hyper/local

Will Cox writes fiction and non-fiction.

[hyper-local-blog]

THE MAKING OF YOUNG FATHERS

They talked to me, and then they won the Mercury. Is there a correlation? No.

When Young Fathers take to the stage, none of them quite know what's going to happen. Configuration: Three MCs and a live drummer backing them up. Graham ‘G’ Hastings takes prime position alongside fellow founding members, Kayus Bankole and Alloysious Massaquoi. Hastings struggles valiantly with a 1969 EMS synthesiser. He has no idea how to control it. It’s better that way.

“I just play with it,” Hastings tells me. “There’s nothing really controllable about it. I don’t know what it’s going to do every show.” It’s got a keyboard attached, but he doesn’t touch that. “We’ve blown a few amplifiers with it. If you turn it up, it’s dangerous. But it’s proper, real analogue warm.”

Young Fathers is a kind of controlled chaos, but Hastings is completely comfortable with that. Six years ago, they met at an under-16s hip-hop night in their home town of Edinburgh, and began recording using a karaoke machine and some budget sequencing software. Their last three years have been incendiary, including recording and releasing two EPs, entitled Tape One and Tape Two, and signing to labels Big Dada and Anticon. This year, they added a debut album to this string of successes, Dead, which was subsequently nominated for the Mercury Prize [hindsight update: they won].

The new album sees the band remain firmly in the ‘hard-to-categorise’ category, which is exactly where they like to be. It’s a fusion of coarse beats, soul vocals, off-kilter synth hooks and incandescent, socially conscious rapping. It’s not simple, and it’s not easy listening, but it is unique and substantial, and it’s got an undeniable pop sensibility. Get Up, easily the most accessible, hook-driven piece on the album, is built on a queasy, nerve-jangling synth line, and yet the vocals implore you to “do the right thing” which is, of course, to party.

“We don’t see the sense of sticking to our lane,” says Hastings. “All the people who are interested in strange underground stuff, we don’t want to just appeal to them. We want to appeal to everybody.”

They do this by keeping a tight grip on every aspect of their output. And since the release of Tape One in 2011, they’ve been running on urgency and instinct. “We’d been together for years, since we were boys,” he says, "and we’d finally created something we were happy with, and we're still happy with four years later.”

“One reason we bonded in the first place is because we have gut instincts. If we all like it, we get on with it,” says Hastings. “[In Tape One] we had something we really wanted to hit people over the head with. We wanted to push it.” The band “shed skins”, and got rid of people around them who didn’t fit what they wanted to do. “We were fed up of being told to just make the music and have someone else do everything else. All the small things matter. Videos matter. Photos matter. Artwork matters.”

It’s been a relentless schedule since then, but a self-driven one. They have made no attempts to blunt their edges and fit into a genre or a scene. Tellingly, they’re from Edinburgh. Outside of perhaps The Proclaimers, bands just don’t come from Edinburgh.

Doesn't being a DIY hip-hop outfit from Edinburgh make them perpetual outsiders? “Edinburgh doesn’t really have any insiders,” Hastings replies, “so I don’t know if you can call us outsiders.”

It’s been a relatively short trip from Edinburgh oddities to unique alt-pop juggernaut. They started by rapping into a karaoke machine after an underage hip-hop night. Now, they struggle manfully with vintage synthesisers, fiddle dials marked ‘Attack’, ‘Pop sensibility’ and ‘Aural assault’, and watch as their reputation steadily builds around them. The rest is an impressive blur.

[hyper-local-blog]

IRANIAN GOTHIC

(Written, as ever, for my main gas bill payers, Broadsheet, back in December.)

Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut film is a murky, ambiguous, full-blooded Iranian vampire western. It’s quite unlike anything you’ve seen before, and it’s coming to ACMI.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that we’d reached peak-vampire. It seemed, for a while, that the last word had been said on this pop-cultural obsession. The dawn was in sight, and we were all looking forward to being able to down stakes and watch something sunny for a change.

You hadn’t bet on Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature, the stunning A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which makes its Australian debut at ACMI this week.

“I hate death,” says Amirpour. “I don’t like the idea of old age, and I don’t like the way it looks either. I never have. I hated E.T. as a kid. I think the E.T. was an old man. I don’t feel comfortable with death and the decay of the body. Vampires don’t die. They cheat death and get to stay here.”

What Amirpour does feel comfortable with is talking about movies. In the limited time I am allowed with her—a rigidly-measured ten minutes—she manages to turn the conversation to E.T., Frances Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish and Back to the Future.

A Girl is a hard film to describe, because it’s such an unusual mix: it’s about a vampire, of course, but it’s set in Iran—not a country widely known for its Gothic tradition. It’s an American film, but it’s spoken entirely in Farsi. It’s part fairy tale, but it’s shot in brooding black and white and takes its visual cues more from Jim Jarmusch than Tim Burton. Tangled up with the vampire element is a story of a depressed Iranian town, dominated by crime and the vista of distant oil mines. We see economic disparity, drug addiction and desperation long before any fangs emerge.

Suffice to say that it’s moving, sharp and completely unexpected. Likewise, Amirpour herself is a mix of many things. “I’m a stew,” she says. “I’m Iranian, but I was born in England. I had my puberty in Californian malls…”

It’s easy to get caught up in the film’s atmosphere and its genre trappings—but it’s not an exercise in style over substance. It’s the small microcosm of well-drawn characters that gives it real potency.

“I think what I’m most excited about is designing characters. We understand the world based on so many rules—the clothes you wear, the car you drive, where you live—but when you peel the layers back there are such strange things. Weird, secret things that contradict the outside system. That’s where I get excited. What you see is never what you get. This girl, on the surface, looks a certain way, but there are so many different things going on. I’m interested in the strange, weirdo stuff.”

Vampires, then, fit the territory. “Vampires have this lonenliess, which I’m very close with. I like loneliness. I think loneliness gets misunderstood, and the vampire is the loneliest character of all.”

Horror cinema as a genre, I put to her, is misunderstood. Along with science fiction, it’s often seen as fluffy, lightweight and not capable of dealing with the big issues. This makes A Girl’s boldness and willingness to take itself seriously all the more refreshing. Amirpour is incensed by the idea that imaginative stories, and weird genre-cocktails like this one, can’t hold their weight.

“Look at Back to the Future,” she says. “For me, Back to the Future parts I and II are some of the most important films in my life. It became this pop culture phenomenon, but when (director) Robert Zemeckis was going around and pitching this movie, it was about a kid in the 1980s who goes back to the past and meets his mother and almost has sex with her. It’s really subversive. The idea’s crazy!”

Crazy ideas, to Amirpour, are the fun part, and the part that stays with you.

“There’s power—different kinds of power—in all different kinds of storytelling,” she says. “That’s what’s wonderful about it. Movies are just dreams. They’re limitless.”

[hyper-local-blog]

"WE'RE CONSISTENT IN THAT WE'RE CONSISTENTLY ALL OVER THE PLACE" - CHRIS GEDDES ON BELLE & SEBASTIAN

I'm pretty dreadful at this whole 'internet' and 'self-promotion' thing. The last few months has been full of fun stuff that's worth sharing.

First up is an interview with Chris Geddes of Belle & Sebastian conducted for Broadsheet Melbourne to promote their tour and new album. For whatever reason, you don't seem to be able to read if over there anymore, so here it is for future generations who might want to know how to talk to a keyboard player on the telephone.

Many years ago indie rock magazine Blender described Belle & Sebastian as “shy girls dabbling in photography and bookish boys dabbling in shy girls.” To Mark Spitz, author of Twee: The Gentle Revolution, they’re “superstars of twee … the first true pop superstars in a decade.” In twenty years, Belle & Sebastian has evolved from a songwriting outlet for band founder Stuart Murdoch to their current incarnation as a six-piece disco outfit. The new record recalls everything from 70s BBC TV themes to the Pet Shop Boys. Keyboardist Chris Geddes took the time to discuss both the longevity of the band and the new sound.

I’m intrigued by the cover art. Can you tell me what that’s all about?

Well, the cover is entirely Stuart’s thing. Anything I say about it is entirely speculative and no more valid than what anyone else might say. My take is it’s a kind of retro-futurist thing with kind of World War II robots. It reminds me of the documentary from last year, The Spirit of ’45 by Ken Loach, about the construction of the welfare state in Britain at the end of WWII. For me, it’s about building something out of chaos. There are a few allusions on the record to the aftermath of the financial crisis. There’s a contrast in the way things were done in 1945 and the way things have been done now since 2008.

The new album has a very synth, disco-driven feel to it. Where does that come from?

(Producer) Ben Allen’s done a few Animal Collective albums, but before that he started in hip-hop. He worked with Diddy then he was Cee Lo Green’s main engineer. The songs were already going in that direction, but he was definitely the right choice. I did some of it as well.

It’s been a while since we’ve done things like this. We’ve maybe pulled it off a bit better this time. We’ve taken it a bit further. We envisaged one song on the last record, “I Didn’t See It Coming”, as turning out something like “Digital Love” by Daft Punk. But we didn’t quite go all the way with it. Now we have gone all the way.

‘The Power of Three’ in particular reminds me of 1970s BBC Radiophonics. What that an influence?

Yeah. I love that stuff. I think when I was a kid my ambition was to be in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Belle & Sebastian has come to mean a lot to a lot of people. You’re kind of cult heroes.

Oh… I don’t know. It’s amazing to meet people who have been touched by it. I know that feeling, being passionate about a band, in the way that I’m passionate about, say, the Beatles or Motown or something. I can’t compare us to that. I can’t say we’ve made a record that could stand alongside “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted”, because I honestly don’t think we have. But I do hear stuff we’ve done and think, “that’s not bad”. I guess our lyrics communicate with people. They’re honest, and they do say something about what it’s like to be a certain type of person.

Perhaps the myth is a side effect of the band wearing its influences so clearly? There’s always a hint of Beatles, or Lee Hazlewood, or a Go-Betweens namedrop in your music. You clearly have a strong handle on the history of pop music.

We devour it. I think what makes the band a bit unique is that there are people in the band who pull it in different directions. There might be a song that sounds like Nancy & Lee, but then… There’s a song on the new record, “Perfect Couples”, that started from something I knocked off in the practice room one morning. I wanted it to be a linear one-chord thing, like a cross between Steve Reich and Fela Kuti. Then Stevie (Jackson, guitarist) says “Okay, we’re going into the chorus”. I said ‘No! It doesn’t have a chorus.’ But it got pulled in a totally new direction by Stevie.

You’ve been going for almost twenty years now, but you’re still amazingly consistent. Are you just all musically on the same page?

I think we kind of are. I think we’re consistent in that our records are consistently all over the place. Apart from maybe If You’re Feeling Sinister, every record is being pulled in different directions. This record is the same. There have also been lineup changes every few years. There was another one recently with Mick (Cooke, trumpet player) leaving. Over the years, we’ve had three members leave. In a normal size band, if three members leave, you’re pretty short of numbers. The internal dynamic has changed. It’s not like exactly the same band has ever made more than two records.

Belle & Sebastian play this Sunday night at the Palais. Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance is out now.

http://www.belleandsebastian.com/

http://www.palaistheatre.net.au/

[hyper-local-blog]

"YOU EITHER WRITE THE BLUES OR ZIP-A-DEE-DOO-DAH": THE IMMORTAL SOUL OF ROWLAND S. HOWARD

Written for Broadsheet a few weeks ago to promote a new compilation of Rowland's work and some Melbourne Festival shows.

-w

Today, a new album will be released covering the 30-year career of Rowland S. Howard, curated by his friends and band mates, who will also perform two live tribute shows. Will Cox catches up with Mick Harvey, Harry Howard and Genevieve McGuckin to talk about how the compilation and the live shows get to the heart of Rowland S Howard.

It’s mid-afternoon and we’re in the near-deserted Espy, right around the corner from where the Crystal Ballroom used to be where, 30 years ago, The Birthday Party played its final show. I’m trying to get a word in among old friends and co-conspirators of the late, post-punk anti-hero, Rowland S. Howard. They’ve been doing interviews all day, but their enthusiasm for Howard’s work knows no bounds. They riff, they finish each other’s sentences and top each other’s punchlines. Between partner Genevieve McGuckin, brother Harry Howard and long-time band mate Mick Harvey, everyone in the room is featured alongside Howard on the new compilation, Six Strings That Drew Blood, and will be performing at the two Pop Crimes tribute shows later this week as part of the Melbourne Festival. “Everyone except you,” Harry points at me.

After existing as a fringe figure in the Australian musical consciousness for most of his life, Howard passed away in 2009. As is the way of these things, it’s only since his passing that he has attained legendary status.

“This whole thing is hopefully going to open people’s eyes and give them something from every part of his life,” says McGuckin, with whom Howard formed These Immortal Souls. “And, you know, earn him some of that respect and admiration that he didn’t get during his life.”

Six Strings That Drew Blood covers Howard’s whole 30-year career, from Shivers, his utterly compelling (and most enduring) song, written when he was 16, through to tracks performed by The Birthday Party and These Immortal Souls, to The Golden Age of Bloodshed, the final track of his final album, Pop Crimes. “We wanted as strong an overview with as much of a sense of continuity as possible,” says Harvey, who worked with Howard on and off during those 30 years.

“Nothing happens in a bubble,” adds McGuckin. “It’s not just one band and then another band.”

There were setbacks – recordings of Howard’s first band, The Young Charlatans, were deemed too rough to include in the compilation, meaning that much of his early songwriting work for The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party is represented by band mate Nick Cave’s vocals – but across three decades and dozens of collaborators, his guitar and, once it finally emerges, his voice, cut through it all like a blade.

They did manage to source a live version of Shivers, from 1999, to open the compilation. “It was important to get one with Rowland singing,” says Harry. “Rowland had a few… light-hearted criticisms of Nick’s version,” McGuckin adds. “He thought he was hamming it up.”

I ask, expecting a disagreement, if there is a single, quintessential Rowland S. Howard song. Surprisingly, it’s not a hard decision. “Crowned sums it all up somehow,” says Harvey, and everyone immediately agrees. Crowned, a full-blooded massacre of a song, closes the first disc of the compilation with nine minutes of crooning doom. It’s not hard to see why they consider it archetypal Rowland S. Howard. Did he make a conscious effort, then, to project this brooding image?

“He just didn’t write songs when he was happy,” explains McGuckin. Harry cuts in: “He thought he was writing good songs, rather than considering how gloomy they were.” Harvey: “Songs that had some potency to them, that were about important things.” McGuckin: “He said once that you either write the blues, or Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

Like the compilation, the live shows are a celebration of the versatility and acerbic tone of Howard’s work, performed by the people who worked alongside him. “I think a lot of people probably misunderstand it and think it’s some tribute night, and it might be dodgy,” says Harvey. “But wherever possible, it’s the actual people. It’s the real sound.”

“It’s very emotional,” says McGuckin. “At times I find myself playing and thinking ‘where’s Rowland?’ But it’s wonderful, and the whole process is so much fun, because it was all the people that played with him. We’re his friends.”

Five years after his death, Rowland S. Howard’s days of obscurity are at an end, with his influence being cited by everyone from HTRK to The Horrors.

“There were years when people thought Rowland disappeared, but he was playing every week or two at the Public Bar or the Town Hall. Twenty people might come, but he’d keep playing. I loved that about him. He kept playing no matter what. Now, suddenly, everyone is claiming to have been one of the 20 people.”

Harvey, McGuckin and Harry Howard performed as part of the Pop Crimes show at the Melbourne Festival. Six Strings That Drew Blood is available in a two-CD version now, and in a deluxe four-LP version at the end of the month.

[liftedbrow]

‘Pharma Roulette’

[hyper-local-blog]

Written for the liftedbrow's Medicine issue:

Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons

A secure hospital ward, one Wednesday morning in March. When the doctor approaches with her trolley, I still have time to tell her no, that I’ve decided I’m afraid of drugs, that I don’t trust the pharmaceutical industry, that I don’t want the three comically oversized syringes of what might be 40mg of something called RPH-203, or might be a placebo consisting of saline and water, inserted into my abdomen.

RPH-203 is being tested for its potential to slow the progress of cancer-related bone lesions. I don’t have bone cancer. But I will be paid $1075 if I say nothing and submit myself to the mysterious, gleaming needles and, for the first and most likely last time, to the roulette of a paid clinical trial.

My consent form tells me that thirty-two healthy male participants have been enrolled and separated into four groups, and will either be assigned RPH-203 or a matching placebo. For medical science, this stage is an essential part of the road to approval for a new drug. The trial’s subjects are a broad spread: students, backpackers and unfunded artists. This cash injection will pay rent, supplement Centrelink payments, fund expensive art projects, or help pay for round-the-world trips. The feeling is that the risk is negligible. There’s a chance we won’t be dosed with an untested drug anyway, and we’ll merely end up with the placebo. According to my consent form, our assignment will be “random, similar to the toss of a coin.” It’s a coin toss whose result I’m not allowed to see: it is essential to the integrity of the study that the participants, doctors and support staff are kept in the dark as to who has been genuinely dosed.

The doctor is a slight, bubbly woman in her fifties. While her hands work at finding the optimum spot on my belly, she attempts to distract me.

“So, I bet you have a girlfriend,” she says in exactly the conspiratorial way you might talk to a seven-year-old.

Read More

[hyper-local-blog]

THIS VIDEO JUST ABOUT SUMS IT ALL UP

Donate to our Pozible campaign here. Play with us on Facebook here.

I sincerely apologise for the Buzzfeed-style ball-grabbing headline.

Casuals Network Press - Pozible from Will Cox on Vimeo.

[hyper-local-blog]

I AM A PUBLISHER NOW

The Casuals Network Press is a new small publisher of small books.

A book from the CNP is roughly equivalent to a 7” single record, or a Kindle Single eBook – it’s a single, short work, under 10, 000 words, across about 32 pages, retailing at about $6 for a print edition and $3 for a digital edition. It’s a way of providing the low price of an eBook in print form, and a way of getting unknown names into people’s reading diets. Our books will have an emphasis on eye-grabbing design and high production values, ensuring they stand proudly on the shelves next to the established names, despite their diminutive stature and mysterious contents.

It's being run by me and a small gang of likeminded suckers, and we're raising money over at Pozible. We are dangerously close to our goal. The books are going to look like:

[hyper-local-blog]

LOST IN THE UNDERGROWTH: KASIMIR BURGESS ON 'FELL'

BY WILL COX

Originally written for Broadsheet Melbourne.

While scouting locations for his first feature film, director Kasimir Burgess got lost in the wild depths of the Yarra Valley. It lasted for all of thirty minutes, but the experience lingered. 'It’s sublime but terrifying how minuscule a civilised and intelligent man can become in the space of half an hour,’ he says.

Now the film, Fell, is being slowly released upon the world. After leaving audiences awestruck at the Sydney International Film Festival and then MIFF, it is now screening at ACMI until September 27.

It’s perhaps an overstatement to say that getting lost was the defining seed for this raw, sparse film, but all the ingredients are there. Fell is populated with long, booming shots of falling trees, screaming chainsaws, lined faces and solitary human figures scaling the old growth. It’s a film about human fallibility and the wild cruelty of nature, as well as a tender portrait of the remorse and renewal of two men, played by Daniel Henshaw and Matt Nable, who are drawn into a deadlock in a small logging community by a tragic accident. The film is an exercise in understatement and tension, ever threatening to escalate into revenge.

But for Burgess, Fell is about subverting those expectations and letting the audience think for themselves. ‘It was kind of about creating a film that would allow people the space to find their own truth. The collective intelligence of an audience, in the cinema particularly, just boggles my mind.’

Burgess has developed something of a reputation across a dozen award winning short films, including Lily, which won the Crystal Bear for best short film at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011. That he has never attempted a feature-length film before is evidence that he wanted to get it right. Fell was conceived as a collaboration with screenwriter and director Natasha Pincus, who is most often recognised for her music video work, including Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’.

‘I never saw shorts as a stepping stone to features,’ says Burgess. ‘I just love doing them. But eventually Natasha and I realised that the story we were looking at was too big for that length.’

The Yarra Valley is the real star of the film. 'It just felt like a really good way to externalise what was happening within our characters,’ explains Burgess. ‘The trauma and the violence of the natural world meant that we didn’t need to use as many familiar tropes, or dialogue or music.’

With this enigmatic approach, the forest operates as more than just a backdrop - it’s a catalyst for the emotional transformations of two men, and its authority pervades every shot. ‘To get to some of these places was a serious mission,’ says Burgess. 'We had to learn to climb the trees to get those shots. We had to know what we were after.’

Given Fell’s subtle, creeping effect on the viewer, it’s not surprising that the producers have chosen to subvert the usual release pattern. The film has had a deliberately slow release, from the Sydney Film Festival in June to the current run at ACMI. Viewers can also stream the film online. For now, Burgess is content for it to slowly build a reputation and mystique. ‘It’s a really gentle, quite clever way of testing the waters. And it democratises it,’ says Kasimir. ‘More people can see the film and that’s great.’

For the full experience, though – for the haunting, ornate sound design and existential unease of the wilderness – Fell will be playing for several weeks at ACMI. If you’re lucky, the cast and crew will be in the bar afterwards. ‘We’ve been doing that most nights,’ says Burgess, ‘just making ourselves available to audiences. It’s been sparking some great debate and conversation.’

Fell is screening at ACMI several times a week until September 27 ($10, $7 concession), and is available to stream online from the ACMI website ($10). The cast and crew will be available for an informal chat with the audience after the 6:30pm screening this Thursday the 28th.

[hyper-local-blog]

ACCELERATED

BY WILL COX

Originally written for Broadsheet Melbourne.

As the Melbourne International Film Festival takes over the city in earnest, a small group of Australia’s most promising new filmmakers are occupied with the festival’s famed Accelerator program - a punishing schedule of parties, premieres and pitching sessions. From Saturday night, their short films will be unleashed upon festival audiences. Will Cox catches up with some of the brains behind the future of Australian cinema.

Building Bridges

'I just got the itinerary,’ says director Jessica Barclay Lawton. 'It’s overwhelming. Screenings, workshops, after-parties. It’s all one big highlight.’

Jessica’s latest short film, Building Bridges, is a poignant sketch concerning a lone man, Australian screen stalwart Mark Mitchell, and a ludicrous solo construction project. Apart from the endless week of parties and networking opportunities, Accelerator means that Building Bridges will be shown in a cinema. 'It’s theatrical,’ she says. 'It’s grand. [The film] needs that theatre environment for it to feel the way it should feel.'

For Jessica, this has been the easiest project she has been involved in. Writer Ted Wilson knocked up a draft script, and they shot a few days later. 'It happened so organically,’ says Jessica. 'It was really just a bit of fun. We’d had another, quite ambitious project we were shooting a few days later. We thought, let’s just have fun. We found a location. We picked a huge, grand wharf.’

‘Then our cinematographer said, what about this shitty one over here? The absurdity of that was just perfect. Straight away, it was the bridge we were looking for.' 

The finished film is an understated, brief encounter with the macabre. The three core members of the production team have been developing their craft in a number of their projects. For Ted, a short like Building Bridges is an opportunity to communicate a tone rather than make a grand statement. 'It's got that isolated, paranoid tone, says Wilson. 'There’s that sense of foreboding. He’s ill-fated. He can’t connect with people.’

'We’re all heading in the same direction now,’ adds Jessica. 'For a few years we’ve just been making things, but it finally feels like we’re settling into our own sort of feel.’

There’s No Such Thing As A Jellyfish

'I guess it’s a combination of the absurd and the melancholy,’ says Alena when I try to draw her on a description of her entry, There Is No Such Thing as a Jellyfish. 'It’s an amorphous narrative. There’s no traditional story with a twist in the end. There’s no real resolution, it’s just a series of impressions.’

Alena is a director who is clear in her resolve: 'I don’t really enjoy watching films that tell me what to think,’ she declares. Suffice to say that it’s about a lone young woman, a tarot reading and the everyday being rendered utterly surreal. The result is a remarkable mix of the choreographed and the improvised, and it’s completely unpredictable from start to finish.

It’s also a reminder that not all productions are as straightforward as Building Bridges. The project was entirely self-driven. Alena co-wrote the film with partner James Vaughan and put the production together with a combination of a Pozible campaign, a lot of her own savings and a cast and crew of friends and likeminded aspiring professionals.

‘This was the most ambitious thing I’ve done,’ she says. ‘I worked with a lot of experienced people – far more experienced than I was. It had that classic film shoot thing where everyone has a role, and if something goes wrong, someone fixes it. It went smoothly. It was a really good vibe.’

Alena is, of course, excited to be a part of the Accelerator program. 'It’s an opportunity to share your work with people. That’s the main thing. That’s what you want. You make a film because you want to say something to somebody. It’s amazing to get it on a big screen, and to reach people. And it’s a real cinema,’ she adds, with visible excitement. 'I’ve never had a screening in a real cinema.'

Rhododendron

Getting any short film off the ground requires a perfect storm of events. For Rhododendron, director Lewis Attey’s graduating piece for Swinburne University, a combination of luck and fortuitous technical decisions lead to a frenetic, visually stunning piece. It started when word got around that leftover 35mm film stock from Nash Edgerton’s The Rover was going cheap. In an age when most films are shot on cheaper and simpler digital technology, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. 

'It’s not often you get to shoot on film. For commercial work, it’s sort of dead. I realised it might not ever be available to me ever again. I wanted to do it before it was… ‘obsolete' is too strong of a word.’ Due to the expense of developing reels of film, Lewis decided to shoot the whole film with a single shot. 'I needed to condense the action to 8 minutes and 34 seconds,’ he explains. ‘That’s how long we could film on a single reel.’

Rhododendron uses the one-take limitation to depict frantic rage and communication breakdown. It’s dark, it’s loud, and it’s almost entirely in Polish. The finished piece is equally exhausting and cathartic.

Not content with the limitation of shooting the whole film in a single take, Lewis also decided to rely on a very narrow window of natural light. To get the required balance of darkness, the whole thing needed to be shot in a 45-minute window, again and again until it was right. The process involved terrorising a St Kilda apartment block at dawn, four days in a row. 'Surprisingly, considering how much screaming there was over five days, [the residents] were pretty cool with it,’ Lewis says. ‘But I felt pretty bad.'

The work has paid off, and now as a part of the Accelerator program, Rhododendron, There’s No Such Thing as Jellyfish and Building Bridges are getting the attention they deserve. Nevertheless, Lewis is quick to point out the luck involved in being picked for something like Accelerator. 'People on the panel at film festivals either like it or they don’t,’ he says. 'It’s impossible to predict. You just cross your fingers and hope they do.’

Building Bridges, There’s No Such Thing as a Jellyfish and Rhododendron all screened as part of MIFF’s Accelerator events between August 9 and 15.

[hyper-local-blog]

THE LONG, LINGERING 'NO'

XAVIER DOLAN'S HEARTBEATS

By Will Cox

<originally written to accompany The Light Trap’s screening of Heartbeats.>

The main narrative of Heartbeats (2010), a tightly-focused rumination on the love triangle, is scattered with snippets of mock interviews with the victims of unrequited love. The eventual and inevitable rejection is ‘like getting your head chopped off in slo-mo. It’s like a long, lingering “No.”’

The film’s approach to the one-sided love affair is clean-cut – it’s like ‘falling in love with an idea’, as one pundit points out – but Dolan is happy to take a leisurely ninety minutes to thoroughly drive this point home.

Xavier Dolan himself was 21 when Heartbeats was released. He both directs and stars as Francis, one third of an alarmingly civil yet dysfunctional love triangle. Dolan divides people for his perceived superficiality. He is a French-Canadian child star turned Indie cinema darling, and the temptation in the media has been to describe him as a prodigy or a ‘boy wonder’, and to marvel at this perfect, youthful specimen who writes, directs and stars in award-winning films. He has impeccable hair and smokes Malboro Lights, one writer in the New York Times points out, dresses head-to-toe in black, and speaks perfect, alluringly French-accented English. His very being is perfect, or perhaps a perfect artifice, and really, what’s the difference?

Heartbeats, Dolan’s second film, is a film which revels in artifice, from the narrative, in which a shared crush drives two friends to attempt to outdo each other in transforming themselves into perfect lover material, to the visual sheen that permeates every shot. The act of walking into a restaurant is heightened with vivid colour and painstaking slow-motion to lend it the air of unwittingly lining up before a firing squad (slow-motion is used repeatedly, with varying degrees of subtlety, and is tellingly referred to in the narrative twice, to describe a ’striptease’ at one point, and later to describe the aforementioned decapitation). A small-to-medium-sized house party is drenched in strobing blue light. Nicolas’ very presence in any shot heightens it to fanciful beauty with his pristine looks, unimpeachable innocence and air of the resolute Adonis and Lothario. Francis and Marie heap affection on him as if he were somewhere between a film star and a puppy, dressing themselves up to classical Hollywood standards and encouraging Nicolas to wear a straw boater.

Dolan revels in this excess.

That said, his precisely controlled visual style is never reduced to window-dressing or self-conscious glitter. Dolan contrasts these moments of excess with embarrassing, forthright realities – the murderous glares while Nicolas’ eye is averted, the scene in which Francis opportunistically masturbates over Nicolas’ clothing, and Marie’s inevitable rambling, heart-rending confession of adoration – to create a bitter and prescient deconstruction of imagined love. Thus the melodrama is played out on two fronts - one of forced Audrey Hepburn glamour, and one of crippling unease. Niels Schneider, as Nicolas, remains the disarmingly charming catalyst throughout, and the camera loves him for it - though the true focus is arguably the minutiae of the performances of Dolan and the gloriously awkward Monia Chokri, who plays Marie. This is the formula at the heart of Heartbeats - shiny falsity played off against paralysing self-doubt. Are the recurring slow-motion shots of Dolan’s perfect quiff there to emphasise his naivety and internal struggle? Or are they merely Dolan exploring his own physical beauty with ‘swooning intoxication’ as The Hollywood Reporter found about his most recent film, Tom at the Farm? Is Heartbeats, and again I quote The Hollywood Reporter, ‘militantly superficial'?

And does it matter?

The French title for this film, it’s worth pointing out, is Les Amours Imaginaires. The literal translation of this is The Love Imaginary, but it formally translates to Heartbeats - the English language, it turns out, doesn’t lend itself to this contrast of romantic love and imagination with the visceral feeling of pumping blood.

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TL --> DR

(too long, didn't read)

On the culture of agreement and the reductive effect of Facebook.

This article was originally printed in the May 2014 edition of Catalyst.

You might have noticed one picture that has been showing up a lot in your Facebook feed lately. It’s a picture of a relatively new figure of popular left-wing disgust, Attorney General George Brandis, and it’s attached to various news stories about his passionately held but ultimately batshit stupid opinions—like the 'people have the right to be bigots’ one, and the ‘refusing to argue with climate change deniers is unfair’ one. It’s a link to an article on a Respected News Source, and the headline is something like ‘Brandis confirms compulsory race hate for under 35s.’ The picture shows him yielding a cane made of gold and crankily finger-jabbing a peasant (both the cane and the peasant are, unfortunately, out of shot).

You can’t tell what he’s saying, as it’s only a photograph. But Christ, he looks awful, doesn’t he?

Don’t click on the article. It will only make you sad. Instead, scroll down, click on the little comment symbol and express your contempt for all that this man stands for. I mean, whatever it is, it’s probably reprehensible. After you’ve registered your disgust, go back and read the other comments, which express similar disdain. God, that feels good, doesn’t it? Everyone agrees. You didn’t even have to read the article. Time saved! High five yourself.

There have been a lot of recent rumblings about restrictions on freedom of speech. George Brandis is attempting to repeal legislation that restricts hate speech. The Victorian parliament has passed laws that will severely limit the right to protest in a public space. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have tightened their social media policy to apparently Orwellian levels of control.  On the face of it, things don’t look good for the future of healthy debate.

Is that new? Not really.

In recent years, social media has come to dominate the way we share information. News sites use advertising algorithms to tailor content to the sort of thing you’ve already read before. Cultivating and trimming your Facebook friends list operates the same way. It has become easy to pick and choose exactly whose truths and opinions you are exposed to. Debate is stifled not just by the implementation of new laws and the repealing of old ones, but by the ignorance and complacency that online discourse facilitates.

Increasingly, people simply don’t care to absorb the facts before they comment. A few weeks ago, when the government rolled out their new social media policy, the news was picked up by a number of outlets. Reporters emphasised the ‘dob in a mate’ clause, which encouraged public servants to report colleagues who criticised the government online. This move understandably terrified and appalled all reasonable people who don’t want their opinions hindered by government. Abbott! Hate that guy! Thought police! People flocked to the Internet in droves to passionately agree with each other.

The only problem was that this wasn’t strictly true. The policy was only rolled out within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, meaning that members of the Prime Minister’s office, in the interest of being seen to be doing their jobs properly, are restricted as to what they can publish on the Internet. It is a department, after all, which describes one of its primary roles as: ‘...to support the Prime Minister and the Government to manage the business of government in an efficient, effective and coordinated manner.’

One public servant, who wished to remain anonymous, explained the thinking behind the legislation to me. They described it as equivalent to any ‘don’t be a dick about your job online’ company policy, and described the media discussion around it as a ‘beat up’. But on Facebook, this article was merely more fuel for a bout of onanistic mutual agreement.

This is the reductive effect that Facebook and other media have had on our critical faculties. The result is that vital discussions, such as the one around freedom of speech, have become mired in dangerous incomprehension. Headlines are read, but details are ignored and confusion reigns.

At the beginning of April, America’s National Public Radio ran an inauspicious bit of clickbait through their Facebook page with the grabbing and infuriating headline ‘Why doesn’t America read anymore?’ Of course, if you went to the trouble of clicking on the link you’d find a note from your friends at NPR, which starts:

‘Congratulations, genuine readers, and happy April Fools' Day! We sometimes get the sense that some people are commenting on NPR stories that they haven't actually read.’

Exactly as they’d anticipated, over a thousand people bypassed the article to express their righteous anger, to pour their vehement fury upon the unworthy - at either the American public for being so ignorant, or at NPR for stooping to the level of alarmist clickbait. Hey now, let's not generalize. ‘Some of us read books daily,’ commented Internet user Timothy Alexander. ‘I read about a book per week,’ said hardened book-reader Annette K Piper. Everyone loves something to scowl over during their morning coffee. This article provided it in spades.

  Meanwhile, back in Australia, as the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ become more and more entrenched behind opposing battlements, people choose their sides, surround themselves with likeminded voices and put up blinders to all else—and our ability to reach sane, reasoned opinions spirals into decline. During the speech in which George Brandis argued passionately for the right to be an arsehole, he went on to say that "the left has adopted a reasonably comprehensive secular morality of its own, which it now seeks to impose upon society… and it’s prepared to impose that secular morality on society at the cost of the freedom of speech which it once espoused".

This is obviously laughable on several counts—it reeks of the kind of paranoid entitlement tailor-made to appeal to the Liberal voter. But it’s also drawing those clear battle lines between the 'left' and ‘right’. This is an obvious tactic, but one that social media propagates. It’s a statement that will provoke the ire of the left, and the agreement of the right. Spokespeople on the left are often guilty of the same tactic. The gap between ‘them’ and ‘us’ is only getting wider, as is the gap between fact and opinion. The danger is that, aside from the occasional peer over the wall, the freedom of speech debate is in danger of becoming lost somewhere in the no-man’s-land in between.

-WC

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EMERGING WRITERS' FESTIVAL

As part of the Emerging Writers' Festival's attempt to catch up with someone from every university writing course in the country, they asked me a few questions about 'writing' and 'emerging', and I answered them.

You can read it here.

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BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2012)

Cabbages, sizzling oil and mental collapse in Peter Strickland's homage to the lost dark arts.

<This essay was written to accompany The Light Trap's screening of Berberian Sound Studio.>

By WILL COX.

The Equestrian Vortex (1976) is an Italian Giallo film about a teenage girl who is shipped to an up-market all-girls horse riding school. The adolescent angst and horse-based sports are soon interrupted, however, by devil-worship, torture and a ‘dangerously aroused demon’. Meanwhile, in the Berberian Sound Studio (2012), a bookish Englishman is brought to Rome to lend his foley expertise to this carnival of horror.

The purpose of foley work is to give a film a seamless, real experience – to paper over the cracks in the fabricated reality with full-blooded, visceral sound. The nature of Giallo films, a particularly bloody and controversial strain of Italian cinema in the 1970s, is to break down barriers between violence and eroticism on a canvas of the bright and hyper-real. Our protagonist, Gilderoy, is displaced from his natural habitat and forced to contend with both workplace bullying and an endless stream of violent imagery. Into this bargain, he is expected to use his mastery of sound equipment to breathe life into this violence.

Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio is often described as a kind of love letter to the golden age of horror cinema and to the lost art of analogue sound. But as the defensive director of The Equestrian Vortex has it, this is not horror – at least not in the traditional sense – and to describe such a brutal and intense film as a ‘love letter’ seems perverse. This is not a film which can be easily classified with a soundbite. Initial reviews of the film tried in vain to lay some kind of conventional genre framework over it - the New York Times described it, perhaps just to be contrary, as a ‘workplace comedy’. It is all of these things, to an extent, but wrapped in the purely gothic conceit of the psychic decline of the Englishman abroad.

We, who never see the depths of the equestrian vortex itself, are exposed only to the sound. For Gilderoy, whose relationship with the outside world is defined by committing it to magnetic tape, it is not long before this world destabilises him. In his spare time, he indulges himself in the comforts of home. Photographs. Letters from his mother. A tape reel of familiar sounds from home to play on lonely evenings (‘2:51 - 3:57 Mum’s footsteps’; ‘5:17 - 6:04 Mantle Clock’; ‘6:19 - 6:34 Pantry tone’).

The horror of the film hinges on this blurring of his work and domesticity. His comfort reels become entwined with those labeled ‘Priest shouting’, ‘Priest pulls witch’s hair’ and ‘Confession ballad #1’. The stress of these violent motifs is underscored by bureaucracy – unpaid expenses claims, equipment orders and work briefing sheets. Arcane patterns appear in the paperwork as the celluloid begins to permeate Gilderoy’s fractured psyche. Mundane items are enlisted in the pursuit of horror: a bedsheet is fluttered; glass smashed; watermelons are sacrificed against the

parquet floor; hot oil sizzles in a frying pan; and cabbages, which appear to be used to simulate human flesh, are chopped, stabbed, boiled and drowned. The work is performed like the rituals of a magic spell, as the elements of the every day are brought together to create terror.

The film’s ‘love letter’ status cannot be ignored. The UK is currently seeing something of a revival of the analogue. The ordinariness of the equipment here recalls the shoestring aesthetic of the BBC’s experimental sound department, the Radiophonic Workshop and the work of its in-house composers like John Baker and Delia Derbyshire.

On the horror side, the all-girl horse riding academy in which The Equestrian Vortex is set is a reference to Dario Argento’s Giallo film Suspiria (1977), which is set in an up-market ballet school. The score, an eerie collage of musique concrète by British group Broadcast, recalls Italian band Goblin’s score for that film. Even the bi-lingual nature of the film, exploited here for its dislocating effect, recalls the way films like Suspiria were recorded in multiple languages at once as the international cast simply spoke in their native tongue, which was then dubbed into consistency in post-production. The Equestrian Vortex is a collaboration across Italian, English and at one point, goblin tongue.

In the 1970s, as the British horror film industry collapsed after becoming stagnant and toothless, dominated by camp Hammer retreads of the Universal monster movie tradition and increasingly bawdy sexploitation - see Twins of Evil (1971) and Vampire Circus (1972) - the Italian horror scene became increasingly disturbing and impressionistic - see Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Profondo Rosso (1975). Gilderoy is from a culture with an increasingly tame horror output, and whose usual foley work is on low-key nature documentaries. When he steps into the cruel and unusual world of The Equestrian Vortex, and the barriers finally come down between his anodyne inner life and the blood-soaked world of Giallo, that he quickly unravels once abandoned to this pit of blood is hardly surprising. 

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FEB 17, 2014.

ON CALL CENTRE WORK, ORWELL AND CAKE.

By WILL COX.

A shorter version of this was originally printed in The Big Issue. They’ve also put it on their blog here.

I HAD PRECISELY 19 seconds. I was submerged in a sea of desks amongst breadwinners, ex-students and middle-management careerists—a cross-section of society, thrown together by chance and necessity, clinging to their jobs like driftwood. I had precisely nineteen seconds to take them in.

This was the ‘after call-work time’ that the department could not take away from me. Although taking the full freedom of this privilege was discouraged, I cherished it.

Nevertheless, I soon discovered that this was scarcely enough time to have a sip of water and draw a deep, slow breath before—

*beep*

“Welcome to B—— Customer Service, you’re speaking with Will, how can I assist you with your enquiry today?”

—and the flow of complaints, enquiries and disputes continued.

There are currently roughly 198,000 ‘seats’ in the Australian call-centre sector. For one year, I was one of them: a team member in the Resolutions Department of B—— Insurance, fielding calls from disgruntled insurees who, despite relief that they weren’t talking to someone on the Indian subcontinent, regarded me with a disdain reserved for the faceless, sadistic bureaucrat. They were frustrated, and the hold time was unbearable. Each ‘call type’ was accompanied by a Best Practice Procedure guide, including handy calculators, lists and even ‘recommended’ phrasing.  Nothing was left to chance. Everything, where possible, was automated. All one had to do was “control the flow”, diverting the conversation down pre-ordained rivulets. The algorithms calculated that this would take an average of 450 seconds.

My entire worth was understood in such figures, each ‘consultant’ a monetised commodity. Call centres report high staff turnover and low job satisfaction. The pay was below average, the conditions stressful, and the consultants perpetually dissatisfied, making surveillance of staff a key managerial priority. To counteract this, there were non-financial incentives: laminated certificates for adherence to key performance indicators; and an endless stream of birthday cakes to assist consultants in marking another passing year in an unchanging environment.

I considered myself a student, though I hadn’t studied for several years. I considered it was a stop-gap until I found something better. Yet I found myself in a curiously involved mindset. I took training programs, I met and exceeded targets and I accepted promotions. I was also a debtor, and I calculated that clearing this debt would take a minimum of nine months in purgatory, during which time two thirds of my pay would be diverted back to the bank. This time was obligingly subdivided for me into seconds, minutes, hours, weeks and months.

I comforted myself with books, but so many just highlighted my situation: “A man in debt is so far a slave,” poet Ralph Emerson said to me, further compounding my unfortunate sense of martyrdom. Saul Bellow taunted “there is nothing to do but wait, or dangle, and grow more and more dispirited.” I read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, giving the duration of my 15-minute break to the exotic squalor of between-the-Wars Paris, in which Orwell describes working 15 hours a day as a breadline-earning hotel plongeur (literally, ‘diver’, one who washes dishes and performs menial kitchen and hotel tasks; in English, a dish pig). As Orwell describes it, it is futile work—the staff hate it, and the customers hate it more. It is a cheap emulation of hospitality, he said, and it benefits no one but the management. I could escape, but I was always pulled back as the alarm on my phone bipped urgently, and 45 seconds later I was back at my desk to hit ‘ready’, consult the appropriate guide and attempt to exert what control I could over the ensuing flow.

At least I was not working down the mines, or as a Parisian plongeur. There was very little chance of contracting the black lung, or dying of consumption.

Today in China, conditions in the factories of Foxconn, manufacturers of the iPhone, are tantamount to slavery. The working conditions are so atrocious that their contracts include a pre-emptive clause preventing family and descendants from suing the company for ‘unexpected’ death, injury or suicide.

There was no such clause in B——’s contracts.

*

LAST OCTOBER, A visibly panicked colleague, S——, pulled me into a dusty alcove and fell into panic. Her team leader had taken her aside and said her performance had been deemed unacceptable. Her fate would be decided by the end of the day. My colleague could not afford to lose her job. An out-of-work schoolteacher, this was her stopgap, too. She told me that her personal breaks often exceeded 10 minutes a day. Her adherence statistics had fallen below the golden 90% mark. She took too many sick days. The pressure and frustration, she told me, had become too much.

We theorised. Perhaps she would be put on an ‘action plan’ to get her back on track. Perhaps they’d go easy on her, and she’d merely be ‘marked down’, potentially failing her monthly assessment. Though team leaders often caught the ire of staff, they, too, were at the mercy of a set of arbitrary rules, and were merely attempting to guide the flow of complaints, frayed tempers and discontent. The call centre is a living, breathing organism, and we each have a part to play.

*

A FRIEND OF mine, T——, once described the circumstances of his dismissal from a large government-run call centre. He was hauled into a meeting, and they explained why they were setting him free. Several weeks prior, a fire alarm had been triggered and, just before lunchtime, the entire building had been evacuated. They told him that upon returning to his desk in the afternoon, he had done no work. Their records showed that though he had clocked in, he had taken no calls, and completed no follow up work. This is absurd, he replied, and there must be something wrong with your records. His managers simply responded with another question: “Do you really want to be here?” He was blunt with them, and shown the door.

Not a team player.

T—— still insists that there is no way that he could have got away with such shirking. Surveillance in a call centre is tight. As S—— was told by her team leader, “be careful what you put in your private emails; we can see everything you’re doing.”

It soon became clear to both S and myself that we were reaching the end of our tethers. We made our separate exit plans, escaping into financial insecurity. Some months later, I wrote to S to ask her: what are your prevailing recollections of that time, now that you’re out of it? Jovial comparisons to both post-traumatic stress disorder and the Vietnam War aside, we both agreed that the months, minutes and micro-managed seconds had simply washed away; that overheated, windowless room was now just a frozen moment in time.

Another Foxconn factory, this time in Mexico: the management informed the staff that the shuttle bus had been indefinitely delayed, and that in the meantime, they should continue to work. A rumour spread amongst the team that the management had deliberately delayed the bus to force the workers into unpaid overtime. A minor riot started, during which several small fires were lit.

We both left the call centre a few weeks before Christmas, and at the end of my last day, I was allowed a 10-minute reprieve for a farewell team meeting. We were each permitted a slice of black forest cake.

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DECEMBER 4 2013

By WILL COX.

A shorter version of this was originally published over on Broadsheet.

Ivy St.: “A bass player that can actually play bass and sensible drumming, all swimming in a dead sea of guitar and vocals.” - Jonathan McCarthy.

One weekend this December, a dozen or so of Hobart’s brightest (and most together) musicians will descend on Carlton’s John Curtin Hotel, along with a significant number of Melbourners and dedicated Tasmanian ex-pats. They’re converging for the inaugural Hobart + Melbourne = Yeah, a celebration of the diversity of the Hobart music scene and its ongoing, love-hate relationship with Melbourne.

Hobart is not widely known for a unique concentration of fantastic bands. But they exist. They’re focused around only a handful of venues, one or two record shops and a relatively new record label, Rough Skies; often only seen by an audience of friends and other local bands. It’s possible that this lack of attention is about to change.

Heart Beach: "Boy/girl unison vocals laid over a bare bones swoony pop songs. Nuanced and assured. It's fucking great.” - Thomas Hyland.

Hobart + Melbourne = Yeah is an event I want to call a microfestival. Melbourne-based organiser Thomas Hyland tentatively agrees, though he and the other organisers resist calling it any one thing in particular. Initially spurred by a trip to New Zealand’s cult festival Camp A Low Hum, their events have been running on and off in Hobart for years, drawing attention for being held in various lounge rooms and church halls around the city, with punters ferried between venues by carpool. “It was this really fantastic… ‘microfestival’ as you put it,” says Hyland. “It went really well. It wasn’t like a proper festival, it didn’t have the pressures and some of the organisational structures that others have. It felt more organic—and people loved it.”

The whole thing is run by a loose collection of driven Tasmanians with an air of the slacker about them, all closely engaged with the music scene, and all working day jobs to pour money into events like this. Hyland tells me they each put about $50 into a bank account every week for a few months to payroll the events—“It doesn’t feel like a loss,” he shrugs, “we’re just excited to be doing the thing.”

The Native Cats: “Self proclaimed ‘electronic pub-rock’. A croony wordsmith, 8-bit effects and a real live bass player. Effortlessly incredible.” - Hyland.

This is par for the course in the DIY world of Hobart music, where industry help is paltry. “Doing it all yourself, it feels like you’re more involved with the end product,” says Hyland. “You can almost see yourself in it. The more you can do yourself the better.”

Hyland is now a Melbourne resident himself, having made the trip a few years ago with the other members of the band Ivy St. But despite several years and seven hundred kilometres, Hyland says, “I don’t feel like I’ve actually moved because I’m still so interested in it. That and a lot of my friends are there,” he says. “I’m constantly reminded of it, and I want to be. I think the day that I consider myself a Melbourner, I’d probably move back to Hobart.”

Catsuit: “A sludgy shoegaze three-piece that’s unafraid to sing. Angelic downer punk-rock.” - Hyland.

In any given month of the year representatives of Hobart make at least one pilgrimage to Melbourne for shows in the city’s pubs—though usually on a smaller scale. Posters remain on walls and telegraph poles for months after, with lingering band names like Naked, Small Black Lambs and Heart Beach. They edge their way into familiarity for those who keep an eye out for such things and camouflage themselves effortlessly with Melbourne’s own innumerable kids-with-guitars groups. But there’s a darker edge. Hobart bands have the market cornered in the ironic mingling of sharp cynicism and pop hooks, if such a market can be said to exist. Everything that comes off the island sounds like its been dragged breathlessly through the dirt.

Needless to say, they’ve gathered something of a following. Festival joint-organiser Jonathan McCarthy summarises the H + M = Y! ethos as simply “some really good, not necessarily prominent, local bands.”

Treehouse: “A sludgy shoegaze three-piece that can’t sing and don’t want to.” - Hyland.

“The kind of music I always wanted to play. Carefree, in your face, young, high-pitched, exciting music. Whenever I tried to have that carefree party attitude, I always ended up too drunk to play.” - McCarthy.

They are the kings of the understatement. The very name of the festival is a typically ambivalent declaration from the shambolic veneer of Hobart’s tight-knit indie scene—simultaneously blasé and enthusiastic—it is, like everything in that scene, composed of equal amounts ire and enthusiasm. Perhaps deliberately, the name is inconsistently styled both with and without the exclamation point, leaving it characteristically unclear if it’s ‘Yeah…’ or ‘Yeah!’

McCarthy speaks with ceaseless enthusiasm about the line-up for the show and the DIY philosophy. He would have it as ‘Yeah!’ “There’s all this talk that freedom of information in music is killing the industry, but I think the opposite,” he tells me. “You don’t have this situation where you have to go through a manager or a label who hold all the keys. Now, you can be a bad band, email a bunch of people you’ll get a bunch of shows. It’s easy to produce a record. It’s easy to get international notice.”

Hobart’s indie scene has something of a knack for being ‘discovered’. It has, on occasion, been identified as one of the most interesting little music hotspots in the country, if not the world, but as Hyland says, Hobart has something of an underdog complex. “I really don’t think it needs to feel like that. I actually think it’s fantastic. A lot of people do. But still there’s this younger sibling thing going on.”

Terrible Truths: “It was going to be an all-Tasmanian line-up, but that’s not necessarily interesting to someone who doesn’t know these bands. Terrible Truths are a looping sun stroked guitar/drum/bass thingy. Head-bopping and cool as fuck.” - Hyland.

There’s been a steady stream of musicians from Hobart to Melbourne for years—and they don’t always return. McCarthy has lived in Hobart for a decade and has seen it happen. “The relationship with Melbourne is really personal in a lot of ways,” he says. “A lot of your best friends move there. It’s something that everyone has in common from this state.”

“I think there’s a lot of comparable traits about the underground music scenes of Hobart and Melbourne,” says Hyland by way of explanation. “There’s also a lot of things that are very, very different.” Hyland concludes that “there’s a conquering desire. I think if you’re in that scene in Hobart, you tend to know everyone, which is great, but you want to test yourself.”

“And Melbourne’s closest.”

Hobart + Melbourne = Yeah is held at the John Curtin Hotel on December 7.

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NOVEMBER NINETEENTH, TWO THOUSAND AND THIRTEEN

Jean Paul Sartre said this in Les Mots (1964):

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OCTOBER 24 2013

By WILL COX.

Originally written for the Light Trap screening of Grey Gardens on 22 October 2013, at the University of Melbourne.

In 1972, acclaimed documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles were in the midst of planning a film about the childhood of well-connected socialites Lee Radziwill and her sister Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. They were called to the residence of the sisters’ eccentric aunt and cousin, 'Big' Edith and 'Little' Edie Bouvier Beale. The Beales, they discovered, were living in grim squalour with a family of cats and raccoons in their dilapidated East Hampton mansion, Grey Gardens. They had no electricity and no running water. Having glimpsed this intriguingly unorthodox life, the Maysles brothers lost interest in their current project and switched their focus to the Beales of Grey Gardens.  The end result, the film Grey Gardens (1975), is a picture of decaying opulence which has gone on to become a cult hit, somewhere between highly regarded documentary and camp classic.

The camp appeal is clear—theatricality, flamboyance and excess in all directions—but there is also an unusual gothic sensibility that permeates the whole experience. The film evokes the recurring trope of the 'dilapidated mansion'. Gothic fiction is littered with mentally ill protagonists living in oversized, ramshackle castles. The bare minimum of rooms in these palaces are kept to a liveable standard—the rest are left to the wild. They are places where the inhabitants’ own toxic nostalgia is allowed to breathe and flourish; where failing mental health is conveniently externalised in crumbling environments.

It stretches all the way back to the eldritch Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861), and carries right through to twentieth-century classics such as Shirley Jackson's 1962 novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder. All feature characters who live in reduced circumstances of mental illness and irrepressible flights of memory; dreaming impossible dreams and endlessly replaying past glories, failures and traumas, to the point that the real world, rotting around them, ceases to be important.

Great Expectations and We Have Always Lived in the Castle dress up these tropes in gothic robes, while Sunset Boulevard bookends them with a film noir murder plot. All ultimately see their central characters becoming dangerously unbalanced, but as a documentary, Grey Gardens is, at least theoretically, free to depict reality unencumbered by genre or narrative structure.

The Maysles brothers, along with their co-directors for the project Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, were proponents of the direct cinema movement—a form of documentary characterised by its non-obtrusive, relatively objective approach. Albert Maysles is still working today, offering advice to young filmmakers on his website, from the precise—"Use manual zoom, not the electronic"—to the broad—"as a documentarian you are the observer, an author but not a director, a discoverer, not a controller". Whilst making the film, it was the Maysles' policy to bypass the typical interview, to eschew narration and to avoid staging scenes. Their role as they saw it was merely to point and shoot; to get as much of an authentic portrait of the Beales' lives as possible.

Yet, in a rare example of life imitating art, the final product fits neatly alongside established fictional representations of the mad living in dilapidated mansions. 

The Beales live amongst clutter and filth as naturally as any 'mad old woman' from a gothic novel, and live to obsess over the minutiae of decades-old parties, half-remembered songs and scrambled conversations. Little Edie openly remarks on the difficulty she has keeping a line between the past and the present, a fact which manifests in her unsettling paranoia about visitors stealing heirlooms from the attic (“See, you shouldn't have a contact with the outside world, because how do I know what's been put up in that room… or what's been taken out?”).

The cult of Grey Gardens has, in the last decade, spawned a 2009 HBO biopic, starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, as well as a Broadway musical. One gets the feeling this list will keep growing. We are collectively fascinated and haunted by visions of the faded grandiose. Whether or not this is one constructed in an editing suite is immaterial.  The original film in all it's gritty, claustrophobic 16mm glory has, of course, been labelled as a piece of exploitation—but it has also been pored over for decades, quoted endlessly and remains a compelling example of a gothic tale that has somehow made its way into the real world.

-Will Cox

You can buy the Criterion Collection release of Grey Gardens here.