The Boys from Oz
Australians have a history of distrust with the suburban space. It’s one that I think is far more ingrained than the ongoing American preoccupation with the suburbs. The abjection, otherness, decay and concealed violence of the suburban space, and the affect this space has on the Australian male, is an important part of the Australian imaginary. This is evident with the continuous repetition of these themes, particularly criminality and violence, in a whole host of recent films: Wish You Were Here (2012), Snowtown (2011), Animal Kingdom (2010), Somersault (2004), The Boys (1998) and Head On (1998).
I’ve chosen to talk about The Boys and Animal Kingdom because I think that they offer a distinct and unique portrayal of masculinity: one that is on the borderline, in between the public and private, criminality and legality, contained in an uncanny domestic space. The everyday suburban space is ruptured, undone and exposed as an unsettling site for a stifling and childlike male development, categorised by violence and the need to return to the maternal. This is the common trope in Australian domestic cinema ‘which finds expression in a distorted reflection akin to a hall of mirrors; each person staring back is undoubtedly familiar, but is in some way simultaneously emphasised, concealed and misshapen.’ (Thomas and Gillard, Metro Magazine, 2003)
4 Comments
September 27th, 2012 / 11:19 pm
September 27th, 2012 / 11:19 pm
Hypochondria, Death, and Boredom
I’ve been on a lot of planes this week, and I will be on more planes before this week is over. This guy I knew once told me that the best place to sit on a plane is in the back, the very back, by the bathrooms. It’s inconvenient, sure, and you have to wait forever to deplane, but if the damn thing goes down, the back is the safest place. The nose of the plane is obviously the first to go. Bye bye first and business class suckers! You’re dead. The middle of the plane is scary because it’s the weakest point, what with the weight of the wings and general architecture. If the plane is going to snap in half, the end. And so, the back. It makes sense. When the plane dives nose first, the back will be the last to impact. Chances are you won’t survive, but at least you’ll have a few extra seconds and maybe a little luck on your side.
A Tornado of Bullshit: my experience with LaBar Partners Limited – pt. 1
I received a business card.
I was at the premiere for The Descendants and a man in a pink shirt bumped into me. Hard. Oh god I’m sorry, I said. He didn’t apologize, didn’t walk on—he was staring at me. Then I really looked at him; wrinkled pink dress shirt, beard, food in his teeth. In retrospect, I think he had food in his pockets. Movie premieres, and this one in particular, have pretty heavy security, so I thought at worst this guy was just pickled and made eccentric by enormous, casual wealth. Who knows anymore.
Are you Ken? READ MORE >
Tyler Malone, The Mad Marksonite
David Markson, the talented writer of numerous literary masterpieces, died on June 4th, 2010. Soon after his death, in accordance with his wishes, his entire collection of books was donated to The Strand (supposedly his favorite place in the world). After this fact was inadvertently discovered by Annecy Liddell, who stumbled upon Markson’s copy of Don DeLillo’s White Noise in the stacks, it became a sort of underground NYC literature-lover exercise to scour the stacks of The Strand for books the man once owned.
…
The Strand is pretty much out of any Markson-owned books now, the hunt is officially over. Not too long ago I was told by a worker at The Strand that he is fairly positive that I own more than double the amount of Markson-owned books of any other Markson Treasure Hunter. I have around 250 or so of his books. And here, once a day, I plan to share some of his marginalia. Please join me in reading Markson reading…
Reading Markson Reading
Curbside Romance
Suze Rotolo, who appeared on the cover The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) was Bob Dylan’s girlfriend between 1961-1964, but because he’s an artist, is considered a muse. That muse is merely love’s exacerbation may be the most sneaky euphemism of all. “Don’t think twice, It’s alright,” whose damn cold lyrics include I ain’t saying you treated me unkind / You could have done better but I don’t mind / You just kinda wasted my precious time was written in emotional defiance over Suze’s considering moving to Italy permanently. We’ve all done this before: diminished someone’s feelings on behalf of our own. He knocked her up, she had an abortion, they broke up. Some years later, in 1971, another couple appeared under fateful film, this time in New Haven Connecticut via Yale. They were both law students destined for politics, both of whose word bending and rhetorical capacities, if not imperatives, give both philosophy and creative writing a useful and more utilitarian poke. One remembers Clinton’s “it depends on what the meaning of the word is, is” as he dug a hole straight into phenomenological territory. The Heideggerian “is,” it turns out, was just sex, the milkshake of human civilization. The president blew a stressed-out wad on an intern, a projectile as morally devastating to this country as a few planes some years later. Suze indeed moves to Italy and marries an Italian director. In his follow-up album, The Songs of Bob Dylan, recorded in a single evening in June of 1964, Dylan would recount his falling out with her in “The Ballad of Plain D,” succinctly beginning with I once loved a girl… only to continue, verse after verse, for a treacherous 8:18 min. It is unlikely that Bill and Hillary got dressed up that day, coordinated in a suede and green jacket, in the fashion of an album cover. It is also unlikely that they knew they would almost change the world by simply trying to. A cynic will tell you the election is an illusion of choice, which is why cynics are rarely remembered. The greatest muse is history as it happens, the notion of one’s part in it. On Tuesday November 6, 2012, in the spirit of American antagonism, people will vote against their enemies all the while imagining themselves standing by each other, or better yet leaning in.
DIED: Dr. Thomas Szasz
Dr. Thomas Szasz was a professor of psychiatry who spent much of his intellectual life critiquing psychiatry. He believed much of psychiatry was unscientific and should not be used to justify coerced detention in mental institutions and that diagnoses should not be allowed in courts of law. He was popular with libertarians (because he believed in body and mind self-ownership over state control of our relative psychiatric [un]hingedness) and, because he called psychiatry a “pseudoscience,” he was embraced by the Church of Scientology.
Because he called psychiatry a “pseudoscience,” he was embraced by the Church of Scientology. READ MORE >
You are what you read from
Your novel in commercial form, taken from the stack of books being sold at your reading. A certain lovely casual or incidental pretension to this. It’s like you walk into a bookstore with the most reasonable faith that your duly inventoried novel, of course, is replicated ~8-12 times in a stack (its “head” brandished vertically by either its own weight or a plastic contraption), on a table next to the mic’d podium, on which aristocratic miscellany (e.g. bouquet of flowers, a doily, English biscuits, a glass of water) rest. This is your reading, and the only preparation required is the lifetime of authorial sensibility whose matured peak may be found in the imminent vocal/verbal/mental evocations soon spoken from your mouth. The type of person who walks into their reading empty handed has faith in both commerce and the self-regenerating muse of whatever’s on his mind.
Your seemingly incidental smartphone. You are most likely still in college or just graduated. You communicate to the crowd “new media,” that unearned and premature skepticism towards tired print. You share the same smug “mellowness” of our recent author, simply finding some online content (gchats, emails, texts, your blog) to read from — as if you made such an ad hoc decision during your ornate introduction, when in fact you had decided days, maybe a week, before the reading to read from your smartphone as affected gesture of commonplace epiphany. The solipsist emphatic slouch of someone gazing into their smartphone is lost upon you, seeing that you cannot see yourself outside of yourself, as someone who looks like that. A bug.
List of Artworks Destroyed in the 9/11 World Trade Center Attack
(via @PierreMenard (via biblioklept (via Wikipedia)))
Check Out
Poet Rob Stephens reading alongside V. Penelope Pelizzon at The Center for Book Arts in NYC this coming Wednesday.
This piece called “Touching Feeling” by Divya Victor @ Two Serious Ladies.
Patricia MacCormack’s essay on “Necrosexuality” at Rhizomes.
&
This new music video for Antony and the Johnsons’s ‘Cut the World,” directed by NABIL and starring Willem Dafoe, Carice van Houten, and Marina Abramović: