Featured in
- Published 20250506
- ISBN: 978-1-923213-07-4
- Extent: 196 pp
- Paperback, ebook, PDF
Already a subscriber? Sign in here
If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au
Share article
About the author
Matt Sainsbury
Matt Sainsbury is a multidisciplinary journalist, critic and author. His work has appeared in The Australian, The Daily Review and The Shot, among many others. His website,...
More from this edition
Culture warrior
Non-fictionIt’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.
Scrolling to the end
IntroductionOur 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.
The marketing is still crap
Non-fictionThis neoliberal reframing of the arts into ‘creative industries’ first took hold in the UK with Tony Blair and his attempt to make the country’s image less frumpy and more innovative: New Labour lumped disparate industries together under the guise of creating a so-called ‘enterprise economy’. This ethos has continued with gusto in the twenty-first century, with artistic development corralled into corporate spaces while creative professionals are expected to perform their roles with sharpened governance, purpose and glad-handing to prove more is achieved by following a new regime of accountability.
