Cat B

This post originally appeared on January 10, 2014.

Read more What Would Yellow Ranger Do? at The Toast.

by Meaghan O'Connell

Open offices may seem better suited to younger workers, many of whom have been multitasking for the majority of their short careers. When, in 2012, Heidi Rasila and Peggie Rothe looked at how employees of a Finnish telecommunications company born after 1982 reacted to the negative effects of open-office plans, they noted that young employees found certain types of noises, such as conversations and laughter, just as distracting as their older counterparts did. The younger workers also disparaged their lack of privacy and an inability to control their environment. But they believed that the trade-offs were ultimately worth it, because the open space resulted in a sense of camaraderie; they valued the time spent socializing with coworkers, whom they often saw as friends.

All these studies cited on the New Yorker’s Currency blog yesterday that suggest we’d all work better behind closed doors definitely resonate. But practically (architecturally?) speaking, how would that even work? Don’t all roads lead to cubicle?

I did love the camaraderie of an open office plan, mostly the amount of time I could spend bugging my coworkers on my way back from something as simple as a trip to the bathroom, but whenever I needed to get something big done I usually had to work from home or hide out in a conference room. Having your own office, though? That seems far-off and magical to me, something from a bygone era I may have missed out on.

Photo: Richard Bowen

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My dog is a Gabor sister, trapped in the body of a pit bull terrier blend. She has never seen a man she did not want to meet, or met a man she could not charm. The heart of a charming courtesan beats within her broad black and white chest. She has the tennis and racket ball collection to prove it.

During walks near the public courts, Lucy is not above grinning and wiggling for “an old ball I was going to throw away, really. She can have it. Who’s a pretty girl? Does this pretty girl want a tennis ball? Oooo, she does!” I stand around smiling, feeling de trop during these encounters. It has been pointed out that maybe if I did not usually dress like a teenage lesbian circa 1998 when I walk the dog, her wingwoman potential could be more effectively exploited. But I doubt it. These guys are dazzled by Lucy’s adorably large ears and freckled belly. And she lacks the ability to distinguish between married, single, gay, straight.

In a display of both spectacular taste and questionable judgment, Lucy boldly attempted to snare Jon Hamm a couple years ago, while his partner Jennifer Westfeldt was probably less than 20 feet away, filming in one of our neighborhood parks. Though her Jolene efforts were unsuccessful on my behalf, Lucy got Don Draper’s hands under her sweatshirt while he whispered praise for the adorable pink tint of her muzzle, while we all huddled together under a shrub at the edge of the Heather Garden. It is unlikely she will ever make a more impressive conquest, but I allow her to pull me into conversations with joggers, tourists, teenagers on field trips, museum staff walking to their jobs at The Cloisters, and parks department employees—a range of men whose common bonds are their inability to resist a friendly furry face and a lack of interest in the woman at the other end of the leash, which is usually mutual.
Read the rest at The Hairpin.

The post Lucy's Conquests appeared first on The Awl.

by Alex Balk

I can't remember who said of Annie Clark's voice that there was something so comforting about it that you accepted even the weirdest surrounding sounds, but boy was he or she ever correct. I am very excited for the new album.

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The post St. Vincent, "Digital Witness" appeared first on The Awl.

More snow is headed to the Northeast this week, and that can only mean one thing (besides traffic delays and endless shoveling): more adorable moments for dogs to play in the snow!  Here are some GIFs to get you in the spirit of winter precipitation, even if you’re sick of it already this year.

This french bulldog stealing a sled.

via thecutenessbuddy.blogspot.com

This dog who doesn’t even need a sled.

via funnyjunk.com

This shiba inu having the time of his life.

via mashable.com

This dog skiing with more effortless grace than you ever could hope to.

via mashable.com

This magically disappearing dog.

via gif-king.com

This incredibly talented pup.

via gifak.net

This corgi who’s really happy to see you.

This same corgi who changes his mind.

via underthemountainbunker.com

This husky who is way more laid-back about the snow than you’ll ever be.

via whatshouldwecallgradschool.tumblr.com

These collies demonstrating the varied techniques of snowball catching.

via famousbirds.net

This boxer showing the amateurs how snow romping is really done.

via gifbay.com

And this amateur showing everyone how it’s done.

via gifsoup.com

This corgi surveying his snow castle.

via thecutenessbuddy.blogspot.com

This pup with the snowiest little nose ever.

via thecutenessbuddy.blogspot.com

This bulldog, snowboarding like a pro.

via mashable.com

And this little fluffball, skating enthusiastically.

via mashable.com

Follow @megelizabeth

by Renee Lupica

This post was originally published June 11, 2013.

I.

Once upon a time a woman never got married, but had many fulfilling relationships, a job that kept her comfortable, an apartment that she got to decorate just for her, and hobbies that stimulated her mind.

The End.

II. 

Once upon a time a woman and a man tried having babies, but it didn't work, so when they were past the age of trying, they decided that they had enough disposable income to travel the world, and so they did, and it was awesome, and both of them felt okay about it, and no one gave them any grief over it, either.

The End.

III.

Once upon a time a woman was approached by a drunk guy in a dark alley, but he was very polite, and explained that he had driven to the bar, but because he was responsible, he didn't want to drive home, but his cell phone was dead, so he asked the lady to call him a cab. She did, and he was grateful, and they said pleasant goodbyes before going their separate ways.

The End.

IV.

Once upon a time a woman was very good at her job, and she knew she had added value to the company she worked for, so even though she was nervous, she talked to her boss, and asked for a raise, and she got it.

The End.

V.

Once upon a time a woman grew up in a land-locked state, and continued to live there because she had married her high school sweetheart, and his job was tied to the area, and she wanted to stay close to her parents, but she had always wished she had learned to surf. So when she turned 65 she used some of the money from her savings account, took her first ever solo vacation to the coast, and took a week's worth of surfing lessons, and had a very nice time.

The End.

VI.

Once upon a time a young girl grew up reading magazines about beauty products and consequently felt very self-conscious about her acne. She tried a bunch of treatments that had varying degrees of success, and never left the house without a full face of makeup. She started using anti-aging products when she was 20, thinking that prevention would work better than a cure. But when she turned 30 she still had acne that she had hoped to outgrow, but somehow it just didn't seem to matter as much. She would sometimes run errands without any makeup at all. And despite the preventative care she had tried to do in her early twenties, she started developing some wrinkles on her forehead in her late twenties. But again, somehow, it just didn't seem to bother her as much as the prospect had when she was younger. When she was in her forties her skin had continued to wrinkle, but she cared even less, and was pleased to see that the wrinkles around her eyes made it look like she smiled a lot, which made her smile more, and she cared even less, and she only wore makeup when she wanted to, and never felt obligated to do so. When she was 80 her skin was thinner and delicate, but reminded her of really beautiful tissue paper, and she was happier, and felt more confident as a person than she ever had.

The End.

 

Renee Lupica recently received a BFA in New Media. She recently began sleeping on two mattresses stacked on top of one another, and is beginning to understand how it might escalate, à la The Princess & The Pea. You can follow her on Twitter @rmlupica.

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Originally published April 5th, 2013.

"Beauty is a responsibility like anything else, beautiful women have special lives like prime ministers but I don't want that."

The writer and painter Leonora Carrington was 33 and a very beautiful woman when she wrote that line in The Hearing Trumpet, a book that is, among many other topics—alchemy, the Holy Grail, the perversities of nuns, the difficulties of getting goats and wolves to live together—also about being very, very old. This was in 1950; her best friend was a Spanish painter named Remedios Varo.

In the book, Carrington appears under the alias Marian Leatherby, who is 92 and has a beard. She has no teeth left and has become vegetarian "as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway." Varo is the magical, enterprising and rather dashing Carmella Velasquez. She wears a red wig in a "queenly gesture to her long lost hair" and smokes cigars between sucking on violet lozenges. When Marian's family stows her away in a home for old ladies it's Carmella who, comfortingly, takes over the care of her cats.

Carrington died a couple years ago, at age 94—into her Marian Leatherby decade. Tomorrow would be her 96th birthday. When she wrote The Hearing Trumpet, she had, after a series of unlikely life twists, come to live in Mexico City. (The book contains her rueful, correct anticipation that she would never return permanently to England.) She was married with two young sons. In a letter written around this time: "… The Antichrists are antichristing each other with antichristly ferocity so I must go and make peace." Like Carrington, Varo had come to Mexico from Europe during WWII. They visited almost daily.

In 1950, Varo was in her early 40s. She did not have children—she had cats, many, many cats and a series of lovers and husbands who, while diverting and sometimes quite impressive, did not, as a rule, have much more fixed income than the cats. (This would change with her last husband.) These men were amiable, though, and they remained devoted; she was the sort of person whose exes forever address her as "your admiring friend." "My very dear Remedios … your hair is like the roots of invisible stars," goes one letter. From a book inscription: "To Remedios whose two breasts are my two hemispheres."

Still a few years away from her greatest successes as a painter, Varo supported herself (and the cats and others) in her first years in Mexico with commercial work. A partial list of her jobs, taken from Janet Kaplan's essential study: She made dioramas for the war effort; she painted furniture; she created commercial art for Bayer; she did scientific drawings of insects; she designed and sewed costumes for the theater. (In Europe, while getting by in France at the outset of the war, she'd faked some de Chiricos and sold candy.) It has to have been a strain and a scramble, though what everyone remarked about her was her liveliness and extreme generosity. "These were not just nice ideas"—said one friend, of the works she undertook on behalf of others—"her head and her heart were united in an extraordinary way."

Carrington told one chronicler that she wrote The Hearing Trumpet in a café in the Plaza de los Mariachis "in the midst of cacophonous noise." That seems fitting. As does the 26-year waiting period between its writing and publication. (The illustrations are by Carrington's second son Pablo Weisz Carrington—which is funny, especially when he's illustrating Marian's cowardly son Galahad.) It has, as you read, the feel of a story dashed off by one friend for the express cackling amusement of another, a very particular Ideal Reader. The writing has a kind of glissading bumptious kangaroo splendor as it moves along but that beauty doesn't seem summoned to formally impress so much as delight. The tone is jaunty and benevolently wicked: "Here we are at the end of everything. I have a beard, you have a wig! HAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Crookhey Hall (1947)

Leonora Carrington liked fairy tales and nursery rhymes; and it's wonderful how much of her early life obligingly flows in a fairy-tale vein. (Susan Aberth's book on Carrington provides excellent background here.) She grew up in a house called Crookhey Hall, a Gothic mansion built by one Colonel Bird who, in honor of his surname, had bird ornamentation put in all around the place—and so Carrington's first drawings began with birds. Her father was "the richest man in Lancashire"; he sold his textile company to what became a part of Imperial Chemical Industries, which, if you are going to have a remote, forbidding father, is exactly the board he should sit on. The Carringtons were only two generations into riches, though; his own father was a mill hand who had patented a valuable thingamajig. The family was, in other words, bourgeois, not aristocratic or intellectual. Her mother, the daughter of an Irish doctor, was Catholic. There was an older brother and two younger ones; their names seem unimportant. Of everyone and everything that existed at Crookhey Hall, Leonora later spoke lovingly of three things: Her mother Maureen, her Irish nanny Mary Cavanaugh, and her horse, Winkie.

By 17 she'd been kicked out of two convent schools and scraped through stints at finishing schools in Florence and Paris. She was allowed some time at a London art school. Here she is with her mother during her debutante season at their presentation at King George V's court in 1934.

She later wrote the story "The Debutante," in which the narrator sends a hyena to a ball in her place: "My mother came in, pale with fury. 'We had just sat down to eat,' she said, 'when that thing in your place gets up and cries, ‘I smell a bit strong, eh? Well I don’t eat cake.' Then she tore off her face and ate it. With one bound she disappeared through the window."

Not long after the presentation, she'd met the surrealist painter Max Ernst, nearly 20 years older than she and married, and disappeared with him through the window to France, never to return.

"Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937-8) features a hyena. (It's part of the Met's collection.)
The photo below it was taken around the same time, in Cornwall.

Remedios Varo also went to convent school, and she painted this autobiographical series about her school time. It's impossible to see unless you're up close, but in the second one, Embroidering Earth's Mantle, the heroine of the triptych—the one who catches your eye in the first painting—has "embroidered a trick in which one can see her together with her lover," which leads the way to the third painting.

Toward the Tower (1960)

Embroidering Earth's Mantle (1961)

The Escape (1961)





Varo's father, Don Rodrigo, was Andalusian; her mother Ignacia was Basque. Like Carrington, Varo preferred her mother's company, finding her father domineering and crowding. He had ambitions for her. He was an engineer, and she learned draftsmanship from him. As Kaplan recounts, he frequently took her to museums as well as made her copy (and recopy) his mechanical drawings. This education stayed with her. Varo's paintings often featured ingenious conveyances and other inventive bits of engineering ("pull that string and that odd-looking shell-like coat becomes a boat in which you can float away"), meticulously rendered.

For some reason this stray detail about her father's life stands out as oddly poignant and funny: "Varo's father was one of the few people in Spain to study the universal language Esperanto." It gives a sense of the excess energy, the questing-ness that he passed along to his daughter. Here's the melancholy father-daughter ride Caravan, painted in 1955.

Leonora and Remedios met at least once or twice in Paris before the war. They were both orbiting within the inner surrealist circle. Varo had fled Franco's Spain with the poet Benjamin Péret, and Carrington was Ernst's companion (to his wife's vocal chagrin). They were both younger women in relationships with older, much more famous men. Varo described the period as one of "awe." Carrington was less awed by the company: Joan Miró "gave me some money one day and told me to get him some cigarettes. I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself. I wasn't daunted by any of them."

Surrealism celebrated the idea of the femme-enfant, the muse-like woman-child who, as Aberth puts it, "through her naiveté is in direct connection with her own unconscious and can, therefore, serve as a guide for man." (Urf.) When Carrington arrived in Paris, she was embraced as the quintessential femme-enfant (and here we find that the young, striking-looking, confident and talented heiress will be warmly greeted most everywhere she travels). She later shrugged off the title: "I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist."

Still, she was in her early 20s; she was brilliant; she would have wanted all the other brilliant dazzling people to take notice. She went to one party dressed only in a sheet and dropped it mid-party. Out to a fusty dinner, she took off her shoes and spread the tops of her feet with mustard. And yet even as she and her paintings gained recognition, one part of her must have been standing apart and surveying the scene, thinking, thinking. (Even, or especially, about her relationship with Ernst, who had a knack for getting older while the femme-enfants stayed the same age. Or as Carrington put it: "Once you were over 25 you were pretty well out.") The croneishness of bearded Marian and bald Carmella seem in the context of the femme-enfant like an extra good, extra dark joke. To repeat Marian's line, "Beauty is a responsibility like anything else, beautiful women have special lives like prime ministers but I don't want that." The "I don't want that" falls as she's sifting around for a memory—but it's obviously about more than that, too.

When the war came, Carrington was living with Ernst in a farmhouse in France. ("Ah, Provence. … I was very happy there. I worked, I painted, I had a vine I looked after.") They'd ignored the warnings of family and friends to leave. Once war was declared, Ernst was sent for interment in a camp with other German nationals. After his arrest, Carrington made her way to Madrid. The plan was to work for Ernst's release there, but after a hellish journey, she had a nervous breakdown. "In the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world's stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health," she recorded. She shared this theory with some authorities at the British embassy, after which she was committed to a Spanish asylum where she was given the anti-psychotic drug Cardiazol. This induced convulsions, and in that condition she was "left for days strapped to a bed."

Eventually she was released. Meanwhile, her family had sent her nanny by submarine—let's repeat that, sent her nanny by submarine—to fetch her and take her to an asylum in South Africa. Dutiful historian-ship forces me to mention that other accounts have it not being the nanny-in-a-submarine, but a business acquaintance of her father's (transport uncharted—one can only hope dog sled) on the scene. Either way, Carrington gave her minders the slip by saying she had to go the bathroom, slipping out a café back door, hailing a taxi, and going to the Mexican embassy. There she had an old friend, Renato Leduc, who, in addition to his job as a diplomat, was a poet and friend of Picasso's. He was also gallant. He offered to marry her, making it impossible for her family to force her anywhere. After a waiting period in Lisbon, they sailed to New York and then, after some time there, moved on together to Mexico.

(Ernst, released from detention, had been in Lisbon too, now in company with Peggy Guggenheim and her money. This waiting-for-passage period was by all accounts a dreadful, jealous time for everyone, including Guggenheim, who probably should have just hired a submarine to take herself out of there.)

Meanwhile, Varo and Péret's wartime hopscotching took them from Paris to Marseille to Casablanca to Mexico City. The two were incredibly lucky to escape. Before leaving Paris, Varo was detained by the police for a few months. That time period, at least, is the most likely estimate: the actual specifics of her detainment are unknown, because she refused to ever speak of them. When she and Péret landed in Mexico City they found an apartment—you entered through a window and there were holes in the floors "we used… as ashtrays but you had to know where to step." Varo pinned up the Picassos and Ernsts they'd come away with; she found work; she began assembling cats.

Once he performed his duties as a friend and escort, Leduc seems to have wandered off in some amicable, permanent way (I picture him just fading from sight as he goes down the block). In the crowd of Europeans in Mexico City, she met Chiki Weisz, a Hungarian photographer. Chiki was a nickname; his first name was Emerico. They were married in 1946—in a marvelous photo of the wedding day, taken by their good friend Kati Horna, there is Varo grinning and peering over Carrington's shoulder.

Antichrist 1 (Gabriel) came along later that year; Antichrist 2 (Pablo) followed in 1948. Her pregnancies were a great time for her painting. As she explained in a letter to her friend, the British art collector Edward James: "Inspired painting, I find, favors a rather bucolic and opaque frame of mind on a continually replenished stomach – preferably with heavy and indigestible foods such as chocolate, sickly cakes, marzipan in blocks… That is why I painted so beautifully when I was pregnant, I did nothing but eat."

James was extremely rich and eccentric; he was also one of Carrington's first patrons, buying up many of her works and helping to arrange her first major show in New York, in 1948. (In The Hearing Trumpet he's gifted a role as Marian's mysterious and globetrotting friend Marlborough.)

About his first visit to her Mexico City studio he wrote:

Leonora Carrington's studio had everything most conducive to make it the true matrix of true art. Small in the extreme, it was an ill-furnished and not very well lighted room. It had nothing to endow it with the title of studio at all, save a few almost worn-out paintbrushes and a number of gesso panels, set on a dog and cat populated floor, leaning face-averted against a white-washed and peeling wall. The place was combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel and junk store. The disorder was apocalyptic: the appurtenances of the poorest. My hopes and expectations began to swell.

The Giantess, below, was commissioned by James.

Bird Pong (1949)

The Giantess (1949)—yes, you recognize this from the Madonna video

Are You Really Syrious? (1953)

In The Hearing Trumpet, they're Marian Leatherby & Carmella Velasquez. In a story of Varo's, they're Ellen Ramsbottom and Felina Caprino Mandragora. Ellen's interests include "somniotelepathic phenomenon," while Felina is "a goat when sleeping and a woman with 'vague little horns' when awake."

In their visits to each other, they put together elaborate practical jokes. Other times, they "would just get together and laugh." There were secrets, said one friend, "that Remedios would talk about with no one but Leonora." They cooked together—and jokes became cooking recipes became "recipes that promised an array of magical results"—that is, spells—became inquiries into alchemy.

Varo in Mexico City.

One joke-recipe: Tapioca spritzed with squid ink, served as caviar. In an email, Aberth said they served this once to Octavio Paz: "He fell for it, much to their delight." (This is one that seems, admittedly, like it was probably more riotous at the time; perhaps squid ink was more plentiful then, too.) Other recipes contained advice "for scaring away inopportune dreams, insomnia and deserts of quicksand under the bed." A recipe for dreaming you were the king of England called for "a sable brush to paint egg white all over the dreamer's body." And here you will find Varo's full recipe for erotic dreams, which includes as ingredients: "a kilo of horseradish, three white hens, a head of garlic, four kilos of honey, a mirror, two calf livers, a brick, two clothespins, a corset with stays, two false mustaches and hats to taste."

Varo was busy with commercial work during this first blazing period of their friendship and so not painting as much as Carrington, but her notebooks are filled with the recipes, letters, stories, and plays written in a journal-y conversation with her. One dream description: "I am washing a blonde kitten in the sink of some hotel, but that's not right it looks like Leonora wearing a loose overcoat that needs washing."

A note from Leonora written in French on a drawing:

Remedios, I told you that I am making you a spell against [the evil eye]. There it is. Last night I had a fever of 38, auto-suggestion perhaps—I do not feel well enough to go out—Come to see me if you can? Can both of you come to drink your tequila? … Leonora.

I love the intimacy and lunacy of that note.

Here's one very funny fact about Remedios Varo: She lied about her age. It's not clear when it started, but, in her book, Kaplan suggests it might have begun when she was in Paris, among the surrealists, and feeling at 30 a little long in the tooth for a femme-enfant—so presto, magic, she became 25 instead. This age-shaving lasted even after her death: her tombstone gives her birth year as 1913, not 1908. (Interestingly, in The Hearing Trumpet, while Marian volunteers her own age, she doesn't announce Carmella's.)

In 1950, at 42 (or "37"), Varo's life was taking a prosperous, happy turn. She's gotten married to a businessman named Walter Gruen, who, unlike her previous affiances, was comfortably well off. Gruen pushed her to return to painting full time and show her work, which she'd been timid to do. A group show in 1955 and a solo one in 1956 brought her wide acclaim. This letter to her mother after the solo show is wildly triumphant: the show, she reports, "was a great success and there were hundreds of people. For my character this is rather painful. But I have sold all of my paintings and I am richer than a toreador. Because of this, whatever you fancy is yours for the asking…" I am richer than a toreador!

Photograph taken in Marseille in 1941.

Remedios died, very suddenly, in 1963 from what was almost certainly a heart attack. Some speculative talk circulated that it was possibly suicide—she was going through an anxious, fearful period—but that seems unlikely. One growing source of anxiety for her was aging. She frequently told friends about a Carmelite nunnery in Spain "where she planned to seek retreat if things ever grew too difficult." (Carmelite/Carmella.) The convent was founded by an ancestor of hers, Don Rodrigo de Varo y de Antequera. But on a visit there, Kaplan discovered that she wouldn't have been allowed entry.

As explained by one of the nuns, a disembodied voice speaking to her visitor from behind an impenetrable wall, although they venerate the memory of Don Rodrigo—keeping his cranial bones and portrait on permanent display—no worldly woman, not even one named Varo, could ever expect them to open their doors to her.

Given her great unhappiness in convent school, it seems perverse that Varo daydreamed of spending her last years sequestered in a nunnery: "Here is my masterful painting The Escape… then here is my next one called The Return." But speaking to visitors in 2009, Carrington observed, "I miss England. … Although I probably just miss the past." The twinned pattern here feels instructive: There's the longing to disappear out the window; the bounding escape; then the realization years later that that window got shut firmly behind you.

But then: So what? There we are out in the world, me with this beard, you in that wig. HAHAHAHAHA.

Previously: How To Be A Monster: Life Lessons From Lord Byron


Carrie Frye is here and here.

The post Two Women, Their Husbands, Their Cats, Their Alchemy appeared first on The Awl.

by Anne Helen Petersen and Jia Tolentino

AHP: Jia, real talk; The Returned is the best show that’s (kinda sorta not really) airing on television.

J: The Returned is absolutely the best show on my computer, which is my television.

AHP: The Returned is a French import, currently airing on Sundance, which seems to have a monopoly on awesome moody imports. It was originally titled Les Revenants. It’s set in a small, remote town in the French mountains near a huge dam (plot point!) where, one day, a small set of random people return from the dead.

J: There’s an arresting, rough-edged, exquisite quality to every shot, and Mogwai does the music, and it’s Explosions in the Sky, Friday Night Lights good.

AHP: To be clear: I’m not into zombie shows. I loathe Walking Dead and put up with World War Z uniquely for Brad Pitt. But mysterious, vaguely creepy foreign shows, holy shit am I on board: see, for example, The Fall, Broadchurch, Top of the Lake. And, anyway, this is no zombie show: they’re all perfectly (and beautifully, in many cases) intact. They died at different times, for different reasons, but they each wake up with zero memory of a.) dying or b.) being dead, and re-enter the world as if nothing happened. The narrative pivots on the rest of the world’s inability to reincorporate them into their lives 5, 10, 15, 25 years later.

The other bonus is that the first episode is available for free on iTunes, which is how I tempted Jia into watching and, hopefully, is how you’ll get hooked as well. We’re committed to non-spoilers past episode one, but we’re going to talk about the feel and tone and addictiveness of the show at large.

J: Yes. My mania for this show is all-consuming. I am not a television proselytizer normally, and The Returned is probably the only show that I’ve ever like, sat people down at parties and tried to convince them to watch it. IT’S SO GOOD.

AHP: I cannot shut the fuck up about this show. Did I just meet you at the awkward faculty Christmas party? Awesome, let me tell you about The Returned.

J: Oh, I should say that I also hate zombie stuff! Especially when it has highbrow aspirations. I strongly disliked Zone One, etc. But this show is something totally different.

AHP: That’s the thing: they’re not zombies, per se. Aren’t zombies technically bitten or consumed or whatever while still alive? These people are dead and then come back, so the question is much less about what will they do to us and much more about how have we changed.

J: Yeah. They are just as much ghosts, or objective correlatives for The Past. Or whatever! The basic question of what the hell are they is a mystery that drives our viewer curiosity in the same way that it drives the action in the town. We’re like the parents and former lovers and cops; we’re trying to make sense of the same, enigmatic, conflicting clues. And the manner in which everyone does try to get around this mystery is a litmus test that says more about each character than anything that the show is trying to do. Depending on the person looking at them, the returned seem unholy and satanic or pure and divine, wildly dangerous or pathetically vulnerable—and at the same time, there’s no sense that the show is trying to say Here Is a Story About Good and Evil.

AHP: I feel like The Returned is for people who like the politics of sci-fi but not the gruesomeness of sci-fi—which explains why a huge Star Trek: The Next Generation fan like me would like it. So much sci-fi turns the “problem” of weird phenomena into a reason to sublimate larger politics into, you know, planetary war, or zombies vs. humanity. There’s always a modicum of individuation (literally star-crossed lovers) but so much of what goes on in The Returned is a fairly simple calculus that has much more to do with grief than the supernatural. Someone died, you grieved, you moved on…. now what do you do when that person comes back?

J: Oh, yeah. That’s such a huge strength of the show; each “returned” person’s plot line feels so compelling and human and real that you frequently forget the sheer outlandishness of the central conceit. My boyfriend watched the first episode with me and refused to keep going because he is a monster who hates anything fantastical, but then two weeks later, he was like, very shyly, “Hey, so, uh, what’s happening on The Returned?” And for a half hour, he made me walk him through every single storyline and made guesses about what would happen next. The show really gets its hooks in.

Also, it’s a nice built-in feature of the conceit that audience skepticism and disbelief is represented and contained by the town’s reactions. It’s like the way Hurley functioned on Lost, except it’s all the townspeople filling that role, and they’re not wisecracking about time travel but genuinely horrified and wrecked by these people who’ve returned from the dead. So the outlandishness is fully on the table, and you’re free to just really feel for everyone (returned or not) and your empathy builds and builds as the show reveals backstory.

AHP: Let’s just say that there’s an already sympathetic, albeit slightly creepy character, whose backstory was so revelatory that I wept.

J: Speaking of Hurley, I meant to ask you: were you a Lost fan? The backstory thing, and the way each episode is sort of devoted to a single character while multiple plot lines play out, and of course the ensemble cast and the creepiness and the isolation and the metaphysical questions—that’s for sure my first reference for this show (to be fair, I’ve barely seen anything else sci-fi).

AHP: I tolerated Lost. I appreciate the narrative complexity, and I liked the first few seasons, but I also felt like the narrative was a bit hackneyed, which I never get with The Returned.

J: Totally hackneyed! Terrible dialogue sometimes, inelegant character arcs, asking the viewer to buy in to a level of ridiculousness this show would never. But nevertheless I was one of those Lost superfans (I NEVER CLAIMED TO BE COOL) and I think anyone else who shared that same fervor would really, really dig The Returned. Watching it I feel the same wild satisfaction about all my strongest TV desires being met simultaneously, the same radiant joy at the unity of weird and beautiful. I guess I’m a big sucker for setting—in The Returned the town is a character the way the island was for Lost—as well as for just that element of spun-out mystery that heightens to the point where you’re like “Hmm, this can’t possibly end in a completely satisfactory way” but don’t care.

AHP: It’s actually quite similar to Top of the Lake—another foreign television show set in a breathlessly beautiful setting (and involving something deeply emotionally unsettling) that you know, deep down, will never precisely wrap up in a wholly satisfying way. But I like those ragged edges: clean conclusions are always lies.

J: Absolutely. And I guess this is one way in which this show differentiates itself completely from Lost in a great way. Here, the mystery, the code-cracking, is not the point.

AHP: Okay let’s talk about the music. It is legit bewitching and 50% of the reason this show works.

J: It is perfect. Emotional enough that it communicates very directly but also subtle and complex enough that, even though there are just three or four recurring themes and they’re probably used in very similar ways in every episode and also I have them memorized, I can’t put a button on them like “Here’s the scary music,” “Here’s where we’re thinking about love.” Honestly, this feels like such a sweet spot for prog-rock/post-rock bands; the same way that ‘90s bands like Duncan Sheik should just write Spring Awakenings till the end of time, I want a horror movie with music by 65 Days of Static, or Mars Volta (RIP).

AHP: And, as we have both noted, perfect work music.

J: Absolutely. It is focusing and it has the invisible effect of making you more emotionally invested, just like it does for the show.

AHP: Also I would watch the credits to this show on continuous repeat.

J: I've never skipped the opening credits once. Visually, too, they function like an epigraph or something.

AHP: The animals in the water! I’m transfixed.

AHP: And yes, outstanding point re: the way that the musical leitmotifs function: they’re not the “love theme” or the “horror theme”; it’s not as simply melodramatic or legible as that. And yes, all these bands should figure do this work and a.) please us tremendously and b.) fund their other work.

J: Yeah! It doesn’t feel like any sort of artistic capitulation or softening in this case. Actually, did you know that Mogwai had to write a lot of the score without seeing much of the script or any preliminary footage?

AHP: I feel like the producers were probably like: hey guys, do something eerie, but do your thing. And Mogwai was like “on it.”

J: Yeah, and then the writers took their cues from the music, they've said. It’s such a great example of how this sort of collaboration can lead to an elevation of the commercial material instead of the opposite.

AHP: Also this show is SO FRENCH. Lesbians being lesbians and no explicit politicization thereof; teens having sex and doing lots of shots and no moralization… I’m totally into it.

J: No moralization or salaciousness from ANY angle. Within the show’s world, the parents are realistic and respectful and so are the townspeople. And then, outside of the show’s world, the camera doesn’t linger for even a second on any of the titillating possibilities that will surely be drawn out to their cheesecake fullness in the American adaptation. That is maybe my fourth favorite aspect of this show, music being the first, setting being the second, weirdo mystery being the third, and then this restraint from “juiciness.”

AHP: Okay I have to admit that the French—and not even the French-ness, but the actual French language, is one of my favorite things. I have lapsed fluency and feel sad about that a lot, but all of these characters are vaguely traumatized and speak somewhat slowly, which makes me feel so, so great about my French. If you speak crappy French, you will be into this.

J: I second that! I have learned some nice idioms too. Cou-cou, c’est nous! sounds much nicer than Heyyyy, we’re home. Also another thing I enjoy is that everyone has great, French posture and self-possession.

AHP: And looks awesome wearing essentially the same thing everyday, which I’ve always viewed as the most enviable French attribute.

J: Absolutely. French women: this is a cry for help. Help us.

AHP: The overarching aesthetic of the show is gorgeous—all of the homes manage to be very postmodern and airy without being cold or dated, and the landscape is at once wild and dense and populated and quasi-urban. I can’t think of another town that I’ve wanted to live in this much—is that fair?

J: Yeah. Let’s go! The TV town is a composite of three separate real ones, and I went down a wormhole of looking them up, and they all look like the perfect places to exist. Also part of my love stems from the fact that I am a Mountains person as opposed to a Beach person, even though I love the beach. And this has the double whammy of Mountains plus Water.

AHP: I am also a Mountains person; this is why we like each other.

J: Wow, it’s so great that Emma is going to send us on a reporting trip to the Mountains in France. Thank you so much, Emma: you are truly a friend.

AHP: If you can’t fly me out of Walla Walla, it’s chill, I’ll drive to Seattle for the direct. And while aesthetics of the town are perfect, so are the aesthetics of the characters. In other words: these characters are HOTT.

J: The holy trinity of hotness. It was a very sensual experience putting all of them together in my fake online Photoshop. Before you ask, let me assure you that I have already thought about this long and hard: I would fuck Serge (center), kill Eyebrows (left) and marry Lena. I can’t wait to live with Lena for the rest of my life in the Mountains.

AHP: You and your Hot French Eyebrows Blasphemy! When we first started talking about this show and I was all into Hot French Eyebrows and you were like “Lena. End of story.”

J: LENAAAAAAAAAAAA. Oh my god. Lena. Lena is so hot. I also just like that character and how they treat her—her hotness is not a “thing” within the show at all, she’s not made to be particularly driven by calculations about boys or herself or anything. They just allow her to exist and act like a bored, gorgeous, nervy 19-year-old girl would.

AHP: No spoilers, but later in the series she has to wear a straight up early ‘90s jean jumper, and she is still hot.

J: And in that episode there is a sexual encounter in which, under very tricky and “problematic” circumstances, her sexual desire is allowed space and agency in a way that feels really unusual.

AHP: And also wholly natural and without blame? I was really into that episode.

J: Absolutely. As its own thing, totally separate from whatever her partner in the scene was after. Which is an incredible way to represent sex.

AHP: Sexual desire as autonomous of partner? REVELATORY. Also manifest in The Fall and Top of the Lake, which is just another way of saying watch those shows.

J: Neither of which I have watched!!!!! I need to watch both of them. I do not watch enough TV; I have no business talking about it now. But anyway who cares about "TV," I only want to watch The Returned. Another thing about it is that it's only an 8-episode first season, so the mania will consume you quickly and then you can move on.

AHP: We can’t talk about extended plotlines, but this show does an amazing job of going beyond looks or actions and making you question what you thought, based on looks and societal expectations, how you would want/expect each character to function.

J: Yes. Like, it seems that the writers show an extraordinary restraint in not manipulating their characters in terms of sympathy and likability and viewer identification. The way that I don’t love or hate or long to be or be with any of them in that broad way that TV engenders so easily—the way that you're never really rooting for anything specific to happen, because you know what does happen will be more real—it’s almost like watching a documentary, which is ridiculous, because the premise is so wack.

AHP: We are spoiling the first episode, so it’s safe to talk about Lena and Camille. They’re twins, but one died and the other went on living, so when the dead twin (Camille) comes back, she’s confronted with a vision of herself several years in the future (the living twin, Lena). I love how the series refuses to make them friends. Also: GENIUS CASTING.

J: Yeah, the scene where they see each other for the first time is so well-acted. And that’s another thing—there are only two characters out of an ensemble of more than a dozen who have ever, and only in a couple scenes, struck me as artificial.

AHP: I really cannot think of a false note in this entire series. How many shows can I say that about?

J: Same. SAME. Do you think we’ve convinced people to watch it yet? Do you think people are already watching this and just not talking about it? I’m so glad that you suggested this to me; when you said it was the best thing you’d seen all year I immediately downloaded the first episode and couldn’t have loved it more.

AHP: Readers, trust us on this one. Then you can be the person proselytizing about it at Christmas and thumbing your nose when the not one but two horrible American adaptations make their way to television. The French Returned is the legit Returned, and don’t say we didn’t warn you about it.

Anne Helen Petersen and Jia Tolentino are always down to talk about The Returned.

42 Comments

Previously: Why Aren’t We Talking About How Much Tim Curry and Dave Grohl Are The Same?

I am horrified and astonished that Johnny Weir and Tom Hiddleston have been running around existing for the last several decades without a single attempt to force them to pair skate together à la Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg because they are the exact same man. Why aren’t we talking about this every day?

Don’t try to tell me this isn’t a still from the movie Thor, because I won’t believe you. That is clearly English actor Tom Hiddleston in the movie Thor, or possibly Thor II, or possibly The Avengers. Whichever one has Tom Hiddleston in it. Is he in all three of them? He couldn’t possibly be in all three of them. Look at him, skating across the rainbow bridge Bifrost to Asgard.

Here, of course, we see celebrated figure skater Johnny Weir in one of his trademark over-the-top costumes preparing to go on the ice.

Important question for readers: Why are they the same face. Why are they the same face in the same elaborate midnight-black skintight leotards with outré neck-and-shoulder embellishments. Why. Why. 

Equally important followup question: Why are they also both Rufus Wainwright? Why are they three, but also one? What is this fey, white-mouthed Trinity? 

While we’re asking horrified, panting questions, why is Rufus Wainwright only sometimes Tom Hiddleston and Johnny Weir but the rest of the time Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica? What goddamn business does this Canadian singer-songwriter have looking like goddamn Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica half the time?

WHY IS GAIUS BALTAR FROM BATTLESTAR GALACTICA SOMETIMES RUFUS WAINWRIGHT BUT ALSO SOMETIMES NABOO FROM THE MIGHTY BOOSHI: 

 I am unsettled and frightened and the only thing that will make this right is A) someone sorting out just how many of these men are real and then banishing the remaining hollow shells to whatever hell-dimension the real Tom Hiddleston summoned them from or B) a movie version of Macbeth that comes out next week where all of them play The Weird Sisters and Lady Macbeth by turns. Thank you for your time.

Read more Why Is Tom Hiddleston Also Johnny Weir and Rufus Wainwright? at The Toast.

The results are in for our annual critics poll. We count down the top 25 Australian records of 2013, a diverse year with a few clear frontrunners.

25. World’s End Press

World’s End Press
(Liberation)

What we said: “I’d love to find some negative aspects, for the sake of balance, but I’ve got nothing. I’m floored.”

24. Underground Lovers

Weekend
(Rubber)

What we said: “If Weekend was simply the seventh Underground Lovers album it’d be considered exceptional. That it’s appeared after so long a break makes it nothing short of amazing.

23. Summer Flake

You Can Have It All
(Rice is Nice)

What we said: “Stephanie Crase knows the beauty in brooding. It’s all over her debut album as Summer Flake … part low-key confessionals to the listener and part circular conversations with the proverbial mirror.”

More reading: Track by Track

22. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Push the Sky Away
(Bad Seed Ltd.)

What we said: “Nick Cave is beyond having to prove anything to anybody. But Push the Sky Away is testament to the singer-songwriter’s ability to successfully flex against the constraints of his own craft.”

21. Machine Translations

The Bright Door
(Spunk)

What we said: “I’m not sure if the name is an in-joke, but I can’t think of many people making music more achingly human than Greg “J” Walker. His are ordinary machines: imperfect, breathing and sighing.”

More reading: Interview

20. Don Walker

Hully Gully
(Independent/MGM)

What we said: “It’s a record with an intense, assured feel and a clean, inviting sound .... I look forward very much to spending a long time in its company.”

More reading: Interview

19. Cut Copy

Free Your Mind
(Modular)

What we said: “If you appreciated them as weightless dancefloor stylists and covert pop classicists, Free Your Mind will hit the same sweet-spot.”

18. Bushwalking

No Enter
(Chapter)

What we said: “I could expound on what is dynamic, thought-provoking and enjoyable about No Enter indefinitely, but that wouldn’t be nearly as exciting as actually listening to it.”

17. Big Scary

Not Art
(Pieater/Inertia)

What we said: “These are youth raiding the FM airwaves of the ’80s. They’ve got a ‘big’ album. Big like a Don Henley record.”

16. Beaches

She Beats
(Chapter)

What we said: “Beaches transcend time in a sound that is at once unique and familiar, grounded and otherworldly.”

More reading: Interview

15. Abbe May

Kiss My Apocalypse
(Independent/MGM)

What we said: “Kiss My Apocalypse is May’s best record so far and also the most likely to succeed commercially.”

14. The Necks

Open
(Fish of Milk/Fuse)

What we said: “The cumulative effect is a kind of transcendent stasis, a liminal state of blissful relief much greater than the sum of its parts … It’s a stunning piece of work.”

13. Primitive Calculators

The World is Fucked
(Chapter)

What we said: “This is a nasty, vicious, misanthropic, spiteful album and I never want to hear it again.”

More reading: Track by Track

12. Kirin J Callinan

Embracism
(Siberia/Remote Control)

What we said: “Kirin J Callinan makes you think. Sometimes, that’s all you can really hope for.”

More reading: Track by Track; long-form feature

11. Gardland

Syndrome Syndrome
(RVNG Intl/Inertia)

Review coming soon

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10. Angel Eyes

Final Fare
(Bedroom Suck)

What we said: “It’s strange to imagine that there’s a hidden meaning behind the distorted moans, but the record is stronger for having that meaning left in the distance.”

9. Ooga Boogas

Ooga Boogas
(Aarght)

What we said: “This is the best record of the year, and the Ooga Boogas are the best band in the world.”

More reading: Track by Track

8. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

Float Along/Fill Your Lungs
(Flightless/Dot Dash)

What we said: “As far as their place in psychedelia goes, they make the Tame Impala/Pond coterie seem like little boys playing in the sand with toys.”

More reading: Interview

7. Courtney Barnett

How to Carve a Carrot into a Rose
(Milk!)

What we said: “It’s hard to imagine an ambassador better suited than someone as acutely insightful as Courtney Barnett.”

More reading: Long-form feature

6. Bed Wettin Bad Boys

Ready for Boredom
(R.I.P. Society)

What we said: “Ready for Boredom captures four guys who use rock and roll not as some kind of salvation but rather just as a way to deal with getting older.”

More reading: Interview

5. Standish/Carlyon

Deleted Scenes
(Chapter)

What we said: “Deleted Scenes is so far removed from rock’s regular physicality that it feels like an abstraction: the sound of desire rather than the desire itself.”

More reading: Track by Track

4. The Native Cats

Dallas
(R.I.P. Society)

What we said: “Packaging experimentation and earnest poetic songwriting into a singular and palatable piece of work.”

3. TV Colours

Purple Skies, Toxic River
(Dream Damage)

What we said: “It is a self-assured record and one of the year’s best.”

2. Dick Diver

Calendar Days
(Chapter)

What we said: “These songs romanticise insignificance, their characters observing a world that carries on unaffected by their everyday problems.”

More reading: Interview

1. The Drones

I See Seaweed
(Independent/MGM)

What we said: “There’s not a note wasted on I See Seaweed and the result is eight songs as streamlined in intent as a shark at dusk … I’d say it’s the best Drones record so far.”

More reading: Interview

TOMORROW: The results of our annual Readers Poll

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Compiled from the votes of Max Easton, David Nichols, Jules LeFevre, Lawson Fletcher, Patrick Emery, Steph Kretowicz, Edward Sharp-Paul, Aaron Curran, Ian Rogers, Anthony Carew, Andrew P Street, Tim Scott, A.H. Cayley, Jody Macgregor, Doug Wallen, Darren Levin, Tim Fitzpatrick, Mitchell Judge, Barnaby Smith, Kate Hennessy, Luke Telford, Samuel J Fell, Hannah Brooks, Everett True, Christopher Lewis, Freya Zaknich, Trevor Block, Jeremy Story Carter, Adam Curley, Jake Cleland, Nick Argyriou and Matt Shea.

While much of Australia was busy watching their team win back an urn full of ashes yesterday, Attorney-General George Brandis was applying the torch to our Human Rights Commission by announcing our next Human Rights Commissioner: Tim Wilson, former policy director of the radical neoliberal think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).

Yes, that’s the same IPA that recommended the Human Rights Commission be abolished in January this year.

The very same IPA this year recommended these 75 radical ideas to transform Australia, including abolishing the carbon tax and replacing it with nothing, repealing section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, abolishing the ACCC and ACMA, withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol, immediately halting the NBN, repealing the Fair Work Act, privatising SBS, CSIRO, Australian Institute of Sport, Australia Post, and Medibank, dismantling the ABC, and defunding Harmony Day.

Ironic that someone who preaches steadfastly against needless bureaucracy will now accept a $300,000+ salary, no? And what for, exactly?

Wilson’s new role has the stirring, hand-on-your-heart informal title of Freedom Commissioner. It seems his main purpose will be to champion the fundamental human right of being free to talk shit on people, regardless of how much one’s position of privilege and influence might mean those words wreak damage on the people already marginalised by the structures holding up our far-from-level playing field.

In an op-ed for The Australian this morning, Wilson penned a persuasive defence of free speech, free expression, and free press. Here’s a quote: “A direct extension of free speech is press freedom. Protecting free speech is fundamental to the operation of liberal democracy. It is an essential principle for freedom of the press. Free speech and press freedom are one and the same; they are essentially interchangeable and mutually reinforcing concepts.”

It’s interesting that the press freedom battle which conservatives like Wilson choose to fight is with the Racial Discrimination Act: “Increasingly free speech has been pushed aside in favour of laws and regulations designed to stop people being offensive to each other,” Wilson writes. There are far greater threats to press freedom in our country at the moment, with far more dangerous consequences for human rights. Why isn’t he commenting on the Abbott Government’s asylum seeker media blackout? Where is his defence of Wikileaks, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning?

In a statement yesterday, Wilson used an interesting choice of words to describe his approach to the new role: “As Human Rights Commissioner I will put freedom on the offensive: where it belongs.”

To be fair, he appears well qualified for the position of bringing balance to the rabid bleeding-heart leftism that has apparently been tarnishing the reputation of Australia’s Human Rights Commission in recent years. Somebody has to protect the human rights of established elites: they’re people too!

Here’s a brief resume of some recent media appearances and articles by Wilson, on a number of key issues relating to human rights and individual freedoms:

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On The Right To Discriminate

Wilson defends our fundamental human right to say offensive shit, in opposition to the oppressive agenda of his future employer, the Human Rights Commission, which pursues anti-discrimination at the expense of unbridled free speech. (Well, used to).

“Human rights these days have been conflated well outside of their ambit of what is a human right,” he says, “and the Australian Human Rights Commission is … pursuing anti-discrimination as a very important measure, at the expense of focusing on human rights.”

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On The Right To Drive Too Fast

Wilson defends the fundamental rights of racing car drivers to put lives at risk by hooning around suburban streets as fast as they bloody well like.

“You’ve got to come to the realisation that there’s going to be a point where there are a number of road deaths that are unavoidable. That’s what happens when you send cars heading down a road at a fast pace. Meanwhile you have this and other examples of government regulating people’s lives.”

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On The Right To Cheap Smiths Chips

Wilson defends our fundamental human right to buy affordable Smiths Chips in the face of the poverty an Emissions Trading Scheme would undoubtedly inflict on ordinary Australians.

“I can tell you exactly how much this [packet of chips] is going to go up. In the first year it’s only going to go up by a few cents. But this is a tax that goes up every single year and by 2020 this will have gone up by 9.15% and will have basically doubled the GST. And then it continues to go up into eternity.”

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On The Right To Treat Our Planet However We Like

Here he is appearing as the IPA’s Climate Policy Director on a special climate change denial themed episode of the Bolt Report (skip to 3:30 unless you want to watch Bolt’s hilarious editorial):

“If you go back and look at the original polling data when the public actually said they were concerned about climate change, a lot of it related to the drought. Now, I don’t think there’s any ambiguity: the drought has officially broken.”

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On The Right Of Men To Be Unburdened By Children

Wilson defends the average male taxpayer’s fundamental human right to enjoy the privilege of being born a man, on Q&A: “It’s not my choice that women have children. It’s genetic!”

(Skip to 2:05 for the comment, which even prompts Liberal MP Kelly O’Dwyer to quip “I think you might have lost the crowd, there”).

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On The Right To Gambling Addiction

Here’s Wilson speaking at the ABC’s Battle of the Think Tanks in 2011. Skip to 6:06 to hear his argument against the regulation of the gambling industry, in which he describes harm-minimisation measures like mandatory pre-commitment for poker machine use as “fundamentally immoral”.

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On LGBTI Rights

Wilson is a strong supporter of marriage equality, as well as one of a relative-few out-and-proud conservative voices — but his anti-discrimination stance sits uncomfortably with much of the work of the LGBTI movement. He recently penned an article in the Star Observer that urges LGBTI activists to abandon “special group rights” in favour of the kind of freedom of speech that guarantees the right to retaliate with equal amounts of vitriol should a homophobic member of an ethnic or other minority group “throw hostile verbal bombs”. Fight hate with more hate, said nobody ever a disappointingly large number of people.

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Our new Freedom Commissioner is one of those idealistic, fundamentalist conservatives who likes to quote the line mis-attributed to Voltaire but in fact written by his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall, to sum up the former’s philosophy: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

The problem with people who use that line is that they seem to forget its essence was conceived at a time and place when the only people allowed to talk in the first place were rich white males. What if the line wasn’t “I disapprove of what you say” but “I am crippled, discredited and silenced by what you say”? We’ve developed a bit more of a nuanced understanding of power relations in the world since the 18th century — and thankfully, many more voices have entered the fray.

There’s no doubt that all these competing voices have complicated things; history tells us that a fundamentalist pursuit of ‘freedom’ often comes at someone else’s expense.  The inconvenient truth is that rights are never truly ‘fundamental’, because there will always be moments when the rights of one individual or group clash with the rights of another. It’s up to organisations like the Human Rights Commission to navigate that minefield regardless of politics, to ensure that the society we live in is a fair and just one. Let’s hope it doesn’t all end up in a pile of ashes.

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Jenny Noyes writes from Sydney’s inner west. She enjoys making opinions about arts and isms, which you can read on her Tumblr or Twitter: @jennynoise.

On Saturday, Mita Dira, a copywriter for Y&R in Indonesia tweeted, “30 hours of working and still going strooong.” Then she collapsed and died the next day.

30 hours of working and still going strooong.

— Mita Diran (@mitdoq) December 14, 2013

After the news broke, her tweet lit up with condolences from around the world.

Most of the tweets in her feed are about working and a few include the hashtag “#agencylife.” Eny Widayati, general manager of Y&R Indonesia wrote in a statement:

“Mita was a talented copywriter with a gentle smile who will always live on in our hearts. It is a great loss, and we wish Mita’s family the faith and strength in each other in going through this extremely difficult time.”

The Y&R company website claims that “people come first,” though I guess that doesn’t apply to everyone in the company. It’s truly despicable that they would demand — or even allow — an employee to work so many hours.

I recommend emailing this article to your boss and then taking a long break from work to go see a movie or something.

h/t Ad Age

It’s been a long time since I believed in Santa. I’m not religious, so that dimension of Christmas celebrations is somewhat lost on me too. Family, food, friends, not going to work — I love all that, and am happy to celebrate it. But gift-giving? I’m sort of forgetting why we, as adults, still insist on doing that every single year.

Even if it’s just amongst your family, gift-giving seems like a relic of the Santa-believing years of childhood, something akin to bags of lollies or afternoon nap-time. Of course the idea of giving is that it’s just another way to be nice to someone — but when you walk through the city and soak up the season’s extreme advertising, sudden influx of charity muggers, ubiquitous sale mark-ups and the prevalence of iconography of gift-wrap, the contemporary postmodern Christmas seems to be more about the spending of dollars than the partaking in nice quality family time.

In a family of adults, it seems strange that we send emails to each other asking what we would like, find those exact items and buy them for each other, only to feel generally underwhelmed by it all. It’s not really magical. It’s not really even enjoyable. It’s basically a chore.

So much garbage is created from wrapping paper, decorations, food and even Christmas trees — not to mention discarded, rejected gifts. In Australia, it’s estimated that we spend around $25 billion on Christmas each year, and throw away three million tonnes of Christmas food. That’s cool for the economy, I guess, but it’s less cool for the environment. It’s also not great for our self-respect as people who want more from our interpersonal relationships than shiny things.

So my mission this year is to enjoy Christmas with my family, friends, sunshine and wine without costing the environment and encouraging bad habits. I’m looking for something like a mindful Christmas, where we don’t rely on symbolic purchases to show love, and we try to minimise the disruption we cause to our environment.

With that in mind, here are five ways that you can make your Christmas a little kinder to the earth, and your pocket. No crafting involved.

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1. Give Green

Literally. Plants make amazing gifts, but if you can, give seeds or bulbs. A gift that keeps growing is a lovely way to help someone get their herb garden started, or might just bestow on them a new holiday activity. Seeds and bulbs rather than pre-packaged and potted plants come with less plastic waste and don’t have to go through the trauma of re-potting either, so stand a greater chance of survival.

Basically, most people are enthusiastic but totally terrible gardeners, so give them the easy version.

Get someone’s green thumbs going with Sow ‘n Sow seeds ($39.95 for a box set), which come in beautifully-designed cardboard packets, with space to write a name and message.

If their garden’s already growing, why not buy them a compost solution? Worm farms are great for people with yard space, and bokashi boxes ($170 for a kit) are an amazing invention for apartment gardeners — you can even make your own.

Put those food scraps to good use, and grow more food from them! Guys, I found the answer to the whole capitalism thing!

We don’t all have a patch of eternal life-giving ground, though. If their life is unsoiled, why not give that special someone a DIY mushroom growing kit ($22.95), made of used coffee grounds for a sustainable and enjoyable fungi growing experience!

These boxes can be grown inside an apartment, room or garage, and oyster mushrooms are so delicious. (See also: 4. The Gift Of Deliciousness.)

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2. Give Without Power

If your gift needs batteries or plugs, maybe rethink it. Aside from the fact that it’s either a) from the past, b) a walkman or c) makes an annoying noise, 75% of computers bought in Australia every year end up in landfill, with a huge amount of them getting thrown out around Christmas to make room for upgrades.

If you’re upgrading a device, recycle or exchange the old version. You can trade in old technology at EB Games or swap an old bike at Bike Exchange. Better still, make it part of your Christmas/New Year’s resolution to donate your old clothes to charity, or join a toy and book appeal to clean out the closet and give to those who really need it.

Let’s not forget about all the non-internet devices that also use a bunch of power, like household appliances — especially coffee machines. Why not buy someone a coffee maker that doesn’t need power? Try an Aeropress (from $30) or a V60 ($40).

The coffee lover is actually pretty easy to give to. Aside from the power consumption, Australians throw out over a billion coffee cups each year. Why not buy your serial take-away addict a KeepCup as a present, and add a colourful little element of sustainability to someone’s life for under $20.

And if KeepCup’s just too mainstream, or the recipient already has one, how about some Coffee Joulies ($59 for five) to keep their brew at just the right temperature? These little guys get dropped in your cup to cool your coffee to optimal sipping temperature and keep it there for longer.

 They are basically magic.

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3. Give For Others

Capitalism has come pretty far. We can now give to charity while also giving to each other*.

The Good Gift Shop collects products from social enterprises in one handy site, so the money you spend goes to worthy causes. “From children’s literacy to global sanitation, and from environmental sustainability to employment of disadvantaged communities, social enterprises exist to benefit the community.” They’ve got stuff for kids, Kris Kringle, women, men, games, edibles… everything. Genius!

For the digital gifter or giftee, The Humble Bundle sells great computer games for cheap, with proceeds going to great initiatives like the American Red Cross, Child’s Play Charity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, World Land Trust and charity:water.

You can buy games like FEZ (pictured below), Gone Home, and Papers, Please for cheap and for a good cause. Plus, no packaging. Hellooooo, holidays.

Oxfam Unwrapped is also good for those who want to make an ethical statement — buy someone a goat for people in another country to truly shun consumerism this year. Their cards, which are sort of vouchers for charitable gifts to needy people, are funny and lovely. Also: tax deductible!

* NB: Slavoj Zizek believes giving to charity while giving to each other is an hilarious delusion. He explains, in his Marxist, post-modern, cultural theorist way, that the Starbucks coffee that donates $1 back to charity has been created to balance out an equation of ego and guilt that drives consumerism. You, as a consumer, are going to buy a coffee; you have approximately $3 worth of consumer guilt; the fact that the corporation gives $1 back to charity takes your guilt balance down to $2, and the ego boost from “being charitable” rounds that down to $1. Zizek argues that this charitable benefit does more for alleviating consumer guilt and making further sales than for the “selfless act” of charity itself. Soooooooo, uh, ahem. Perhaps it is also a gift to your ego. Christmas is complicated for feelings. Please don’t get upset. Anyway.

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4. Give The Gift Of Deliciousness

If you’re cooking up a Christmas feast, stay away from the turkey and the chestnuts, and stick with seasonal fruit and vegetables. Fresh strawberries, avocados, mangos and bananas will bring happiness in the form of delicious nutrients. If you do have to do the traditional Christmas roast, buy from a local butcher, not the supermarket. Check out what’s currently in season at the Seasonable Food Guide.

If you’ve got some time off before Christmas, why not make someone an edible present? Preserved gifts like pickles, marmalades and jams last for months if properly canned (the above set goes for $18.15, and you can find great recipes here), and a box of home-baked cookies shares the Christmas spirit without the Christmas waste.

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5. Kris Kringle

If you really have to give a traditional gift, cap your consumerism by limiting your gift-giving to one present with a dollar value limit. It’s a staple at the workplace but it’s becoming increasingly popular in families too. You buy one present and one present only, so make it a good one – and unlike the workplace lottery of $10 craptastic terribleness, you can up the limit a little and get one meaningful present each.

You should also consider the value of giving a service. You can’t throw a massage in landfill. For something more interesting, why not buy a voucher for a trip to the Onsen? The recipient will have a wonderful experience at their own convenience, support local businesses, and not a single wrapping paper will be shed. (While we’re on the subject, re-use paper, wrap gifts in fabric, or buy recycled; LoveMae and BioMe have some stylish, cheap and sustainable alternatives to garish Xmas wrapping.)

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If you’re keen to celebrate friends and family without worshipping the God of Shopping, why not start a new tradition? It’s more important that you spend your time over the festive season with friends and family than in the department stores — and no one deserves the stress of shopping centres this season. Consider it your year off.

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Amelia Schmidt is a writer, copywriter, web developer and web designer living in Melbourne. She’s interested in food, technology, sustainability, ethics, literature and film, among far too many other things. You can read her food blog here.

Feature Image: stamped fabric wrapping from LinesAcross.com

 

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Chris McVeigh has a website full of Lego building guides, including lists of all the parts you’ll need to put them together yourself. And, naturally, links to where you can purchase any missing pieces, either through him or Lego themselves. It’s not Christmas morning with out Some Assembly Required, or some new ornaments, so make sure to check out his site for the full guides.

(via Geek With Curves.)

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Adalita’s second album outside of Magic Dirt celebrates not just painful experience but living through it to tell the tale, writes PATRICK EMERY.

“This lady spoke to us about music today,” remarked our nine-year-old son last year, apropos of the school day’s events. “She was in a band called Magic something ... Magic Dirt, I think it was, and she had a kind of different name – Adalita,” he added, before handing over the latest edition of the school newsletter.

In amongst the principal’s cheery summary of recent events, and advertisements for upcoming sporting events, fundraising activities and secondhand household items was the announcement of an upcoming parental seminar on resilience – that increasingly hackneyed buzzword used ubiquitously in every children’s pop psychological program. (The perverse irony is by removing every instance of potential physical or psychological danger in the school environment, resilience is, at very best, learnt by radical exception. But that’s another story.)

The serendipity of the coincidence of the two events only became apparent in hindsight. Adalita knows a thing or two about resilience – far more, you suspect, than someone invoking the latest round of psychological jargon to a room full of earnest parents and largely disinterested children.

Adalita is one of contemporary Australian rock ’n’ roll’s survivors: back in the day, Magic Dirt was a fearsome and volatile force. (Bruce Milne’s description in Craig Mathieson’s The Sell In of Magic Dirt’s accidental efforts at countering the band’s burgeoning popularity is particularly resonant.) In an industry notorious for chewing up and spitting out talented artists, Adalita has stood her ground – resilient to a fault. On All Day Venus, Adalita bares her emotional scars for all to hear.

The album opens in confrontational style. Fuelled by a dirty guitar riff straight from Adalita’s Detroit-via-Geelong rock heritage, ‘Annihilate Baby’ is laced with retributive rhetoric: “I’ve been way too generous/You should be under arrest/for your unbridled contemptuousness.”

“A romantic battle has been fought, and there’s substantial damage.”

In many ways, it’s this track that sets the scene for the rest of the record: a romantic battle has been fought, and there’s been substantial direct and collateral damage; yet Adalita is still standing. ‘I Want Your Love’ is an elegant pop song (with shades of The Motels) that walks the line between frustration and lingering attraction: “But I know if I let you/even with the best of intentions/We all know how these things go.”

On ‘Warm Like You’, the mood is equivocal: “I was born cold/No, not evolved/I’ll never be warm like you.” Adalita’s vocals are laced with affection; the LA rock punch suggests it’s not all hugs, kisses and red roses. ‘Trust is Rust’ opens a small wound for cursory observation and exposes a festering sore of anger borne of duplicity: trust, it is said, takes a lifetime to build and a moment to lose.

The title track is the soundtrack to reflection: “I sit on a wick/Combing my hair out.” Bad shit’s gone down, and the gloss of love has given way to the scungy residue of failed romance. Yet this is no torch song of resignation; in the last few lines (“Do you adore me/Do you give birth/Do you make the earth turn for me”) Adalita signals her resilience in the situation into which she’s fallen.

‘He Wrote’ is perhaps the most touching song on the album. Eschewing the classic 4/4 rock beat for something approaching a waltz, it’s a tale of a break-up conducted by letter (thankfully not, as things sometimes happens these days, via social media and truncated text messages).

On ‘Blue Sky’ the tempo is upbeat: it’s a pop song with more guts and determination than Ron Barassi’s North Melbourne in its 1970s halcyon era: “Gonna run like a dream/and split from the team/And tell everybody what a motherfucker you’ve been.” It’s ‘fuck you’ with melody; it’s ‘get fucked’ with a smile. That was then and this is now, motherfucker.

Yet ‘Too Far Gone’ suggests an element of bravado might be in the air. It’s reserved and unsure, and the metaphors might be cutting closer to the bone than we’d care to think: “Make it out like you don’t care I know you do/Need a little fix/I’ll be a little fix for you.”

‘Homesick’ sounds like it’s recorded out the back of the studio with Adalita just strumming away to her stream of consciousness, contemplating what happens from here as the dust settles and new paths are drawn. It’s prophetic but still slightly affectionate: “You’re gonna feel homesick/When I get word of it/It’s gonna be quick/Like the setting sun.”

“It’s so sombre, it almost hurts – and that’s just from a distance.”

On ‘Ego’, Adalita turns the spotlight on herself, suggesting that – as is so often the case – that it takes two to tango, and maybe a strong sense of self can have its own unintended negative consequences: “Everywhere you go I go/I’m so in love with my ego.” ‘Heavy Cut’ is everything the title promises: this is the story of the final goodbye, raking over the coals of the good, the bad and the dysfunctional of the relationship. When the swirling guitar riff rolls in, the emotional pain is palpable.

Finally, there’s the next day: on ‘Rolled in Gold’ the bond has been broken and love has been replaced by contrived anonymity: “And you will survive/And we will be strangers/And you will survive this/And we will be strangers.” It’s so sombre, it almost hurts – and that’s just from a distance.

There is a school of thought that says great art only comes from painful experience; certainly there’s plenty of empirical evidence to support that. All Day Venus isn’t just a tale of love gone wrong: it’s the soundtrack to emotional resilience.

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‘All Day Venus’ is out now through Liberation.

Singer-songwriter Holly Throsby wrote an opinion piece for last Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald on the subject of marriage equality. In the piece Throsby mentions that multiple people have said that her song ‘Now I Love Someone’ provided the soundtrack while they walked down the aisle: “Isn’t that something? I was touched. I’m not sure if any of them knew I’d written it about a woman.”

Throsby goes on to explain that she and her partner would like to get married as well some day – “But unfortunately, Australian law says my partner and I aren’t allowed.”

In 2010 Throsby recorded an ARIA-nominated album of children’s music called See!, which contains several songs of an educational nature, so when former Katter Australian Party Senate candidate Bernard Gaynor said that he wouldn’t allow a gay person to teach his children, it moved her to tears. “The idea that some people think gay people shouldn’t raise children or teach children? To me, that is heartbreaking.”

(Gaynor eventually left the Katter Party when it refused to oppose abortion, because even they weren’t extreme enough for him.)

Throsby concludes with an explanation of why she hasn’t felt the need to publicly discuss her sexuality until now. “I have never spoken directly about my relationships in public. Some people may think that in not talking about them, I’ve hidden them. That’s fair. I suppose I have in a way, because it’s no one’s business, it should be irrelevant, and I haven’t trusted that the response would be positive. Now I figure, if my perspective helps just one person, then good. And if anyone has hitherto liked my music and this turns them off it, well, they can choose other music.”

RELATED: A.H. Cayley’s review of Holly Throsby’s “absolutely, painfully beautiful” 2011 album ‘Team’.

(From FasterLouder)

Where the majority of Paul Keating’s recent public pronouncements have been excoriations of other politicians (in the tradition of those flamboyant parliamentary smackdowns), Keating — an interview series that debuted on the ABC last night — is a wide-ranging exploration of his life, times, obsessions and motivations.

It covered the first thirty-odd years of Keating’s life. It made me feel like a prodigious wastrel. And it seems a little ridiculous that this was merely the first instalment of four.

There was a decent amount of soft focus in last night’s series premiere, but — perhaps unsurprisingly — it was light on actual revelation (beyond the take-home point that Keating is looking properly elderly these days). It was the only character study that a man of such unremitting self-possession would ever allow, and as such we learned only what he would have us know.

Kerry O’Brien did an exemplary job, but there was no question of who was in charge: The really interesting stuff was in the omissions, the dead-bat responses, and the tell-tale twinkle in the eye, as high-minded Keating revealed, at times unwittingly, a relish for the dirty work of politics.

In roughly chronological order, though, the key Keating characteristics revealed were thus:

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On Grandmothers

Keating described his upbringing in Bankstown, “the land of the fibro house”, with no small nostalgia. He saved his mistiest reminiscences, though, for his mother and grandmother. On his mother: “Like a lot of women born in the twenties – suffered the Depression, then the Second World War – they never got their shot at life, really.”

From a guy who, let’s be honest, relished being an utter jerk at times, the following tribute was revealing, and rather moving:

My grandmother and my mother invested a ton of love in me…I walked around with that grandmotherly and motherly love, and it gives you that inner confidence…you go through the fire, but you don’t get burned, because someone loves you – you are complete… When you’ve gotta get the sword out for real combat, have a love quotient working for you is very, very powerful.

On his father’s sudden death at 60? “You never get over it, but you don’t want to get over it. There is a place for sadness and melancholy … we don’t want to be sparkling and happy all the time … we need the inner sadness. It’s what rounds you out.”

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On Ambition

O’Brien: Why were you interested in learning about power at 18?

Keating: That’s the business I had decided I wanted to be in.

In case you didn’t already know it, Keating is ruthless. He overcame fierce, passive-aggressive, aggressive-aggressive opposition from the Labor’s left faction to win preselection in his home seat of Blaxland. Throughout his career he sought the advice of powerful men at the end of theirs, reasoning that “people at the end of their careers give you an honest summation of what they’ve found.”

On O’Brien’s implication that branch-stacking was rife in the campaign for Blaxland, Keating almost-conceded, with a glint in his eye: “It’s a matter of whether they stay … Most of the people who joined the party in my day stayed for their lives.”

Throughout, you got the sense that power, not politics, was Keating’s true vocation: that he wanted the world not only to know his name, but to be shaped by his hand.

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On Self-Regard

O’Brien pointed out that being an avowed lover of classical music would have made life difficult for a young aspiring politician from the working class. In his smirking acknowledgement, though, you got the sense that the young Keating was too enamoured of his self-image as a man apart to be playing it beige. Ditto the Jaguar E-Type he drove to party meetings, and the pocket watch that cost three months’ wages for a fifteen-year-old clerk.

Keating spent his whole career as the younger, more ambitious, better-dressed man among his peers and rivals, and you get the sense that he was happy for them to know that he knew it: an angry opponent is a rash opponent, and Keating could push buttons with his mere being.

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On The Eternal, And The Arts

The one and only dandy of Australian politics, Keating’s thoughts on art, design and music were always going to be intriguing. On his noted love affair with classical music, he had this to say: “Our DNA is wired for music. What the great composers know is how to play with us. Classical music opens up a vista.”

He is one of the rare politicians who views the arts as holding a central place in Australian culture: “I always thought the arts were central to a country. Anyone that has had an emotional connection to the arts gets that. Anyone that hasn’t, doesn’t.”

As a lover of the arts, I did a little fist-pump at that quote — but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was drawing something fundamentally different from the music that so took him. I would never have thought that someone of such earthly obsessions – the will to power – would appreciate, let alone seek, the possibilities of the transcendental.

Keating’s view of that connection became clear in the following exchange, regarding the ‘Arcadian period’ that followed the French Revolution:

Keating: If you’re looking for something, look for that which is most perfect.

O’Brien: And yet democracy is the practice of the deeply imperfect. I mean, the concept of democracy is great, but…you’re searching for perfection as a politician, in what is a fundamentally imperfect art.

Keating: I always believed that you have to have, in these more revolutionary – the reconstruction of the Australian economy was a revolutionary phase – you have to have an anchor…where is Arcadia? Where is the distilled time?…There’s no such thing as the ideal (in politics), but it’s a useful guide.

And he’s a big Tom Jones fan. “I always loved star power. Jones was the greatest individual artist of my lifetime.”

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On Old Labor

Probably the most depressing aspect of the whole was Keating’s summation of his early years in the Labor party: “It was a civil war…around the future of the party: would we ever see…an electable federal moderate Labor party again? [But] it did train you in combat.”

The caucus he entered in 1969 was utterly riven between the left and right factions. “They’d talk to Liberals before they’d talk to each other,” he says. Eerily familiar, huh? His will to power long having taken root, you got the sense that this was when Keating’s political philosophy truly began to crystallise. In the caucus he entered, “people were interested in the Vietnam War…Aboriginal affairs, social security. Not much interest in treasury matters – you wouldn’t find anyone interested in minerals and energy.”

Keating shared Rex Connor’s interest in “the wealth machinery of the country”, and he became noted for seeking out old bureaucrats in his efforts to “work out how all the organs function”. Basically, he was still studying power, and coming to the conclusion that if Labor wanted to drag Australia out of the “Menzies torpor”, private investment and proper exploitation of Australia’s mineral wealth had to come before even the most admirable social agenda.

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On Annita

On the subject of his wife Annita, from whom he is now separated, Keating attempted to draw up the boomgate. But love, tenderness, guilt, regret all flashed across his face. This was the one passage in which O’Brien truly dictated proceedings.

O’Brien: She’s a beautiful, sophisticated globetrotting woman from Europe. Suddenly she’s in suburban Bankstown, alone a lot of the time, with the children when they come along. Do you think you realised what you were asking of her?

Keating: Well, it was tough, and ah, no. I probably didn’t realise quite what it would be like.

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On Gough

This is what the dags and the tragics were waiting for. Keating had a front-row seat at the most dramatic political event in Australian history: The Dismissal.

He was far from complimentary on Gough’s tenure, noting that it was “the old Labor party again, the confusion of ways and means”, blighted by “the incapacity to run the budget” and “the tearaway level of government spending.”

But in spite of his misgivings about Gough the politician, Keating was quick to align himself with Gough the symbol, handing Whitlam the megaphone for his famous ‘God Save The Queen’ speech – he knew a martyr when he saw one.

Keating was visibly seething when the question of the dismissal arose.

A lot of ministers took it in their stride…but what had happened to him was a coup. Clear as day…illegal, a coup…This kind of exercise of reserve powers is not a matter for the High Court…I knew that the blade had been lowered.

Of course, when I briefly raised the idea that we should arrest this guy, it was met with complete derision. They’re just dead lucky that I wasn’t Prime Minister, because even I wouldn’t have known what would have happened, but it wouldn’t have been to take it lightly.

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In Summary? 

Go watch it on iView now, and bring on round two — which lands at 8.30pm on Tuesday November 19, on ABC1.

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Edward Sharp-Paul is a freelance writer and drink-pourer from Melbourne, who has written for FasterLouder, Mess+Noise, Beat and The Brag. Follow him on Twitter @e_sharppaul.

If you’re sad because you miss someone, but you’re also really hungry:
a) if the person is probably dead: Seeing Daylight
b) if you’re still pretty numb about the whole situation: Alpha Omega
c) if you have a sweet tooth: Jam Eater Blues

If you haven’t had sex in a really long time:
a) if you then have sex: How to Embrace a Swamp Creature
b) if you will probably never have sex again: Autoclave

If you really shouldn’t have had sex with the person you just had sex with: Golden Jackal Song

If the person you’re in love with is a real pill:
a) if you’re feeling pissed about it: Pseudothyrum Song
b) if you don’t really care: Orange Ball of Love
c) if you like Greek mythology: Deianara Crush

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and it’s making you sad:
a) if you’re in the bathroom: Have to Explode
b) if you’re in the living room/bedroom: Game Shows Touch Our Lives

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and it’s making you angry:
a) if you like rhymes: Baboon
b) if you’re in Florida: Alpha Sun Hat
c) if you’re in Florida and also drunk on a bus: See America Right
d) if you’re in a car: Scotch Grove

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and it’s making you passive-aggressive: Spilling Toward Alpha

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and it’s making you horny: Oceanographer’s Choice

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and you feel like you have to honor that: Old College Try, Alpha Rats Nest

If you’re in a mutually destructive relationship and you don’t give one good goddamn: No Children

If you’re fucking tired of hearing from this person who doesn’t love you anymore. If they’re so fucking sure they don’t love you, why do they keep sending you fucking postcards?: Source Decay

If you have literally no idea how to take care of babies:
a) immediately after birth: San Bernardino
b) some days later: Pink and Blue

If you’re pretty sure your only meaningful interactions these days are with wild animals, and that doesn’t bother you as much as it should: Snow Owl

If you’re in love with someone who is in a relationship with someone else: Standard Bitter Love Song #8

If you and the person you love are both in relationships with other people:
a) if you’re sad about it: So Desperate
b) if you’re happy about it: Alibi
c) if you’re in denial about it: Going to Maine

If you’re in love with someone and it feels absolutely terrible:
a) if you’re unable to talk about it: Alpha in Tauris
b) if you have a child: Poltergeist
c) if you’re in a car: West Country Dream
d) if you like Soviet-era geopolitical similes: International Small Arms Traffic Blues

If you’re in love with someone and miserable for other reasons:
a) if you feel that you will never be entirely comfortable with anyone: Riches and Wonders
b) if you sometimes go for walks by yourself late at night: Moon over Goldsboro

If you’re in love with someone and it feels OK, but you’re pretty sure it’s going to get worse from here:
a) if you’re still trying to have a good time: First Few Desperate Hours
b) if you’re pre-emptively having a very bad time: Letter from a Motel
c) if you like ominous imagery: Tallahassee
d) if you like references to Aristotelian poetics and you’re in a car: The Recognition Scene

If you’re in love with someone and the shit is juuuuust about to hit the fan:
a) if you’re impatient for it to do so: Alphonse Mambo
b) if the other person doesn’t know yet: It’s All Here in Brownsville
c) if the other person doesn’t know yet and also you’re in the shower: Shower
d) if the other person knew first and you wish they would just come out with it already: New Britain
e) if you’re in a car: Horseradish Road

If you’re in love with someone and it feels great, but that’s mostly because you’re a teenager and you don’t have a lot else to feel good about:
a) if your partner is slightly exploitative: Dinu Lipatti’s Bones
b) if your partner is slightly criminal-minded: Attention All Pickpockets
c) if your home life is very bad: Broom People
d) if there are UFOs: Tulsa Imperative
e) if you’re high on pills and you’re in a car: Dilaudid

If you’re in love with someone and it’s actually making you happy:
a) if you’re in a pretty quiet mood and it’s raining: There Will Be No Divorce
b) if you’ve got a motorcycle: Jenny
c) if you romanticize the Old World: Flight 717: Going to Denmark
d) if you romanticize the New World: Going to Mexico
e) if you’re in a car and the relationship is going to last: Twin Human Highway Flares
f) if you’re in a car and it isn’t: Alpha Incipiens

If you’re not really in love anymore, at least not in a way that an impartial observer would recognize
a) if your job gives you lots of vacation time: The Mess Inside
b) if you spend all your money on ephemeral goods: Fault Lines
c) if you blame your partner for the whole situation: Standard Bitter Love Song #4
d) if your partner smokes: Orange Ball of Hate

If you’re just straight-up in a car:
a) if it’s hot with heat: The Car Song
b) if it’s hot with hatred: Family Happiness
c) if you’re in New York: Going to Port Washington

If you and the person you’re in love with are separated by a large quantity of land/water:
a) if they’re farther north than you: New Star Song
b) if they’re farther south than you: Noctifer Birmingham
c) if you’re sad about it: Raja Vocative
d) if you’re sad about it and interested in Aztec mythology: Quetzalcoatl Eats Plums
e) if you’re resigned to it: Dutch Orchestra Blues
f) if you’re resigned to it and don’t like crows: Distant Stations
g) if you’re fabulously, cartoonishly lonely: Any Available Surface

If you and the person you’re in love with are separated, period:
a) if it just happened: Woke Up New
b) if it happened an embarrassingly long time ago: Half Dead
c) if it happened in a parking lot: Somebody Else’s Parking Lot in Sebastopol
d) if you’re very bitter about it: Standard Bitter Love Song #1
e) if you’re very bitter about it and have a gun: Black Molly
f) if your sadness feels like such a permanent and physical presence that you’re thinking maybe you should start introducing it at parties, like, “Hi, I’m John, this is my sadness, nice to meet you”: Waving at You
g) if they owe you an improbably large sum of money: Alpha Desperation March

If your actual relationship status is unclear, but you think everything might eventually be OK:
a) if this is because you are aware of the transience of both pain and happiness: We Were Patriots
b) if it’s because you’ve just had a tulip-related moment of catharsis: Minnesota
c) if there are dogs nearby: Weekend in Western Illinois

Read more Which Mountain Goats Song Should You Be Listening To? at The Toast.

What: Carpetbombing by Harmony.

When: February 7 on vinyl, CD and digital through Poison City.

Key notes: Second album from Melbourne ensemble of Tom Lyngcoln (The Nation Blue), Jon Chapple (Shooting at Unarmed Men, mclusky), Alex Lyngcoln, Amanda Roff, Quinn Veldhuis and Erica Dunn. Follows 2011’s On Rotation self-titled debut and last month’s Diminishing Returns 7” EP. Recorded and mixed by Lyngcoln, who has recorded recent albums by Batpiss and The Spinning Rooms, among others. Features a spoken-word performance from Cold Chisel legend Don Walker. Includes the singles ‘Do Me a Favour’, ‘Cut Myself Clean’ and ‘Diminishing Returns’; revisit all three below. Available for pre-order here from this Friday (Dec 6). Comes with a free-download bonus record with other artists covering all 15 songs, including Adalita, Qua, Heinz Riegler, Mick Turner, Max Crumbs, The Spinning Rooms and Summer Flake. Upcoming gigs below.

Thurs, Dec 19 – Poison City 10th anniversary @ John Curtin Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
Tues, Dec 31 – New Year’s Evie, Tallarook, VIC
Sat, Jan 18 – Port Royal Street Party, Melbourne, VIC [w/Cosmic Psychos, The Meanies, Batpiss + more]

From the presser: “Blunt, bleak and ragged, Harmony mine their creative obsession for ballads and songs about loss.”

Tracklisting:

The Closing of the Day
Water Runs Cold
On Your Summons
Diminishing Returns
Pulse
Cold Storage
Unknown Hunter
Underground
Cut Myself Clean
Big Ivan
Do Me a Favour
Prayer for War
Wailing Widows
Vapour Trails
Carpetbomb

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Julie Gillrie has sent us her latest Quiet Book project – The Lord of the Rings. Or should I say, The Quiet Book and the Ring? As you can imagine, it’s filled with adorable stuff.

If you’re interested in making one of your own, Gillrie has the pattern (and a few others) for sale in her Etsy shop!

Previously in Quiet Books

• Harry Potter Quiet Book
• Doctor Who Quiet Book
• Star Trek Quiet Book

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April 19, 2014 will yield the premiere episode of BBC America’s hit series Orphan Black Season 2. I. Can’t. Wait. One more Orphan Black teaser plus the Doctor Who tease, after the jump!

And here’s our first look at the Doctor Who Christmas Special…

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?!?! Actually, I don’t want to know. I need a break after all the Doctor Who 50th excitement.

(via TV Line, io9)

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by Jia Tolentino

Courtesy of SNL, here's Wes Anderson's imagined foray into horror movies, starring Ed Norton's impeccable Owen Wilson impression. Another standout from last week's episode: the commercial for "Autumn's Eve: Pumpkin Spice Douche."

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What if famous events from history had been documented on social networking? The Tumblr blog Histagrams seeks to answer that question with these filtered and hashtagged blasts from the past.

(via: Laughing Squid)

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In the second half of this video, Brosh answers the vital question: how are Simple Dog and Helper Dog doing?

(via Pajiba.)

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by Jia Tolentino

At the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith has a beautiful essay up about two trips to Italy, the first taken with her father:

It is not easy for a white man of almost seventy and a black girl of seventeen to go on a mini-break to Europe together; the smirks of strangers follow you everywhere. We did not like to linger in restaurants or in the breakfast room of our tiny hotel. Instead, on that first, exploratory trip, we found our pleasure in walking. Through the streets, through museums—but more than anywhere else, through gardens. No money has to be spent in a garden, and no awkward foreign conversation need be made, and no one thinks you odd or provincial if you consult your guidebook in front of a statue or a lake.

The second trip taken alone:

There is a sentimental season, early on in the process of mourning, in which you believe that everything you happen to be doing or seeing or eating, the departed person would also have loved to do or see or eat, were he or she still here on earth. Harvey would have loved this fried ball of rice. He would have loved the Pantheon. He would have loved that Rossetti of a girl with her thick black brows.

In the first season of mourning there is a tendency to overstate. But still I feel certain that this was the garden that would have made us both happy. It was a bittersweet thing to walk through it without him, thinking of our last trip together, to crowded, expensive Venice, which had not been much more successful than Florence. Why had I never thought of Rome? Like me, he would have loved the glimpses of the new arrivals: African families, Indian couples, Roma girls hand in hand. Sitting for a picnic, unpacking foods that smelled wonderfully of coriander—an herb most Roman grocers wouldn’t know from a weed.

Zadie Smith, still at the top of the essay game. The whole piece is beautiful; she captures what it's like to travel with a parent, someone you love and are always already mourning: the simultaneous need to be both wildly alone and also fully in their presence, the expansive present-tense of a lush green garden that's intruded upon, always, by the past that was, and the past that wasn't, and the future that might never be.

Photo via Roger Wollstadt/flickr

[NYRB]

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Photographer Sophie Garnand has a project capturing dogs in the midst of their bath-time routine.  These dogs are strong.  They are statuesque.  They are so sad and soaked it’s just too adorable.

In Sophie’s words, “‘Wet Dog’ is part of a project about grooming and the way we alter our dogs’ appearance to fit standards of hygiene and beauty.”  I would also like to add that it’s about how completely ridiculous dogs look when they’re getting a bath, but who am I to say?

There’s the ones where they seem so overwhelmed by their own fur it just doesn’t seem fair:

And the spiked-up rebels:

The ones with the ‘tude:

And, my personal favorite, THIS:

All images via StrikingPaws.com

This is not the socialist paradise you’re looking for

You’ve probably heard of New Zealand, even if you don’t know much about it. You know it’s somewhere, vaguely, down around Australia…ish. What you do know: it’s a magical land of environmental purity, pacifism, and hobbits or something.

Which is great, because if favoured presidential candidate X doesn’t get elected in 2016, you’re totally moving to New Zealand. You might even go on reddit to do some research. Hey, you even threw in a bit of te reo to show how different and special you are. Kiwis will love you, right?

Assuming you even qualify for immigrant status (lol), there’s a few things you should know before upping sticks. So swap out the rose tints for a proper prescription.

Rugby is not our national sport

Mercilessly mocking you and your deepest and most dearly held beliefs is. And we’ll do it with a straight face so you won’t be able to tell if we’re serious or just joshing. You can give back as good as you get or you can beat us at our own game and get to the punchline first. Don’t bother getting offended, that will only make it worse. Your best bet is not to be genuinely passionate about anything. Except rugby and drinking. Everyone’s passionate about that.

Kumbaya my lord

… sang no one in New Zealand, ever. I’m pretty sure there’s a special dispensation in our strict gun control laws that allows us to shoot anyone singing Kumbaya (also anything in Elvish) on sight. Call it cultural self-defense. While we’re not all freewheeling hippies, we do hold things like universal healthcare and social safety nets quite dear. We pay higher taxes to fund them out of our generally lower incomes, but you’d have a fight on your hands to take them off us. Mental health services are viciously underfunded with the result that our suicide rates — especially among youth and Māori — are particularly worrying.

The kumara does not sing of its own sweetness

Oh, you have a degree from an Ivy League university? Your bonus at Goldman Sachs was half a mill last year? Look at how impressed I am right now. We don’t care. We care about who you are. And right now, it sounds like you think you’re better than us. We already feel inferior, like, 99 percent of the time (except in rugby and drinking). You’ll need to become familiar with Tall Poppy Syndrome. It’s this thing where people who think they’re all that get collectively shamed for ‘over-achieving.’ This is not a positive trait for Kiwis in general. Luckily, it’s changing slowly. In the meantime, your sense of American Exceptionalism is probably going to just piss people off.

Clean, green, obscene

So you’ve seen the ads: 100% ‘it’s a brand, not a guarantee’ Pure New Zealand. You’ve imagined hiking through lush rainforests, and swimming on pristine beaches. Well, you can still do that. Hundreds of thousands of Kiwis do. What we can’t do is ignore the poor environmental record that’s seen many of our rivers polluted by runoff from agriculture (our major industry) and deemed unsafe to swim in. Or the plight of endemic sea mammals like Maui’s and Hector’s Dolphins, which are extremely rare. Soz, dolphins.

We’re at the arse-end of nowhere

There are no weekend trips home from New Zealand. If you want to leave the country, it takes your whole weekend just to travel wherever you’re going. There’s no spring break in Puerto Vallarta, no last-minute trip to Mardi Gras, popping up to Montreal or a week of retail therapy in Paris. It takes 12 hours to get half-way to anywhere, 17 if you do it on the cheap. Except for Australia. There’s always plenty to explore in the South Pacific – just don’t expect foam parties and the international DJ circuit to turn up in Honiara or Port Vila. On the other hand, with the money you save on blow in TJ this Christmas, you can instead make a roadtrip out of our oversized roadside novelties. And don’t forget the Bucket Fountain, may its splashy goodness be upon you.

Oh. Watch out for Moa. They are the unspoken menace.

That being said…

The land of the long white cloud is fucking awesome, and those of us who do call it home are generally proud to do so. If the prospects of lower wages, higher taxes, gun control, 6pm store closings, and half-strength G&Ts don’t sound too awful to bear, you’ll be rewarded with a laid-back lifestyle, plenty of laughs, rugby and binge drinking. This way to immigration.govt.nz.

Lynda Brendish is from New Zealand, where she presumably plays rugby and drinks.

***

Time zones are the bane of my existence. I know that sounds melodramatic, but here’s the thing about New Zealand: it’s a tiny, isolated island at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The closest significant landmass to us is Australia, a mere 1,500km (or 900 miles) away. We share a time zone with a few other small Pacific Island nations and one region of Russia’s coast.

For most people, day-to-day, that doesn’t matter. Where it does have a huge effect: when you want to travel, and when you have friends in different time zones. 

I fall solidly into both those categories.

–

Time zones make sense; they’re a necessity in the modern age. I get that. But it makes communicating with the people you care about a slight inconvenience at best. At worst it’s stressful enough to make you burst into tears when your Skype starts to ring.

–

New Zealand is also right next to the International Date Line  - we’re the first country in the world to see the dawn. Which was particularly cool in 2000. It’s less cool when it’s 5pm on a Tuesday and the rest of the world is stuck in Monday night.

–

Sometimes the longing to talk to friends – to just let them know that I’m thinking about them, that I miss them, that I wish we were together drinking beer or eating cake, that I just have to message them, even though they definitely aren’t online and probably aren’t awake.

–

Okay so there are some pretty cool loopholes thanks to time zones. Movies are released in New Zealand on a Thursday. Which works out to almost a 48-hour head start when things line up in the right way. This is rare, though, and it’s a small comfort.

–

There’s a somewhat-common refrain through my pocket of the Internet. It’s a desire for a return to Pangea; that if the distance and the differences were smaller, the missing would be less.

I’m skeptical.

–

Sometimes time zones are magical, though. There’s something so beautiful about waking up with your friends at 3am to watch the All Blacks (national rugby team, basically as big a celebrity as you get in New Zealand) play England or South Africa or whoever else is trying to topple them on any given day.

–

Living in New Zealand makes you brutally, painfully aware of just how big the world is, and how far away we are from everything. This is in small things like the price of shipping our online shopping, or the crackle over the long-distance phone call.

Mostly, it’s waking up in the morning and remembering that the person you love isn’t down the street, but 10,000 miles and 7 hours difference away.

Caitlin Anderson also lives in New Zealand, where she specializes in making Mallory tear up.

The post Let’s Hear From New Zealand Now appeared first on The Toast.

*breathes into a paper bag for a few minutes* OK, I’m good, I’m good.

It was about a year ago when we heard the news that the BBC is adapting Susanna Clarke‘s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell—aka magicians during the Napoleonic Wars, aka my second favorite book of all time—into a miniseries. Well now the miniseries has come forth from the fairy realm like the Raven King, and we finally know who’ll play the fuddy-duddy old magician Norrell and his protégé Strange.

The former will be Eddie Marsan, whose credits include The World’s End, Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes movies, V for Vendetta, the Red Riding trilogy… a bunch of stuff. Even if you don’t recognize his name you almost definitely know his face, basically. And Jonathan Strange will be Bertie Carvel, who’s mostly done theater work (he was Miss Trunchbull in the Broadway version of Matilda! Joy!) but has appeared in Sherlock (as Sherlock’s sleazy banker classmate in The Blind Banker), The Crimson Petal and the White, and Les Misérables in addition to various TV shows.

My face did this when I read Marsan’s name, as he’s several decades younger than I envision Norrell, who starts out the book as an elderly old curmudgeon and only gets more elderly and more curmudgeonly as you wind your way through the 800-some pages. But hey, Marsan’s a good actor, and that’s what makeup for. I can definitely see him playing an ornery magical scholar at turns frustrated with and frightened by his pupil Strange.

And speaking of Strange: My headcanon is still James McAvoy, and that’s a tough one to dislodge, so I’m going to have to wait and see what Carvel does with the role before I form any sort of opinion. The same fate will meet whoever ends up playing the Man with the Thistle-Down Hair. He’s an amalgamation of Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton in my head, and you’ll have to pull that fancasting out of my cold, dead hands.

But best of luck to everyone who’s actually involved. I can’t wait for this show to air (whenever it does—no release date has been set yet). Please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck…

(Broadway World)

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At Dallas Comic Con last week, Battlestar Galactica‘s Katee Sackhoff and Jamie Bamber discussed expectations of women in film and television. It’s a truth bomb.

(Thanks to tipster Nicole!)

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Any time I happen upon Big Brother, I can’t fathom how it’s still on television. It looks so boring. And then I heard about watching people knit competitively. And my mind was blown.

So apparently, Norway’s public television network, NRK, is planning to broadcast a bunch of folks attempting to break a world knitting record.

“The NRK network says the Nov. 1 broadcast will be preceded by a four-hour documentary on how the wool off a sheep’s back turns into a sweater,” according to the Associated Press. “NRK producer Rune Moeklebust said Friday that ‘it’s kind of ordinary TV but very slow, although they’ll be knitting as fast as they can.’”

They’ve dedicated five whole hours to the event to see if the individuals can beat the previous record held by Australia of 4 hours and 51 minutes of non-stop knitting. Originally, I was thinking grandmothers around the world must have beat this record 10 times over since the beginning of knitting, but the actual record involves the fastest time between the sheep to the actual finished sweater.

Producer Lise-May Spissoy told NRK TV’s website. But she is enthusiastic about the Norwegian bid: “We’ve already earmarked the lamb for shearing, and are putting together the team of eight record-breakers – one will shear, while the rest spin and knit as fast as they can.”

Previously, the network aired over 5 days of a cruise ship sailing along in the Arctic.

(via Yahoo, image via LlGC ~ NLW on Flickr)

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