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)
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4 Comments
September 27th, 2012 / 11:19 pm
In school there was always the grade. Now we’ve graduated to a system of answers privately corrected, and of public failure. Do you know the markets? I play them sometimes. They are not always open, you see. Though I suppose there are these constant rumors of emotional success. Yoga, for example. Parenting? The system of invisible and unpronounceable truth partially submerged in unfolding experience: value. I think I like to see it both as our American currency, and as the sort of power you can have in bed or at the office.
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Author Spotlight / 2 Comments
September 27th, 2012 / 5:37 pm
Choosing clothes can be very vexing. Sometimes I think that the turmoil of buying clothes is similar to the kind that exists in the Middle East. There’s screaming, destruction, and lots of second-guessing.
My most recent fashion crisis involves not a weird YouTube video but a Mickey Mouse sweater. I first saw the Mickey Mouse sweater at a vintage store in the East Village. When I noticed that marvelous boy mouse on the faded blue garment I became awfully excited.
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Film & Mean / 9 Comments
September 27th, 2012 / 4:20 pm
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.
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Random / 10 Comments
September 27th, 2012 / 9:30 am
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 >
Random / 9 Comments
September 27th, 2012 / 9:00 am
From Rick Strassman’s book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. This is the way a DMT test subject named “Willow” described her experience on the psychedelic. I’ve added emphasis to the sentence that struck me:
The other side is very, very different. There are no words, body, or sounds there to limit things. I first saw deep space, white with stars. Then there was this multidimensional experience starting. It was alive. It was the aliveness that I heard.
And here, a quote from Terence McKenna recently reTumbled by Tao Lin: READ MORE >
Craft Notes / 10 Comments
September 26th, 2012 / 4:30 pm
I’m a big fan of anything that has to do with publishing but ISN’T publishing (like Submittable and Vouched), so naturally I was intrigued by Bkclb, a new and Australian eBook seller that’s geared directly toward indie lit. I started using them for PGP books and I really like everything about it. Shit don’t cost too much. They got the new Lifted Brow and some Dzanc Books and this Sententia book that’s all the rage.
I asked Connor Tomas O’Brien, who runs the show over there, a bunch of questions a while ago (see below) and now Bkclb is coming out of Beta, so to celebrate checkitout: go here, enter “HTMLGiantSux” and you can get the eBook of Timothy Willis Sanders’s excellent Orange Juice for free. Try it out, see what you think, say what you think in the comment box below, provided by Disqus, here’s the what why when who how: READ MORE >
Behind the Scenes / 12 Comments
September 26th, 2012 / 3:22 pm
