Events
Emerging Writers’ Festival – TV Night with KYD
People who love TV consume programs vehemently and discuss fervently, yet there are few avenues for writers to critically engage with television as a central focus. From recappers to ‘shippers’, spoilers to distribution streams, this event will consider the different ways television is (and isn’t) being written about.
Featuring: KYD’s Stephanie Van Schilt and regular contributors Luke Ryan, Mel Campbell, Rochelle Siemienowicz and Julia Tulloh Harper.
When: Monday 28 May,9PM, 2013
Where: Thousand Pound Bend, 361 Lt Lonsdale Street, Melbourne
How much: Admission is free. For further details about the EWF, click here.
Reviews
The Women’s Prize review: Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple
Formerly known as the Orange Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction is awarded annually and ‘celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world’. We delve into the fourth of the six shortlisted novels – Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go Bernadette.
A kaleidoscopic snapshot into the lives of Bernadette Fox, her husband Elgie Branch, and their gifted daughter Bee, the highly enjoyable Where’d You Go Bernadette is narrated through a series of pithy emails, letters, FBI transcripts, emergency room bills, and school reports – with Bee’s sharp musings occasionally punctuating the various correspondences. The sheer breadth and atypical nature of the media paint an apt picture of the non-conforming, dysfunctional family that reader quickly becomes acquainted with.
Interviews
Follow the paper trail: Q&A with Sofija Stefanovic and Lorelei Vashti
Sofija Stefanovic and Lorelei Vashti are the brains behind Melbourne’s write-as-you-walk-workshop, Paper Trail Tours. Spanning some of the city’s most popular hangouts and lesser-known nooks, the foot tour focuses on unlocking participants’ creative potential, all while in a relaxed, friendly group atmosphere. They even provide notebooks, with the hope of people continuing their scribbling long after the tour concludes.
Having been lucky enough to attend the inaugural tour, I can guarantee it helped unblock my writers’ block and energise my deskbound-body. It also allowed me to see a city I swore I knew like the back of my hand in a whole new way. Not convinced walking is the best cure? Perhaps Sofija and Lorelei can change your mind.
Reviews
The Women’s Prize review: Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
Formerly known as the Orange Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction is awarded annually and ‘celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world’. We delve into the third of the six shortlisted novels – Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour.
Kingsolver is no stranger to the British literary award for women writers. In 2010, the American novelist beat out Hilary Mantel – incidentally, another finalist in this year’s shortlist – and Lorrie Moore to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction in its previous incarnation.
Not one to shy away from the themes of social justice, biodiversity and the interaction between humans and the environments in which they live in, Kingsolver’s latest novel revolves around the peculiar presence of the beautiful monarch butterflies in Feathertown – symptomatic of the larger cataclysm of climate change – as it traces the life of Dellarobia Turnbow before and after she discovered the advent of the butterflies.
Column: Books and Writing
On the road with Caravan of Comics
‘Australian comics have been around for decades. But it has been in waves and visibility has always been a problem. I’ve been in it long enough to see several waves come and go,’ says Bruce Mutard, who has been making comics in Melbourne for over 20 years. ‘This wave, I’ve been saying for a long time: it will stay. This has legs. What we’ve got now is the comics culture I always dreamed of.’ Mutard’s dreams involved comics being made and embraced by a diverse community, being in mainstream bookstores and libraries, considered by arts and funding bodies, studied in academia and included in literary and arts festivals. ‘All of that has come to pass,’ he says.
Column: Film and TV
Hate the player, not the game: Actors compete in the Kickstarter popularity contest
The internet is a place where people feel things deeply. Sometimes, those feelings are about Zach Braff. During the four days it took the Scrubs star and writer/director of Garden State to raise US$2 million dollars on Kickstarter to fund his next movie, numerous commentators felt it necessary to point out that a successful Hollywood actor was using a platform designed to fund small-scale art projects to finance a fairly commercial-sounding Hollywood feature film. Sometimes they phrased it as ‘it seems somewhat askew that an actor/director who has the means to either fund his movie himself, or sign a typical financing deal, is asking you for cash’. Other times they were more like ‘Oh for crying out loud. This needs to stop’.
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
Godfather of Carnage: Dance of Death at Malthouse Theatre
‘Dance of Death’ with Belinda McClory and Jacek Korman
The underside of the marriage plot is the marriage-as-blood-sport plot.
In 1900 the so-heralded ‘father of modern Swiss literature’, August Strindberg, wrote a theatrical template for the marriage-turned-sour drama called The Dance with Death. In it, an ailing artillery captain and military writer, Edgar, faces off with his wife Alice, a ‘once celebrated actress’ we’re told, in a series of escalating rounds that inaugurated the structure of this brand of bourgeois tragedy as a cycle of horrific repetitions rather than a teleological narrative moving toward an end.
In 1969, the Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt adapted the second half of Strindberg’s play, ironizing its bathos and earnest marital angst. Retitled Play Stringberg, Dürrenmatt’s work set the play in a boxing ring, literalising both the cramped claustrophobia of Alice and Edgar’s home – a barren, island military barracks from which both their children and their servants appear to have fled – as well as the theatrical spectacle itself of watching hateful adversaries fighting it out. With very little of the hopes for redemption of the earlier play, Dürrenmatt adapted Dance with Death into a series of brutal – and brutally funny – boxing rounds between these marital malcontents.
Podcast
Podcast: Little Pearlers Ep. 1
Grown-ups can learn a lot from children. When it comes to the big questions in life, children have a natural ability to wonder. Join Erin and Fleur as they explore time, love, health and careers through the eyes of the Little Pearlers. Music compliments of Kevin MacLeod. Executive producer Chris Saxton.
Amusements and Distractions
Amusements and distractions
Killings brings you our weekly selection of posts that have amused, enlightened and
generally distracted us.
Did you manage to see the google doodle celebrating Saul Bass this week? It’s so wonderful!
When wrong layouts lead to wrong laughs.
The Sydney Film Festival released it’s program. So much to see!
In other festival news, Human Rights Arts & Film Festival opened in Melbourne last night – its a great program, so be sure to check it out.
Did you see this super smart advertising campaign created in an ’effort to provide abused children with a safe way to reach out for help’? Amazing.
Hopefully we won’t mess up your routine too much, but be sure to procrastinate a little at ‘Daily Routines’ while you delve into the various daily rituals of famous writers, artists and other creatives.
Feel a bit peckish? Want to cook up a storm this weekend? I’d recommend: Slate‘s peanut butter cookie recipe or getting lost browsing food blogs What Katie Ate or Smitten Kitchen that offer a range of hearty recipes and lovingly presented food photos.
‘An animated graphic of meteorites seen impacting Earth’ = coooooooooool.
Have you seen David Bowie’s new clip, yet? Gary Oldman and Marion Cotillard are in it.
Listen to Wilco’s Melbourne set online, thanks to ABC Radio National. Perfect weekend listening.
Last minute A&D update: Gosling rejecting cereal! This is a very important addition.
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
Military Vision: Embracing accelerated change
Photo credit: maHidoodi
For artists, the accelerated rate of technological change presents an interesting conundrum. It has always been difficult to make statements about technology that will maintain their relevance for more than a few years, but the Cambrian explosion of contemporary digital technology has amplified this problem. As an artist, what can you say about the internet, about social media, about videogames, that remains essential in five years, ten years, 50 years time?
For Military Vision, an exhibition curated by Baden Pailthorpe at Melbourne’s Screen Space gallery, one answer is to embrace this accelerated change. Military Vision presents three works that explore ‘the militarisation of sight’: John Crandall’s Heatseeking (2000), Denis Beaubois’ There is no aftermath (2004), and Matthieu Cherubini’s Afghan War Diary (2010). The short temporal space between each work amplifies the pace of technological and political change, as each work is concerned with issues that have been displaced quickly, yet not erased.
