Comments Off on How to give your videos that sweet sweet cinematic look
A few weeks ago, I said to a friend: “I haven’t had a single coherent thought in years.”
When I said it, I meant the comment as ironic and self-deprecating, not to be taken seriously or to linger in the conversation for more than a few seconds. But for some reason, it’s stuck in my mind, and the more I think about it, the more I worry I might have been right. I say that I write (and occasionally, if I am feeling bold, I say that I am a writer), but really, most of the time I spend ‘writing’ is time spent fiddling with existing work, shifting things around, trying a new word here or there, but never really making something new. Whenever I discuss writing with others, I feel like I’m describing a process in the past tense: ‘I used to do this,’ or ‘I would always try to make it feel this way.’
When I’m procrastinating or bored, I watch a lot of short films, especially student short films. Apart from being helpful instruction for future personal projects and often very entertaining in their own right, there’s a particular kind of janky sincerity about student filmmaking that’s uniquely appealing. These shorts are often the first tentative gestures of creative expression, swirling thoughts and ideas being pulled into a sort of order, unsteady, speaking with a voice struggling to be heard through the cliches that need to be sorted out organically with time. Often, when watching the shorts that now-successful filmmakers made at school or with a few friends over a weekend, you can see glimmers of what they would go on to create.
One of Martin Scorsese’s first films (not to set the bar too high off the bat) was just him sitting down and interviewing his parents for 40 minutes. Right there, in the gritty footage of a pokey New York City apartment, is the blueprint for the paradoxical blunt sensitivity that Scorsese paints like no one else. Watching amateur short films feels like brushing dirt from a historical artefact; they allow you to discover stories and context beyond what the object itself tells.
Not that every short film is good, or even competent. For every short film made by one of the most talented directors in the history of cinema, there are an uncountable number of films that are instantly forgettable, trite, and even annoying. But even atrocious shorts can recommend themselves on the basis that they made it out of the filmmaker’s head and onto the screen. For every one of those films, there are probably a thousand more that never made it that far.
What I’m getting at by all this is that I think there’s a lot of value to be found in amateur art, not just as the person making the art but as a viewer. They recommend a method of creative engagement that is more compassionate to the one we instinctively extend towards movies we see at the cinema, one that examines potential and not failure. It encourages me to push back against my instincts that everything I make has to be profound and perfect. It is enough to have made something that didn’t exist in the world beforehand. When I watch a film made with access to the same resources I do, their various amateurisms reassure instead of discourage.
Here’s another thing I watch a lot, and of which I carry a much less favourable opinion: filmmaking tutorials on YouTube. A necessary evil if I want to learn how to use DaVinci Resolve, but one that always leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. All these videos teach is how to emulate and reproduce. A video titled ‘How to make your shots look cinematic’ can’t possibly do what it says, because ‘cinematic’ isn’t really a specific visual style.
But worse, it actively misleads us about where art’s real pleasure and importance come from. Teal/orange colour grading and camera lens recommendations can only get you so far. What gets me about these videos is how cynical they are about why people might want to be creative. Or rather, that they reflect a broader trend towards artistic commodification that makes me deeply uncomfortable. These videos don’t help people to tell stories; they teach them how to make content. (Content, that awful, awful word I have started to hate more than is perhaps reasonable. It is simultaneously meaningless and yet all-encompassing, a tool of destructive generalisation that reduces all the work to which it subjects itself down to something with the sole purpose of filling a gap where profit can be made. The phrase ‘content creation’ is a bitter oxymoron. If your goal is to make content, chances are you won’t end up with anything new.) When it comes to filmmaking, as with writing, there’s absolutely value in attempting to mimic a certain style. The problems start when that emulation is framed as the end of the road. Once you have achieved the elusive ‘cinematic look’ (once you have bought the expensive camera lens and lighting setup), what happens next? A film can be composed of a hundred beautifully considered images that are completely empty and which mean nothing.
That, I think, must be the reason why I’ve started to become hesitant to make anything new. It’s every creative’s nightmare to earnestly pour your whole self into a piece of art, only to find that it’s instantly forgotten, or worse, reviled. How to cope? Films, books, and music are churned out, then chewed and spat out within weeks or months. It’s hard to attempt originality in good faith when the only things we see that gain any traction are recycled pictures of the same old; it’s even more difficult to see the things you create as having any sort of impact when it feels like it’s impossible for cultural longevity to attach itself to anything. Part of the answer is probably spending less time on YouTube, but I think I also need to think about the end goal of creative endeavour through a more charitable lens. I want to be able to make crappy writing and film without being self-conscious. We are all under the same stifling pressure to turn any inkling of creative energy into a product that can support our careers, or change the world. I don’t want to make bad art, but I’ve got to stop being afraid of the growing pains.
Comments Off on The Jazz of Nala Sinepho: A soundtrack for the age of core-core and introspection
The world moves too fast. Each day bleeds into the next. Lectures bleed into work, work bleeds into sleep, sleep bleeds into breakfast, Monday bleeds into Friday, and eventually, life will bleed into death.
The world moves too fast. Faster than ever. Advanced technology has enabled us to do more than ever before, but just as we have become able to do more, so too has each day become an instrument for completing a growing to-do list, upon which crucial time for ourselves rarely makes an appearance.
The music of experimental Jazz musician Nala Sinephro provides a refreshing answer to the increasingly chaotic world we live in.
Nala Sinephro’s Jazz
Jazz has always pushed boundaries. Playing with increasingly complex musical arrangements and improvisations is the genre’s bread and butter. While these elements are certainly not lacking in Sinephro’s jazz, they are aided by a characteristic style of meditative calm.
Among a series of tightly crafted ambient, and yet emotionally charged soundscapes, adventures into melody and rhythm are timely responses to our world; a world increasingly saturated with noise and jargon.
Space 1.8
In 2021, Sinephro came out with her debut album Space 1.8, blending the ethereal tones of the harp with powerful jazz improvisations and synths into a sound that was — and still is — fresh and distinct.
Alongside collaborators Nubya Garcia and the Ezra Collective, Space 1.8 moved away from the bombastic and instead looked to evoke introspection and reflection. With each track, Sinephro crafted a spiritual space, both open and calm. The album was a pivotal release, striking a chord with listeners around the globe, and breaking new ground in both the jazz and the ambient genres.
Endlessness
Now, her second album, Endlessness, is here. Sinephro pushes her experimental ethos even further, in a 45-minute exploration of jazz stripped to its ambient core. Shimmering arpeggios, yearning saxophones and pulsating rhythms decorate the bones of the project, while thematic throughlines of recurrence colour Sinephro’s reborn sonic cosmos.
While Space 1.8 offered continuous variation, Endlessness is wholly minimalistic. A single arpeggio motif guides us through the album and results in a deeply cohesive and meditative experience, though some may find this a repetitive trap.
And yet, it is this very sense of repetition that I find deeply intentional, mirroring contemporary cultural shifts in the digital world, especially viral online artistic movements like core-core.
Core-core and Introspection
It is in core-core that seemingly random, often emotionally charged images and sounds are paired to invoke a mellow appreciation of our shared human experience, helping us process and navigate a world of overstimulation, nostalgia, and often overwhelming existential helplessness.
Both core-core and Sinephro make heavy use of recurrence, spontaneity, and subtle emotional shifts. Both ultimately function by taking something simple — be it an image, a video, a melody or a motif — and developing it into something deep and meaningful through prolonged repetition, layering and an emphasis on difference.
In both core-core and Sinephro’s jazz, simplicity is utilised as a powerful tool for emotional resonance, invoking an atmosphere that is equally soothing and haunting.
As core-core engages us, it creates a space for reflection. Sinephro’s Jazz does the same. We are offered a peaceful refuge from an increasingly fragmented life, from our penchant for instant gratification and endless doom scrolling. Sinephro’s music encourages us to slow down, to focus on each note, on each moment that captivates us, and also to appreciate all the space in between.
In a world where our attention is constantly pulled in multiple directions, we often need a counterpoint, or perhaps a cure. Something just like this, which demands of each of us patience, and rewards those capable of giving it with peace, if only for a little while.
Ultimately, in an era of information overload, Nala Sinephro’s music captures a cultural moment where introspection, minimalism, and fluidity are central to how we should be navigating the world. Both of her albums, Space 1.8 and Endlessness, provide much-needed room for reflection. Whether it’s through the loops of a synth arpeggio or the hypnotic pull of a jazz motif, her work aligns with the current cultural landscape — offering, in the vein of core-core, a soundtrack for those seeking solace in a world of never-ending noise.
For those who feel overwhelmed, I ask that you listen.
Slow down, breathe, and listen.
Comments Off on Static Horror: A Review of I Saw the TV Glow
The sensation of being at the edge of a personal revelation can be at once terrifying and beautiful. Words, heavy with possibility, are placed at the tip of your tongue. Once they escape, they can never be put back.
This is the line that Jane Schoenbrun’s toes in her second feature I Saw The TV Glow, where the psychological horror doesn’t come from autonomy that is stripped away, but rather from the weight of having full responsibility and control over your life, and the fear of having wasted that autonomy by lying to yourself. The specific type of dread that comes from the possibility of self-destruction doesn’t need to be communicated by gore or jumpscares—in this space, static suburbia can be made threatening by its own ambiguous familiarity. A father staring, blank faced, while canned laughter spills from the TV set. A fallen powerline slithers and sparks across the road, spewing pages from a half-remembered book. An ice-cream truck watches from the sidelines. You don’t have to go far.
Owen, played by Ian Foreman and then Justice Smith, is a painfully reclusive and sheltered teenager. His sickly and quiet mother is constantly frustrated in her attempts to connect with her son, and Owen’s looming and mostly silent father (Fred Durst) furthers his isolation by belittling his ‘girly’ interests. Owen’s interactions are halting, uncomfortable, and laden with a kind of resigned despair, as though he’s already accepted that it is easier, with the rough hand he has been dealt, to navigate the world as a non-person than to experience the pain of being trapped. He bonds with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), an equally ostracised peer a few years older, over their love of the TV show The Pink Opaque. There’s a specific type of obsession unique to adolescence that Lundy-Paine communicates with raw, clumsy intensity — that feeling of trying to show someone how a piece of media you love has changed your life, the awkwardness in the gap between wanting to be understood, and the limitations of putting feelings into words. To Maddy and Owen, The Pink Opaque is a lifeline — from their alienated, pre-internet suburbia, on the other side of the screen, suspiciously relatable, overpowered heroines fight the same monsters of the week portrayed the way you remember them being when you were a kid: unintentionally terrifying on first impression; innocuous when revisited in adulthood.
I Saw the TV Glow is refreshingly explicit about its connection to trans experience and dysphoria, but it conveys this in a broad, metaphorical sense in such a unique way that seems like something of a formal miracle. The word ‘trans’ is never said, but the pervading sense of wrongness that Maddy and Owen feel is overwhelming in its intensity, conveyed by a grainy, analogue frame of neon light and a soft shoegaze soundtrack that imbues each moment with nostalgia, regret, and unease. Scribbled pink time cards and Owen’s matter of fact fourth wall breaking often abruptly adopt the tone and pace of kitschy millennial coming-of-age stories. But the school corridors are dark and vacant, and the arcade and movie theatre are silent. Owen’s addresses to the camera don’t create a sense of intimacy or triviality so much as they feel controlling, false, and disturbingly out of place. Instead of subverting genre tropes, Schoenbrun lets them function as a trapping of their own, an empty nostalgia prison that Owen has chosen to embrace. Though the film provides the setup and texture of a much happier story, Schoenbrun takes a calculated step back by portraying a protagonist whose story is unambiguously self-destructive, refusing the call up to the last frame.
Time moves differently in the suburbs, certain images moving slowly, ingraining themselves into the fabric of the film, others skipped entirely or only present for a moment, making it feel like you are constantly missing something. In Schoenbrun’s suburban nightmare, years don’t pass in seconds; they have already passed, unseen, by the time Owen takes the time to look back. His story is always in the rear view, always, in his mind, observed too late to change anything. The true devastation comes from our experience as the helpless viewer on the other side of the screen, who knows that Owen is wrong. There is still time, a chalk mural proclaims before the film moves towards the final act, a statement that seems more directed at the audience than at Owen, whose back is turned to the words and who certainly does not take them to heart. There is still time for us, the film warns, but here is what can and will happen if you choose to let time run away. It might not be too late now, but life is not endless. One day, the chalk words on the road will be wrong.
To me, what makes Schoenbrun’s film truly singular is its refusal to shy away from the true consequences of self-repression. No Hero’s Journey does passive participation in real life make — not everything will be okay, unless you work to make it so. Here is a film so intimate and specific that it will make some people cry in the cinema and stare blankly out the window on the drive home; here is also a film that humanises the still deeply taboo topic of dysphoria by pointing out the simple truth: if you want to change who you are, you can. There is still time.
Within Schoenbrun’s precise, familiar imagining of queer possibility, there is hope, and there is despair, dancing around each other, creating a picture that is at once horrifying and beautiful. Go see their film, if you can, in an empty cinema, where the light from the screen can set your face aglow.
Hater pants on, popcorn in hand, and my lip-gloss flawlessly intact, I had made up my mind: when I came out of Palace Cinema’s screening of the highly anticipated Monkey Man, I must and would most definitely be profoundly offended. And not just because I’m a self-proclaimed saffron-loving religious bigot of a “patriot” (note: sarcasm) who couldn’t tolerate the film’s unflinching description of how Hindu nationalism has blighted the Indian polity and society but also because I’m sick of the fanciful Western notion of “India: Where poverty shines and hope declines!”
I wasn’t super excited for a new rendition of the same old saga: immense suffering and poverty in India, the daunting, ubiquitous corruption, and most excruciatingly, the repetitive strains of the only Indian music that the myopic Western media recognises (cue the tabla and intro tune to “Mundian To Bach Ke (Beware of the Boys)”). The West’s perpetual fixation on Third World poverty and class division has become exasperating. Yes! It exists — I can vouch for it — but no, that’s not all there is.
But alas! Dev Patel, the man that you are, you completely disarmed me. I absolutely most definitely loved the movie (and Dev Patel himself). And trust me, it boils my “nationalist” blood to say this. Because honestly, how dare this British-Indian guy craft an astoundingly sly satire on Indian politics and societal conditions? How dare he do such a bloody fantastic job at it?
‘You know it’s the ultimate underdog action film, I’m a huge fan of the genre… (but) I never had access to it, looking like this gangly Indian dude. The only kind of roles I was getting offered were the funny sidekick or the guy that hacks the mainframe for the lead dude. So, I was like I got to write this thing for myself.’
— Patel on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
With Monkey Man’s stunning cinematography and the actors’ captivating on-screen presence, there is no way the audience could guess that this is, in fact, Patel’s directorial debut. The movie gracefully pirouettes amidst alluring visuals, each frame and sequence, a stroke of such magnificent artistry that it’d easily put some of the most renowned directors to shame. Minutes into the film, you can tell that this is a labour of love, blood, and broken bones.
Sure, the plot is predictable at first glance (I wouldn’t have watched it if I weren’t engulfed by this all-consuming creative void looming over my next piece) — there’s this kid leading a life of serenity with his mother until one devastating day when the bad guys show up and kill her, the kid grows up traumatised, then there’s some grandiose “remember who you are” journey to self-storyline in between, he seeks revenge and triumphs over evil, and yay! world order is restored. It’s a story we’ve heard one too many times before. But at no point does the film feel stale. Patel hits you with a rich tapestry of religion, mythology, politics, class divide, and gender among other complex societal issues that one would ordinarily keep mum about. My naive assumption that this would just be some Slumdog Millionaire x John Wick parody went flying out the window.
The movie draws extensively from the Hindu mythology of Ramayana, which, as Patel shares in several interviews, is also his loving way of paying homage to cherished memories of his father recounting stories of the half-man half-monkey Hindu deity: Hanuman, during his childhood. This is a British kid who grew up in the diaspora, ashamed of his Indian roots, finally embracing his heritage and (literally) taking control of the narrative.
For those who may not be familiar, in Hindu households mothers often tend to affectionately address their sons with names derived from the names of Hindu gods. Well, in the case of Patel’s character, he takes his mother’s endearing reference to Hanuman a little too devoutly. But then, he wouldn’t be the ever-doting Indian son if he didn’t go around in a low-budget rubber monkey mask, valiantly fighting the bad guys to seek revenge for his beloved mother’s gruesome death. Trust me, becoming an embodiment of an actual deity for your dead mother isn’t very extravagant as per Indian film standards.
An intriguing observation that even those with passing knowledge of Ramayana would’ve made is the absence of a character symbolising Lord Ram. Unlike the mythology, where Ram is the central figure and Hanuman is his devoted helper, a side character so to say, who supports Ram in his journey to rescue his wife from a demon king, the movie instead places Hanuman at the forefront, with no Ram in sight. Esteemed analysts (me) interpret this absence as a conscious critique of India’s ruling party. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which is currently in power, is notorious for utilising Lord Ram as a formidable political symbol and has been associated with heightening religion-based politics and pushing for Hindu supremacy in the country. Patel, very intelligently and insidiously (given the uphill battle that he now faces with India’s censor board), uses the tools that Indian politicians adore against them. The movie is his own modest revolution.
Another impressive aspect of the movie is the remarkable portrayal of the hijras, India’s third-gender community. While the society has always been judgemental of them and still looks down upon the community with disdain, defying all convention, the movie wondrously showcases them as nurturing and stalwart protectors; everything you’d never expect to see. In the film, they assume the role of temple keepers and assist Patel’s character in his journey of rebirth and transformation. This also draws parallels to Hindu mythology, as they are symbolic of the Vanar Sena (army of monkeys) who aided Lord Ram in his conquest. The scene where they show up to the final fight, in all their glory — donning extravagant masks and costumes — was beautiful and undeniably chilling. These characters are, surprisingly enough, not some forced plot device to help the movie pass a superficial “woke” criteria. Patel doesn’t try to beat the audience with overburdening messages of social consciousness. Instead, he simply elevates them to fully-realised human beings with rich, complex and mundane lives just like any other. They dance and sing and cook and care and love like all humans do. They are nuanced and well-developed characters with actual significance in the movie, which is truly revolutionary! The sheer brilliance with which the actors execute these well-written roles is commendable. In light of the discrimination and mockery that this community is still subjected to in Indian society, this was a much-needed treat. This is Patel’s “How to Ace Marginalised Representation 101”, and the entire industry needs to be schooled.
However, all that being said, I do have one qualm: the limited screen time with the female lead. For those who are not aware, the female lead, who in the movie portrays the role of a sex worker working for the fancy brothel run by Patel’s evil nemesis, Sobhita Dhulipala is the Indian film industry’s latest obsession having come out of the online streaming landscape. Those who’ve seen her previous works will agree that her character was grossly underutilised. With all the potential she has, there was so much scope to develop her character beautifully without it having to interfere with the main character and his vengeance arc. While I still appreciate her presence and do realise that this was her big global break, which of course holds great pertinence to her career, I also do not think we’d be robbed of any substantial element if they’d killed her character in the first half.
Alright, final remarks? If you’ve been blissfully living under some rock and still haven’t watched the movie, I cannot stress enough how fundamental it is for you to drop every other thing and go see it as soon as possible. Remember, life was never about the grind or the tears we shed over unending uni-work, it’s always been the controversial political commentaries we watched. It’d be criminal to not watch it and it’d be criminal to not start a Dev Patel appreciation society on campus so we can worship the ground he walks on and the air he breathes.
I downloaded Letterboxd in November. For the uninitiated, Letterboxd is an app where you can rate and review and add new movies that you watch to your watched list. I wasn’t bothered with the rate or review function, to date I’ve only reviewed two movies. No, the downloading of this app precipitated the awakening of something much worse: a deeply competitive streak centred around beating everyone in my life in one category: number of movies watched.
Many late nights followed as I tried to remember obscure childhood movies to add to my watched list, and a burning desire was born to watch every new film released in cinema. A desire that I indulged as much as I could. I haven’t reviewed these films on Letterboxd, so what follows is a Woroni Exclusive (that no one asked for).
Here is my review of every movie I watched in cinema this summer, in the order that I watched them.
BIG SPOILERS AHEAD
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The Boy and the Heron
This didn’t have the same magic as the rest of Haiyo Miyazaki’s filmography. But the five minutes of screen time Florence Pugh’s character had made me very happy.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
As someone who read the book… boy am I glad they didn’t include Snow’s internal monologue in this movie. It allowed me to focus on what’s really important: the #slay of his silly little outfits.
Saltburn
I watched this sitting in between my parents. Still loved it. I honestly can’t articulate why I love this film except to say, visually, intellectually, spiritually, conceptually, hornily, I loved it. I have a crush on every single person involved in the making of this film. I want to kiss them all directly on the brain.
Poor Things
I also watched this sitting in between my parents. This was worse. However, Emma Stone was incredible. The sets, costumes, world building and cinematography were similarly inspired. What I can’t get past is that they showed us a woman who had had her unborn child’s brain transplanted into her head and then we were expected to find it attractive when we saw her masturbate and have copious amounts of sex (with the brain, mannerisms and speech of a toddler). It’s important to note that the narrative does not condemn these men for finding her childlike personality attractive. I’m all for celebrating womens’ sexuality and sexual liberation, just maybe not when their vocabulary still includes the words “goo goo” and “gaa gaa.” The second half when her brain matures was great!! I’m just side eyeing the baby sex part.
Trolls
This was not released in cinemas this summer. In fact, it was released in 2016. I just felt it needed to be included in this list. Me and my Dad watched it the day after we saw Poor Things, in an attempt to heal from the trauma. It did not work. In fact it nearly made me delete Letterboxd and swear off movies altogether. I rate this movie negative 5. Do not interact.
Next Goal Wins
So cute! Truly a Taika Watiti film. While it didn’t hit like Boy or Hunt for the Wilderpeople, it more successfully healed the Poor Things trauma than Trolls did (this wasn’t hard).
Dream Scenario
I didn’t expect watching Nicolas Cage cum untouched as a girl takes his belt off during an ill-advised failed affair then farting loudly and running away to be as funny as it was. Say that sentence twice, my GOD. I enjoyed this film. The tram ride home (again with my parents, yikes) was silent but in a vaguely good way?
Bottoms
I wanted to love this movie but just… didn’t. I think it was a me problem? This film was like a cake which had all the right ingredients and followed the correct method but then the oven was a bitch and didn’t like it. I’m the oven.
Anyone But You
Such a cute romcom, truly one of the better of its genre to come out in a while. And may I say, a Shakespeare retelling to rival 10 Things I Hate About You. The lines that came directly from the play made me happy, but it was also equally as enjoyable for people who were unfamiliar with the play. Really fun. I loved that it was set in Australia. Added a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’.
Napoleon
JOKES I did not watch this movie. A 3 hour long, historically inaccurate Ridley Scott film? Not even adding another notch to my Letterboxd bed post could entice me.
Wonka
As soon as the film finished the girl behind me said, “thank GOD that’s over”. I did not agree with her. I thought it had the perfect amount of whimsy and fun. My mother, who is the biggest Timothee Chalamet fan in the world, gives it 5 stars.
Mean Girls
This was… boring and unnecessary. Auliʻi Cravalho as Janice was a standout performance though.
The Holdovers
For all sad nerds, this movie is like Dead Poets Society but if all the characters were cantankerous assholes (affectionate). I was hungry when I arrived at the cinema so I spent a lot of the movie thinking about the sausages they showed in the establishing shot of the kitchen. On the way home (via Coles to buy sausages) I figured out what I thought of the film: it had a beautiful soul. You could tell a lot of heart went into making it, the use of film rather than digital, the editing, the soundtrack, the performances. I forgot I was watching a film made in this millennium and not an actual film from 1970. Super lovely.
Priscilla
Like Mean Girls, this movie was boring and unnecessary. It tried to say something new about Priscilla and Elvis’ combined legacy but failed. It meandered.
All of Us Strangers
This movie made me grin from ear to ear and also clutch my chest like I was dying of heartbreak. It was filmed so beautifully. It looked warm, and felt like a hug goodbye. Every performance was intentional and masterful and the result was truly breathtaking. But for my own mental health, I will never ever rewatch it.
May December
I had a really embarrassing asthma attack in the middle of this movie (ironic since the main character suffers from chronic asthma herself) and had to leave. I never saw the ending and can’t bring myself to stream it and find out. It was well acted but didn’t compel me.
Anatomy of a Fall
Holy shit. When I wasn’t distracted by how beautiful Vincent, played by Swann Aulaud, was (seriously, he is stunning, and what nice hair), I was jaw-open marvelling at what a great film this was. The pacing especially was perfect. It managed to be interesting and compelling as well as thoughtful and picturesque. Highly recommend it.
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Honourable mentions go to two of the ads I had to see at every single one of these screenings:
The confusing Budget Direct ad which featured an evil sentient pool cleaner (?). Stay weird Budget Direct.
The Toyota Hilux ad about a divorced couple refinding their love for one another through sharing joint custody of their car. This ad made me tear up.
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Is there a single thematic takeaway from this experience? Any additional wisdom I have gained by conquering these 15 films? Not really. But it was a fun way to while away the summer.
Jonathan Glazer’s recent The Zone of Interest (now showing at Palace and Dendy) is a Holocaust film without a Holocaust.
Ostensibly, the film is a snapshot of the family life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss in late 1943. Höss reads bedtime stories to his daughter, is given a canoe for his birthday, and teases his wife, Hedwig, about her laugh. She catches up with her mother, gossips with other Nazi wives, and teaches her sons the art of gardening.
But the Höss home is adjacent to the death camp; their garden shares an adjoining wall with Auschwitz I. Like the family, we are blind to the Holocaust next door. But we are not deaf to it. The sounds of industrial slaughter — screams, gunshots, trains hissing, crematorium crunching, and less identifiable noises — are played, ceaselessly, throughout the film. They are ambient.
Against the visuals of idyllic domesticity, this brutal soundscape has a jarring, alienating effect. You almost wonder whether you’re overhearing Dune 2 next door, or if Palace is undergoing particularly quarrelsome renovations. When the film arrives on HBO Max next month, I’m sure some laptop viewers will assume a long-forgotten YouTube tab is piping up.
It has been said of Holocaust literature that ‘one does not look directly at the sun’. So Glazer listens. (The quote is attributed to Aharon Appelfeld. Unfortunately, there’s no record of him saying it.) But the sensory element — the abbreviation of the Shoah to the sound of the Shoah — is not the director’s only trick. He also steals glimpses; at the risk of extending the metaphor ad nauseam, he uses sunglasses. These are irony, microcosm, and childhood.
The original Zone of Interest (2014), by Martin Amis, is a vicious, obscene, absurd satire of the Holocaust. Its only major similarity with our film is that it stars Höss (or a thinly fictionalised version of him). Other than this, it’s a completely different story. So why does Glazer present his film as an adaptation?
I think the film preserves, in ice, the satirical quality of the book. It is not a funny film, of course — you should walk home silent and horrified — but I hope I’m not splitting hairs too finely when I say that it is ironic, or comic in form. When Rudolf (only this film can make you first-name a Nuremberg defendant) is transferred to Berlin, his wife throws a fit and begs to stay at Auschwitz:
“This is our home. We’re living how we dreamed we would…out of the city finally, and our children strong and healthy and happy.”
I thought Rudolf would ignore this odious appeal. But he makes an arrangement. The family will remain at Auschwitz, as knowing and profiting neighbours of genocide, while Rudolf lives and works in the capital. There is something very blackly comic about a family choosing to live at Auschwitz because they really like the property.
Later, as Hedwig is giving her mother a tour of the garden, the familiar gunshots suddenly crescendo. Both women notice. Trying in vain to return her mother’s attention to the pot plants, Hedwig speaks louder and gestures desperately.
The old lady wonders aloud:
‘Maybe Esther Silberman is over there. The one I used to clean for. She was the one who had the book readings…Bolshevik stuff. Jewish stuff.
And I got outbid on her curtains at the street auction.’
Another time, we hear a story about the same sordid appropriations. A Nazi wife was given a choice of Jewish-owned dresses, but ‘chose one that belonged to some little Jewess half her size’. She said it’d make her lose weight.
These stories aren’t funny; but they have a comic structure and pacing to them. They are almost-jokes, with almost-punchlines.
While Rudolf is on assignment in Berlin, he phones home to tell Hedwig about a high-society Nazi party he attended:
‘I was too busy thinking how I’d gas everyone in the room. Very difficult, logistically, because of its high ceiling.’
I venture that this is a distinctly Jewish irony. The pogrom punchline, the ghetto guffaw, the work-camp wise-crack. The whole absurd situation of the film — the distasteful, oblivious indulgence of the Hösses — satirises the wilful, terrible ignorance of the German people; and, finally, the satire and the irony become indistinguishable from the horror.
In the fifth season of Seinfeld, Jerry famously makes out in the theatre during Schindler’s List. Coincidentally, I’m sure, the irony is impressed on the audience in a manner peculiarly reminiscent of The Zone of Interest. We see Jerry French kissing (or “necking”, as his mother later says with a shudder), but hear woeful music and barked German. These are the same sounds which are keeping Rudolf Höss’ daughter awake at night. Both Glazer and Seinfeld embody the Jewish tradition of Holocaust satire which softens, but never sanitises, the tragedy.
(Not even Spielberg could look directly at the sun. Between shoots of Schindler’s List, he would watch Seinfeld reruns to cheer himself up.)
Glazer’s second pair of sunglasses is microcosm. Pay close enough attention to the Höss garden, and you begin to make out a Holocaust in miniature. There is a train set in the garden; we see train smoke over the walls. There is an outdoor shower. Burnt human remains from next door are used to fertilise the soil. On his 41st birthday, Rudolf is walked out blindfolded onto the lawn — only to be shown his present, a canoe. That afternoon, Rudolf has meetings with engineers about the design of the furnaces; Hedwig boasts about the garden being ‘all [her] design’. She calls her husband a ‘busy bee at work’ while we watch bees among the flowers. She educates her son in the proper identification of weeds. Later, he locks his brother in the greenhouse. In one particularly memorable scene, swelling death screams accompany closeup stills of chrysanthemums and white and purple dahlias — Jewish lives. Later, Rudolf sends a memo to his SS subordinates restricting the picking of flowers. It is dreadfully suggestive of arguments between Nazi departments over access to prisoner labour. This is a horticultural Holocaust: a tinted mirror which helps Glazer safely observe the “sun” and its squalid details.
Glazer’s last trick is childhood. There are four children in the film, and their reactions to the adult horrors around them epitomise the reactions to the Nazi regime.
The first is the fantasy of rebellion. In haunting thermal-image scenes, a young Polish girl sneaks, incredibly, into the camp work area. She leaves a trail of half-buried apples for the prisoners. As a voice-over, Rudolf Höss reads the bedtime story of Hansel and Gretel to his daughter. The girl’s quest culminates in the discovery of a sequestered poem, which is duly and movingly recited. The hopeful fantasy of this sequence is annihilated when one of the Höss boys (onscreen) hears a soldier (offscreen) explaining why he shot someone:
‘Fighting over an apple, Commandant.’
In the Ost, in the Bloodlands, native (especially Polish) resistance was daring but always viciously punished. In a way, the story of the little Polish girl is a fairytale version of the Warsaw Uprising, and the subsequent retaliatory obliteration of the city. As Rudolf recites in the voice-over: ‘The witch got cooked alive as a punishment for her horrible deeds.’
Rudolf’s children are analogues for the German people: they are emotionally stunted, traumatised young Nazis. (There is no Boy-in-the-Striped-Pyjamas fantasy of young German innocence. A wise choice, given the historical controversy that book provoked.)
After one boy hears the apple-fighter being killed, he mutters to himself ‘Don’t do that again.’ Who is he talking to? Is he telling himself not to pay attention again to the happenings next door? Or is he mimicking the commands of the guards? Later, we see him sitting on his bed, hissing the sounds of the gas chambers.
Another time, he is woken up by his brother’s bedside lamp.
‘I’m looking.’
‘At what?’
‘Teeth.’
In the next scene, the boy’s phrase is tellingly echoed by his sister, clearly also traumatised, who has a habit of sleepwalking. Rudolf discovers her in the middle of the night in a trance.
‘What are you doing there?’
‘I’m passing out sugars.’
‘To who?’
‘I’m looking.’
Like the Polish girl, Rudolf’s daughter sees (or rather, hears) the humanity of the internees. But her insomniac mourning, and her charity, are undirected. Perhaps Glazer is talking about the Germans who suspected something rotten in the East but never did anything substantial about it.
When asked in an interview why he called his book The Zone of Interest, Amis explained that it had a threefold meaning. The name refers to the Nazi administrative term (Interessengebiet) for the depopulated and patrolled area around Auschwitz; to the zone of fascination, both for Amis himself and our culture at large; to the revealing moral zone where people discover themselves. In his own Zone of Interest, Glazer uses children to populate this last zone.
So Glazer listens and dons sunglasses. Somehow, though, he finds hope at the end of all this oblique appraisal. Rudolf, stuck in Berlin, is descending stairs when something catches his eye. We cut to the present: cleaners in jeans wiping the floors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. We see the suitcases and pyjamas and crutches and shoes and portraits of the prisoners. The cleaners mop away. It’s a long scene. One reviewer put it perfectly: ‘the banality of good’ to challenge Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’.
And when the camera returns to Rudolf, the sounds of cleaning — of expiation — seem to stay with him. Just as we could not shake the sounds of evil, Rudolf Höss cannot shake the sounds of good. Just as our culture cannot shake the memory of the Holocaust, Höss could not, in Glazer’s telling, shake the premonitions of liberation.
This attitude of hope has its source in the production of the film, I suspect. Alexandria Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk (a gloriously, proudly unpronounceable Polish name) was the real Polish resistance fighter who snuck apples into Auschwitz and saved the poem of Joseph Wulf. Glazer met her weeks before she died — enough time to arrange shooting in the house she lived in, and to use her dress and bike as props in the movie. He told the Guardian that, without her, he could not have made the film. It would have been ‘utter darkness’.
In his Oscars acceptance speech, his hands trembled, but Glazer didn’t stutter.
‘Alexandria Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, the girl who glows in the film as she did in life, chose to [resist]. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance.’
Have you ever been listening to a song and are so taken aback by an unhinged lyric that you have to go back and check that it’s exactly as insane as you thought it was? Yeah, me too. Typically I don’t listen very closely to the lyrics of songs. However, every so often, there’s one so special it requires recognition. Here is a collection of a few of my favourite lyrics that have stopped me in my tracks (pun intended).
If you, like me, have a middle-aged white Australian father, you’ve probably been forced to listen to a lot of Triple J over the years. When I was fifteen, Pond came out with their album The Weather and to say my dad was obsessed is an understatement. This meant anytime one of their songs was played on Triple J, my dad would turn it up and sing along — horribly off-key, mind you. Truly nothing is more horrifying as a teenager than hearing your dad fucking belting the line, ‘in between my penis and chin/is camembert and shame’ (Pond, Sweep Me Off My Feet). The moment has never left my brain since and probably never will.
Being on Youtube in the mid to late 2010s, you may have come across the animation community and its even smaller subset, the animated meme community. Me and my brother fucking loved to show each other the most stupid videos from there, like Momotaro by Ap Selene and Vivziepop’s Timber. I still maintain that some of those songs were good. One of our absolute favourites was the reanimation of Pokemon Sun and Moon characters to You Reposted in the Wrong Neighbourhood by Shokk. The image of Professor Kukui dancing hard to ‘I’m a menace, a dentist, an oral hygienist’ is timeless. The original may have been deleted, but I still go back to reuploads every now and again.
For one of my introductory courses in first year, the professor would play the music video for a song at the beginning of each module (so usually one or two a class) that was in some way related to the content we would be learning. We were forced to listen to all manner of wild songs at 8 am on a Tuesday morning, but I can’t deny that they were part of the reason I loved that class and went to every lecture, even with that brutal start time. One of the most memorable was the 17th song in which the line, ‘I’m learning to hate all the things that used to be great when I used to be bent!’ was uttered. Honestly, the entire song, I Want to Be Straight by Ian Dury (ft. The Blockheads) is mad, so I would encourage watching the music video or even just listening if you feel so inclined.
In the past couple of months, a lot of my friends have moved houses and as the fantastic friend that I am, I helped. On one of these expeditions, after we had moved most of the boxes into the new place, we were taking a break and listening to the radio (which station I couldn’t tell you for the life of me). We were sweaty, exhausted and overheated. Basically we were delirious, which means that only something truly out of pocket would’ve shaken us out of our stupor. It was actually an earlier lyric from the song that caught our attention (breathing out a hole in my lung) but the later lyric is one that stuck with us so bad we immediately had to look it up to make sure we didn’t hallucinate what we had heard. We hadn’t, and that lyric was; ‘I’m a sex change and a damsel with no heroine’, from Silverchair’s Straight Lines.
When I told my dad about this collection of silly song lyrics that he had originally prompted, he was at first amused but then said he had the perfect song to add to it. He was right. The entire song is a collection of lyrics that I’m frankly astounded made it past a producer but the one I’ve chosen is tame enough that it’s entertaining but not batshit enough to be concerning – like some of the rest of the song is. That lyric is ‘I like football and porno and books about war/ I got an average house, with a nice hardwood floor’ from Dennis Leary’s song Asshole.
Those are all lyrics that have really stuck with me, but there are others that I believe deserve an honourable mention:
‘May God rest that twink, he is no more’ – Lynks, USE IT OR LOSE IT.
‘Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil’ – Ministry, Jesus Built My Hotrod.
‘Sipping tea by the fire is swell/ pushing people in is fun as well!’ – Starkid, Different as Can Be.
‘I get eaten by the worms/ and weird fishes’ – Radiohead, Weird Fishes.
‘I have a big gun/ took it from my Lord’ – MELL, Red fraction.
‘Doctor holding a big bottle of tonic but the bottle’s full of rings and the doctor is Sonic’ – Tom Cardy (ft bdg), Beautiful Mind.
‘And I’ll blend up that rainbow above you/ and shoot it through your veins’ – Owl City, Rainbow Veins.
‘I got money and fame and fancy clothes/ I got a cat food sponsor deal’ – 2winz², Just One Day.
‘Your waitress was miserable and so was your food’ – Alex Turner, Piledriver Waltz.
‘He keeps begging me to eat me out, I said, / “You gotta take my tampon out with your mouth”’ – Ayesha Erotica, S&M remix.
‘Sixty-nine is the only dinner for two’ – Childish Gambino, Heartbeat.
‘Bish I’m a star but not Patrick’ – Lisa (BLACKPINK), Ddux4 (JP. Ver).
‘The whole world is my daddy / wabi sabi papi’ – Okay Kaya, Mother Nature’s Bitch.
‘Pick my shorts out my ass with my blood-stained hands’ – Ashnikko, Cheerleader.
‘You won’t doo-doo me, I smell TNT’ – Kendrick Lemar, United In Grief.
Comments Off on Back to Basics: 20 Years of The Presets – Woroni Artist Series
Some of our 2000s-born students at ANU may be unfamiliar with the iconic Australian duo, The Presets, but I am fairly confident they would recognise their dance tune “My People”, a certified banger but also a frustrated, desperate call to arms from Julian and Kim about how Australia treats asylum seekers.
To celebrate their 20th anniversary, The Presets have embarked on a 20 Years in 20 Nights Tour. Intentionally playing smaller venues in low-key places, the tour is intended to be a departure from festival style gigs. Instead of a traditional performance, the gigs will be DJ sets that aim to go “back to basics” and feel more like a house party, where artist and fan can dance and enjoy the music together.
Ahead of their show at Kambri ANU on August 26th, I sat down with Julian to talk about the tour, electronic music today, and what album clubs can do for your friendships.
Thank you for joining me. The tour has started and you guys are three shows in I believe, and it looks like a lot of them are selling out which is really exciting. How are you feeling?
Yeah it all sold out on the weekend and yeah, now a lot of them are selling out. It’s fabulous. We’re really enjoying the tour.
How does it feel to be touring? You guys haven’t toured since 2018, how does it feel to be out there again?
Yeah, that’s right, actually, now that I think about it. I mean, we’ve played a lot of festivals and one off things but yeah, first actual Presets tour in, goodness, in five years. It’s great. It’s wonderful to be back out there and it’s great to play rooms where everyone’s sort of, you know, come along just to see us. It’s nice to meet all of the fans again, for sure.
Yeah, absolutely. Does this feel a bit different to other tours you’ve done in the past? Or is it feeling kind of just more of the same? Do you feel like you guys have changed how you’re touring at all?
Well, this time around, it’s a DJ tour. So we’re not performing live, we’re bringing our records along and it’s more of a 20 year celebration party, a birthday party, really. So that’s quite different. That’s something we haven’t really done before and it’s fun because…obviously we play a lot of our own music but we can also play a lot of, I guess, obscure remixes that people might have forgotten about and different versions of things that we don’t normally play live.
Plus, of course, you know, we can play a bunch of music by other artists that really inspired us that we love from back in the day or new tracks that are out today that we really love. So it’s more like a house party that we’re throwing, with all the stuff that we like, to celebrate 20 years.
Yeah I saw that you guys said you wanted to do this tour to be more like a house party. How do you envision the vibe being more like a house party? What are you guys kind of hoping for people to feel when they’re there?
Honestly, we wanted it to feel like what it felt like when we used to go to clubs. When we were younger and we were starting out, you know, I can say there’s a bit of a trip down memory lane for us.
And we’re getting quite nostalgic and over the years when we perform at festivals, they’re always great fun, but sometimes you’re 10 feet above the audience, 20 metres away from the front row and there’s like 20 security jobs between us and the crowd. You know, it’s hard to connect with an audience at a festival sometimes. That’s why we wanted to perform, you know, in a much more intimate setting and have these parties so it just feels like you know, much more of a visceral kind of celebration, rather than like an outdoor festival experience.
What inspired you guys to come back on the road and tour again after such a while Was there something that made you think you might want to go on tour again?
Well, two things. Post Covid-19 has been weird, to be honest. Like post-Covid-19, the industry hasn’t really come back in the way that it used to be. It’s really strange out there.
And so we’ve been getting a lot more offers to DJ at festivals or DJ events rather than play live, because I think for some events, it’s quite expensive to get the production and everything that’s needed to book bands. So that’s a bit of boring behind the scenes thing about how the industry is going, it’s kind of changing. Plus we got an opportunity recently to do a little DJ gig in Sydney, at a tiny little club where we first started playing 20 years ago, and the tickets sold really quickly for that and we thought, well, this is so much fun, and people obviously really want to come and have this different experience.
So there was that, and then you know, the 20 year anniversary of the band was coming up this year and we thought, what would be a fun way to celebrate 20 years? You know, we could do a handful of shows in the big cities like we always do, or we could do something a bit more intimate and special, and do a whole heap more shows but in a much smaller environment and we can really get close to and really party with our fans.
So yeah, it’s super fun. To be honest, it’s been a bit more enjoyable for me than performing live. Just being able to sort-of play some records and dance, you know, with our fans, has been great fun.
That sounds like an absolute blast. Your fans have been with you for such a journey, as you said you’ve hit the 20th anniversary. Are you expecting it to be a lot of those old hardcore Presets fans, or are you seeing some new fans rolling in?
It’s been a real mix, you know, for sure there’s been some oldies there that used to come to the very early shows, you know, 20 years ago. And then some of them are bringing their kids along this time. You know, it’s crazy.
There’s a lot of young people there as well. So it is a real mix, it’s a real lovely vibe. The cool thing is no matter what age people are that are coming, everyone’s there for a good time and everyone’s dancing and jumping around and yeah it’s been a real blast.
That’s fantastic. You guys have been making music for so long, do you feel like your sound has kind of evolved? Is there any new stuff that you’re throwing into this setlist? Or are you busting out some of the fan favourites?
It’s a real mixed bag. I mean, certainly we’re throwing down some old favourites, we can’t do a Presets show without doing that. But we’re able to sort-of reimagine and rework some of the older tunes into more kind-of club adjacent or club versions, which is really fun too, to just sort of strip them back and just reimagine the songs a bit. And then plus, yeah, we get to choose a bunch of music from other artists that we really love, like old classics from back in the day that inspired us, and you know, new music from today that’s really exciting us as well. So, I mean, it’s such a huge world, you know, the club music scene, like there’s so much music out there to choose from. It’s a lot different from when we’re doing our own shows, where we’re performing and we’ve only got 40 songs to choose from now, now we’ve got 40 million songs to choose from.
You’ve talked about some remixes, I know a lot of your tracks sometimes get remixed by a bunch of really cool and different artists. I was wondering if you guys had any artists or people in mind that you would love to see remix one of your tracks? Or just a dream collaboration you would like to see happen?
Wow. Obviously you know, we have favourite artists that really inspired us when we first started, I mean, obviously the big examples of bands like The Chemical Brothers, or Daft Punk or Basement Jaxx you know, a lot of these bands that were around when we started and that are still around today.
Gosh, it’d be lovely to get one of them to remix us one of these days, but I can’t see it happening. As far as collaborations go, I mean, we do work with a lot of other people just solo, Kim and I, we work with other artists and produce other bands and co-write songs with other bands. So we keep pretty busy doing that outside of the Presets.
But it’s funny, I don’t know, I’m thinking about my favourite acts, I’m kind of happy to not collaborate with them. I like them just the way they are. I’m not sure what I would bring to it, to be honest. But who knows, gosh, if The Chemical Brothers knocked down our door, I’d certainly be saying yes to that.
You were talking about how you’re really excited to hit some of the smaller places and more intimate shows. Are there venues or cities from past tours that you’re excited to come back to? Or any memorable past experiences or places that you’re really just excited to perform again?
Honestly, just excited for everything.
The one thing I’ve learned over the years is sometimes the really hot shows, the ones that really blow up, they’re the ones you don’t expect. You might be doing a huge festival somewhere and it’ll go okay, you know, but then you’ll play a tiny basement in Cleveland, Ohio, or in Berlin or whatever, and that’ll be a crazy party and really, really fun.
And it’s the same in Australia, you know, you’ll expect sometimes a show in one of the capital cities is gonna be really great, but it might be a little flat, and then you’ll have a really cooking show, you know, at a smaller venue later on. So it’s very hard to predict. But I will say that so far, the three shows we’ve done already have been so much fun, and just what we had hoped, you know, just people jumping around having a good time and done. Yeah, it really has felt like just partying with friends.
Yeah, that sounds fantastic. The visual aspects of your shows are always really captivating. I remember seeing you guys a very long time ago, it would’ve been 2009 or something along those lines, but I remember even back then, the visual elements were so fun and captivating. I was wondering whether your fans are going to see stuff like that visually in this performance or because it’s a DJ set, is it going to be kind of more traditional, like house party vibes?
Well, it’s a bit of both. I mean, one thing we did want to do with this tour is get back to basics. So much electronic music is based these days on massive production and huge, huge screens and huge you know, pyrotechnics and everything. The whole EDM thing, it’s kind of become crazy, the whole stage show that people put on. And yeah, and we’ve been doing that over the years, obviously with our own shows.
So this one we had tried to get a bit more back to basics and make it more about the music. And just more about just partying and dancing, you know, because I guess.. I’m sounding like an old fart here, but I remember in the old days when you used to go to a club, it wasn’t even so much about the DJ, you know, you just sort-of danced. And then after a while, people started facing the DJ, and then it became this kind of DJ worship thing. That always weirded me out a little, because I always loved electronic music for the anonymity of it, you know? But I’m kind of getting off track a little bit here. But yeah, I mean, we do have some obviously a lot of visual things that we’ve curated over the years and design that we’ll be bringing to this show. But we’re trying to make it a bit more just low-key and cool, and not so much like, ~show business~ you know what I mean?
That’s great. I’d love to know and I think our readers would really love to know as well, what you’ve been listening to lately? I know with lockdown, we’ve all maybe sunk back into our music caves a bit. I’d love to know what you guys are listening to?
Oh, my goodness, it’s such a hard question. Yeah, well, there’s two main things I listened to. One of them is just listening to new techno music and electronic music, and every day you dive into this world, and there’s like 100 acts that you’ve never heard of, you know, it’s like, ‘oh my god who are these people making this music?’ You know, from Europe and the States and Australia, you know, there’s so much going on. And then the next day you’ll dive in, and there’ll be 100 more artists you’ve never heard of. It’s a crazy, huge world of artists making beats and then usually none of them I even remember their names.
Yeah, I mean, there’s a bunch of Australian DJs doing such great stuff. There’s that girl Haai, she’s smashing it, she’s such a great DJ, I love her. Dj Boring is another Aussie DJ doing huge things. So they’re two Aussie DJs I really adore. And then there’s like 100 more that are just kind-of a bit more underground and they’re really smashing it over there. It’s crazy to keep track of. And then the other music I listen to, it’s kind of weird. I have an album club with some of my friends, we started during COVID-19 and every week someone picks an album and we listen to it, and then on Monday night, we get together on Zoom and we just talk about it together.
Kind of like a book club?
Yeah it’s kind of like a book club kind-of thing, for us old men. But yeah, we really love that, and every week it’s something very different, like it’s some obscure 60s jazz record, or it’s some new sort-of Middle Eastern thing, or it’s like a techno album or whatever, you know, it’s always something really, really different, so I really enjoy that too. But, gosh sorry, I’m sure you were hoping for me to tell you to check out some new artist.
No, that’s a fantastic answer. Honestly, that’s brilliant.
I highly recommend album clubs for people. It’s been such a fun way to keep in touch with friends.
Everyone gets so fragmented and everyone’s on social media and just communicating with each other with, you know, emojis and gifs. And just hanging out with your mates on a Monday night talking about an album you all listened to over the week, it’s such a nice thing to do. So hopefully, maybe some people might read this and be inspired to do that.
I hope so, that’s a fantastic suggestion, I love that. Well, thank you so much for sitting down. Good luck on the rest of the tour. It looks amazing. You guys are performing at the Uni in late August, so I’ll see you guys then. Thank you so much for having a chat with Woroni.
Get tickets to see The Presets on Saturday 26th of August 2023 at Kambri ANU
To celebrate their 20th anniversary, The Presets have embarked on a 20 Years in 20 Nights tour. Intentionally playing smaller venues in low-key places, the tour is to be a departure from festival style gigs. Instead of a traditional performance, the gigs will be DJ sets that aim
Comments Off on INTERVIEW WITH TEENAGE DADS – WORONI ARTIST SERIES
Rather than brave the chilly walk to Civic or the daunting descent down the stairs at one22, head out to Belconnen and enjoy the musical delight of something that isn’t a poorly done remix of Rush or Padam.
As part of our Artists Series, Woroni Content Editor Lizzie sat down with Teenage Dads to chat about life on tour, crowd culture, and the big scary P word (pop!).
Thank you guys so much for taking the time to chat with me.
That’s okay, we’re not doing much.
That’s surprising because you guys have been busy!
Yeah, I mean, we actually are doing certain things, getting ready for Splendour in the Grass, but the whole point of the next few days is to rest after our US run and then get ready for the festival.
Yeah, absolutely. So you guys have been touring all across Europe, are you guys excited to tour in Australia? Do you find it different to being on the road in Europe, versus you know, being on home turf?
Yeah everyone’s pretty different. It’s kinda weird…we skipped winter this year.
That’s one benefit I’d say. I feel like in our experiences so far overseas, overseas is just set up far better for touring. We were joking with Lime Cordiale a lot how you do a weekend in Australia, you would feel absolutely ruined. Whereas you do two weeks in the UK or Europe and you’ll be fine.
Why is that?
I think partly the distance stuff but also, you don’t really have to fly anywhere. I think the whole process of finishing a gig in Australia, you go to the hotel room, you sleep for a couple of hours, get up, airport, fly, and just that whole process kills you.
Whereas you can just take trains and stuff around Europe and it’s much quicker, much easier on your bodies, I guess?
Yeah. It’s just that’s the way it’s kind of felt anyway, but we’re still really looking forward to being back home. I think it’ll give us a new perspective.
The water is better in Australia.
That I don’t doubt. What are the crowds like over there? Are they different to your home base fans here, who maybe have known you guys for a while?
It’s a little bit different, in different areas the crowd is more cool than other areas, and some places are more inclined to dance and sing, and some places it’s more of like a ‘hands on hips, just watch’. But I feel like people still will come up everywhere and say how much they enjoyed the set. It’s just very, very different in some areas, people don’t show it during the set as much.
I imagined in Australia crowds kind of go a bit more wild. But that might be a stereotype.
I think the big part of it, particularly for us, is you kind of just can’t really compare the two just yet because, like you said we’re an Australian band and we played in Australia for years. So people kind of definitely know who we are, so there’s a more likely chance of fans being really big fans. Whereas overseas they’re seeing us or hearing us for the first time, so they’re not going to be absolutely losing their mind or anything like that.
Having said that, Dublin particularly popped off. They’re really loose people there.
Maybe they have something in the water?
Yeah or just the Guinness, maybe.
All those sorts of cultural differences, like when we did the first Dublin gig, instead of a one more song chant they’ve got “Olé, Olé, Olé!”.
You never get that here. Then you get the odd Australian that’s there being a dickhead going “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!”
That’s so good. Maybe for some of our readers who aren’t super familiar with your stuff, how would you guys describe your sound to our readers and listeners?
Do we get like, ‘describe your sound in three words or less’?
I’ll be generous. I’ll give you five.
Too many!
2
First word is alright. Yeah. Alright .
Allright…Let me see. That’s four!
What’s the closer?
Rock! Indie rock. We just tell everybody it’s indie rock, indie pop.
I was in a record store the other day in Toronto. It was massive and I was just looking at the way they categorise things. Most of the bands and artists that I listen to were all in indie pop. So I was kinda like,’ all right, I can see us being in the indie pop category, if that’s what this classifies’.
For ages we were scared of those words, we’d go, “yeah, we’re a psychedelic rock band”. You didn’t want to use the word pop, or indie.
I would say we probably describe our band more so now as not psychedelic. Just to kind of really reaffirm that we don’t think that’s what we are. Maybe to all the Woroni readers out there: Teenage Dads are not a psychedelic band!
And they’re not a surf band!
If you guys could have your way, no strings attached, no limits, who would you love to go on tour with, supporting?
Abba! If they’re free…probably hit them up.
Queen. That would be a good one. Kinda sick.
Prodigy.
Dolly Parton.
Dolly Parton would be sick, do you think her fans would like your stuff?
I think Dolly and I would really get along well.
That’s all that matters.
So true, it’s about the vibes. Great answer. If you guys were to make it really big, which I feel is not too far off, who would you bring on tour to support you, what upcoming artists?
There’s a really cool indie folk artist in Nashville…. Dolly Parton?
Um….. that’s tough.
Let’s plug all the bands that are supporting us on the next tour. We’ve got the Moving Stills, Death by Denim, Betty Taylor, Aleksiah, Siena Rebelo, Bocce in Tassie. I think that’s everyone! It’s always really cool picking support, sometimes you want to… you feel like you need to do it on a strategic basis to help pull more people to the tour and that sort of thing. But it’s also just really fun if you can set that aside and bring your friends along
So what’s next for you guys? I mean, I’m sure you’re exhausted and this is the last thing you want to think about, but the people want to know – are you thinking about another album, less touring, a break maybe? What are you feeling?
We’ve got a new song that we just got back from a master, but apart from that nothing’s really ready to go.
Yeah on the music front, we are working away, but we don’t know when things will be… we don’t have much information to divulge…
That’s all right. Keep your secrets.
We do have this big Australian tour coming up, which will, I think, bring us to nearly 100 shows this year, which will warrant some rest. We don’t have a whole lot planned for the November/ December period, but who knows, things might pop up.
Sounds like you guys are overdue for a little vacation.
Want to stay on campus? Check out the Kambri website to get tickets performances like the DMAs and Safia!
Interview with Teenage Dads – Woroni Artists Series. Live Show at University of Canberra Saturday August 12.
This pride month we harnessed the collective magic of our massive little team to create this collection of media for queer people as chosen by queer people.
Celeste by Maddy Makes Games
Celeste is a fiendishly difficult indie adventure platformer that tells a tale of stubborn persistence, self acceptance and retrying the same screen for 20 minutes because you can’t time a jump right. Celeste has a vibrant and active community around it both for those with a casual love of the game and hardcore speedrunnners, and is one of the best $30 I have ever spent.
Nat, she/they
Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
Dykes to Watch Out For was a comic strip that ran from 1983 until 2008. It’s a ‘serialised Victorian novel’ kind of strip, with characters who are both frustrating and relatable, whose problems are strikingly similar to those of queer people today. I like it because it’s really funny, but also because there’s something comforting about that relatability. Even decades later, queer people are still arguing about a lot of the same stupid stuff.
Claudia, she/her
Girls Can Kiss Now by Jill Gutowitz
In Girls Can Kiss Now Jill Gutowitz delves into the intricacies of lesbian representation in the media, drawing from her own experiences growing up in the early 2000s and the impact it had on her identity and sexuality. With a blend of pop culture analysis and personal anecdotes, this timely collection of essays navigates the contemporary landscape of queer representation and personal exploration. I wish a book like this had been around when I was younger. Isolated by my own internalised homophobia, I longed for representation and understanding. These essays offer solace and validation to those who have walked similar paths.
Arabella, she/her
Good at Falling by The Japanese House
Behind the delicately layered soundscapes, there is an inherent intimacy in these songs as Amber Bain, the creative force behind The Japanese House, transforms her personal narrative into captivating lyrics. The lyricism in this album illuminates the complex landscape of queer love, identity, and the journey towards resilience. Each verse acts as a step forward as she navigates the intricacies of life after grief and paves the way towards healing and acceptance. Bain’s introspective writing, delving into the ebbs and flows of her personal growth, resonates deeply with her listeners, forging a powerful connection that lingers long after the music fades.
Arabella, she/her
Handsome Devil by dir. John Butler & Dating Amber by dir. David Freyne
These are two truly beautiful films, both starring the amazing Fionn O’Shea. Both films highlight important relationships for queer people which are often not displayed in general queer media, which has traditionally focused on romantic relationships (and often unhealthy ones). They focus on friendship between and for queer people and the power of this friendship for its encouragement and support. The stories portray love and betrayal between friends, and the mending of these friendships. These films move towards a normalisation of queer people in film free of fetishisation or tokenisation, by not relying on a love interest to explore identity.
Matthew, he/him
Mythic Meetup by Heartmoor Studios
Mythic Meetup is a messaging visual novel created for Otome Jam that features four love interests with nonbinary and asexual representation. The characters hail from different cultural backgrounds and each has their own realistic and grounded issues, which are explored amazingly even despite their fantastical and mythical nature!
Vera, she/her
Next Thing by Greta Kline
Next Thing is an album for delusional girls with big feelings. These dreamy tracks are a candid homage to the complexities of navigating identity and relationships. Frankie Cosmos (AKA Greta Kline) shows us that limerence transcends sexuality. This is an emotionally complex album offering frank discussions of self-doubt, existential longing and being in love with your best friend – echoing the queer experience in its rawest form.
Arabella, she/her
Of an Age dir. by Goran Stolevski
Of an Age perfectly encapsulates the pining, unknowing space that is a queer crush. It captures 24 hours between Kol, a young and closeted Serbian immigrant, and Adam, his best friend’s older brother (played by Thom Greene – AKA Sammy from Dance Academy – need I say more?). Nothing has come close to the way this film made me feel. It was an accurate representation of queer cultural norms as well as the realities of growing up poor in an unaccepting Australia. I know that feeling. I live and have lived varying degrees of being poor and lonely and queer, and this was a fantastic and heartbreaking representation.
Maya, she/they
Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro
This beautiful story follows the upbringing of Fahad as his father forces him to come home to Pakistan for the summer, and details the way this summer impacts his life in consequent years. We get to uncover more about his relationship with his father, and watch him come to terms with how his upbringing and heritage shaped his perspective on what love looks like. A book that explores queer identity but doesn’t follow the same stereotypical coming of age arc – I couldn’t recommend anything more.
Charlie, he/him
Pride dir. by Matthew Warchus
I still rewatch the scene from Pride where the miners turn up to the march. Between Welsh accents and gay people, this film is the empowering and inspiring take needed amidst rising trans- and homophobia. For me, I loved seeing multiple queer people on screen, engaging in politics and forming friendships, without that focus on romance. A reminder as well of the queer community’s roots in activism, union solidarity and intersectionality.
Alexander, they/them
Revolutionary Girl Utena by Be-Papas
Revolutionary Girl Utena is a dark, surrealist, sapphic 90’s shoujo anime, and if that sounds like your vibe then you owe it to yourself to watch it. It’s foundational queer media history. The vibes are insane and the art and music are bizarre and enchanting. It’s barely literal and the best of times, and because it refuses to ever say what it means, it gets to talk earnestly about sexuality and gender (and lots else) in a media space that characteristically didn’t let that stuff onto screens. There is nothing like it!
Max, they/he
Rumours by Fleetwood Mac
Okay so hear me out: yes, this is a band of heterosexuals creating music about their heterosexual relationships. But is there anything more quintessentially queer than tumultuous romances between friends who become exes and exes who become friends? Everyone slept with everyone in Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks spun her heartbreak into the gold that gilds this album, providing anthems for sad femmes and witchy wannabes (this venn diagram is a circle) everywhere.
Rose, she/her
Supernormal Step by M. Lee Lunsford & Bloom Into You by Nio Nakatani
As someone who would consider themselves somewhere on the aromantic spectrum it is incredibly difficult to find any representation. The ‘representation’ that is out there is usually never explicitly stated, just implied. Sometimes aromanticism is shown to be a character fault, portrayed as being unloving and abjectly against intimacy. So it’s always refreshing when I come across media that both explicitly says that a character is aromantic, and that that is not a bad thing. I would say Supernormal Step and Bloom Into You are pretty great examples of this.
Jasmin, she/her
The Sisters of Dorley by Alyson Greaves
The Sister of Dorley is a series that is both a love letter and homage to the terrible force femme webnovels of the 2000s and a fantastically well written and deep exploration of identity, how gender shapes existence and what it means to be a trans woman.
Nat, she/they
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The Song of Achilles is that stereotypical queer novel that deserves its fame. Fast-paced but with the most beautiful writing and scenes that alternate between gut-wrenching and uplifting, it produces a queer story that is not about homophobia or AIDS, but about love. Humanizing in a world of Gods and ancient Greek heroes, it’s a fantastic read for anyone, but it is just wonderful for queer people.
Alexander, they/them
Where’s Tess by Play Core
Where’s Tess is another dating sim with bisexual, pansexual and lesbian representation. The game centres around modern influencer culture, how it can make or break someone; the experience of being queer in a conservative environment; and how the corporatisation of the arts can create ethical or moral conflicts in your personal and professional life. Nevertheless, Where’s Tess is quite light hearted and the art is great.
Vera, she/her