Category Archives: Reviews
Music, Reviews
Claustrophobic and Bittersweet: Tristesse Contemporaine and The Music From the Balconies Nearby Was Overlaid by the Noise of Sporadic Acts of Violence
The Parisian DJ-collective-cum-record label Dirty Sound System – DJs Guillaume Sorge and Clovis Goux, alongside a roster of associated producers and curators – have always been somewhat out of sync with their contemporaries, and this characteristic has usually served them well. In 2003, at the fag end … Read more
Film, Reviews
Wild, whimsical thing: Beasts of the Southern Wild
It’s not an original thought to find child actors distasteful. Those treacly little creatures who over-enunciate lines too often break the fantastic illusion of reality that films try to conjure. Even in hammy, saccharine musicals like Mary Poppins or Anchors Aweigh, or heavy-handed dramas like Jerry McGuire, … Read more
Books, Reviews
Hook, line and sinker: Emily Maguire’s Fishing for Tigers
It’s hard not to be hooked by the opening lines of Emily Maguire’s Fishing for Tigers: ‘I had picked Hanoi because the airfare was cheap and I knew almost nothing about the place. The need to be swallowed up by strangeness was the closest thing to desire … Read more
Books, Reviews
Not such a bitter aftertaste: Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth
Long before Mulder and Scully turned the phrase ‘trust no one’ into an iconic piece of pop culture, Agent George Smiley, world-weary MI6 intelligence officer and star of several spy novels by John le Carré, was meting out this sombre advice to his peers. But what happens … Read more
Books, Reviews
A child’s song of war and home: Majok Tulba’s Beneath the Darkening Sky
What is it that is so precious about childhood? In Victorian England, the prevailing view was that children were little more than half-formed, incompetent adults. In more modern times, we often hear that children are the future – but even this attitude locates children’s importance in … Read more
Music, Reviews
Rendering unto Caesar: Dirty Projectors’ Swing Lo Magellan
Until recently, Dirty Projectors traded in a highly idiosyncratic and instantly identifiable form of indie rock. The band’s sole songwriter and explicit leader, Dave Longstreth, is a Yale-trained musician whose songs contain passages as fiendishly convoluted and baroquely formalist as anything in the classical music canon. At … Read more
Books, Reviews
Patroclus Now: Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles
A novel based on Homer’s The Iliad that wins one of the highest literary accolades can expect a lot of attention. On a first read, debut novelist Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, the 2012 Orange Prize winner, was disappointing. Those expecting the depth and intricacy of … Read more
Books, Classics, Reviews
Castaways, convicts and cannibals: Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves
Why do we read Patrick White? The answer, ‘because he won a Nobel Prize’ is not sufficient in itself. If it were, we’d read Vicente Aleixandre, Jaroslav Seifert and Wislawa Szymborska. But by and large, we don’t. Nor do many of us read White. No doubt some … Read more
Books, Reviews
Stumbling into adulthood: Paul D. Carter’s Eleven Seasons
I have a confession: I know nothing about football. So it’s a good thing this year’s Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award winner for an unpublished manuscript is about more than just that. Paul D. Carter’s Eleven Seasons is a grunge-era bildungsroman, an homage to working-class Melbourne and one young … Read more
Music, Reviews
‘It’s a natural fact that it’s good to be gay!’: Strong Love: Songs of Gay Liberation 1972–1981
The digitisation of vast back catalogues of music has made music historians of all of us. Consumers can now access nearly any recorded music they want, and are thus encouraged to explore their favourite genres of music in great depth. Paradoxically, this also encourages a kind of … Read more
