Comment
Ethnic diversity on Australian television
When I wrote my piece on memory, migration and MasterChef for Issue Seven of Kill Your Darlings, I mentioned that Poh Ling Yeow (Adelaide-based visual artist and cook of Malaysian-Chinese origin) had become a role model of sorts. Not only was she the runner-up in the first series of Channel Ten’s MasterChef, but subsequent series have continued to feature ‘ethnic’ contestants, possibly because it provides ‘colour’ to both the food and the personality dimensions of the reality TV contest. Still, I feel none of the later participants complicated the non-white representation discourse on mainstream, commercial television in the same giggling yet dead-serious manner as Poh. Not only was commercial Australian television beginning to include non-white people (real and fictional) in its shows, but Poh also defied the subservient Asian woman stereotype through her cooking and interaction with the judges, giving us a televisual hint of Australia’s multicultural nuances and complexities.
There is a long history of academic scholarship and some public debate on whether (and even how) non-white minority groups are represented in the media of OECD nations. At the cost of oversimplifying what is a vast body of literature, let me say this – the one phrase that has resonated with me since my first encounter with postcolonial writing at uni is black British cultural critic Kobena Mercer’s ‘burden of representation’. As weighty as this term sounds, I think it has enormous potential to free both migrants and non-migrants from the burden of bland cultural representations and political correctness.
What Mercer meant by ‘burden of representation’ was the immense pressure felt by creative practitioners in the diaspora to both represent their own ethnic group, and also to show it in a positive light. They were also faced with the inevitability of being defined by their ethnic group, over and above their affiliation with their chosen creative practice, as explained in this interview by black artist Kerry James Marshall. I am sure those of us working in any creative industry in Australia in the present day are expected to have a ready-made archive of ‘cultural’ or ‘exotic’ images and stories if our last name or skin colour even so much as hints that we would be out of place on Ramsay Street. There is no doubt that many of these stories are worth telling, and do find a voice in commissioned SBS documentaries such as the currently airing Once upon a Time in Cabramatta, or satirical ABC series starring the likes of John Safran and Lawrence Leung. But what happens when ‘ethnic’ creatives want to tell non-specifically ‘ethnic’ stories, or show the dark side of their community?
Books
Hanging out with television stars: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
I generally try to avoid the US version of The Office, as I do any US remake of a television show, as I often find them too in-your-face and more contrived than the original. The comedic memoir and collection of essays by Mindy Kaling – a writer for The Office USA, who also acts in the show as office chatterbox Kelly Kapoor – was therefore a risky choice. However, a good friend had persuaded me that her book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is funny and relatable, so I brushed aside my prejudices at the promise of a kindred spirit. My first meeting with Kaling was this:
Thank you for buying this book. Or, if my publisher’s research analytics are correct, thank you, Aunts of America, for buying this for your niece you don’t know that well but really want to connect with more. There are many teenage vampire books you could have purchased instead. I’m grateful you made this choice.
It’s a strong start to a debut book, and indicative of the tone of Kaling’s work. Smart, witty, and with the times, Kaling’s book details formative life experiences and reflections on her childhood up until her current stint as a Hollywood writer (as well as strict instructions for her funeral). The book is not structured as a detailed memoir, but rather as a series of humorous essays, lists and short asides with titles such as ‘Don’t Peak at High School’, ‘Types of Women in Romantic Comedies Who Are Not Real’ and ‘The Day I Stopped Eating Cupcakes’.
Kaling’s writing is very easy to read, as her style is straight-talking and fairly colloquial. She provides plenty of insight into her motivations for entering the field of comedy writing and acting, with her career musings particularly relevant for those familiar with the US TV comedy scene or those with aspirations to enter a similar field.
Issue Eight
Issue Eight launches today!
We are excited to announce that Issue Eight is launched today! You can purchase it here or subscribe to the journal here.
Five of the issue’s pieces are now available online for free: click through to read them.
The edition kicks off with Maria Tumarkin’s lead essay, ‘Sublime and Profane: Our Contemporary Obsession with Food’, and continues with Clementine Ford remembering her time as a phone sex worker. Scott Steensma fights his sister for copies of Penthouse and Georgia Gowing visits the Catacombs of Paris.
In fiction, we’ve got an excerpt from Michael Sala’s forthcoming novel, and short fiction from Jessie Cole and Matthia Dempsey; and for our interview, we speak with author of The Life, Malcolm Knox. Don’t forget to check out Anthony Morris’ contemplation of good guys and bad guys in Justified and Breaking Bad, and Natalie Kon-yu’s reflections on reading Siri Hustvedt and Lionel Shriver.
So get into it! You know you want to.
Issue Eight
Issue Eight launches next week!
Thank you for checking in at Killings for teaser week! Issue Eight of Kill Your Darlings launches on Monday, January 9. You can pre-order the issue here, or contact our stockists for availability.
And psst … visit our website on Monday for free full-text content from the new issue.
Issue Eight
Issue Eight teaser: Anthony Morris’s ‘Men Without Hats – Justified and Breaking Bad’
For our final Issue Eight teaser, Anthony Morris ponders what a character’s headwear says about them. If a teaser just isn’t enough, you can find the full text of Morris’ essay and more on our website in the coming weeks. For instant gratification, why not pre-order a copy of the latest issue?
In the golden age of the Hollywood Western, you could tell which side of the law a character was on by the colour of his hat. Good guys wore white hats; bad guys wore black. Today, in the golden age of television drama, such simplistic moral signifiers are, well, old hat. Audiences aren’t asked to cheer on the good guys and boo the bad – series like Dexter and Deadwood, The Sopranos and Sons of Anarchy present thugs and killers as their leads, with the good guys placed strategically as obstacles at best, and as victims at worst.
So when Breaking Bad – a show hailed as a subtle and complex drama unafraid to pose profound questions – has protagonist Walter White (Bryan Cranston) putting on a black hat, it’s played as a bit of a joke. He’s trying to convince the junkies and drug dealers of his New Mexico town that he isn’t just some nerdy high-school science teacher. The joke is that he is a nerdy science teacher; the black hat is merely a costume.
Meanwhile, on Justified – a show as nuanced and gripping as Breaking Bad, if less critically acclaimed – US Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) wears a creamy-white Stetson cowboy hat on the job. In the 21st century this is unusual enough to attract attention, even in rural America (Givens’ beat is Eastern Kentucky). It may not be a disguise as such, but there’s a clear sense here – as there is in Breaking Bad whenever White’s black hat comes out – that this is a man playing a role; and it’s one that is bound to be subverted.
Givens sees himself as an old-fashioned, straight-shooting (often literally) good guy. White, on the other hand, wants people to fear him, as they would the villain in an old Western. In both cases, of course, real life (and both shows largely aspire to realism) isn’t that simple. Law enforcement today isn’t like a Western where the sheriff rides in and cleans up the town; Walter White is a solid citizen play-acting at being a bad guy.
But the closer you look at both shows, the less of a joke their leads’ headgear becomes. Past the layers of irony and comedy, these protagonists’ hats mean exactly what they would mean in a Western: for all their moral complexity, Breaking Bad and Justified ultimately present viewers with a world populated by clear-cut good and bad guys.
– Anthony Morris has been reviewing books, film and television for the last fifteen years. He is currently the DVD editor at The Big Issue.
Pre-order Kill Your Darlings Issue Eight, or subscribe to the print journal here.
Issue Eight
Issue Eight teaser: Clementine Ford’s ‘It’s a Sex Thing, Right? – When Fantasy Becomes Reality’
‘Téléphone‘ by zigazou76 at flickr, CC BY 2.0
In our second Issue Eight sampler, Clementine Ford reminisces about pesto pasta, phone sex and other attempts at adulthood. Our final instalment of Issue Eight teasers is on its way – watch this space!
I’d moved out of home at the start of my second year at university, and the realities of fending for myself were moving into sharp focus. ‘Vegetables’ had become a thing of the past, a distant memory associated with heated living rooms, clean sheets and mothers who made sure you didn’t go to bed with wet hair. My housemate, Sim, and I had taken to cooking the same thing every night – a bag of pasta with a jar of pesto mixed in and half a block of grated cheese.
After dinner, we’d retreat to the back step to smoke cigarettes like the self-assured adults we felt certain we were. On the nights our boyfriends upset us (and Lord knows how we even had them), we’d disappear into Sim’s room and drink vodka straight from the bottle while Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Adia’ played on repeat behind us.
We are so grown up, we’d murmur to each other, reclining in poses we best thought reflected the bored wisdom of our years.
But it had to end. I didn’t have Sim’s metabolism or her genes. I didn’t look like Cate Blanchett in profile. I didn’t look effortlessly chic in my Bonds t-shirt and bootleg jeans. I looked like a freckled dugong in dire need of some vitamins and a decent bra. And for those things, I needed cash.
WANTED: Creative, open-minded ladies for friendly chat line. Enjoy flexible working hours, the potential for excellent salary and the freedom of working at home. Apply within.
The subtext might have been hidden behind a veneer of chirpy professionalism, but I was nobody’s fool. I wasn’t born yesterday. I didn’t have sucker written across my forehead. No, I cracked that code 23 right open. This was no ordinary chat line, set up to service all the lonely folk out there who just wanted a nice lady to workshop Harry Potter theories with, or debate the relative merits of savoury snacks versus sweet. This was a sex thing. They wanted creative, open-minded ladies to chat to men about sex. Harry Potter might come up, but it would likely be in the context of Sirius Black needing to be disciplined by a stern and uncompromising Professor McGonagall.
I could be that person, I reasoned. I could get inside the mindset of a disciplinarian like McGonagall, should it come up. I was creative. I was definitely open-minded, and I knew this because a few months prior I had pulled my top off in a glorious display of authoritarians-be-damned pique at Unibar and danced boisterously to Christina Aguilera’s ‘Come on Over’ in my brassiere. On a chair.
Better still, I now had some kind of practical experience with the whole sex thing. After spending my entire adolescence in the barren wilderness of the chronically untouched, I’d finally found a boy willing to not just press his lips against mine but his groin as well. It made a nice change from my school days, which had been characterised by my innate understanding that I was not the kind of girl who could expect a boy to find her physically attractive.
No, I’d been giving blow jobs and engaging in careful, consensual sex for the better part of two months. Who better than me to bestow their skills of lewd repartee and innuendo on the good men of Australia?
– Clementine Ford is a freelance writer and broadcaster living in Melbourne. She now has a pathological fear of answering the telephone, but this is less to do with erotica and more to do with debt collectors.
Pre-order Kill Your Darlings Issue Eight, or subscribe to the print journal here.
Issue Eight
Issue Eight teaser: Maria Tumarkin’s ‘Sublime and Profane – Our Contemporary Obsession With Food’
'Red Raspberry Fruits' by epsos.de at flickr, CC BY 2.0
In our first sneak peek at Issue Eight, we’re delighted to serve up a delicious piece by Maria Tumarkin, discussing why Australians are becoming increasingly obsessed with food, even at the expense of other forms of culture. There will be more teasers to come over the following days, so stay tuned.
In a food court no one can stop me looking: two women, barely in their twenties, one of them dark-haired and holding the thing that beeps when your food is ready. Theirs is a wise order. The food, when it comes, looks fresh and good, its molecular structure seemingly intact, not destroyed by continuous re-freezing and re-heating. The young women eat, paying attention to what’s on their plates. It matters to them – not above all else; not above their conversation, which looks unforced, satisfying – but enough. You can tell.
We, my friend and I who have not ordered wisely but grabbed at stuff already made and on display – we who are like horses sticking heads in a trough, like children who failed the delayed gratification test – sit with our lumps of post-food staring back at us from plastic plates. The post-food looks like food, but it’s not really food. What is absent is not nutrients (this I can easily forgive) but a kind of matter. It is like greasy, coloured air that fills your insides and makes them swell: heavy, voluminous and devoid of substance. It is the continuation of void by culinary means.
After a while the young women get up. They didn’t eat much. The plate belonging to the blonde looks barely touched. It still has – but now in a scorned, jilted way – food spilling from it onto the table. Didn’t taste good? Wrong choice? Not hungry after all? Food waste is the basic currency of a food court. Yet I am surprised by how irritated this uneaten meal makes me feel.
A guy in his thirties – obviously hungry, obviously a new (illegal, I wonder?) migrant – is eyeing the plate from a distance. He holds a pizza box in both hands (someone must have left behind a slice or two), but how much more inviting all the rice, the vegetables, the bits of untouched meat on the plate across the aisle look. Still a touch warm too, I imagine.
The guy slips closer to the vacated table, glances around, takes a bite of the cold pizza which by now has become a decoy, then moves swiftly into a seat in front of the coveted plate while jamming more pizza in his mouth. We avert our eyes, pretend to be deep in conversation. Everyone deserves some privacy. He pounces. It’s a beautiful thing – a terrible thing, too – a hungry person eating well. And so what if it is off someone else’s plate, chewing fast, eyes on the prize, body balancing on the edge of a chair like a fugitive? So what? How this food must taste to him, how it must soothe his insides, how pleased he must feel for a moment with his brilliant catch. Desperation, humiliation, shameful inequity – they are all suspended in that moment. Let him eat, we can do the socio-economic analysis later.
– Maria Tumarkin is an author and cultural historian. Her most recent book is Otherland: A Journey with my Daughter.
Pre-order Kill Your Darlings Issue Eight, or subscribe to the print journal here.
Issue Eight, News
Happy holidays, and Issue Eight teaser week
Well, that was a lot of turkey. Here at KYD headquarters, we’re hoping all our readers and friends are having a lovely holiday season. Killings will be taking a short break this week, but we’ll be back right after New Year’s with some sneak peeks at Issue Eight. We’ll also have some exciting news for you about our new digital offerings throughout January, so stay tuned!
Until then, we hope you have a safe and happy week. See you in 2012!
Literary Links
Amusements and distractions
Killings brings you our fortnightly selection of posts that have amused, enlightened and generally distracted us.
‘The common view is that the Scottish English adjective wee means little.’ Or is it a vehicle for conventional implicature?
‘Authors beware’: at Liticism, Bethanie Blanchard’s interview with Steve Rossiter on D Publishing.
Unfortunately, it’s not really the season, but here’s William Faulkner’s hot toddy recipe.
It’s time to admit you love Love Actually. Or do you hate actually?
Hooray! Wild Flag are coming to Australia in March 2012. Listen to Carrie Brownstein’s playlist at The Hairpin.
Christmas fare: why did Jewish communities take to Chinese food? (Answer includes: chicken dishes, secular decor, no mixing of meat and milk.)
The lovely covers of Atticus Books.
Oh my god! My friend is a writer! What do I do?
Review of Pauline Kael anthology The Age of Movies: “There may never have been an American movie critic with a more voracious desire to work her will on the world — or with a more sui generis back story.”
If you haven’t read Emma Straub’s piece on ‘showrooming’, go on right ahead.
Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld, Abigail Breslin, Ben Kingsley to star in Ender’s Game.
Books
Review: A plot thickened? Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot
It has been a long wait between books for fans of Jeffrey Eugenides: his door-stopper of a novel Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize back in 2002. However, readers hoping for a similar multi-generational epic will be surprised by The Marriage Plot. Middlesex was a clever queering of the familial saga/generational epic, while this novel is a self-consciously conventional, ‘straight’ narrative.
It’s the eighties, and a cast of bright, go-getting young Ivy Leaguers are on the verge of graduation. The three central characters are each getting to grips with Derrida’s theories of deconstruction while also attempting the even more complex business of deconstructing their desires. Madeleine, the novel’s archetypal ingenue, is an English major from a prosperous family in New Jersey. Mitchell and Leonard (essentially her suitors) study religion and science respectively and hail from humbler backgrounds. So far, so standard. But, this being the 1980s, and the height of the trend for post-structural and postmodern philosophy, Eugenides has Madeleine write her senior thesis on the ‘marriage plot’: the narrative principle of so many nineteenth-century novels, in which the author’s objective is to marry off the characters.
Regrettably, the reader never learn much about how or why Madeleine values the classic Victorian romances, although the title for her final essay is a killer: ‘I Thought You’d Never Ask: Some Thoughts on the Marriage Plot’. What is made clear by Madeleine’s interest in the nineteenth-century novelists is that she feels unprepared for adult life in the hard-edged, deconstructionist 1980s.
No matter how is might differ from his other works, The Marriage Plot is about what Eugenides’ books are always about: the drama of coming of age.
The love triangle that develops between Madeleine and the two men is utterly predictable, deliberately so. The adoring Mitchell is, as Madeleine recognises, the ‘smart, sane, parent-pleasing boy’ she should choose, but it’s the charismatic and complex Leonard to whom she is drawn. To Eugenides’ credit, he takes these stereotypes in some interesting directions. Mitchell, for instance, is not only sensitive and devoted but also arrogant and egotistical. Leonard, who veers from manic highs to desperate lows, is also the novel’s most honest and therefore most vulnerable character. The novel plays with the concept of convention, both social and novelistic, and Eugenides works hard to imbue his central characters with the vitality and sensitivity of early adulthood – the struggle to understand the expectations we have of ourselves and that others have of us. At his best when it comes to young love, Eugenides – as was the case with his first novel, The Virgin Suicides – captures the sexuality of his characters vividly and convincingly.
Yet The Marriage Plot is a less striking novel than the author’s previous work, and fails to leave the same lasting impression.
