Back To Stay (Abrir puertas y ventanas) is the debut film from Milagros Mumenthaler. The winner of numerous international awards (including best film at the 2011 Locarno Film Festival); it is ultimately a low-key family drama. It’s also a semi-autobiographical tale from this first-time director. The movie is actually a concentrated character study that…
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I’m going to admit it: when Nestle released Nespresso machines a few years ago, I thought they were going to be a fad. They seemed convenient, but surely people would put away their pods in return for the ritual of their own espresso machine, right? Or return to the even less quick fix of instant?…
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I can only vaguely remember the first time I flew on a plane. I had just turned five, and I was flying to Darwin with my Mum and my brother. I remember being so excited about flying on a plane for the very first time, but that’s about it. I can’t remember anything of the…
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[**Spoiler Alert**] Lore is not your typical film about World War II. The story is based on a novel by Rachel Seiffert and is about a young family of middle class German children who are forced to flee their home as the allies overtake Germany at the end of the war. It is an eye-opening…
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Tracy Ryan’s The Argument is a profoundly thoughtful and sensitive volume of poems. It won the 2011 Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Poetry, which was announced in September last year, and it is the poet’s sixth collection. More than anything, it’s the domesticity that appeals to me about this book. The poems often point…
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Considering that Bloomsday is imminent (16th June), I thought it might be appropriate to produce a short piece of writing on one of my favourite short stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners: “The Dead”. It is a story mesmerising in its beauty; its recreation of reality profound. It is, in the minds of many, one of the greatest works of…
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Up until the eBook, not much has been done with the physical novel since the 1700s. Basically, the novel was a bunch of pages bound together. At its most physically innovative, it might have included some pictures, otherwise we just rely on the words for profundity. Yet, more and more authors and publishers are extending…
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Just One Day opens, somewhat counter-intuitively, at the end of an adventure: Allyson has been on a guided tour through Europe, and is thoroughly underwhelmed by the experience. This trip is a barely-disguised Contiki tour for American teens, with rigid daytime itineraries and hedonistic nightly pub-crawls. On her last night with the group in London,…
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Prostitutes, drunkards and erotic dancers. These were amongst the favourite subjects of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), whose art is the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris and the Moulin Rouge is composed of more than 100 works spanning his brief yet celebrated career. This includes…
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![Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Jane Avril at the Jardin de Paris [Jane Avril au Jardin de Paris] 1893
brush and spatter lithograph, 128.2 x 93.6 cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of Orde Poynton Esq. CMG 1996](http://lipmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Jane-Avril-at-the-Jardin-de-Paris-214x300.jpg)
Tasmania has a lot of problems that ‘mainlanders’ might not know about. As Jonathan West writes in his essay, “Obstacles to progress”, ‘Tasmania ranks at the bottom among Australian states on virtually every dimension of economic, social, and cultural performance.’ It’s perhaps timely then that this island state is investigated through an entire issue of…
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Oh, AA Gill. My feelings about him are mixed. On the one hand, he is mordantly witty, and utterly bereft of filter or bullshit – my kind of writer. On the other hand, he can be brutal and acidic and so proud and self-satisfied that it’s incredibly off-putting. AA Gill is away is his first…
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A Fatal Debt is a murder mystery novel, centring on the business elite of New York City, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The protagonist is Ben Cowper, attending psychiatrist at New York’s Episcopal hospital. When major donor Harry Shapiro is brought in by his wife, Cowper is caught between professional opinion and…
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A larger-than-life circular mirror angled to reflect the clouds above. The aptly-titled Sky Mirror (2006) graces the lawn outside Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), which is currently showing a major exhibition by the artist behind this intriguing work, Anish Kapoor. Provocative yet majestic, Sky Mirror makes a striking appearance in Circular Quay and,…
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A few years ago, Melbourne Books began compiling the country’s prize-winning stories and publishing them in an annual collection called, Award Winning Australian Writing (AWAW). Last year, they added poems to the mix. It’s such a wonderful idea I don’t know why it wasn’t done sooner. The series is now in its fifth year. There are…
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