Progressive culture since 1954
If most videogames are collaborative stories that the player travels through and participates in, like an actor following their part of the script, Elden Ring is more like a complex puzzle box that players collectively poke at, trying to find a way into to figure out its secrets. It pretends to be about masochistic individual performance but is in fact about collaboration, helping each other out, and working against a deliberately obtuse and unfair opponent.
ABC News Exchange is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. / Time: Jan 6, 2022 03:00 PM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney / Interviewer: Why are you boycotting Sydney Festival? / [redacted]
If, as Andrew Todd has written, Sony’s recent Morbius was the triumph of intellectual property over storytelling, Disney’s Lightyear is intellectual property as storytelling. It is the story of a toy, written by people who don’t know that toys come alive. It is a movie that exists solely because of its franchise yet narrows its imaginary boundaries.
On 13 August 2021, the Geographical Names Board officially approved Bayside Council’s request to rename Eastlakes Reserve as Jack Mundey Reserve. Mundey was neither a local resident, councillor nor mayor. Yet sixty years ago, he led a movement that saved these four acres of land as a park for the local people.
Mum and Dad reckoned I was always a waterbaby. As soon as we stopped the car at the beach, I’d take off, a trail of clothes left in my wake, headed straight into the water. I didn’t notice the difference of the cooler waters down here until I was an adult. The water was always a refresher, a relief from baking hot sun and dusty throats. We would swim everywhere—Johanna, Kilcunda, Wonthaggi, Ninety Mile Beach, Mallacoota, Gunnamatta, Koonya.
The third volume of Helen Garner’s diaries, How To End a Story, is a reminder of how affecting books, or art and culture more widely, are. This is art, as Elizabeth Grosz writes via Gilles Deleuze, as an ‘enhancement or intensification of bodies’, an ‘elaboration of sensations.’
Amid the slightly muted jubilation about a long-awaited change in government, certain similarities between Greens insurgents, ‘teal’ independents and, to a lesser extent, hard right fringe parties have received less careful analysis. These point to a shared anti-establishment, anti-corruption populism that, in almost every instance, articulated itself in terms of a ‘scientific’ consensus on either climate change or health policy.
In spite of isolated acts of warmth and grace taking place between people around the world at any given moment, broadly speaking, formally organised collectivism is in decline. We’ve probably never been this alone, in a time when coming together couldn’t be more important.
The multiverse can have deeper implications when the interests in self-conscious play and knotty conception are probed for a more consequential social commentary. While neither a flawless execution of the cinematic multiverse nor an exhaustive exploration of identity and inequality, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a productive example of this balance.
i feel you shiver-shift against my pillowed fingerprints feel the warmth of me slick your skin {dew-licked and humid}
I walked to the gates of the Botanical Gardens in my formal pleated shorts, purchased especially for the occasion. I wanted this experience to be memorable. I wanted to impress.
The Nakba is ongoing. However, our story of dispossession is not unique, but rather forms part of the many stories of Indigenous populations being uprooted, murdered and having their lands destroyed by violent colonial regimes, including the land we live on.
The larger industrial factories David Ireland worked at and wrote about needed oceans for their runoff. Those machines are the shape of his second novel, and his first of three to win a Miles Franklin award, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner.
It seems to me that the utopian potential of Universal Income can easily be exaggerated, but so can its dangers and implausibility. There are struggles all around us which, on a daily basis, we’re forced to abandon and forget. Given increased power over our own attention wouldn’t make these problems disappear, even more would emerge. Material poverty, for all the most airtight policies and implementations, will likely never cease to exist.