Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
Making it work
Christine, who is labelling jars, has a visual impairment. So does Shannon, who seals the jars. Both can do this precision work by feel and sound. Young Henry, who until recently was at school, has autism and is very good at counting. It is only his second day though, so he is starting out labelling mints.
Time to catch a break
Surf Like a Woman is full of behind-the-scenes anecdotes of life on the tour, plus play-by-plays of surf heats... The opening pages hook us in with a riveting story of Pauls taking on six-metre Margaret River waves at a championship tour event in 1990: ‘As the hooter for my heat sounds, I’m jacked with adrenalin...'
Keeping it platonic
But an increasingly conservative media environment, in which sex on film has dropped by almost 40 per cent since Carrie Bradshaw and co.’s heyday in 2000, means there was valid concern about how younger people would respond to the rampant sex that saw the show’s quartet sleep with ninety-four men and one woman...
Seeing the bigger picture
Effective storytelling in short word limits is not just about running the red pen through extraneous adjectives, either. It demands creative problem-solving, like seeking out useful synonyms, rephrasing and reconsidering the core message. The more reading one does of well-structured short fiction, the more naturally one can recall the solutions others have deployed.
Being and becoming predictable
The argument that the internet and social media have fundamentally homogenised cultural taste is well-worn, but is the implication – that taste was more varied before the internet – actually true? Has the in/out sorting mechanism intrinsic to algorithms eliminated the possibility of individual style and taste?
Captain Planet sucks
I hear the sceptics pointing out that we have now had six (yes, six) Terminator films warning us of the risks of evil, fighty robots – and yet here we are, merrily cracking on with more and more advanced AI.
Weird feelings
Engineering is all about taking a complex thing, breaking it down into its smallest parts, then working out the connections or sequencing between the parts. Cartoons are kind of the same. I like trying to apply a sense of logic to an emotion or feeling.
Mapping my queer lineage
When I graduated from high school, I was finally free to leave – to venture beyond the borders and confinements of my small town to search for something I inherently knew was missing from my life. And so, at seventeen years of age, I sped down the well-worn Carnarvon Highway towards an uncertain future.
The return of the femcel
Where male incels blame feminism for their inability to get laid, femcels identify misogyny, power imbalances and unrealistic beauty standards as the cause of their struggles. Unlike previous waves of political lesbianism, the #femcelrights movement to opt out of sexual relations with men is more of a signal than a concrete commitment.
Real men eat meat
Men eat meat. And if a man does not, his masculinity will be in question; emasculation shall be his malnourishment. Many of us today mock the ‘real men eat meat’ refrain. Yet society still insists that meat consumption is a marker of manliness – and the redder the meat, the manlier the man.
No place like home
There are more than 4.4 million disabled people in Australia. We constitute 18 per cent of the population, and over 90 per cent of us live in private dwellings. Yet only 5 per cent of private houses built here meet national accessibility standards.
Being David Cohen
Recently, I typed ‘David Cohen’ into Google Books, just for the modest thrill of seeing my name appear. The thrill quickly gave way to dismay when I saw how many other writers there are named David Cohen: dozens of the bastards.
