16 minute read
Fiona
All Class
Afew months back, in the grip of Lockdown 4: The Existential Horror Returns, I decided to Shake Things Up and apply to do a Masters. You could argue that studying at university isn’t precisely a radical departure from teaching at university, but with international travel being what it is I had to press hold on my Plan A of “move to New Orleans, hang in jazz bars and contribute to the hollowing out of one of the most culturally and creatively vibrant cities on the planet by being yet another white person to turn a shotgun house in Tremé into an Airbnb”. Maybe next year.
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To my surprise, I got my application in despite a book deadline and a smidge of depression, and was accepted. Bloody hell. I am now three weeks into studying a Masters in Directing (Theatre), full-time. That’s right. THEATRE, darling. Given that I last studied full-time in the 1980s, in Perth, around when Dave Dobbyn spent four weeks at No. 1 on the charts with ‘Slice of Heaven’, it’s a shock to the system. Hello tsunami of assignments. Looking forward to punching out that 2500-word essay on *checks notes*, blinks, *checks notes again*, “In which ways are Queer Theory, Normativity and Phenomenology coterminous in relation to Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis?”
Things have changed. I wrote all my assignments by hand in the 80s, usually on all-nighters fuelled by No-Doz (colloquially known back in the day as the “truckies’ friend”). The active ingredient is, oooh, so edgy, caffeine, which gives a jittery high when, like I did, you ignore instructions to the contrary and pop them like candy. Many a time I’d drop my handscrawled-in-blue-biro-on-lined-paper essay off on the deadline knocker of 8am, vibrating like an electric fence. Good times. I now get a migraine if I push working past a sliver after midnight.
The toilets are a revelation. At Curtin Uni in WA, where I did my BA, I have no recollection of the dunnies, so I presume they were bog standard (brief pause to allow you to marinate in awe at that wordplay). At my current campus they’re a centrepiece. A lifestyle magazine centrefold. Clean and nicely scented, pink-walled, gender-neutral and VERY well stocked with condoms. So many condoms. Like, half a wall. Yay for contraception/disease and virus barriers (also lube), but who has time for contemplating a wall of options when you’re a) urgent with desire and b) halfway through an essay on the modalities of noesis and noema?
Given my advanced years and clear comfort in rocking a lanyard, I’m often presumed to be staff rather than a student. It’s an interesting space to grapple, being mature age. Several of the teaching staff are my peers, a couple are close friends, and the cohort is young and serious enough that I’m still seeking common ground. The women are quiet, and I want to shake them and yell “Speak!” The dudes, quelle surprise, are confident in contributing to every discussion. They are…not alone.
I definitely talk too much. I can’t stop. I talk because others aren’t, and I feel for the teachers. I ask questions because WTF is noesis? I talk because I’m learning, because I’m excited, because my brain is fizzing like sherbet, and I have to put it somewhere. I talk because I’m an older woman and I refuse to be quiet, screw the patriarchy. I talk because beneath the veneer of prestige, this university is still systematically underpaying their staff. You bet I talk about that.
On reflection, the only thing I’m not talking about is Existential Horrors, so…I made the right move. But if you run a university? It’s nice to have showroom dunnies, but I’d prefer it if you TREASURED YOUR TEACHERS AND PAID THEM WELL.
Fiona is an author, comedian and Masters of the Uni Verse.
The World Is Yours
Harriet Pilbeam – better known as Hatchie – is learning to live with herself, and making gorgeous dream-pop while she’s at it.
by Jared Richards
@jrdjms
Jared Richards is an arts and music critic who has written for The Guardian, Junkee, Swampland and more.
Through a swirl of dream-pop and shoegaze synths, new elements of Harriet Pilbeam poke through Giving the World Away, her second album as Hatchie. And as old layers are being washed away, the Brisbane artist says she cringes while listening to some of her old lyrics.
“I really didn’t dig very deep on them,” she laughs. “And I didn’t want to make that mistake again – they were just very surface level, quite juvenile. Which is fine, because I was a lot younger when I was writing them.”
While it’s only been five years since Pilbeam released her first track as Hatchie, those five years have been long. Beginning with ‘Try’, a twinkling piece of pop that renders every listener the protagonist of their own 90s rom-com, Hatchie was soon being labelled the “dream-pop idol of tomorrow” by Pitchfork, and playing festivals across the globe off the back of her 2018 debut EP Sugar & Spice. Pilbeam followed it a year later with Keepsake, an assured debut that cemented her place as a leading artist of the new wave of cinematic shoegaze, a position she fought against.
“It’s funny, because I remember saying in interviews, ‘I really don’t wanna be pigeonholed as only shoegaze or pop. I wanna straddle the line,’” she says. “[I thought] I was being really smart and not backing myself into a corner, but I still totally did.”
Giving the World Away plays with new sounds, albeit still inspired by the 90s: Pilbeam flirts with UK garage, trip-hop and acid house, adding darker shades into dream-pop. The singles ‘Lights On’ and ‘This Enchanted’ came first, vibrant and playful songs about bubbling love intended to kickstart a new, dancier album. Written in early 2020 in Los Angeles with producer Jorge Elbrecht (Sky Ferreira, Japanese Breakfast), they offered a way forward after she struggled to find direction. But then COVID hit, and Pilbeam and her husband/writing partner Joe Agius were stuck in Brisbane. A flurry of cancelled gigs and writing trips gave Pilbeam pause for the first time since Hatchie’s first release. This downtime led to revelations, with the artist realising “deep-seated issues of self-esteem and confidence” from childhood hadn’t disappeared, despite her success.
“It all happened so quickly that I was able to ignore a lot of my feelings until everything came to a grinding halt,” she says. “I just really had to address my perception of myself and my perception of other people’s perception of me as well.
“I had a lot of time to think about how I was dealing with things that I had been dealing with for over 10 years, and how not a lot had changed with my mindset. I’ve been putting in a lot of work over the last two years to make changes and accept the things that I can’t change about myself. It’s a work in progress.”
Tracks like ‘Quicksand’ detail Pilbeam’s ambivalence about what Hatchie was: “I used to think this was something I could die for” she sings over a shimmering, unstable synth. It wasn’t necessarily her output that frustrated her, but that it hadn’t “fixed” her. Giving the World Away became something of a mantra, one that took time.
“It’s about being vulnerable with yourself,” she says. “The lyrics to the [title track] are, ‘Stop giving the world away and stop giving the only heart you’ve got’. In that context, it means stop giving a hundred percent of yourself away to other people, because your heart is really fragile. I thought that applied nicely to the album, because so much of it is about being vulnerable but also finding strength in your flaws, and just learning to live with them.”
Pilbeam doesn’t pretend that learning to live with all of yourself is a linear journey, saying it’s more of a “one step forward, two steps back” process. But one song did provide a sense of closure. ‘Take My Hand’ is a tender track sung to Pilbeam’s younger self, struggling with accepting her body (“you don’t have to change,” she sings over airy synths).
“I like to think that I’ve moved a bit beyond that – not into body positivity and self-love, but selfacceptance and body neutrality,” she says. “I haven’t necessarily made leaps and bounds forward, but just writing that to my former self helped me forgive my younger self for hating myself so much.”
Pilbeam is as earnest in interviews as she is across Giving the World Away, stepping through the nostalgic haze of Hatchie’s first releases to find a more distinct sound and self. At the same time, it’s still decidedly dream-pop, with gorgeous guitar lines and soft vocals. Pilbeam says this is her truest-to-self work yet, but freely admits that she didn’t want to alienate any of her old fans.
“I wish I could say that I don’t think about that stuff, but I do,” she says. “And I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to care about what your audience wants – there’s this idea that if you’re creating for other people and not just for yourself then it’s fake. But I wanna do both. I wanna cater to my fans, and I also wanna cater to my own journey.”
Beat Happening
Director Audrey Diwan adapts a celebrated Annie Ernaux memoir for the screen, tackling women’s desire, determination and desperation.
by Philippa Hawker
@philippics
Philippa Hawker is a writer on arts and film.
Audrey Diwan’s Happening is an unsparing, often delicately drawn account of a young woman’s life at a time of crisis. Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei), a student in her early twenties, is pregnant. She knows what she wants to do about it. But in France in 1963, an abortion is illegal, difficult to obtain and dangerous. This is an ordeal she will have to endure alone.
Diwan – a journalist turned screenwriter, directing her second feature – adapted a celebrated 2000 memoir by one of her favourite authors, Annie Ernaux. She wanted to capture particular aspects of the book and its implications. She aimed for a strong sense of time and place, but was keen to avoid making a film that looked like a period piece.
“Period piece says to the audience that it’s a past topic, it’s done. And we all know it’s not, in so many countries in the world,” she says. She imagined that her film could feel like the past in the present tense. “It was a game we played with all the crew: how to say, ‘It’s the 60s’, but not to say it out loud.”
In 1963, Anne faces obstacles at every point. Secrecy and silence surround the subject of abortion. Doctors, even sympathetic ones, refuse to become involved; some actively intervene to prevent it. Women had to resort to clandestine, risky backyard procedures. Those who carried out or in any way facilitated abortions faced jail, as did the women who underwent them. Aware of all this, Anne still has no doubts. “I’d like a child one day, but not instead of a life,” she tells a doctor.
She lives in student accommodation, studies literature and expects to become a teacher. Her working-class parents are proud of her academic achievements. She has friends, but when it comes to this particular situation, they are frightened, hostile or unwilling to get involved. She explores what avenues she can, as the film counts down time, week by week, showing us the details of her daily life alongside her increasing desperation.
For Diwan, Anne’s story is not simply about a particular prohibition. There are other constraints imposed on what Anne can hope for or want or expect; other ways in which she is defined or judged. “I didn’t just want to do a piece on illegal abortion,” Diwan says. “To me, illegal abortion is related to other things in our society.” For example, “Do we allow girls to desire?” Many issues about freedom in general, she suggests, are bound up in this one.
Before writing the screenplay, Diwan spent time with the author, known for her innovative use of memoir, her clear-eyed examination of individual experience and how it is shaped by the external world. They revisited the time, clarifying personal and political elements of her story. After those conversations, Diwan says, Ernaux agreed to read up to three versions of the screenplay. “She said from the very beginning that she understands the general idea of adaptation, and would not try to make the screenplay look like the book. But she would always tell me what was right and what was not regarding the 1960s. She showed me a path, and I could follow it.” When it came to finding an actor to play Anne, Diwan says Vartolomei made an immediate impact at the first audition. “She was asking me questions like, ‘In that scene, I understand I will have to be naked, but I want to hear from your mouth what is the reason I should accept that.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, somehow she is already the character.’ She had all the qualities I wanted for the part.” Happening is a carefully observed work, full of sensory detail. There are moments of nervous energy and grace, but there’s also a gruelling, visceral aspect. It is filmed in a way that amplifies a sense of intimacy, often shot as if we are at Anne’s shoulder, a step behind, sometimes unsettlingly close. Diwan needed an actor with technical skills, she says, and also someone who was prepared to experiment, to be part of a creative partnership.
Showing Ernaux the finished film was an alarming experience, Diwan recalls. She left the author alone in the cinema, and came in afterwards to hear the verdict. “She was silent for a while, and I was shaking. Then she said, ‘It’s right.’ Maybe a week later, she wrote me a long letter to tell me what she liked and how much she liked the movie.”
There was, however, one reference Ernaux felt compelled to take issue with, Diwan adds. “She said, ‘Audrey, there was no Tupperware in 1963, 64.’ And I told her, ‘Annie, if that’s the only problem of the movie, I will tell that story to every journalist I meet.’”
TOP: LOUISE ORRY-DIQUÉRO, ANAMARIA VARTOLOMEI AND LUÀNA BAJRAMI IN HAPPENING BOTTOM: SANDRINE BONNAIRE AND ANAMARIA VARTOLOMEI EMBRACE IN THE FILM
Women Who Rock
Singer and actor Lo Carmen has lived the bohemian life – and now turns her hand to chronicling other wild and willing women who likewise lit up their own paths.
by Jenny Valentish
@jennyvalentish_public
Jenny Valentish is a journalist who followed up her addiction memoir, Woman of Substances, with Everything Harder Than Everyone Else, a new take on endurance and extremes.
When Lo Carmen was 13 years old, she took a Greyhound bus from Adelaide to Kings Cross to join her father, Peter Head, who was a piano player in the cocktail lounges and dive bars there. Instantly, she was enamoured by this exotic new lifestyle, soaking up the atmosphere at gigs and sharpening her own desire to be a performer. Ever since she was a small child she’d had a showgirl’s wardrobe and flair that suggested a future studded with rhinestones.
“It wasn’t really a ‘look at me’ type thing,” she says. “It was more about my own satisfaction. I couldn’t understand why you would wear ordinary things like Roman sandals and track pants when you could wear sequins and high-heeled boots. Dressing the part sometimes helps you on your path towards what you want to be.”
Prior to moving to her new spiritual home, Carmen had grooved on gutsy female leads such as Tina Turner and Suzi Quatro. Now she had entered a world of even wilder women, who lit up the local venues, burlesque clubs and alleys, but who were not always given their due.
And so, some four decades after taking that bus, Carmen has written her first book, Lovers Dreamers Fighters, which she calls a love story about songs, secret histories and self-invention. It was her intention to properly pay homage to women who became mirrors in which she could see her own possibilities reflected back at her. Among them are The Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett (whose schoolgirl tunics were made by Carmen’s seamstress mother), Robyn Archer, Wendy Saddington and Renee Geyer.
Carmen’s own story is woven throughout. She’s a singer-songwriter with seven albums under her leopard-print belt, ranging from wistful alt-country to Dolly Parton-style kitsch. During the pandemic, she and her husband, actor Aden Young, moved back from LA to Sydney with their two sons. Her daughter is Holiday Sidewinder, a pop musician who similarly lives out of a suitcase (and similarly, that suitcase is crammed with many glorious costumes), and who is named after Suzi Sidewinder, one of the women in Carmen’s book.
Sidewinder was a New York-based actress, dancer, singer and wrestler, who collaborated and cavorted with Nina Hagen, Vivienne Westwood, Andy Kaufman and Jean-Michel Basquiat, before marrying Vince Lovegrove, manager of The Divinyls and Jimmy Barnes, and moving to Sydney, where Carmen met her. When Sidewinder contracted AIDS she gave permission for a documentary, Suzi’s Story, to be made about the impact of the virus that eventually killed her, but it was Sidewinder’s legacy as an unsung cultural hellraiser that Carmen wanted to celebrate.
“I relished the opportunity to get words printed in a book about how astonishing these women were,” Carmen says, “because it’s only what’s printed that becomes history, and if our stories aren’t told and shared, they disappear. When I realised that the gatekeepers of what made it into papers and music magazines etc were predominantly male, it wasn’t really surprising... especially with the particular challenges and expectations faced by women in entertainment. Often it was the kind actions of women that helped introduce many now hugely famous men to their first audiences. Charles Aznavour, Leonard Cohen and Kris Kristofferson all have women to thank for their first breaks.”
It’s not only women in entertainment that Carmen writes about. As an actor (who made her name playing the lead opposite Noah Taylor in 1987’s The Year My Voice Broke), she portrayed Sallie-Anne Huckstepp in the 1995 docudrama Blue Murder, and so began a lifelong connection between Carmen and the woman she never got to meet. Huckstepp was a writer, sex worker and whistleblower who had spoken out about police corruption on TV, and who was murdered in 1986.
“Addressing the bias and judgment she’d faced in the media and beyond was very important to me,” says Carmen, “and most of all to highlight her as a trailblazer, both as a feminist woman who lived life the way she wanted to and was honest and open about sex and drugs in an era that maintained serious double standards, and also of course for her heroic activism. Without Sallie-Anne’s actions, it’s possible Roger Rogerson would be a highly decorated police commissioner and that the vice squad would still be running organised crime in NSW.”
Writing Lovers Dreamers Fighters, Carmen relied on her suitcases of trinkets to prompt memories, alongside trawling through old newspaper articles, but she didn’t want to get too bogged down with timelines and details, and decided against interviewing people.
“As a rock’n’roll musician it’s part of my job description to have forgotten everything,” she jokes. “I decided to use my lack of total recall to my advantage, to let time and perspective distil memories into their essence and write from that place. I researched hard to back up everything I could after I wrote.”
Paul Kelly has heralded the book as “a hard-won account of the glory, mess and risk of making art”. It is indeed, but it’s also a sparkling mirror ball, reflecting the accomplishments of the women inside, far and wide.
