Section: Arts And Culture
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 26 October 2016
1 Comment
'When I was a kid I liked to stand at the window with a rifle and aim it at people.' So begins the opening, titular essay. It is a singularly arresting entre to an essay that charts the author's complex relationship with firearms (part awe, part terror), by way of commenting on the place of guns in Australian society. In this collection of essays Winton adopts this mode frequently, weaving (sometimes deeply) personal narratives into stirring, thoughtful commentary on a broad range of social and political issues.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Brian Doyle
- 24 October 2016
5 Comments
This is what I saw at a funeral, on a bright brilliant crystal spring day which the late lamented would most surely have called a great day for golf: His grandson, age smallish, dandling the deceased's favourite club on the lawn outside the church, as all the mourners stood around chatting. The boy whirled it like a baton, and balanced it on a finger, and finally leaned insouciantly on the club, exactly as his grandfather had so very many times before. It seemed very much to be a prayer, somehow.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 19 October 2016
Our first glimpse of Jesse, a 16-year-old model recently arrived in LA, is of her sprawled on a sofa, scantily clad and smeared with fake blood. Later, during her first professional shoot, she is ordered to strip naked, and to endure being smeared with gold paint by the photographer's own hand. Another model boasts about the routine cosmetic surgery she undergoes to maintain the object that is her body. In the eyes of the industry, Jesse as an 'object' is already perfect.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Chris Wallace-Crabbe
- 17 October 2016
1 Comment
When I was a kid, I certainly knew, that a cassowary in Tinbuctoo, was able to eat a missionary, cassock, bands and hymn-book, too. Because it rhymed, it had to be true. But what on earth were those bands doing? Nothing musical, I'll be bound, And a cassock, what sort of jigger was that?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins
- 13 October 2016
1 Comment
I attempted at one stage to lodge snippets of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience into the minds of our children. Emily complained that 'symmetry' didn't really rhyme with 'hand or eye'; Ben was and is more into dragons than tigers. The question later pondered of Blake's tiger 'Did He smile His work to see? Did He who made the lamb make thee?' regularly confronts me, as my wife semi-mourns and I embrace the maturing process that is taking our children towards adulthood.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 12 October 2016
2 Comments
Representation of minority identities in popular entertainment is key to amplifying and dignifying those identities and their stories. Conversely, the lack of representation is a form of silencing. It's why the charges of racism laid against the all-black Luke Cage is so laughable. 'I will never get tired of seeing a bullet-proof black man,' series creator Cheo Hodari Coker told the LA Times earlier this month, positing the character as a riposte to the phenomenon of police shootings of unarmed black men in the US.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Max Richards
- 10 October 2016
9 Comments
'You'd be on the beach with me, dearest, and your favourite birds nearby as if making gifts of themselves to you. Sharing was what we were doing, and there seemed no end to it, though there would be, darkness coming on, no knowing when but not yet, not quite yet.' Poetry by Max Richards, who died after sustaining head injuries in a car accident in Seattle on 21 September.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 05 October 2016
1 Comment
At the opening of the Environmental Film Festival Australia in Melbourne last week, festival patron and former Greens senator Bob Brown highlighted the movement against oil drilling in the Great Australian Bight. He painted a picture wherein a major spill in the region could lead to an environmental disaster stretching as far from the site as the NSW coast. His words make the release of Deepwater Horizon, about the disaster that led to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, even more timely.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Elizabeth Smither
- 03 October 2016
4 Comments
I read it somewhere in a journal of cardiology. Sometimes I mention it at dinner parties. The use of time, the clenching of the heart that can be no stranger to the beats of a clock, and all that accompanies the emptying and filling of chambers where silence must be an unknown but still love sluices and cleans and restarts as the surgeons did in the old Middlesex.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 28 September 2016
1 Comment
Snowden's disclosures regarding the data-mining activities of the US government sparked a worldwide debate about security versus privacy that rages to this day. If his status as either a villain or a hero - a traitor, or the ultimate patriot - remains a matter of debate in some circles, you won't die wondering in which camp Oliver Stone sits. In Snowden the famously didactic filmmaker posits an utterly sympathetic portrait within the structure of a lithe and gripping political thriller.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Jena Woodhouse
- 26 September 2016
5 Comments
Across the black hole of my solitude, the self-indulgent pit where I lick self-inflicted wounds, lightly step returning refugees. They know why they trek through forest, crossing rivers, day by day, on bruised and lacerated feet, in rain, on clay, on sharp-edged stones. For them there is no other way, and they are going home ... They have no doubt where they belong, the dying and the newly-born, no time to squander on regrets: they are going home ...
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Julie Guirgis
- 22 September 2016
5 Comments
Being unique has its pros. It has made me a compassionate person able to see past the differences in people. And although I am a dwarf by birth I don't identify as that. Being the creative free-spirit that I am I have come to reject any labels put on me. I haven't let my medical condition define me; instead I have created my own identity. As the writer Helen Keller once said, 'Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight.'
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