OnlyFans and the adults in the room
The emerging OnlyFans community offering training and support to adult-content creatorsJuly 2008
Arts & Letters
‘Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith’ by Mark E Smith (with Austin Collings)
Mancunian Mark E Smith is the founder of The Fall, after 27 studio albums the most durable and protean of all bands to emerge from that burst of musical DIY inspired by punk 30 years ago. Actually, if that is news to you, no purpose is served by reading further: this memoir will be inexplicable. But if you're still in the club that sets its watch by Smith's latest venture, prepare for 250 pages of exquisitely bitter and chewy pith.
Previous attempts to tell The Fall's story have failed, either through too little organisation (Mick Middles' The Fall) or too much (Simon Ford's Hip Priest, Dave Thompson's A User's Guide to The Fall). Smith provides less a narrative than a tone poem full of sideways glances and surly meanderings. He offers a glimpse of his youthful self, a docks clerk paying for studio time with pool-table winnings and tarot readings. Otherwise, Renegade is a manifesto of refusal - solitary, unsentimental and sometimes slightly messianic. Of The Fall's constantly changing membership, he states simply: "They came, they saw, they fucked off and now I no longer see them." Trademark putdowns abound. Rough Trade were "only arsed about entertaining their mates round the corner"; the Clash were "like watching the news in your living room"; Oasis are "always trying to conquer America, but never make it past New Jersey". Smith is likewise superbly unimpressed by football ("A bunch of Walter Softies"), mobile phones ("People ringing each other up all the time, talking about tomato sauce and what's happening in their car") and contemporary architecture ("Buildings nowadays are not symbols of progress; they're the result of too many minds regressing into childhood").
What's never satisfactorily explained is how the young apathete keen only to "get a flat, take drugs and not work" became the workaholic puritan justifying turnover in band members as natural attrition ("Do you still work with the same people you worked with ten years ago?") and mithering of lazy guitarists ("They want a say in all the songs but they don't want to fill in the tax forms"). Similarly, reading The Fall is not hearing it - and the difference is greater than Smith acknowledges.
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A bleakly satirical look at death and the afterlife from the wisecracking author of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’
Ghost notes: Simon Tedeschi’s ‘Fugitive’
A virtuoso memoir of music and trauma, and his experiences as a child prodigy, from the acclaimed Australian pianist
One small step: ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’ and ‘Deep Water’
Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped film evokes the optimism of late-1960s America, while Patricia Highsmith’s thriller gets another disappointing adaptation
Art heist: The landmark conviction of an Aboriginal art centre’s manager
The jailing of Mornington Island Art’s chief executive for dishonest dealing has shone a light on ethics and colonialism in the Indigenous art world
‘Loveland’
Robert Lukins’ second novel takes a Brisbane woman to Nebraska, where an inheritance sparks a change in character as well as in fortune
‘We Own This City’
David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, returns to Baltimore for a present-day examination of rapacious police corruption
‘Slow Horses’
A sardonic Gary Oldman heads a misfit branch of MI5 in Apple TV+’s thrilling exploration of personal motivation and political expedience
‘The Golden Cockerel’
Barrie Kosky’s Adelaide production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera satirising the Russo-Japanese War came with uneasy resonances
The avoidable war
Kevin Rudd on China, the US and the forces of history
Election special: Who should you vote for?
Undecided about who to vote for in the upcoming federal election? Take our quiz to find out your least-worst option!
Remembrance or forgetting?
The Australian War Memorial and the Great Australian Silence
Property damage
What will it take for Australia to fix the affordable housing crisis?
