Scrolling to the end

Our contemporary content malaise feels very recent, yet the twentieth-century media scholars Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman predicted our technological capture decades before Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates devised a neat way for their fellow Harvard students to connect online.

A half-century of hatchet jobs

Authors and publishers worry that bad reviews kill sales. I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case, but plenty that bad reviews distress and demoralise their subjects. Many people who care about literature endow criticism, and especially negative reviews, with magical powers. They hold dear the fantasy that if critics did a better job, if they were braver soldiers, the profound structural problems that bedevil Australian literature – books rushed to press, low pay, policy indifference, plummeting reading rates, crisis in higher education, not to mention the racism and the classism – might somehow disappear. A cracking review ennobles its subject with attention and consideration, but I’ve never seen one earn an author a higher advance on their next book or buy them more time for revision, let alone shift the federal arts budget.

Resisting the ‘Content Mindset’

Artists’ dedication to their practice has long been glamourised as the ‘struggling artist’ trope, trivialising the mental and physical labour of creative work. Their flexibility has been co-opted into the ‘portfolio career’, normalising all professional engagements that lack secure tenure, not just creative roles. Their agility in working cross-discipline and cross-platform has vindicated the expedience of a ‘content-first’ approach. Their precariousness has been hyped as the ‘gig economy’, standardising working conditions that lack basic entitlements. Their intellectual property has been stolen to feed or ‘train’ generative AI programs, making IP theft widely acceptable. (You’ve got to hand it to the Content Mindset’s PR guys: rebranding industrial-scale IP theft as ‘training’ for ‘artificial intelligence’ is right up there with rebranding creationism as ‘intelligent design’.) Artists’ venturous thinking is widely dismissed as ‘fringe’, depoliticising its impact. Time and again, artists’ commitments to their ethics and responsibility to their communities have been co-opted as ‘culture war’ tools, dumbing down the public debate to reinforce hegemonies. And of course, their works have been belittled as mere ‘content’, undermining their expertise.

Negotiating cultural heritage

Understanding how culture is integrated into a sense of self is challenging. What do we even inherit from the cultures of our ancestors? We may be able to accept, quite readily, that we are shaped by our cultures in all kinds of conscious and unconscious ways – that we inherit traits, practices, beliefs and stories – but it’s impossible to determine precisely how cultural heritage impacts not just any given person but also the stories they tell (assuming these are different things) in the past and in the present. In one sense, all stories, at the level of both form and content, are embedded within cultures – but since cultures are unstable and change over time, what is it that a writer might inherit?

From the hills of Killea

She lived alone with five horses, five dogs, three cats, three geese and two ducks. She had escaped Manchester under Thatcher, gone off the grid in Tipperary and never returned. She said mass suicide was the only answer to climate catastrophe. She was the most interesting person I had ever met.
Before dawn, I would write. By daybreak, I would find a pair of wellies and then muck out the stables, wheeling huge barrows of horseshit across her yard to a pile the size of a fire truck. There was little time to rest. The stove needed to be fed, constantly, with bricks of peat to keep the house warm. The horses needed to be given hay five times a day. The geese needed guarding from the foxes. I learnt to care for animals, to give them my attention.

The marketing is still crap

There are 3,700 people employed in publishing – a small industry, really – according to the surveys (via the Australian Publishers Association). Those interested people following current trends here and worldwide will know that mergers and acquisitions in the sector are a regular news item and, ultimately, make it harder for independent houses to maintain a presence in a boisterous market where it can be easier for bookshops to follow the dominant players and probably get some added benefits for doing so. Who knows how this market will fare a year on and how many Australian voices will be included. Right now, the unspoken reality is that advances to authors are spiralling downwards along with sales and, obviously, royalty payments. Fewer and fewer writers reach what they expected in financial and career-building stakes, even those making new books fairly and squarely in the mainstream… In the new etiquette of social media, each book apparently needs its own framework and journey, while authors, debut or veteran, are expected to muck in and do their own marketing and ‘brand building’ in the online marketplace. That’s what it looks like, anyway, to this observer. I am supposedly an insider but am perpetually perplexed by the fame stakes involved in becoming an author, as well as the claim that authors have viable careers.

Nobody panic 

The desert of the real is now where most teens search for answers to life’s big questions: what is love? Who am I? What is truth? The images of reality we create hold messages about reality. Copies of copies of copies though they may be, they nonetheless have a material effect on our children’s thoughts, behaviours, opinions. Consumerism. Communism. Sexism. Cancelism. Nationalism. Anarchism. Stoicism. Humanism. Ideas about what we should live like, look like and love like, what it means to be a man or a woman, what it means to be an individual or part of a community, are all displayed on a screen in their pockets. The influence is profound, but not necessarily sinister if they are taught to interrogate what they consume.

Bypassing the gatekeepers

Once invisible, the Matildas are now everywhere, spanning worlds from football to high-end fashion. The questions we’re now grappling with are: What does it mean to go from no one watching to everyone watching? From too little to too much interest? (When fans are, for example, creating entire TikToks to unpack the complexities around teammates dating teammates.) And: When your brand is built on a direct-to-fan connection and now unsustainable accessibility, how do you manage those parasocial demands? Complicating this is the fact that fans follow players more than teams – the demand is more individualised, the load more concentrated.

Very online feelings

There was once a simpler time when influencers were mostly known for spurring within their audiences feelings of aspiration: the 1 per cent of fashion bloggers flaunted business-class flights to international fashion weeks while clad in mortgages’ worth of goods. They sold us repositories of taste and performances of modelling, role modelling and role playing by providing templates for mimicry through highly parasocial sales tactics. The aspirational internet seemed straightforward: buy these things and your quality of life will improve. But the commodification of everyday life carried more far-reaching implications.

It ain’t easy being twee

During my pre-teen years, I amassed a large collection of animal plushies and figurines. I loved collecting different species, different families and different genii. I didn’t just want a generic teddy bear, I wanted specific representations of the animal kingdom: grizzly bears, black bears, sun bears and so forth. (FYI: in earlier decades, it was hotly contested whether giant pandas were true bears or were closer to their raccoon relatives, so my panda plushie split its time between families.) My plushies were ‘decluttered’ when they were no longer ‘age appropriate’. I was expected to become a different kind of person – one who doesn’t think about plushies. One who can get by on utility, with no need for art, beauty or whimsy. One who can use their perspicacity for something sensible.
It wasn’t to be. My dad’s influence failed miserably – emphasis on misery. Or, arguably, it swung me further away, back in the direction of my grandparents, imbuing my possessions with sentience, value and personality. I find it unbearable to let anything go. 

Know thyself

We spoke to the genetic counsellor and the doctors. I had more than a 70 per cent risk of breast cancer and close to a 50 per cent risk of ovarian cancer in my lifetime. This would require vigilant surveillance, but with ovarian cancer there is no reliable screening method. It can already be advanced before it’s detected, which is what happened with my mother.
My mind kept taking me back to those sandy ruins and the Pythia. Those characters in mythology who tried to avoid their fate even when she had given them the answer. You can run but you can’t hide from destiny. Enter the acts of dramatic surgical intervention. Like a deus ex machina, but without the gods, just the science.

Culture warrior

It’s safe to say, then, that Star’s protagonist is not a carbon copy of Mishima, despite the novelist’s status as Japan’s first Sūpāsutā (superstar). Twenty-three and blindingly gorgeous, Rikio Mizuno, known by the anglicised monomer Richie, is a Japanese James Dean. ‘I am a speeding car that never stops,’ Richie muses, conflating the icon with the instrument of his death. ‘I’m huge, shiny and new, coming from the other side of midnight… I ride and ride and never arrive.’ Unlike Dean, Richie survives past his twenty-fourth birthday, the addition of a single year weighing on him like a death sentence. At the story’s conclusion, when Richie is confronted by the crinkled visage of a matinee idol of yesteryear, he realises that having celebrated the twenty-fourth birthday Dean was denied by his Porsche 550 Spyder, ‘Little Bastard’, he has missed his chance to, as Dean said, ‘Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.’ 

Anyone who has been to a gay guy’s thirtieth birthday party will recognise the sentiment.

The accidental film school

The DVD format – the Digital Versatile Disc – was invented in 1995 and reached the peak of its popularity in Australia in the 2000s, before the rise of streaming platforms in the 2010s. During those salad days, Australian entertainment companies started producing and selling DVDs at a rapid rate, building a library of local and international films. The Melbourne-based company Madman Entertainment were competitive players… The extras on their DVDs – making-of documentaries, deleted scenes, audio commentaries – allowed producers to have an active role in the historicisation of film; audio commentaries typically featured directors and actors rewatching and reminiscing together. But companies like Madman (and Criterion in the US), which distributed ‘art-house’ cinema, were more likely to invite film theorists and historians to provide an analytical reading of the film as it played.

A freer state of being

Today, we live in a time in which self-worth and value are often signified by a numerical figure – how many followers we have, how many likes we receive, what level of traction our posts incite. We live in a time in which this numerical figure equates to social capital, with digital ‘celebrities’ gaining varying levels of access to places and perks on the basis of their following. We live in a time in which the aesthetics and metrics of this burgeoning digital realm pervade and influence not only the way we live our lives but what we perceive to be reality. We understand ourselves and the world around us through the cultural codes, signs and symbols we consume. We depend upon and wield such cultural codes, signs and symbols to inhabit narratives in which we wish to belong, fashioning them like an armour that tells the world who we are. Appearances are everything. 

Less than human

What elevates Miku and makes her significant in our cultural landscape is her accessibility. Unlike traditional celebrities, who, even if they want to be accessible to their fans, only have so much time and can’t be perpetually available, Miku is software that anyone can buy and use. It only costs $200 and doesn’t require particularly advanced technical skills. Most of the people who produce Miku music are self-taught. One of the enduringly popular things about the concerts is that everything you see essentially comes from fans – the music, costuming and dance routines are all drawn from the expansive ‘Miku community’, where the lines between amateur and professional are deliberately blurred by everyone involved. You’re as likely to hear a song produced through a record label as you are one that was popularised by YouTube.

Creative industry

In the 1990s the term ‘cultural economy’ brought a double meaning to creative work. First, it captured the cultural dimensions of economic activity, like packaging design or marketing, and gave them an artistic dimension. Second, it referred to an expanding category of economic activity concerned with cultural goods and undertakings centred around value and profits. It would see the ascendancy of creatives to the C-suite, where companies across a range of industries appointed chief creative officers (CCOs) to oversee ‘creative activities’ and align them to corporate strategies and visions. Scan through job descriptions and you’ll see that CCOs are expected to be strategic leaders and ‘igniters’ of creative intuition within organisations. CCOs are charged with finding more ‘creative solutions’ to problems that often stretch beyond an organisation’s core operations.

Hidden tracks

Young and Kucyk are as good at tracking down hard-to-find people as they are at tracking down hard-to-find music, although sometimes they do reach dead ends. Their methods aren’t particularly advanced and are often helped by luck. Sometimes they’ll raid the White Pages. Sometimes they’ll search for relatives of musicians online. Sometimes – as in the case of another song on Someone Like Me – they’ll scour through five years’ worth of archived weekly newsletters from a Seventh Day Adventist Church in the UK and Ireland and spot a tiny article that contains the full name of a mysterious musician they’re trying to find.

The art of appropriation

I had this assignment at university when I was doing my creative arts degree. A lot of the time, art students will copy the old masters to get better at painting and fix their technique. So I thought, I’m going to give this a go and copy Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus – and while I’m at it, I’m just going to make Venus brown and make her look like someone I know. I didn’t really have words at the time to say why I was doing that – I was just drawn to it.

Stuff

It wasn’t dangerous, this thing with Marty. I could choose not to do what he told me to do. I had my freedom. But I didn’t want it. I wanted no responsibility. It was a turn-on. All the research shows that libido is diminished by mental fatigue. The mental load. I could see it with Rachel. She was my younger sister, but she looked about ten years older than me, and we joked that she had no working memory. Dory, I called her. She and Greg never had sex. 
I didn’t have children, and the mental load was still big. And in every relationship I’d ever been in, it had gotten bigger. I ended up taking their mental load too. Emails to answer, bills to pay, budgets, basic living. Christmas gifts and dinner arrangements. Everything had a password now. Every password had a one-time code. Choice was overwhelming. A woman in the suburb next to mine had been found in the foetal position, dead from an aneurysm, clutching internet service-provider plans

Björk in concert

The wind feels strange on his face. He hasn’t stepped outside in too long. He hesitates in the doorway. He really doesn’t have time for this. He needs to write that last chapter. He needs to finish what he has promised. What separates humans from everything else is our urge to create. He turns back towards his computer but then he is outside and locking the door and it feels like he has no agency over this. His body wants to go for a walk and so he must walk.
He catches a glimpse of something bright poking up through the mulch at the base of a tree. A mushroom. Then suddenly they all come into focus. Mushrooms everywhere. Mushrooms on tree trunks like little shelves for fairy books, mushrooms in the mud and mushrooms in among the grass. There are even little net-like things around red stalks. Weird Cronenberg mushrooms, half fungus, half machine.

You will be seen now

I saw a fin- ger loosen the zipper,the bag’s tan exterior animated by teeth.  Beneath knuckle-white shades, faces surfaced–witnesses in a waiting room.  Pareidolia or paranoia?Malice etched in putty. Everything conspired to I saw in a brick escape.

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