Seeing Other People, by Diana Reid

This review of Diana Reid’s Seeing Other People appeared in the 22-23 October 2022 print edition of The Weekend Australian. You can view the full newspaper layout via PDF here, with the article also inset below. I’ve also included a longer form review of the novel beneath the newspaper version. You can purchase the book at all good bookstores (I think?), and also via Ultimo Press. Enjoy!

Longer form review
9 October 2022:

Seeing Other People is Diana Reid’s second novel, following her critically acclaimed and bestselling Love & Virtue (Ultimo Press, 2021). It exceeds the high expectations that unduly accompany Sophomore novels and affirms Reid’s arrival as a rare and vibrant voice in Australian letters. The book deserves to become an Australian classic adorning every other beach towel in the coming summer months. It ought to have the global appeal of Dolly Alderton’s Ghosts or Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, as a similarly insightful, fun, witty, and zeitgeisty novel shining a light on modern life and relationships.

Set against the backdrop of a glorious Sydney summer, with the worst of the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, Seeing Other People examines the relationship of the Hamor sisters amidst a constellation of family, friends, and lovers. Twenty-five-year-old Eleanor is a conventionally high-achieving, “analytical”, "dutiful”, and emotionally limited management consultant (think Surry Hills), while twenty-two-year-old Charlie, more “at ease with her own emotions”, is a hip and “unguarded” actor also working in hospitality (think Newtown). Rather like an Ian McEwan novel, the story is propelled by the repercussions of a catalytic event or moral infraction, like ripples radiating outward from a pebble dropped in a still pond.

In the opening pages, we learn that Eleanor’s boyfriend Mark - a self-absorbed lawyer straight from central casting - “almost slept with someone” after visiting a strip club with friends. They promptly break up, and Eleanor is cast into an unfamiliar and liberating state of singledom just as summer begins. Meanwhile, Charlie’s acting career is getting back on track after two years of lockdowns and industry closures. A sense of possibility and new beginnings quivers in the air.

The writing and pacing of the novel thrum with joie de vivre as the characters burst out of the claustrophobic social atomization of pandemic-induced lockdowns and restrictions. Lives and loves collide in that sacred period over Christmas and New Year’s, where time almost ceases to exist. Languid days are spent by the beach dipping into crystalline waters, and warm evenings are filled with friends, merriment, and dancefloors, where “proximity was promiscuity”. Amidst this rediscovered vitality and everyday intimacy, Charlie has a string of passionate sexual “encounters” with her housemate and theatre director Helen, an intelligent, beautiful, and magnetically charismatic woman, and hopes for something more. 

Then Helen and Eleanor (Heleanor?) cross paths at a New Year’s Eve party. Sparks of desire quickly turn into a burning romance in the “newborn year”, unbeknownst to Charlie. The latter half of the novel examines the complexities which unfold as both Hamor sisters drift in and out of Helen’s gravitational orbit, navigating questions of love, desire, duty to moral principles and each other, and what it means to be a good person (and a good sister). The key question the novel poses is how one ought to distinguish self-love from selfishness.

Two key philosophical notions threading throughout Reid’s work illuminate this question and allow us to appreciate Seeing Other People on a deeper level. The first is from Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge, featured in the epigraph: “Meaningful commitment to a love in the world can require the sacrifice of one’s own moral purity”. This underscores the novel’s encouragement to gnosis and authentic love despite the moral and personal imperfections of one’s beloved, as when Helen professes to Eleanor: “I know what you’re like – and I love you anyway… I even love the bits you don’t like about yourself”. 

The second is from Cicero, found in Love & Virtue’s epigraph: “many wish not so much to be, as to seem to be, endowed with real virtue”. This captures Reid’s concern with authenticity and goodness over mere appearance and performance, as when Eleanor decides to lie to Charlie about her seeing Helen: “she could cope with the knowledge that she was a bad person, as long as nobody thought she was”.

Reid’s sensitive third-person narration allows her to map the contours of her characters’ thoughts and feelings, and to articulate the intricacies of relationships and social exchanges to a stunningly astute degree. That said, the constant parsing of social dynamics and situations can become overwhelming. It leaves one yearning for a little more emotional impressionism, a sfumato blurring of lines in place of relentless objective narrative by the author. Reid is certainly capable of this. Several scenes have resonances with the gentle acuity and emotional sensitivity of Ian McEwan, as the below description of a sunset in late February indicates:

The bridge was a distant coin, like a silver coin half-submerged. And the sky: low clouds at a distance, shot with purple. Everywhere, a gentle, fading pink. It was the sort of view to stretch time. Although it only lasted for a few minutes, it contained all the beauty of a day – of a whole summer.

Or take the scene where Helen and Eleanor first make love:

Helen drew circles in Eleanor’s most private self, adding one finger at a time, then her tongue – wet and eloquent – until Eleanor felt as if her soul – once solid and housed in her brain – was now liquid that trickled beneath her skin, everywhere at once. Then, when she had caught her own breath, Eleanor traced kisses down Helen’s body, each one a poem – not links in a chain, not leading anywhere. Every kiss, every tonguing stroke had its own point. Everything she couldn’t put in words, she put to Helen’s skin.

 The inclusion of these vignettes in the latter half of the novel is likely a stylistic technique to demonstrate Eleanor’s emotional flourishing and development after she falls in love with Helen, representing the sublimation of her rational self into a more feeling and emotionally intuitive state of being. But these uncomplicated and unanalysed moments of pure emotion and experience appear too infrequently for how eloquently poetic and moving they are.

Still, the book is a delightful Reid. The prose sparkles on the page, as effervescent and drinkable as a glass of prosecco on a warm summer’s evening. The writing is elegant, clean, insightful, and often laugh-out-loud funny. The self-conscious, darkly comical stylings - informed by Reid’s involvement in student theatre and sketch comedy - are worthy of Michel Houellebecq. Take the scene where Eleanor’s ex, Mark, arrives at an LGBTQIA+ networking function and runs into Eleanor, who is attending at the invitation of her colleague Seb:

Mark met her gaze now with open-eyed surprise. His face was tense, pulled apart by instinct and theory: wanting to assert how straight he was; knowing it was offensive to be so offended. This dance – between the heteronormativity he so valued, and the fluidity he knew he ought to value – played out across his mouth, which wobbled and tripped through several false starts.

 Seeing Other People is also remarkably attuned to how social media and digital technologies shape our lived realities and relationships, including the meaning of emojis, digital romance and friendships, and the tangibility of our digital selves. It seamlessly captures the ways our existence is, sometimes disturbingly, intertwined with our phones – as when Eleanor “physically ached to reach for her phone”, or how we are told Charlie was “intimately attuned to the rhythms of her phone”, able to distinguish between “the short vibration for email; the longer hum of a text”. Or consider the ways in which we glean lapidary details about our friends and lovers through their digital selves – as when Eleanor trawls through Mark’s tagged Instagram photos, and the accounts he followed to find “evidence – a photo, a new contact – of what happened the night that Mark betrayed her”.

The novel also deftly depicts, in both form and substance, the various ways in which digital communications convey meaning, emotion, and desire in modern communications and relationships– the “unopened message from Helen still flirting on the screen – wyd tonight?”; the import of leaving people on read or seen; the communicative nuances of reactions to messages and stories: love-hearts, sad, surprised, and laughing reacts; the anticipation of watching “the three dots dance” when a message is being composed; how receiving a notification or message from a crush can make you “feel like a plucked violin string”; or the dopamine rush one gets from seeing someone you’re interested in like your posts. All of this lends the work a compelling contemporary credibility. Reid also beautifully captures the tonalities of different pockets of Sydney, including “bus-exhausted King Street”, the effortless and “salty” January days by the eastern beaches, or the way one feels “cheated” when it rains in Sydney: “the city didn’t suit the grey. It looked abandoned: like a failed project.”

Given her youth, it’s tantalising to think of the works within Diana Reid still to be written, and the myriad ways she will continue to reflect life back to us as her craft develops. Setting aside the novel’s aesthetic and artistic merits, the greatest virtue of Reid’s work is its subtle intellectualism. The deceptively simple narrative structure and playful prose encourage us to think more meaningfully about love and morality in everyday life, and about what it means to really see other people for who they truly are, and to still love them authentically and unconditionally.

The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza)

Written by the late Bob Ellis on his Table Talk blog, republished with permission from Anne Brooksbank.

***

Bob Carr implored me to see The Great Beauty and I did so with my wife at Norton Street yesterday. Afterwards I rang him suggesting it might be the best film ever made and he agreed. I said it was the greatest gift which in forty years of acquaintance and friendship he had accorded me. Let me explain.

A man like Marcello in La Dolce Vita has turned 65, and a flamboyant party occurs on the roof of his apartment which overlooks the Coliseum. The vigorous dances and aged faces, one a female dwarf, put one in mind of Hieronymous Bosch or the bright young things of Waugh's Vile Bodies, grown old. Hung-over, the birthday boy, Jep Gambardella, a literary journalist and courtier longtime of the decayed, once-glamorous aristocracy (he resembles Taki, Swann, Charles Ryder and Petronius), recalls the course of his life and the one good novel he wrote, still praised across Europe, forty years ago and why he did not attempt another.

He goes in the following days to Eurotrash parties, intellectual dinner parties, garden parties, eccentric, explosive dance events and grimy strip-shows, meets a future Pope with lizard features famed for his exorcisms, tries to interview a toothless female deep-wrinkled Saint who, at 103, has never yet allowed herself a day's pleasure, watches a frenzied young girl action-paint a huge pointless mural, sobbing, before an awed celebrity audience, observes an outdoor 'artistic' event by a nude Marxist who bashes her bleeding head against a Roman viaduct, rehearses his commiserations at an important funeral, and so on. For a while he pursues a non-sexual relationship with Ramona, a badly facelifted stripper now 42 and slowly drugging and meditating herself to death but he cannot save her; and he confronts, at last, the memory of his dead first love, the subject perhaps of his second novel, which he starts, perhaps, at film's end.

This, though impressive, gives no great sense of the calm, exuberant beauty of the images that attend this narrative, lusher and sweeter and sadder than Fellini's Roma, or Antonioni's La Notte, or Visconti's The Leopard, as Luca Bigazzi's camera, soaring and swooping and sauntering, drifts past three thousand years of nocturnal statuary and architecture, not always crumbling, that still give meaning to hundreds, thousands, of autumnal, pretentious, briskly fornicating lives.

Wisely, Jep, the thoughtful narrating essayist-historian, fornicates only once himself, with a fiftyish old friend who apologises for her performance, and he has no lacerating ex-wives or difficult daughters to arbitrate and subdue. He drifts, like a ghost or attendant eunuch, with rehearsed compassion, calm eyes and the odd devastating soliloquy, through the lives of others: his elderly dwarf editrix; his junkie strip-club-owning friend whose daughter, Ramona, prefers to keep stripping – brilliantly – at 42 and squander, somewhere, her money; a female friend whose handsome crazy son appears as a red-stained nude Christ in public places, and is, she says, 'improving'; all these figures whom Waugh would present in flashes of lightning, scornfully, are here shown with tenderness and, though judged curtly sometimes, well understood.

Jep's first love is dead, lately dead, and her sombre widower reveals that she loved him, Jep, all her life and said so in a padlocked diary that he, the widower, read and in despair destroyed; so much is vanishing, like Rome's magnificence, as we watch. And Sorrentino, like others –  Hawthorne, Henry James, Gore Vidal, Robert Hughes –  lovingly watches it go, and sets down what he can. In the film's most remarked sequence, a young man with a walking cane and a key takes Jep and his non-mistress on a tour by night of Rome's most esteemed surviving busts and statues and bas-reliefs, dimly lit, in what seems like a dream, approaching death, of all of history's past achievement. In another we see on a sandstone quadrangle a hundred thousand tiny photos, maybe more, of the same man growing, day by day, from childhood to middle age.

It's a film, in short, that sums up so much of life that it would be good, I think, to show it at a weekend party that preceded one's self-euthanasia. It reminds us of how much of our happiness derives from being around good architecture; how dancing is an unmixed good; how the Italian spirit, from Rosselini, De Sica, Capra and Minnelli to Scorsese, Coppola and Tornatore is an exultant, pagan fount of hope that outruns in its pursuit of happiness all other civilisations; that we waste many, many days of our lives not being in Rome. And it tells us too how death comes, and the grace with which we receive it on that day and the days before is worth rehearsing.

In most American films the surgically altered faces are beautiful, or show past beauty. In films like this we see decay and wrinkling sadness garishly lipsticked and painted – and, in one scary sequence, botoxed – at every turn. We are reminded of beauty's brevity; and, in a great sense, of its irrelevance. So much of our lives is the pursuit of points of pride and ego, of public acclaim, when beauty goes. Fanny Ardant hurries past in moonlight looking much like Bronwyn Bishop and we see, alas, what Sorrentino mourns of what is past, and  passing, and to come.

I could write many days on this film and perhaps I will. In the meantime, see it. See it; please.

Watching ‘Normal People’ in Lockdown

The BBC/Hulu television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestseller and “future classic” Normal People was met with critical acclaim around the world when it premiered in late April 2020. However, the series hasn’t received uniformly positive reviews. Jessa Crispin's piece in The Guardian called it “a gutless soap opera for millennials” which left her “bored”. She also suggested that Rooney’s work revealed nothing new when she asserted “the desire to tell an old story in a new way only really works if you have something new to say”.

The frustration I have with these kinds of takes is that they're not written by millennials. That's not a problem in and of itself, it's just that they fail to understand the significance of the work for the millennial generation. Nor do they do justice to the artistic and aesthetic brilliance of the TV series, nor appreciate all that Rooney’s work reveals about contemporary relationships, mental health, questions of class and belonging, first love, and representations of nostalgia. This is to say nothing of the exquisite aesthetics and cinematography of the television adaptation.

Co-written by Sally Rooney, Mark Rowe, and breakout British playwright and screenwriter Alice Birch, the TV series condenses the novel into 12 bingeable episodes of roughly 30 minutes in length, faithfully adapting the acclaimed novel. Normal People is the story of Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell’s (Paul Mescal) relationship, as they evolve from secret high school lovers in Sligo, Ireland, to variously being friends and lovers as they attend Trinity College, Dublin, drifting in and out of the orbit of each other’s lives. In these four years, we become intimate voyeurs of the events and milestones that define their young lives, such as finishing high school and starting university, first kisses and romances, painful break ups, overseas travel with friends, the emergence of mental health issues, substance abuse, changing friendship groups and fortunes, the suicide of young friends, and familial disharmony and break down.

It’s worth observing that the story is for and about normal people in anything but normal times. The lives of Marianne and Connell are abnormal for several reasons, including the stunning onset of digital culture and technology, and the unsettling changes that has brought to the very ideas of communication, intimacy and memory. The pair are coming of age in the aftermath of the Great Recession from 2007-2009 with all its economic pain and insecurity, along with the international turmoil of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On top of that, their lives are characterised by the hyper-mobility of contemporary life and all the disruption of identity and community, love and meaning that this entails. That the TV adaptation was released just as the COVID-19 pandemic began added a whole new disruptive reality to the experience of our own time.

Youth, Nostalgia and Being Fully Alive

Now so long, Marianne
It's time that we began to laugh
And cry and cry and laugh about it all again
- So Long, Marianne, Leonard Cohen

I rewatched the series during Melbourne’s stage 4 lockdown in August, and found that it impacted me even more intensely than when I’d watched it in the first lockdown in April and May. I suspect this is because the second lockdown has been far more severe and restrictive, with a nightly curfew from 8pm-5am, movements confined to a 5km radius, daily exercise limited to 60 minutes or less, mandatory mask wearing outdoors, and all social and familial visits prohibited except for intimate partners. For the first time, Melburnians have been confronted with the true scale of the pandemic and its protracted nature. These measures wouldn’t be confined to what now seems like a novelty 6 weeks in autumn full of iso-baking, indoor fitness and Zoom calls. No, this would be our lives for the foreseeable future; always looking over our shoulder, and always at the mercy of the virus and future outbreaks.

While watching this stunningly intimate series from the confines of my room, alone and eating Uber-Eats (the handover with the delivery man being my only face-to-face human interaction for the day), I became conscious of how sharply my situation and circumstances contrasted with the lives and freedoms of Marianne, Connell and their contemporaries. I thought of all that the pandemic had taken from me and countless others around the world. I grieved for everything we’d lost and wouldn’t experience in the months and years to come, which was so innocently and joyfully displayed before me on my computer screen.

I envied the vitality of Marianne and Connell’s youth, the unbounded belief and possibilities of being in one’s early twenties, and the intimacy of friends and lovers. I missed thronging university campuses and lecture halls; house parties (not the app), clubs, and live music; dinner parties and conversations with friends over coffee and cigarettes on a balcony overlooking the city; hugs, first kisses and first loves; the freedom to just be outside - alive in nature and the city - without a reason or a permit.

Seeing their overseas holiday to Italy, I yearned for the gorgeous, sepia-toned panoramas of Tuscany and Marianne’s family’s 150 year old Italian villa (unbelievably available on Airbnb for $67 per night). I dreamt of long and languid days traveling overseas; cycling along dirt roads with golden tans and beaming smiles; enjoying a sorbet ice cream in a piazza with a lover or a friend talking about history and politics in the summer heat; journeying by train to Venice to spend a day admiring artwork, and getting lost in galleries, museums and churches, rather than experiencing all of these things on a virtual tour.

Watching them complete their final exams and begin university, I remembered with a sweet nostalgia the last years of high school, and the easy friendships and community it represented. I thought of those in their final years of school today, unable to enjoy coming of age rituals like ‘the Debs’, with their beautiful corsages, dresses and romantic intrigues. I thought of all the 18th and 21st birthday parties that would never happen, and the joy and liberation of Schoolies trips, gap years and university O-Weeks that many would never know, and the classroom friendships and memories which can never materialise in the atomised landscape of online and remote learning.

When confronted with the cataclysmic economic, social and public health circumstances we now find ourselves in, along with the extinguishment of all sense of futurity and agency, it’s natural to reflect on how we spent our time before the pandemic, with a view to re-evaluating our priorities once this crisis passes. Watching Normal People made me reflect on all the things I loved doing, as well as the things I didn’t do enough of or value sufficiently, and strengthened my resolve to live more boldly, intentionally and fully on the other side of the lockdowns and pandemic.

First Love, Intimacy and Romance

And this is the room
One afternoon I knew I could love you
And from above you how I sank into your soul
Into that secret place where no one dares to go
- The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. One, Neutral Milk Hotel

Normal People features a lot of sex. 12 sex scenes in total, to be precise. Shortly after it aired in late April, reviews and listicles started appearing across publications like Body and Soul and Vulture, ranking the scenes in order of steaminess and various other metrics. The best commentary about representations of sex and intimacy in the TV series has focused on how authentic, healthy and anti-pornographic the portrayals are.

From the first time Marianne and Connell make love in episode two, their intimacy is defined by mutual respect, consent and pleasure. As they kiss and explore each other’s naked bodies for the first time, Connell seeks affirmative consent from Marianne by asking “is that what you want?” and “is this your first time?”, before stating “if you want to stop or anything, obviously stop… if it hurts or anything, we can stop. It won’t be awkward, you just say”. Notions of positive masculinity and affirmative consent have increasingly been a feature of university and institutional education in the past decade and a half, and it is refreshing to see this positive behaviour modelled so maturely in a globally popular and culturally influential series.

Marianne and Connell’s sex scenes evoke an authentic intimacy and intense sensuality between young lovers which has rarely been done so well on screen. It’s all so thoroughly normal and human: flushed cheeks; messy, sweaty hair; deep and passionate kisses while breathing and drinking each other in; and full, tender embraces in bed. What’s really wholesome and endearing is the way the series gives time and space to the couple’s gentle conversations after they’ve made love. In these moments, we see them bask in each other’s presence, giggling and smiling with their eyes, gently playing with each other’s hair, and comfortably draped over each other’s bodies like decadent figures in Renaissance art.

The series beautifully captures the pure intensity and excitement of first love and romance, and how it evolves and matures physically each time they get back together throughout the years. It’s incredibly special and profound, and fills you with a wistful nostalgia for your younger self. There’s a Japanese concept called mono no aware (物の哀れ, もののあはれ), which means “the pathos of things” or “empathy towards things”. It’s that feeling - mostly nice but occasionally overwhelming - of being deeply aware of something beautiful and transient, which evokes a certain sadness about the impermanence of life. That’s certainly what I feel when I see Marianne and Connell in the exhilaration of their teenage romance, while I’m mired in the solitude of Melbourne’s second lockdown.

At the end of episode 12, just as everything is their lives seems to be in a state of harmonious equilibrium, Connell receives an offer to study an MFA at a university in New York. As they tearily discuss their respective futures (and future together), it becomes increasingly clear that Connell will go to New York to pursue his writing dreams at Marianne’s encouragement. Through tears, Connell says “you know I love you, and I’m never gonna feel the same way for anyone else… I’ll go.” Marianne replies, “I know… I’ll stay, and we’ll be okay”. It’s a perfect example of real love, which is selfless and concerned with the well-being and growth of the other. It’s instructive to revisit the text to understand more about their final exchange:

That’s ridiculous, he says. I’m not going to New York without you. I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you. It’s true, she thinks, he wouldn’t be. He would be somewhere else entirely, living a different kind of life. He would be different with women even, and his aspirations for love would be different. And Marianne herself, she would be another person completely. Would she ever have been happy? And what kind of happiness might it have been? All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions. But in the end she has done something for him, she’s made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that…

… what they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks. Really. People can really change one another. You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.

When I think about Marianne and Connell’s relationship and the indelible imprints they leave on each other’s lives, the notion of a palimpsest comes to mind. A palimpsest is a piece of writing or manuscript on which subsequent writings have been superimposed, with the old text often rubbed out or effaced. The metaphor is that our first and most intense loves never really leave us, and we carry them with us throughout our lives, imprinted forever on our hearts and memories, recalling how irrevocably each changed the other. The metaphor of a palimpsest also illuminates the opening quote of Rooney’s novel:

It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a particular influence, subduing them into receptiveness
- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Aesthetics and Cinematography

It's like I'm falling out of bed
From a long and vivid dream
- Separator, Radiohead

One of the ways the pace of the series is slowed down and allowed to breathe is through the use of “pillow moments”. When reflecting on the power of Isao Takahata’s acclaimed animated film Grave of the Fireflies, the legendary film critic Roger Ebert argued that the film derived a lot of stylistic inspiration from Japanese poetry’s use of “pillow words” known as Makurakotoba (枕詞). These epithetical words form a kind of break or musical beat within the overarching narrative of the poem, slowing the reader down.

Ebert went on to note that the great Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu adapted this poetical technique to film by developing “pillow shots” or pause moments, where the main scene cuts away and focus on something disconnected from the main narrative for a few seconds - i.e. a close up of a character’s hands washing dishes, abstract stills of powerlines and street signs, or someone peeling a potato. The overall effect of a scene absent of motivation is to punctuate the film with a calm pensiveness, creating a slower and more comprehensible narrative pacing, as well as standalone aesthetic moments of silence and contemplation. Directors Hettie Macdonald and Lenny Abrahamson achieve a similar stylistic effect in Normal People. Flicking through the shots above, you may recall the image lingering on the dead bugs in the pool at the Italian villa, or Marianne absently contemplating the slater climbing through blades of grass in the summer heat, or picturesque landscape shots of country roads and fields.

The series is beautifully framed, thanks to the artful cinematography of Suzie Lavelle and Kate McCullogh. One is left with a sense of the natural beauty of the Celtic landscape, and the poetry and history of its urbanity. The symmetry is exquisite throughout the series, and recalls director Wes Anderson’s love of centredness. The images below give some sense of this, and how balance is maintained across landscape shots as well as in personal portraits. The scenery of the outdoor stills is often rendered with a beautiful, soft watercolour look. There’s also a hint of the sfumato painting technique, where tones and colours blend into one another, creating a hazy or dreamlike effect which supports the nostalgic feel of the series. Perhaps the most important thing to note about the cinematography in Normal People is how it’s designed to induct you into the lives of Marianne and Connell. By frequently shooting the camera angle from their perspectives, it’s easy to begin to feel part of their story and conversations, and as a witness to the most intimate moments of their relationship, which are unseen by anyone else.

Light and shadow are also used deftly throughout, often to match the emotional states of Marianne and Connell. When things are going well, Marianne and Connell are glowing and bathed in warm sunlight. In moments of despair, depression or uncertainty, they’re cloaked in shadows and darkness.

Mirrors appear throughout the series and frequently in Sally Rooney’s writing. In sweeping landscape shots, both individuals and backgrounds are reflected in water, be it a canal or a swimming pool. Often, at the opening of an episode, Marianne is in front of a personal mirror at home, brushing her teeth, getting dressed and doing make up, or affectionately applying moisturiser together with Connell and getting ready for bed. Movingly, when Marianne takes a nude selfie (a modern kind of mirror), she does so blinking through tears, likely from the stated lack of self worth she feels, but also perhaps at the strange hollowness of participating in this unfamiliar form of digital romance.

It’s instructive to note how often references to mirrors feature in Rooney’s work, such as these examples from her debut novel Conversations with Friends:

I gazed at myself in the mirror. Inside Nick’s coat my body looked very slim and pale, a white wax candle. He came back into the room and laughed at me in a good-natured way. He always dressed to go to the bathroom in case Bobbi came home unexpectedly. Our eyes met in the mirror.

and

When Bobbi talked about me it felt like seeing myself in a mirror for the first time. I also looked in actual mirrors more often. I started taking a close interest in my face and body, which I’d never done before. I asked Bobbi questions like: do I have long legs? Or short?

It’s interesting to think about the overall significance of the repeated use of mirrors as a literary and cinematic technique. Without drifting too much into literary criticism or analysis, lots has been written about the way in which Rooney holds “a mirror” up to the millennial generation. I think it has more to do with Rooney’s concern with self-perception and examination, as the above quotes suggest. It also captures the romantic sense of recognising your self in your lover, and vice versa. This feeling of complementarity and authentic belonging is something that pervades Normal People - i.e. the search to “find your other half”.

To illustrate this concept, it’s useful to think about a literary device called chiasmus in which words or grammatical concepts are repeated symmetrically in the reverse order (i.e. ABBA). A beautiful and relevant example of chiasmus is from the Song of Solomon (6:3), which I think of in relation to Marianne and Connell as lovers, and the idea of love as being a mirror or reflection of soul mates:

I am my lover’s, and my lover is mine.

Millennial Culture

Yet there's still this appeal
That we've kept through the years
But love, love will tear us apart again
- Love Will Tear Us Apart (cover), Nerina Pallot

Normal People effortlessly captures the various ways in which millennials communicate, relate, fall in love, and grieve. Which is to say, mostly through screens and apps. Millennials and zoomers know the features of this reality intimately, but it’s not often that they’ve been represented so naturally or affectionately in film or TV for a wider audience. Relatable things, like being woken up by the insistent bzz bzz of your phone on the bedside table accompanied by the hollow white light of a late-night message; feeling your heart flutter when your crush’s name pops up in your notifications; or checking to see whether they’ve replied to your text or liked your post and the crestfallen feeling when they haven’t.

One of the scenes which best captures this is when Marianne is in Sweden on exchange, and Connell is in Dublin going through a period of intense depression and isolation. They’re up late chatting over a grainy Skype video. Connell doesn’t want to have to leave Marianne, who suggests leaving Skype open while he sleeps and she works, so she can watch over him while he sleeps and be there when he wakes up. It’s a tender and relatable sequence, which highlights the tension between authentic digital connectedness and the non-localisation of human relationships, which is all the more relevant in the COVID-19 era.

Representing these dramatic changes in digital communications and their impact on human relations is a defining feature of Rooney’s work, with many calling her “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”. In the aftermath of Rob Hegarty’s suicide and the funeral in Sligo, Marianne revealed how she’s spent days scrolling through Rob’s Facebook page, reading the comments of those who had posted to his wall. The dialogue is faithfully transposed from the text:

What were these people doing, Marianne thought, writing on the Facebook wall of a dead person? What did these messages, these advertisements of loss, actually mean to anyone? What was the appropriate etiquette when they appeared on the timeline: to ‘like’ them supportively? To scroll past in search of something better? But everything made Marianne angry then. Thinking about it now, she can’t understand why it bothered her. None of those people had done anything wrong. They were just grieving. Of course it didn’t make sense to write on his Facebook wall, but nothing else made sense either.

The above neatly summaries the changed ethical and technological landscapes we’ve found ourselves in over the last decade and a half, and the attendant ambiguities around etiquette and social protocols. With more of our lives and relations playing out online than IRL (it’s not uncommon for zoomers and millennials to spend 12 hours a day working, socialising and interacting through screens) what happens to our elaborate digital selves after we die? How do we memorialise loved ones in the digital realm?

How are we meant to remember those who have died: as they were in the flesh, or as they were represented across various social media platforms? How do we feel about the fact that the dead don’t always seem dead in the digital world, with countless videos and automatic Facebook and photo memories appearing to remind us of their presence? How has spending so much time living through screens changed us as beings, and what are the implications for intimacy, connection and romance?

Mental Health

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Midway in the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost
- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

One of the most powerful and transcendent features of Normal People is how it handles the subject of male mental health.

Beginning his career as a stage actor after graduating from the Lir National Academy of Dramatic Art at Trinity College, Dublin, Paul Mescal is well suited to the task. The scenes which represent Connell living with anxiety, depression and panic attacks are nothing short of groundbreaking due to their their honesty, realism, and sensitivity. Early in the series, Connell experiences a minor panic attack at high school after his friends pressure him about whether he’ll ask Marianne to the Debs. The camera claustrophobically follows and winds around him, framing him at a close distance as he seeks an escape in the toilet cubicle, as Stephen Rennicks’ score switches to a drawn out, anxiety-inducing strings piece.

Later in the series, Lorraine (Connell’s mother) phones Connell to inform him that his friend Rob Hegarty has taken his life, with his body found in a river on New Year’s Day. Connell’s reaction is visceral. Upon hearing the news, his throat seizes up with anxiety and he struggles to swallow, the mobile phone dropping from his hand as he blinks in disbelief.

The next scene - which could have been written for the stage - depicts Connell and his psychologist sitting opposite each other on wooden chairs in a nondescript clinical room. With his eyes avoiding the gaze of his interlocutor and his hands fumbling nervously in his lap, Connell opens up about Rob’s suicide and how it’s precipitated his severe depression and anxiety. He expresses his guilt that he “wasn’t in touch with him more” and says - ignoring the psychologist when she absolves him of responsibility - that he “never even replied to the last message he sent me.” In a subsequent scene with his psychologist, Connell opens up about his relationship with Marianne, and how starkly it contrasts to his feelings of loneliness and alienation in Dublin. Faltering, he says “I don’t think people here like me that much”, and how - despite having such different values and interests from his contemporaries at high school, including Rob - he hasn’t been able to find the same sense of belonging and community in Dublin as he had in Sligo. The novel reads:

I just feel like I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life, he says. But I hate it here, and now I can never go back there again. I mean, those friendships are gone. Rob is gone, I can never see him again. I can never get that life back.

It’s incredibly moving to watch Mescal deliver these lines as the camera lingers on his grief-stricken, distressed face. His voice gives way to waves of tears, despair and grief, not just for Rob, but for the life he once had and the person he once was. The performance evokes an overwhelming feeling that many of us experience growing up and moving schools, cities and countries. That of not quite fitting in and feeling comfortable in ourselves and around others, nor knowing where or who to call home.

It’s rare for an actor to embody vulnerabilities in mental and emotional states so authentically. Watching Mescal, you can feel the listlessness and enervation of Connell’s depressive episodes, or the pins and needles, tight chest and hyperventilation from his sudden panic attacks and anxiety, and the roiling emotions he experiences when opening up to his psychologist.

My friends have described Normal People as an experience of being “seen”, so closely do the intricacies of the story align with the millennial experience of growing up in the 2010 decade. One - an attendee of a UK university and a star debater (like Rooney) - humourously described it as though the lives of her peers had been “appropriated”.

Normal People reflects so much of the realities of millennial lives that it’s intensely moving and emotional to see it played out before you, almost as if you were watching a recreation of your own youth and life on screen, with all its joys, heartbreaks and intimacies.

This is even more profound when contrasted with the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and all the pain, dislocation and uncertainty that it’s wrought on the world. The series should serve as a springboard for thinking about who 'we' are as millennials, and how we would like our individual and collective futures to be on the other side of the pandemic. Being threatened with cataclysm and the recognition of one’s mortality should help us understand how precious and beautiful life is, and how important it is to live a life filled with meaning, connection, and beauty.

A NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM – NOCTURNAL X OUR GOLDEN FRIEND

This piece was originally published on Ripe: http://www.ripemusic.com.au/a-night-at-the-museum-nocturnal-x-our-golden-friend-040518/

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Held on the first Friday of every month, Melbourne Museum’s Nocturnal has established itself as a highlight of Melbourne’s live music and cultural scenes. On Friday 4 May, guests were treated to a special offering hosted by the Museum in collaboration with independent record label and management collective Our Golden Friend. The artists on display included Jade Imagine, RVG, Jess Ribeiro and Totally Mild, each of which is managed by Our Golden Friend. The ensemble recently concluded a tour across the United States in March, giving Nocturnal the feel of a happy family reunion which happened to feature some of the most unique and promising talents in Australian music.

Before recapping the performances, it’s worth reflecting on how extraordinary Nocturnal is as an interactive venue and immersive experience. Located in the Edenic Carlton Gardens, the postmodern Melbourne Museum is transformed into an otherworldly “adult playground” with an impressive array of bars and other dining options. The exhibits are open to the public for exploration, including the stunning Vikings: Beyond the Legend, Te Vainui O Pasifika, and Dinosaur Walk. We are encouraged to re-experience the childlike sense of wonderment, awe and discovery that children have when they step into a museum.

Walking through the exhibitions while sipping a glass of red, we marvel at the graceful beauty of a Blue Whale skeleton suspended in mid-air; we are humbled by fully reconstructed dinosaur skeletons from hundreds of millions of years ago; and we are baffled and filled with existential dread at the sight of an Australian moth, which, having spent months gestating in its cocoon, emerges into the full splendour of its adulthood without ‘any functioning mouth parts’, according to one of the Museum’s scientists present at Nocturnal. Denied all culinary pleasures, the moth’s sole purpose in life is to enjoy a brief autumnal period of fornication to reproduce its species (which is more than I can hope for).

With summer in the rear-view mirror and Melburnians now bracing for a bitter winter, cultural offerings such as these have never been more important. They represent little oases of colour, pleasure, and abundance that sustain us through the desert of the working week. Melbourne Museum and Our Golden Friend should be congratulated for this outstanding event.

Jade McInally, Jade Imagine

Jade Imagine

Keeping the themes of discovery and contemplation of the sublime in mind, patrons flocked to the main stage at 7:30pm to see Melbourne indie staples Jade Imagine take the stage. Resplendent in her pink power suit, black RM Williams boots, and orange polka-dot socks, lead singer Jade McInally (Teeth & Tongue) created an ethereal aesthetic and atmosphere which suited Nocturnal perfectly. She was brilliantly supported by guitarist Tim Harvey, his brother James Harvey on drums, and bassist Liam ‘Snowy’ Halliwell. With their dream-pop, low-fi and folksy sound evoking The Shins, Simon & Garfunkel, and Sibylle Baier, Jade Imagine were spellbinding to watch live.

As an ensemble, Jade Imagine have gone through many incarnations, but this line up of performers feels just right. Patrons enjoyed much-loved staples such as Walkin’ Around, Stay Awake and Esteem. Each band member also performs as a vocalist, which Jade Imagine used to great effect on stage through harmonization to create a dreamy wall of sound, which feels like they’re wrapping you up in a big hug. Their musical style supports the band’s deeply evocative and poetic lyrics, which sometimes border on magical realism.

Romy Vager, RVG

RVG

One of the most anticipated acts of Nocturnal was RVG at 9pm, led by the sensational frontwoman Romy Vager. Despite Romy battling through sickness, RVG put on an electric and rollicking performance which had the crowd in raptures. Having released their debut album A Quality of Mercy (Our Golden Friend/Island Records) in August 2017, the band has already picked up a suite of awards including four nominations each for The Age Music Victoria Awards and the AIR Music Awards.

One is struck by the sense that RVG is on the brink of a very special career, spearheaded by Romy’s unforgettable and deeply moving voice, which transcends genres and eludes definition. Punters revelled in the power, goth and glam of the performance, which recalled the brooding and melancholic stylings of Joy Division’s Ian Smith. Romy’s lyrics are pared-down, hardboiled and often monosyllabic, which lets the profundity of the words hit you in the chest like a hammer: “I used to love you / but now I don’t / and I don’t feel bad / we’re just not the same any more / we’re just not the same”. *dies*.

The eponymous Jess Ribeiro

Jess Ribeiro

The enigmatic Jess Ribeiro took the stage at 10pm. Patrons were enveloped by the smoky texture of lead-singer Jess’s voice, which is informed by the diverse hinterland of her travels and musical background. It’s been a remarkable personal and creative journey for the talented frontwoman, ranging from the outback and tropics of the Northern Territory to the urban wintriness of Melbourne. Along the way Jess has found critical acclaim in with My Little River (2012), which won the ABC Radio National Album of the Year and Best Country Album (AIR). This dusky country feel came through at the Museum, where the band performed tracks such as “Hurry Back to Love”, “Slip The Leash” and “Strange Game”.

Jess Ribeiro is getting ready to release their next record in 2018. Jess has worked with some impressive producers in her career, most notably Mick Harvey (The Bad Seeds) who helped Jess rediscover her muse after a three-year hiatus to produce the critically-acclaimed Kill It Yourself (Barely Dressed Records, 2015). She’s recently spent a lot of time in New Zealand collaborating with producer Ben Edwards, who has worked with other emerging Antipodean sensations such as Marlon Williams, Julia Jacklin, and Aldous Harding. One has the feeling that big things are on the horizon for Jess Ribeiro as a collective, and I also suspect that lead-singer Jess will one day make a brilliant producer herself.

Elizabeth Mitchell, Totally Mild

Totally Mild

Rounding out the evening was Melbourne lush quartet Totally Mild, who took to the stage at 11pm. Frontwoman Elizabeth Mitchell was sublime and at her charming and magnetic best. Her angelic and versatile voice enchanted the crowd, and one could feel the influence of her choral background coursing through her. She was brilliantly supported by the intricate sounds of guitarist Zachary Schneider, the subtle indie drumming of Dylan Young, and rolling bass of Lehmann Smith. Totally Mild make for disorienting performers. You’re so beguiled by the heady, atmospheric sweetness of their musical stylings and by the band’s extroverted stage presence that you miss the dark and brooding nature of their lyrics, best exemplified by their Christa. I think this makes their music more impactful and compelling, as it enables Mitchell to speak about highly-sensitive topics such as depression and loneliness in subtle, disarming ways. 

It was fitting that the night closed with Totally Mild, who released their second record Her in February. It’s a thoughtful and complex meditation on the experience of being a woman in the 21st century, which was a powerful acknowledgement of the fact that Nocturnal was headlined by four bands which each featured creatively confident, highly-intelligent, and empathic frontwomen at a time when the Australian music industry is being criticised for inadequate representation of female artists at music festivals. Speaking with Elizabeth over the phone, she informed me that Her “speaks to the tension between independence and the sense of having unlimited potential as a young woman, but also still being bound by structural oppression and other personal limitations, such as mental health and other social roles”.

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Nick Fabbri is a Melbourne-based dilettante, flâneur and occasional writer. You can follow him on Instagram @nafabbri 

Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait

Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait
22 October 2017 - 25 March 2018
Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourne

I have been utterly transfixed by the music and story of the late Amy Winehouse since mid-December 2017, when I saw Thando perform on a Thursday evening at the Jewish Museum of Australia as part of an impressive range of events accompanying its Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait exhibition. In February I attended the outstanding Amy Winehouse Tribute Concert at Memo Music Hall in St Kilda, which played host to some of the premier jazz and soul talents in Australia. My desire to know more about this unforgettable woman and talent drove me back to the exhibition for a second time. Created in 2013 and curated by Amy’s brother Alex Winehouse, the exhibition has toured successfully through Vienna, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam and San Francisco, and leaves Melbourne in less than a week on March 25. Alex was adamant that the exhibition be held at the Jewish Museum of Australia, and for good reason.

A Family Portrait is featured alongside The First Waves – Russian Jewish Migration, 1881-1922, which explores the parallel migration of Russian Jews to Australia. Both temporary exhibitions are displayed against the backdrop of the permanent features of the Jewish Museum, which helps us to appreciate the scale and variety of Jewish stories across time and space. The permanent and temporary exhibitions flow into one another seamlessly. Moving down the corridors from the deep history of the Jewish people to Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait, one is encouraged to reflect on the relationship between the individual and the ineluctable historical forces which shape us.

The Holocaust, Jacques Wengrow, 1991-1996, Melbourne

With such perspective, one comes to view Amy’s Family Portrait as but one flourishing and tragic human story amidst the millions of others throughout history. This is poignant, since Jacques Wengrow’s The Holocaust sits metres from the entrance to Amy’s exhibition. The haunting and arresting painting depicts over 6,000 anonymous figures as a memorial to the six million Jews who were murdered in the Shoah. This caused me to reflect on Isaiah 51:12, where humans are said to “wither like the grass and disappear”. Given what I have described above about historical forces, perhaps another analogy to understand the transience of human existence is the Tree of Life, in which individual human lives are like leaves blooming and wilting with the seasons; determined and sustained by the roots, trunk and branches of culture, religion, ethnicity, language, and so on.

The Jewish Museum of Australia, A Family Portrait

Walking up the steps of the Museum on Alma Rd (fittingly, Spanish for soul), I was immediately struck by the glowing Mediterranean beauty of Amy’s visage, probably informed by her Belarusian Ashkenazi Jewish extraction. Set against the St Kilda palm fronds, Amy resembled a modern-day Cleopatra, resplendent with her bronzed skin, black hair, and depending on the light, her olive green, hazel or even golden eyes.

When entering the exhibit, it is instructive to bear in mind James Salter’s reflection from his 1997 memoir “Burning the Days” as an interpretive metaphor for understanding the genius of this exhibition, and how it all hangs together within the Museum:

If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house. Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly. Visitors come and go. At some windows, you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen”.

Gazing upon the family portraits on the wall upon entering the exhibition, one has the almost-uncomfortable sense of fossicking about a family’s unattended living room, poring over private photo albums and polaroids which have been unseen for decades. Vividly colourful displays pop out from hospital-white walls, while a soundtrack inspired by Amy’s “Chill Out Tape” plays unobtrusively in the background.  The overall effect is of entering a dreamscape, in which time has stood still. It is in this sense that one can appreciate A Family Portrait as part of the Winehouse family’s grieving process; a kind of extended Kaddish. It’s hard to hold back tears while wandering through this beautiful garden of memories dripping with the dew of nostalgia and vulnerability. This is how the Winehouse family remember their little girl before she dropped from the Tree in the full flourishing of her spring and summer, never to know the autumn and winter of life’s journey.

Photographer unknown, A Family Portrait

Set in the curved corner of the Museum, we are stepped chronologically through vignettes of Amy’s life, made sweeter and more powerful by reminiscence and the passing of time. At the beginning is a suitcase full of beautiful polaroids and kodak prints which Amy had hoarded from various family members over the years, which she was examining in the days before her death on 23 July 2011. The next station we come to is a sprawling family tree, which throws into high relief the intermingling continuum of disparate histories and geographies that combined to form Amy and her family. Below the family tree sits Amy’s school tie and jumper from Osidge, almost as if it was prepared for the first day of the school year. Adjacent is Roden’s ‘The Book of Jewish Food’ with an excerpted recipe for chicken noodle soup, once requested by Amy, and poorly made. (Unlike her meatballs, we are told). We learn that Amy’s great grandfather Harris Winehouse (Weinhaus) came to London from Minsk, Belarus by mistake in 1890, and that she loved Snoopy, Dr Seuss, and Postman Pat.

Moving from the historical and geographical contextualisation of the exhibition, we come to the vignettes which focus on Amy’s musical influences. Inset in a stunningly soft pink alcove is Amy’s favourite guitar, along with her music collection. We are informed that Amy developed her love of vinyl from her mother, and that she spent hours in Camden record stores. It is always instructive to read about an artist’s musical influences, but quite another thing to cast one’s eyes on the very CDs and vinyls which they spent hours listening to. In attendance are Quincy Jones’ Big Bad Bossa Nova, Bobby Darin’s That’s All, an album from Dinah Washington and plenty of Ray Charles. Once realised, one cannot but hear these influences coursing through Amy’s catalogue.

Amy's musical influences, A Family Portrait

A function of the family-oriented nature of the exhibition is that it fosters an understanding of how we are continually shaped and influenced by others, particularly our families. Beneath Thelonious Monk’s At The Black Hawk sits this beautiful quote from Amy in 2006:

my brother started listening to jazz when he was about 18 and I was 14, and I just remember the first time I ever heard ‘Round Midnight’ by Thelonious Monk through the wall, and I was just like: ‘what is that?’ I’ll never forget that.

Life is stochastic. Just as Harris Winehouse settled in London by mistake, so too did Amy discover jazz by chance, seemingly because of her brother’s musical taste. We therefore not only appreciate how the Winehouse family developed in relation to the deep histories of the Jewish people and diaspora, but also how Amy was shaped in relation to her family. This is a deeply humbling notion which helps us to understand the fragility and interconnectedness of all things.

An Indian Summer, A Family Portrait

Powerfully, a quote from her 1997 audition essay to join the Sylvia Young Theatre School overlooks the a glassed-off display of wrist bands, tickets and passes to her shows – all taken after the release of Frank (2003) up until the global success of Back to Black in 2006:

but mostly I have this dream to be very famous. To work on stage. It’s a lifelong ambition. I want people to hear my voice and just forget their troubles for five minutes. 

And so they did, and still do. The penultimate section of the exhibition surveys Amy at the height of her powers as a fashion icon and, as described by the BBC, ‘the pre-eminent vocal talent of her generation’. This section teases out the duality of the public and private selves. Beneath a quote from 2010 “I still dress like it’s the 50s”, we see the famous navy blue sequined Luella dress from Glastonbury, and the Christian Louboutin shoes.  Amy’s tattoos, designed by Henry Hate, are also explained with tenderness as references ‘to her life and loves’. The most memorable on her right arm is described as a tribute to her nan Cynthia and her eternal youthfulness and ‘va va voom’. We are invited into Amy’s library, and see how she read Dostoevsky, Bukowski’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man, and Hunter S. Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear, and learn how she loved all things vintage and retro, collecting fridge magnets and transistor radios. Quirky little things, which each of us could list about our own siblings and family.

Fashion Icon, A Family Portrait

The final stages of the exhibit include a posthumous Grammy from her Body and Soul duet with Tony Bennett, adjacent to two beautiful bird cages which Amy owned (sans birds, except for one short-lived canary). The symbol of the uncaged bird informed the logo of the Amy Winehouse Foundation, which has carried on the good but relatively unknown charitable works that Amy did while living.

What is left out of the display is as profound as what is included. There are no images of Blake Civil-Fielder, who in many ways both made and destroyed Amy. There are no pictures of the skeletal and slack-jawed Amy after she was ravaged by her addiction to cigarettes, drugs and alcohol; after she began to decay inside and out through a host of mental and physical illnesses, most visibly anorexia and bulimia, but also invisibly through early-stage emphysema.

Back to Black, Ireland, 2006

One steps out of the main room of the exhibition and into a final alcove with two rows of benches, in front of a small projector screen playing on repeat Amy’s otherworldly rendition of Back to Black in a church in Ireland. It’s incredibly moving when one considers it with reference to the final quote printed on the wall by the exit, again taken from her Sylvia Young audition essay:

I want to be remembered for being an actress, a singer, for sell out concerts and sell out west end and broadway shows. For being just... me.

We are so accustomed to hearing about Amy as described above: in flashing lights, at the sell-out concerts, and through the ill-repute generated from the ravenous paparazzi and gossip magazines documenting her downward spiral and self-destruction. What this exhibit has encouraged us to do instead is to honour the wish of that 14-year-old girl, to remember her as ‘me’. The final video of the exhibition brings together all that we have learned about Amy and her family’s precious private life and reconnects us with how we all invariably came to know her, through the indescribably sublime and transcendent power of her voice.

Which 21st century artist has distilled and articulated the vulnerabilities and vagaries of love as she did? Which other 17-year old could sing about the youthful exuberance of adolescent independence and aversion to romance as she did in My Own Way, echoing Sinatra? Who could then sing at 20 on Jools Holland, and with such maturity, of the terminal frustrations of long-term relationships and the complexities of gender roles in Stronger Than Me? Who else could, at 26, encapsulate the utter devastation of a break-up as Amy does in Wake Up Alone? ‘He’s fierce in my dreams, seizing my guts / He floats me with dread / Soaked in soul / He swims in my eyes by the bed”? Even through their death, who else could render the words of A Song For You with more extraordinarily beautiful and eternal meaning? "And when my life is over / Remember when we were together / We were alone / And I was singing this song to you / I love you in a place / Where there's no space or time"

The answer is no one. And so we are left to leave the exhibition contemplating the tragedy of this loss, and the irreversible silencing of this great human voice. The mind boggles at the fortuitous and unrepeatable randomness that went into the making of Amy Winehouse, especially when we consider the full sweep of Jewish history and her own family story. This uniquely beautiful person who felt so deeply, loved so intensely, shone so brightly, and then was gone.

Stronger Than Me, 2003

A review of my review from Janis Winehouse

Dizzee Rascal Redux

Dizzee Rascal
Forum Melbourne
Tuesday 20 February, 2018
(4 minute read)
★ ★ ★ ★ ★

I hadn’t really thought about or listened to Dizzee Rascal since I saw him live 8(!) years ago on a dangerously hot Australia Day in 2010 at the great but ill-fated Big Day Out. I was 17, and able to support two friends on my shoulders jumping to Bonkers with 20,000 other enraptured patrons at Melbourne’s Flemington Racecourse. I had just discovered Dizzee through Tongue ‘N Cheek in late 2009. That brilliant album, sometimes derided by implacable reviewers in The Guardian for its commercial detour to Armand Van Helden and Calvin Harris, introduced me and millions of others to Dizzee and the then-flowering genre of London Grime. 

Dizzee Rascal at Big Day Out in Sydney, 2010

By way of further context, Dizzee’s electronically-luscious hits Holiday, Dirtee Cash, Dance Wiv Me, and Bonkers provided the soundtrack to me falling for my first great love at the similarly ill-fated Pyramid Rock Festival in 2009-10. There we revelled in youth, sun, sea and curly hair on Phillip Island, without the tedious and HR-inspired ‘good life partner’ metrics that plague one’s mid-20s. And so it goes.

Thus it was without hesitation that I accepted a last-minute invitation to attend Dizzee’s intimate gig at the stunning Forum Melbourne on a balmy Tuesday summer evening. I spent two full days schooling up on his broader catalogue, and in particular his newest and sixth studio album Raskit (2017), which he was in town to promote.

Dizzee Rascal at Forum Melbourne, photo by Matilda Elgood, SYN

Immediately returning to his Grimy roots, Mr Rascal opened his set with the lyrically brilliant Space. It is a sparse, bent, and angry anthem which reveals a maturation in Dizzee’s musical oeuvre and his lyrical and poetic development since he blew up in 2002. Here, Rascal cast the semblance of a brooding Prince Hamlet. His icy and staccato speech was fractured and words fired from his mouth like bullets from a machine gun, betraying an almost paranoid and under-siege psyche (perhaps from mixed reviews about The Fifth?): “I’ve been through hell and I’ve swallowed the ashes, / running this ting for so long as it happens, / I’m knackered, / All of my enemies broken and shattered, / sprinkling hate, / they’re all over the shop and they’re scattered”. Listen to the track and find yourself reading the rest of this piece in Dizzee’s irresistible Jafaican (Multicultural London English) accent and trochaic pentameter, with its bouncy glottal stops and juicy vowels.

Dizzee Rascal at Forum Melbourne: photo by Matilda Elgood, SYN

Following this outstanding, swaggering and brooding opening, the punters were treated to a series of his grimy but unrelatable tracks (at least for Melburnians) – such as Ghost, Wot U Gonna Do and Make It Last. Disappointingly, Dizzee didn’t perform Raskit’s brilliant and relevant opening track Focus. It goes without saying that everyone enjoyed the filthy resounding bass and impressive lyrical dexterity of each track (my ears are still aching four days on), but many songs in the opening half of the gig lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. Fortunately, the punters were thrown a life rope with his exquisite Jus’ A Rascal (2003) about ten tracks deep, a tune which strikes that stunning balance between Grime and broader commercial appeal.

Dizzee Rascal at Forum Melbourne: photo by Matilda Elgood, SYN

Reeling us in from all corners of the Forum, Dizzee resuscitated us with a barrage of his classic hits that we had all come to see (at least according to my market research at The Duke of Wellington beforehand). Drunk on nostalgia, we were treated to Fix Up, Look Sharp, the great and catchy new hit from Raskit Bop n’ Keep it Dippin, followed by the unbeatable flow of Heavy, Bassline Junkie, Dance Wiv Me, and Holiday. Dizzee then busted out You Got the Dirtee Love - that superb collaboration with Florence and the Machine - before informing the ecstatic crowd that he had breached Melbourne’s curfew regulations and had to leave the stage. This being Australia, half of the crowd (me included) believed him and resigned ourselves to filing out of the venue in an orderly manner. He returned triumphantly moments later, with the smile on his face and the lights illuminating the stage, to inform us that he “was jus’ jokin' wiv ya”.

He then dropped Bonkers, getting the whole crowd at the Forum jumping and heaving together in one final blissful moment of forgetting that life and work would roll around in 8 hours. For me, and I suspect for many others, it was also a blissful moment of remembering. What a time to be alive. ♦

One more unto the breach at the Duke of Wellington, Melbourne - 20.2.2018

Mark Chu: Opus

1-4 February 2018
Marfa Gallery, Abbotsford, Melbourne
(9 minute read)
Mark's Instagram

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Perched in the corner of Abbotsford’s Marfa Gallery sat Mark Chu’s portrait of his great artistic influence, Francis Bacon, gloomily observing the throngs as they inspected the 79 other works neatly arranged throughout the OPUS exhibition from February 1-4. A noted hedonist and boozer, one wonders how wistfully Bacon’s portrait looked on during Thursday’s opening event, which was attended by some 300 persons from all walks of life.

Portrait of Francis Bacon, Mark Chu

Grotesque with its sagged jowls, recessed eye sockets and paunchy flesh, Bacon resembled a bemused ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’; that famous painting locked in an attic and made hideous by its creator's lifetime of hedonism and debauchery in exchange for the artist's eternal youth and beauty (until Faust’s debts were called in of course). Geometrically un-experimental, and the colours dank and almost fungal, except for the licks of hell flame, this painting stood in stark contrast to the vivid and playful colouring of the rest of Chu’s exhibit.

I found myself at the OPUS exhibit after a chance encounter with Chu in front of the State Library. Briefly in Melbourne following four years living and working in New York City, he was running an innovative pop-up called Art Pay$ in collaboration with Exile Entertainment; together they aimed to break the stereotype of the impoverished artist. After drawing a five-minute sketch of Chu I was paid a handy $20 for my labour, thereby becoming a commissioned artist (which I immediately added to my LinkedIn profile). I also received the additional honour of having my portrait featured in the Marfa studio along with 15 other nouveau-artists.

The rest of the exhibit was equally as jarring and thought-provoking. When unpacking Chu’s work, a good starting point is Nadia Boulala (below), which helped me understand the influence of the Cubists on his style. Quizzical faces are mangled into kaleidoscopic abstraction, as if pinched and discombobulated on some Apple Mac application, and then given life by Chu’s brilliant gestural brushwork. Despite the distortions, one is able to discern the human face, a phenomenon reflected on by Chu in this very good profile by Convicts.NYC. Eyeball sagging from her left socket – not unlike that appalling scene from Hostel (2005) – Nadia retains an essential feminine beauty in her pointed cheekbones, luscious lips, and delicate nose, each feature constructed from different geometrical shapes and accentuated by the contrasting lighter tonal colours in the background.

Nadia Boulala, Mark Chu

My favourite portrait was Cosmetic Fear IV (below). It had resonances of an elegant, demure and alien-looking Audrey Hepburn. As suggested by the very kind and knowledgeable Alexi Ouzas, Manager at Exile Entertainment, Chu’s inclusion of the colour palette on either side of Hepburn broke down the wall between the artist and the subject, where the subject is normally entirely oblivious to the colour palette being used to create their portrait. This trope of breaking down barriers to understanding art was also demonstrated through the Art Pay$ exhibition, and was a very thoughtful inclusion to the whole OPUS experience. 

Cosmetic Fear IV, Mark Chu

Much of Chu’s work demonstrates a fascination with the down-and-out, austere and dysfunctional aspects of the human condition. The sadness of Lucien Freud’s subjects can be found in many of Chu’s portraits. Witness Julio (below), a New York local who entered into his own Dorian Gray Faustian Pact by agreeing to have his photo taken for a portrait in exchange for one of Mark’s cigarettes. Or consider, perhaps, the honest and deeply personal triptych Why Have You Foresaken Me? Which recreates Bacon’s Triptych, 1976, with an anguished and contorted Chu sprawled on a canvas overshadowing his lover, who is draped languidly across a rug with wine stains on the carpet. Here, Chu considers the impact of his art and lifestyle on his partner. (Probably).

Julio, Study III, Mark Chu

Why Have You Foresaken Me? Mark Chu

I am prone to lapse (prolapse?) into panegyrics, but Chu has always struck me as an endless font of great creative potential, be it in music (he has recorded as a solo pianist for the MSO and WASO), or in creative writing (featured in The Lifted Brow and an MFA from Columbia University in NYC). Given that he now seems to have substantially turned his attention to art and painting, I feel certain that he could not only win something like the Archibald Prize, soon, but also make a broader impact in the world of painting and portraiture through his life’s work. He is certainly much younger than Bacon was when the latter began honing his craft in his late 30s.

I recall three vivid fragments from the last decade and a bit of knowing Chu at the overlapping peripheries of our social circles. The first image is him sitting serenely atop a ziggurat overlooking a green football field – shirt untucked and in his final year of high school in 2006 - working on complex specialist maths problems. The second is probably from 2009 at a mutual friend’s beach house on Victoria’s surf coast, where he calmly counselled me about the need not to care about what others thought of me. (I had become embroiled in some beachside internecine summer feud, of Mercutio-Tybalt proportions in Luhrmann’s R+J). The third vignette is from his St Kilda Road apartment in 2011 while he was doing a lot of creative writing – books piled up to the ceiling - and he kindly and patiently offered me advice about career and study direction, me being at a loose end. We spoke about my new-found vegetarianism, how he didn’t agree with it, and how he would gladly eat whale meat in Japan.

All three of these interactions inform a lot of my understanding of Chu and his work in OPUS: the out-of-the-box intellectual who chose to tap into his creative wellsprings and passions rather than follow his successes into the professions; the anchored and almost serene man not riven by the opinions of others or by status anxiety; and the kind person moved (and bemused?) by the foibles of human beings and the human experience, but seemingly benignly indifferent (in his artwork at least) to broader political and social concerns and questions of morality. All of that said, one can only hope that there is not some grotesque and decaying ‘Portrait of Mark Chu’ locked away in an attic above his studio in New York City.

***

In Conversation with Mark:

Nick: How did you find the review overall?

Mark: Kind, and that anguish is in the eye of the beholder.

Nick: Can you speak a bit about Francis Bacon: how you came to admire him, how his personal life informed the development of his artwork?

Mark: At the beginning it was Bacon’s screaming mouth. But then Bacon’s color schemes and paint application began to seduce me, and his stories. What a moving tale about his partner Dyer committing suicide two days before his huge Grand Palais opening, Bacon reacting nil to the public, then painting that triptych to reference that tragedy.

Nick: Can you say something about colour: how you choose it, and your use of it in layering?

Mark: Over this exhibition I’ve learned how to use the colors I find most difficult to paint with—yellow, for instance, which has a tendency of making everything muddy. One difficulty is to break away from the language associated with color, and to relinquish thinking of the standard terms to describe color. Words like ‘red’ and ‘blue’ are not only imprecise, but harm the planning of a well-considered image, as they correlate to too specific a hue. For instance, if you start thinking about ‘yellow’ it’s more likely you’re thinking about sunflowers or lemons than the yellow of amber. The color should be imagined first, not the word.

Nick: How has your partner influenced your art, and does your art impact your partner? Do you have a Muse?

Mark: She is a permanent supporter; aid, critic, fan, colleague, observer, archivist. What I love most about her is her strangeness, or her being unique without trying to be—I am much more pretentious—and the shared life we created, how irreversibly she changed me, how irreversibly I changed her.

Nick: Can you elaborate on your fascination for the human face? Why do you paint more male faces than female?

Mark: As an image, the face provides a lot of direct psychological meaning. And faces are easy to abstract because we naturally read faces even if their composition is altered. Men are easier to ask in person to portray, as more men seem okay with being ugly. But—many of the faces I’ve painted which I see as women, people see as men. I’d like to paint more women soon.

Nick: The first portrait I noticed of yours (below) was this arresting, bent figure with spindly limbs and fingers. That was 9 years ago, and your work has evolved considerably since then. How have you developed your style and skill set, and with what routine and coaching and resources, if any? How does this differ to your discipline/training as a musician?

Mark: Every resource can teach, so to be constantly thinking about learning is important. That can make social interactions difficult as people sometimes prefer light conversation. Technique is vital—stamina and consistency too—strategy too. I’m not naturally disciplined, or humble. I’m perhaps more impulsive and indulged—so you have to trick yourself into not only being disciplined but knowing you require it, to train yourself into having better instincts and impulses. Not sleeping and eating regularly has been a colossal help over many years, but unhealthy habits like those can also erode mental health.

Nick: What do you make of my reflection on the absence of politics in your work?

Mark: Image has a better chance of approaching the sublime without politics, especially currently. There are too many ugly logos around, and clever posters. Perhaps my writing will be political in the future. ♦

Profile Picture, 2009, Mark Chu

Amy Winehouse, A Tribute

Memo Music Hall - St Kilda, Melbourne
Sunday Feb 4 2018

★ ★ ★ ★

Melbourne is a moveable feast in summer, and the 2018 St Kilda Festival made the offering all the richer with its February 4 tribute concerts to the late Amy Winehouse.

In conjunction with the Jewish Museum of Australia’s exquisite  ‘Amy Winehouse Exhibition’ (running until March 25), Memo Music Hall attendees were treated to a matinee offering of some of Australia’s most promising and established musical talents. Led by Darcy McNulty of Jazz Party, the ensemble brought to life the mixtape and catalogue of this once-in-a-generation artist.

Darcy McNulty, Jazz Party - image supplied

Sydney-based Elana Stone was magnetic and the most natural and entertaining performer of the afternoon, infusing the poetry of ‘Valerie’ with her smooth and soulful voice. Rita Satch was similarly compelling. As McNulty observed, Satch’s voice has developed over the past five years so that she now resonates elements of Amy's smouldering voice, appearance and movements behind the microphone. She was irresistibly groovy performing ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’, ‘Mr Magic’ and ‘Stronger than Me’. The latter rendition demonstrated why Satch was the most adept at inhabiting the emotion and rhythm of Amy’s music. She communicated the soulful frustration of Amy’s life in a way that the other performers didn't, from infidelity and sexual disappointment to disintegrating relationships: “I just want to grip your body over mine / Please tell me why you think that’s a crime / I’ve forgotten all of young love’s joy”.

Rita Satch - Stronger Than Me

21-year-old wunderkind Alma Zygier was a revelation and probably the most unique and memorable vocalist of the show. Her otherworldly voice dripped with the sultriness and texture of some pre-War jazz singers (think Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald), which was enchanting when set against a more lilting musical arrangement. Her rendition of classic ‘Body and Soul’ was sublime and spellbinding, and Zygier seemed far more comfortable in this space than she did in her moving rendition of ‘Back to Black’. While Zygier is undeniably a phenomenon and future star who ably captured the sadness and vulnerability underneath Winehouse’s exterior, one yearned for the confident, ribald and defiant maturity of Amy’s (or Satch’s) voice when performing Amy’s catalogue. (But perhaps I am just unsophisticated and possess an unrefined musical palate).

Alma Zygier - image supplied

Husky Gawenda (of Husky fame) delivered a mesmerising unplugged version of “You Know I’m No Good”. Slowed down and stripped of the complexity and busyness of instrumentation, Gawenda’s mellow voice afforded the sparse lyrics space for contemplation and a hardboiled poignancy made more tragic by Amy’s death: “I cheated myself / like I knew I would / I told you I was troubled / you know that I’m no good.”

Husky Gawenda - You Know I'm No Good

Lachlan Mitchell closed out the matinee performance with ‘Rehab’. The best moment of this rollicking performance was when the band finally unbottled itself, allowing him to step into a more gravelly and full-throated swing: “I’m gonna, gonna lose my baby / so I always keep a bottle near / he said I just think you’re depressed / kiss me, yeah baby, and the rest”. Mitchell demonstrated a remarkable but understated and restrained charisma on stage.  He was a kind of bashful generalissimo - hands mostly in his pockets - beckoning the other performers to dance on stage before they finally brought the house down with Amy’s biggest hit.

The Jewish Museum of Australia, St Kilda Festival and Hear Them Holler should be commended for this outstanding cultural, historical and musical contribution to Melbourne. One reflects on the tragedy of Amy’s downward spiral and death, of the gaping hole she left in the music world, how her presence endures 7 years on, and how we waste many, many days not listening to jazz.

Lachlan Mitchell - Rehab

Alma Zygier performs Body and Soul

My favourite live performance - "Sweet reunion Jamaica and Spain, we're like how we were again"