In 1962 the Dutch manufacturing company Philips first developed the audio cassette in Belgium. Twenty years before this in neighbouring Germany, the Nazis had secretly developed a portable audio recorder that allowed sound to be recorded and played. They called it the Magnetophon. From 1975 to 1990 a very uncivil war raged in Lebanon. Groups fought one another, then fought alongside one another, then fought one another again. At times militias conducted joint operations in one town while exchanging fire in another, like the Royal Rumble spectacle of wrestling where multiple opponents fought one another in the ring. Though wrestling had […]

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Parking is easy when I go to the Morning Owl Café because it’s in the middle of an industrial area. As I walk to the café from my car, I see an overgrown grassy strip between two warehouses. There is nothing in the fenced-off space and it can’t be accessed.

When I was a ten-year-old I started going to The Sun Theatre in Yarraville all the time. It was a big old art deco building that had fallen into disrepair in the previous decades, but around 1997 it was resurrected as a film society. It had an enormous 1000-seat auditorium, one screen, and barely anyone ever went. The film society only showed films on the weekends, mostly black-and-white stuff. Films such as Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955) and The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950). I saw Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970) and soaked it up like a cinematic sponge.

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The pigeon flew above the street with the fruit stands, the women in headscarves and tracksuits soaping away dog shit, the angel statue holding sleepy pigeons and the double-parked Fiats. It shat on a diamante-encrusted shoe, spread a brief shadow on a plastic table, dove towards the low rising sun and into the bicycle spokes of English teacher Anastasia. In the part before the Torino morning bird slice, she had grown up cold and rural reading affectionate odes to pigeons with her babushka. In the part after it, she would be made late to a meeting with the pair of […]

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Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

I am not allowed a knife, but the National Treasure’s son is. He has a red-handled Swiss Army one that incorporates a can opener, a bottle opener, two saw blades and a detachable pair of tweezers. He shows it to me in his back yard, levering the primary blade out of the handle with his thumbnail. ‘I killed a bird with it last week,’ he tells me.

I consider myself somebody who watches a lot of reality television. Married at First Sight was once my chosen poison, and it is exactly as it sounds: a juicy social ‘experiment’ where, according to objective compatibility standards, two individuals are coupled, only to meet for the first time at the altar.

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How can I tell you where it began? The episodes. The doctor always asks that. ‘Did you take drugs? Did somebody slip you something?’ No. It began with water … a long time ago. With a whisper calling me to gaze deep into it, and then a lifetime of following through. To harness and evade it. To yield without faltering. To fall and rise with its rhythm. To transform, evacuate and fill. To flush and gather. To hold and to keep still without raising the temperature, the pH level, the salinity. To source all nourishment from its constant movement and my […]