Pelican 2016 (87) Edition 4

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ISSUE 4 VOLUME 87

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PREZITO RIAL

MA DDIE M U L H OL L A N D

Howdy trashionistas!

First things first, trash can be beautiful.

Just picture yourself transposed into WallE’s world. Nothing but trash surrounding you. A tumbleweed-like piece of trash blows over the mounds of trash in front of you. The light shining through the plastic, reflecting only a little because it’s plastic.

Sound nice? Of course it doesn’t, this is why you should clean up after yourselves.

Libraries, Oak Lawn, toilets, lecture theatres. Clean up. I believe in you that you can do it.

To help you, the Guild has put recycling bins in all the cafes on campus. We also have e-waste disposal days (that’s computers, TVs, electronics, etc) and we are currently looking at ways we can compost and deal better with food waste.

We’ve even installed solar panels on the roof of the Business School! Seen a place that needs more bins? Have great ideas to reduce trash at UWA? Email Dennis the Guild Enviro Officer at enviro@guild.uwa. edu.au.

You know what else is trash? Not enrolling to vote in this year’s Federal Election. You should do it and you should get interested in what each of the parties’ policies mean for you as university students. I bet even Oscar the trashiest of grouches is enrolled. Got questions? The Guild’s Education Action Network (search them on Facebook) is a good place to start.

IMO, $100k degrees are trash. We want you to have your say and put students first in this year’s federal election.

That’s all from me today. If you have ideas or feedback on anything Guildy, email me at president@guild.uwa.edu.au. I promise it won’t go straight into my trash ;) x Maddie

H AY T O RIA L

H AY D E N DA L Z I EL

I think that, much like how some people get closer to god through the church, I become closer to trash through my friends. I speak mainly of the small group that’s been with me since high school, who upon coming back from a trip to Denmark (the town, not the country) took to calling themselves SCUM SQUAD. They’re also the source of about half the Trash stories we have later in this edition (submitted anonymously, but I know. I know). Trash is fairly integral to the continuation of the Pelican operation, as without a steady stream of absolute trash surrounding us (mostly supplied by friends and contributors) we would cease to function. We also wouldn’t be able to feel quite as good about ourselves if we didn’t know that we weren’t the ones who did meth or shat in a towel (no one knows who did).

I’d like to think I’m less trashy than when I was a teenager. The truth is, in some ways I am, in some ways I’m not. I would no longer drink a whole bottle of vodka, but I would be more likely to wear a muumuu as I care a lot more about my personal comfort now that I’ve stopped buying ridiculously small jeans. How times change. They’ve changed so much that I don’t even go to parties with free goon any more, although this isn’t a reflection of maturity so much as the fact that everyone has to pay too much rent to buy a communal goon. Not even the best-value-for-money goon I ever found ($5 for 5 Litres).

I think that’s the main thing still pulling us down into trash, an appreciation of value.

But I’d prefer to be trashy than someone who doesn’t see the value of one dollar per litre. x Hay

P R E N D IT OR IA L

KAT E PRE NDE RGA S T

On the soft damp earth of a beachfront in the small Costa Rican town of Puerto Viejo, I stroke the thick, imperilled hair of a 19-yearold Texan as she bends over and ejects another cocktail onto my mouldy laced flats.

“It’s okay” I murmur, and as she clutches my arm and dribbles I forgive her for telling the gardener I liked him (leading me to the hotdust tool shed to present me to him who grins, and the workmen who cackle and say things in Spanish I don’t understand).

Another one of the girls at the Jaguar Rescue Centre we have been volunteering at for about a month is also there. But she’s distracted and fidgety – wanting to descend again into the raucous bustle of the taberna nearby, eyeing the smooth-skinned chicos as they spill out with the light from the lanterns. With a cheery unconcern that disgusts me, she rubs the back of the vomiting girl in time with the pop Latino music, jiggling her hips seductively.

My trip to Costa Rica was the first time I had ever travelled overseas, and the first time I had travelled alone. I booked it at a very low point in my life on the bleakest of whims at around 3am after a Eurovision party in 2014, and for a few thousand dollars won many dull hours of sitting around with suicidal and malicious sloths. Whilst a more beautiful place I have yet to see – with its ruby thumbnail-sized frogs, its enjungled paint-splashed buildings, its luminous storms and its bearded washerwoman who spruced my socks every Tuesday – it was a town built upon cultivating an exotic yet familiar experience for a contemptible anywhere-but-home tourist like me. It is so hard to travel and not feel feckless and trashy; not feel like an entitled pursuant of the ‘new’. The question returns: should I be more or less like Herzog? x Prendy

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THE talent EDITORS

CONTRIBUTORS

Hayden Dalziel

Adam Smith ᵒ

Harry Sanderson ᵒ

Simon Carrello ᵒ

Kate Prendergast

Ben Yaxley *

Hayden Dalziel *ᵒ

Taylor Brown *

Brad Griffin ᵒ

SECTION EDITORS

Holly Jian *

Tom Rossiter ᵒ

Bridget Rumball ᵒ

Jacob Mitchell ᵒ

Wade McCagh ᵒ

POLITICS Brad Griffin

Bryce Newton *ᵒ

Jesse Wood *

Will Paparo ᵒ

FILM Jaymes Durante

Bunderscotch Hovercraft ᵒ

Jessica Cockerill *ᵒ

Xin Lan Xie *

MUSIC Harry Manson

Camden Watts *

Jordan Webber ᵒ

Zoe Kilbourn ᵒ

BOOKS Bryce Newton

Cameron Moyses ᵒ

Kate Prendergast *ᵒ

ARTS Samuel J. Cox

Caz Stafford ᵒ

Laurent Shervington ᵒ

LIFESTYLE Thomas Rossiter

Cousin Pete ᵒ

Leona Mpagi ᵒ

Danyon Burge *ᵒ

Nick Morlet ᵒ

Dennis Venning ᵒ

P.I. Staker ᵒ

Eamonn Kelly ᵒ

Prema Arasu ᵒ

Gabby Loo *ᵒ

Ryan Suckling ᵒ

Georgia Curry *

Samuel J. Cox ᵒ

Hannah Adams ᵒ

Sarah Ison ᵒ

Harry Manson ᵒ

Shannon Lively (Shlives) *

DESIGN Elise Walker

ADVERTISING Chelsea Hayes

chelsea.hayes@guild.uwa.edu.au

offer applies to large pizzas only

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FEATURE ART COVER Clare Moran INSIDE Shannon Lively (Shlives)

ᵒ Words

* Illustrations

INSIDE

PELICAN EDITION 4 : VOLUME 87 TRASH REGULARS Editors’ Notes

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Campus Spot

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Trash Art Page

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Is Green Is Good

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FEATURES Rikers Island

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Boxes, E-ternity, Bees

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Prized Possessions: A Short Story

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Office Trash

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Your Dirty Secret Trashy Selves Exposed

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EMAS Miami: A Double Report

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How to Make a Gadey Bong

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SECTIONS Politics

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Film

22

Music

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Books

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Arts

36

Lifestyle

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GET INVOLVED! ~~all students welcome ~~

pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au

pelicanmagazine.com.au

Above the ref! Post to M300 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley 6009 WA

@PelicanMagazine @pelicanmagazine

The University of Western Australia acknowledges that its campus is situated on Noongar land, and that Noongar people remain the spiritual and cultural custodians of their land, and continue to practice their values, languages, beliefs and knowledge.

The views expressed within are not the opinions of the UWA Student Guild or Pelican editorial staff, but of the individual writers and artists.

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SPOTLIGHT ON CAMPUS SPOT W H AT ?

Cameron ‘Cam Hall’ Hall

WHERE?

Not so much a hall as a big grotty red-brick monstrosity teetering on the fragile foundations of a million dead moths and gamers who couldn’t press ‘B’ fast enough, Cam Hall shunts its lumbering self into the back of the Tav and groans.

Pocketed with the many dens of suitably littered clubrooms - from UWAnime to the University Computer Club to Leisure - its history can be traced back in infinite Guild Report motions to “fix the holes in the walls”, “suppress the rat king uprising” and “get the filthy students to stop using the heaters to melt their Kraft cheese slices for toasties”.

. . .T H AT P H O T O ?

As seen in the above on the left, Leisure’s room is smack bang next to the UWA Catholic Society (UCS). Now, the juxtaposition is in itself perfect. But then you realise that UCS has no door handle, that the clubroom can only be accessed by passing first through Leisure, and the absurdity bellyflips into fucking grim, cheap imitation-Goethe allegory. If UCS is salvation, Leisure can only be the dark passage of carnal sin and perdition that must be endured prior. To be confirmed: is Cam Hall the devil? Check the sulphur readings in the stones to find out.

Pelican

Look Book: Trash

Questions 1. What was the most popular cowboy hat in the Old West?

5. YEAH I KNOW RIGHT, FUCKN POSERS

2. What was the most famous role of Adam West?

6. Sorry, which widely read newspaper is often called “The West”

3. What did Ancient Egyptians believe lay to the West?

7. Tell me the middle name of Kanye West.

4. What did Ancient Celts believe lay to the West?

8. Thank you perhaps now I will see my family again.

1. Bowler Hats, or on saturdays they’d wear ol’ Jimmy Crukshanks’ Ma’s hat. 2. Himself, or Batman. 3. The Underworld, ruled over by the god Osiris. 4.

The “Otherland” which was like a discount Underworld or some shit. 5. YOU WERE MEANT TO CONTINUE THE WEST THEME. 6. Pelican on a good day, but usually The West Australian. 7. Omari. 8. I am glad I could be a part of letting you lay eyes on Pablo once more.

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PERTH FACT CAN ANYONE GIVE US AN INSIDE SCOOP ON UWA’S HIP HOP LISTENING GROUP

In 2012, the world’s population managed to throw away 1.2 trillion kilos of trash.

Here’s what it looks like if you write it out: 1 200 000 000 000. Looks like a big number, but if you’re like me, it probably doesn’t mean a lot—so here’s a listicle to help put it in perspective.

WORDS BY SARAH ISON | ART BY TAYLOR BROWN

1.2 trillion kilos is: 1. 8 quadrillion-or-so Pelicans! I weighed Feb 2016’s Fresh issue. It weighed 143 grams—more than The New Yorker, but less than the West Australian. Take from that what you will.

2. About 140 billion pelicans! The flappy, birdier kind.

Who doesn’t want 140 billion pelicans? I know I don’t not want them!

3. Close to 17 billion adult people—enough for everybody currently on the Earth to clone themselves, watch their clone grow up, and then for about a sixth of them to decide they love their clone so much they want another clone, in case the first clone runs off with another clone like in that movie with Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor.

4. Around 16 billion Ewan McGregors, but more than 20 billion Scarlett Johanssons. Imagine if we lived in that world! Unfortunately we actually live in a world we throw away 16 billion Ewan McGregors or 20 billion Scarlett Johanssons.

As our gardens grow wild, and our wardrobes burst And the vice-grip of hoarding is at its worst That time rolls around, the golden ‘Spring Clean’ Providing for us the much needed vaccine A cure delivered through just one injection And this is of course, Local Verge Collection.

Branches are cut and trees are maimed The verge garbage grows as the garden is tamed Then go the books, then tables, a chair All toys are tossed, every malting teddy bear.

As the pile grows higher, and the sun sinks low Something stirs in the suburbs from amidst shadow The Verge Vultures take flight, honing in without trouble, Swooping down and surrounding all the discarded rubble.

Scuttling forth come The Vultures, driven to the supply Dozens more crawling passed in their slow-paced drive-by Eyes gleam, lighting up with both glee and ambition The hunter awakes for this yearly tradition.

5. Nearly 200 million elephants! Enough for at least a few of the Scarlet-Ewan clones to escape on if the elephants were the sort of elephants that you ride. I don’t know if they are—I just chose the heavier type of elephants. It turns out there’s a pretty big difference in weight between different species of elephants.

6. Over 5 million biiiiiiiig houses. Not counting all of the concrete, but a biiiiiig house.

7. About 500 Manhattans. Not counting the ground, but with all the people and trains and cars and stuff. I tried to find a city that might be a bit more interesting than Manhattan but apparently people on the internet have mostly just weighed Manhattan.

8. 10 times the amount of water in all of Perth’s dams.

Damn.

9. 1 giant amount of trash, about half of it organic, maybe 1% of it recycled, mostly in landfills and dumps, and inordinately more of it generated by well-off people like you and me.

10. Just under 1% of Mt Everest. That’s a relief, right? It definitely was for me. Because despite all my dumb jokes through this, 1.2 trillion kilos is a lot, and that’s kinda scary. So I’m glad that we’re not making piles of trash that weigh as much as Mt Everest. At least not yet.

WORDS BY DENNIS VENNING

Alone or in pairs, or even in packs, They come out of nowhere to launch their attack With boots flung open to stash pre-owned rusty treasures, They snatch up ‘most anything that might suit their pleasures.

And yet more wait for dark to begin venturing out A sly way to explore, as they scavenge about Their bangs and scrapes are heard all through the night, The sound in the suburbs as The Vultures take flight.

Then, without warning, they’re gone altogether Vanishing as one flock, dirty birds of a feather And with them goes the rubble, all without trace Where once there were bikes and boxes, now empty space Chairs, couches and desks all carted away Every cabinet is gone, every shelf and display.

Now The Vultures take roost, plunder safe in their nests With the streets picked clean of the worst and the best.

But our hoarding continues and grows once more The clutter expanding: just as before The Vultures are waiting, ready to reappear Talons out and itching for The Verge Collection coming next year.

PERTH FACT THE ILL-FATED BEN STILLER FILM “NIGHT AT PERTH MUSEUM” FEATURES AN ATTACK BY A SHRIVELLED MEGAMOUTH

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WORDS BY LEONA MPAGI ART BY GABBY LOO

M

ost of us will have heard of Rikers Island, in one way or another, as references to it are scattered throughout contemporary popular culture. Be it from Law and Order: SVU, Blue Bloods or your weekly binge watch of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, we all think we have a relatively good grasp of what Rikers is.

But what do we really know about this notorious island, other than that it houses a jailing complex off New York City’s East River? Technically – tucked away between Queens and the Bronx on the mainland, with New York’s La Guardia Airport situated adjacently to it – Rikers is made up of ten jail facilities (with one housing juvenile prisoners, and the other female prisoners), as well as a power plant, hospital and bakery.

Yet the true nature of Rikers and what it encompasses in terms of basic human rights, environmental impact and political agendas is far more grim than what popular media choose to render to the public for entertainment.

Essentially, Rikers is man-made landfill. Once a military training ground during the Civil War, the land was bought for $180,000 by the Commissioner of Charities and Corrections in 1884 and converted into a massive jail complex in 1932. Due to the growing prison population and the almost certain financial profits to be made, the landfill was expanded after a mere two years in order to accommodate new detainees and expand the prison facilities. In the decades that followed, Rikers continued to endure landfill expansions through the use of ash, garbage and prison labour. It is today one of the largest penitentiaries in the world, with an annual budget of $860 million and approximately 9,000 staff.

Currently, Rikers has the capacity to hold on average 15,000 detainees. As Rikers is a short-term jail facility, most of the

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population being held (roughly 85%) have not been convicted of any crimes, and are instead merely awaiting due process through the legal justice system. The remaining 15% are convicted felons, serving short sentences for minor crimes.

With much of its foundations in garbage waste, and with the New York City council expending little effort on repair, Rikers has become the site of devastating environmental, living and working conditions.

Natural disasters such as the recent Hurricane Sandy as well as heavy snowfalls have confirmed the instability of the island as well as a shockingly flawed evacuation procedure. By default, landfills do not break down garbage waste but they do, however, slowly start to decompose over time. Due to this steadfast decomposition, bacteria in the waste naturally produce the greenhouse gas, methane (25 times more potent than carbon dioxide). The stench of rotten eggs released by the ground burping up the odour is overpowering. Attests former inmate Candie Hailey-Means, incarcerated on the island in 2015, “The smell alone would torture you. It smells like sewer, mixed with fertilizer, mixed with death.”

Because of the greenhouse gas production, along with the subterranean air pockets that are in constant creation amidst the biodegradable waste, the ground settlement has slowly but surely caused the land to shift. This is evidenced through damaged walls and ceilings, and burst pipes proliferating throughout the ten island facilities. In essence, this shift in the land is causing the island to gradually sink below the water’s surface.

Working with an incredibly tight budget has meant that the facilities are in ongoing need of repair and subject to frequent flooding. Putting aside for the moment the serious risks to the safety of prisoners and staff alike, the degradation of the buildings means that the prisons are becoming increasingly permeable when it comes to the traffic of contraband. It has become relatively easy for inmates to procure lethal weapons, even fashioning them from the deteriorating infrastructure of the facilities. This has led to a huge increase in violence and death on the island, and a more rigorous and brutal approach from the jail’s Emergency Response Unit.

Another detrimental impact on the welfare of the prison’s detainees is the inadequate attention that is given to mental

PERTH FACT ELIZABETH QUAY WAS BUILT ON LANDFILL WHICH WILL FULLY DECOMPOSE IN 10 YEARS

health. This is again due to strict budgeting to keep the prison running. Statistics have shown that close to 40% of all inmates detained on the island suffer from a mental health disorder.

But rather than sending these detainees to mental health institutions and ensuring they get the appropriate treatment, they are pumped full of generic medications. A substantial amount of these mentally ill individuals spend the duration of their incarceration in solitary confinement, allowed out of their prison cells for just one hour per day.

To worsen the matter, there is the complete lack of air conditioning in several of the island facilities, including in solitary confinement cells. Whilst a class-action lawsuit into the unsuitable heat conditions on the island has been ongoing since 1975, it is yet to reach resolution. Not only does this place prisoners at a heightened risk for health problems such as asthma, the inescapable heat inside the buildings inevitably correlates to a more irritable and fractious atmosphere and temperament for both prisoners and staff alike. As New York papers ceaselessly report, staff brutality and physical violence between inmates is the prevailing culture within the island complex.

The health department on Rikers Island was, until very recently, under the city contract of one of the nation’s largest for-profit healthcare providers, Corizon Health Services. Corizon has been scrutinised on numerous occasions, both for how prisoners are treated and also for the harrowing working conditions of their employees. Recently, they settled on a federal labour complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which was initiated by a group of medical employees of the company due to “Corizon’s failure to protect them from inmate assaults”. The previous year alone, the company was fined $71,000 by the OSHA for failure to do the same.

The mounting problems for Corizon don’t stop with OSHA. Recently, Dr Sidney Wilson, who was working at the women’s facility on Rikers was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple former inmates. One inmate claims that Dr Wilson would bring her gifts (a popular food chain’s chicken, candy, cigarettes, prescription medication, etc.) in exchange for her undressing behind an examination curtain under the false pretence of a routine medical check-up. Dr Wilson would join the inmate behind the curtain and proceed to fondle her private parts, going as far as engaging in oral copulation.

Dr Wilson furthermore chose to share intimate details of his personal life with the inmate, and to make false promises about taking care of her, as well as her daughter, upon her release, insinuating that they would share a life together. This is a promise that was later found to have been told to numerous other inmates of the women’s facility.

Initially, Dr Wilson chose to categorically deny the validity of these accusations, stating that they were “solely made in retaliation for not prescribing these female inmates with medications that they wanted in order to get high”. He concluded with “I’m telling you, these ladies – they come to you for some type of drugs, and if you don’t give it to them, that’s it, you’re on the black list”.

Corizon Health Services are as of yet to terminate the employment of Dr Wilson. Instead they have opted to let him continue with his employment in a strictly administrative capacity, assuming that this will limit patient contact.

Correctional facilities often struggle to recruit medical professionals of exceptional quality. Places such as Rikers Island are notorious for their corruption within management and wanton culture of violence, where staff are placed in danger on a daily basis, and where accountability and followup procedurals are sloppy at best, and intentional cover-ups of misconduct at worst. Subsequently, such positions often attract individuals who choose to exploit this culture to their advantage and temperament. Dr Wilson is far from the first healthcare professional to be accused of criminal and/or sexual misconduct.

Sexual abuse and criminal misconduct are prevalent aspects of the criminal justice system, and even more so at Rikers. Youths are particularly at risk. Following a 2-year investigation into the island’s three juvenile facilities, a report concluded that Rikers correctional complex utterly failed in its duty to protect its adolescent inmates from harm.

“Rikers Island is a broken institution," said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in a follow-up statement to the report.

"It is a place where brute force is the first impulse rather than the last resort; where verbal insults are repaid with physical injuries; where beatings are routine while accountability is rare; and where a culture of violence endures even while a code of silence prevails. The adolescents in Rikers are …consigned to a corrections crucible that seems more inspired by Lord of the Flies than any legitimate philosophy of humane detention."

Rikers Island is without a doubt an environmentally, mentally and physically toxic habitat. The landfill that the facilities are constructed on is sinking, the individuals that are incarcerated there develop additional, or even new medical conditions (both mental and physical) and the island’s employees endure subpar labour conditions that will, without a doubt, have lasting effects on their health too.

A prison built on trash and where society sees fit to send their ‘trash’, Rikers is indeed an island that itself needs to be trashed.

The continued breaches to prisoner’s fundamental rights, health and safety are neither ethical nor sustainable. Whether or not they are declared criminal by the justice system, those imprisoned there should no longer be treated like the landfill they have been consigned to live on; discarded on an island and forgotten about – much like the situations on Robben Island, Alcatraz, Nauru and in colonial times, the island continent of Australia.

PERTH FACT NEW TRANSPERTH BUSPORT TO FEATURE AUTOMATED ANTI-GRAFFITI ARTIST SENTRY GUNS

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A

WORDS BY JORDAN WEBBER

week or so ago, I found myself in a pretty heated conversation about whether or not tourists should be allowed to climb Uluru. People threw around lines about their liberal rights, about spiritual beliefs oppressing secularists, about the problem with archaic traditions. Behind every comment, there was this undercurrent of ‘my individual rights are to reign supreme’ and ‘my field of responsibility need only extend a few centimetres from my nose’. I walked away from that discussion unsettled. And if I look into that feeling, the twists in the stomach are just screaming that there is, and has been for a long time, something darker about the widespread attitudes that spit on sacred Indigenous sites.

In 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an ‘International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ with 144 states voting in favour, and 4 voting against. Those 4 states were Australia (then under the Howard government), Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. The Declaration constituted of 46 separate articles promoting the individual and collective rights of Indigenous peoples, calling for policies to ensure their self-determination, the prohibition of discrimination, and the protection of their cultural heritage and tradition. The 4 states mentioned above hosted then and now the most significant populations of disadvantaged Indigenous peoples. Whilst the Rudd government did officially endorse the Declaration in 2009, it chose to do so informally, such that it would not become legally binding. Cautiously supportive of the move, Indigenous leader and Professor Mick Dodson remarked at the 2009 endorsement ceremony: “The value of human rights is not in their existence, it's in their implementation. That is the challenge for the world with this declaration. The standards have been set, it is up to us to meet them.” The endorsement has since fruited little but a publicity stunt.

One of the most contentious issues for Australia and the three other settler states was that of protecting Indigenous cultural heritage. The Australian Senate disputed the fact that the Declaration would “require the recognition of Indigenous rights to lands which are now lawfully owned by other citizens, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and therefore [would] have some quite significant potential to impact on the rights of third parties”. Although it is peculiar that the Senate argued that citizens impacted negatively by the Indigenous rights to

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lands would be “both Indigenous and non-Indigenous” – almost seemingly frightened to leave the word “non-Indigenous” apart from “Indigenous” in fear of revealing a partiality for white rights – it’s worth focusing more on the idea that rights of third parties overrule, let alone are parallel with, the rights of traditional landowners. The WA Government has a strong track record when it comes overlooking Indigenous land rights.

A few months ago, UNESCO advisory board ICOMOS (the International Council of Monuments and Sites) investigated the fact that the WA Department of Aboriginal Affairs had deregistered 30 sacred sites from the National Heritage List.

Of particular interest, several of these now deemed ‘unsacred’ sites happened to be situated along the route of the government’s proposed Roe 8 project. This Roe 8 project intends on extending Roe Highway in order to establish a freight link between Fremantle and Welshpool, meaning parts of Beeliar Regional Park (and the sacred sites it comprises) would be razed to the ground. Involved with the ICOMOS investigation, Tom Perrigo warned that “Aboriginal people as well as nonAboriginal people don’t understand why these sites are being deregistered and the government has lacked transparency and has shown little accountability”. Perrigo added “it appears [the deregistration] is in association with the development of Roe 8 and that’s of great concern”.

When we see a gross invalidation of Indigenous rights occur on an administrative level, it is no great surprise when those attitudes permeate in homes, schools, the media. The said conversation I was a part of can be threaded to the WA government’s treatment of sacred sites which is itself wound up in national decisions around whether or not to authorise a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. More often than not, we see these issues play out in the politics of space, where Indigenous groups have their spaces identified for them by an intruder (as in sacred or not sacred), or where Indigenous peoples’ access to space is inhibited by an intruder (as in the recent WA community closures). Part of the problem does seem to be in this assumed detail that, in the context of land rights, the rights of the majority of non-Indigenous individuals should lie parallel with those of the traditional custodians of the disputed land. We are currently at a stage where a nonIndigenous authoritative body decides what is considered ‘sacred’ to Indigenous cultures, where 20% of visitors to Uluru still climb the rock – a statement in itself which rejects any notion of sacrality; even perhaps reinscribing ideologies of the colonial ‘conqueror’. These circumstances beg to show that Indigenous rights to space and country demand greater priority, and that there is still plenty of room for further questioning to be placed on where and how exactly non-Indigenous people hold power in relation to the Australian landscape.

PERTH FACT UNDER EACH SEAT OF PARLIAMENT IS AN EMERGENCY FLASK FILLED WITH BOURBON

WORDS AND ART BY KATE PRENDERGAST

The whole world, everything which surrounds me here, is to me a boundless dump with no ends or borders, an inexhaustible, diverse sea of garbage. In this refuse of an enormous city one can feel the powerful breathing of its entire past. This whole dump is full of twinkling stars, reflections, and fragments of culture (Kabakov, “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away”).

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air. Fingernail clippings. A milliondollar painting, colour-wormed with confetti. A wedding invitation from Liza Minelli, a Keith Herring ashtray, a Jean Harlow silk-velvet gown, acne cream. Bees (dead), underpants (dirty); and in another box, a photograph of a naked Rob Lowe with a stuffed snake wrapped around him, below the words ‘call me’ and a number.

These are but a fingernail-scrape of the 300,000-item-plus ephemera contained in the 610 ‘time capsules’ (cardboard boxes) left behind by shock-mop Pop Artist Andy Warhol after his death in 1987, currently being excavated (sometimes as performance art on stage), indexed and dutifully restored by three women in an Pittsburgh basement for the Andy Warhol Museum. Even the paperclips get numbered – every goddamn one. With the opening of each box dollared at around $5,000, it’s a costly operation.

A packrat by nature, ‘Andy’s Stuff’ (a formal collection artwork) began as Mary Poppinesque ruse when the purse-hugging Warhol refused to pay for a moving company on his relocation to The Factory.

“Deal with it”, he selfished at his staff.

Sweating at the vast litterage confronting them, they “suggested to Andy that they start putting everything in boxes, and they could call them 'time capsules' and he could work on them forever,” says chief archivist Wrbican. “And he did. He thought that was a great idea.”

We’re all affected to some extent by the archival impulse Marie Kondo is trying (lucratively) to reprogram out of us. And although laborious, space-consuming, and likely to have you featured on Hoarders (“I'm so sick of the way I live, of all this junk, and always dragging home more” Warhol lamented in his Philosophy Of) it does make sense. Objects have a totemic, transportative power: they take us back to the time that we interacted with them.

Whether organised and documented in

boxes, cluttered visibility on our bedroom shelves, or in a storage crate in Welshpool, the knowledge that they are there, owned, ours: it’s reassuring. Infused with association, they constitute an exterior constellation of identity, a lattice to reconstruct in our memories things lost. We can also (because I like to) talk about mortal panic. Investing so much in them, these artefacts are our legacy, our perpetuation.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruin” murmurs a nameless character in T.S. Eliot’s 1922 ‘The Waste Land’. Walter Benjamin was another ‘scrap merchant’; but where Warhol’s collecting was more symptomatic of fifties material culture, Benjamin (a Marxist) was involved in a compulsive work to salvage and preserve the Berlin of his childhood, from which he was forced to flee after the Nazi putsch.

These were the ragpickers, just two amongst the millions, who built up their private trove by labour, transaction, time, movement. Then the digital age slammed into the back of the nineties with BernersLee’s World Wide Web, the stateless revolution happened, and the archive lost all dimension, atomised, lost its atoms in immateriality. That’s not to say the tangible collector’s item doesn’t matter anymore, or has slid into obsolescence.

Material displays of wealth and class and love of a certain cultural aspect or figure (you can now buy Steve Buscemi onesies) remain important and political. Yet technology has democratized the archive – what is remembered, kept and circulated is no longer exclusively controlled by institutions of power or defined by a select few decision-makers.

This is of course in many ways very empowering and positive. The scanner is

PERTH FACT I’M GOING TO BED. #PERTHISOK

an instrument, role and person of great industry nowadays, going about God 2.0’s work of eternalisation. Myriad projects are owing to them and the rest of the digitization labour-force – from the English Broadside Ballad Archive, which collates over 7,000 17th century English broadside ballads, to the sensitively-curated WA State Library’s ‘Storylines’ initiative, which aims to recuperate and make accessible thousands of photographs, oral histories and historical documents relating to the state’s Aboriginal heritage.

Yet the rhetoric of the technocratic evangelist is ludicrous, and digital technology creates as many problems as it solves. For starters, in the key of philosophy and psychology, you hear arguments about how the limitless, allaccessible, now-and-always archive has put the web-users hoarder’s impulse into overdrive. Everything is preserved, nothing is selected, space is no check: why decide on what to keep when you can keep everything? Which feeds directly into the Orwellian threat of surveillance, control, crowd-shaming, employer profiling, cybercrime. To ‘save’ ourselves (forever online) do we need to share ourselves in bits and pieces for a bureaucratic Morloch?

Radiohead’s wiping of their online presence as a hype promo-stunt in the lead-up to their new album drop in early May – beginning with the bloody great single “Burn The Witch” – was for this reason an interesting moment and gesture.

How they did it, and whether the data has truly vanished, this writer has yet to know.

Yet in that moment – as they curated their nothingness, presented absence, erased their ‘history’ – the band effectively challenged and perhaps mocked the extent to which our knowledge and memory systems depend upon the internet. That there? That wasn’t them.

Still. I am going to summon a dead bee Andy Warhol left for me now.

11

12

WORDS BY HANNAH ADAM ART BY JESSE WOOD

T

he sun had caught something, reflecting its light in Madge’s eye. She reached for the sparkle, digging past the empty food wrappers and rotten fruit until her hand closed upon something small and round – a diamond earring.

“Doris!” Madge called.

A tattered beanie poked above the mounds of rubbish, followed by a head. It looked about for the person who’d called it, eyes scrunched against the sun.

“Doris,” said Madge again, the hand clutching the earring waving erratically, the dozens of bangles that covered Madge’s arms jangling.

Catching sight of Madge, Doris pottered over, her long scarfs trailing along the ground, almost getting caught in the wheels of the small trolley she dragged behind her.

“Look,” said Madge, ceremoniously extending her hand. Doris leaned forward, her eyes widening as Madge uncurled her fingers to reveal the delicate earring. “It’s like the pair I used to wear. Do you remember? When we’d go dancing.”

Doris nodded enthusiastically. She held a finger up. Wait.

Doris delved into her trolley bag. Fabrics rustled, there was a highpitched clinking, the sound of beads falling. She produced a scarf.

It was finer than any of the ones she wore. Softest silk, a deep red the same shade Madge’s hair used to be. Doris wrapped it around her, throwing it over a shoulder with a swish of her hand.

“Yes, we’d dress up too,” said Madge, suddenly aware of the shabby nightgown she was wearing. “The finest clothes. We’d spend hours preparing ourselves. The floor would be filled with clothes until we had an outfit that was just right. But it would be worth every minute, for we would be stunning. I remember.”

Doris returned to her bag, taking longer than before. This time she returned with a box, a knob on the side. She wound the knob, the mechanical sound of clicking loud in the isolated yard. When she was finished, she opened the lid, and a soft strange music flowed out it for the two friends. A lone ballerina spun on her axis.

“Oh, you’re right Doris!” Madge swayed on the spot, sighed. “How could I forget the music? The bands that would play. We would hear the most wondrous sounds. Some nights, the hall would be filled with a full orchestra, the deafening violins, horns, flutes. But my favourites were the soloists. There was something so intimate in watching them play, alone there on the stage.”

Doris nodded her agreement. She stepped forward to bring the music closer and something crackled underfoot. Madge smiled and bent to pick it up.

Madge brought the wrapper to her nose, inhaling deeply. Under the smell of earth was the faint but unmistakable sweet smell of chocolate.

Doris opened her bag one more time. This was the longest search.

Madge’s eyes shone brightly when she saw what Doris at last fished up. There, in Doris’ dirt stained hand, lay the crowning decoration for a wedding cake. A plastic groom and bride, arms joined, smiling beatifically.

“I met my husband there.” Madge stared past Doris, past the junk beyond. “Tall, he was. He used to tower above everyone he met.

And so, so handsome. I felt so plain next to him, and yet, he would make me feel like the most beautiful woman. I remember.”

Doris started returning the trinkets to her bag.

“No wait.” Madge reached to stop Doris and an earring fell from her hand. It hit the ground sharply, the surfacing cracking and breaking in two. Madge shook her head. “No, not like my earrings.

My earrings were diamond. Given to me by my ….”

Husband? But she could not recall a single thing about him.

Doris snapped the music box shut, and suddenly the yard was eerily silent.

“The music, Doris. Where is the music?” Madge tried to recall the sound. “I can’t hear it anymore. How long ago was it now? It seems so long ago.”

Madge tried to conjure the sound of the orchestras in her head, of the soloists, but her memory was failing her. Where had she seen them again?

“You do remember the music, don’t you?” But Doris was walking away, already in search of her next possession. “And we would dance.”

But the music was gone now. The light from the chandeliers flickered in her mind. And the memory of chocolate had become ash in her mouth.

“Do you remember? Because I don’t.”

But there was no one there.

Who had Madge been talking to? She squinted against the sun, missing the sight of a worn beanie disappearing behind a hill of trash.

“Chocolate was my favourite,” said Madge, crinkling the wrapper between her fingers, recalling the sweet satiny taste running down her throat. “I would always take a few home in my bag, so that days later I could eat them and imagine I was back there under the brilliance of the chandeliers. The shining lights, just like a dream.”

PERTH FACT OFFICEWORKS: ALSO A SOURCE FOR BUDGET BDSM EQUIPMENT (JUST GET A PACK OF BULLDOG CLIPS)

13

WORDS BY JESSICA COCKERILL ART BY GEORGIA CURRY & JESSICA COCKERILL

T

he average Aussie generates about 1.9 tonnes of rubbish each year, half of which is either dumped in the environment or goes to landfill. Rather than wasting your precious rubbish in that whole mess, why not put it to use in your garden? Here are three crafty ways to turn your kitchen trash to horticultural treasure…

GROWING SPRING ONIONS FROM SCRAPS When chopping up spring onions for a delicious recipe, we usually cut off the rooty ends, right? What you will be happy to learn is that these can actually be re-planted, and will grow you MORE spring onions for next time. Magic!

Simply cut off the ends at about three centimetres from the roots, plant them in a well-conditioned soil (newly-bought potting mix or old dirt with manure or soil conditioner mixed in) with the base of the plant just out of the ground, and the roots just below. Remember to water them daily if you can. From there you can cut your spring onions straight out of the garden, leaving the root-end in every time for more to grow later.

USING OLD FOOD CONTAINERS AS POTS Some rubbish will never break down.

Don’t worry, it’s not the end of the world: those plastic or metal containers can really come in handy as ‘totally hip’ pots. Next time you go to Kakulas or the Re Store get the coolest looking tin of beans or tomatoes you can find.

Use the contents and hang on to the tin: drill holes in the bottom (because they’re aluminium this can actually just be achieved by stabbing the base with a sharp enough knife) and fill them with potting mix.

You can plant herbs, succulents, or seeds inside these little pots, and they look great on windowsills, tables, lined up along a wall, or wherever else you can fit them. You can even get really creative by drilling two small holes on either side and using some wire, suspend them from overhead or on a fence to create a vertical garden. They will rust and fade over time, but hey, that just adds to the essence of poverty-stricken student chic, right? You can also use old newspaper (or exam paper – hope your mid-sems went well) to create short-term pots for seed raising. Just look up an origami box template, fill the box with soil, and pop the seed inside.

Keep it watered and once the seedling is ready, you can plant the whole thing, paper and all, into the ground, where the paper will break down and help

14

with water retention.

SALVAGED SEEDS You will need a jar, a few kebab sticks, and a rather large seed: think avocado or mango.

Salvage the seed next time you’re eating your fruit of choice, and carefully poke the kebab sticks into the seed, as shown. These will hold the fruit suspended over the jar: if the neck of your jar is narrow enough, you may not even need the kebab sticks.

Once this is done, you want to fill the jar with enough water that the seed is JUST touching it at the bottom. Over time, you should notice it begin to put a root down into the water, and you can reduce the water level so that just the root is submerged, and not any part of the seed. Keep the plant over the jar until a mass of roots and several leaves have been established before considering whether to plant it outside.

Avocados and mangos are very sensitive, especially in the harsh, windy and arid Perth climate, so make sure to keep them out of the wind and direct sunlight in the early days until they are sturdier. This project is a bit of trial and error: not all supermarket fruits will be able to grow into healthy plants thanks to weird patenting on certain plants that have been made sterile via genetics or spraying.

But hey, you never know til you try!

Have you had any plant problems lately? Are you curious about something you saw in someone’s garden? Or do you have something exciting to share with us? Send your questions, photos and thoughts to pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au!

PERTH FACT PELICAN: NOW GARETH LIDDIARD AND THE DRONES RATIFIED

16

ART BY HOLLY JIAN

It’s 9:00pm. We just dropped 100 each.

I pat my pocket – the other 50s are still there – God forbid I should have to get by at this event with a single pinger. My friends procured the goods, went through the purity and testing to make sure it’s the good stuff. Ping with care, kiddies. I’m here with some guys I’ve known since high school. We’ve been to countless soirees together over the last decade but the pills are a relatively new addition to our party formula.

We’ve made it into the silent disco and I’m keeping my head low. No doubt my eyes are saucers proclaiming to everybody my current state. I’m holding the headphones close. The louder the music is, the more I feel it courses through me. I look over at my friend, his eyes are closed, he’s got a faint smile and he’s just swaying around.

In this moment I’m just really appreciating the friends I’m around. I get nostalgic.

We leave the silent disco, drop our remaining pills and sit down and talk shit for a bit. Not really about anything in particular – our families, lives, loves, fears. This is my favourite part – the interaction. They say methylenedioxy-methamphetamine makes you more empathetic. It sure does.

You feel connected with people. You build connections with others when under the influence of other drugs like alcohol as well, sure. But you don’t empathise with alcohol. There’s something wholly different about the sincerity of the connection with molly. You bump into a person in the mosh, you turn to say sorry, but instead they hug you. You feel the molly love.

I run into a few friends from work. I’m constantly worrying if they know I’m on something, or what they think about me.

“Relax,” my friend says. “Everybody is on something, and those that aren’t don’t care.” No matter how many times I do this,

So there I am, in line, waiting for the bouncers to let me in so I can sit on a table for the first hour waiting for my friends to arrive whilst the six people, who like me are way too keen for this, sit on opposite corners of Oak Lawn. I have my ticket out and my learner’s permit brandished, I’m so ready.

My friends have arrived, it’s time for a cigarette, my buddy and I approach one of the guards and ask if we can pop down to Matilda Bay for a smoko. He says we won’t be able to get back in, and already it’s like there is no getting off this hell train. We scum around the food truck and eventually sneak past a barricade around its back, ask the food guy if it’s ok and he says yes, great…

We’re interrupted by a student EMAS organiser, who knocks us straight with the ‘non-smoking campus’ line. We tell him piss off.

Understandably he’s quite mad, so we leave.

The fear is getting to my friend, the toilet line is too long and he’s gone an hour with friends at an event without a cigarette. We are all headed towards the music when I catch a glance of my friend at the back fence trying to get out. I run after him, but I’m too late, a flood of dudes in blue shirts have seen him take the fence out of its green plastic jumper thing and sneak out for a wee. I stick my head out the gap he’s made in the fence yelling obscenities in his general direction, the bouncers reinform me of the severity of his crime against Super Serious Festival Rules. I am now alone,

or how many times I’m reassured, I can’t help but look over my shoulder, or wonder if that person was staring at me, or just past me.

It’s the big finale and I’m on my phone.

My friend pushes me: “Bro come an’ look!

Look at the glitter!” I look up at the glitter – it’s glitter. I’m not amazed. Soon it all ends and I’m fascinated by this guy who looks exactly like Rai Thistlethwayte from Thirsty Merc. I go up to him and tell him that. His friends are in staunch agreement, and he takes it in good humour.

We make our way to the foreshore and sit down. I’m coming down and I’m getting sleepy but Matilda Bay looks real nice tonight. I lean back and look at my friends talking shit to each other. I’m thankful.

WORDS BY BUNDERSCOTCH HOVERCRAFT

hopelessly alone.

I’m sitting back to the fence, feeling quite sorry, when a guard shines a spotlight in my face. He’s at a distance, slides away when I respond… Just then, I hear my friend yell behind the fence he made his escape from and an orange traffic cone is hurled over the fence.

Stay golden friend, stay golden.

We head to the rave. I get a glowstick-thingy thrown at me: oh well, it’s free I guess. It’s sweaty and uncomfortable and I should not have worn jeans, I’m getting mad chafe from half-jumping so that my glasses don’t fall off my face and I really just want to get out.

The line into the club is the archipelago of inconvenience, and a girl with a kebab and chips from the place next door tries to make it past a phalanx of these shitkickers to get to the street on the other side. The bouncers are having none of that, they pull her up by the shirt straps, wasting a good kebab and a chance at decency.

The afterparty is shit. The afterparty is ALWAYS shit, why do I do this? It is midnight and we’re all pretty sick of it, we leave, cross the street and catch the uber home. Strangely I feel we are all closer for this experience.

PERTH FACT PELICANS ARE DIURNAL, MEANING “TWO URNS”

WORDS BY P.I. STAKER

17

who will run withh

Hillary?

Be informed. Compare them on the issues that matter.

Issue:

A

s Hillary’s securing of the Democratic Nomination seems more and more likely, whom will she pick as her running mate? Jacob Mitchells investigates.

On the night of Thursday the 28th of July 2016, the final night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, it is almost certain that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be declared the Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency of the United States. Secretary Clinton has been widely considered the frontrunner for the nomination since her defeat in the 2008 primary campaign by outgoing President Barrack Obama.

Compared to her previous unsuccessful campaign, Secretary Clinton has faced candidates less competitive than those she stood against eight years ago. From the beginning of her second time on the trail, the Secretary has easily swept aside four of her five competitors. Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb, Governor of Rhode Island Lincoln Chafee, and Harvard academic Lawrence Lessig abandoned their campaigns following continuously low polling. The next candidate to fall before the Clinton juggernaut was the War of 1812 reenacting, with folk punk

Needs a running mate

band-fronting Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley dropping out after receiving a mere 0.6 percent of votes in the Iowa Caucus.

Since Iowa, Secretary Clinton has been locked in an intense campaign with Senator Sanders’. Key to this tension is Sanders’ bold refusal to accept money from power super PACs (Political Action Committees), which has seen his campaign draw the majority of its funding from small donations. Sanders staunch commitment not to be perceived as bowing to special interests, coupled with his declarations of a new hardline campaign against economic misconduct on Wall Street and ambitious plans to abolish tuition fees at public universities has seen him garner enormous support from youth voters (18-to 24-year-olds).

However the millennial and collegiate vote are unlikely to provide the hundreds of delegates necessary for Sanders to usurp Clinton.

With Hillary Clinton clearly set to take the nomination come July, the question now turns to her running mate. Who are the most likely candidates to appear alongside Clinton on the 2016 Democratic ticket?

My ideal running partner is Tally, my poodle

THE MAIN CONTENDERS Julian Castro Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (Texas)

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On the first night of the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, the wider American public was introduced to keynote speaker and charismatic mayor of San Antonio, Texas, Julián Castro. Castro’s selection for the prestigious position immediately drew comparison to nowPresident Barrack Obama’s selection for the role at the 2004 convention.

Raised from the age of eight by his single mother and migrant grandmother Julián Castro and twin brother Joaquin (Representative for Texas’ 20th Electoral District) he attended Stanford University and earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard. Elected as mayor of San Antonio at the age of thirtyfive in 2009 he was, at the time, the youngest ever mayor of America’s seventh largest city. In 2014, following Senate approval, Castro entered the Obama Cabinet as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Since his appointment Secretary Castro has been widely spoken of as one of the frontrunners for the coveted position of Clinton’s running mate. Although hailing from the delegate-rich Texas it is unlikely Castro’s presence on the ticket will swing the strongly Republican state to the Democrats. However his working-class Mexican-American heritage could draw significant support in states such as delegate-rich California and key swing states Nevada and Colorado. A solid campaigner with a strong stage presence, Julián Castro is one of the strongest options of Hillary Clinton’s running mate.

PERTH FACT THE GUZMAN Y GOMEZ / ZAMBREROS COMPETITION WILL EMERGE AS A FULL SCALE CIVIL WAR IN 2045

POLITICS

Elizabeth Warren Senator (Massachusetts)

Cory Booker, Senator (New Jersey)

Sherrod Brown, Senator (Ohio)

Tim Kaine Senator (Virginia)

Elizabeth Warren may go down in history alongside such giants as late New York Governor Mario Cuomo, former Colorado Senator Gary Hart, and late Senator Robert F. Kennedy as one of the great presidential nominees that never were. Warren was elected in 2013 to fill the Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by John Kerry upon his appointment to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. As a candidate for the Senate in 2012 Elizabeth Warren stood out as one of the most outstanding speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. In that speech and since, Elizabeth Warren has pursued Wall Street malpractice with passion and vigour. With strong progressive credentials the former Harvard academic has emerged as one of the most widely known and admired senators in the United States. Many within the Democratic Party’s liberal base had hoped Senator Warren would run against Clinton in the primaries, but their dreams were dashed with Warren’s repeated declarations that she would not seek the Presidency. Despite her clear disinterest in the executive and almost unmatchable value as a legislator Elizabeth Warren has garnered significant buzz as a progressive liberal foil to the more pro-business Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race. As running mate, Senator Warren would ensure high turnout from the liberal base and be highly effective in rallying even the most devout Sanders supporters behind the Clinton ticket.

Elected to a vacated New Jersey Senate seat in 2013, Cory Booker was already considered one of the state’s most prominent Democrats. Whilst serving as mayor of Newark, New Jersey since 2006 before his election to the Senate, Booker made national headlines when he saved one of his constituents from a burning building. Since arriving in the Senate Cory Booker has sought to bridge the partisan divide; a goal achieved through the co-sponsoring of bills with fellow Democrat (and strong Vice Presidential candidate if it weren’t for the Twelfth Amendment) Kirsten Gillibrand and libertarian Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky. Like Hillary Clinton, Senator Booker is a pragmatic liberal, continuously supporting progressive social causes but remaining pro-business. A skilled orator and debater Cory Booker would prove himself more than equal to Republican Vice Presidential nominees. Popular and high-profile, Cory Booker has what it takes to further energise the party’s base in support of Clinton.

The Buckeye State, Ohio, has long been something of a bellwether in Presidential elections. Strongly blue-collar, Ohio elected gravelly-voiced, progressive Sherrod Brown to the Senate in 2006. Since arriving in Washington Senator Brown has established himself as one of the most vocal progressives in American politics. A strong supporter of marriage equality, Brown was a key critic of Ohio’s conservative stance on the issue prior to the landmark ruling of Obergefell v. Hodges established the legality of same-sex marriage under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Senator Brown has garnered significant popularity within his home state and throughout the Rust Belt for his strong support of public sector unions. With Brown on the ticket it is more than likely that his home state’s eighteen electoral votes would go to the Democrats, shoring up the vital support in the traditionally conservative Midwest.

The ability of Sherrod Brown to unite both the liberal and working class wings of the Democratic Party makes him a competitive choice for Hillary Clinton’s running mate and his skill as a debater makes him more than a match for any Republican nominee.

A constant figure in Virginia politics since 2003, Senator Kaine began his political career as mayor of Richmond before being elected Governor from the position of Lieutenant Governor in 2006.

As the 2008 Democratic primary season drew to a close and Barrack Obama cemented his hold on the nomination, the then-Governor was ranked highly on lists for the second slot on the ticket, which eventually went to then-Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. In 2012 Tim Kaine won a highlycontested race for a Virginia Senate seat, propelling him onto a national stage. During his time in the Senate Kaine has been a champion of bipartisanship; even co-sponsoring a bill with the seminal contemporary establishment Republican senator, John McCain. What Tim Kaine can offer Hillary Clinton is a charismatic, likeable campaigner who speaks fluent Spanish (which he learned as a missionary in Central America), which could assist in swaying swing states such as New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and Florida, all of which have significant Spanish-speaking communities. As a relative moderate from a blue-collar background Senator Kaine has a real capacity to appeal to voters in the Rust Belt and swing states areas the Democrats will need to win in order to prevent a Republican from taking the White House.

PERTH FACT UWA TAV WORKERS ARE EXPECTED TO BE MADE ENTIRELY OF WOOD BY NEXT YEAR

19

T

WORDS BY WILL PAPARO ART BY HAYDEN DALZIEL

he 21st of March 2013 was an unremarkable day – much like any other – at the offices of the Immigration and Protection Tribunal in central Auckland, New Zealand. The tribunal was dealing with its usual caseload of immigration issues, from the deportation of over-stayers on working holiday visas, to hearing appeals against rejected applications for asylum. However, the case the tribunal heard that day was anything but unremarkable. In fact, it was likely an early glimpse of a problem that has the potential to see some countries literally disappear and swathes of people become homeless.

The case involved a man named Ioane Teitiota from Kiribati who was an over-stayer in New Zealand with his wife and two kids. After being pulled over by the police for minor traffic offences, his visa issues came to the attention of authorities, who sought to have him deported back to Kiribati. This is the sort of thing that immigration departments do every day. However, when Mr Teitiota went to lodge an appeal against the deportation order, his argument was something that had never been seen before – he argued that he should be given refuge and protection in New Zealand because his home country was sinking because of climate change. Mr Teitiota had applied to become the world’s first known climate asylum seeker.

Kiribati is indeed being submerged because of global warming. The small Pacific island nation is scarcely more than two metres above sea level at its highest point, and has precious little land available.

Its population of 105,000 is struggling to sustain itself amid the rising sea levels. Land previously used for agriculture is simply not producing the amount it used to, with the islanders’ freshwater supplies being engulfed by seawater. What’s more, much of that land used for agriculture has to now make way for people instead, since homes close to the water are being inundated by the sea. The slowly creeping tides are not an existential crisis just for Kiribati: Tuvalu, Micronesia and the Maldives are other nations also struggling with rising sea levels. This is not some theoretical prediction way off into the future – these nations are experiencing rising sea levels threatening peoples’ livelihoods today. More broadly, climate change will impact agricultural communities in developing nations across the world, with increased temperatures turning the land barren.

longer call their homelands home? Many of the Pacific Islands would probably argue that the immediate responsibility should fall to their closest neighbours – Australia and New Zealand – and the projected costs involved will require a global effort. In a report released by the charity Oxfam after COP21 in Paris, they estimate the cost of adaptation to a 2-degree increase in average temperature is about US$600 billion (AU$772 billion). This would rise to US$800 billion if warming increases to 3 degrees.

What is required is a truly global solution to this looming issue. It is clear that the most affected countries will inevitably be developing states – the states which are least able to financially cope with the effects of climate change. The international community needs to take greater action, not just to limit global warming, but to provide assistance for developing nations to adapt. While the cost of this assistance would be high, the cost of inaction is significantly higher.

Current estimates, although difficult to predict, suggest there could be tens of millions of potential climate refugees in the first half of this century. The resettlement of these displaced people would be a massive cost to the international community. However, this could be mitigated if funding and expertise are provided to the developing world to promote more climate-resistant agriculture, improve water security and, in the case of island states, put in place strategies to prevent inundation wherever feasible. It would be a significantly cheaper option to invest in this now, rather than make the significant social restructuring and aid efforts required to assist and accommodate the human victims of (a largely developed worldmanufactured) climate change. To be fair, progress is being made, with the UN-backed Green Climate Fund is putting some funding into this area. But further work at an international level is needed.

Mr Teitiota ultimately lost his case that day at the tribunal. He appealed and took his case to the Supreme Court of New Zealand, the highest court in the land. This was rejected too, with the court stating that a refugee required a form of persecution, as stated under the 1951 Refugee Convention. However, the court did leave the door open to providing protection to victims of climate change in different circumstances. This certainly isn’t a question that will be going away anytime soon.

While the recent Paris Climate Conference (COP21) was primarily concerned with limiting the effects of climate change, an equally pressing question is how to deal with the inevitable human toll of climate change. The Paris Conference aimed to keep global temperature increases to below 2°C , but this isn’t enough to stop permanent damage to some of the nations most vulnerable to climate change. Who then is going to take responsibility for those who – because of drought, disease, or rising water levels – can no

20

PERTH FACT COMPUTER MOUSES MADE OUT OF ACTUAL MICE AFTER CSIRO CUTS

POLITICS

WORDS BY BRAD GRIFFIN ART BY JESSE WOOD

I

n the early 2000s, a younger Recep Tayyip Erdogan became Prime Minister of Turkey. The early noughties were a time of great prosperity for the country.

Turkey was a stable, relatively peaceful nation and GDP growth was consistently above 4%, leading it to become the 17th biggest economy in the world. Turkey was also playing a careful foreign policy game.

At the time, the northwestern Middle East, where Turkey sits on top – both geographically and strategically – was at peace, and Turkey was able to focus its foreign policy energy in areas including Europe and its own growing clout in international affairs.

And then it all began to crack.

With Erdogan’s ascension to the Presidency in 2013, the Turkish state began to take a decisively more authoritarian outlook.

Some commentators have called Turkey’s direction under Erdogan ‘neo-Ottoman’ – citing various domestic and international decisions including removing the ban on wearing headscarves in public and the increasingly religious rhetoric in lands that were once part of Turkey’s predecessor, the Ottoman Empire.

If Erdogan continues to take Turkey down this revision path, he risks undoing all the positive work done within the country over the last century. Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, the founding father of modern Turkey and the man who led the stiff Ottoman resistance during the Gallipoli Campaign, saw the need for his nation to reform after their catastrophic loss in the First World War. As the inaugural president of the Republic of Turkey, he adopted a western alphabet, traditions and institutions, and laid the groundwork for a foreign policy of working with the West. Despite flares with Greece, intermittent periods of military rule and the Cyprus Question, Turkey has more or less fulfilled the agenda set out by Attaturk. Turkey is now a member of US-led NATO, the most powerful military alliance the world has ever seen.

Yet recent events have strained Turkey’s current position. Intensely geostrategic, Turkey sits at the intersect of Europe and

Asia, holding a commanding position at the top of the Middle East. With stable Europe to their northwest, paranoid Russia to their northeast and a quagmire to their south, Turkey’s foreign policy has had to endure a rapid evaluation over the past few years.

Erdogan however has not been up to the challenge, and is now leading his country into internal and diplomatic crisis.

Described by some as a ‘would-be dictator’ by some media (who put themselves at risk of being prosecuted under a previously seldom-used law which makes it a crime to insult the President), Erdogan has fallen back on empty nationalism with little or no strategic outlook. What was the point of shooting down a Russian jet that may (or may not have, depending on which media source you trust) strayed into Turkish territory for a moment? This incident, while costing Turkey billions in potential business deals with Russia, also soured international relations severely and rang alarm bells at NATO HQ. The fall-out has also contributed to increased tensions between Russia and the US, as evidenced by Russia’s recent buzzing of the destroyer USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea in April.

Erdogan has also supported Bashar AlAssad’s enemies in Syria. This gets a big thumbs-up from the US. However, evidence of their aid to and protection of Islamist rebel groups such as ISIS and al-Nusra Front (the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) is now hard to ignore. Last year when the Kurdish YPG (Democratic Union Party) began liberating Syrian towns on the border with Turkey from ISIS, the Turks dug in their feet. As the YPG converged on Jarablus, a vital conduit for ISIS’ supply lines through Turkey to their ‘capital’ of Raqqa, Turkey threatened to intervene militarily. Whether this has more to do with Erdogan’s and indeed Turkey’s historical mistrust and repression of Kurds

is beside the point. The fact of the matter is that Turkey has shielded ISIS from defeat in the field – a direct snub to the current efforts of their allies embroiled in the Syrian conflict.

Into this mix is Turkey’s continued bid to accede to the European Union. Previously, leaders including former French President Sarkozy spoke defiantly against such a proposition. It has however become very difficult to see how Erdogan’s Turkey would be eligible. Despite years of strong economic growth punctuated by high stability, Erdogan’s erratic and divisive style of leadership and approach to friends and foes alike has greatly diminished the European view of Turkey. Obama’s praise of the Muslim leader in 2009 is unlikely to be repeated, and has aged badly as the Republic strays further and further from democracy and diplomacy.

Rather than reforming his policies and approach, Erdogan is instead using refugee lives as a kind of political threat. Accept us into the EU, he says, or you’ll see a whole lot more of the desperate and needy crossing the border into your lands. European society is already beginning to fracture at the prospect of yet more Syrian refugees entering the continent. From Turkey, their first port of call will be Greece, a nation that cannot afford to support its own people, much less refugees.

With such an aggressive and reckless foreign policy, Turkey’s allies are nervously scratching their heads and asking how they are to trust its motives. NATO does not want to be dragged into a shooting match with Russia, nor does Europe want to seek to integrate a nation that has recently so flagrantly damaged its own democratic institutions, and is so willing to use humanitarian blackmail to further its own goals.

Erdogan seems to fashion himself as the 21st century version of Attaturk. With his continued attempts to disassemble the secular Turkey that Attaturk created, it seems doubtful his legacy will be remembered so fondly.

PERTH FACT PRINCE’S VAULT CONTAINS 30000 COPIES OF THE JOKE TRACK “ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS QUINCE”

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P

WORDS BY RYAN SUCKLING ART BY KATE PRENDERGAST

auline Kael only ever saw a film once. I can imagine her entering a dimly-lit cinema in weary anticipation, her notepad and fraying pencil clutched by her side, scanning the cinema. She’s readying herself for battle. Perhaps she brings along a friend or confidant, a fellow New Yorker colleague, or she stubbornly leaves her lushly hedged brownstone alone.

Honestly, she’s probably there with other critics at some advanced screening. In the cinema, she’s focused and stern, yet feels free to make disapproving noises and a customary tut of the tongue. These are embellishments; and I have become far too speculative of Ms Kael’s movie-going habits.

Kael was similarly generous with her embellishments.

Although, I’m admittedly not familiar with American cinema during Pauline’s reign over the New Yorker film column. I’m afraid only Hitchcock offers some qualification. The rotund, balding expat who couldn’t get enough of eye-caressing his Hollywood sweethearts, plus causing a headache for studio executives. Kael didn’t like Hitchcock very much. Marnie and Vertigo sucked, yet her response to Notorious (which I haven’t seen) was typically Kaelian: “great trash, great fun”.

Kael is a fierce and visceral voice to read. When the credits are rolling, Pauline strides out of the cinema, her notepad damp from her sweaty palms, and charges across New York’s weathered pavement (sorry, sidewalk!), desperate to start laying down filmic law in her review. Her reviews are instinctual and primal in their desire to correctly convey her initial reaction.

Her reaction to a spectacle with which she was obsessed. She was enchanted by Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris; she decried It’s a Wonderful Life with James Stewart, who she might have had something against (he’s in Vertigo).

Pauline knew how to love trash. Her essay “Trash, Art and Movies” is a sloppy attempt to determine how a Kaelian review is written. Rule number one: know good trash when you see it.

Rule number two: don’t trust Hollywood. Meanwhile, Pauline offers slight insight when it comes to how we can identify, distinguish, and evaluate art and trash. The long essay is another tour through Pauline’s put-downs, direct praises, and trashables.

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To her, Hollywood was a greedy, artless chimera you ought to despise, but you don’t. Pauline wants you to appreciate all trash. Forget guilt-ridden weekends binging on animal revengethemed Piranha, Rogue, or Anaconda; perhaps some Cockneys vs. Zombies; or a drunken, phallocentric American comedy like This Is the End (faced with an apocalypse of course). Ms Kael wants you to unashamedly enjoy blood-spilling, cum-spraying, unapologetic trash; not some dull, obscurely philosophical art film at Luna on SX. Feel free to take some whorey, trashy, pulpy pleasure whenever you can! As long as it’s good trash.

Again, I embellish and over-simplify. Ms Kael’s position was slightly more nuanced. Yet she rarely offers a review remotely resembling something with an argument, or just a slim, logical trail to something within the realm of justification. She’s abruptly conclusive. Instead of being my critical companion through the woes of movies and Hollywood, she squeezes my hand tight, tugging and pulling me in all directions. She ends her seminal essay with, “trash has given us an appetite for art.” I don’t know how we got here.

I wonder what Pauline would make of movies now? Perhaps she’d take to Deadpool. The excruciatingly self-referential Marvel movie, with an antihero and enough violence and sex to satisfy anyone’s appetite for a Thursday evening. I think she’d get bored of seeing people get chopped in half. Whilst doodling on the first page of her notes, she’d most likely miss Deadpool’s seventh jerk-off reference.

Pauline Kael wasn’t without her own critics. Enter Renata Adler.

In 1980, Adler penned “The Perils of Pauline”, securing its place among New York’s most heated critical feuds. There’s nothing

PERTH FACT ANY CRITICISM OF MALCOLM TURNBULL’S HIGH SCHOOL POETRY TO BE LABELLED “CLASS WARFARE” BY THE AUSTRALIAN

“Who?” R. tentatively asks with dread as he spots the incriminating title on the Review’s cover: “The Perils of Pauline”.

like a bit of literary scandal. Apparently Susan Sontag was in stitches over the piercing finality with which Adler delivered each sentence. Adler accused Kael of bullying her readers into accepting her unsound judgements, which contained “nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility”.

Ouch!

The take-down article is thorough and a very enjoyable read.

Adler captures Kael’s fleeting and salacious comments, her unbridled capacity to coerce the reader using dirty tactics. I bet there were quite a few coffee and stale Danish meetings with the New Yorker’s editor at the time, William Shawn.

I indulge my imagination once more…

Pauline fumbles with her keys, feeling flustered and irritable.

She drops her worn leather bag on the steps, along with her prized papers and review notes. She doesn’t care. Her copy of the New York Review of Books is fastened under her arm, creasing her starchy coat in an effort to keep it from falling. She gets more control over the key, pushes her hip into the front door, and stumbles into the hall. The echoes begin, and she kicks off her heels and throws the keys to the floor. R. better be home.

FILM

“Renata-I’m-the-fucking-queen-at-the-New Yorker-Adler. You know, I remember her from the guild evening in ‘77, all puffed up after getting that Hemingway award. Pretty, blonde, skinny thing. Had a childish plait she slung across her shoulder. Acting all elegant and literary with her philosophical claptrap.”

R. begins reading the article after a doubtful look at Pauline.

She has propped herself onto the armchair, feet shoved in under the arm. Resting the whiskey on her knee. She watches him disdainfully, as though he is participating in Adler’s cruel act by merely reading her blasphemy. Her critical life is coming under fierce and unprecedented examination by all of literary New York, and all she can do is watch her only confidant read, and await his verdict. Surely R. will comfort her.

Pauline sluggishly gets up and tip-toes across the room, leaving R. to his judgements, whatever they are. “Where are you going?” he calls.

“To my study,” she proclaims defiantly. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

He is silent.

Pauline is relieved to enter the calming and controlling surroundings of her study. The pristinely-bound books, stacks of paper hiding the crevices of the floor from view. She reaches for a brand new notepad, plucks her pencil from the lefthand draw of her desk, stows away her stockinged feet, and begins scratching onto the page: “The Rage of Renata: A Tale of Treachery and Trash…”

There’s light streaming into the hall from the living room. R. lies supine on the vanilla chaise lounge, twirling his fingers through his thick brown hair, and balances a tumbler of whiskey on his belly. Pauline storms in.

“Well you’re home early—" “What a fucking bitch!” Pauline slams the copy of Review onto R.’s chest and collapses onto the adjacent armchair.

“W-What’s this?” R. stammers.

“That pretentious cow has had it in for me all this time. I knew it as soon I was given the film column at the New Yorker. I bet she was having talks with William to set my downfall in motion.”

Pauline makes her way to the minibar, and sloppily begins her sojourn through the warm caress of quality whiskey.

PERTH FACT CAN YOU ACTUALLY KEEP AWAY A FLU BY STAYING PERMANENTLY DRUNK? I’M FINDING OUT SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO

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FILM REVIEWS as one of the best American directors of this generation. Despite his pedigree, Nichols falls short with this latest offering, mostly because he isn’t offering much at all. Midnight Special follows Roy and his friend Lucas, who are harbouring Alton, Roy’s estranged son with unexplained supernatural powers, on a road trip across the Bible Belt. They’re being chased by both the FBI and a religious cult, who respectively see Alton as a saviour and as a possible weapon.

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL Director Jeff Nichols Starring Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst & Adam Driver Jeff Nichols is well past making a name for himself in the American film scene.

The 37-year-old’s acclaimed offerings — 2007’s Shotgun Stories, 2011’s Take Shelter, 2012’s Mud — have cemented his status

The film uses a whole bucketful of suspense techniques to keep us on the edge of our seats, but perhaps a bucketful was a bit too much. Used with more care and finesse, the lack of dialogue, moody music and dark lighting would have worked. Yet it feels as if Nichols has done a good job at burying the film in a sandpit of obscurity, offering iceberg tips of intel and not much else.

More information would have made sense of some otherwise vague developments, which when not anchored by context become flimsy and questionable. We The established characters are welcome sights, of course, but they still find time to grow and learn as the story develops.

Scarlet Witch and Vision grow closer, Hawkeye is funnier, Black Widow is colder, Ant-Man is the fish-out-of-water, and War Machine and Falcon show the most conviction to their opposing causes.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR Directors Anthony Russo & Joe Russo Starring Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Don Cheadle & many many more Directors Joe and Anthony Russo deliver an adventure that builds on the thrills and chills of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and even makes the best parts of The Winter Soldier bigger and better, in Captain America: Civil War.

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The newcomers to the stage steal every scene and are further proof that new is always welcome if done right. Black Panther is intense and ferocious, performed rather beautifully by Chadwick Boseman. And then there’s Spider-Man. The best SpiderMan and Peter Parker ever created onscreen is right here, and he is Tom Holland, not Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield. But it is Iron Man, Captain America and Bucky Barnes that will shatter you into atom-sized pieces.

Robert Downey Jr. shows the most cynical, arrogant and emotional side of Tony Stark.

Having lost almost everything he’s ever loved and killed hundreds with his failed creation Ultron, Tony must surrender himself to the government. Chris Evans just gets better in his portrayal of Steve Rogers, and he too surrenders himself – but does so

are expected to readily accept that Roy’s childhood friend (whom he ceased connections with after joining a cult) would put his life on the line to protect his longtime-no-see friend’s son. Without any background information and impressively limited character development the film becomes incapable of making this scenario believable. Another example is Alton’s powers — he’s first shown to the audience as some type of Cyclops hybrid as he shoots sapphire beams from his eyes into those of an ex-cult member. And yet again we never find out the why or how, such that what could have been interesting is just frustrating and intangible.

Though the film does revolve around the idea of things that are beyond human understanding, I’m not sure whether this concept works when applied to the film’s narrative. Watch it for the classic sci-fi imagery towards the end, but maybe at home, where you can skip scenes and exhale large amounts of oxygen without feeling like a lousy person.

REVIEW BY SIMON CARRELLO

to the only thing he trusts: his friend Bucky.

Sebastian Stan lets us into Bucky’s mind and we recognise him as a true hero.

However, match Iron Man against Captain America, and what you get is a climax more reserved in setting, but larger in heart than anything seen before. Their fight is directed with the intensity and fury of Michael Mann or Martin Scorsese; a genius work.

But enough with the doom and gloom, because Captain America: Civil War is still doing what Marvel movies do better than anyone else: fun. The airport battle, glimpsed in trailers, is not a fight-to-thedeath, but more of a playground brawl with constant quips, mind-blowing surprises.

The fluid, confident direction means the scene is so giant but never confusing as to who is where and what.

Captain America: Civil War is a rollercoaster of incredible action, great humour, perfect tone and pacing, with an amazing cast working harmoniously against a unique villain from Daniel Brühl, and a showcase of strong writing, stronger direction and attention to detail. The best MCU movie since The Avengers.

REVIEW BY CHRISTOPHER SPENCER

PERTH FACT NEW RADIOHEAD ALBUM CAUSES PERTH DAMS TO OVERFLOW WITH WHITEBOY TEARS

FILM

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WORDS BY BRIDGET RUMBALL

I

have always professed to be a fan of the heavy 1980s-themed revival movement that is sweeping through popular music as of recent. Having being raised on a healthy diet of Depeche Mode, The Human League, The Cure and Meat Loaf (amongst others) by my parents, perhaps my musical tastes have been biased towards loving any tune that a) is completely over the top and b) sounds remotely like it’s out of a John Hughes motion picture. Hence why I’m completely here for the tsunami of ‘80s influenced’ albums that seem to be released every second day, with some of the most wellknown examples over the past few years being Walk the Moon’s overblown Talking is Hard, Chvrches’ debut The Bones of What You Believe and the quietly lauded E·mo·tion from ‘one hit wonder’ Carly Rae Jepson.

French producer M83’s brand-spankingnew album Junk is yet another of these 80s inspired releases. Despite being only the second of frontman Anthony Gonzalez’s releases to successfully jump across the Atlantic Ocean into mainstream Western popularity (the first being the acclaimed Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming), it is his seventh overall. The first five albums in his discography are extremely synth rock based, utilising guitar solos over electronic production; but Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming marked a turning point in his musical style.

Lead single “Midnight City” was used on the soundtrack for every teen movie and as the opening theme for every reality TV show throughout 2011, and was praised

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for gearing M83’s sound towards a softer, 80s bent.

Now, I’m totally fine with musical tributes to a time, place or decade that has gone before it. In my books, ‘paying respects’ to your genre’s, or even just popular music in general’s, predecessors through subtle-enough references is more clever than plagiaristic. A particular lick of psych-infused guitar in the middle of a Tame Impala breakdown may reflect the sounds of selected pioneers of psych rock in the early 70s; in much the same way, a differentiated meter amidst a Kendrick verse can throw a listener back to the melting pot of RnB/rap style that defined the late 80s and early 90s. If anything, references like these make the song seem more nuanced overall, and generally earn you a lot more critical praise than if you’d gone for a blander approach.

of Susanne Sundfør and a breathy spokenword interlude which altogether reminds you a bit too much of two white and horny teens making out in the jock’s car in the school parking lot, circa 1983. Instrumental interludes like “Moon Crystal” and “The Wizard” play like awkward elevator music, and the background noise for a 1986

In saying this however, there is a goddamn limit. There are only so many times that you can rehash the motifs and stereotypes of a single genre, before looking like an idiot and overstepping the line. This is most likely why Junk leaves a really bad musical taste in my mouth – like the saying goes, too many misfits in the Breakfast Club makes the cliché even worse. Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming was the album that made M83 ‘famous’ in the mainstream; hence, it’s only natural that Gonzalez would try and repeat the formula on its follow up.

However, it’s such an overblown repeat of the formula that it comes across as naff and way too busy; it’s absolutely way too try-hard in its approach to 80s revival.

Sussan ad respectively; whereas closing

A good 70% of the album plays like the drawn-out, slow-dance-esque lull in a high school prom, with the only exceptions being the exuberantly out of place opener “Do It, Try It” and its successor, “Go!”. If you’re looking for specific examples, “For The Kids” combines a cheesy Kenny G saxophone solo, the lulling female vocals

and instead becomes trackside forgettable

track “Sunday Night 1987” has managed to somehow combine the distinctly Parisian muted saxophone with excessive amounts of layered vocals and slow synth.

It’s like Gonzalez is trying to replicate the 1980s from both a Parisian and American perspective – trying to capitalise on both markets, with a common theme of what’s considered popular music in the now – and fails rather miserably. In what could very well be a self-fulfilling prophecy, Junk has in reality become just that – an Icarus of an album that tries so goddamn hard to jump even further onto the 80s revival train than Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming did, junk because of it. It’s a lesson of specifically what not to do when emulating a genre, or at least paying homage to it – a forewarning of sorts to the next artist that dares attempt the same jump next week.

PERTH FACT THE NANNUP TIGER IS A COVER FOR COLIN BARNETT’S TASTE FOR HUMAN FLESH

WORDS BY EAMONN KELLY

Black metal has kind of a bad rap with people – it is an incredibly cagey genre for beginners because of its fan base of big scary men with scary face paint holding scary medieval weaponry. This isn’t helped by the whole Mayhem thing, what with the lead singer committing suicide then the guitarist taking a Polaroid and using it as an album cover and later, but by no means lesser, the same guitarist being stabbed to death out of paranoia by one Mr Varg Vikernes (aka Burzum, but that is a whole other thing I will leave you, dear reader, to investigate and make judgements on after being hopefully inspired to seek out more of the genre by the subject of this article). Run-on sentence and excessive bracket usage aside, black metal is billed as a violent and edgy genre for violent and edgy teenagers looking to spook their parents. All this is noise however: this is just an image. If you think real hard about it, black metal and the whole Satan worshipping thing achieves what it sets out to. It appeals to only the most trve kvlt, the most genuine. Black metal is sincerity embodied, and that is sadly a very rare thing in today’s music scenes.

Most people cannot even tell the difference between black metal and its decidedly more br00tal cousin, death metal. Black metal is characterised by ring-wraith ‘wretched’ vocals and tremolo (aka faster than the speed of light) picking and death metal by guttural cookie monster ‘pig-squealed’ vocals and hard-punching riffs.

The singing is one of the main gripes people have with extreme metal. I cannot count how many times I have been asked by my friends why I listen to it because “you can’t even hear what they are saying”. My answer is always the same: that’s not the point, and besides, that’s why lyric sheets exist. Another thing I’ve heard going around is that it takes no talent. Take it from someone who has done it before, extreme metal vocals require painstaking breath control, the ability to be very loud and to push the sound produced to the bottom of your throat; it is an incredibly demanding and very dangerous vocal style to nail.

Now, Liturgy has a bad reputation with black metal fans. This is largely because of lead singer Hunter Hendrix. In 2010 in the lead up to the release of the band’s 3rd album Aesthethica, Hendrix published a manifesto entitled Transcendental Black Metal which basically shat all over the legacy that Mayhem and co. had established in the early 90s. Hendrix thought that black metal was too depressing, and that deliberately relishing in elements

I remember hating Liturgy as a teen with the passion only a crazed fan can; they had the nerve to criticise a genre’s foundation and then produce an album that “only hipsters liked”; I used to call them ‘Shiturgy’. I was a lot less mature then and a lot less willing to deviate from my chosen interests, so when I actually did listen to the album, it blew my mind. Aesthethica is furious. More aware of my standing in the world, I ‘got’ what Hendrix was on about.

It doesn’t mean that ‘Transcendental Black Metal’ is any less ridiculous (Hendrix’s manifesto is absolute drivel), but the kernel of a good idea is there in Aesthethica.

MUSIC

#4.

LITURGY – AESTHETICA

of human decay (“madness, atrophy, misanthropy” to use his ten dollar words) is counter-productive to a being well adjusted human being. Hendrix instead chooses to idolise productive human values of self-improvement (“sanity, hypertrophy, philanthropy”). The image you might have now is that Liturgy produces happy music for happy people, but that’s not entirely the case. Aesthethica is still packed full of black metal’s characteristic anguish, here rebranded from the utter hopeless desolation of smouldering ruins of a burnt out church, into more mundane fury at your current situation in life. Say what you will, Liturgy takes the genre seriously -- at least they did before they fucked up with ridiculous MIDI horns and drums on 2015’s The Ark Work.

I should probably actually talk about the music. For one thing, the drummer is fantastic, superhuman even. Greg Fox innovates here with the ‘burst beat’, which is basically a blast beat but ‘looser’ on the snare, which creates ghost notes, which act like echoes.

It’s cool and it is probably the most interesting thing done with the blast beat since the beginnings of extreme metal in the 70s.

Fox also plays fast and loose with the idea of consistent time signatures, and is able to maintain a blast beat through a signature change. That is impressive.

This is a strange black metal album, as it’s actually danceable in points. The drums and guitars often lock into this groove which I dare you not to bob your head along to. The guitars rip holes in the sky with their tremolo interplay. There are some savage riffs on here, some that dwarf the ‘classics’, and almost all of them are in the major scale. The whole album sounds huge – it feels as if an entire symphony orchestra is playing to you, yet it really is just four guys. It’s incredibly bright and cathartic, which is a refreshing thing in a genre overrun with much doom and gloom.

Hendrix wails like a banshee, producing some sort of sound out of very real pain that the listener can identify with. You do get the sense from how far back the vocals lay in the mix that Hendrix screams from the soul. Hendrix also counterpoints this fury with some faux Gregorian chant on select tracks. He makes this semiridiculous ‘HEEEY’ sound and then builds upon it with loops and more chants. It certainly is an acquired taste but it makes for very interesting vocal interludes. Give it a shot, you might end up actually liking it.

PERTH FACT TURNBULL HAS A JOB LINED UP WITH TRANSPERTH IF THIS WHOLE THING DOESN’T PAN OUT

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WEEZER - THE WHITE ALBUM (CRUSH MUSIC) REVIEW BY EAMONN KELLY 2/10

Rivers Cuomo is 46 dude, that’s like, 4 less years than my dad. Rivers Cuomo is old enough to be my dad, man. Hold me.

Unfortunately for bands like Weezer, escaping the shadow of their earliest efforts (in this case the eternally vulnerable Blue and Pinkerton) proves very difficult. See, it’s hard to place a 46-year-old in a teenager’s shoes these days, and it seems fake to do so. Weezer have lost their piss and vinegar; they aren’t discontented anymore, which is what made their early albums ‘classics’. Knowing also that Rivers Cuomo is worth a neat 30 million also helps to undermine the sincerity. This fact makes it difficult to suspend your disbelief when they sing about eternal love and subsequent heartbreak.

There were quite a few moments on this thing which made me screw up my face and cough in disgust. Not least of which is when Rivers starts rapping about Cannoli’s and the like on “Thank God for Girls”. In this track Weezer are caricatures of a group of dads sitting in a room with a whiteboard brainstorming what the kids are into these days. It’s not even a good rap – in typical Weezer fashion they force lyrics out that don’t fit the rhythm of the song, and instead of being necessary as they have felt in previous offerings, they feel forced.

It’s also not a very technically proficient album. Most of what’s here is basic – four chords in a standard time signature. The songwriting process is lazy. Of course, writing four chord songs in standard timing is not a musical crime – most of the best music is written in such a way.

However, when you do this, you better make damn sure you at least do something interesting. On this effort Weezer don’t do anything interesting; the lyrics are by the numbers and the instrumentation is very simplistic. Especially when compared to albums like Pinkerton – which has far more interesting instrumentation and a relatable concept that allows for actual individual self-expression as compared to the generalised dreck found here – The White Album falls woefully short.

Avey, frontman Paul; Panda B., other frontman John; and Geologist is none other than George reincarnate, that tripper), and another example of a Kickstarted artist having bumfuck nothing to show for it, several years and weepy forum posts later. But despite his endearingly low esteem in the eyes of AnCo fans, and despite the roundly-doubtful or outright apathetic response his thought-failed Kickstarter had, Deakin has put together an inventive, mind-bending and addictive album; but best of all, just so thankfully free from that fucking vocal echo-harmony thing from Painting With. This is from a guy whose greatest prior creation was a shoe made out of sleeping bag material.

These six songs present a dreamy walk through a washed-out psychedelic vista, coalescing and dissolving at turns. It's enjoyable and interesting listening; but by failing to venture in any bold directions outside of the neo-psych oeuvre, Deakin's solo productions will never escape comparisons to his career with Animal Collective, at least in my mind. "Footy" is like a rejected off-cut of 2007's Strawberry Jam, while "Shadow Mine" is a straight throwback to 2003's Here Comes The Indian. To add, several songs are unavoidably derivative of other AnCo members' solo work; namely Avey Tare & Panda Bear.

Album closer "Good House" is all about the effect-cooked loops and pondering, sweet vocals of the latter, while "Footy", for example, has the needlessly hectic taste of the former's latest album, Slasher Flicks.

This would be a criticism if it weren't generally as good/better than them. Album opener "Golden Chords" is the most original of the six tracks, and the best, with multi-layered guitars accompanying sweet vocals about sucking at expressing yourself and being bad at making albums.

Listening to this album, you might get a sense of Deakin as a pathological procrastinator, or manic-depressive, or else afflicted by some other variety of creative paralysis to have spent six years making an album that feels largely incomplete: an intro, a couple of direct, poppy singles interleaved with wishy-washy ambient tracks, and an outro, thirty minutes total. It’s a minor gripe really; with his debut solo album, Deakin brings freshness to an explicitly experimental style that’s somehow become tired. Largely incomplete and vaguely plagiaristic, Sleep Cycle is nonetheless a worthwhile listen.

PARQUET COURTS - HUMAN PERFORMANCE (ROUGH TRADE) REVIEW BY HARRY MANSON

DEAKIN SLEEP CYCLE (MY ANIMAL HOME) REVIEW BY NICK MORLET 8/10

Before now, Deakin had really been two things to mind of each Pitchfork-reading broad-listening cool guy: the 'Ringo' of millennial psychedelic savants Animal Collective (For the sake of completion: 28

7/10

It’s easy to look at Parquet Courts as martyrs for ‘social consciousness’ folk music, examining web-warped society through poetry and reconciling techno-dislocation with unmasculine punk and offbeat indie rock from the internet-pre-empting decades of yore. Andrew Savage and co. no doubt grew up educating themselves on that corner of music history spearheaded by Lou Reed and Brian Eno and Neil Young where all anyone wanted to hear was a guitarist experiencing inner maelstrom with agreeable chords in hand, narrowly dodging Led

PERTH FACT PAUL JOHNSON NAMES HIMSELF THE SOLE PRIME BNOC

Zeppelin territory by shooing away testosterone’s influence on the whole procedure.

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The band’s goal is mostly clear five albums deep: codify their late-20th century idols’ art into a platform for contemporary messages; a similar mechanism to the one folk music has used historically. I mean, we can all turn a blind ear when a ‘60s folk singer is sitting there fingerpicking C F and G on a Martin, because those musical elements and cues have been codified by so many different artists that it just doesn’t matter anymore; it’s a language supplementary to the actual point of the music. That concept of rock music being a communal exchange of ideas is what Parquet Courts is going for. How the band applies it on Human Performance is admirable, but disorienting. In finally cleaning up and colourising their previously dry sepia sound, the instrumental sounds and cues occasionally become so directly referential to very particular music that it starts feeling like a joke. “Captive of the Sun” is the sound of an Odelay era Beck going cold turkey. “Steady on My Mind” is, like, literally a Velvet Underground song. Parquet Courts is of course just one among countless projects under that influence, the thing is that here they’re not exactly ‘taking cues’ but rather holding their headstocks and pedals up to the sunlight and tracing “Pale Blue Eyes” nuance for nuance. “One Man No City” also tries to hide its rephrased plagiarism by turning the nightlight raga of “Lady Godiva’s Operation” into a roadtrip jam.

Human Performance feels most assured at its most concise and poppy – “Outside”, “Berlin Got Blurry”, “Pathos Prairie” as well as the title track are all among the band’s most profound moments. This is engaging, modestly straightforward rock music with a few textural quirks and extremely strong lyricism. Parquet Courts may be overtly influenced by other music but they end up getting away with it because, like folk, it’s the singing that holds the purpose. It’s just a shame how wobbly they straddle the line between reference and parody.

PELICAN MIXTAPE 1. Sonic Youth – “Total Trash” (Daydream Nation) 2. Mercury Rev – “Trickle Down” (Boces) 3. Yo La Tengo – “86 Second Blowout” (May I Sing With Me) 4. Wireheads – “The Frisco Tracks” (Big Issues) 5. Pavement – “Perfume-V” (Slanted & Enchanted) 6. The Velvet Underground – “White Light/White Heat” (White Light/White Heat) 7. Neil Young – “Down By the River” (Everybody Knows This is Nowhere) 8. Modest Mouse – “Trailer Trash” (The Lonesome Crowded West) 9. Beck – “Beercan” (Mellow Gold) 10. Mac Demarco – “Robson Girl” (2) 11. Royal Headache – “Garbage” (High) 12. Alex G – “Snot” (Beach Music)

PERTH FACT JOIN THE CULT OF GALLUINATI: NEVER GO POTATO-LESS AGAIN

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WORDS BY WADE MCCAGH ART BY CAMDEN WATTS

A

bout half an hour into his epic, three encore solo performance at Perth Arena in February, Prince looked out over the hypnotised crowd firmly in the palm of his hand during “Controversy” and, altering the lyrics slightly to suit the occasion, playfully asked “Do you believe in God? Do you believe in me?”

It was a good question. It seemed inexplicably surreal witnessing such a legendary entertainer, who’d been on stage in Auckland less than 24 hours before, sitting alone at the centre of a stadium, surrounded on all sides by transfixed, adoring fans create something so energetic and yet so intimate. At 57, an age when most entertainers are well into leisurely touring schedules and pedestrian recitals of their hits, he had travelled around the Earth almost spontaneously to put on a series of shows based simply on a piano and himself. Nowhere to hide, nothing to fall back on, nothing planned in advance. A master in his element, still finding something new and exciting and worthwhile after nearly forty years of performance. He was so vital, so in the moment. It felt like he could play forever.

••• In recent months, I’d been revisiting Prince’s early albums – in particular 1980’s Dirty Mind and 1981’s Controversy, where he first captured the wider public’s attention before embarking on the legendary run of masterpiece albums that decade that would cement his superstar status. I’m struck by how much the opening eponymous track of Controversy serves as a sort of mission statement for the entirety of Prince’s musical oeuvre; a foundation of raw sexuality with a side of self-mythologising; acknowledgement of the curiosity over his ambiguousness (his gender, sexuality, ethnicity, et al.) while firmly rejecting arbitrary binaries; a preoccupation with pursuing pleasure and celebrating life made all the more urgent amidst the everpresent spectre of death; the presence of the spiritual that oscillates between a Dionysian and a Manichaean outlook; and an ultimate resolution to destroy boundaries and embrace inclusion and togetherness. All set to a devastatingly funky guitar/bass/synth combination.

Part of the legend of Prince is that he emerged fully formed as an artist in 1978; he wrote every song and more amazingly played every single instrument on his first two albums. But his instrumental virtuosity takes a backseat to the clarity of his vision as an artist and, despite his overwhelming shyness, his willingness to stand firm and fight for his vision. His multiethnic, sexually diverse band became a visual rejection of being pigeon-holed as ‘black music’. The genre-defying double album 1999 proved that he was more than just R&B or funk, but rock

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& roll, electronica, jazz, or just unashamed pop. Most musicians would be fundamentally shaken after being booed off stage opening for the Rolling Stones in the early 80s. Not Prince. His self-belief in his music, that he was ahead of the curve and that the public would catch up, would ultimately be validated: he was the most successful chart act of the 1980s.

That self-belief in who he was and his refusal to equivocate or hide his identity from the world was what made him such a captivating and important figure during the 80s and 90s to so many different people. In the aftermath of Thursday’s news, we’ve witnessed this in the personal reflections of countless writers, performers, celebrities and fans. In the midst of the current cultural and political climate around gender identity worldwide, it’s difficult to overstate the impact of an artist as influential as Prince in the 80s leading the way by actively rejecting gender norms and demonstrating that there is no ‘correct’ way to be a man. Prince gave you implicit permission to be weird, to not conform simply to appease society. There’s a natural compulsion to compare him to the recently departed, similarly androgynous David Bowie. But where Bowie was alien and otherworldly – transitioning between polished personas with the ease of a great actor – Prince was always much more human and approachable; someone with a more stable identity over time that allowed him to express his vulnerability and allowed you to relate on a personal level. Bowie could have been from Mars. Prince was (and remained till the end) a kid from Minnesota.

••• In my opinion, Prince was the most talented star of all time. His vocal range was vast and his falsetto was the gold standard. He mastered several instruments, was a bandleader comparable to Duke Ellington or Miles Davis (who himself compared Prince to Ellington), and was legitimately in the conversation as one of the greatest guitar players of all time. (Watch Prince’s solo

PERTH FACT NEW MAD MAX TO BE FILMED IN KWINANA

Where to start with Prince: 7 songs from 7 albums

When I woke up and heard the news, the first song I reached for “Sometimes It Snows in April”, the closing song of Parade. It’s a raw and emotional ballad that was recorded in one take about Prince’s character Christopher Tracy in the film Under the Cherry Moon (which he wrote and directed) who, spoiler alert, dies at the end. Prince was fond of using that phrase to answer the questions of executives and journalists trying to better understand and categorise him. But I can’t help but think when he wrote that song 30 years ago, he was writing about himself and acknowledging his mortality. “Sometimes I wish that life was never ending/ And all good things, they say, never last.”

We were lucky to have him as long as we did.

HEAD (DIRTY MIND, 1980) Dirty Mind was a major jump forward for Prince as an artist, breaking out from the designation of 'just an R&B artist' and into something much more interesting and difficult to define.

It's also where Prince the deviant sex machine really emerges, nowhere more so than this track, where Prince is apparently so alluring that brides on their way to be married are compelled to blow him.

1999 (1999, 1982) After achieving success with the rock-centric Dirty Mind and Controversy, Prince took another sudden turn and created his most ambitious statement to date, a sprawling double album that resists genre and thematic classification. The constant thread through the album is laid out in the titular opener; the apocalypse is coming soon and you need to get down while you still can. It also introduces the Oberheim OB-SX and the Linn LM-1 as the weapons of choice for the Revolution era.

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during “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” at George Harrison’s 2004 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and then watch George Harrison’s son Dhani’s face during that solo. Pure elation).

His studio production remains remarkably modern and inventive, with the ability to create sounds both richly complex and ridiculously simple. His songwriting ability, demonstrated through his own prolific output (a staggering 39 studio albums, countless other releases, and the legendary vault in Paisley Park containing decades of unreleased material which, distressingly, may never be heard according to his wishes) and the dozens of songs he penned for other artists (not to mention those he’s suspected of writing) is only rivalled by his fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan. His 2007 Super Bowl performance ranks among the greatest performances of all time. He was an amazing dancer. In many ways, the sheer overwhelming sum of his output means inevitably there are areas where he’ll always be underrated. And yet, despite this, it felt like he still had so much left to give the world. He was still touring, still recording. In March, Prince announced he was writing a memoir.

I WANNA BE YOUR LOVER (PRINCE, 1979) Prince's first major hit is in retrospect a basic disco-pop track, but it features many of the trademarks he'd become known for.

The entire song is sung with a Gibb brother falsetto, contains references to gender ambiguity and, while comparatively tame for what was to come, features a startlingly direct sexuality in the lyrics. It's a remarkably polished, confident song for a 21-year-old.

WHEN DOVES CRY (PURPLE RAIN, 1984) Easily the most difficult track to select, as Purple Rain is such a perfect album that you can mount a legitimate argument for all nine tracks. (Shout-out to “Darling Nicki”, which is basically responsible for the invention of Parental Advisory warnings).

If you haven't listened to it in full, do so immediately. The reason 'When Doves Cry' earns its place here is how radical it was as a single, a funk song with no bass that you still want to dance to. When he played it to the Revolution for the first time, he bragged only he could write a hit single with no bass. As usual, he was right.

GIRLS AND BOYS (PARADE, 1986) Under the Cherry Moon as a film was nowhere near what Purple Rain had been, commercially or critically, but its soundtrack Parade was a masterpiece of raw, minimalist funk and jazz. (“Kiss” is so sparse that it was essentially a demo, and Prince had to fight bitterly with Warner Brothers to get it released as the lead single. It delivered his first US #1 since Purple Rain). Not released as a single, “Girls and Boys” is a deceptively funky number, revolving around a deep baritone sax hook and a duck-like keyboard sound that sneaks up on you.

SIGN O’ THE TIMES (SIGN O’ THE TIMES, 1987) At a crossroads after disbanding the Revolution towards the end of 1986, Prince supposedly recorded four albums that went unreleased before the release of double album Sign o’ the Times, a return to a more or less solo Prince relying on his musical aptitude and vision. The result is a complex, restless album that serves as Prince's most varied work and as a time capsule of that moment in America. The title track serves as his version of 'The Message', reflecting the burgeoning rap scene while creating a dark, brooding sound - the iconic intro is unlike anything that had come before in pop.

GETT OFF (DIAMONDS AND PEARLS, 1991) By the 90s some considered Prince a spent force, especially coming off the previous year's film flop Graffiti Bridge (though the soundtrack was still a chart topper). Diamonds and Pearls feels like Prince reminding everyone that he's still Prince producing an eclectic six singles and multiple hits. He begins lead single “Gett Off” with a window-shattering scream before hitting you with an irresistible flute melody/industrial drums one-two punch.

PERTH FACT ATTN: PERTH WEED DEALERS. WEARING A TRENCH COAT IN A PARK DOES NOT MAKE YOU BADASS

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WORDS BY ZOE KILBOURN ART BY JESSE WOOD

1. MANOSPHERE Hoo boy. Everyone’s across the Red Pill now, but you’ve taken it one step further, you sick fuck. You’re chasing up the personal blogs of the biggest hitters in the Manosphere, the neocon anarcho-capitalist cesspool everyone loves to hate. You’re trawling through the personal blogs of borderline sex offenders with names that ooze insecurity: ‘Captain Capitalism’, ‘Illimitable Man’, a bunch of faux-Latin lunges at upward mobility. You’re getting to know the lingo, the internal dramas, the evopsych controversies; you’re starting to throw around phrases like ‘cock carousel’ and ‘beta bucks’, and you don’t even believe this shit. There’s an exquisite agony in recognising that the people who most passionately preach ‘female solipsism’ are the least selfaware men on the planet, and there’s no way you can convince them. You’re not even gonna try. You’re just going to passively contribute to their ad revenue.

Maybe one day you will download that free 9-page texting manual.

If you’re feeling ambitious: Sex and Character; the worst of Schopenhauer.

Why do you do it? Is it comforting to know, for once in your life, that you are undeniably, indefensibly right? Did you need to be reminded how much people still hate women like you? Do you get off on all the drama?

2. JUNK YOU GOT FROM A BLAZING SWAN BOOK EXCHANGE You’ve spent three days wandering around Burning Man Lite and they’ve finally set up the lending library (delayed due to torrential country rain).You’re tossing up between three books in a series by a nineties Jungian psychoanalyst, allegedly running a very successful practice in California.

You’re tempted by He and She, two complete breakdowns of the male/ female experience, but you settle on Ecstasy, which promises to put you in touch with your inner manifestation of Dionysus. An entire chapter is a dialogue transcribed by one lucid dreamer: she compliments Big D on his “surprisingly dry” sense of humour, but the whole

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thing reads like an /r/Seduction field report. You fail to meet anyone during your own psychedelic experiences later that evening, except for a fellow tripper, who fights off candy-flipper giggles to tell you that Dionysus ditched you. And you could’ve scored one of two copies of Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps.

If you’re feeling ambitious: some of the Bryce Courtenay residue left at the end of the festival.

Why do you do it? Were you just trying to get the most out of your ticket price?

Were you trying to compensate for your inability to experience the whole psychedelic shebang as spiritual? Do you think you might be a hoarder?

3. JUNK YOU REVIEWED PELICAN FOUR YEARS AGO

FOR

Someone set aside copies of Jane Eyre Laid Bare (“an erotic reimagining”) and Naomi Wolf’s Vagina for you, and you’re still grateful for them.

If you’re feeling ambitious: The Booker Prize winner you got three pages into and fudged a review for using Goodreads and intuition.

Why do I do it? Was Vagina underrated?

(It wasn’t.)

4. LABELS ON “INDIE DRINKS” ACTUALLY PRODUCED BY MAJOR INTERNATIONAL CORPORATIONS OR MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING SCHEMES

whatever contemporary novel you were assigned in English Lit. If you’re really unlucky, next to Atlas Shrugged.

If you’re feeling ambitious: the 150 books you’ve had overdue from the Reid library since 2015, all of which were showcase loans.

Why do you do it? Did you peak in high school? You weren’t even that popular in high school!

6. THE AWL’S “CLASSIC TRASH” You’re not sure how The Awl wound up at the top of your Facebook feed, given it’s a weird little NYC-centric blog that’s largely about revisiting old romcoms, but you’re glad you found it. You thought the article on Love, Actually (“hate actually!”) was pretty funny, you’ve grieved for the loss of advice columnist Polly Ester (alive, but behind a paywall), and you spent thirty minutes engrossed in an article about bedbugs. And now they’re pushing an article series dedicated to trashy novels of the ‘30s through ‘90s, which is very convenient, because that’s what you’re writing an article about! And now you can read a selection of quotes from Riders without actually having to read Riders. Although, come to think of it, you just might.

If you’re feeling ambitious: the trash itself.

Why do I do it? Does part of you feel like you’re above this stuff? You loved Rebecca!

If you’re feeling ambitious: That’s Life!, conveniently located near the check-out for easily manipulated suckers like you.

Why do I do it? Are you trying to build some sort of relationship with the corporate nobodies bleeding you dry?

Are you trying to justify your mindless compulsive consumption?

5. YOUR ‘SHOWCASE’ BOOKSHELF THAT HASN’T CHANGED SINCE YOU WERE SEVENTEEN The collected poems of Edgar Allen Poe next to War and Peace (earmarked at page 4) next to what has to be Bukowski’s shortest work next to

PERTH FACT ONE MAN’S TRASH IS ANOTHER MAN’S PLACE TO RAISE A RACOON

A/N: so I don’t own deltora quest obviously it belongs to EMILY RODDA!!! Pls don’t sue me Hi my name is jasmine and I have waist length ebony hair with green tips and green eyes with long eyelashes. I grew up in the forests of silence and used to wear grey guard uniforms that I made into my own clothes but now I’m living in the castle so I have to wear dresses.

Today I’m wearing a dress Leif’s tailor made me which is a floor length blue gown that shows off my cleavage and is tied like a corset in front. I cut the sleeves off and ripped up the skirt at the front so it shows off my pointy knee high boots. I walked into the throne room where leif was hanging out with our friend Barda who is 28 which is older than us (I’m 16 and Leif is 17)!

As I walked into the room leif’s jaw dropped. “Woah” he said. “Jasmine you look beautiful.”

“Hey Jasmine there’s something I need to tell you,” said Leif. He stood up and took my hand blushingly and then led me to the highest tower of the castle. The view was amazing, we could see the harbour and the glittering sea and the poor parts of Del. Leif grew up there but his parents were only pretending to be poor. He held my hands in his long fingers and his eyes were glistening orbs as blue as the sea.

“What is it Leif?” I asked worriedly.

He stared deep into my emerald green eyes. “Jasmine I l-” suddenly there was a flash of dark black swirly smoke and I felt a knife at my throat and someone put their hand over my mouth! I reached for my dagger but I didn’t have it because I was wearing my new dress instead of my travelling clothes!

A voice came from behind. “King Leif, the Shadow Lord demands that you hand over the belt of Deltora or else prepare for revolution!” it laughed “ha ha ha! The autocratic imperialist regime of the capitalist monarchy is oppressing the people. Your reign of tyranny is over! Bring the Shadow Lord the Belt of Deltora or we will kill the girl!”

“NOOOO!” screamed Leif in horror and then everything went dark.

I woke up in a dark room and found myself lying on a bed. It was a bedroom decorated with red curtains and flags on the wall. Then the door opened and an old man in a red robe came in. He was wearing a hood and had a long beard and his red eyes glittered evilly. It was…. THE SHADOW LORD!!!!1

“Ew gross no way!” I said. “Leif will never hand over the kingdom to you!”

“You misunderstand, girl! I do not want a kingdom; I will create Republic state which belongs to the people and is ruled by me the Supreme Dear Shadow Leader as a representative of the working class!”

“Your wrong! Leif earned his throne by collecting all of the gems which you stole!” I said. I was scared but didn’t show it. “Wait I’m not Leif’s mistress. You have the wrong person!” then I realised that lief must have a girlfriend and the shadow lord thought I was her… but wait why did that make me sad? Oh no……….. I was in love with leaf!!

I felt heartbroken like my heart was shattered into a million shards of glass.

“King Leif isn’t going to rescue me,” I told the Shadow Lord depressedly. I would have to escape myself before he tried to marry me.

THEN the door burst open and Leif came in with Borda and they both had their swords out!

“Don’t worry Jasmine we will save you!” shouted Leif sexilly as he stabbed the Shadow Lord. He screamed and blood red blood spurted out of the stab wound.

BOOKS

“Thanks Leif,” I smiled shyly. Leif was wearing leather pants tucked into leather boots with buckles on them and a long navy blue jacket with lots of buttons on the front. The belt of Deltora was on his waist (A/N: for those of u who havent read deltora quest its a magical belt with seven magic gems on it that each have differint abilities!)

and we will breed a superior race of Deltorans to live in our classless utopia in which the wealth of the land is equally distributed among the working people instead of being controlled by corporate pigs and the bourgeoisie!”

“Aaaaahhhh” yelled the Shadow Lord as he collapsed onto the floor.

“There will be revolution… your filthy capitalist bourgeois monarchy will fall to the proletariat…” and then he died.

“Leif we have to get back to the palace” said Bardo.

“Ok but first I have to tell Jasmine something,” replied Leif and turned to me and hugged me. “Jasmine I love u, I was going to tell you before you were captured!”

“OMG!” I said “but I thought you had another gf.”

“No I’ve only ever loved you” he said shyly and then we made out with tongues and it was like we were the only people who exited in the entire world.

A/N: sooo wat do u think? pls comment and review thanks 5eva!!! RAWR! (it means i love you in dinosaur :3)

“I didn’t realise that King Leif’s mistress was so sexy,” he said, staring at my cleavage and licking his thin lips creepily. “I had my minions capture you as bait but now I have decided that I will make you my bride

PERTH FACT ONE MAN’S TRASH IS ANOTHER MAN’S PLACE TO HIDE A BODY

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WORDS BY BRYCE NEWTON ART BY XIN LAN XIE

There are plenty of books that don’t deserve a second read, let alone the necessary effort to actually sift through the entirety of their content. Rather than re-gifting these naff novels to the trash (because bin day is a long way away and that remaining space is precious), why not reimagine them as other objects that were never intended to be read, creating new items to enhance your home and lifestyle.

Don’t throw bad stories into the bin; throw them into the realm of possibility.

BOOK BOXES You’re inside, it’s a Sunday. You decide to spend some relaxing YOU time gluing the pages that make up the inside of your most hated novel until they are all stuck together, your fingers are stuck together, you haven’t seen the outside world for 12 craftheavy hours and that story is long gone from being readable. The next vital step in this shape-shifting body mod operation is to cut a rectangular recess, leaving a sturdy border of glued together (gone forever) pages and carving out that worthless story inside to create a space where you can store something even better.

Like receipts or a leaf that has sentimental value (we all have one right?). Catch you later, book-with-a-beautiful-cover, because you’ve just been reborn as a box!

BOOK ART

COFFEE TABLE COASTER

For a great way to comment on an object containing knowledge, take a stab at a story you’ve never liked by distorting it and using it for aesthetic purposes or just taking advantage of the high quality paper most stories are printed on (I did this for a second year art class with a swanky novel from Good Sammy’s). If you don’t mind that not all pages are blank and ready for your personal mark making it’s a LOT cheaper than buying an art notebook.

A quick fix for the Kraft cheese slice enthusiast who somehow mixed up Kraft and craft and now the craft phase they proclaimed to be immersed in on Facebook is kind of a sham. People are demanding proof of your crash hot craft skills and you’ve naught to show. Look no further cheese enthusiast friend. Utilising a strongly disliked book as a coffee table coaster is time efficient and will provide something (anything) to upload to the feed.

Simply find some duct tape, book contact or material and wrap the book in said item to create a coaster your parents would be proud of. Place items on coaster accordingly and delete the people who doubted you.

LEVELLING A TABLE Books are a great item to ensure your dinner table, side table or TV cabinet doesn’t rock back and forth precariously whenever pressure is placed on it. Start off with a table that is unbearably wobbly and is causing you to deal with anxiety (after the time you spilt an entire bowl of soy sauce onto your jeans) and deep-rooted sadness caused by not being able to trust would-be reliable household items. Now you’ve located this unfriendly piece of furniture, find a suitably sized novel you’ve never really liked (perhaps that book you have refrained from giving an op shop because you never want anyone else to read it?) and wedge it under one of the legs. In that easy step, you’ve given purpose to an otherwise unreadable book and can begin rebuilding trust with your table.

HOUSEHOLD DECORATIONS Taking cues from any home decorating show, it becomes clear that books should be valued as decorative objects rather than useful knowledge vessels. Don’t look at a Penguin Classic as a narrative but rather as homeware. How does it make the room FEEL? Using books as decoration is an amazing way to spice up your otherwise plain interior. For maximum effect, place books that you don’t really like but don’t want to lug down to the local

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op shop on a bookshelf prone to collecting dust and feel the ambience emanate.

CONVERSATION PIECE Frame the book and mount the frame with a small brass plate engraved with the words “a book I hate”. No doubt this book, hung in your lounge room, hallway or on your front door (depending on how far other people venture into your home) will inspire conversation. If not, you have made a piece of art that can be used as a family heirloom in future.

FIRE KINDLING Place pages of despised novel in fireplace with small pieces of wood or branches. Light with matches. Toast marshmallows, thank book for helping you enjoy such a delightful treat.

Accidentally get lost in the process and consume entire jumbo size bag of marshmallows. Begin to feel badly towards the book again. Go on life-changing health kick. In five years give inspirational talks about how the book you once hated helped you quit sugar.

PERTH FACT ONE MAN’S TRASH IS ANOTHER MAN

BOOK REVIEWS ECONOBABBLE

WAER

RICHARD DENNISS (BLACK INC. REDBACK)

MEG CADDY (TEXT PUBLISHING)

4/5

4/5

Econobabble is a term which describes the incomprehensible economic jargon that many politicians spurt when they are trying to cover up the complete ridiculousness of their policies.

Australia’s most prominent, witty and unfortunately not most-well-known economist Dr Richard Denniss has written a handy guide on how to understand the econobabble that parliamentarians employ and the reasons as to why they do.

I read this book after seeing Denniss talk at the Perth Writers Festival. There, he spoke predominantly about climate change policy, holding himself with an air of professional ease, explaining concepts in simple terms whilst still maintaining a non-biased approach. His public demeanour transitions well into text, with Econobabble being both easy to read and informative. Nimbly, he cuts down many policy decisions, utilising current examples including the carbon tax and explaining exactly who wanted it to fail and why. At times it may seem that he is focusing solely on the Australian Liberal Party, but it is justified as they have been the driving force of all recent political reform.

Econobabble is a guide for anyone who has queried the objectivity of Australian economic policy. It is so informative and succinct that I feel it should be sent out to all citizens with the right to vote, and given to those who are about to.

The cover gives us a heads up on this book’s epic proportions: the almost insurmountable fortress amid brooding mountains, the sassy sword-wielding heroine and the shaggy hero. Sure it isn’t an ultra-classy sleek looking novel; but it’s perfect for a YA adventure like this one. The faint claw marks beneath the title (and well, the sword) foreshadows the terrible struggle our sassy furry friends face. Plus the cover lettering is very shiny so you know it’s going to be good.

Despite a cover that could be a bit cliché the storyline is nothing but original, leading you through a world as unique as the characters that inhabit it. Caddy’s writing differs from your stock standard fantasy author: less unnecessary flourishes and filler, more pluck in each sentence. Her characters are incredibly wellthought-out with gorgeous description and depth. I mean come on, her werewolves are farmers, or soldiers with identity crises and her gods become thieves and doctors. Each landscape and setting is gritty and detailed; giving life and believability to cities and mountains that would otherwise be a little far-fetched.

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This book is composed of eight chapters of semi-academic writing focussed on how public figures, generally right wing ones, utilise the tactic of vomiting economic bulldust to create a false veil in front of their inherently unfair policy decisions. Chapters tackle current issues facing Australia like climate change, unemployment and the ongoing battle of the Federal budget, explaining how jargon can be used to sell nonsensical policies.

For instance, Denniss explains how politicians have managed to sell the idea that cutting public spending on the services needed by the unemployed population will help decrease unemployment.

The book also takes the time to break down the inaccuracy in any economic modelling, a device many politicians resort to, as well as the falsity of Free Trade Agreements.

Yeah okay, so werewolves are a bit overdone. However, Waer by Perth gal Meg Caddy certainly gives us wolves like we’ve never seen before. No one is sparkly or running a tad too hot – they’re messy, complicated and really well, very human.

The only problem I have with this book is that I wanted more: more explanation of the civilisation, more plot elements and a more drawn-out ending. Although the final push of the book is entertaining and wraps up all the loose threads, I just wish that there were a slower pace and more anticipation building.

Caddy is an author to watch – I hope her next book gives us more of this world she has created.

Recommended reading snack: a stew as hearty and complicated as these heroes.

Caz Stafford frankly reads too many fantasy novels.

Recommended reading snack: black and gold marshmallows, because they make economic sense.

Simon Carrello shops the specials.

PERTH FACT PERTH'S MOST UNPOPULAR GEOSPOTS REMAIN: THE BELL TOWER, THE PERTH MINT, AND THE PELICAN OFFICE

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the most experienced puppeteers training others, including many performers from the Eastern states, and sending them out into the world.” Alums of the training program have gone on to work with the renowned Philippe Genty Company in France, and include Tim Watts, the highly successful and much lauded theatre-maker who is part of The Last Great Hunt.

WORDS BY BRYCE NEWTON ART BY XIN LAN XIE

Spare Parts Puppet Theatre has proven that when you use your imagination, everything feels more magical. Longtime Artistic Director and CEO Philip Mitchell spoke with Samuel J. Cox.

F

ounded by Artistic Director Peter Wilson, with writer Cathryn Robinson and designer Beverley Campbell-Jackson in 1981, Spare Parts Puppet Theatre has become Australia’s flagship puppetry company, reaching more than 60,000 people annually.

Elevated to the position in recent years as several companies lost funding and other industry stalwarts moved in new directions, Spare Parts has stood out for its commitment to strong training programs; whether its in-house initiative (the only one of its kind in Australia) or its new puppetry and visual theatre unit at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

Having served in the role for 14 years since State Living Treasure and master puppeteer Noriko Nishimoto ended her tenure in 2001, Philip Mitchell carries on Spare Parts’ 35-year history with pride. Previously an Associate Director and performer with Terrapin Puppet Theatre in Tasmania, Mitchell trained as a young puppeteer in the Czech Republic (shortly after the revolution), studying at Prague’s School for Alternative Theatre and Puppetry.

A Western Australian company based in Fremantle, Spare Parts hosted the 20th UNIMA (Union Internationals de la Marlonette) World Puppetry Festival in April 2008. The largest event of its kind, it was only the third time the festival had been hosted outside Europe and drew international attention to the art form in Australia. “There’s a huge difference between the work coming out of Australia and that from the rest of the world,” Mitchell says. “Australia’s output has a distinct feel to it. We’re like magpies, particularly here in WA, in that we take a bit from here and there and irreverently combine them. For example, mixing Banraku [an ancient form of puppetry originating from Japan] with traditional Sicilian marionettes.”

The youthfulness of puppetry in Australia means the few companies that do exist are not tied to the hundred-year-old traditions that exist in other countries. This means the company can experiment – “bastardize things and make new, exciting forms of puppetry,” says Mitchell. “The freedom we have in Australian means we can partner digital projection with shadow puppetry, or play with the intersection of dance and puppetry.” Dancers often make skilled puppeteers because of their strong sense of timing and subtle movements. “We’ve even got a collaboration with WASO [the West Australian Symphony Orchestra] in the pipeline. Saint-Saens’ The Carnival of

Animals is currently in development and we will soon have a puppetry work with a full orchestra on stage.”

Presenting a “layered program” in 2016, the company uses the “idea of puppetry as allegorical storytelling” to create family theatre able to be enjoyed by adults and children in the same space. “Using language immediately makes a work either for adults, or for children. The less language we use, the more space we have for visual storytelling and the deeper we can go into adult ideas about what it means to be human,” says Mitchell.

Beyond Associate Director Michael Barlow, who has been with the company for 25 years as a full-time writer/deviser, performer and director, and Mitchell himself, who directs and sometimes performs, the company’s full-time staff does not include puppeteers, designers or makers. Instead, the company contracts its artists from a pool of about 50 Company Associates, including wellrespected theatre-makers like Humphrey Bower, St John Cowcher and Ian Sinclair.

“Our Company Associates might be composers, designers, makers, writers or devisers. We attempt to keep them actively employed through a range of different programs. We have a School of Puppetry where artists facilitate puppetry and puppet-making workshops for adults, and many of our puppet-makers are currently busy creating 21 puppets that will be used all around Australia as part of Camp Quality’s shows [the charity seeks to create a better life for children living with cancer]. Additionally, The Little Prince will embark on a three-month national tour, and Hachiko [based on a true story from Japan about a dog that waited at a train station for its master

“Being acknowledged as Australia’s flagship company for the art form is both flattering and an enormous responsibility. Our goal is no longer just creating excellent work, but also training the next generation of Australian puppeteers. Only a very small group of artists in Australia actually practice puppetry, and here in WA we have some of

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PERTH FACT “TRASH-TALK IS A LANGUAGE BUILT ON A CLASSIST, RACIST, SEXIST CULTURE OF MACHISMO BULLYING” – OSCAR THE GROUCH

to return] will go on a 13-week regional tour of WA. This means our performers are kept employed and we can spread the love of puppetry.”

Rather than writing a story in the traditional way, Spare Parts devises work instead.

Stand-in or mock-up puppets are used to develop an idea or concept, but “when the final puppet is made you can’t tell it what to do. The makers do their best to create something that fulfills the function of the dramaturg, but as they determine how a puppet will move and look, their work can inspire scenes or moments that the story evolves from. We often rework the story around what the puppet has ended up being. It’s an interesting dynamic, and one that introduces surprises you hadn’t expected,” says Mitchell.

From foam to wood to plastic, the materials used in making the company’s puppets depends upon the aesthetic or style each designer brings to the table. Company associate Jiri Zmitko “tends to work in wood, so his puppets are crafted from beautiful carved wood. Cecile Williams works in fabrics and textiles which means a lot of her puppets are very tactile. For our 2014 production of Tim Winton’s book The Deep, she created dolphins out of a clear shade cloth so that when they were lit they’d glow and shimmer. Leon Hendroff, who came to us at the age of eight to do a School of Puppetry workshop, is a graphic designer, now in his late twenties, who is a self-taught specialist in marionettes and works in the animated figure.”

“There was a period, around the time Avatar was released, when I wondered

However, what I enjoy most about my role

“I think audiences now are searching for things that are much more visually intriguing, and that’s why there’s been a resurgence in physical theatre, circus and puppetry. This is reflected in the success of War Horse and The Lion King.” However, in a day and age when arts funding is competitive and difficult to procure, Mitchell protects the company by programming “our artistic product in tandem with business decisions.

station. The company’s next show, I

is nurturing artists and bringing in new designers. At the moment, I’m exploring immersive and interactive shows which is a really new, scary territory! We’re considering how you might emotionally immerse an audience with visual images and also have them as participants, rather than just spectators, in the storytelling. It’s an area I’ve never explored, and I’m excited to work with new designers and devisors on

ARTS

Along with puppets from previous plays, their work is exhibited in the company’s foyer. There are some “very impressive Aquasapiens that were commissioned for a large-scale, outdoor performance work by the Perth International Arts Festival in 2005, which were painted by Shaun Tan – before he became famous!”

Mitchell laughs. Also there, the demon Mephistopheles from the company’s first ever production, Christopher Marlowe’s Faust for the 1981 Festival of Perth, now the Perth International Arts Festival.

how puppetry could compete with the amazing effects and animation seen in film. However I’ve since realized that we don’t have to compete, and that’s what’s beautiful about puppetry!” says Mitchell.

“People become emotionally engaged in our work and they get suspended in a magic world, as only live theatre can do. We often have young people ask “is that real?!”, because the magic of theatre and puppetry is that there’s a blurring of what’s real and what’s not. That’s why I don’t feel puppetry is threatened by modern technology or cinematography, and why we here are very confident that puppetry will endure into the future. The real-life experience of suspending your disbelief for the hour you are in the theatre is unparalleled.”

Shaun Tan’s surreal fantasy Rules of Summer.

My job is to endlessly journey and explore an art form that has no boundaries.”

The Spare Parts Puppet Theatre is located in Pioneer Park, opposite the Fremantle railway See Red, will run 19 & 20 May. Other upcoming productions are Splat!

(July) and Nobody Owns the Moon (Sep/Oct).

PERTH FACT ARE YOU IN PERIL? SHOULD’VE GONE TO NECKSAVERS

37

INTERVIEW BY GABBY LOO

Based on the idea that one human being in the audience is more than enough to make a full house, Proximity Festival is an annual event in Perth showcasing one-on-one, intimate performances from local and international artists. I sat down with co-curators Sarah Rowbottam and Kelli McCluskey to chat about changes to the boundary-pushing project in its fifth year, and the thinking behind this contemporary first.

Q. What are the future plans for Proximity Festival 2016?

Sarah Rowbottam: We’re looking to shift to a biannual model, as an artist-run initiative of this scale it is quite exhausting.

Kelli McCluskey: The festival has always begun with a two-week mentorship lab prior to the performance season, which was quite productive but very stressful.

We’re considering separating the lab from the outcome, so there’s more consideration given to mentoring those artists.

Some of the artists will want to work siteresponsively, so it’s been a huge learning curve for us to understand how that particular institution works. Also, we have quite a unique model of spatial occupation so it’s not like these places would have had something similar to us before.

We can adapt to any space and that’s what keeps it fresh and exciting for us. It could happen in a pub, or a carpark, or a beach; it doesn’t have to be an arts institution.

However the moment you step out into a BP service station, for example, it’s loaded with a whole new set of ideas. There is an instant impact on what you present there, and what the work is about.

Q. Do you ever have repeated types of artworks, and how do you go about shaping them differently?

Sarah: We’ve moved from the quick and dirty live art experience we presented in 2012 to a more conceptually rigorous process. In four years the program has become massive, and we’ve started to ask “what worked and what didn’t? What should we keep?” That can be one of the most difficult things to do when you’ve been locked into one system of working.

To step away and say “we don’t have to do that anymore”. That’s the beauty of being an artist run initiative as well. You are answerable to yourselves, the artists, the city.

Q. For each institution you’ve entered – from the Fremantle Arts Centre, to the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts and then the Art Gallery of Western Australia – how do you deal with shaping the festival to its architectural space, conditions and reputation?

Kelli: It’s a very different beast each time.

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Kelli: We’ve had artists that have done the festival multiple times, but they always come back with very different ideas from a new conceptual basis. It’s not a case of

doing the work once, then trying to redo it the next year. Someone like [Perth theatre-maker] Ian Sinclair once had two works in Proximity, but both were completely different. Then he came back last year and facilitated the Day Spa. This was a place to relax and treat yourself before or after Proximity performances; a space to be, rather than do. It was an alternative way for Ian to engage again.

Sarah: All the works come from existing ideas. Kelli and I find the intention of the work and how to make it an experience for an audience, rather than directing it like a play or choreographed show. That’s why I think a lot of the works are pretty diverse in their outcomes and experiences.

Q. In reading the Proximity model, I recognised that you have a large emphasis on taking care of the artists; making sure they evolve as well as showcasing them.

Kelli: Working one-on-one is very specific, so the mentorship component is super

Emily Parsons-Lord (2014), Different Kinds of Air A Plants Diary

PERTH FACT THERE IS NOW A REPORTING SERVICE IF YOUR UBER DRIVER DID NOT OFFER YOU A MINT

Emily Parsons-Lord (2015), You will always be wanted by me important. Having one audience member in front of you means it’s going to be a very different experience for the performer as well as the audience, and it’s quite exhausting.

Kelli: I say celebrate and be proud that growth can happen. Success isn’t necessarily going to Sydney or Melbourne.

Sure, we have had lots of interest from people wanting to take the model, but I think that we grew here, and if you want it, come join us.

There is a strong possibility that Proximity Festival will only undertake its LAB later this year with the view to present in 2017.

Pelican joins Perth in awaiting its return with great anticipation.

ARTS

What’s lovely about Proximity, is that it is about nurturing, taking care of, and talking to artists about where they’re going with their work. We challenge and interrogate them in supportive ways. We’re interested in the process, not just buying the end result.

bring people in and build.

Sarah: Making intimate work that deals with personal matters can introduce a psychological factor, and artists have to be prepared mentally, emotionally and physically to deal with that. There’s a high level of artists that have mental health issues, and draw from these in their work.

But artist self-care is not something I’m aware of that exists in WA, or Australia atlarge.

Q. What significance do you think Proximity Festival holds in Perth, and would you expand?

Sarah: A lot of people think if something moves out of the state, it’s more legitimate as an entity. I think you may as well keep it in one location and grow the community;

Leon Ewing (2015), Raised by Brutalism

PERTH FACT THE SAUSAGE AND BUN APPRECIATION SOCIETY HAS BEEN INCORPORATED INTO BUNNINGS

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REVIEW BY HARRY SANDERSON

A

t an opening in Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museum of Contemporary Art, the viewer is invited to consider the aesthetic potential of rubbish. The champagne is Taittinger and they play Edvard Grieg, while the well-groomed and well-attired attendees engage in calm conversation around the centrepiece of the exhibition: a ten-foot synthetic phallus, cast in dump leavings and sculpted to extraordinary vascular detail. On the floor there are works made from cat fur, dead flowers, last year’s newspapers, pear-can wrappers and splintered, Estonian tiger-engraved tea chests. For the artist (the program reads), the dump is full of images.

The concept is not new, having originated in 1960s Italy with the Art Povera movement, in which artists rejected the dominant artistic mediums and celebrated waste as a constructive material. The collective was wildly progressive, promoting a revolutionary mode of creativity free from both the governmental power structure and the insidious capitalist art market.

Works by some of its members, notably Michelangelo Pistoletto, Pier Paolo and Mario Merz, sit in prestigious galleries around the world. Very few pieces are worth less than six figures.

The Astrup Fearnley gallery paid more than £450,000 for Damien Hirst’s Mother

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and Child (Divided) in 1996. It is among the most well-known of contemporary sculptures, and sits in the immense gallery across from the rubbish-themed exhibition I attended. A floor below, there is a gift store which contains a rack of official Damien Hirst trademarked, white cotton t-shirts, featuring printed representations of his various works, Mother and Child included. They cost £30 each, go up to XXXL, and are apparently very good sellers.

bins were stark white and printed with his iconic coloured dot design.

Many high profile critics have dismissed Hirst as uninspired and talentless. It’s easy to understand why, but also difficult not to feel like it’s a joke ‘why’ when the artist is doing so well selling and exhibiting white trash, prints of trash on white, and white trash cans.

None of his works were included in this opening, which might be considered a missed opportunity. With regard to the art that was featured, most people I spoke to agree the concept felt tired. The ‘playful irony’ of assembling works of art from rubbish has been well and truly done. The shock value of works like Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit relies on there being an established

In 2001, Hirst’s work The Dead Ones (priced over six figures, but not quite as much as Mother and Child) was mistaken for rubbish and swept up by a janitor in a Mayfair Gallery. Hirst was apparently not bothered, and the janitor kept his job.

Twelve years later, he created a series of limited edition souvenir artworks to celebrate his first solo exhibition at the Astrup Fearnley, which gallery goers could purchase for £450. They were a series of pedaled rubbish bins, marketed in collaboration with the ‘vipp’ brand. The

high-class/low-class separation in the art world which the artist can then disrupt.

Once galleries have begun to accept any level of art, the theoretical ‘edginess’ of non-traditional work is weakened significantly.

If you happen to pass through Norway in the next few months, The World is Made of Stories runs at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo until July 31.

PERTH FACT THE AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER OF 2041 WILL BE REPORTED EATING AN ENTIRE FIELD OF CORN

WORDS BY ADAM SMITH ART BY HOLLY JIAN

A

nime, like all other major motion media isn’t immune to the draw of low budget, C-grade storytelling. Unfortunately due to the sheer competition of anime series, when it comes to making a profit there is a very select group of consumers to aim for: those (typically men) who buy US$70 Blu-Ray sets, figurines, and themed body pillows.

And there’s one very easy feature to include in order to attract this group. Fan service. Not an easily defined thing, in general it’s a kind of pandering; where to attract and maintain viewers, the series’ creators generate and shape content they think will please this viewer group.

Fan service comes in many forms, and is present in all genres, but – to put it bluntly – is often the equivalent of a show giving a few extra strokes of the shaft to its devoted male audiences. Sexual forms and behaviours are exaggerated in female characters, from the overly largebreasted female characters who feature in One Piece, Bleach and Naruto, to the sadly unavoidable “Beach Episodes” (I can think of about three series that haven’t featured them). Even sweet, perfect Cowboy Bebop (seriously watch it) has a character who toes the line between femme fatale and fan service prop – fortunately she also has a rich and developed backstory so we’ll err on the side of the former. Here I’ve listed well-funded popular shows, and it is without doubt a systemic problem. But at the bottom of the barrel it gets so much worse.

Next up is the disintegrating clothes trick, popular in fighting shows (Dragon Ball Z used it a lot although mostly to show improbably muscular male bodies).

This features prominently in Ikki Tousen.

But, unfortunately, the tricks appears to be the main premise of a show for a while voted number one on several anime ranking websites. High School DxD, another combative tale, also uses this fan service strategy. The series story revolves around demons and their followers fighting other demons in some sort of organised competition, where each fighter is given a title based on a chess piece. The main character’s ability is that he can instantly disintegrate the clothes of his (predominantly female)

opponents, thus somehow rendering them incapable of fighting further. The existence of a show like that (and I’m still amazed it does exist) shows the extent to which the anime industry caters to and reinforces the (pretty perverted) majority audience male gaze.

And now, the pièce de résistance of this entire sordid affair: Strike Witches. To be honest I’m not sure how I came across Strike Witches, but I’ve only ever watched it drunk. The basic premise is that there are unknown invaders attacking Europe and young teenage witches wielding guns and flying around with propellers attached to their legs are the only ones who can fight them. Think Kiki’s Delivery Service meets Evangelion. This is a classic anime story: teenagers fight unknown attackers using bizarre technology and abilities. In Strike Witches however, fan service is off the chain. The characters don’t wear skirts or pants, several characters are large-breasted and every episode seems to include an extended bath scene. Adding to this is the camera angles during fight scenes, often having little to do with showing the battle itself, and even an episode where the witches learn to fly on brooms like their forebears, to ‘increase their power’ translates into close-ups of brooms between witches’ legs.

Basically what I’m saying is there’s a tonne of very avoidable anime out there.

The industry has some real problems with how it presents women, and fan service is the post-internet marketing mechanism which only feeds that problem. On the other hand, anime remains a medium all to itself, and some series are very enjoyable and avoid using of the hyper-sexualised female body to bring in ratings. If you’re still considering checking out a few series, try: Planetes, Last Exile or Raxephon, Kamisama Kiss, Baccano or Fruits Basket, hell even Gintama, Hunter x Hunter or Legend of the Galactic Heroes if you want a few hundred episodes. Do yourself a service.

PERTH FACT THOSE HOLES IN PERTH'S OLD BUS STOPS? GLORY HOLES FOR GIANTS

LIFESTYLE

Easily the most common blatant form of fan service is the ‘panty shot’. Whether the girl just fell over, is walking along or is even sitting down at a desk, this shot is heavily abused. Ikki Tousen, for example, is a show about several high schools who have somehow developed a fighting culture, to the point where students from rival schools are constantly fighting, and of course, the strongest fighters are all buxom young women who choose to fight in skirts. The next

major feature of fan service is absurd breast physics. This can range from way too much bounce, to just frenetic and uncontrolled movement. Which brings me to Highschool of the Dead – an anime that despite itself is a fun, absurd, action comedy about high schoolers in a zombie apocalypse (it’d be much better without the fan service but admittedly, this would cut its runtime by about half).

The series features a scene where one girl uses her breasts as support for a rifle (which I imagine would just leave the worst bruise) and another fires a bullet which flies between the wildly gyrating breasts of another katana-wielding character and hits a zombie in the head.

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PERTH FACT TONY ABBOTT PHOTOGRAPHED HOVERBOARDING NEAR THE COOL KIDS

LIFESTYLE ART BY DANYON BURGE

43

WORDS BY TOM ROSSITER

Over the past few months one of the most fascinating and generation-defining stories has been incredibly retold on American television. The OJ Simpson trial, phenomenon that it was, is referenced pretty regularly in pop culture: now we millennials finally have the full context.

Sarah Paulson can give a real snake-eyed stare. One of the best after a smarmy cashier scans tampons Marcia is buying and gives her: “Uh oh, I guess the defence is in for one hell of a week, huh?”

Marcia does more with a look than most people can do with dental torture.

American Crime Story came along at a near perfect time. Racial tension in the US is on a steady incline, and during the run, new developments emerged in the OJ Simpson case when a knife was found at a property he had previously owned. The events of the trial have been restructured, with the story centred around Robert Kardashian (and the writers don’t miss an opportunity to make fairly ham-fisted jokes about his family, in the series’ only misstep) as well as giving the prosecution, Marcia Clark and Chris Darden, much more credit than most other sources. Incidentally, we all love David Schwimmer now – that’s just a fact you’re gonna have to get used to.

It is of great help that this is based on a fascinating true story. We see the ironclad case that the prosecution constructs, we see their confidence – but we know the outcome. This curiosity would drive me to keep watching, even if it wasn’t so all-round well-written and engaging. The show covers all aspects of a complex trial – we see and understand from the perspective of the prosecution, defence, the victim’s families, OJ. Even the Jury gets an unusually in-depth and intelligent episode, with a pretty entertaining Martin v. Seinfeld argument (“Seinfeld ain’t about nothing”).

And the acting is faultless. Sterling K. Brown can look like one giant, throbbing vein when he’s mad. You can feel his rage pulse within him. Opposite, Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran uses charisma as a battering ram, one impassioned and excellent speech at a time.

Nathan Lane sleazed his way into my heart a long time ago, and he’s in top form here, stealing all the scenes he appears in. He also carries the show’s funniest scene, when he and Johnnie Cochran visit the south to get the ‘Furhman tapes’ released for their case, and he uses the power of his folksy southernisms to convince the all-white judiciary, to Courtney B. Vance’s utter and hilarious confusion.

Adding to this is Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark, the much-harried lead prosecutor. Marcia’s story can be heartbreaking, particularly as a woman and mother under so much public scrutiny. But goddamn,

44

And the chemistry between Marcia Clark and Chris Darden!

I was surprised to find how invested I was in their romantic relationship (KISS! KISS!). Then you have Kenneth Choi as the implacable judge Lance Ito, and Cuba Gooding Jr. giving a deceptively great performance as OJ himself. Occasionally you find yourself wondering how people can ignore this character’s past domestic abuse, or likely status as a murderer; but Cuba carries it off, alternately manic and charming. There really are no bad performances here.

In the details, this program shines. The series looks great, the camerawork in each episode is understated but effective – constant motion, coupled with a stylish unobtrusiveness make this series look better than most films. And the framing, the constant cuts on motion, all work to maintain a sense of energy that gains and gains. All this work building tension, amassing momentum, finally pays off in the sudden, and unexpected climax: Sterling K. Brown in an elevator. Just please watch it.

Were I a betting man (and I am), I would be placing a fair amount on American Crime Story winning several Emmys. It’s fair to say that Sterling K. Brown has this in the bag. Honestly, if you watch only one thing this (the cliché is to say year, but I’ll revise for modernity to) month: make it this.

PERTH FACT ‘DELIVER US FROM WEEVILS’ THEY SPAKE, AND THE FUMIGATOR DESCENDED ON CAMERON HALL ATOP A CLOUD OF CHLOROPICRIN

THE TOOTHY PICK

Solo + Co.

360 Hay St, Subiaco

Food .............................. 3/5 Coffee ........................... 5/5 Atmosphere ................. 5/5

WORDS BY PREMA ARASU

The open plan Hay Street warehouse of Solo + Co. is a seamless combination of café, bakery, art studio, homewares gallery and showroom. I spent several hours there, drinking coffee and working on my EURO3301 essay. There’s plenty of light, friendly staff and a chill, unpretentious atmosphere. My enormous wooden table was decorated with a giant conch shell and a tank containing a Siamese fighting fish.

pomegranate juice smoothie (9.5) may have been

The breakfast menu features Modern Australian brunch staples like Shakshuka with greens, avocado and dukkah (16) and chorizo with spicy beans on toast (16). The entirely gluten-free bakery sells scones, croissants, ciabatta, sausage rolls and pizza bases. If you are gluten intolerant, try Solo + Co. for good versions of things which are usually terrible, at least when made with flour substitutes. Oh, and they make duffins.

Furniture and art pieces are sourced from South

The lunch specials vary. Lamb kofta with saffron yoghurt and corn salsa, pasta with chorizo, rocket, cherry tomatoes and feta, and a steak sandwich with roast mushroom, aioli and onion jam are all 18.50. The menu is subject to change but I’d expect Australian takes on European and Mediterranean traditions with a focus on fresh, locally-sourced ingredients. The banana, strawberry, almond milk and chia seed smoothie (9.5) was quite bland but probably healthy (right?).

The banana, cacao nib, raspberry, Nutella and

a more exciting choice.

Coffee is of the highest standard, as they have to compete with Stimulatte across the road and Architects and Heroes a bit further down. Beans are from Loaded, a local roaster based in Nedlands who also supply some of Perth’s best: Virgil, Felix & Co, Max + Sons.

East Asia. These are traditionally inspired but with a modern take. The studio area offers art jamming sessions (35 for 3 hours) as well as long-term art courses.

Overall, Solo + Co. is more than another good Subiaco coffee spot. It's a creative multifunctional concept space – exactly the sort of rule breaking Perth's hospitality scene needs more of.

LIFESTYLE ART BY GABBY LOO

PERTH FACT IF YOU DID NOT ENROL TO VOTE, YOU WILL PROBABLY FEEL JUST AS AWFUL AFTER THE ELECTION AS THOSE WHO DID TBH

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