repeated over and over until it becomes a kind of threat, is, “You must be having so much fun.”

But Barnett doesn’t reckon that’s all the album is. “That was defi nitely a background noise to the writing of the record. But I wouldn’t say it’s about that. Lots of people have kind of assumed that.

But to me it’s not my way of writing about that.

It’s a factor of the story. It feels more a record about personal relationships and connections and communications; everyday things. Which are so much smaller than that story, but exist within it as well.”

Anyway, Barnett doesn’t really feel like she knows what it means to sell out; what it means to “get big”. They are nebulous phrases to her, as foreign to her artmaking process as it is possible to get. “The concept of selling out; I think it’s all so dependent on your own situation,” she says.

To test their differing attitudes towards their work, she and Cloher will sometimes play little games with each other. “We’ll do hypotheticals,” Barnett explains. “Like, Jen asked, ‘Would you still write songs if you couldn’t perform them?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I think I would still fi nd it therapeutic to write songs and performing is great.’ And she was like, ‘Would you still write songs if you couldn’t record them?’ And then she went, ‘Would you still write songs if no-one else could hear them?’”

Barnett throws up her hands. “I was like, ‘Ah. I don’t know.’ Because you can do it for yourself, or for other people, or both. There’s no wrong answer. But the energy you get from other people – you’re connecting with them. It’s an important part of the process. So it’s funny to really fi gure out why you do it, and what for.”

Barnett is going to be spending a lot of the next few months on the road. She’s no more used to touring than she was when she started out – she still considers it a “weird exercise”, alternately exhausting and bone-numbingly dull. “It’s just about fi nding the balance of looking after your mental health and physical health and all that stuff. It’s like anything else. Balance keeps it normal.”

And, in true Courtney Barnett style, she fi nds that balance not in the big things – not in the grand, pivotal moments that defi ne the songs of other musicians – but in the small stuff; in the simple, everyday ways we can show ourselves love.

“My mum would always say, ‘Are you drinking enough water? Are you getting enough sleep?’

And I’d go, ‘Yes mum, don’t tell me what to do.’ But now I go, ‘Oh my god, I’m not drinking enough water; that’s why I’m getting these headaches.’” Barnett beams, the smile mostly in her eyes. “Who would have thought. Sometimes the simplest stuff is life-changing.” ■

Where: Sydney Opera House When: Saturday August 25 And: Tell Me How You Really Feel is out Friday May 18

“Sometimes non-violence just gets nowhere.

And I get angry at myself that non-violence is my natural instinct.” thebrag.com

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arts in focus

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FEATURE

Showing The Whole Shark:

READY PLAYER ONE AND THE NEW SPIELBERG

By Liam Jordan

“After five minutes of conversation there is twenty minutes of prayer. And the prayer is into iPhones and Samsung devices and Galaxies and iPads.”

– Steven Spielberg, speaking to the New York Times.

T

here was a lot riding on Bruce the Shark. Built for a then-noteworthy quarter million, it was supposed to swim, jump, and bite terrified extras. On its first day Bruce immediately sank to the ocean floor. Facing a career ending flop, Steven Spielberg refocused – the fear would have to come not from seeing the shark, but from where the shark might be. Delays forced the opening into summer, which in 1975 was where weak and sickly pictures got left to perish. To the surprise of nervous studio heads, test audiences loved it, and so the legendary success of Jaws (and its accompanying business model) came to pass.

Two years later, Spielberg’s friend George Lucas released Star Wars, and thus began the age of the summer blockbuster.

Sequels for popular films were a largely cynical exercise, and rarely involved their original creators. Where Spielberg feared creative stagnation, Lucas saw an opportunity – the franchise.

Lucas took advantage of pessimistic producers and negotiated a share of the merchandising profits. Star Wars: A New Hope became a blueprint, a Campbellian work of emotional peaks and troughs that’s dynamic, toyetic, and endlessly reproducible.

No film before or since has been re-released quite so often, and in all likelihood this process will continue until the ocean laps at our proverbial doorstep. What Lucas learned is that each iteration must be bigger than the last. A shark, simply implied, will not do. Imagine a Jaws 7 where we’ve met the evil scientist that created the shark, exploded the lab, and made privy to the struggles of his entire extended family. The plot of the seventh Star Wars revolves around a Death Star even bigger than the previous two.

What Star Wars provides is a universe (not just a world, but a universe) where every detail is available to the faithful. Every character, no matter how minor, has a name and backstory. A colossal tower built on minutiae. In essence, it’s a story without mystery, ready for self-proclaimed geeks to bicker over whether it’s realistic for Boba Fett to get digested by the Sarlacc.

Enter Ernest Cline.

branding without people actually having to watch your movie.” thebrag.com

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arts in focus

“What Star Wars provides is a universe (not just a world, but a universe) where every detail is available to the faithful.”

Cline developed a following for his work in the slam poetry scene, producing such notable works as ‘Nerd Porn Auteur’. His debut screenplay, Fanboys, followed a group in post-high school malaise who decide to steal a rough cut of The Phantom Menace before their friend dies of cancer. In the climactic scene, George Lucas, playing himself, gives them a quiz to prove their worth. To Cline, Star Wars is a devotional text, and geekdom is measured on the accumulation of information. The pleasure lies in nothing so base as story or character, but in recitation. It is not enough to simply love, one must be constantly seen demonstrating their love. Luckily enough, the church has a gift shop at the end of the tour.

Ready Player One was subject to a bidding war before the book’s release (which, to be fair, was also the case for Jaws), and it’s easy to see why. It’s the one film you don’t have to put any work into getting people to care about, because the dazzling array of pop symbolism is built entirely from things the audience already knows. This is the end goal for intellectual property.

If your iconography enters pop culture, then you can perpetuate branding without people actually having to watch your movie.

We’re in a post-content era, where promoting the interplay of iconography takes precedence over the product itself. Divorced from context, these figures can be used to promote a franchise by targeting people who would otherwise have no interest in the property. Disney promotes new Star Wars characters by releasing action figures months prior to the film’s release. The Twilight phenomenon popularized the

“To Cline, Star Wars is a devotional text, and geekdom is measured on the accumulation of information.”

notion of being on a fictional character’s ‘team’, the ins and outs of its four-film love triangle debated on social media. Newsmedia’s insistence on using Harry Potter references, which has (at best) a facile grasp of politics, keeps it in the cultural conversation a full decade past its use-by date.

The problem with this approach is that you might neglect to make a memorable fi lm. Avatar made billions of dollars, but all most people remember is the blue people with LED tails. Ready Player One is nothing but iconography, and is all the worse for it.

Spielberg is still a master of framing and spectacle, but its impossible to pinpoint what, if anything, is the point. It’s a struggle to recommend any individual scene, something that encapsulates what Ready Player One is really ‘about’. Its original characters hew so closely to archetype they’re barely present. Without an angle of investment: a relationship, a message, a warning – it’s all ticker tape and no parade. A ceaseless barrage of references with no motivation to care, dotted with explanatory nods for the uninitiated.

A YouTube clip of Cline explaining the video game references alone runs nearly 20 minutes.

There’s no sin in escapism. It’s an entertaining way to spend a few hours, and the successful ones help fund the ‘difficult films’ critics love to pore over. The Marvel content factory, an iterative process much like Star Wars, has even found a way to include significant political and cultural issues in its psychedelic costume drama. You just have to be careful with how much shark you use.

What: Ready Player One is in Australian cinemas now

“We’re in a post-content era, where promoting the interplay of iconography takes precedence over the product itself.”

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arts in focus

Playing The Reality Game:

TRUTH, LIES & RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE I

By Dave Crewe

couldn’t believe it. Trixie Mattel in the Hall of Fame and fans are calling it rigga morris? Who would have thought that the fan favourite taking the crown would be the real gag of the season?

If that didn’t make much sense to you, let me backtrack a little. For the uninitiated: I’m referring to the third ‘All Stars’ season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality show about drag queens that’s a little bit America’s Next Top Model, a little bit Project Runway, and a lot its own thing. All Stars reunites contestants from earlier seasons – the tenth regular season has just begun – and going into the latest All Stars, Trixie Mattel was the clear favourite to take the crown.

Despite underperforming in the show’s seventh season, she’s won plenty of fans since – Drag Race is the rare reality show where onscreen popularity translates to off-screen success – as a sharp-tongued comedian and as the co-host of the Trixie And Katya Show (screening here on Viceland). With an incredibly distinctive look – tonnes of makeup, plenty of pink – seeing her walk away with the grand prize of $100,000 and a spot in a Photoshopped, non-existent Hall of Fame isn’t in of itself surprising.

To understand the surprise, you only need to watch the season. Trixie was overshadowed first by Seattle queen BenDeLaCreme, who firmed quickly as a frontrunner, and then – after Ben sensationally eliminated herself at the season’s midpoint – veteran Drag Race competitor Shangela. It’s more than that, though. Reality shows are all about last minute upsets; you can’t keep fans’ attention if the obvious frontrunner wins every time, so countless shows are engineered and edited to produce unexpected outcomes.

All Stars 3 was a little different, in that Trixie’s win felt transparently like the outcome of producer meddling. Drag Race – always at least partly operating as a parody of similar reality shows – folded Survivor into its DNA with the final episode, bringing back eliminated All Stars contestants to vote on which two competitors deserved to lip sync for the title.

I don’t intend to offer a post-mortem of this decision. I’d only reach the same conclusion everyone else has: this ‘jury’ came across as a clumsy way to disadvantage the season’s frontrunner(s) and inject drama into the proceedings; it might have worked, but not when sprung on the contestants without prior warning. I don’t want to talk about Trixie Mattel, either. What I do want to talk about are the two queens who could – and perhaps should – have won the season, and how BenDeLaCreme’s and Shangela’s approach to the show tells us a lot about performance both within and without the context of reality television.

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he story of Shangela is, in many ways, the story of how Drag Race became the show it is today. Long before she was – if Reddit and the live viewing I attended were anything to go by – the fan’s preferred AS3 winner, she was a scrappy young queen with a few months experience in the show’s second season, back in 2010. Despite being eliminated in the very first episode, she made enough of a mark to be invited back for season three.

It’s in that season that Shangela lay the groundwork for Drag Race queens and Drag Race itself. Shangela came to play with preprepared branding – a catchphrase (“Halleloo!”) and a corn gimmick – that could be easily slapped on merchandise after the show. She parlayed her talents into other arenas, too, subsequently acting in the likes of Community, Terriers and The X-Files reboot. But most importantly, Shangela ensured that Drag Race remained entertaining. She delivered entertaining confessionals – guaranteeing herself screen time – and made every effort to tap into reality show fuel: “conflama” (conflict and drama) by turning even the gentlest slight into a full-bore fight.

Shangela didn’t win her season. She was still a young queen, ill-equipped for season three’s frequent sewing challenges. But she proved more influential on the show than I think she’s given credit for. Before Shangela, the show had its share of fights – Tatianna vs Tyra, Mystique vs Morgan, everyone vs Rebecca – but never found the kind of seasons-long narrative (Heathers vs Boogers) that she helped sustain.

Post-season three, the show’s producers went out of their way to cultivate emergent drama into ongoing storylines that could

“RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE IS A REALITY SHOW ABOUT DRAG QUEENS THAT’S A LITTLE BIT AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL, A LITTLE BIT PROJECT RUNWAY, AND A LOT ITS OWN THING.” 16 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

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“QUEENS ARE EITHER SHUNTED INTO A VILLAIN ROLE BECAUSE IT’S BETTER TV, OR ARE DISMISSED BECAUSE THEY DON’T PRESENT AN ENGAGING NARRATIVE.”

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maintain fan interest through weaker episodes. Season four was defined by a fight between alternative goth queen (and eventual winner) Sharon Needles and “tired-ass showgirl” Phi Phi O’Hara. This was more than a short-lived reality show scrap; this was a stage for a showdown between different eras of drag aesthetics, and the producers made sure to weave this storyline through every episode. In subsequent seasons, queens were chosen specifically to promote such conflict, whether it was Alyssa Edwards and Coco Montrese in season five, ex-Idol contestants Courtney Act and Adore Delano in season six, or ‘twins’ Aquaria and Miz Cracker in the show’s latest season.

There’s no denying that this sort of meddling has made for great television. But, inevitably, valuing stories over success has its victims. Queens are either shunted into a villain role because it’s better TV, or are dismissed because they don’t present an engaging narrative. I’d argue that, one of the more prominent victims of this approach was BenDeLaCreme. In her season – the sixth – she was clearly one of the more talented queens (though undeniably overshadowed by perhaps the show’s most successful competitor, Bianca Del Rio), but her star waned as the season progressed.

Essentially, Ben wasn’t built for reality TV. Her persona is – in her own words – “terminally delightful.” She didn’t have a tragic backstory, and she wasn’t interested in picking fights with other competitors. When another queen – Darienne Lake – took umbrage at Ben’s success and perceived arrogance, a possible plotline presented itself. Producers jumped on the opportunity, constructing a (largely onethebrag.com

“SHANGELA AND BENDELACREME EACH REPRESENTED DIFFERENT WAYS OF PLAYING THE REALITY SHOW GAME.” BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18 :: 17

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TRUTH, LIES & RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE

“RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE MAY, ULTIMATELY, BE A BIT OF TRIFLING ENTERTAINMENT, BUT THE RESPECTIVE PATHS OF SHANGELA AND BEN ARE DEMONSTRATIVE OF THE CHALLENGES OF RESISTING e A SYSTEM FROM WITHIN.” re m

sided, mostly artificial) enmity between the two queens that culminated in Ben’s elimination after losing a lip sync to Darienne. It was a capper to a storyline built around Ben, at her expense.

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Shangela and BenDeLaCreme each represented different ways of playing the reality show game. Shangela profited by offering editors plenty of entertaining options to motivate producers to keep her around as long as possible, while Ben suffered from her inability to engage with the nastier undercurrents of the genre.

hich brings us to All Stars 3. Both queens turned up playing essentially the same game as in their original seasons: Shangela doing her best to make mischief, Ben endeavouring to keep everyone happy.

But the game had changed. Unlike normal Drag Race, where queens are eliminated at RuPaul’s discretion, the All Stars model gives the elimination power to each week’s winner. That was perfect for Shangela – who immediately set about attempting to forge alliances – but when Ben proceeded to win an unprecedented streak of challenges, the pressures of kicking out other queens began to overwhelm her.

At the time, Ben’s choice to eliminate herself at the climax of the show’s sixth episode – after winning fi ve (!) of the six preceding challenges – was shocking. But given how the season ended, her decision looks very smart.

Where Shangela expected (understandably) to be rewarded for offering entertaining television, Ben intuitively understood Drag Race’s need for escalation. The previous season of All Stars, while well-received, had been criticised for the seeming inevitability of Alaska’s win. What would be more dramatic that cutting down the frontrunner at the fi nal hurdle? Instead of waiting to be dispatched, Ben chose

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to leave on her own terms; she took a lesson from Shangela and created the drama herself.

Shangela was left in the lurch. The aforementioned jury twist was only ever going to punish the frontrunner – after all, Shangela had herself eliminated many of the queens in the jury. Despite doing her damnedest to up the conflama quotient, Shangela herself sacrificed at the altar of television and its ravenous need for one more big surprise.

The whole season of All Stars 3 turned out to be a lesson in the dangers of trying to exploit a system from within. Back in season three, Shangela’s unending quest for conflict kept her in contention and helped establish her thriving career thereafter. But that was almost a decade ago; in 2018, playing into the producer’s hands isn’t enough. None of this is to say that Trixie didn’t deserve her win! But the circumstances of the finale – where Shangela wasn’t even granted the opportunity to lip sync for the crown – were unmistakably designed to surprise audiences, and thus get the kind of social media outrage that ultimately attracts more eyeballs.

The lessons here go beyond how reality shows coax their contestants in performing certain roles before betraying them. As BenDeLaCreme said in a Facebook post after the finale aired: “Stop accepting what “authority figures” have told you you have to do.” RuPaul’s Drag Race may, ultimately, be a bit of trifling entertainment, but the respective paths of Shangela and Ben are demonstrative of the challenges of resisting a system from within. When we play by the rules – even if we bend them to our will – we’re still subject to those rules. To succeed on your own terms, you need to question and, where necessary, explicitly reject those rules. If nothing else, it makes for great television. ■ thebrag.com

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mentary.” cu do ic us m r he ot no e lik s el fe d “Instrument both looks an

“According to Picciotto the band doesn’t preplan their setlists, so every live show is a unique improvisation.”

[FILM]

Instrument Is An All-Time Great Rock Doco

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By Chris Neill

here’s a moment in Jem Cohen’s Instrument – a documentary about the seminal Washington D.C. punk band Fugazi – where drummer Brendan Canty explains that his sister’s boyfriend believes the band live together in a group house without any heat. It’s a weird rumour that doesn’t seem to surprise guitarist and co-frontman Ian MacKaye: “The problem is if you don’t say anything, then people place your thing on you. They say who you are.

“But then if you try to steer it all,” MacKaye continues, “It’s premeditated ... You’re manipulating it.”

So how do you solve a problem like this? How do you create an honest portrait of a band that dispels misconceptions without creating a narrative that isn’t genuine? With music documentaries, there’s always a degree of artificiality. Candid behind-the-scenes moments are edited together to form some kind of narrative, and there’s usually an awareness on the subject’s behalf that leads to them performing for the camera.

“Instrument answers a few questions you might’ve had about the band, but still remains vague enough to let you to make up your own mind about who Fugazi are.” thebrag.com

Through a collection of material consisting of live concerts, interviews, studio recording sessions and behind the scenes tour footage – amassed from 1987 to 1998 – Instrument answers a few questions you might’ve had about the band (no, they don’t live in a freezing share house subsisting on a steady diet of rice), but still remains vague enough to let you to make up your own mind about who Fugazi are. The band isn’t so much steering their image as they are giving the driver advice on which route to take.

What Instrument does better than anything else is capture Fugazi’s sound through the assembled visuals, constantly jackknifing and throwing the audience off-balance. The band will be locked into a hypnotic rhythm, MacKaye and co-frontman Guy Picciotto dawdling around the stage before an abrupt explosion of energy. MacKaye and Picciotto’s bodies will contort and convulse for seconds, their guitars screeching, before they will suddenly return to their subdued demeanor and sound, almost as though the last few seconds hadn’t happened at all.

According to Picciotto the band doesn’t pre-plan their setlists, so every live show is a unique improvisation.

That uncertainty translates into the film’s editing: just as a song peaks it’ll cut to the band eating in a food court to a close up of MacKaye’s face as he screams vocals into the microphone, then to bassist Joe Lally attempting to bathe in a motel shower that barely comes up to his chest.

Watching Instrument for the first time, you don’t know what you’re going to get.

From day one Fugazi have always done everything on their own terms. Forming in 1986 and going on an indefinite hiatus in 2003, they existed in a period when the underground transitioned into the mainstream, with every major label snapping up whatever alt-rock band they could in the hopes of scoring the next angry-guitar fuelled platinum hit. Fugazi refused to march to the drum of these major labels – MacKaye: “I have a lot of contempt for the record industry” – and it worked. They remained independent throughout their career and still managed to out-sell and out draw the bands on those big labels.

They’re the poster children of do-it-yourself punk ethics for a reason, unwavering in their integrity and maintaining the respect that comes from not selling out, the cardinal sin of punk rock.

Instrument both looks and feels like no other music documentary. The film opens with an ethereal live performance, filmed on Super 8 stock that’s been slightly slowed; it’s poorly lit and colour-graded a sickly yellow.

The band’s bodies blur and smear as they perform (Cohen would use stills from this scene for the film’s poster and the soundtrack’s cover art). The end result of Cohen’s collection of disparate snatches of footage is something raw and experimental – crude film stock and unedited video footage combined in a way that feels honest, never distorting who Fugazi are. While you might get the odd shot that flirts with the realm of art-school pretentiousness, the context renders that pretention moot.

Picciotto’s erratic dance moves and almost liquid body are the perfect focus for Cohen’s lens.

If you’ve listened to Fugazi but never really looked into the people behind the music, Instrument is an indispensible document of one of music’s hardest working acts, and one of the most important bands of the ’90s. In their review of the band’s third album, In On The Kill Taker, Rolling Stone called Fugazi “the only band that matters.”

An exaggeration, sure, but after watching Instrument, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

What: Instrument Where: Sydney Opera House When: Friday May 25 – Saturday May 26 BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18 :: 19

arts in focus Star Wars: The Last Jedi

A Wrinkle In Time

Is Hollywood Finally Dealing With Its Lack Of Diversity?

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t’s a sight that will restore your faith in movies themselves: De Ja Little, a sixth grader from the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, Georgia, watching Black Panther on the film’s opening (a few weeks prior, a video of the whole school finding out they were going to see the film also went viral). Little’s face of moving awe and wonder was repeated again and again, from New York to Melbourne.

“I would like to remember this 20 years from now … and go: ‘I remember that night, it was incredible.’ I am moved,” Dorcas Utkovic, presenter and producer for Oz African TV told the ABC after a screening in Melbourne.

“We’ve got to undo colonial and historic disadvantage for the last 400 to 500 years,” Scottness L. Smith, a filmmaker originally from South Africa also told the ABC. “It is a film that tells a story of a fictional African country that exists only in our imagination, and when we take that power and we focus and we go forward, global African excellence will be realised in our lifetime.”

With Black Panther and A Wrinkle In Time releasing within a month of each other, representation, from Wakanda to Ava DuVernay’s rendering of Meg Murry, has been writ on the largest of screens all over the world, the former even becoming the first film in 35 years to be shown in movie theatres in Saudi Arabia.

“A Wrinkle In Time is for all the girls – and boys, and non-binary kids, and teens and adults and the elderly – who’ve ever been a Meg,” Angie Han of Mashable wrote in her review of the latter. “It’s a flawed film that

“With Black Panther and A Wrinkle In Time releasing within a month of each other, representation has been writ on the largest of screens all over the world.”

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By Ella Donald

“Is the canon of Hollywood, typically written by white men in the directing chair and boardrooms, finally changing?” entreats us to love flawed things, up to and including our very own selves. Maybe that sounds like a hoary cliché now. It didn’t feel like one when I was watching the movie, which is so disarmingly earnest that I fell completely under its spell.”

Is the canon of Hollywood, typically written by white men in the directing chair and boardrooms, finally changing? In recent years Disney has been celebrated for their strides in diversity that are unmatched by other Hollywood studios: DuVernay became the first woman of colour to direct a film with a budget in excess of $100 million; Kelly Marie Tran took on a major role in Star Wars: The Last Jedi; Black Panther broke with the well-worn formula of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; Moana found monumental success (although it’s worth noting that Moana was directed by two white men), and the studio even released the sadly forgotten Queen Of Katwe by Mira Nair. They seem, mercifully, to be listening to the current murmurings about representation like no other studio, doing fewer haphazard reboots than their counterparts, and instead revising their past successes with purpose.

This realisation couldn’t have come soon enough.

Until Wonder Woman stormed the box office last year and Black Panther this year, interest in the oversaturated tent pole films that now make up the bulk of Hollywood’s expenditure was drying up. Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice made over 50 per cent of its total gross on opening weekend, quickly deflating under a tiredness for the self-serious bombast DC is mainly known for. Justice League, long touted as a high point for the DC universe, recently became the lowest grossing film of the franchise. Not even Avengers: Age Of Ultron was safe, grossing below that of the first outing from 2012. One story about a troubled man saving the world quickly faded into another, and Marvel’s template of fake-out deaths of characters

and multiple endings was compounded by there being multiple movies to see each year.

But what comes next after this dream run with Black Panther and A Wrinkle In Time? Can Disney continue the work they’ve started to resounding acclaim?

Because in the past, to most studios, even the most limp attempts at racial and gender diversity (I’m questioning whether the record-breaking success of every male-directed, female-driven ensemble comedy counts as such) has always been a passing attraction.

A film breaks new ground, scoops up a staggering amount of box office dollars, sets off a cacophony of shocked reactions, and is then promptly forgotten in the continuous parade of white-bread, cookie-cutter superheroes.

When Elizabeth Banks directed Pitch Perfect 2 to a $287 million gross worldwide in 2015, surpassing the first installment in just five days, a lot of the reactions included ‘shock’. “Why Was Pitch Perfect 2 Such a Shocking Box Office Smash?” asked Moviefone. “Pitch Perfect: Hollywood’s surprising success story” said the BBC. “Is 2015 The Summer Hollywood Finally Bet Big On Women?” SlashFilm wrote.

“Until Wonder Woman stormed the box office last year and Black Panther this year, interest in the oversaturated tent pole films that now make up the bulk of Hollywood’s expenditure was drying up.” thebrag.com

FEATURE Queen Of Katwe

Black Panther

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iven studies have found that 51 per cent of cinema audiences are women, and that studio films written, produced by, and starring women show a higher ROI than those by men, perhaps it’s time for Hollywood to learn its lesson.

By the time Bad Moms crossed close to $200 million and Hidden Figures beat one of the most anticipated films of the year (it should, however, be noted that both are directed by men) the next year, Hollywood had returned to shock and bemusement again. “Surprise!

Turns out Hidden Figures beat Rogue One at the box office,” USA Today said.

How about when Patty Jenkins jumpstarted the muchmaligned DC Universe with Wonder Woman, and when Ryan Coogler made Black Panther the 10th highest grossing film of all time? “Theater owners have been asking for more diversity in movies for a long time, and

by diversity we mean diversity in casting and diversity in times of the year when movies are released,” said John Fithian, head of the National Association of Theatre Owners, the peak body representing cinemas in the US. “We want these movies to set a precedent and not be one-offs that people forget about.”

Until quite recently, Disney has led the charge – but thankfully other studios are now getting the message too. Patty Jenkins is returning for DC’s Wonder Woman sequel, DuVernay is hopping to the same studio for the upcoming New Gods, and Cathy Yan has been signed on for Harley Quinn spin-off Birds Of Prey. Is Disney keeping up their progressive strides? Look at their planned slate for everything from princesses to Star Wars to Marvel, which extends well into the 2020s. Of the films we have learned details of beyond reserved release dates, there’s the long-awaited live action Mulan directed by Niki Caro (Whale Rider, The

Zookeeper’s Wife), an untitled animated film from LinManuel Miranda, and a female lead in this year’s Mary Poppins Returns.

But regardless of the diversity of their current output, such titles are far in the future. Furthermore, there’s controversy around Guy Ritchie directing the upcoming live-action Aladdin film at Disney, despite his latest film King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword proving both a critical and commercial failure. Star Wars, consistently amongst the highest grossing films of all time, is still being directed exclusively by white men, despite continued calls for diversity. And the similar problem goes for Marvel, which has never had a woman helm one of their films, and is yet to engage another director of colour. It’s a situation that asks a simple question – if Hollywood doesn’t learn, how will these successes be replicated, instead of becoming a wishful footnote? ■

“Can Disney continue the work they’ve started to resounding acclaim?”

A Wrinkle In Time

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FEATURE

WO(MAN)

Sex And Violence In The Films Of Paul Verhoeven

POWER:

BY OLI VI A COS TA

“Verhoeven is alternately labelled a misogynist and a feminist by audiences and critics alike.”

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Hence the bold hypothesis: these films both deal with the stripping away of power from their protagonists, and the type of power they get denied differs depending on their gender.

As a result, delineating where the autonomy of the characters lie within such a struggle is an interesting way of exploring the means by which gendered biases change the nature of autonomy and influence.

Verhoeven is alternately labelled a misogynist and a feminist by audiences and critics alike, two words that seem to have lost their weight in the contemporary world’s socio-political boxing ring; an arena where the very nature of equity is at stake. And so the question arises: does Verhoeven comply with traditional tropes of power prescribed to male/female characters, or is he, in fact, subtly subverting how we understand power and gender?

otal Recall and Elle are two of Paul Verhoeven’s most notable films (obviously excluding the masterpiece that is RoboCop), but they’re vastly different beasts. From content to style, acting to colour palette, these films are born from totally different worlds. But despite the things that set them apart, they meet at a curious intersect, overlapping as two presentations of a struggle for power; films where the protagonists try desperately to clutch at whatever autonomy they have remaining in their crumbling worlds.

Total Recall tells the story of Douglas Quaid (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) in 2084, a mild-mannered worker who dreams of moving to Mars. He purchases a “holiday” at Rekall, a company that specialises in implanting artificial memories, only to find himself forced to battle his way through the colony on Mars, in the process trying to decipher which reality, and indeed version of himself, he should believe.

Elsewhere, Elle is an intimate exploration of Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert), a middle-aged woman who is repeatedly raped in her home. She is hesitant to report the attacks after spending time under public scrutiny as a child, following the arrest of her serial killer father.

So the first overlap should be clear: both films are centred on disturbing situations that could end with dire outcomes, namely the death of both lead characters while they are powerless to fight against forces bigger than themselves. But looking at what kind of power is taken from these characters reveals how gender can be a determining factor in the portrayal of character; how sexuality and sex can change what characters want, and what they can achieve.

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ouglas Quaid is robbed of power through the reconstruction of the world around him – quite quickly, his reality is no longer under his control. By contrast, Michèle is robbed of power through repeated, premeditated rapes committed against her. Quaid’s world explodes while Michelle’s implodes. Does this suggest that the ultimate removal of autonomy for a man is the loss of control over his reality, but for a woman, it is the violation of her sexually?

It seems as though Quaid chooses to undergo the memory implant (although it’s worth pointing out that depends entirely on your interpretation of the fi lm: some have argued that this decision is a fake choice, and Quaid has already been implanted – but that’s a whole other article), whereas Michèle has no autonomy over the power taken from her.

As a child she was thrust into the public eye at the hands of her serial killer father, as she bore witness to the murders and kidnapping of his victims. His application for parole has brought him back into the public consciousness, and she again faces vitriol from the public – in one scene a customer in a café pours her food scraps onto Michèle’s lap.

This initial removal of power perhaps hints at the progression of story within each fi lm. Spoiler: Arnie triumphs over his reality (or at least so it seems…) but Elle sits in a much stickier middle ground, and we’re not sure if Michèle is empowered, oppressed or a strange combination of the two.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Paul Verhoeven on the set of Total Recall.

“Does Verhoeven comply with traditional tropes of power prescribed to male/female characters, or is he, in fact, subtly subverting how we understand power and gender?”

“These films both deal with the stripping away of power from their protagonists, and the type of power they get denied differs depending on their gender.”

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eminist film scholar Jean-Anne Sutherland has designed a wonderful table called Power And Powerful Women In Film that you should definitely Google. In the work, Sutherland details the different types of power afforded to female characters, with the types of power broken down into “power-over’ (a character carrying out their will over another), power-to (the character’s sense of personal control, and independence) and power-with (coalition building that is necessary to address oppressive systems and inequality). Each type of power escalates in potency.

The distinction between these categories is crucial in understanding where and how power is allocated to Quaid and Michèle.

Quaid is given traditional modes of power: he’s physically strong (Arnie is of course huge), socially able, and has the ability to fight back against his aggressors.

All of this is contrasted with Michèle, who is a small woman who lives in a large home alone, the double-edged sword being the home is both the domestic empire of a woman, and also the kind of space that is typically only really considered complete when also occupied by a man. Michèle is powerless against a masked oppressor, and is a victim to both the media and the exploits of her murderous father.

Cleverly, Verhoeven uses the language of cinema to reflect this. Colour is aggressively splashed throughout Total Recall, whereas in Elle the palette is creamy and soft. Camera movement is used to highlight Douglas Quaid’s struggle and heroism: fast cuts, low angle shots of Quaid and close ups of emotion squiggling across his face are contrasted with long, slow takes of Michèle, fluidly edited.

While of course these films are in different genres and have different plots, the question remains: is that reason enough for Verhoeven to stick to traditional visual portrayals of men and women in film?

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scar Wilde of course said a lot of things, but his observation that “Everything in the world is about sex except sex; sex is about power” is near perfect when applied to the world of Elle.

A woman who is in control of her sexuality without it being the only facet of her character seems to be the ultimate fear of screenwriters. You’d be hard pressed to find the depiction of a female-identifying character that has a sex life presented as just another aspect of her persona, rather than as the defining feature of her character.

Indeed, Vehoeven’s presentation of Michèle can be contrasted with the female characters in Total Recall to highlight this. Whereas the characters in the latter film could be described in three words (for example, Quaid’s wife Lori is sexy, sharp and deceptive, and not much more), Michèle is bafflingly hard to comprehend.

She is not a cliched “strong, female character”; she is a complex, realistic woman, so perfectly realised that we feel we may have well passed her in the street or sat opposite her in a coffee shop.

The sadness and brilliance of Michèle’s character is that we are not accustomed to seeing female characters like her onscreen, and so interpreting her character is a difficult task.

Michèle’s character epitomises traditional concerns over “immorality”, the kind that inevitably evolve from female sexual liberation: she covets her neighbour, and is engaged in an affair with her best friend’s husband. Even more troublingly, she seemingly enjoys her violent sexual encounters with the masked assailant (in the moment where Michèle discovers his identity their sex seems to turn from an attack to an erotic experience). In that way, the fi lm seems to be tapping into an old, old worry: that women, given the opportunity for freedom, will run amok, guided by a primal indifference towards what is socially and ethically permitted.

Isabelle Huppert in Elle.

“In the opening scene of the film Michèle’s cat watches calmly as her owner is raped, and this seemingly indifferent reaction to the attack is mirrored by Huppert throughout the film.”

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Elle

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“Elle sits in a sticky middle ground, and we’re not sure if Michèle is empowered, oppressed or a strange combination of the two.”

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omestic and sexual violence are obviously loaded topics. In Australia alone, one woman dies at the hands of a partner every week. And although it received overwhelmingly positive reviews, resulting in a swathe of nominations and wins at major festivals, Elle also copped some backlash for the boundary-blurring between rape and submissive-dominant sexual relationships.

Most notably, film reviewer Richard Brody from The New Yorker described Elle as “a cinema of disinformation masquerading as transgression.” And it is certainly unsettling to watch the simplicity of male brutality, not to mention the string of problems it leaves for Michèle to messily untangle. It shouldn’t take the repeated knocking down of a woman to demonstrate how strong she is; she should not be defined by how many times she must get back up.

At work, in her home, during her childhood – all spheres of Michèle’s life have been tainted by her seeming lack of autonomy. Even as the founder of a video game company – a role that gives her a certain degree of authority and power – Michèle is stripped of her influence when she faces harassment from an anonymous programmer who pastes her face on a virtual woman while she is sexually violated.

And yet at the same time, Michèle sits in a development meeting for a video game and gives feedback on a scene of extreme sexual violence. Coldly, her voice barely rising above a whisper, she tells the programmer to make the sounds of the virtual woman being raped louder and more sexual.

Elle proves to be a challenging examination of power with a female protagonist at the helm, and it provokes the audience into stepping over the imaginary rope that surrounds minorities and oppressed groups: can we feel distaste and distrust for a rape victim?

After all, this is perhaps the most intriguing and confusing aspect of Elle: how the viewer must reckon with a female character who seems to assert her power through her refusal to let it shake her. Huppert’s superbly understated and nuanced performance tears through layers of moral ambiguity, as is Verhoeven’s signature move, to present a character that we are not used to seeing, and remain singularly unsure of how to handle.

In this way, Michèle’s means of regaining power is totally dissimilar from Quaid in Total Recall, who is active, violent and clearly intentioned. For that reason, it could be argued that Michèle regains power in a “feminine” way – her first moment of empowerment comes from the knowledge of her attacker’s identity; it’s only when she sees his face that she suddenly starts to understand the situation for what it really is.

Appearing passive after discovering the rapist’s identity, rather than pursuing justice Michèle instead waits. She asserts power through composure, judging the right moment to strike. In the opening scene of the film Michèle’s cat watches calmly as her owner is raped, and this seemingly indifferent reaction to the attack is mirrored by Huppert throughout the film. She is smart, poised and self-assured, while simultaneously cold, sadistic and damaged, and it is these latter traits that ultimately lead to her freedom.

In this way, the difference in what type of autonomy is removed from each character is telling. It reveals to us the ways we view protagonists based on their gender: we have the strong, brave man; and the conniving, quiet, cold woman. Total Recall presents the traditional narrative arc with traditional characters that are easy to understand, precisely because we are so used to them. But Elle is something different; it challenges us with character types so new – so bold – that they almost cause us to recoil. ■

“The home is both the domestic empire of a woman, and also the kind of space that is typically only really considered complete when also occupied by a man.” thebrag.com

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ew to stre am sn ’ t a ing

W h

arts in focus

The Last Of The Mohicans

Monty Python And The Holy Grail

“The Life Of Brian and Holy Grail are perhaps the two greatest comedies of all time.”

WITH JOSEPH EARP

I

It’s a sad story, the tale of It Comes At Night. The A24-produced, Joel Edgerton-starring horror flick received near unanimous praise ahead of its release, with critics calling it one of the most important shockers in years; a new genre masterpiece, certain to send audiences into fits of anxious spasms. But in doing so, the press suffocated the flick with their kindness. Crowds flocked to the film expecting some gruelling, almost unwatchably tense fright fest, and instead got a taught, determinedly simple little chiller.

puddle; all neon lights and exploding squibs. Although ostensibly the story of Frank (James Caan), a criminal desperately trying to leave his safecracking ways behind him, the occasionally convoluted plot comes secondary to Mann’s real focus; exploring the dichotomy between a good man and the evil world around him. Much like Manhunter, another Mann masterpiece, the best way to watch Thief is to soak it in like one would a fi ne scotch; to sit back and let it happen.

While we’re on Mann, why not check out his elegiac, big budget epic, The Last Of The Mohicans. Held in place by a dynamic, soft-eyed performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, the fi lm cartwheels from grisly violence to humanistic drama and all the way back again. It’s a Blockbuster spectacle like few others; an intelligent, classic picture in the Lawrence Of Arabia mould. They really don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

“It Comes At Night is a horror film about having roommates; about how unpleasant it is to find oneself forever surrounded by people.”

Now, over to Netflix. There are a horde of new original titles heading to the streaming service, but unfortunately, the ruling share of them are not very good. The Alienist is unstoppably dreary nonsense; Seth Rogen’s Hilarity For Charity is about as amusing as a snuff film; and the new series of A Series Of Unfortunate Events is a sad case of diminishing returns.

It Comes At Night

“Thief is a kind of cinematic tone poem; a swirl of oil in an alleyway puddle, all neon lights and exploding squibs.”

Wild Wild Country

James Caan in Thief

“Wild Wild Country tells the sad, surreal story of the Rajneeshees, a quasi-religious cult that set up shop in rural Oregon.”

Not that the film was a commercial disappointment – shot on a budget of five million, it made almost 20. But its word of mouth was shocking; opening to a tidy two and a half million on its first day, it dropped to almost one sixth of that by the second.

Disappointed audiences warned their friends: It Comes At Night wasn’t the film they had been promised.

But, like the infected ghouls and starved, black eyed souls that haunt the film, It Comes At Night won’t stay down for very long. It is perfectly placed for rediscovery, and, available to stream now via Stan, will undoubtedly be embraced by a fresh audience who haven’t had their expectations yet set.

Edgerton stars as Paul, a gruff one-time history teacher eerily committed to keeping his family safe in a devastated apocalyptic environment. Isolation is what has kept his brood safe from the disease-addled denizens of the near future, so when he encounters a seemingly friendly and capable pack of fellow survivors, he is suspicious; aggressive. And although he eventually forms a truce with his new friends, the bond is as shaky as a string of saliva.

Which is to say, It Comes At Night is a horror film about having roommates; about how unpleasant it is to find oneself forever surrounded by people. Director Trey Edward Shults keeps things admirably brisk; at a mere 91 minutes, the film clips along at a terrible pace, and strips all but the bleached white bones from the story.

It’s a good ‘un.

Stan are also boasting an extraordinary transfer of Michael Mann’s theatrical fi lm debut, Thief. A kind of cinematic tone poem, it’s a swirl of oil in an alleyway

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But, those late to the party should run not walk over to Wild Wild Country, one of the most intelligent and nuanced documentaries of recent years. A masterpiece of the form, it tells the sad, surreal story of the Rajneeshees, a quasi-religious cult that set up shop in rural Oregon, with nuance, grace and humanity. Barry Jenkins, the director of Moonlight, has called it “something special”, and he’s not wrong; it’s a breath of fresh air in the glut of true crime documentaries clogging up our streaming services.

If you’re in the mood for something lighter, mind you, then Netflix have acquired a bevy of Monty Python flicks, including but not limited to Monty Python And The Holy Grail, Monty Python: The Life Of Brian, one season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and a host of associated documentaries and best ofs. Despite the fact that I, like many other antisocial, spotty young men, fell for Monty Python hard when I was a teenager, for many years in my early twenties I considered them an embarrassing reminder of how generic my taste had once been. But it’s wrong to judge the surrealist comedy troupe on the basis of their devotees; Brian and Holy Grail are perhaps the two greatest comedies of all time, hysterically funny, endlessly inventive doses of madness that still stand unequalled for their impressive zinger-to-bellylaugh ratio.

And now for something completely different: Jason Goes To Hell. The ninth instalment in the Friday The 13th franchise, the flick was pooh-poohed by snobby critics on its release, and considered a betrayal of its hockey-masked killer’s roots by fans of the series. But viewed in isolation, the flick is a batshit fucking crazy art piece; a ham sandwich of a horror film, full of stilted dialogue, horror icon cameos, and some of the most adventurous directing the series has ever seen. Do check it out. ■

thebrag.com

FEATURE

Sydney Writers Festival:

Best Of The Fest

[BOOKS] Writers Festivals can be tedious affairs; opportunities for dusty literary types to gather around and listen to even dustier literary types spruik their most recent weighty tome. But Sydney Writers Festival is not like other such events.

It never has been. From its conception, it has always been a literary event with a difference; a celebration of cutting edge, boundary-pushing writers looking to expand the form and all of its potential.

“A mix of weird fiction, feminist theory, and postmodern playfulness, Her Body And Other Parties is vicious and vast.”

That’s never been more clear than this year. Although the focus is on authors of fiction and non-fiction, the lineup also includes a viral star and academic (Robert E. Kelly, an expert on Korean relations who had his live BBC interview crashed last year by his two young children); one of the most acclaimed interviewers and political journalists in the country (Leigh Sales); a poet and author with few contemporary equals (Eileen Myles); a number of outstanding, formchallenging poets; and a “controversial”, AKA odious, columnist (Miranda Devine).

Indeed, the lineup is so overstuffed that it’s quite easy to get lost in all those names, and all those panels. For ease of access then, here are our picks of the festival; the writers and the events that shouldn’t be missed.

Carmen Maria Machado

Emily Wilson

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection of short stories, Her Body And Other Parties feels like one of those genuinely pivotal literary texts, a work that draws on a host of genre touchstones (most obviously the stories and novels of Alice Sheldon, Ray Bradbury, and Poppy Z. Brite) and uses them to synthesise something entirely new. A mix of weird fiction, feminist theory, and postmodern playfulness, it is vicious and vast; epic in scope and ambition, but carefully realised and precise too. These are familiar voices placed into unfamiliar mouths; recognisable horrors stretched to become new and freshly confronting. To read Maria Machado is to take a shortcut through a dark wood; to remember the fear and the fantasy of childhood; to become a young reader again, staying up late to read a book under the covers with a flashlight.

The Odyssey isn’t the most accessible book in the world. Although its key setpieces have become permanently engrained in pop culture consciousness, it is a difficult, meandering book. After all, it was designed to be spoken aloud rather than to be written down, and it has an odd kind of conversational quality to it. That strange, stop-start pacing is particularly alienating for modern audiences, many of whom have started a bad translation of the work only to be so bored by it that they never managed to muster the courage to pick it up again.

Machado is set to appear in conversation at the festival on Sunday May 6 at 3pm. She will be interviewed live onstage by Amelia Lush, bookseller at Newtown’s own Better Read Than Dead and celebrated member of the Australian literary community, making this an unmissable afternoon.

Enter Emily Wilson, the first female translator to ever work on the story. Her version retains the quirks and tangents that make Homer’s work so unique, but never gets bogged down in asides, or clunky phrasing. It’s an easy, endlessly entertaining read for modern audiences that draws out the adventure in the text – the sense of discovery and energy – while leaving behind the dustiness and dryness.

Jennifer Down

Peach, the debut novel

by Emma Glass, does what many might consider impossible: it takes a brutal story and tells it beautifully, with poetry and with light. Indeed, the book’s central dynamic – violence and assault translated into sentences full of internal rhymes, gorgeously rendered tangents, and trips of the tongue that recall Nabokov at his most inspired – make it a tricky, though admittedly short read. But as confronting as it might sometimes be, it is full of a kind of scraped, bleeding humanism; a deep understanding of failure. Quite simply, it has announced Glass as one of the most important writers of the last 20 years.

Jennifer Down is, simply put, one of the most exciting emerging writers in the country. Pulse Points, her recent collection of short stories, is full of a kind of gentle melancholy; that insistent sense of sadness that lurks about the edges of a lazy Sunday in the suburbs. Hers is a world of dignified, heartbroken partners; of fresh cut grass and fucked-up faces; of absolution lost and gained.

They’re brisk, brief, but they linger the way all truly great stories do.

E M I LY W I L S O N

Down is appearing at two events at the festival. On Sunday May 6 at 11:30 am, she will deliver a talk on how to disappear; a lecture that will involve discussion of those who have faked their deaths, the impossibility of escaping the modern world, and the loneliness that drives people to turn in everything they’ve ever known so that they might start again. Then, at two pm on the same day, she will be talking audiences through Pulse Points, noting her influences, inspirations, and aims.

“Peach has announced Emma Glass as one of the most important writers of the last 20 years.” thebrag.com

EMMA GLASS

Wilson is set to appear at the festival on Sunday May 6 at 4:30 to talk about the work. She’ll be joined by Jennifer Byrne, the host of ABC TV’s Book Club.

Emma Glass

Glass is set to appear at the festival on Saturday May 5 at 10am. The event is free, and will be moderated by Abigail Ulman, the author behind the exceptional short story collection Hot Little Hands.

CARMEN MARIA MACHADO

JENNIFER DOWN What: Sydney Writers Festival 2018 When: Monday April 30 – Sunday May 6 Where: Carriageworks BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18 :: 27

arts in focus

REVIEW

■ TV

Lost In Space is a vivid sci-fi adventure, and Netflix’s first big hit of the year

By Cameron Williams he new reboot of Lost In Space will conjure different feelings depending on when you first encountered the story of the Robinson family who get stranded in the cosmos. Fans of the 1960s television series might remember seeing the show for the first time, or catching a re-run.

You might cringe at the thought of the awful blockbuster film from the 1990s that tried to sell Matt LeBlanc as an action hero. Even the iconic theme song may have been stuck in your head at some point.

T

Netflix have retooled Lost In Space, and what’s most striking

about the 2018 version is how it draws on none of the past iterations. The show forges ahead with a slick new space adventure, great modern family dynamics, and light touches of science fiction.

safe from danger while trying to connect with other colonisers.

Of the survivors they initially encounter are a psychologist, Dr. Smith (Parker Posey), and a pilot, Don West (Ignacio Ariel Serricchio).

In the year 2046, the Robinson family get marooned on a mysterious planet after a mission to colonise a new world hits a catastrophic snag in transit. Mum and dad, Maureen (Molly Parker) and John (Toby Stephens), must keep their children, Judy (Taylor Russell), Penny (Mina Sundwall) and Will (Maxwell Jenkins),

The Robinsons are playing a card game when their mission goes bad, and the image of the Robinsons in space suits floating cards to each other in zero gravity is symbolic of the show itself. Lost In Space has a lot of science-fiction gloss; the sets, costumes, vehicle design and digital effects are similar in style to

“The Robinsons are playing a card game when their mission goes bad, and the image of the Robinsons in space suits floating cards to each other in zero gravity is symbolic of the show itself.” a Ridley Scott production like The Martian, or the rebooted Battlestar Galactica.

It’s pure blockbuster television.

The first episode is directed by Neil Marshall whose television credits include Game Of Thrones, Hannibal and Westworld (he also made the ace horror films Dog Soldiers and The Descent), and it has shades of the unforgettable first episode of Lost. Every item the Robinsons use is practical without requiring too much futuristic mumbo jumbo to explain, which makes the show feel close to our own times – Elon Musk’s SpaceX pops to mind a lot – while remaining just out of reach to allow for a little suspension of disbelief. Yet at its core, Lost In Space is a family drama.

“The show forges ahead with a slick new space adventure, great modern family dynamics and light touches of science fiction.”

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Show creators, Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, set out to show a family united on the surface – but The Robinsons are far from perfect. It doesn’t matter how many lightyears The Robinsons put between themselves and Earth, their problems follow, and Lost

In Space spends most of its 10 episode run jumping between the present and the past to flesh out their grievances. Simply put, the mission to colonise a new planet is Maureen and John’s last shot at making their marriage work.

The modern breakdown of a family depicted in Lost In Space 2018 is in stark contrast with the beaming smiles of the colourful family from the ’60s. Trying to keep The Robinsons together is juxtaposed with the mission’s goal of creating a utopia, which is depicted brilliantly in ‘how to create a colony’ videos that play in the each spacecraft and resemble commercials depicting wealthy housing estates with display homes. Perfect families and worlds don’t exist; will humans never learn that?

The volatile nature of the planet and its wildlife challenges the Robinsons and their fellow colonisers, which triggers a divide between family and self-preservation. Each episode presents a different life or death scenario while the mystery of who thebrag.com

arts in focus The BOOKSHELF:

Each month, we talk to one of our favourite Aussies about their personal libraries – the books they own, the books they love, the books they hate – and this time around, we were particularly excited to chew the fat with Erica Dunn of Mod Con. Mod Con’s brilliant new record, Modern Convenience, is one of the most enthralling records of the year so far – a plastic bag packed with broken glass, full of damning lyrics, and uplifted by a heavy dose of gallow’s humour. Mod Con play the Red Rattler on Saturday April 28.

“It’s pure blockbuster television.” (or what) sabotaged the mission slowly reveals itself. Lost In Space has enough secrets to keep it compelling in its first season, but there’s a ticking clock on how long the writers can drag it out before it becomes manipulative.

The depiction of life on Earth in 2046, mostly glimpsed in flashbacks or mentioned in conversations, is spookily similar to the same dilemmas plaguing us; governments are unstable, pollution has blocked out the sky and bookstores are extinct.

There’s a scene where Maureen tells her children they have no future on Earth – nobody does.

An eerie performance by Posey as Dr, Smith, one of the shows biggest mysteries, transforms the character into a complex antagonist. Smith manipulates The Robinsons for selfish reasons but her backstory is handled well enough that you empathise with why she despises the idea of a stable family. All the female characters are presented as smart and capable but they are vulnerable and allowed to fail, especially Maureen, played stoically by Parker who gives a performance as though she’s the captain of The Enterprise on Star Trek.

Lost In Space works best when the splintered family and supporting characters are united in survival. The show has an adventurous spirit and the presence of the younger characters give it a young adult edge reminiscent of The 100 (minus all the tribal murder and genocide). Even Will Robinson’s relationship with an alien ‘robot’ who utters the famous line, “danger, Will Robinson”, is similar to the John Connor and Terminator bond in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The first season of Lost in Space is a masterclass in reinvention.

The nostalgic beats are rare and it avoids winking at the audience, while the personal problems of the Robinson family match the peril of being marooned. After a rough start to the year for Netflix with series that aren’t reality shows, they finally have a hit on their hands with Lost in Space.

What: Lost In Space is available to stream on Netflix now

“At its core, Lost In Space is a family drama.” thebrag.com

What is the most prized book that you own?

I don’t think that I actually own any valuable books in the dollar sense, but the one that springs to mind as prized in my heart is The Woman Warrior: Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston.

A dear friend lent me their copy years ago and each word was like eating delicious candy! Hong Kingston mixes traditional Chinese folklore with hard autobiographical realism and takes the reader through the generations of women in her family who moved from mainland China to the United States. After years of scouring I found a secondhand copy in the bookshop above Angry Mom records in Ithaca NY alongside the sibling book China Men. Double score!

What was the first book that you bought?

I remember having to go out and buy my year 12 literature class booklist which included Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Both titles, which, at the time, were just weird words on perforated paper, became big love affairs for me. While they are worlds apart both stylistically and contextually, they both bring women’s experience and critique of society to the fore and are forever linked in my mind.

What’s the last book that made you cry?

I cry all the time when reading! I think the most recent story that got me salty was Carolyn Burke’s biography of Lee Miller, who led an incredible life as a Vogue model turned photographer, Man Ray’s muse/collaborator and a World War Two photojournalist who was one of the only women documenting the front lines and the first to capture evidence of the atrocities at Dachau. At the end of her life, after having been so exceptional and truly experiencing monumental moments of the twentieth century, she died misunderstood and unloved by those close to her largely due to her PTSD and alcoholism. After her death, her son found hundreds of boxes of negatives and realised he had, due to their bad relationship, lost the opportunity to appreciate someone incredible.

“Surely there’s a manual out there about how to make your wee drinkable and how to make coconuts into sunglasses.”

What’s the book you fell in love with when you were a teenager?

A game changing teenage crush was Hunter S. Thompson. Machismo and sociopathy aside, The Great Shark Hunt is a countercultural gem that doggedly chases the ills of the mainstream and knifepoints them in the alleyways. Illuminating nonfiction as totally surreal, Thompson’s abrasive stand-and-deliver account of social change in 1960s North America gave me a framework for resistance and off-kilter critical thinking. Remembering his campaign to run for Sherriff of Aspen still gives me a charge.

What books do you have on your bedside table?

Too many! A selection of the stack right now: The Day They Hanged The Sioux by C. Fayne Porter, Straight Life by Art & Laurie

“A game changing teenage crush was Hunter S. Thompson. Machismo and sociopathy aside, The Great Shark Hunt is a countercultural gem.”

Pepper, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, The Spinoza Of Market Street by Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield, The Boy Who Bought Old Earth

by Cordwainer Smith.

If you were trapped on a desert island, what’s the one book that you would want to have with you?

Surely there’s a manual out there about how to make your wee drinkable and how to make coconuts into sunglasses. I don’t own it. But I’d take that.

What’s the last book that you hated?

I’m not going to say that I hated it, because normally if I hate a book I just stop reading it, but Yukio Mishima’s The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion was deeply disturbing and hard to finish because the protagonist is so incredibly sadistic. Set on a backdrop of monastic temple life, Mishima’s portrayal of violence and self-destruction is so well juxtaposed that some passages really slap you in the face. I actually found it a weirdly addictive and a genius work of art but not pleasurable reading.

What’s a “classic” book that you’re ashamed you haven’t read?

I haven’t read heaps of classics! I don’t think I’ve read a single Dickens or Austen or Faulkner. I didn’t finish Ulysses or Don Quixote – I think I’ve even got a chapter left of The Idiot. I think if you’re suffering through reading something for the sake of it, you’re better off putting it down. It will work its way back to you at a better time. Not ashamed of none of it.

What’s a book people might be surprised to learn that you love?

I surprised myself when I became obsessed

with a non-fiction text on the most brutal of blood sports (which has never interested me otherwise). But On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates totally consumed me. It presents a series of discursive essays that begin by examining the sport’s larger-than-life protagonists and then simultaneously confronts broader narratives about class, race, gender, media, economy, philosophy, ego and human spirit with a mind-blowing nonchalance that only a true intellectual like Oates could pull off.

“Recently, when I was going through a real stage of writer’s block, Lucia Berlin’s A Manual For Cleaning Women absolutely inspired me to get my shit together.”

Who’s the writer that changed your life?

It’s obviously hard to pinpoint one, but recently, when I was going through a real stage of writer’s block, Lucia Berlin’s A Manual For Cleaning Women absolutely inspired me to get my shit together.

Immediate and honest, she re-illustrated for me what good writing is. Parts of that incredible collection can bring you to tears just by how good she is at her craft.

“I surprised myself when I became obsessed with a non-fiction text on the most brutal of blood sports. But On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates totally consumed me.”

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arts in focus

REVIEW ■ FILM

■ BOOK

Raw: My Journey Into The Wu-Tang is an explosive, powerful work

By Doug Wallen

A

mong the nine founding members of Wu-Tang Clan, Lamont “U-God” Hawkins hasn’t always been the most visible. And most recently he’s made headlines for suing the Staten Island rap collective – which still counts him as a member – for millions in royalties. Yet he’s the first person from WuTang to pen a proper memoir, and it turns out to be an insightful, charismatic account.

breakdown of his daily survival (“There’s no school like jail”), and regrets only being around to appear on three tracks on the first Wu-Tang album – though he did earn the opening verse on ‘Da Mystery Of Chessboxin’’. He was a key part of Wu-Tang’s touring, though, and after spending a fortnight in a mental asylum and then detoxing for two years, he finally started to find his own voice.

From its blunt opening line – “Time is a The blowout success motherfucker” – Raw: of Enter the Wu-Tang My Journey Into The (36 Chambers) saw Wu-Tang is brashly the Clan decamp funny. It also covers to Hollywood for six a lot of ground, months to make the dispensing roughfollow-up, 1997’s hewn motivational Wu-Tang Forever.

Raw: My Journey Into The Wu-Tang by Lamont wisdom when he’s That stretch of the ‘U-God’ Hawkins reflecting on his own story lags some with mistakes and doubling celebrity run-ins as an awestruck glimpse of hip-hop’s golden and periodic in-fighting, but it does provide era. Born in 1970, Hawkins provides a streethappy lashings of humour and nostalgia before level look at the fight to stay alive in the projects Hawkins devotes the final chunk of the book of both Staten Island and Brooklyn’s notorious to airing his grievances about Wu-Tang – right Brownsville neighbourhood during some of down to rushed albums like 2014’s A Better New York’s most lawless years. He’s unflinching Tomorrow. yet conversational, lamenting friends who’ve been killed on the street while describing the character-building effects of fist-fighting: “Not enough people living in New York today have been punched in the face.”

“From its blunt opening line – ‘Time is a motherfucker’ – Raw: My Journey Into The Wu-Tang is brashly funny.”

“The most sustained criticism is directed at RZA’s handling of money (“He lacks business skills”) and limiting of creative freedom.”

The most sustained criticism is directed at RZA’s handling of money (“He lacks business skills”) and limiting of creative freedom. Still, that’s balanced with considerable humbleness and positivity about his place in the Wu hierarch.

Aside from a brief prologue, he doesn’t get around to music until 40 pages in. But the sections about his early days are the book’s most vital, as he details rec-room parties during the mid-’80s, getting his first gun at age 14, and making thousands of dollars a day during the crack epidemic. But despite calling himself and Method Man the “Batman and Robin of the block” when it came to dealing, he doesn’t neglect the grim reality of that lifestyle.

For all its venting, Raw feels honest and level-headed on the whole. Between the memoir and Hawkins’ new album Venom – which features guest spots from Method Man, Inspectah Deck and Raekwon – the book should challenge anyone who sees U-God as only a minor character in the ongoing Wu-Tang saga.

Hawkins spent several years in prison, including time at Rikers Island. He gives a methodical

What: Raw: My Journey Into the Wu-Tang is out now through Faber & Faber

“Hawkins provides a street-level look at the fight to stay alive in the projects of both Staten Island and Brooklyn’s notorious Brownsville neighbourhood during some of New York’s most lawless years.”

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G

enre films made by people not widely known for their love of this mode of filmmaking are often interesting precisely because, like their makers, they don’t quite fit in the tradition. Jordan Peele’s Get Out is the most recent example: mixing together horror and satire, the Oscar-winning thriller also has the sense of humour for which its sketch-comedian-director is famous. Peele’s wit makes his social commentary even more biting, although critics claiming Get Out to be fully groundbreaking for its take on racism ignore a long tradition of socially conscious horror cinema, from James Whale’s Frankenstein in 1931 (the creature’s ruin by his own makers echoes that of Black Americans doomed by their past in slavery) to George Romero’s tragically killed African-American hero in Night Of The Living Dead in 1968.

Collaborating with experienced horror screenwriters Bryan Woods and Scott Beck (they co-wrote and co-directed a few low-budget horror films, such as Nightlight in 2015), comic actor John Krasinski co-wrote and directed A Quiet Place, the

almost silent alien invasion film he also stars in with his wife, Emily Blunt. Still best known for his turn as the sweet Jim Halpert in The Office, Krasinski’s dip into horror may surprise some viewers, but the end result feels very much like him: A Quiet Place may be effective as a collection of jumpscares, but it also has Krasinski’s beloved tenderness. It doubles as an alien film and a deeply emotional family drama about protecting your offspring and loving them unconditionally under any circumstances.

Opening in medias res, A Quiet Place doesn’t bother explaining the how and why of the alien invasion that has seemingly eradicated most of humanity.

The first scene establishes the simple premise purely via miseen-scene, while also indicating the sensitivity at the story’s core.

In an abandoned supermarket, dust-covered kids and their mother (Blunt) are walking on tiptoes, delicately grabbing pillboxes from the shelves and communicating in sign language.

The youngest boy (Cade Woodward) still hasn’t completely mastered ASL and draws a

“As is common – and arguably unavoidable, if not essential – in genre cinema, A Quiet Place references several iconic horror films, but does so modestly.” thebrag.com

arts in focus

A Quiet Place is a bold meditation on the nature of family

By Manuela Lazic

“Genre films made by people not widely known for their love of this mode of filmmaking are often interesting precisely because, like their makers, they don’t quite fit in the tradition.”

Dad, pretends not to be scared when the creatures come too close, and Krasinski’s wholesome and expressive face, combined with his muscular body, makes him the ideal strong but kind fatherly archetype.

A Quiet Place

rocket in the dirt, mimicking the best he can to his deaf older sister (Millicent Simmonds, the star of Todd Haynes’ misfire Wonderstruck) that this is how they will escape. When he comes close to accidentally activating the sounds of an electronic toy rocket ship, his relatives turn pale and gently scold him; he’s just a kid. Kids are loud, and this truism will become the main problem in an environment where noisiness has turned deadly, as well as an evocative metaphor for the struggles of parenthood.

Spoiler: the child eventually makes too much noise and is torn apart (off screen) by a ruthless alien.

Already, loud children are literally and metaphorically ripping apart the family unit. The sister feels

that her father (Krasinski) will never forgive her for the accident.

The parents, meanwhile, blame themselves, as they are supposed to protect their children, but try to move on in order to survive. The realism of this family dynamic, revolving as it does around things (literally) unspoken and pent-up, is the heart of the film.

The fantasy aspect of the story allows these relationship struggles to be expressed in more dramatic strokes. Under such extreme circumstances, loving, trusting and, most importantly, communicating with each other is very difficult, but paradoxically more important than ever. Family life, the film proposes, is the struggle to make your voice heard without creating a dangerously

noisy household that would end up being toxic to everyone involved.

The analogy is taken to another level when, months later, it appears that the mother is heavily pregnant. Now living in a deserted but functional house in a cornfield, the family prepares a soundproof room for the newcomer. Slow dancing with earphones on, Krasinski and Blunt make for a sweet couple, and together beautifully portray parenthood as the sharing of both love and fear for the future. With their children, they are patient and affectionate, refusing to let the monsters outside turn them into soulless animals dedicated only to survival.

This humility translates into the performances. Nobody, not even

As is common – and arguably unavoidable, if not essential – in genre cinema, A Quiet Place references several iconic horror films, but does so modestly. Emily Blunt standing face to face with a blind extraterrestrial whose sense of hearing is hyper-developed recalls Sigourney Weaver and the titular Alien, only Blunt is also carrying a newborn – an amusing and symbolic touch that anchors the image in Krasinski’s film beyond superficial borrowing.

The cornfield naturally becomes the site of Signs-like chases while still belonging to this film’s universe, and Blunt’s bloody hand hitting against the shower glass after she’s given birth recalls both Psycho’s infamous murder sequence and, to this viewer, Titanic’s heated sex scene (the jump from intercourse to childbirth isn’t that difficult to make, after all.)

Original ideas are present as well as the characters think up clever tactics to save themselves, such as using fireworks to drown out their own sounds (which also calls back Shyamalan-style to their son’s claim that rockets would save them, and to his subsequent death because of a tiny rocket): the best horror movies find inspiration in the limits of their

hypothesis.

Ideally, they also avoid believing in their fantasy too much to become smug, and in its final moments, A Quiet Place both solves and acknowledges the latent goofiness of its premise. The easy but uplifting ending is also satisfying for the heroes it makes: in Krasinski’s fable, the family is saved by its strong and intelligent women.

What: A Quiet Place is in Australian cinemas now

“Still best known for his turn as the sweet Jim Halpert in The Office, Krasinski’s dip into horror may surprise some viewers, but the end result feels very much like him.”

Emily Blunt in A Quiet Place

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arts in focus

REVIEW

■ FILM

The uneven Unsane casts the director as the oppressor

By Manuela Lazic

A

fter almost 30 years making feature films, TV movies and series, the diversity of Steven Soderbergh’s output has gained him the admiration of critics in particular. Working across all genres to great success, the director has proven again and again that he is a cinephile in the fuller sense of the term; he cares about genres and their tropes, but also about filmmaking techniques and the possibilities they offer as the medium keeps evolving. From working fast with a small budget on his first feature (the smash hit modern chamber piece sex, lies and videotape) to crafting a chooseyour-own path online visual narrative drama with Mosaic, Soderbergh has demonstrated that he takes cinema seriously, but also creatively: his latest is a conspiracy thriller shot entirely on iPhones The casting of Amy Irving in Soderbergh’s Unsane is yet another clue to his intelligence (as if anybody doubted it). Claire

Foy stars as Sawyer Valentini, a troubled woman kept in a mental facility against her own will, while Irving’s presence as Sawyer’s mother deliberately recalls her own confinement for powerful mental instability as a telekinetic teen in Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1978). This is a nice, knowing touch – and Irving is always a welcome presence – but it also highlights the gap between De Palma’s and Soderbergh’s efforts, and not to the latter’s advantage.

While Irving – literally – saw herself in fantastical scenarios that she couldn’t explain in The Fury, nothing genuinely surreal happens to Foy’s character in Unsane. Here, Soderbergh pays homage to arguably one of the most fanciful American chroniclers of the dark sides of human psychology, but without any of De Palma’s extravagant forays into the eerie and the dreamlike (or the nightmarish). In Unsane, madness isn’t a spiritual ailment causing visions that can only be described with the vague term of ‘fury,’ but the product of real phenomena

that fully answer to the laws of physics and psychology.

Within minutes of meeting Sawyer, it becomes clear to any viewer that she has experienced her share of harassment. In other words, Sawyer is a woman in the world.

Insulted by a client during a phone call at her office job (interestingly, Soderbergh emphasises the fact that the caller was a woman, perhaps to comment on how rampant misogyny can find its way even into the hearts of its victims), discreetly but unmistakably offered career advancement in exchange for hotel room favours by her boss, she emanates a mix of frustration and know-how. With only a few words, she extricates herself from her boss’ office while letting him down gently, like a savant mouse who has by now learned where all the traps are hidden. It is in such scenes of muted dialogue and psychological gamesmanship that Claire Foy shows her talent, even though the lines she’s given often seem taken out of a screenwriting manual.

“Within minutes of meeting Sawyer, it becomes clear to any viewer that she has experienced her share of harassment. In other words, Sawyer is a woman in the world.”

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“Although ambiguously rendered early on, Sawyer’s fears are never probed by Soderbergh, who is consistently on his character’s side.”

Soderbergh’s semi-fish-eye closeups at once heighten the sense of oppression while letting Foy’s face do all the talking.

Soderbergh doubles down on discomfort via his chosen aesthetic, juxtaposing the dangers posed by men to women with the claustrophobic omnipresence of smartphone technology. The images of exaggeratedly wide eyes and aquarium-like rooms look at once stylized and naturalistic, and when Sawyer’s paranoia about being stalked starts manifesting itself through her irrational behaviour with a Tinder date, the spectator’s unease deepens.

Although ambiguously rendered early on, Sawyer’s fears are never probed by Soderbergh, who is consistently on his character’s side. Even when she mistakenly sees the face of David (Joshua Leonard), the man who has been pursuing her for two years, on the bodies of other men, the director represents her visions faithfully to her experience of reality. She blinks, and David is replaced by the real person standing in front of her.

This dedication to realism is laudable for many reasons. The constant sense of threat that women have to live with is a serious matter; the voyeurism inherent to a time when everything can be recorded, tracked, and data-

mined is worthy of scrutiny. In terms of camerawork, employing smartphones to create raggedly cinematic images continues the evolution of filmmaking techniques represented by Sean Baker’s similarly shot Tangerine (2015). But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In Unsane, unrelenting realism ends up tarnishing the film’s moral righteousness by making its important but predictable provocations seem unnecessarily and unrewardingly direct.

Soderbergh isn’t opaque about his generic intentions. Unsane’s opening titles evoke vintage paranoid thrillers like The Fury or even Alan Pakula’s Klute (a film about toxic masculinity that predates the term). Following Sawyer from afar as she walks down the street and looks around for potential pursuers, the iPhone camera is the stalker. When she enters a mental institution to ask a psychiatrist about her fears, we are far from the exaggeratedly seedy milieu of Seconds (1966), yet the perspective is as slanted as it was in Frankenheimer’s masterpiece.

The situation escalates fast once Sawyer is told the papers that she has casually signed commit her to 24 hours in observation, yet Soderbergh’s realist approach keeps all events thoroughly believable. When she starts thebrag.com

arts reviews

seeing David in the face of a male nurse, one hopes that things will start to take off into the bizarre and the fantastic, not as much for the sake of art or play as for a need to be relieved from the heaviness of Sawyer’s very evident and unmistakably real

“Soderbergh doesn’t delve into Sawyer’s mind because her mind is clear.”

pain. But they don’t, and what for a moment seemed to be a figment of Sawyer’s imagination is proven to be authentic. David has truly infiltrated the facility as a male nurse, withholding his true identity and strategically making Sawyer seem crazy to the staff (although never to the audience).

Soderbergh’s decision to employ realism as a way to update a somewhat antiquated genre ends up having the opposite effect: Unsane becomes problematic.

De Palma’s withholding of information to generate twists and his predilection for ridiculous exaggeration (Hitchcock had his victim killed by a phallic knife, so De Palma opted for a gigantic

vibrating power drill) in films such as Body Double or Dressed to Kill have often been judged as simplistic and distasteful (the villain’s crossdressing in the latter film is directly tied to his mental instability and murderous tendencies), yet those films employed those questionable means with a degree of extravagance that took them far from realism – and did so to explore the darker recesses of the mind. The endless shootout in Scarface is a ridiculous bloodbath, but it’s also a balletic representation of a man broken by power. The impossibly depressing ending of Blow Out feels less like an affront to the audience because of the powerful message

“Soderbergh’s semi-fish-eye close ups at once heighten the sense of oppression, letting Foy’s face do all the talking.” thebrag.com

“The constant sense of threat that women have to live with is a serious matter; the voyeurism inherent to a time when everything can be recorded, tracked, and data-mined is worthy of scrutiny.” it sends about America and personal responsibility.

Soderbergh doesn’t delve into Sawyer’s mind because her mind is clear: it turns out that she has no illusions, and so neither do we.

The film doesn’t explore David’s mentality either, but instead has him stand and face some hard truths directly from Sawyer’s mouth. Many reviewers have praised Unsane as fun schlock, but this intense late moment in the facility’s solitary confinement room merely enshrines the script’s pedestrian pop psychology. “I love you so much! You must know that at this point!” says David pleadingly, and Sawyer’s exasperation is also our own. It’s uncomfortable, but also redundant, reiterating as it does what we, indeed, already know and don’t necessarily need to think about more deeply. David’s obsession, and its origin in a male idea of the perfect woman never was a mystery; worse yet, it is a blatantly commonplace and uncomplicated notion. Sawyer’s difficult extrication from her crazed suitor’s grasp becomes the film’s sole thrust and Soderbergh’s decision to make things as realistically nasty as possible along the way slowly turns our boredom into revulsion.

Even though Sawyer’s eventual showdown with her stalker is intensely cathartic, that’s only

because it is preceded by a series of gruesome attacks (on top of David’s cliched behaviour). By the end, one just wants all the realistic blows and hackneyed psychological remarks to end. After such a viscerally satisfactory resolution, I was almost willing to be sympathetic towards Soderbergh’s shock-tothe-system approach to men’s oppression of women.

Yet I found myself again disappointed and troubled by the film’s coda. After refusing his traumatised heroine any illusions for the duration of her incarceration, he suddenly veers into fantasy – and again for only a brief moment. Suggesting that Sawyer’s inner turmoil is here to stay feels at once disrespectful to her (perhaps she really was and is still crazy!) and to the audience – the last freeze frame is just one more bleak ’70s trope.

Soderbergh loves the trickery of heists, as his Ocean’s series and last year’s Logan Lucky make clear, but in a story about mental imbalance and manipulation, such ruses turn him into the oppressor.

Soderbergh’s gaslighting of his character and spectator may just be more questionable than De Palma’s pushing of the limits of plausibility for entertainment.

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SHORT STORY

People Keep D i sappear ing

BY N AT H A N J O L LY

disappeared three years ago this Wednesday.

I

There’s no need to buy me a cake, or a shovel, or bore me with the same moral objections that have been thrust at me since, because I guarantee you I thought longer and harder and from more angles about this than you ever could, because it was an actual option for me. I studied, and shook and took it, you see? I no longer exist, and it’s the best way to be.

I know you can only see the debris, the fire trail such an extreme move would cause, but you cannot simply disappear without having planned it with all the precision of a surgeon.

This wasn’t a rushed decision, which I understand will only make some of your objections towards me stronger. It’s okay for you to hate how easily I tore apart many people I was meant to love just to be able to start again, and I appreciate how, of the many terrible things humans do, this can be ranked among the very worst, but I promise you’ll feel differently after hearing me out, or at least be lulled enough to hold your tongue out of pure kindness.

I largely trade on pure kindness. You will see that I am a good person who ejected himself from a terrible situation in a horrible way. I bleed good thoughts though; you will understand this soon. I don’t eat meat. I don’t! I don’t keep pets in fibrocement houses. I tell strangers the things they want to hear, and spark and love and keep moving. When nobody knows you are alive – or rather, when they are sure you are not – it’s like drilling a hole into your skull.

Once you let the light in, you can do some truly amazing things.

I get the impression you think all of this mess and nonsense you’ve built here is real, and I know it looks that way from certain sharp angles, but it isn’t at all.

Look at my ex-wife laughing, look at my father continuing to hit golf balls down

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“It’s okay for you to hate how easily I tore apart many people I was meant to love.”

“You will see that I am a good person who ejected himself from a terrible situation in a horrible way.”

“When nobody knows you are alive – or rather, when they are sure you are not – it’s like drilling a hole into your skull. Once you let the light in, you can do some truly amazing things.”

“Nowadays, I am just a photo album and an awkward aunt asking what became of my clarinet.”

fairways, at my daughter making faces and twisting her lips in the ways I used to – when I was alive to look at her. Look at the inconsequential divot I left. Nowadays, I am just a photo album and an awkward aunt asking what became of my clarinet.

None of it is real; more than a thousand days have passed, and even the most patient people get bored counting to a thousand. ll you need to do is not use a credit card. All you need to do is not open a bank account. All you have to do is type up some new paperwork. All you need to do is work at a bar during those moonlit hours that slip between the tax brackets, to earn and burn your tangible money accordingly, tokens for goods like it was for most of civilisation.

Be vague and be gentle and you will attract the kinds of gentle, vague people who will want to love you without too many heavy questions.

A

Pick a name: it’s up to you now. Who are you? Are you an artsy Julian? Are you a strong Michael type? Your past can be crafted too. You are plaster to be cast into whatever mould you wish. Be confident in your story and it will become your story.

You are a splinter, a speck of sawdust and nothing is more important than anything else. I can tell you are lost. I can tell you know there is more, and that’s because there is. I can help you to disappear, but after that – and you must understand this – you will be completely on your own. •

Nathan Jolly is a Sydney-based music writer, journalist, and author of fiction. This is an extract from his collection of short stories, People Keep Disappearing, which is available now from Amazon.

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SHORT STORY

The Nag gles

BY R YA N M U R P H Y

nd so you find yourself just to the left of a dream, slap bang in the middle of the Snarkleberry forest.

In front of you stands a shack. It doesn’t look very inviting. Its roof is made of plain, unvarnished Beetlebum wood; its windows are filled with ever so dusty, yellowed glass; and its door is decorated with only a single, brassy knob.

“It is ever so dark, and getting cold. You have been wandering your way through the Snarkleberry forest for days now.”

You don’t much feel like knocking on the shack’s door. After all, it’s awfully plain. And what kind of creature would build their shack in the oh-so-dangerous Snarkleberry forest? You start imagining the hideous beasts that must live behind that simple door. You imagine their sharp teeth; their frothy mouths; their bright, dreadful eyes…

you to come inside; she’s asking you to come inside, and you can understand her! Why, she speaks English like the best of them. You are entranced; transfi xed. Without a word, you cross the threshold.

A

But it is ever so dark, and getting cold. You have been wandering your way through the Snarkleberry forest for days now. You have fought off the terrible Twicker-Twocker, the giant creature that stalked you for a whole night straight; you have stumbled straight into a hive of Plissbits, and have had to jump straight into a Rumperty River to escape their orange stingers; and you have had nothing to eat but a handful of snarkleberries – and they made you sick.

What choice do you have then? You summon all of your courage, and knock.

You knock once. You knock twice. Just as you are ready to turn away, the door begins to creak open. The hinges scream out. Squeeeeek, they say. Squeek! The noise must be a warning. Your heart starts beating fast in your chest, and you get ready to run, run as fast as you can, away from this terrible shack…

But before you can turn, you lay your eyes on a Naggle for the very first time.

This is mummy Naggle, Nora. She does look dreadfully funny. But her many eyes are warm, and her arms are open. She looks as though she has been waiting for you. How could that be possible? After all, even you don’t know what you’re doing in the Snarkleberry forest.

You can’t even remember how you got here.

Nora Naggle is fi xing you with the kindest of kind gazes. She wants Ryan Murphy is a horror writer and film critic based out of the UK. He initially concieved The Naggles as a homage to the work of Alice Sheldon, who published under the name James Tiptree Jr.“I wanted to capture some of Tiptree Jr.’s experimentation with form,” Murphy explained.“She is very good at deceiving the reader when it comes to her true intentions, which is exactly what I wanted The Naggles to do.”

However, the more he wrote, the more he realised the story was actually his way of coming to terms with the birth of his daughter.“You suddenly realise how vulnerable you are when you have kids. That’s what the story is really about."

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Inside, Nora introduces you to her family. There’s Neville, the daddy Naggle; Nigel, the grandpa Naggle; and Norbert and Nelly, the little Naggles. And look! They’re coming to say hello! They want to know why you have only two eyes, when they have seven. They want to know why there are funny little sausages poking out from your sides; where are your tentacles?

The last human to come to their shack wasn’t so good at answering questions, but they are sure you will be. The Naggles want to know how you’re meant to breathe with a nose that small, and fat; after all, the Naggles have big, long trunks. And they want to know what you’re wearing. They think your shoes are awfully odd. Why, don’t you like the feel of the Timmy-Tum grass on your feet? Are you ticklish? Is that it?

The Naggles are awfully pleased to see you. You may think them odd, but they really are the gentlest, quietest creatures in the forest.

Everybody knows that Naggles are famous for their hospitality.

There hasn’t been a rude Naggle for as long as Twitterjibbets have taken to the skies. Why, a Naggle would rather die than ever say a cross word to anyone.

They can see that you’re feeling a little uncomfortable; after all, the Naggles are well known for their emotional intelligence. So attuned are they to the feelings and thoughts of the creatures around them that they can tell when a Blibber flower is miffed from a dozen paces away. And Naggles don’t so much see how creatures are feeling; they can taste it. Their mouths are filled with six little tongues, and though two of those are for food, the rest are for tasting happiness, sadness, and everything in between.

Inside, Nora sits you down, and brings you a plate piled high with roasted waterbumbles. The shells of the waterbumbles are all cracked and cooked on the outside, but when you break them open you see they are bursting with succulent orange flesh. You have never tasted anything so delicious in all your life. The waterbumbles fill you from head to toe with a warm, beautiful feeling. The waterbumbles make you feel happy, and relaxed, and a little bit sleepy.

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T he Nag gles CONTINUED…

The little Naggles, Norbert and Nelly, want you to sit by the fire.

They want to see you better; it is so dark in the shack, and there is so much of you to take in. Grandpa Nigel is looking at you with his tired, milky eyes; there is a strange glimmer in each of them, one that you cannot quite work out. But you don’t have the strength to think too much about Nigel anymore. You are feeling ever so tired.

The Naggles want to know what you are doing in the Snarkleberry forest. Why, they haven’t seen a human since… Since… But the Naggles don’t want to talk about the since. That would make them sad. That would make them think about the thing that lives under their house, and the Naggles spend a lot of time and a lot of energy not thinking about the thing under their house.

They want you to talk, though. The Naggles pester you and pester you. What brought you here? What creatures have you slain? What fruits have you eaten? Under what suns have you slept?

As the Naggles talk, you start to remember. You remember the rabbit first. Rabbit? What kind of funny thing is that? Oh yes, rabbits; those odd little creatures with long ears. How strange they seem to you now you have seen the wonders and terrors of the Snarkleberry wood. But what about the rabbit? It comes to you. You remember it darting out in front of the car. You remember the screech of tires.

You remember being thrown through the windshield. You remember the pain; the way it flooded your body.

You start to tell the Naggles what happened to you. But they do not know what a car is. You have to explain that, though you do not do it very well; the Naggles don’t know what rubber or metal is. The little Naggles are getting cross with you.

You try to remember why you are here. The Naggles want a story, and you don’t like seeing the little ones cross. You search through your memory…A girl. There was a girl, once. She was very beautiful, and very small, and you loved her very much. You touch your head against your brow. There is a terrible, deep cut there, though whether it came from the bladed fingers of the Twicker-Twocker, or the rough skin of the asphalt, you do not know.

You try to tell the Naggles about the girl. As you speak, you remember more. The girl was important to you. And then, one day, she went missing. The Naggles’ mouth go wide. They are worried that this will be a sad story, and Naggles hate sad stories. For the Naggles, sad stories belong to the dark; to the shadows; to the thing underneath the house. They ask you not to tell them the story if it

“The Naggles are awfully pleased to see you. You may think them odd, but they really are the gentlest, quietest creatures in the forest.”

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“The Naggles don’t want to talk about the since. That would make them think about the thing that lives under their house, and the Naggles spend a lot of time and a lot of energy not thinking about the thing under their house.” will make them cry. But you are not listening to them anymore. You tell the Naggles you have been trying to find the girl for a long time.

You tell the Naggles that you have been drinking a lot lately. They want to know what is so bad about drinking. They drink all the time!

But you tell them this is a different kind of drinking; the kind of drinking humans only do when they are very sad.

And there is that word again. Sad. It is like a knife in the ear to a Naggle. Nora looks as though she might cry. But the little Naggles, Norbert and Nelly, are not sad anymore. They’re very cross. They told you not to deliver a sad story. They start nipping at your legs. Nora is horrified! She wants them to apologize, but they are in grumpy moods now.

Poor Nora! How embarrassing it must be to have your own little Naggles act so rudely. Nora wants them to stop their insubordination; she wants them to stop this very minute. So Nora lets her voice drop low, and she tells little Norbert and Nelly that if they keep being naughty then they will have to go and clean out The Horror’s sty. And that stops them from whining. That stops them right away.

Though you know it is rude to ask, you cannot help but start pestering the Naggles. You want to know what The Horror is. The Naggles go very quiet. And it is in that silence that you hear a slow, terrible sucking noise. It sounds like it is coming from underneath the floorboards.

Quick as a flash, Nora Naggle jumps up and starts moving her whole body, up and down, up and down. Her dark grey flesh is beginning to jiggle and shake; it looks very funny indeed. Her trunk goes straight up in the air, as though it is a sword being raised in a salute, and from it comes a loud blooting sound.

And then you understand: Nora Naggle is dancing!

Soon the other Naggles are joining in. They are all dancing: even old grumpy grandpa Nigel Naggle! Before long, you’re laughing.

You can’t help it. They all look so funny! Look at little Nelly Naggle.

She’s twirling and spinning. And what’s that? She’s got something stuck to one of her spines at the back! It looks like a ribbon, and it is flowing after her, and it’s very pretty; so pretty you could almost cry.

Why, you knew someone with a ribbon. You knew someone with a

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SHORT STORY

ribbon just like that…

The breath catches in your throat. Not a ribbon just like that. That ribbon.

That exact same one.

You ask Nora Naggle where it came from. The Naggles go very quiet. They know, of course, because the story of the ribbon comes from the same place as the story of the since. It hurts for them to remember. It makes them want to never speak again. But you ask.

You tell them. You say; that ribbon used to belong to the girl.

You feel very angry. Anger curdles your blood. You want to hit the Naggles. You rise from your chair, and they cower from you. You say: where the fuck is she?

The words take all the strength from the Naggles. They look like they might never dance again.

It is Nigel Naggle who speaks.

She is below, says Nigel.

Take me there, you demand. For a while, there is silence, so you repeat yourself, and when you do, it is with such force that the tongues of the Naggles snap back into their head.

Slowly, ever so slowly, Nora Naggle comes across the room. She takes your hand in one of her tentacles. She leads you towards the room’s dark corner. There is something set in the floor; as Nora bends to it, you see that it is a trapdoor. She opens it.

The stairs descend. You are suddenly gripped with fear. The Naggles taste it. Their spines flatten against their backs. But you have come this far. You have come so, so far.

Nora Naggle gestures you downwards. You take the first step. It creaks. It goes: squeeeeek. It is a warning now. The hinges were just chattering to themselves before, but the stair? The stair does not want you to descend. The stair wants you to close the trapdoor, turn your back, and return to the Naggles and watch them dance.

But you ignore the stair. You take the next one. And the next one.

Nora Naggle is no longer with you. You are down, below the house.

There is a single torch, set into the wall. You take it from its bracket.

You are in a tunnel; it is long, and dark, and the torch is not powerful

“The Horror is very close to you now. You do not have any strength to fight, or any strength to run. Not that you could escape it anyway.” enough to light anything but the space just in front of your feet.

You walk. The smell hits you. The place smells like an abattoir. You take a step, and then another. You keep walking.

There, on the ground. You spot the shape, though you do not fully process what it is until you are close; until you are picking it up in your hand.

It is a torn dress. You know it so well. You bought it for her only six months ago. How pretty she looked in it. She was wearing it the day of her birthday party. She was wearing it the day she disappeared.

You take a breath. The torch begins to flicker. Warm air hits you in gusts. Slowly, you look up. And there it is; staring at you with its two dark eyes. There is a moment of silence, and then The Horror begins lumbering towards you. Its mouth gapes open into a terrible, open smile. The smell. The smell.

Upstairs, the Naggles can taste your fear; it mingles with the taste of The Horror’s rage. The Naggles do not want to think about the bad things. The Naggles do not want to think about what is happening underneath the floorboards. They begin to dance, trying to blot it out. It was not their fault the girl died. They did not want her to go down to see the Horror, but she insisted. She was lost, she told them, and she wanted to find her daddy. She thought maybe the tunnel under the house might take her there. Back to him.

You hear the floorboards above you creak, straining under the weight of the dancing Naggles. The Horror is very close to you now. You do not have any strength to fight, or any strength to run. Not that you could escape it anyway. The Horror is so much bigger than you. It always was. It was born the moment your daughter came into this world, and since then it has only been growing. You have been living in its shadow ever since. Only now you face it.

The Horror approaches. Its mouth drips. You say your daughter’s name. •

“The stairs descend. You are suddenly gripped with fear.

The Naggles taste it. Their spines flatten against their backs. But you have come this far. You have come so, so far.” thebrag.com

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arts in focus

Meet The Future Of Home Sound Systems

By Joseph Earp

S

ome 16 years ago, Bianca Benjamin took a paper envelope full of silver coins down to her local Sanity, and bought her very first CD single. “It was ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls,” the 24-year-old says now with a laugh. “I had to save up for weeks. It was all I wanted. Everyone at school already had it, so I’d borrow someone’s copy at lunchtime and listen to it on my Walkman ’til they inevitably got mad at me and grabbed it back. I drove my parents crazy singing the song around the house; I think they thought when I bought the CD, that was going to make it better. Like, I’d get over the obsession. But it only made it worse. Instead of singing it, I just played it, over and over.”

Needless to say, a lot has changed in the almost two decades since that day – for Benjamin and for the music industry at large. Nowadays, young listeners on the hunt for new music turn to the apps on their phone, not their local shopping centres, and rather than the battered, tinny pink CD player Benjamin used to torment her poor parents, there’s an entire world of state of the art speakers and sound systems available for the discerning music lover to sample.

But also, in a deeper, more significant sense, very little has changed. Benjamin’s tastes are rather less poppy these days – she counts Kurt Vile, Courtney Barnett, and the War On Drugs as some of her favourite acts – but she’s just as obsessed with hunting down new singles and artists. “I know it’s a

“I know it’s a cliché to say ‘music is everything to me’, but it really, really is.”

“For ages I used to say that vinyl was unbeatable; I’d ignore anyone who tried to convince me that you could get the same richness of sound from anything digital.”

Benjamin’s newest musical obsession is the Sonos One. The smooth, compact speaker sits on her living room mantlepiece, a few metres away from the record player she inherited from her father. She still has a sentimental attachment to the player, of course, and her vast vinyl collection, but she readily admits that the Sonos One is unmatched in terms of sound quality.

“For ages I used to say that vinyl was unbeatable; I’d ignore anyone who tried to convince me that you could get the same richness of sound from anything digital,” Benjamin laughs. “My housemates knew I was a luddite like that, so they raised their eyebrows when I got the Sonos One. They were like, ‘Oh, look who’s singing a different tune now.’ But it’s just hard to argue with the way the Sonos can fill the room.”

Benjamin controls the Sonos One through a Sonos app she

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Photography by Brianna Elton

cliché to say ‘music is everything to me’, but it really, really is,” Benjamin says. “There’s nothing else that gives me that thrill; that wonderful rush you get when you hear a new band or a new song and go, ‘I’m going to be listening to this for the rest of my life.’”

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FEATURE

has downloaded onto her phone. The app uses her Apple Music and Spotify accounts, as well as the songs she has downloaded onto her phone, so all her music is in the one place. “It’s really so much easier than having to swap between apps,” Benjamin says. “I used to get so confused; I’d be like, ‘Wait, what do I have on Spotify and what do I have on Apple Music?’ This way I can literally just type what I’m after into the Sonos search bar, and it’ll bring it up for me. It’s great.”

Moreover, Benjamin, who lives with four other dedicated music lovers, thinks the Sonos One is unbeatable as a speaker for sharehouses. Every one of her roommates has the Sonos app downloaded, so DJ duties can be split between them easily. “We used to have a little speaker that you’d have to plug into your phone,” Benjamin explains. “That meant you’d have to swap over the AUX chord, and when you were DJing, unless you were sitting right next to the speaker, you couldn’t really use your phone. It was just a bit of a pain.

Whereas with the Sonos, I’ll say to my roommate, ‘Okay, you take over now’, and they can just do that on their phone straight away.”

Of course, the Sonos One’s capabilities for budding home DJs are only set to increase with the introduction of a new software that activates voice control – users can instruct Alexa to play their favourite song via the device. So, theoretically, Benjamin can ask for ‘Wannabe’ in the living room, while her flatmate asks for Parquet Courts’ ‘Wide Awake’ in the bathroom upstairs.

The Sonos One also boasts advanced ‘volume ducking’ technology, as Ryan Taylor, Sonos’ Global Director of Partnerships explains. “A feature that really sets us apart is the ability for Sonos One to hear you over the music,” he says. “This is because the volume intelligently ‘ducks’ while

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“Some speakers can get really scratchy; they lose a lot of quality the louder they are. But the Sonos wasn’t like that at all.” you’re speaking to make the interaction easier. We wrote our own code for the software that runs on the speaker and constantly listens to determine if anyone is talking to it. And it’s pretty smart. We used the same Digital Signal Processing engineering team that built Trueplay in order to create ‘echo-cancellation software’ which removes the sound of the music playing on the speaker so it can still hear you. The adaptive noise suppression algorithm lets the six internal mics hear you when you’re in a crowded room with several people speaking.”

Those who have been stung by voice activated software in the past will be pleased to know that the Sonos One has been road tested to be as accessible and intelligent as possible, and unlike other systems, it doesn’t get thrown by accents or unusual voices. “We tested and refined this wake word detection engine on native speakers all throughout the US, UK, Germany, and Australia to make sure the Sonos One could understand many different accents and dialects,” Taylor explains. “Sonos One isn’t just a clone of an Alexa speaker. It’s a full voice speaker from Sonos that will work with multiple voice providers in the future without the need to buy additional hardware, so in addition to Alexa we announced that we’ll be supporting Google Assistant in 2018.”

This also makes the Sonos One a perfect speaker for a house party. “We had a big get-together recently,” Benjamin says. “All my friends are music nerds like me, so they wanted to see what the Sonos could do – that’s almost why we had the party.” She laughs. “I think the most impressive thing was the quality of the sound when the Sonos was turned up.

Some speakers can get really scratchy; they lose a lot of quality the louder they are. But the Sonos wasn’t like that at all.

It just fills the room in this really beautiful way. You never feel like you have to scream over the top of the thing, you know?”

The Sonos One is built from cutting edge, state-of-the-art technology, and Benjamin loves it for that reason. But she also admires its simplicity; the uncomplicated magic of the thing. “I listened to ‘Wannabe’ on it the other day,” she laughs. “It took me back.” Even as our gadgets get more and more complex, constructed from some of the great achievements in modern science and technology, the best unlock the most uncomplicated kind of joy in us. And in the happiness it brings her, the Sonos One makes Benjamin feels like she’s an eight-year-old again, pushing her coins over the counter with a free hand, never letting the thin CD single out of her grasp.

What: Sonos One is priced at $299 AUD and is available at sonos.com and retailers nationwide

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arts in focus

parent talk

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with Nick Hollins

THE WORLD OF YOUR DREAMS I place high value on dreams. I’m one of those people who regularly lucid dream, meaning I know that I’m in a dream and can control my environment accordingly. Basically I can fly if I feel like it, travel anywhere, levitate objects, meet anyone, and a whole lot more beyond.

A simple way to develop your abilities to dream lucidly is by asking yourself a simple question about eight times each day: “Am I in a dream?” Getting into the habit of appraising your reality seeps into your consciousness, and pretty soon you’re actually asleep and dreaming when you ask yourself, “Am I in a dream?”

This time, the answer will be yes. Suddenly you’re conscious of how strange and surreal your surroundings have become. The first few times you achieve this, you may quickly wake up. That’s part of it. When you realise you’re in a dream, usually you’ll wake up. The next phase of learning to lucid dream is to

realise you’re in a dream state but retain the ability to remain asleep. Once you develop that muscle it’s off to the races.

You simply choose to stay in the moment, to pick up objects and start talking to people. You can get into some incredible conversations with dream characters – it’s almost like something out of films like Inception or Waking Life.

It’s worth pointing out that the people in your dreams often don’t like when you start changing things. They push back; they retaliate. In fact it can get downright creepy. But friends, despite how unsettling the dream world can become once you’re free to explore, I urge you to pursue it. Make use of that time for moments far crazier than near anything you can find in the “real” world.

ADVENTURE TIME

OUR HAUNTED HOUSE Picture this: it’s like 1am, your kid and partner are safely asleep, and then out of nowhere some creepy ass toy starts laughing, its sound effects firing off on the other side of your house.

And bitch, now you gotta go and check it out.

This is one of the ultimate things they don’t tell you about becoming a parent. When your newborn comes home, most likely they come with a whole bunch of toys and gifts from friends and family.

At least one of those toys will be one with faulty built-in sound effects that will activate in the middle of the night. For us it was one of those spinning wheels that land on an animal, and we’d have this messed-up horse making noises. Easy to imagine some extradimensional fuckery happening.

It will creep you the hell out, being sleep deprived as you are already, right up until you quietly throw that accursed toy right in the bin.

For example, I was inspired to write this by a Paw Patrol helicopter triggering itself in the early hours for no reason. Sweet dreams.

It’s easy to get stuck in a loop; to live in the same place for two years before stumbling across a great cafe and park within three blocks of your house that you never noticed because you’ve failed to ever take a walk in that direction.

I’m determined not to fall back into a rut. Resigning from a nine to five office job and moving to Byron Bay from Sydney was step one. Now that we’re here, we’ve assembled a list of activities and groups in our local area to hit up with our son.

I say let’s make the conscious choice to create those experiences. What will we remember in 10 years? The thousands of mornings, days and nights between home, work and home? No, it’s the unique moments we create in between. The smallest things can spark joy for kids.

SLEEP WELL Parenting is all about choosing your own adventure, with your choice of sleeping arrangement proving a major decision. There’s a lot of people out there who think you should lock your infant in their room from X months onwards to get them used to being on their own. They’ll stop crying eventually after weeks, having absorbed a crucial lesson right into their DNA – that they’re on their own in the universe and no-one is ever coming to help them.

Our son was born premature into intensive care and we brought him home after six weeks. When he was very young, he slept in a basket in our room before graduating to sleeping in his cot in his own room. At some point soon after that, he started sleeping with us. There was more than enough room in

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together. After leaving him in a hospital every night for six weeks, we felt better having him right close to us.

When he was two and a half, we moved into a new house that didn’t really have a suitable bedroom for him, and so we kept on sleeping all together in one room.

Through the night he’d wake up and crawl up between us. In our new place, he has his own bedroom but still sleeps with us. And really, we don’t care. It’s become our habit born out of an extreme experience when he was young. It’s possible we’ll face a challenge when moving him into his own room but that s just how itit’s s been. that’s

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game on Gaming news and reviews with Adam Guetti Light Duties In a controversial decision, it seems as though Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, will not include a single-player campaign. While still not officially confirmed at time of writing, sources have claimed that, after realising the solo component wouldn’t be completed on time, the game’s development team made the call the cut it entirely. Instead, a greater focus will be placed on multiplayer and the increasingly popular zombies mode. Should these sources be correct, it will be the first Call of Duty game to forgo a campaign in the series’ history.

2018

If you’re after some new additions for your gaming library, things thankfully kick off early on Friday May 4 when Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze swings onto the Switch. The game is a port of the 2014 Wii U title, but now includes a beginner mode.

Jumping ahead to Tuesday May 15 and PS4 fans can enjoy Dragon’s Crown Pro, which aims to wow you with updated visuals and 4K support while still retaining the title’s controversial character designs.

A few days later on Friday May 18, two new contenders enter the market. For Switch owners, they’ll have the chance to nab Hyrule Warriors: Defi nitive Edition, a port of the Zelda-inspired hack-and-slasher.

Alternatively, 3DS owners are treated to JRPG Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux which combines soldiers, demons and... Antarctica?

Xbox One gamers will be able to get in on the action from Tuesday May 22 with State of Decay 2. The zombie survival sequel is set 15 years after the original game and promises a much larger sandbox to play around in.

If sport is more your thing, however, then why not check out Tennis World Tour, a brand new sim from some of the creators of Top Spin 4.

You’ll be able to find it on PS4, XBO and PC also on the May 22.

Then there’s Friday May 25 which sees the release of both Detroit: Become Human and Dark Souls Remastered. The former is the latest creative endeavour from David Cage which once again toes the line between game and cinema, while the latter will surely lure in hardcore PS4, XBO and PC gamers with its brutal difficulty.

Further speculation also suggests that Black Ops 4 will feature a new battle royale mode, capitalising off the success of breakout hits Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Wrapping up the month, SEGA Mega Drive Classics (PS4, XBO) combines over 50 historic titles on Tuesday May 29.

reviewroundup

Law and Order

NEWS

MAY

New Releases

In legal news, The High Court of Australia has denied Valve’s attempt at appealing a $3 million fine it was given back in 2016. The original fine was handed out after The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) took legal action against the company over its refund policy, or lack thereof.

“This important precedent confirms the ACCC’s view that overseasbased companies selling to Australian consumers must abide by our laws,” said ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court. “If customers buy a product online that is faulty, they are entitled to the same right to a repair, replacement or refund as if they’d walked in to a store.”

By Adam Guetti

Review: Far Cry 5 (PS4, XBO, PC)

F

Review: South Park: The Fractured But Whole (Switch)

ar Cry 5 hardly reinvents the wheel for the series, but it doesn’t need to when it’s this much fun. Being able to add a canine sidekick to the mix is an entertaining addition to the chaos, and an increased focus on co-op will ratchet up the laughs between you and a friend. That said, if you’re growing weary of Ubisoft’s tried and tested formula, then Far 4 Cry 5 might start to feel a little too familiar, even though the core gameplay loop remains gleefully enjoyable.

uch like when The Fractured But Whole originally hit consoles last year, not every joke will have you in stitches, and unsurprisingly there’s a big reliance on fart jokes –but it’s a tale not designed to be taken seriously. If you’ve already completed it, there’s not much to draw you back into the antics of Cartman, Stan and friends, but if you haven’t, 3.5 this is definitely the most convenient way to play.

Review: Florence (iOS, Android)

Review: God Of War (PS4)

F

lorence is a fascinating experiment that forgoes bombastic setpieces or fantastical stories in favour of a simple tale about everyday life – specifically that of 25-year-old Florence, who is stuck in a familiar rut. Before long it transforms into a tale about love, heartbreak and everything in between. Australian developer Mountains is exceptional at creating ingenious mechanics to walk you through the whole experience – like trying to fill speech bubbles faster than your partner in order to gain the upper hand in an 4.5 argument. You’ll be able to blast through the experience within an hour, but it will stay with you for far longer.

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G

od Of War has managed to do what many thought impossible, reinventing the series while retaining the core sensibilities of the long-running franchise. The result is an adventure that is slightly slower, restrained and a whole lot more emotional. The interplay between Kratos and his son, Atreus, is engaging from start to finish, and the combat is simply sublime. PS4 fans don’t just have one of the best action games on the 5 console, but one of the best this generation. Play it.

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“T

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The debut Tropical Fuck Storm record, A Laughing Death In Meatspace, takes much the same tact. It’s a vicious thing, packed like soap into a sock, but it’s not some weighty exercise in existential drama. Rather, it’s full, counterintuitively, of life; a crackling, bleakly comic, beaming album about the end of the fucking world. “Now there’s hardly anybody left,” Liddiard’s voice winks on the title track, like he’s peeling off the punchline to a dirty joke.

“Now there’s hardly anybody left.”

His assessment might be grim, but Liddiard is smiling. And this is how it goes for much of the rest of the interview: the lead singer of Tropical Fuck Storm might be well aware that the world is falling apart, but he seems to have made some kind of peace with all that decay, moral and otherwise. He laughs; considers the appeal of fucking off the modern world and just becoming a sociopath; refers to life as a “weird avalanche, going down to the grave”; and generally appears to be having as good a time as you can when it’s a scorching mid-April day, climate change has permanently cancelled Autumn, and an “Oompa Loompa with the nukes” is threatening global security.

he older you get, the more you’re just left with your neuroses,” Gareth Liddiard says. He’s sitting out the back of a café in Darlington, batting his second coffee of the day between his hands. It’s a weekday, earlyish, and the place is almost deserted; the autumn sun is unseasonably warm, streaming through some natty netting hung up over the patio. “It hasn’t got worse or better. Everything else falls away. Your looks. All that stuff. And then you’re just this shell, with all these mental problems.”

Yeah, totally. I mean, people do it to be remembered. And they have kids for the same reason. Or politicians have stupid statues built of them for that reason. But the odds of it happening are so low. Someone like Bob Dylan, he’d be a candidate – but even for him it’s not going to happen.

[He’ll be remembered for] 50, maybe a hundred years tops. But in 200 years, no-one’s gonna know.

And the main thing, I think, is if you’re gonna be immortal,

Does that mean making art to be remembered forever is bullshit, do you reckon?

Yeah, protect the herd; behave a certain way. It’s a shame.

Unless you’re a psychopath. That’d be good.

It’s scary how much you owe to that younger version of yourself that you don’t know and don’t remember.

Yeah, you don’t get to choose how you turn out. It’s that weird misguided question of whether it’s biological or psychological, having the perfect [upbringing.] But you can’t have the [perfect upbringing]. Because everything before you led up to your situation. Ancient Rome led up to our political situation now – but they weren’t planning to do it for us. They weren’t going, ‘Well, did you know in 2018, it’s going to be like this, so we should plan ahead.’ They were just fixing the problems they were having because people fucked up before them. It’s an ongoing mess. It’s damage control. It’s terrible. [Laughs.] Then you die, and

Protect the herd.

Yeah, but to what extent? There’s genetic programming and then there’s societal programming – societal norms.

And they are norms that are fixed to an epoch, but they’re norms none the less. I mean really, if you were sensible, you would go out and do the most heinous, selfcentred shit. And then if the cops come and shoot you, then it doesn’t matter, because you won’t remember – it basically never happened. But you don’t do that. You’re programmed. Evolution got to you before that and went, ‘Nup, you’re gonna behave a certain way.’

I think that makes it kinda freeing though, right? If there’s no point, you can make your own point.

It’s like, have you ever been so drunk, you wake up the next day and you can’t remember a big chunk of the night?

That’s what your life is when you die. So there’s no point.

you’re not around to remember any of this happening, so therefore none of it ever fucking happened.

It’s weird. It’s this weird avalanche, going down to the grave.

I heard this physicist say if you imagine a wave at a beach, or a ripple on a pond moving through the water – the water atoms aren’t moving, they’re just going [he makes a movement with his arm] as energy comes through.

And if the water is time, and you are matter, that’s … an illustration of you moving through time, picking up atoms and discarding them as you go. So it’s not you. There’s just those traits that form early; that’s what’s left.

GL: Kinda. I think so. Change is an interesting thing.

Behaviourally, you’re shaped in the first three to five years of your life. You have these genetic character traits, and then those nurtured character traits you’ll never shake. But as you get older – every decade you’re a different person.

There’s really nothing in common with you and the person who used to be you except for those dyed-in-the-wool traits.

Certain things are sorta fixed, and other things are fluid.

Has the way you create changed over the years?

By Joseph Earp

Think of great writers – the ones that don’t need context.

Like, George Orwell; he’s really fixed in that time, early 20th century. That political left, Spanish civil war shit. You need to know about all that. But then you know [Jorge Luis] Borges, the Argentinian guy, he didn’t write about anything that was going on around him, and people used to trash him for it. There was all that fucking fascism in Argentina, and he never mentions it in his writing. People were going, ‘You’re such a selfish cunt.’ But he’s complete unmoored from time and place. And it doesn’t make him any less valuable. It certainly makes him a candidate for something approaching mortality.

I think it’s crossed my mind. There have been moments of egomania. But I usually stifle them. My parents brought me up with really low self-esteem, which was good actually. [Laughs.] It’s kept me grounded. Neurotic but grounded. There’s no free lunches. If you’re gonna be interested, or interesting, you’ve gotta be a little mad.

Did you ever try?

But that’s fucking hard to do. I’ve given up on that.

you need to be impressive without any context. People need to find what you’ve done and not know the context. I mean, Stravinsky, he was immensely talented. But it really helps to know about his times and that type of music.

You need to be up on that shit. Otherwise most of it will go over your head. Whereas someone like Erik Satie, it’s classical music, but it’s really simple. Everybody likes it. If you told someone, ‘This is Erik Satie, he’s from the 1990’s’, they’d be like, ‘Oh okay.’ But it’s not. It’s Erik Satie from the 1910’s. It’s hard to pick. He’s like a virus, he floats free in the air without any context and can latch himself onto any living thing.

And The End Of The Fucking World

FEATURE

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“[LIFE IS] THIS WEIRD AVALANCHE, GOING DOWN TO THE GRAVE.”

“HAVE YOU EVER BEEN SO DRUNK, YOU WAKE UP THE NEXT DAY AND YOU CAN’T REMEMBER A BIG CHUNK OF THE NIGHT? THAT’S WHAT YOUR LIFE IS WHEN YOU DIE. SO THERE’S NO POINT.”

Tropical Fuck Storm photo by Jamie Wdziekonski

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“REALLY, IF YOU WERE SENSIBLE, YOU WOULD GO OUT AND DO THE MOST HEINOUS, SELF-CENTRED SHIT. AND THEN IF THE COPS COME AND SHOOT YOU, THEN IT DOESN’T MATTER, BECAUSE YOU WON’T REMEMBER.”

FEATURE

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Pretty much. You’ve gotta throw something [contextual] in there; something interesting from the outside world creeps in. You don’t even have to try. Some kind of artistic impression always ensues. But honestly, I’ll be thinking about the girls in the band – I’ll go, ‘They’re going to scorn me on the weekend if they come up to the house and I haven’t got anything for us to practice.’

And that has been that way my entire career.

And it goes get that personal? It’s for you, and the people around you?

Yeah, you have to. You’ve just gotta go fuck that.

You’re going, ‘All I’m trying to do is write a stupid song so the band have something to play on the weekend.’

That’s all I’m thinking about.

So you ignore all that context stuff?

That’s the thing with Bob Dylan. He’s great, and he’s useful, but he’s useful to the second half of the twentieth century. He was born in a sweet spot. Postwar, when capitalism and everything was balanced and was ticking over well – or as well as these things go.

But, it’s easier to say in retrospect. How do you plan that move? You can’t. It’s fucked.

Homer’s Odyssey, that would have all been oral. So people would have gathered on the beach and listened to an old guy sitting and telling a story around the fire.

And it is all bad news. It’s the same thing. When it’s all good news, it’s called a religious cult.

Yeah. And music should be playful. What we have always done is kinda heavy. And certain moments of it are earnestly heavy. But a lot of it is negative in a disaster movie way. There’s a sense of play there. If you’re gonna write a song – who reads good news?

You’ve gotta make it bad news, so you’ve gotta make it like a disaster movie. I love disaster movies. Disaster songs. They’re cool.

I guess those motives do have the side benefit of making sure you’re not too precious about the music.

And I think someone like Bob Dylan, if he told you something different, he’d be lying. If he said, ‘No, I’m doing it for the betterment of mankind’, you’d go, ‘No you don’t, you’ve got a gig on the weekend and you don’t wanna look like a fucking idiot standing up there and going, ‘Sorry, I’ve got no more songs.’ It’s selfpreservation, and vanity; all these ulterior motives.

“IF YOU’RE GONNA BE IMMORTAL, YOU NEED TO BE IMPRESSIVE WITHOUT ANY CONTEXT.”

So when people get moral on each other, it’s like, ‘You don’t even understand where the other person is coming from.’

People don’t understand any sort of relativity. In a flash, morals can change. We’re all good in here right now.

You can believe, ‘You shouldn’t kill anyone; violence is morally bad.’ But if a dangerous person came in and killed someone, you have a moral invective to inflict harm on that person. Suddenly your morals have been flipped on their head, just because of a simple environmental change. It’s not like suddenly the world became Ancient Rome. There’s not a giant tectonic shift; a day and night shift. It’s just a little shift.

What about morality? Can art teach us morality in that way?

It’s funny. It’s a confirmation of, and a playing with, that instinct that it’s better to believe there’s a tiger behind the bush then to believe there’s not a tiger behind the bush. Because even though you live in fear, eventually there will be a tiger behind the bush, and you’ll be ready for it. Whereas the other way around… So things like horror movies, disaster movies; it’s indulging that thing in a nice way.

Where: Oxford Art Factory When: Saturday May 5 And: A Laughing Death In Meatspace is out Friday May 4 through Mistletone / TFS Records

There’s a way to disseminate a philosophical climate. And by ‘philosophical’, I don’t mean merely political. The world is deeper than politics. [Art] disseminates the slowestmoving part of a society, which is its story. America has a story that it tells itself; it has a future it has planned for itself; it has values, and characters in this story. Every continent has a story. And I think art disseminates that.

Do you think art can cross the divide sometimes?

Like, break the political bubble?

Yeah. It’s like, when you’ve got a cold, you’ll tend to vote more conservatively. So don’t vote when you have a cold.

[Laughs.] And there’s an argument for things like an app on the phone that, when I go to the polls, I go ‘Who should I vote for?’ and it’ll go, ’99 per cent of the time, you are this politically’. Because politics fluctuates, depending on what mood you’re in; how much sleep you’ve had.

It’s terrifying to think how little it takes to change your entire worldview like that.

“WHEN YOU’VE GOT A COLD, YOU’LL TEND TO VOTE MORE CONSERVATIVELY. SO DON’T VOTE WHEN YOU HAVE A COLD.”

FEATURE

“THE BIGGEST THING YOU HEAR FROM EVERYBODY IS,

‘YOU JUST DO THE MUSIC

AND WE’LL WORRY ABOUT RUNNING THE BUSINESS SIDE OF THINGS’.”

Shannon Noll:

What Drives Nollsy?

Belinda Quinn talks to the 2003 Australian Idol runner up about the peaks and pitfalls of working in commercial music

T

he phone crackles with a nasally, yet kind voice: “G’day Belinda, how are you?” Shannon ‘Nollsy’ Noll has just arrived home after spending his Easter fishing and motorcycling in Condoblin with the family. He’s currently working through a long line of press and checking off odd jobs in preparation for the Unbroken tour, which will see him play everywhere from Sydney’s revered Oxford Art Factory to the dirty and delightful Dapto Leagues Club.

for by his father before he passed away in 2001. “In this industry the biggest thing you’ll hear from everybody is, ‘You just do the music and we’ll worry about running the business side of things’ and I think that lots of people will quite willingly spend your money when they’re not spending their own,” Noll says.

It’s been seven years since the release of his previous studio album, A Million Suns, and the recording hiatus has allowed the singer to sit and reflect. His new 13-track Unbroken combines rock and roll with the odd ballad and is sprinkled with his O.G. country identity throughout.

“Listening to the album now I can really get a sense of where I was emotionally and my headspace over those years,” explains Noll.

Having worked with the three top dog record labels at different points in his career – Warner, Sony and Universal – his main words of wisdom to young Australian artists feeling out deals revolves around selfawareness. “I think you’ve always got to have a sense of who you want to be and the artist you want to be. I think you’ve got to go in there with a clear plan and hope that your plan lines up with their plan. That is the biggest one, because a lot of the time music execs can see what they want you to be, whether you are that or not,” explains Noll.

Unbroken even features a protest song against Sydney’s lockout laws and the unfortunate loss of country balls in an acoustic guitar-led track titled ‘No B&S’. “Do you know what a B&S is?” asks Noll. When queried if he’s referring to the word ‘bullshit’, he responds excitedly. “Yeah yeah, but it’s also this thing called a Bachelor and Spinster Ball that they used to have out in the bush. I think the state of NSW has gone from having 40-odd to two or something; they were a big staple when we were growing up. It’s just a great opportunity for young people to go and camp and have a really big night and just have a really great time.”

For a while now, Noll has been known to all as the ‘boy from the bush’, marketed to Channel Ten audiences as the stereotypical True Blue Aussie Bloke – a seemingly simple and patriotic white ex-farmer who loves to throw around ocker slang. When his strong sense of patriotism is brought up, Noll defends himself, “Yeah look, I am very, very patriotic. My first consideration in saying that is to recognise the sacrifi ce that many men and women made to protect this country … [they fought] in wars that we probably didn’t need to be a part of really.”

Noll grew up motorbike riding and camping down the river of the family farm, what he describes as “typical farmboy stuff.” It’s a childhood he’s fond of, but he missed out on seeing live bands and now makes a conscious effort to bring his shows out west. As for the B&S, he says, “A lot of them were not-for profit, charitable committees that they put on in their local towns just for young people. I think a lot of them now can’t afford to pay the insurance, that’s why it’s gotten too expensive to put on.”

We discuss the difficulty of holding onto patriotic values when our country is responsible for refugees being forcibly held in dire living conditions on Nauru; Noll agrees that we are living in a time of crisis. “The future of our country depends on the decisions we make as a public so that we can leave something for future generations down the track, because the way things are going there’s not going to be much left of anything worth holding onto.

Unbroken also sees Noll realise the truth of his inevitable mortality on the track ‘Invincible’. The now-43-year-old had an emergency spinal surgery while living in Melbourne and the ongoing condition forced him to forfeit his position on Dancing With The Stars after rehearsing a Dirty Dancingstyle lift. “That song is all about when you felt you used to be invincible, but you’re not anymore.” he laughs.

“I think people have got to take notice a little bit more and step up a little bit and get a bit more involved to try and right some of the wrongs that are happening day-today at the moment.”

This, to Noll, includes staying curious and engaged.

“Yes, get more educated; become more aware; become more invigorated and get involved more.”

Asked what one piece of advice he would give his 2003 emerging Australian Idol self if he could, he pauses to think. “The industry itself is chock-full of people that want to make money off the back of an artist or a talented person when they probably haven’t got an ounce of music in their body at all. I think the biggest advice I would give myself again now is to not trust anyone.”

Admittedly, these are unexpected words from a man that has become synonymous with Australian reality TV and who is current riding out a resurgence built on internet meme culture – but perhaps that makes it more of a welcome surprise.

After Idol, most of Noll’s winnings went back into paying off debt from the family farm, which was originally cared

When it comes to his passion, career and plans for the future, Noll says, “to be able to perform live and to do it to the best of my ability – that’s what drives me.”

“A LOT OF THE TIME MUSIC EXECS CAN SEE WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO BE,

WHETHER YOU ARE THAT OR NOT.”

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FEATURE

“PEOPLE WILL QUITE WILLINGLY

SPEND YOUR MONEY WHEN THEY’RE NOT SPENDING THEIR OWN.”

“YOU’VE ALWAYS GOT TO HAVE A SENSE OF WHO YOU WANT TO BE AND

THE ARTIST YOU WANT TO BE.”

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Confidence Man:

Did You Know They Are In A Band?

Sugar Bones of Confidence Man outlines to Augustus Welby his band’s plan to sneak subversion into the mainstream

N

othing can stop Confidence Man right now. With debut LP Confi dent Music For Confi dent People just released, the Melbourne-based project is blowing up around the world. A string of breakout singles led to a triple j feature album, the announcement of a major Australian headline tour, and high-profile billing on the Groovin the Moo festival lineup.

The quartet’s upcoming overseas itinerary, meanwhile, includes slots on some of the world’s biggest festivals like Primavera Sound, New York’s Governor’s Ball and Bestival and Latitude in the UK. “It’s crazy; we’re still pinching ourselves,” says cofrontperson Sugar Bones. “We don’t really know what’s happened, but it’s really nice that people are responding to it so well. It was great to be able to get so much out of the first few singles so we could actually set ourselves up to release an album in a good position.”

The album is exactly what you’d expect from a group called Confidence Man – a consistently upbeat affair rooted in rhythmically forthright dance instrumentals, topped by persuasive spoken-sung vocals from Bones and his partner in crime, Janet Planet.

The sound is complemented by the duo’s glamorous, unapologetic visual aesthetic and predilection towards choreographed dance routines. Contrastingly, the group’s other two members – Clarence McGuffie and Reggie Goodchild – are typically seen in full-body black cloaks, injecting some dramatic intrigue into the proceedings. Sure, it’s certainly ambitious, but more than that it’s a whole lot of fun.

liberating – to not have any restrictions or ideas that we were trying to fit into. That was quite different from all these other bands; being able to create something from scratch that doesn’t have to abide by any rules.”

OBNOXIOUS, VAIN REFLECTIONS OF EVERYONE ELSE IN OUR SOCIETY.”

Confidence Man has already proven their significant commercial appeal as an outfit, but the LP doesn’t hew to the sound of contemporary mainstream pop. It’s also out of sync with much of contemporary indie dance music; it has a kind of distinct, glossy strangeness to it.

“We weren’t setting out to make dance music or rock music or any particular kind of music,” Bones says. “It was just whatever felt the best. I think the freedom to take it any direction and combine all these different influences that we had, and not feel like you need to fit into a genre, that made the end product a weird, different sound. It wasn’t quite commercial, but still seems to work in a commercial way and isn’t really underground, it’s still really poppy and sugary.”

Confi dent Music For Confi dent People is a dynamic cocktail of genres with rhythms and grooves taken from house music; detours into acid house and Northern soul; hook-laden moments reminiscent of ’80s act like EMF and Big Audio Dynamite; a subversive nod to Beck and the Beastie Boys; and funfilled self-assurance akin to early -‘00s electro rockers like Le Tigre and Peaches. And while elements from a range of genres are included, at no point does it lose its accessibility, or its sense of voice.

“At the core of every song is a super repetitive, catchy bass line,” Bones says. “Once we’ve got the rhythm and the beats and the bass line, then we’re free to add all the weirdness on top. It has that accessible, ear worm foundation that we can just sprinkle all kinds of weirdness over the top.

“The first few songs we wrote, they were pretty silly.

We were just mucking around so there was no real angle we were pursuing – it was just what ended up happening,” says Bones of the stylistic evolution the band have slowly undergone since breaking onto the scene. “And the more songs we wrote, the more the characters developed and grew into these obnoxious, vain reflections of everyone else in our society.”

“Everyone’s into a whole range of different styles from all kinds of eras. Often we’ll start a song thinking we want to write a song like this – not completely rip it off, but there’s definitely a direct inspiration from certain songs. And a whole range of them, so I think that’s why you get that patchwork style throughout the album.”

Confidence Man has been deliberately and carefully built into a garish, larger than life act. The group members’ adopted personalities are brazenly cocksure, physically fit and unstoppably hedonistic.

Accordingly, the line between fact and fiction is blurred in the biographical details revealed – one guesses Janet Planet and Sugar Bones aren’t the names written on their tax returns, for example.

A notable source of inspiration when working on the album was a record from just a few years ago. “There was a real deep Todd Terje phase going on. His album, It’s Album Time, had just come out around when we were starting to write the stuff and the fun, cheeky house stuff was really hitting a note with us. That helped create the low-key, pop-house sound. We’re trying to get him to do a remix, but he’s not getting back to us, so we’ll have to wait until we’re more famous.”

“Everyone’s still doing things with other projects and really enjoying it, but I think the refreshing thing [with Confidence Man] was that we weren’t really trying to do anything in particular; it was just whatever felt good,” says Bones. “That made it really freeing and

“THE MORE SONGS WE WROTE, THE MORE THE CHARACTERS DEVELOPED AND GREW INTO THESE

“WE WEREN’T SETTING OUT TO

MAKE DANCE MUSIC OR ROCK MUSIC OR ANY PARTICULAR KIND OF MUSIC.”

Where: Metro Theatre When: Friday May 18 And: Confi dent Music For Confi dent People is out now

“[THE SONGS] HAVE THAT ACCESSIBLE, EAR WORM FOUNDATION THAT WE CAN JUST OVER THE TOP OF.”

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“THE FIRST FEW SONGS WE WROTE,

THEY WERE PRETTY SILLY.”

“IT WAS GREAT TO BE ABLE TO GET SO MUCH OUT OF

THE FIRST FEW SINGLES

SO WE COULD ACTUALLY SET OURSELVES UP TO RELEASE AN ALBUM IN A GOOD POSITION.”

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“THE UK HAS BECOME A BIT OF A

HOME AWAY FROM HOME.”

DMA’S:

50 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

Old Souls Ahead of an international tour and the release of his band’s new record, Johnny Took of the DMA’s chews the fat with Natalie Rogers

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FEATURE

“WE HAD WRITTEN A LOT OF SONGS EVEN BEFORE HILLS END THAT

DIDN’T MAKE IT ONTO THAT ALBUM.” “I don’t think we wanna move, but on that note, it’s been really nice how welcoming people have been. They’ve seemed to take us under their wing.

Sure, there are Britpop influences in our music obviously and they could have dismissed us, but they’ve really taken it on and the UK has become a bit of a home away from home.

“I remember when we first started touring we were a bit younger and much more inexperienced at it all,” Took continues. “It was really exciting – it’s still exciting getting over there – but it’s kind of almost more exciting coming home now. It makes me realise how much I really love Australia.”

The inner city suburbs of Sydney is where DMA’S found their voice. When mates Took and Tommy O’Dell, vocalist, bonded over whisky and riffs and decided to leave their respective bluegrass bands and a rock outfit called Underlights to form their own group, the chemistry just felt right.

O’Dell had risen through the ranks of the city’s music scene behind a drum kit.

Took was an established bass player and a singer-songwriter with a keen interest in music production, but as history would have it, as soon as Took heard O’Dell’s vocals over one of his arrangements, he knew they’d found their sound and their front man.

But they needed a third, and one fateful day they met Matt Mason through friends.

Now, not only did they have the benefit of combining their talent and experience, they also realised their fortune of having three competent songwriters in Took’s home studio. So they got to work, writing and recording as much as possible until Mason wrote their break-out single ‘Delete’. “I think Mason was 19 when he wrote that song,” Took says.

Amidst the flurry of creativity in those early days, not only did they write and record enough to release their hugely popular debut LP Hills End, they also found themselves shelving songs that didn’t fit – until now. “We had written a lot of songs even before Hills End that didn’t make it onto that album. Not because they were better or worse; it was because we thought they would be more appropriate on our second album.”

“One of my favourites, ‘Tape Deck Sick’, was written in the same year as ‘Delete’, and songs like ‘The End’ I wrote a year and a half ago, so all the songs were written over a long stretch of time.

“Actually, ‘The End’ really wasn’t meant to make the record,” Took adds. “It was a demo that I had done on Ableton, but I’d normally use Pro Tools or programs like that. When I started learning more about dance music production and we started working with Kim [Moyes, The Presets and co-producer of For Now] I sent him the track ‘cause he is a bit of a wizard and a legend in that area. Of course I was really nervous and intrigued to see what he thought, but he loved it. He made the call; he said, ‘If I’m going to do this record you have to let me have a stab at this song,’ and I think he made it better than it could have ever been, you know? It’s cool because it’s still got those electronic flavours but then it also gets pretty noisy and pretty washed out towards the end.

“This record is really special to us three and I think it’s an organic growth for the band sonically,” Took says. “It’s a little bit more hi-fi but not in a sterile, clinical way, and it’s not too bright, too light or wholesome I feel. I think there’s some really beautiful tracks on it. Also, together with the backing band that we have at the moment it’s really been the best dynamic between everyone that we’ve ever had, and everyone’s just been having a great time, so that makes it easy as well.”

Sydneysiders will be able to hear DMA’S gorgeous and inspiring new album For Now when they play two nights at the Enmore Theatre this June. As a support the fellas have hand-picked Brisbane’s indie darling Hatchie, AKA Harriette Pilbeam.

“We’ve always been a fan of Harriette’s stuff and her guitarist Paddy Harrowsmith, AKA Green Buzzard, used to play guitar in DMA’S in the beginning,” Took says.

I

t’s 2018 and Sydney trio DMA’S are done with comparisons. Although most are flattering – Oasis and The Stone Roses are the names frequently thrown around – with the release of their second album For Now the three friends are living in the present and focused on the future.

However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t looking forward to meeting Liam Gallagher again in a couple months time; after all, he has been an outspoken foe turned ally of the band in recent times. Not, mind you, that the band are thinking about packing their bags and decamping to the UK full-time; as guitarist Johnny Took tells it, they’re pretty happy where they are.

“Joe from The Creases is the other guitarist in her band, and they supported us on our first ever EP tour. We’re all friends. We’ve all known each other for a while, so having them on tour again will be great. We both have that dreamy, ’90s nostalgia thing going on and Harriette’s just such a great songwriter in her own regard.

“It’s just a bunch of good people hanging out on the road. There’s no wankers, so we couldn’t ask for anything more.”

Where: Enmore Theatre When: Sunday June 10 – Monday June 11 With: Hatchie And: For Now is out now through I Oh You / Mushroom

“THIS RECORD IS REALLY SPECIAL TO US THREE AND I THINK

IT’S AN ORGANIC GROWTH FOR THE BAND SONICALLY.” thebrag.com

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FEATURE

Parquet Courts:

Fuck Nihilism Austin Brown of indie rockers Parquet Courts talks violence, dub, and Danger Mouse with Allison Gallagher

F

or nearly a decade, Parquet Courts have skirted the edges of jangly indie rock and unkempt art-punk. However, on forthcoming album Wide Awake!, the group made a conscious effort to create something “you could put on at a party and people would dance to”, according to guitarist and vocalist Austin Brown. Drawing on funk and dub influences, the album’s titular lead single is an effervescent serving of hooky guitars and an infectious repeated vocal motif, all driven by undeniably groovy rhythms courtesy of bassist Sean Yeaton and drummer Max Savage.

“We wrote a lot of different kinds of songs in the year leading up to recording this album, and the ones that we were drawn to the most were the ones that were rhythmic and had a danceable groove to

them. It was a lot of previously unexplored territory, which is something we try to do with each of our records –find something we haven’t tried yet and give it a crack.”

Parquet Courts manage to be both diverse and accessible on Wide Awake!, borrowing liberally from genres like funk, dub, disco and punk. “I think the last thing we want is to be boxed into a certain genre.

We’re often considered this throwback New York City rock band, and that’s always kind of annoying to me – I feel like we’re very much a band of the present, and a band that’s able to take from a lot of different influences, be it from the ’60s up until now.

“Part of that is just being aware where music came from; where groove, where aggressive music, where danceable or sweet music came from. We’re a band

that comes from a lineage of music, it’s not like we went to Guitar Centre and bought a bunch of delay pedals. I think you have to appreciate where you come from. I think that includes drawing from a lot of different sources of inspiration, and that’s part of the process of making a new record for us. That’s what makes things feel exciting and new and of the moment.”

The band’s eclectic sound on the album can also be attributed in part to working with famed producer Brian Burton – AKA Danger Mouse – who approached the group about working with them.

The band, who had never previously worked with a producer, were unsure what to expect going in – which is exactly why they were intrigued.

“It was a curious combination,” says Brown. “I wasn’t familiar with his catalogue at all going into it. I knew Gorillaz and Gnarles Barkley and the singles, and The Grey Album. I had no idea he was so acclaimed and had worked with like, Adele, and made all these hit records.”

“I THINK THE LAST THING WE WANT

IS TO BE BOXED INTO A CERTAIN GENRE.”

“I THINK

YOU HAVE TO APPRECIATE WHERE YOU COME FROM.” 52 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

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FEATURE

“I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW THAT

PARQUET COURTS STOOD FOR SOMETHING.”

“We kind of brought in the vision for the songs and he was able to help us achieve that vision. It was a relationship that I think we were kind of wary of at first but ended up working out really well. Rather than him trying to put us in this Danger Mouse box he was able to really adapt to our style, which makes me think that’s probably what he does a lot of the time.”

Lyrically, Wide Awake! covers a lot of ground.

Brown and fellow songwriter A. Savage have a knack for communicating complex ideas in a way

that is accessible. Opening track ‘Total Football’ speaks to the power of collectivism, rejecting archaic notions of the lone individual – “it’s the idea that individuals can exist in collective, and the group is stronger than the sum of its parts,” says Brown.

As a whole, Wide Awake! feels like an active resistance to the jaded apathy and detachment that feels present in society right now. With the constant saturation of awful news and clickbait outrage, turning to sarcasm or dissociating can be a tempting path to take – but it’s one that Brown and the band can’t endorse.

Other songs, like ‘Violence’, explore the cumulative effect of bearing constant witness to forms of violence, particularly in America – to the point of it becoming routine. “I think it’s about being tired of that, being worn down by the idea of violence.

Whether it’s war overseas, or terrorism, or police officers shooting black people, or systemic poverty,” explains Brown.

“If Parquet Courts and this record stand for anything, it’s anti-nihilism. Nihilism is a very seductive feeling, and I think it’s really rampant in culture these days, especially American culture.

It’s one way people escape the idea of unpacking complicated issues and emotions.

“It’s about the idea of becoming numb to these kind of things, when you hear about a new school shooting on the news it’s not even surprising, and being upset that you’re not surprised by it. Trying to figure out how to deal with the fact you can’t even process grief for a national tragedy.”

“When people look back on this time, I think it’s going to be an important era. I want people to know that Parquet Courts stood for something.”

Parquet Courts phtoo by Ebru Yildiz

Brown notes that Burton’s habit of drawing from a range of musical styles when working with artists felt like common ground between the band and him. “I think that was something he was able to hear and relate to. So when we were trying out a dub rhythm on a track he knew exactly what we were trying to do, and was like, ‘What you’re trying to do here is a dub rhythm, so let’s move the kick drum to this part and slow it down by 2 BPM.’

What: Wide Awake is out through Remote Control Friday May 18

“I FEEL LIKE

WE’RE VERY MUCH A BAND OF THE PRESENT.”

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Eels:

Tragically Hopeful Jade Smith and Mark Oliver Everett, the lauded frontman of Eels, talk how to rebuild the world

“I FEEL LIKE WE NEED TO BE REMINDED TO TRY AND

BE NICE TO EACH OTHER RIGHT NOW.” 54 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

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FEATURE

“I WOULD SPEND [MY RETIREMENT] SITTING OUT ON THE BACK PORCH, PLAYING RECORDS AS THE SUN SETS AND

GETTING A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP.”

F

ittingly for the current climate of civil unrest, Eels’ new album The Deconstruction is a look at the concept of regeneration – and how some things need to completely break down before they can return again, anew. Songs like the title track and ‘Sweet Scorched Earth’ reference the apocalypse and environmental disaster under Trump and the powers that be, albeit with a distinct undercurrent of hope running through the album, sidelining the misery and chaos of the present.

E – full name Mark Oliver Everett – is hesitant to talk about the more politically-inclined aspects of the album. “I try not to get political in music, because it doesn’t usually work I think. It’s usually too heavyhanded and obvious. But things are so dire lately that it’s impossible to completely ignore the elephant in the room.”

As such, The Deconstruction spends less time picking apart actual policies and movements, and more time addressing the need for kindness and self-care in critical times. “I feel like we need to be reminded to try and be nice to each other right now. I’m also simultaneously talking to myself and reminding myself that I need to be nicer to me too.”

He adds that people need to remember that there is still beauty in the world. “It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the news, but there’s a big picture and little picture, and you can find some good stuff there.

I think just decide to be happy in whatever your reality – just make that decision. I think then it makes it a lot easier to be more compassionate and kinder to other people and being kinder to yourself.”

That selfsame love and compassion is reflected in tracks like ‘You Are The Shining Light’, which serves to remind us that we are not alone in our journey. In times of heightened social isolation and self-doubt, this brassy track cuts through the crap with hand-claps, encouraging commentary – and a Theremin solo. On the other hand, songs like ‘Be Hurt’ utilise elements of lullaby melodies and a colourful drum machine rattle which channels an uplifting innocence and naiveté, a mainstay of E’s songwriting.

it.

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To E, experimenting in this way allowed him to free-form the arrangements to great effect. “We could pick it off there and cut it up, and chew it up and spit it out onto a different song. It’s a lot about editing and experimenting and just throwing pasta against the wall, and seeing what piece sticks somewhere and all these happy accidents happen where you stick a string part onto a different song in just random places. You’d be amazed when something magical happens and you never would have been able to plan for. It’s all very random and experimental.”

When it comes to recreating the sound live, Eels aren’t the type of band to perform a carbon copy of the latest album on tour. Instead, fans are introduced to almost completely different incarnations of material each time around. As E says, he doesn’t set out to simply perform an album live. “I always try to treat the shows as their own album. I’m sure we’ll do some songs from the album, but they may or may not resemble very closely the songs on the album.” As to how he might interpret the album on the upcoming tour, even E doesn’t know quite what we will be in for: “I’m about to start figuring that out.”

After the release of his previous album, The Cautionary Tales Of Mark Oliver Everett, E initially thought of retiring, following a bout of tour burnout. When asked what it was that made him turn from retirement and lean back into music, E says there wasn’t one particular moment that turned everything around. “I don’t know. It happened so gradually that you don’t really notice it happening, until all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m back.’’

If we manage to evade our impending doom long enough for E’s potential retirement, he carefully considers how he would spend his time. After some thought, E sums it up with a laugh: “I would like to just spend it sitting out on the back porch, playing records as the sun sets and getting a good night’s sleep.”

This rings true to the unfettered optimism of the record. As the album come to a thoughtful close, the second last track, ‘The Unanswerable’, an instrumental, heaves with life in a breathy chorus, and leaves all other things best unsaid.

And well after the album ends, an earlier sentiment echoes on: “I had a premonition / that we’re gonna get by.” If we collectively turn to empathy and compassion, we might just make What: The Deconstruction out now on E Works via [PIAS]/Inertia

Eels photo by Gus Black

Such eclectic instruments and arrangements recall earlier Eels albums, imaginative sound collages crafted together in a Virginia bedroom from what array of instruments E had available. Unsurprisingly, even as E’s music has grown and evolved, this method of music-making has well and truly stuck, as he extends this experimental creative process to vast string arrangements with the newlyformed Deconstruction Orchestra.

“It was really fun because most of the time when you hear strings on this record somewhere, they were intended to be on a different song altogether. It’s a very creative way to do it I think, rather than just have a score written out for a song and have strings play the score for the song.”

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“CREATIVITY IS KIND OF CHAOTIC – HOPEFULLY IT’S CHAOTIC.

YOU DON’T WANT TO BE HOMOGENOUS OR GO DOWN THE SAME ROAD THE WHOLE TIME.”

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FEATURE

A Perfect Circle:

Form And Chaos Bianca Davino chats with Billy Howerdel of A Perfect Circle, a rock and roll hellraiser with few equals

W

hen seeking a sense of calm from the world’s disorder, Billy Howerdel of A Perfect Circle’s coping mechanisms are simple. “There’s always tension in your world – whether it’s the tension in your macro world or personal world, there’s always stuff that comes up. Some people take it out on a punching bag, we do it through music. You’ve gotta find that pressure release valve.”

A Perfect Circle are an alternative rock enigma – blurring the lines between prog and metal, they’ve carved a niche within an oversaturated scene. Striking the perfect equilibrium between experimental sound work and accessibility, they have consistently punched above their goateedonning contemporaries, catapulting them to the forefront of heavy music’s consciousness. Indeed, their debut album Mer de Noms, released 18 years ago, solidified this identity – it’s a brash and bold statement that combines the hypnotic merits of atmospheric soundscapes with biting social critiques.

“THE TASK AT HAND IS TO FINISH A RECORD, SO

YOU CAN’T TWIDDLE FOREVER.”

“Creativity is kind of chaotic – hopefully it’s chaotic.

You don’t want to be homogenous or go down the same road the whole time,” says Howerdel, the band’s founder and songwriting spearhead. “It’s always changing. I don’t have anything, in particular, to go to but I’m always inspired. I think just taking a break sometimes from playing an instrument, getting some perspective and having a burning desire to get back into it always helps.”

Waiting 14 years between album releases is a difficult feat – but Eat The Elephant was born out of necessity. “I think it’s just heightened states of emotion that drive creativity – it can be reflective or reactionary.”

On the album’s lead single ‘TalkTalk’, melancholic piano arpeggios soar over enigmatic frontman Maynard’s vocals, culminating in a subtle yet moving riff fest that lyrically plays with themes of religion and ethics, reflective of Howerdel’s views on the reactionary heart of creativity.

“When you’re feeling overwhelmed, sad, pissed off – music might be the contrast of that because you can’t take it any longer. You never know.” For Howerdel, necessity drives his self-confessed “obsession”

“The muscle memory mode of playing music is just playing music, whether it’s singing into your voicemail. I start getting on a roll and I want to keep creating new ideas. The task at hand is to finish a record, so you can’t twiddle forever.

“You’ve got to lock down and focus on the songs.

Once songs start sounding good, then I get obsessed with them, but we have to set deadlines so we don’t end up in creative paralysis.”

This focus showcases itself in the tight songwriting and most starkly in ‘The Doomed’, and the acousticdriven, middle-eastern inflicted ‘Delicious’. It’s substance over style, using varied elements tastefully, leaving space for the listener to interpret and take what they want from the song, and the band’s way of paying tribute to their back catalogue.

During the writing of Eat The Elephant, Howerdel saw himself take to the keys rather than his trusted six-string for foundations at first. Howerdel, a former guitar technician for The Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails, noted the move pushed him towards grander melodies and richer harmonies – a trait his at times suffocating obsession with guitar tones and soundscapes blocked him from.

With a heightened sense of aesthetic mysticism, their legacy is founded in a crux of interplaying elements, marrying the personal with the political, the accessible with the experimental.

In 2004, the band released Emotive, their poignant attempt at conveying a message on ‘anti-political apathy’ and since then, the world has only become more of a moral minefield. This year, A Perfect Circle have released Eat The Elephant, their fourth studio album and one created out of a need to embrace the inherent and essential chaos in creativity – a trait exacerbated both musically and lyrically for the band.

with music, stopping what he describes as “creative paralysis” in its tracks.

“THERE’S ALWAYS TENSION IN YOUR WORLD

– WHETHER IT’S THE TENSION IN YOUR MACRO WORLD OR PERSONAL WORLD.”

“I wrote most of this record on keys and piano – we’ve typically written with more guitar. If any of this was written on guitar, that initial spark came from the sounds and soundscapes more so than a riff.” Although he fesses up as not being “much of a musician’s musician”, Howerdel is the force behind the band’s distinct sonic output – a trait exacerbated on Eat The Elephant, which he also attributes to the work of legendary producer David Sardy.

“I have strength in putting sounds together and finding the notes rather than how well they’re played.

Approaching this record from keyboard instead of guitar was also reliant on sound – it got me out of the habit of dictating the creativity – usually it would come from the delay or the reverb, whereas piano you can kind of be anywhere.”

Eat The Elephant feels like the necessary and vital next step for a band who’ve yielded an undeniable influence on modern rock music. When pondering the expectations longtime fans may have of the new album, Howerdel muses on the band’s ability to stick to their guns – honesty is the thread that weaves the time between their albums.

“I’m old enough to speak with younger musicians. A lot of band’s first records are their best because there is a dying desire to create, if you can tap into that, then you’re going to create something great. We make records to stay true to that.”

What: Eat The Elephant is out now through BMG

“I THINK IT’S JUST HEIGHTENED STATES OF EMOTION THAT DRIVE CREATIVITY –

IT CAN BE REFLECTIVE OR REACTIONARY.”

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Dr. Octagon:

The Future Is Now It may have been 22 years since the last Dr. Octagon record, but time has done nothing to weary Dan the Automator, as the chaotic emcee himself tells Doug Wallen

I

It may have taken 22 years, but there’s finally a follow-up to Dr. Octagonecologyst, one of hip-hop’s most stubbornly weird albums. And the new Moosebumps: An Exploration Into Modern Day Horripilation certainly ticks all the boxes when it comes to cartoonish perversion and free association. But why did it take two full decades for rapper Kool Keith, producer Dan the Automator and turntablist DJ Qbert to dream up a rightful successor to the freaky ’90s classic?

“Keith is a bit of loose cannon,” admits Automator (a.k.a. Dan Nakamura) by phone from the San Francisco Bay Area, his voice thickened by what he describes as a “crazy cold”. “We’d talked about doing it [a decade ago] and it didn’t end up coming together. A couple years ago he came to me and said, ‘I’m ready to go.’” Despite a crowded schedule that saw him helm another cult-classic sequel via his Deltron 3030 reunion with Del the Funky Homosapien, Automator slipped right back into Dr. Octagon mode despite the considerable stretch between albums.

“WHERE KEITH BEGINS

AND THE CHARACTER ENDS IS ALWAYS

TOUGH TO ASCERTAIN.” The follow-up came together easily, despite Kool Keith’s famously idiosyncratic wordplay, which resists collaborative restructuring. “With [Keith],” Automator explains, “all the tracks are what they are. Either they work or they don’t. In the actual verses, once you start correcting things, it loses its balance. It’s a free flow of ideas. It works when it works, and it really doesn’t work when it doesn’t.”

Luckily then, Moosebumps works. What’s more, Automator’s dank, low-slung production is every bit as fun it was in the mid-’90s, while Kool Keith throws himself vividly back into the madcap

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Moosebumps arrives on the heels of last year’s three-LP vinyl reissue of Dr. Octagonecologyst, released in an octagonal box set and priced at $69.69, naturally. Kool Keith used the Octagon name twice between the two albums, but Automator dismisses those unofficial outings as cash grabs on the part of a start-up label. Still, he adds, “I’m not one to keep Keith from making money.” As for live shows, they’ve done a couple dozen so far and might eventually get down to Australia, where Automator last toured with Deltron 3030 three years ago.

If there’s an elephant in the room with Dr. Octagon, it’s how Kool Keith’s explicit sexual fantasies might come across today. But Automator defends the character’s decidedly un-PC bent: “He’s not pushing people against their will; he’s just a freak. There’s a lot of metaphors and comedy.”

character of a libidinous science-fiction surgeon cutting loose in the year 3000. The pop culture references may have been updated for the new millennium, but otherwise it plays like vintage Octagon – right down to those askew, cobwebby strings and synths.

But that doesn’t mean Automator felt compelled to bring back every sonic signature. “I had 20 years of making records [in between],” he says, “so I have a different mentality when it comes to making music. That being said, I wanna be sure it fi ts into the Dr. Octagon world. It’s not about a formula. There are just certain tones and an ominous nature that I want Octagon records to have.”

Dan the Automator is a world-class collaborator, having struck upon enduring success not just with Dr. Octagon and Deltron 3030 but with Handsome Boy Modeling School – his celebrityheavy team-up with Prince Paul, which has been back in the studio this year – and the first Gorillaz album with Damon Albarn. He’s also produced Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Cornershop, Primal Scream and even Ben Lee, and joined actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead (10 Cloverfi eld Lane) in the duo Got a Girl, among other genre-jumping pursuits.

And lo and behold, none other than Slayer guitarist Gary Holt shows up on the new album’s ‘Power of the World (S Curls)’, while Interpol’s Paul Banks lends a crooning cameo to ‘Flying Waterbed’. Like all of his collaborators over the years, they were simply part of Automator’s talented pool of friends. Holt’s bad-ass contribution harks back to the first album’s metal-shaded ‘I’m Destructive’, a track that Automator says was “done in a punk kind of way.” He elaborates: “I didn’t know what I was doing. It was the naiveté that allowed that to happen. On this record, my approach was less random. I knew what I was looking for.”

He points out Keith’s odd lyrical fixation on animals and how the MC routinely blurs the line between reality and fantasy. “Where Keith begins and the character ends is always tough to ascertain,” he admits. Automator himself is just starting to grasp certain lyrics, like when he found out from Keith’s brother that a randomsounding line in ‘Black Hole Sun’ about Clinton and governors was actually a specific mention of Keith’s own high-school football team. Yes, one of the most out-there rappers in the game has been smuggling some straight autobiography into one of his most conceptual and outlandish characters.

“That’s part of the genius,” muses Automator. “I used to think he was connecting two thoughts but maybe missing the connecting thought.

What’s really going is that he’s connecting on all cylinders, but we don’t necessarily know it.”

“IT’S A FREE FLOW OF IDEAS. IT WORKS WHEN IT WORKS, AND IT REALLY DOESN’T WORK WHEN

IT DOESN’T.”

What: Moosebumps: An Exploration Into Modern Day Horripilation is out now through Bulk/Inertia

Other highlights on the new album include ‘Operation Zero’, which calls back to the first album’s spooky calling card ‘Blue Flowers’, and the Deltron crossover ‘3030 Meets the Doc, Pt. 1’. “Considering that Deltron is in [the year] 3030 and Dr. Octagon is 3000, it was too close to not do it,” notes Automator.

THAT I WANT OCTAGON RECORDS TO HAVE.” thebrag.com

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Middle Kids

Have Given

“LIFE’S PRETTY SCARY, WHATEVER YOU DO. AND ANYTHING THAT’S A RISK IS GOING TO BE SCARY. BUT WE’RE DOING IT TOGETHER. WE’RE ALL SCARED TOGETHER.” Middle Kids photo by Maclay Heriot

60 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

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FEATURE

Up On Planning For The Future

By Joseph Earp

T

here’s not many of us that will live to fulfil our wildest creative dreams. True commercial artistic success is rarer than any biopic or musician’s autobiography could ever make it seem: right now there are thousands of struggling geniuses out there more talented than you or I will ever be who have as little chance of striking gold as we do.

And even those who do manage to hit it big don’t necessarily see their future as being written. Middle Kids, a Sydney-based three piece made up of Hannah Joy, guitarist Tim Fitz, and drummer Harry Day, might have burst onto the scene two short years ago in a flurry of chart-ranking singles, opening spots for Ryan Adams and the Cold War Kids, and success and acclaim overseas, but they don’t necessarily see their career as being stable. “Who knows what will happen?” Joy says, her eyes gleaming.

Indeed, the band have largely given up on reading their own tea leaves these days. In person, they give off an easy, untroubled air; Joy and Fitz are husband and wife, Day their good friend. They have none of the weariness that bands can develop even reasonably early into their career: their brows are unfurrowed; their laughs rich and abrupt.

Their new record, Lost Friends, shares that sense of ease, and light, and laughter.

Debut records can sometimes be tortured, convoluted affairs, but Lost Friends is as uncomplicated as honey on toast; as rich as a glass of red wine. It is the sound of three people having the time of their lives; three people who care about nothing but making the music they want to make.

They’ve already decided how they’re going to celebrate the album’s release. “We’ll have a dinner,” Joy says. “We’ll have a great feast. I want big carafes of wine that swill.” But past that point, the record will firmly become its own living, breathing, changeable thing. They have no demands of it; no expectations. For them, the hardest part is already in the past. The world will take Lost Friends whatever way the world wants to, and Middle Kids will keep doing what they have always done, producing beautiful, lifeaffirming songs as though doing so were as easy as drawing breath.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

“YOU DON’T USUALLY GET TO

DO SOMETHING YOU REALLY LOVE FOR YOUR JOB, SO WE’RE REALLY FORTUNATE.”

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FEATURE

“IT DOES MEAN THAT REGARDLESS OF WHERE THIS PROJECT GOES,

WE JUST KNOW WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE MUSIC AS THIS REALLY SPECIAL THING.”

The BRAG: Was there a moment when you decided that you wanted to make music full-time?

Hannah Joy: I mean, making music is all I could ever do. This is all I wanted to do.

I was never like, ‘I’m going to be a musician!’ There was just never anything else competing for my attention or imagination. It’s just been the thing that I’ve continued to do. That said, you don’t actually ever believe you can do it for your job. But maybe now we’re going, ‘Hey, perhaps we could?’

Harry Day: I always wanted to do it. I don’t think I even knew why, when I was younger – I still don’t. It’s just the thing I’ve felt most strongly about, and most passionately about. And now I think I’m starting to see why that is.

Tim Fitz: You don’t usually get to do something you really love for your job, so we’re really fortunate. But also, it’s something that’s not so financially stable. You’ve got to decide you’re going to do it. There’s a certain risk you have to accept. Which is cool.

Would you still be making music then even if it wasn’t a job?

TF: That’s what we’ve been doing our whole lives. You do it ’til someone says, ‘Maybe we’ll allow you to make some money doing this.’ And you go, ‘Great, I was going to be doing this anyway.’

HJ: It does mean that regardless of where this project goes, we just know we’ll always have music as this really special thing outside of just being a career. It’s probably the most sacred, special thing. It’s such a gift to us; it makes us come alive. And we’re always going to have that. That is amazing.

HD: It’s weird when you become an adult and it goes from being that thing that you love – the thing you don’t need to be anything – to sort of navigating a career in it.

You’re trying to keep that pure thing that you had when you were younger, while also making important career decisions.

Is that intimidating?

HD: It is. Life’s pretty scary, whatever you do. And anything that’s a risk is going to be scary. But we’re doing it together. We’re all scared together.

Was there a specific moment you knew making music could be a career then?

TF: There was never a specific moment; there was a series of them. You start to see that you’re doing things that if you looked at other bands doing them, you’d go,

‘Oh, they’re really going for it.’ The band’s doing things that we never imagined we would be able to do. At some point you have to accept that there’s a real amazing opportunity here, and that you have to follow it wherever it goes.

HD: I think it’s hard when you’re in it to get a sense of the relative size of it. But there are definitely moments when you see it kinda clearly and you’re very thankful for it. I find those moments very energising as well. It can be a little thing. It could be a message you get from a fan about how the music is impacting their life. That’s something that is very personal. Or it could be when you play a show; a big show.

That’s cool as well.

HJ: That’s been very cool; touring places that we’ve never been to before and playing shows. They’re often small shows, but that people are there, and they know us and our music; that makes you go, ‘Wow, okay.’ You’re caught up in the day-to-day of it, just making the thing. And then you go, ‘Oh, something is happening’. Something external to us is moving.

Is there the sense then that when you release a song you have to kind of release ownership of it? You have to relinquish it?

TF: One hundred per cent. It stands on its own; it’s separate from the artist. That’s something that I think people can get confused about. You’ve created something; it’s not yours anymore. It just has to speak for itself.

Is that scary though – the idea that people could take it however they want?

TF: They should. That’s what we do when we listen to something.

HD: There’s a relief when you release it. When it’s still yours, you second guess it. But when it’s out, you go; ‘That’s it.’

HJ: That’s the power of art. There is a risk from the outset – there is a bit of fear involved. But the job of art is for other people to own it and interpret it. I feel like that with all my favourite songs; like, they’re my favourite songs. They have impacted me and they mean something very different to other people. That’s why art is so powerful.

It connects so many different people in so many different walks of life. It does mean we don’t have control. But we shouldn’t.

Where: Sydney Opera House When: Sunday May 27 And: Lost Friends is out now through EMI Music Australia

“THE BAND’S DOING THINGS THAT WE NEVER IMAGINED WE WOULD BE ABLE TO DO. AT SOME POINT YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT THERE’S

A REAL AMAZING OPPORTUNITY HERE.” 62 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

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FEATURE

Don Walker:

One Suave Fuck Natalie Rogers learns Don Walker, Cold Chisel songwriter and formidable Australian musical legend, is as charismatic as he is grizzled

I

n no small part thanks to his 45-year-long music career, Don Walker cuts a fine figure as frontman of his band the Suave Fucks. Dressed all in black, the stage lit by soft spotlight, audiences illuminated by the candles on their tables, he is softly spoken as he introduces his band’s first song – but even then his tone is instantly recognisable, and his incredible gift for storytelling has all those in the room hanging on his every word.

But it wasn’t always this way.

“It took a while to get comfortable, but I had good people to help get me through,” Walker says of his transition from songwriter of such undeniable hits as ‘Saturday Night’, ‘Cheap Wine’, ‘Khe Sanh’, ‘Breakfast at Sweethearts’ and ‘Flame Trees’ to swaggering, Johnny Cash-inflected frontman.

“The two Catfish albums [his first project after Cold Chisel initially disbanded] were produced by Peter Walker and even though I was feeling my way as a singer, he managed to get good performances onto those albums. And it also took me those two Catfish albums to try and figure out what I should be doing, as far as what kind of songs suit the tales that I have to tell.”

“I HAVEN’T HAD A

TURNTABLE

FOR A LONG TIME BUT PEOPLE ARE VERY PASSIONATE ABOUT IT AND THEY TELL ME THAT IT SOUNDS

BETTER.”

Now, 30 years on from those early Catfish recordings, Walker has released a box set of his entire solo catalogue – six albums, five on vinyl for the first time. However, as he tells it, the timing of the release was a total coincidence. “You mentioning that [it’s been 30 years] is the first time that I’ve realised it, but I forget birthdays, so an album’s got no chance,” he laughs. “I know there are bands and singers out there who do this thing of having 30th anniversaries and stuff like that but that’s just not something that I have ever done. I’m just not really conscious of it.”

Superorganism photo by Steph Wilson

Out now, the Blacktop box set includes both Catfish releases, Unlimited Address (1988) and Ruby (1991) alongside 1994’s We’re All Gonna Die, Cutting Back (2006) and more recently 2013’s Hully Gully. “It’s not a re-issue because all of these albums are available on other formats and they’ve always been available. I just wanted to get everything out on vinyl because a lot of people listen to vinyl now. I haven’t had a turntable for a long time but people are very passionate about it and they tell me that it sounds better.”

Walker is currently on tour appearing at the Camelot Lounge in Marrickville, only a stones’ throw away from the part of the city where the Ayr-born, Grafton raised wordsmith spent more than half his life, Kings Cross. “There’s no question that some parts have been gentrified, but I lived there for nearly 40 years and it always changed from one decade to the next, that will never stop.

“I FORGET

BIRTHDAYS, SO AN ALBUM’S GOT NO CHANCE.” thebrag.com

“IT TOOK ME TWO CATFISH ALBUMS TO TRY AND FIGURE OUT WHAT I SHOULD BE DOING, AS FAR AS WHAT KIND OF SONGS SUIT

THE TALES THAT I HAVE TO TELL.”

“There’s still an area between the station and the El Alamein Memorial Fountain that is pretty down market and economically challenged,” he says, “but there’s a lot of development going on and people say that that’s going to disappear – but there are good people there who are fighting that too. Things always change, and it’s just a matter of watching that change and being interested in it – it just is what it is.”

The former physics student is more than adept to change as he moves effortlessly between his many projects. One weekend he can be found behind the keyboards as Barnesy belts out one of Cold Chisel’s unmistakable anthems for the enthusiastic crowd at the Supercars event in Adelaide.

Then by the next weekend he’s enjoying the Harbour City skyline as part of his long-standing super-trio, Tex, Don and

Charlie.

However, for now all his attention is placed firmly on the Blacktop tour and the audience reaction to new material he has (somehow) found time to work on. “Yes, there are a few new songs that we’re playing on this tour, but I’ll probably wait until I’ve got a couple more and also see how they develop live before I think about recording them,” he says. “One is very new – we learnt it at rehearsal at the beginning of the tour, and it’s a little bit newborn at the moment.

to a magic point where you know them too well – so you’ve gotta catch them in the net just at the perfect stage of development if you can.”

“The way we operate is on tour, sometime, somewhere, I’ll book a studio for a day and go in and play them,” Walker explains. “I fi nd that as each song is introduced to a band and you start to perform them live, they go through an arc where initially you don’t know them well enough, then they get

“It’s wait and see for both of us,” he jokes when I ask about a possible release date. “I’m writing and writing, and I’m sort of fi guring out on the run what it’s about too.”

So if timing is everything, nine years on from the release of his memoir Shots, he’s more than ready to see his stories in print again. “I’m writing prose as well as songs at the moment, but I’ve been too busy in the last two years to go at it as hard as I would like,” he says. “Although the prose is not a follow up to Shots; it’s fi ction.

What: Blacktop is out now

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FEATURE

Beach House:

Lucky Number Seven Beach House’s Alex Scally tells Holly Pereira that he has accepted all that comes with growing old

W

hile the process of growing older is often met with some resignation and resistance, the members of art pop duo Beach House have chosen to embrace their age and the wisdom that comes with it. Interviewing just one half of the project poses as a challenge, given that Beach House is defi ned by the musical relationship between Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand, but, to his immense credit, Scally does well to sum up where he and Legrand are at as they approach the release of their seventh album, aptly titled 7.

After the dual release in 2015 of Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars Scally reveals that the opportunity to fl esh out the new album over a longer period of time was much needed.

Along with extra time, the addition of a studio built within their practice space meant that an immediacy lost on other albums was able to be captured. “We didn’t have to hold on to an inspiring moment for six months and then try to resurrect it,” explains Scally. “It really added a lot of life to things because we were able to work quickly and intensely whenever the moment came

to us. It was really liberating, too, to not have somebody between us and the music. It was just us, completely unfi ltered.”

As the band explain in an open letter shared when announcing the new album, the number seven is associated with the highest level of spirituality, and also happens to pass a close resemblance to the number one. Scally feels as though this perfectly suits what feels like a beginning of a new chapter for the band. “I think this is the way we want to move forward in the future but it’s hard to predict these

“WE HAVE THIS KIND OF

BEAUTIFUL RESILIENCE

AS WE PROCESS REALITY AS BEST WE CAN.” 64 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

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FEATURE

“THERE’S THIS

INCREDIBLE KNOWLEDGE

THAT COMES WITH HAVING BEEN THROUGH SO MANY THINGS; DOING THINGS SO MANY WAYS.”

things. Hopefully things will keep changing and evolving too, and hopefully inspiration will still exist.

That’s all we really need at the end of the day.”

The recording of the album also serves as a pivotal turning point for a band who previously limited themselves by making music that could be easily translated live. “We got really inspired by things and we didn’t want to worry about how we’d play it live,” says Scally. “The great thing is in rehearsals we can figure out how to play the songs live anyway, so it hasn’t held us back at all. It actually makes them cooler.”

With 13 years of experience behind them Scally feels as though their growth as individuals has shaped what has become the biggest creative statement of their career. “There’s this incredible knowledge that comes with having been through so many things; doing things so many ways. You know so well how to avoid the faults of the past, and you know so well about what you want. That assuredness and confidence that comes with being older is so amazing and it’s really great for creativity.”

Despite making music that explores some of the heavy truths that come with life, Scally feels as

though he doesn’t possess the authority to comment on these themes. “We write pretty abstract music,” states Scally. “Those themes that we explore, such as darkness and trauma, those are huge, giant themes. I think we’re at this point in life where we’re starting to see the gravity of things. We have this kind of beautiful resilience as we process reality as best we can. Hopefully the filter to reality that we create is of some interest to somebody.”

completely arresting. “Songs never get finished without some kind of integration and back and forth between us,” says Scally. “Sometimes Victoria will write a chord progression or a beat and then I’ll do one, and then there’s moments where we both work together and that’s usually where the jumps forwards happen. Working with Victoria is such a pleasure. It never ceases to amaze me how much better everything gets when she’s involved.”

Now recording with a permanent drummer, Beach House has expanded beyond the world created

by Scally and Legrand. Scally explains that things haven’t changed in terms of the writing process, but admits that expanding their personnel is a reflection of their growth as musicians. “When you’re younger you don’t want anybody to help you, but when you get older you can see how people’s ideas are valuable and powerful. Recording the album was a really good vibe the whole time. There was a lot of creativity and good, positive feedback.”

When asked to ponder what keeps his passion for the project alight, Scally is remarkably astute.

“What keeps us energized is being true to ourselves and being creative. Touring keeps us energized too; the feedback from the wonderful people who support us is something that charges us and keeps us going.

Ultimately, the initial collaboration between Scally and Legrand serves as the integral component of the finished product, with the connection between the two responsible for the sudden shifts that make tracks like the album’s opener ‘Dark Spring’

“I think our only goal is to be honest and stay true to ourselves, says Scally, summing up. “To do what feels right and what’s honest and to not let ourselves be compromised. If you’re not inspired, don’t continue. We just want to be real. It’s the only option for us. The only other option is death,” he concludes with a bitter laugh.

What: 7 is out Friday May 11 through Inertia / [PIAS]

thebrag.com

Beach House photo by Shawn Brackbill

“IT WAS REALLY LIBERATING TO NOT HAVE SOMEBODY BETWEEN US AND THE MUSIC. IT WAS JUST US, COMPLETELY UNFILTERED.”

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FEATURE

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats:

Fresh Pain

Natalie Rogers and one-time preacher Nathaniel Rateliff talk the quiet loneliness of life on the road

“I’VE ALWAYS LIVED FOR MUSIC;

ALWAYS HAD IT IN ME.” 66 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

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FEATURE

“I WANTED TO HAVE THE INPUT OF EVERYONE, BECAUSE OVER THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS TOURING WE’D CHANGED SO MUCH AND BECOME A BAND – AND MADE A LOT OF SACRIFICES.” N

athaniel Rateliff is notoriously hard to pin down, but if you do manage to wrangle him for a chat or even catch a live performance of him with his backing band the Night Sweats, you’ll find that you’re in for one helluva treat. Not that you can blame Rateliff for being one tough customer to corner – after all, the Missouri-born mover and shaker is a busier man than most. When we do manage to wrangle an interview out of him, it’s over the phone from Belfast, where he has just wrapped up the UK leg of his world tour in support of his latest album Tearing At The Seams.

“It’s a real blessing,” reveals the former missionary when asked about the response to his group’s new music. “We were surprised by the reaction to our first record [2015’s self-titled album, one that quickly went gold] as well, but it just keeps getting better.”

The Denver-based musician has worked as a carpenter, a gardener and at a trucking depot, but writing songs has always been his dream. His love affair with music began at the tender age of seven; he played drums in his family’s band. “I’ve always lived for music; always had it in me.” However, he admits he didn’t take playing music seriously until he was 13, when his father was tragically killed in a head-on collision on the way to church.

Despite now living his dream, Rateliff is the first to admit life on the road hasn’t been easy. Following the release of their debut album, the eight-piece played over 350 shows and soon loneliness, isolation and the freedom that being on tour brings (which included a whirlwind three days down the East Coast of Australia last year, not to mention a night fuelled by Adderall and mushrooms in Paris) led to the breakdown of his marriage.

In need of a change of scenery Rateliff packed up and caught a ride to the desert to sweat it out. “There is a big difference from our first album compared to this one. Last time I came up with all of the ideas myself and then took them to the band. But this time very early on in the writing process we all went down to New Mexico with Jamie Mefford, our front of house engineer, who helped produce the record,” Rateliff says.

“We needed to make an experience for ourselves and I wanted to have the input of everyone, because over the last couple of years touring we’d changed so much and become a band – and made a lot of sacrifices,” he adds. “I thought the way they approached their instruments would contribute to the way I write, and also help me to come up with different ideas.”

Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats photo by Brantley Gutierrez

thebrag.com

From the wide, rose-coloured landscapes of Rodeo, New Mexico, the Night Sweats headed to the lush greenery of rural Oregon, the home of long-time friend and producer Richard Swift (The Shins, Foxygen). “We’re really close and we don’t have to communicate that much about what we wanna have happen – it just sort of happens naturally and we have a really good time working together,” Rateliff says.

“We laugh a lot.”

Indeed, despite the harshness of his music, Rateliff often looks like he’s having fun: his onstage shuffle and shimmy has been known to get whole audiences up and dancing. “I think that’s what I love about working with Richard and the guys in the band – we get along so well, we just have a good time. Besides making music that’s really all we’re trying to do, and we just hope people enjoy it.”

What: Tearing At The Seams is out now through Stax / Caroline Australia

FEATURE

“I STARTED DOING PSYCHOANALYSIS MAYBE THREE YEARS AGO NOW,

AND OBVIOUSLY THAT’S REALLY REPETITIVE, TALKING-BASED THERAPY, AND I THINK THAT’S WHY I GRAVITATED TOWARDS IT.”

“BECAUSE ART HAS NEVER BEEN MY FOCUS,

I PROBABLY ACHIEVE WHAT I WANT TO A LESSER DEGREE.” 68 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

thebrag.com

FEATURE

Sarah Mary Chadwick:

A Kind Of Therapy Sarah Mary Chadwick tells Allison Gallagher her music helps her work through emotions that might otherwise be inaccessible

J

oan Didion once talked about how she found examining something was an exercise in making it less scary. Growing up in the West, there was a theory she maintained that if you kept a snake in your eye line, it wasn’t going to bite you. “That’s kind of the way I feel about confronting pain,” she once explained. “I want to know where it is.”

This method of identifying and examining pain in order to confront it feels reminiscent of the approach Melbourne-based artist Sarah Mary Chadwick takes when writing the tender, vulnerable meditations on intimacy, relationships and mental health that appear throughout her solo catalogue.

While the instrumentation has changed over the course of several records – from the lo-fi, guitardriven Eating For Two in 2012 to the piano, drums and bass on forthcoming album Sugar Still Melts In The Rain – the music itself always serves as an understated backdrop to Chadwick’s lyrics and vocals, which oscillate between quietly meditative and an anguished howl.

“With earlier stuff it was more of a necessity, in that I was doing stuff by myself,” says Chadwick of the sparse instrumentation. “With this one it’s got a little bit more in it, it’s got drums and bass, but I think because I’m more focused on the songwriting aspect than instrumentation it probably quite naturally happens. I don’t put a lot of thought into the instrumentation side of it.”

“I think we’ve probably just done enough stuff together now that it’s really easy. Having bass and drums on this record – my friend Tim [DeaneFreedman] plays drums on it – and doing it with those two made me realise I can collaborate with people; it just needs to be the right people really.

We’re friends so obviously we socialize together as well. It’s quite easy and not awkward at all.

“I KIND OF NEED A DEADLINE SOMETIMES

“Geoff’s obviously really good to work with as well. We did a video together a couple months ago and I definitely realized that I don’t really bother to make it very fun for him anymore. We started at maybe 9 o’clock and it was just Geoff and I setting everything up and then at 1 o’clock I realized I hadn’t really said anything to him for three hours.”

Left to her own devices, Chadwick says she’ll write a few songs occasionally.

However, she’ll ask O’Connor if she’s able to book recording time months in the future in order to prompt creative output.

“I kind of need a deadline sometimes if I want to do a lot of work. When I know I have that date coming up, I start to write a lot, so generally I’ll have about 20 or 30 songs and pick from that. But I need that impetus of embarrassing myself or fucking Geoff around to make sure I have the work done.”

IF I WANT TO DO A LOT OF WORK.”

On Sugar Still Melts In The Rain, Chadwick continues to address difficult topics head-on, finding a level of comfort in exploring uncomfortable things. “Some people think skies should be blue all the time / but me, I always like a storm” she sings on album standout ‘Wind Wool’.

“I’m doing it to process and work things out,” says Chadwick of her songwriting catalyst. “I started doing psychoanalysis maybe three years ago now, and obviously that’s really repetitive, talking-based therapy, and I think that’s why I gravitated towards it. The ideas really spoke to me because it was very similar to working stuff out in the way I do with songwriting. You just talk about what you don’t want to talk about, and you talk about it a lot, and you try to articulate it as clearly as you can, and through that process you can achieve some sense of change or movement.”

Chadwick joins a long line of artists for whom openly facing sorrow through songwriting serves as a therapeutic act. Listening to Sugar Still Melts In The Rain, one can’t help but feel privileged as a listener to be trusted with what Chadwick is communicating in each song.

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Originally from New Zealand, Chadwick first came to prominence fronting Melbourne grunge band Batrider. After a decade with the group, she turned her focus instead to independent songwriting, releasing three solo albums as well as two collections of B-sides and rarities. Chadwick recorded fourth album Sugar Still Melts In The Rain with longtime collaborator Geoffrey O’Connor, who recorded 2015’s 9 Classic Tracks and 2016’s Roses Always Die as well, also playing bass on the new record.

In addition to songwriting, Chadwick is also a visual artist. Her often pornographic work feels like it stems from a similar creative process to her music, focusing on directness and a rawness of expression.

“I’m a lot more capable with music, I’m more able to achieve what I want to in my mind, I’m able to make stuff that’s more realized. Because art has never been my focus, I probably achieve what I want to a lesser degree, but I do approach it in the same way. It’s not something that benefits from me doing it longer or harder, I do very much approach it in the same way. Maybe with a slightly different intention because I don’t try and make it as overloaded as I do with songwriting. I don’t try and pack as much into it, but the intent is the same.”

What: Sugar Still Melts In The Rain is out Friday May 11 via Rice Is Nice / Remote Control

Sounds Like…

NEW ALBUM AND SINGLE RELE A SES WITH JOSEPH E ARP

Listen, I know usually this column starts with a personal anecdote – a (tenuous) lede that spills out into the first review – but we simply don’t have the fucking time for that this month. Thanks to whatever force, divine or otherwise, controls album release dates, May is an embarrassment of riches.

We don’t have a word to spare for any of that artsy journalistic shit, I’m afraid.

That said, it’s also worth quickly rounding up the late April records not covered by our last column, so here goes: Confident Music For Confident People, the debut record from Confidence Man, is a glossy, sexy delight, and one of the most impressive dance releases of the last few years; The Sciences, the surprise release from stoner metal pioneers Sleep, is precisely as exacting and sludgey as one would hope; and Djarimirri (Child Of The Rainbow), the posthumous release from Gurrumul,

Jaala

Evelyn Ida Morris

is devastatingly beautiful, cartwheeling between the fragile and the defiant.

Nor have I stopped listening to Evelyn Ida Morris’ debut self-titled record under their own name. Best known as the musician behind the Pikelet moniker, Morris writes songs that are as hard to pin down as fog; piano-based heartbreakers that resist easy interpretation. ‘Freckles’, the record closer, is one of the most beautiful songs of the year so far, but it’s not worth pulling apart favourites from the record; Evelyn Ida Morris is a complete, fully-formed beast.

There are only a few more impressive albums that have been released this year.

“Best known as the musician behind the Pikelet moniker, Evelyn Ida Morris writes songs that are as hard to pin down as fog.”

I have also been obsessed with Joonya Spirit, the new album from Jaala. A bundle of corrugated iron, it owes more to the work of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis than it does the indie rock touchstones that get trotted out ad nauseum these days. ‘Horn’ is wormy and imprecise; ‘Frogs Tears’ is all unsettled, overcaffeinated beauty; and ‘Gwynne’ flirts with the kind of unhinged intensity that defines the best work Spencer Krug. It’s a masterpiece.

Then there’s Mod Con’s debut record, Modern Convenience, a musical tirade that has more clear-eyed intensity in its opener,

“Joonya Spirit owes more to the work of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis than it does the indie rock touchstones that get trotted out ad nauseum these days.”

‘Scorpio’, than most post-punk albums of late have over their entire running time.

Lead singer Erica Dunn pushes her voice ’till it breaks, chord structures get built up only to crumble, and the whole thing has the feel of a bad acid trip, or a day of layoffs at a business in trouble.

Now, before we run out of space without even really having begun, onto May. First up, we have A Laughing Death In Meatspace, the debut record from supergroup Tropical Fuck Storm. A burntout car of a record, the thing is a bundle of rusted sharp edges all loaded with tetanus. Fans of frontman Gareth Liddiard’s other band The Drones will recognise the busted-out poetry that made that group

“Modern Convenience has more clear-eyed intensity in its opener, ‘Scorpio’, than most post-punk albums of late have over their entire running time.”

70 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

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albums

The Defender

BY L AURA WILSON Each month, a BRAG writer picks a pop culture oddity that they feel has been hard done by and puts in their plea for a retrial. This month, Laura Wilson comes out swinging for Steven Spielberg’s most misunderstood fi lm, A.I. Artifi cial Intelligence.

A.I. Artifi cial Intelligence Mod Con

E

one of the most important in Australia, but this isn’t just Drones mk 2. It’s stranger – lumpier – even than Feelin’ Kinda Free, a freewheeling, unfettered record that incorporates elements of hip hop, postpunk, death metal and more.

The apocalypse hangs heavy over the thing, but it’s more John Waters than it is Lars Von Trier. Liddiard can’t help himself; even when Rome is burning to the ground, he’s gotta fucking dance, and tracks like ‘Antimatter Animals’ are among the most mischievously entertaining he’s ever written.

“Your politics ain’t nothing but a fond fuck you,” he hisses across that track; later, on the extraordinary ‘The Future Of History’ he memorably warns that if IBM has the power to make your dreams come true, you could always the same about your nightmares too.

‘Meatspace’ is what silicone valley bros dismissively call the real world, and A Laughing Death shares that same detached attitude towards people and the irrational, illogical things they do. Both ‘Rubber Bullies’ and ‘Chameleon Paint’ are about online gangs of roving tone warriors looking to bully fellow left-wingers; ‘A Laughing Death In Meatspace’ is about illness and mortality; and even the record’s gentle, surf-rock indebted instrumental track, is called ‘Shellfish Toxin’. It’s as much an anthropological study as it is an

“Time may well reveal Tell Me How You Really Feel to be not just Barnett’s masterpiece, but one of the most profoundly realised Australian records of the last decade.”

album; a huddle of sad humans dissected in the middle and arranged in tanks of formaldehyde like a Hirst.

Then there’s Tell Me How You Really Feel, the new record from Courtney Barnett. It’s a darker album than her debut, Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit; an unsparing, dense thing. On ‘Nameless Faceless’ she addresses murder, trolls, and assault; on ‘I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch’, she howls back at the haters, her voice run through ten miles of barbed wire.

The world is troubled, and Barnett knows it; the Sunday morning panic attack that ‘Avant Gardener’ pivoted on is a once a day rather than a once a week affair now, and the whole world seems to be going through it.

But Barnett’s most unique skill has always been her precision, and while trawling through all that bad psychic territory, she picks out her mission statement: the world is shit, people can be cruel, but still, despite all the odds, goodness persists. Her friends are “sweet relief”; even when people do nothing, she thinks they’re doing fine; and though she gets sad, as on ‘City Looks Pretty’ she can pull it together.

Mod Con photo by Kalindy Williams

search for the Blue Fairy leads him to the deepest depths of a drowned Manhattan, where he gets frozen in the ice. But rather than end there, the film suddenly jumps forward thousands of years. David is resuscitated by a race of highly intelligent robots who offer him the opportunity to bring his mother back from the dead for a single day, at the cost of her being erased from the space-time continuum.

David, having been programmed to want nothing but his mother, leaps at the opportunity, and the film ends with a sunlight-dappled montage of the young robot finally getting exactly what he has always wanted.

“EVEN A.I.’S CRITICS DON’T REALLY HATE THAT FILM.”

I don’t even feel like I really need to defend the film’s first two hours, as they are generally – and rightly – seen to contain some of Spielberg’s finest work as a director. The story of David (Haley Joel Osment, delivering perhaps the finest performance by any young actor in a major motion picture), a robot boy who is adopted and then abandoned by a human couple, the film is full of inspired – though admittedly brutal – Spielbergian flourishes. Desperately searching for the Blue Fairy, a magical entity he has learned about from the battered copy of Pinocchio his beloved mother has read him, David moves through a dark, Blade Runner-inflected world, and Spielberg captures every step of his journey with nuance, grace, and intelligence.

What he doesn’t do, or so the story goes, is stick the landing. David’s

It sounds saccharine on paper – and it’s meant to. The power of A.I. comes from the way the film’s darkness rustles up against its fairy tale plotting, and the ending is a perfect, ever so subtle inversion of the “happily ever after” finale.

Sure, David has been reunited with his mother, but that’s no happy ending. In his selfishness, he has erased her from history – he has valued his happiness over her own, treating her like a robotic plaything. And that final shot – David and his mother nuzzling up to one another in bed – isn’t a heartwarming, Spielbergian send-off; it’s a deeply fucked-up Freudian nightmare. It’s a sexually impotent, genital-less robotic child, lying in bed with the mother he has doomed to non-existence, shot with all the eerie romance that permeates Romeo And Juliet’s final act. What could be bleaker?

That, ultimately, is what is left in the wake of closer ‘Sunday Roast’; Barnett’s deep, warmly-felt connection with people, and all the things they are capable of. Time may well reveal it to be not just her masterpiece, but one of the most profoundly realised Australian records of the last decade.

Highlight Of The Month: A dead tie between Tell Me How You Really Feel and A Laughing Death In Meatspace

Dud Of The Month: No duds here, friend.

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ven A.I.’s critics don’t really hate that film. The extraordinarily bleak sci-fi/ fantasy/fairy tale, a pet project of Stanley Kubrick’s that was carried to the screen by Steven Spielberg following the death of the A Clockwork Orange director, has been praised for its vicious setpieces, its astounding central performance, and its tortured philosophical musing. What it has never been praised for, mind you, is its final 30 minutes; a sudden tangent that has become shorthand for films that stridently and aggressively jump the shark in their final act.

“DESPERATELY SEARCHING FOR THE BLUE FAIRY, A MAGICAL ENTITY HE HAS LEARNED ABOUT FROM THE BATTERED COPY OF PINOCCHIO HIS BELOVED MOTHER HAS READ HIM, DAVID MOVES THROUGH A DARK, BLADE RUNNER-INFLECTED WORLD.” BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18 :: 71

g g guide gig g Submit your gig and club listings, head to: thebrag.com/gig-guide.

PICK OF THE THE MONTH Cat Power

FRIDAY MAY 4

TUESDAY MAY 8

15 Grams The Star, Pyrmont.

7pm. Free.

Horrorshow Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $34.70.

1927 Ettamogah Hotel, Rouse Hill. 7pm.

Free.

Chase The Sun The Stag And Hunter Hotel, Mayfield. 7pm.

Free.

Endless Heights Rad Bar, Wollongong. 8pm.

Free.

Letters To Lions Miranda Hotel, Miranda. 8pm.

Free.

Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay.

Cat Power

SATURDAY MAY 31

Tonight Alive Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7pm. $59.15.

8pm. $69.

WEDNESDAY MAY 2 Amine Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 8:15pm. $64.90 Dan Sultan Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay. 8pm. $55.20.

Hello Bones Rad Bar, Wollongong. 8pm.

Free.

Jimmy Barnes Sydney Town Hall, Sydney CBD. 8pm. $159.

Lady Leshurr Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $46.11.

Machine Gun Kelly Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 8:30pm. $79.90

THURSDAY MAY 3

Rixe Freda’s, Chippendale.

8pm. Free.

10CC WIN Entertainment Centre, Wollongong.

7:30pm. $75.90.

Terra Lightfoot Brass Monkey, Cronulla. 8pm.

Free.

The Cribs Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale.

8pm. $24.90.

Dan Sultan Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay. 8pm. $55.20.

Enter The Jaguar Rad Bar, Wollongong. 8pm.

Free.

The Mission In Motion Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $24.90.

SATURDAY MAY 5 Mastin Lismore Workers Club, Lismore.

8pm. Free.

Belle & Sebastian Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay. 7pm. $69.

Strawberry Boogie University of Wollongong Bar, Wollongong. 8pm.

Free.

Darude Ivy, Sydney CBD. 8:30pm. $20.

Jimmy Barnes Sydney Town Hall, Sydney CBD. 8pm. $159.

Darude

Endless Heights The Lair, Sydney CBD. 8pm. $20.

Luigi Madonna Chinese Laundry, Sydney CBD. 8pm.

Free.

Story Of The Year Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7:30pm. $72.40.

SUNDAY MAY 6 Horrorshow Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $34.70.

Missy Higgins Anita’s Theatre, Thirroul. 7:45pm. $91.56.

Pears Rad Bar, Wollongong. 8pm.

Free.

Darude

Ivy, Sydney CBD. Saturday May 5. 8:30pm. $20.

Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dundun dun dundundun dun dun dun dun dun dun dundun dundun. Daddadd adadsadadadadaddadadaddadddadaddadadadd.

72 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

MONDAY MAY 7 Missy Higgins Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 7:45pm. $79.90.

Missy Higgins Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 7:45pm. $79.90.

WEDNESDAY MAY 9 Angus And Julia Stone Anita’s Theatre, Thirroul. 7pm. $69.90.

Dani Im Leadbelly, Newtown. 8pm. $55.94.

Dr. Feelgood Brass Monkey, Cronulla. 8pm.

Free.

Dyer Maker Rad Bar, Wollongong. 8pm.

Free.

Horrorshow Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $34.70.

THURSDAY MAY 10 Horrorshow Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $34.70.

The Mavis’s Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 8pm. $25.

FRIDAY MAY 11 DZ Deathrays Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 6:30pm. $34.80.

SATURDAY MAY 12 Cradle Of Filth Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 8:30pm. $73.55.

Horrorshow Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $34.70.

Like Thieves Red Rattler, Marrickville. 8pm. $21.

SUNDAY MAY 13 The Black Sorrows Brass Monkey, Cronulla. 8pm.

Free.

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g g guide gig g W I T H F R OYO

Submit your gig and club listings, head to: thebrag.com/gig-guide.

1. Draw your band: Is your favourite movie Drive? Do you find yourself lounging on furniture and glaring over the top of a pair of sunnies, the collar to your denim jacket popped?

Are you obsessed with everything ’80s? Then boy is Froyo the band for you. The three-piece make danceable synth that owes a debt to everything from the films of John Hughes to the neon-drenched cool of LA at night. We asked them some questions; they drew us some answers.

Marlon Williams

2. Draw the cover of your single, ‘Darling’:

Marlon Williams

Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. Thursday May 17. 7:30pm. $50.10.

3. Draw your ideal rider:

New Zealand-born folk crooner Marlon Williams has had one helluva year – his new record Make Way For Love has been showered in praise; he’s performed to rapturous applause at Fairgrounds festival; and his songs have been used in the excellent Netflix doco Wild Wild Country. Catch him at the Metro and see what the fuss is all about.

MONDAY MAY 14 Angus And Julia Stone Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 8pm. $89.90.

Marlon Williams Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7:30pm. $50.10.

FRIDAY MAY 18

TUESDAY MAY 15

Emily Davis The Stag & Hunter Hotel, Mayfield.

8pm. Free.

Angus And Julia Stone Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 8pm. $89.90.

Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $39.98.

Grant Lee Phillips Brass Monkey, Cronulla. 8pm. Free.

The Rubens The Beery, Terrigal.

7pm. $32.42.

WEDNESDAY MAY 16

SATURDAY MAY 19

Pals + Space Boys Rad Bar, Wollongong.

8pm. Free.

Castlecomer Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 8pm. $15.

Slapshock Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 6pm. $66.70.

THURSDAY MAY 17 Crocodylus Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $14.30.

John Maddox Sappho Books, Darlington. 7:30pm.

Free.

thebrag.com

SUNDAY MAY 20 The Weather Station Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $39.10.

MONDAY MAY 21 Deadlights + Dregg Rad Bar, Wollongong. 8pm.

Free.

TUESDAY MAY 22 Europe Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 8pm. $81.50.

4. What is your favourite food?

WEDNESDAY MAY 23 Rich Brian Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 6:30pm. $69.90.

Seether Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 8pm. $79.90.

THURSDAY MAY 24 5 Seconds Of Summer Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 8pm. $71.30.

4. Draw your favourite musician of all time:

Busby Marou The Basement, Sydney CBD. 8pm.

Free.

Rich Brian Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 6:30pm. $69.90.

Slumberjack The Basement, Sydney CBD. 10pm.

Free.

5. Draw your ideal audience BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18 :: 73

g g guide gig g Submit your gig and club listings, head to: thebrag.com/gig-guide.

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.

FRIDAY MAY 25

Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay. 8pm. $49.

British India Towradgi Beach Hotel, Towradgi.

8pm. $34.75.

Jack Ladder & The Dreamlanders Factory Theatre, Marrickville. 8pm. $27.70.

Iron & Wine Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay. 8pm. $49.

SATURDAY MAY 26 Augie March Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale.

8pm. $44.90.

Iron & Wine

The Whitlams Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7:30pm. $62.

MONDAY MAY 28 Kratae Kratay Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 9pm. $69.

Jack Ladder & The Dreamlanders Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

Saturday May 26.

8pm. $27.70.

Jack Ladder is one of this country’s primo surrealists; a musical Kafka whose songs twist and pivot in unusual and abrupt ways. He also boasts a pretty unbeatable live band, with Donny Benet on bass proving a bona fi de, unforgettable star.

Jack Ladder & The Dreamlanders

THURSDAY MAY 31

Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds

Brother Bad Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $17.85.

Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst.

Friday May 18.

8pm. $39.98.

Cat Power Sydney Opera House, Sydney.

8pm. $69.00.

I caught Kid Congo on his last Australian tour, a couple of years ago, and it was the very greatest liveshow I have ever witnessed.

Whether you’re a fan of Kid or a complete newcomer to his work, this is an absolute must see. Seriously: don’t miss it.

FRIDAY JUNE 1 Sarah Blasko Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 8pm. $51.10.

Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds

SUNDAY JUNE 3 Solange Sydney Opera House, Sydney.

8pm. $79.90.

MONDAY JUNE 4 Solange Sydney Opera House, Sydney.

8pm. $79.90.

TUESDAY JUNE 5 Niall Horan Sydney Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney Olympic Park. 8pm. $132.20.

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

free stuff head to: thebrag.com/freeshit

CHAPPAQUIDDICK Don’t let its knotty name throw you off: Chappaquiddick is a dark, spellbinding dose of political cinema, made in the classic paranoid ’60s thriller mode. Think The Conversation meets All The President’s Men meets JFK and you’ll be close, if not quite there, because Chappaquiddick has an intensity and sick shock all of its own.

WIN

A DOUBLE PASS

Based on a real life scandal in the late sixties that kicked off when senator Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge, killing a young staffer in the process, the film stars Jason Clarke and was directed

by John Curran of Praise fame. To celebrate the Thursday May 10 release of the film, we have ten double passes to give away; to enter, head over to thebrag.com/freeshit.

74 :: BRAG :: 737 :: 02:05:18

TULLY

WIN

Who doesn’t love a good dramedy? Moreover, who doesn’t love A Charlize Theron? The Academy Award winning actress is set to star DOUBLE in Tully, a “brilliant new comedy-drama from the Academy AwardPASS nominated director of Juno and Up In The Air”. Pivoting on a budding friendship between Marlo (Theron) and her new young night nanny, Tully (Mackenzie Davis), the film is an extraordinary, darkly comic look at motherhood, middle-age and the great, pressing weight of time.

To celebrate the Thursday May 10 release of the film, we have 15 double passes to give away to a special preview screening, going down on Wednesday May 10 at Events Cinema in George Street.

Interested in entering? Head over to thebrag.com/freeshit.

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