Other than having a grown-up job (at least if you squint your eyes a little), I lack many of the key markers of adulthood: no car, no stable coupling, no kids, no mortgage. So when I think about things…
- Senior Lecturer, The University of Melbourne
So I shelled out the fifty or so dollars to see Margaret Cho’s show “Mother” during the Melbourne Comedy Festival. After a little under 50 minutes of Cho-time, the Capitol Theatre lights came up - almost…
Quoted in one of the many tributes following his recent death was film critic Roger Ebert’s remark: “I have seen untold numbers of movies and forgotten most of them…” I haven’t seen untold numbers of films…
The formula for peddling luxury items has always been simple: establish a need by pointing to a deficiency and then proffering a solution. Ta daa: marketing 101. Initially the Dove differential began as…
Aside from seeing it at the drive-in - in bad weather albeit with good company – I only remember two things about The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, a fortnight on: The use of the song Abracadabra (“I wanna…
When I was little, maybe five or six, I got the idea to slip my spaniel’s feet into freezer bags and watch her slide around on the kitchen floor. Sure, this episode could have sparked in me a yen for further…
When everybody was reading 50 Shades of Grey, I resisted: a) if I’m seeking prose to masturbate to, I don’t need a whole novel, and b) from my sketchy knowledge of the plot I’m pretty sure that I’ve been…
The Rubensque bloke dressed as pharaoh - who stripped down to his nipple tassells and gold G-string - was my takeaway moment from the Victorian finals of Miss Burlesque 2013. I was however, attending not…
I’m always vaguely suspicious of people who don’t have stories. Folks who, when you ask them what they’ve been up to, offer a bit of a shrug, a vague “not much”. This does not make good conversation. I…
Carb-love and vegetarianism might have seen me pay more attention to the Domino’s story than had a burger chain been involved, but my real interest lies in the “anticlimax”. For the past week, TV ads have…
[Warning! Warning! This article contains an - albeit predictable - spoiler] Films are too often dubbed contemporary, modern. Of the Zeitgeist, at the vanguard. Normally I’d roll my eyes at such a description…
The verdict I gave when the lights came up was, “I fell asleep three different times”. My friend laughed a little - arrogantly so - having predicted that I’d find Lincoln boring when we bought the tickets…
Hosting an awards ceremony is always fraught. No matter how talented the host is, such night-of-nights are always boring and, as I’ve written previously, scarcely entertaining enough to sustain a multi-hour…
Aside from being convinced that I’d seen the whole Carnival Triumph story play out before - pretty much the same thing happened in 2010 with the Carnival Splendor - my interest was piqued by Twitter chatter…
Watching Silver Linings Playbook was how I’d imagine a shiv being shoved into my ribs would feel. Over and over and over again. And just when the plunging stops, the wounds would get doused in battery…
For the first 5 years of primary school, my best friend and I were in the same class. Come Grade 5 and we were abruptly separated. As a world-crumbling-around-her 9-year-old, I begged my mother to get…
There’s a worthwhile article to be written about Brenda (Kyra Segwick), the protagonist of the sadly now-defunct The Closer. Brenda, who went to her drawer for a Ding Dong every time she was stressed…
A couple of years ago I went to a rather interesting fetish conference in Istanbul. One bloke, giving a paper about porn, read his paper monotonously from his notebook; behind him on the screen played…
Late January spells hot and hideous weather, the TV full of rubbish and the saddest of legacies left behind by Little Johnny Howard: stores full of flag crap and bastions of hypocrisy like Dick Smith vying…
I’m a vegetarian who’s served as an apologist for KFC. I abhor the elevation of athletes to God-like status, but sure, I’ve defended Warnie. I actually quite like David Koch so writing a defence of him…
I understand the morals clauses in contracts. I might not particularly like them - being morally ambiguous and all myself - but they make sense: you signed a contract with PETA; wearing a coon-skin bikini…
Much has been made of Lance Armstrong falling short of an Oprah mea culpa. While he may have admitted to the imbibing, he didn’t say sorry, didn’t express remorse. Certainly didn’t do the expected Marion…
Once upon a time, there was something beseeching about a public mea culpa. Once upon a time, if you found yourself soliciting sex in a toilet block, in bed with a prostitute or having fathered an illegitimate…
Last week on Lifetime - a cable channel in the US - a reality TV show called Double Divas premiered. The trailer gives a useful overview: a couple of best friends fit amply bosomed women for new bras…
Writers, feminists, academics, social commentators. Each stir up varying degrees of loathing, mockery and complete and utter frustration in me. The irony and hypocrisy does not evade me. Depending on the…
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