[Non-fiction]
On my screensaver, the random word of the day is ‘resuscitate’, and I’m thinking, ‘this goes with this goes with this goes with that… ’
It’s like a women’s clothing commercial.
I recall the image of the heavyset cop on his knees, trying to push life back into the limp body of Tyrone Lee Slemnik, who lay on his back on the grass verge down the road from our house.
Continue reading “Closer Than They Appear”
[Non-fiction]
We’ve just left Garden Island. My wife Erica, Marlowe and I are standing on the foredeck of the Supercat Susie O’Neill, a modern Sydney Harbour ferry, working the route east from Circular Quay to Watson’s Bay. The deck thrums evenly, erasing the waves with the sheer power and bulk of the boat. My one-and-a-half year old son is crooked into my right arm, squinting into the sun and wind, blond hair plastered to one side of his face, which is scrunched into a disapproving contortion of his usually angelic disposition as he looks out over the massive steel gunwales of the ferry. He is trying to unlock the mysteries of the host of sparkles that seem to run parallel to us across the water. Continue reading “Immersion”
[Non-fiction]
I’m standing in the hifi section, wondering if I should buy this clock radio. My eyes flick from the price tag, back to the bullet point specs, back to the price tag again. I take in the sleek wooden exterior, the extra port for your iPod, the retro feel of it. Enticing.
I imagine the cost it would have taken to build, I try to gauge it. I mean, after all it’s not real wooden inlay is it? It’s a plastic veneer. Inside, the circuitry is brand spanking new, sheathed in plastic – sealed in amid Taiwanese air. The circuitry is old though, in another way.
But it’s digital. That must cost something… mustn’t it? How can it be so damn cheap? Continue reading “Meditations on a clock radio”
[Non-fiction]
It was Santa Monica in summer, 1997. Jim Sheldon taught me to play scopa over a series of alcohol-fuelled evenings. The alcohol fuelled me – Jim drank coke.
He didn’t need to drink; teaching me this game was his high. His eyes sparkled over the cards. His voice assumed an authoritative, zesty tone, encouraging and challenging me at the same time.
I dug in deep, but I couldn’t beat him.
Continue reading “Jim Sheldon – No Dark No Light”
[Fiction]
Kethryn ne’Lassiter had always known. That was the bottom line. The Prime daughter of House Lassiter waddled about the house like a whale that had grown legs, bumped into things, carelessly snatched what was not hers, and all the while stared about herself with a benign morbidity that was the core of her innocent nature. She had been told as early as age four, and then again every year of her life, taken into that room on her birthday, and told again.
Taken in where Selena herself was never allowed. Given presents that Selena would never touch. Continue reading “The Claiming”
[Fiction]
I had no way of explaining it even to myself, let alone anyone else. They were halcyon days. It was the twilight of youth. I was still very young but somehow felt on the brink of manhood. I felt the onus to perform as a man somehow without the faintest idea how to actually do it. As soon as I sensed it, the very instant, I felt myself profoundly removed from my family. Almost as though I resented the burden of responsibility that I felt, and in spite of knowing that they had nothing to do with it, they were somehow responsible for putting me in that position. It pushed me away from them more forcefully than any argument or outburst or emotion ever had. Continue reading “Among the Ashes”
[Exegesis]
Writing style is primarily determined by how we perceive the truth, and secondly by what we do with it once we’ve registered it. The quest for truth, in other words, informs on almost every choice a writer can make. This, however, could be said of any writer, nonfiction or otherwise. Continue reading “In My Back Pocket”
[Non-fiction]
My son’s little fingers cradle the iPad to his chest. “Apad,” he says, looking up at me, “pickcha?” His wide eyes are imperatives. This really is something he doesn’t need, but kids are good at convincing you they do. He’s only one and a half, for god’s sake, and he’s already swinging off me with jungle vines of emotion. Continue reading “Tarzan”
[Review]
In all of its genuine messiness, its insistence on a multi-stranded narrative, its capricious flaunting and taunting of truth, Stories We Tell finally does what I have been wanting to see in cinema for years.
Sarah Polley tells the story of her mother’s life and legacy through the eyes of her family. It sounds so simple, and yet the story as it progresses serves the purpose of both delineator and obfuscator of the truth. Polley uses narrative forms of memoir and interview, to provide a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the same story. As the film, and the lives of her parents and siblings unravels, so does our adherence to a singular truth loosen. Continue reading “Stories We Tell”
[Interview]
Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, and The 50th Law (co-written with 50 Cent), has come out with a ripping new book, entitled Mastery. His soft-spoken manner belies the cool, critical eye he uses to analyse history and our society.
Mastery is split structurally into six parts, which are (roughly speaking) discovering your life’s calling, apprenticeship, mentorship, social intelligence, awakening the creative, and fusing the intuitive with the rational. Notice how the titles get longer toward the end? Yeah, it gets complicated. You didn’t think it’d be easy, did you? Continue reading “The Prince of Dysfunction”
[Review]
Imagine falling asleep right there in the cinema, at a film festival with films screening back to back. Suddenly, a strange man who doesn’t belong in these movies breaks the fourth wall and begins addressing you about how the films are affecting you, deconstructing each film before your eyes.
Like an intellectual gremlin, the strange man walks from They Live to The Searchers to Taxi Driver to The Sound of Music to A Clockwork Orange, explaining each film in a startling light. He looks like a cross between Con the Fruiterer and Sigmund Freud, complete with a lisp and thick Slavic accent. Continue reading “The Perverts Guide To Ideology”
Whats On My Mind? 