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.
No name for the country
For the past thirty-odd years, Hideo has worked exclusively in Japanese, publishing several novels and collections of criticism and essays. Why Japanese? is a question he is often asked. It harbours a kind of suspicion: why would a native speaker of the English language, the language of power and prestige and capital ... give it all up in favour of a comparatively minor language, a marked and ethnicised tongue?
Will we dance when it’s over?
The stakes in our real world have reached a point so high, so close to apocalypse, that they’ve disappeared entirely. We are gripped by a nihilism and unnerving sense of unreality, and so we don’t receive the messages others are trying to send to us.
Art, AI and figuring the future
There is an eeriness in the anonymous way DALL-E and Midjourney create art... The artist is nowhere and everywhere, like a ghost inside the machine. We see the rendering of images, but nothing that makes the design process more relatable.
The money shot
Pornography challenges our very constructions of what is ‘real’. It complicates questions about how we understand ‘real’ consent, for example. There may not be anyone forcing young people to follow the pornographic script. But with so much influence on young people’s sexual imaginations, pornography is setting the cultural context within which they do sex and gender.
Outside, Mona Lisa
Where bushwalking is concerned, Tasmanian maps are not an authentic picture of the landscape. They’re fine if you want to stick to well-known trails, but if the track has been assigned a T4 rating it won’t be on the map. Sometimes that’s because the route is so rough it would be misleading to mark it as a track, but sometimes it’s that for a range of management and environmental purposes, the PWS just doesn’t want many walkers going there.
Tell me a story
As QAnon members circulated their vernacular and practices across social networks, their acts and ideas became increasingly visible, and individuals began to recognise the behaviour as sanctioned, expressive acts within their community. In other words, adherents of QAnon began to recognise and conform to their very own folklore – one that explained who they were and described how they should act in given situations.
Living in kayfabe
On free-dress days, I wore my sister’s dance tights to school because they made me feel like I was a real wrestler. I would’ve worn my Speedos if my mum let me. Other kids stared at me and asked ‘What are you wearing?’ and I’d tell them that this was my wrestling gear.
Unaccompanied minor
THE FIRST TIME I fly to Melbourne to see my father alone I am four years old, and I’m so little...
At the end of the line
THE CALLS STARTED the night I was released from hospital. My lungs again. I’d coughed so hard inside my motorcycle helmet that I’d blacked out as I slowed down for a traffic light, slipped off and under my bike, and out into a rain-slick intersection.
Speaking my language
MY AUNTIE HAS stopped speaking to her siblings. Rifts like these are commonplace in my family, where people fall...
Moonwalking
The first woman on the Moon will have to think carefully about her first words, as they will resonate for generations into the future. Neil Armstrong chose his famous ‘one giant leap’ line himself; but in this case, knowing what’s at stake, there’s bound to be a committee who gives this long and considered thought.
The banksia revolution
IT IS FRIDAY morning in a moderately busy, inner-suburban Melbourne supermarket and I am standing a little awkwardly in the...
