Progressive culture since 1954
Forget the Bechdel test, while we’re at it. I want to know whether a work of literature will pass the big beautiful female theory test: is there a self-aware female or gender non-conforming narrator who confesses to their body’s abjected secretions with a non-sexualised matter-of-factness?
The status of intoxication is oddly paradoxical. On the one hand, it is a site of social control and docility, rabid consumption and social problems. On the other hand, some claim it escapes precisely the same social control, inducts us into new pleasures, and helps us cope—more or less innocently—with genuine social problems that aren’t about to disappear simply because of a new wave of temperance.
Watching Break of Day today positions Weir’s Gallipoli as a reactionary response to the prior subversion of the ANZAC myth. However, the popular and critical success of Gallipoli , and the launching of Weir’s international career, effectively erased Ken Hannam’s critical and pre-emptive deconstruction from Australian film/media discourse.
The sublime failure of Snipes’s performance is, for me, a triumphant evocation of what Poetry is, or wants to be. An exceptionally blunt object, a constant attempt to push toward something new.
To say that Australian officials were complacent in keeping Kiwi Farms operational for as long as it was would be an understatement. Australia was directly responsible for its continued existence as well as the harm it caused.