The edge of their seats
Lessons from Gilmore, Australia’s most marginal electorateJune 2005
Arts & Letters
‘Big Brother’ Channel Ten
Tragically, Big Brother is back. As with Australian Idol, this show’s soundtrack of non-stop hysteria is provided by a mob of nine-year-olds leaping about and screeching as though their complimentary jumbo drink-bottles of red cordial have all been laced with speed. And that’s just the housemates. This year’s lot seem obsessed by the question of who’s going to have sex with whom. Given that they are a largely undifferentiated mass already and most of them seem incurably narcissistic, you’ve got to wonder why they care. But I wish they’d all hurry up and get on with having sex; it’s got to be more entertaining than their conversation.
Then there’s the hostess, who used to be a quick-witted, good-looking brunette with a mobile, lived-in face, a gifted comic who wouldn’t have been caught dead mouthing platitudes or keeping up an inane fiction night after night. It’s time Big Brother called this strangely smooth-skinned and po-faced poppet into the Diary Room and asked her a few pertinent questions. Who are you, and what have you done with Gretel Killeen? And why are you wearing the back half of a polar-bear cub on your head?
One wonders who’s profiting the most from this cheap-to-make TV, its prime-time advertising and all that frantic text-messaging. Telstra or Channel Ten? Not the housemates who provide this cash cow’s fodder, that’s for sure. And who’s going to win? I’m barracking for Glenn, the down-home country boy. He’s honest, relaxed, sweet-natured, competent and he’s neither a boor nor a fool. I can’t think what he’s doing on this show.
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Peter Dutton doesn’t just have a talent problem on his hands
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Does the military attract violent misanthropists, or are they forged in murky theatres of war?
The dream machine: The 59th Venice Biennale
Curator Cecilia Alemani’s long overdue Biennale overwhelmingly features female artists and champions indigenous voices and other minorities
Mission statement: Daniel Boyd’s ‘Treasure Island’
An AGNSW exhibition traces the development of the Indigenous artist’s idiosyncratic technique, which questions ideas of perception
Shades of grey: Kerstin Thompson Architects
The lauded Melbourne-based architectural firm showcase a rare ability to sensitively mediate between the old and the new
Fear as folk: ‘Men’
Writer/director Alex Garland’s latest film is an unsubtle but ambitious pastoral horror, mixing the Christian with the classical
‘Trust’
The American novelist Hernan Diaz audits the silence of great wealth in a story of four parts presented as novel, autobiography, memoir and diary
‘Irma Vep’
Olivier Assayas revisits his 1996 film in a delicious palindromic limited series, in which a frazzled director remakes his ‘Irma Vep’ film into a TV series
‘Trespasses’
The powerful debut novel from Irish author Louise Kennedy is a masterclass in emotional compression
‘An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life’
Alienations and fantasies of escape unify the stories in Australian author Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut collectionGhosts in the war machine
Does the military attract violent misanthropists, or are they forged in murky theatres of war?
A dog’s breakfast
Notes on John Hughes’s plagiarism scandal
App trap: ‘Chloe’
‘Sex Education’ writer Alice Seabright’s new psychological thriller probing social media leads this month’s streaming highlights
‘The Picasso Century’ at the NGV
The NGV’s exhibition offers a fascinating history of the avant-garde across the Spanish artist’s lifetime
