17 OCT 01 NOV 2019
Ed.
617 07 AUG 2020
16.
STREET CAT BOB
24.
CHRISTINE ANU
28.
and MEGAN WASHINGTON
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Contents
EDITION
617 16
Rest in Peace Bob James Bowen was sleeping rough and battling addiction when he first encountered the injured moggy he named Bob. In this very special tribute, the former busker and Big Issue UK vendor celebrates the street cat who saved his life.
24 LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF
‘It Felt Like a Distant Dream’
12.
Cirque du Katy by Sarah Smith
She’s one of the biggest pop stars of our generation, and she makes everyone she meets feel like her new BFF. Ahead of the release of her new album and the birth of her first child, Katy Perry opens up to our Music Editor Sarah Smith about pregnancy, life with Orlando Bloom and learning to smile again.
26 Ricky 27 Fiona 34 Film Reviews 35 Small Screen Reviews 36 Music Reviews 37 Book Reviews
39 Public Service Announcement 40 Tastes Like Home 43 Puzzles 45 Crossword 46 Click
BEHIND THE COVER
“I think that this journey is about getting my smile back and getting my playfulness back and getting my purity back,” says Katy Perry of her new record, Smile. photo by EMI Music
28 MUSIC
THE REGULARS
04 Ed’s Letter & Your Say 05 Meet Your Vendor 06 Streetsheet 08 Hearsay & 20 Questions 11 My Word 20 The Big Picture
After more than three decades in the music business, Christine Anu shares her thoughts on starting late, playing the long game and why Black Lives Matter.
Holy Batflowers Coronavirus lockdown gave Megan Washington licence to be bold, get weird and record her third record, Batflowers, exactly as she wanted it.
Ed’s Letter
by Amy Hetherington Editor @amyhetherington
E FO RT NI GH T LE TT ER OF TH
Farewell Bob
O
ne of my first jobs out of school was at The Silver Poodle, a dog‑grooming parlour run by a mother-daughter duo in Melbourne. As a dog person, pampering and preening pooches (and the occasional cat) was a lovely way to spend a day; I was entrusted with the care of our customers’ best mates. There were hazards, of course: being bitten and peed on; wrangling dogs in heat; and the summer heat itself was brutal under the industrial dryer. Plus, the wet-dog smell that stuck to your skin meant my flatmates made me undress out of my fur-plastered work clothes by the back door. In the lead-up to Christmas, a big old Samoyed came in to be spruced up. In my hazy memory, his name was King. Under the dryer, his white fur flew around like snow. When we were done, he looked beautiful, like a regal snowball with a red bow around his neck. A few days later, we learned he’d died, the
owners sending us flowers to thank us for looking after him. We wept – heartbreak, another hazard of the job. In this edition, we join the global Big Issue community in paying tribute to our unofficial mascot, Street Cat Bob, who died last month. We have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of calls and messages about the ginger moggy, who rose to fame and became a literary and film star after being adopted by Big Issue UK vendor James Bowen in London. Bob and James saved one another with their friendship, and their story touched thousands more. As James says: “Bob saved my life, it’s a solace to know that he may save many others.” Closer to home, your messages of support to Big Issue vendors affected by COVID restrictions continue to be a ray of sunshine and solace, especially for those in Victoria who are doing it particularly tough right now due to the hiatus in street sales. Please keep them coming via social media and email – submissions@bigissue.org.au.
04
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The Big Issue Story The Big Issue is an independent, not-for-profit magazine sold on the streets around Australia. It was created as a social enterprise 24 years ago to provide both a voice and a work opportunity for people experiencing homelessness and disadvantage. Your purchase of this magazine has directly benefited the person who sold it to you. Big Issue vendors buy each copy for $4.50 and sell it to you for $9, keeping the profits. But The Big Issue is more than a magazine.
Your Say
So glad to have you back! I hadn’t even got past ‘Meet Your Vendor’ in Ed#615 when I felt compelled to write and say hi to Raylene, who sounds like an absolute gem! As it happened, I bought this edition from her son Jarran outside Peaches in South Freo. Anyone who’s met Jarran will attest to his sunny nature and positive outlook. I think your next venture should be parenting tips, Raylene, because Jarran has the qualities that I would love my children to bring to this world. I can see where he got that big smile from too! All the best and hope to see you on your pitch outside of Fresh Provisions one day. Love that they are getting behind you and The Big Issue. JACQUI FREMANTLE I WA
Gotta let you know that Fiona’s ‘We Can Work It Out’ (Ed#615) inspired laughter and a deep empathetical sadness at her/my perception of our place in the universe. Ricky, Fiona and Lorin always make me laugh and dig around in the depths of my feelings and intellect. Thank you! Thanks for the Women’s Subscription Enterprise – I’d be in the wilderness without it. ANONYMOUSLY IN THE BEAUTIFUL KIMBERLEY I WA
• Our Women’s Subscription Enterprise provides employment and training for women through the sale of magazine subscriptions as well as social procurement work. • The Community Street Soccer Program promotes social inclusion and good health at weekly soccer games at 19 locations around the country. • The Vendor Support Fund will offset the cost price of products for vendors, allowing them to earn a larger margin on their own street sales. • The Big Issue Classroom educates school groups about homelessness. • And The Big Idea challenges university students to develop a new social enterprise. CHECK OUT ALL THE DETAILS AT
THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU
Jacqui and Anonymously each win a copy of Katy Perry’s new album Smile. Check out our interview with Katy Perry on page p12. We’d also love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions: SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU
YOUR SAY SUBMISSIONS MAY BE EDITED FOR CLARITY AND SPACE.
Meet Your Vendor
interview by Anastasia Safioleas photo by Barry Street
PROUD UNIFORM PARTNER OF THE BIG ISSUE VENDORS.
07 AUG 2020
SELLS THE BIG ISSUE AT BEE GEES WAY IN REDCLIFFE, BRISBANE
05
Peter
I was born and bred in Sydney near Paddington but moved around a fair bit with my parents. I’ve got a brother who is two years older than me and a sister who is seven years younger than me. I’m the middle child, unfortunately! We moved to Newcastle when I was five and then to a country town called Inverell in northern New South Wales. Then we moved to Queensland. I’ve moved around a fair bit. My childhood was pretty interesting I reckon. I got to do things others never got the chance to do. I left school at the end of Year 8 and got a job straightaway. I hated school; it was really hard for me. I’ve got a learning disability and had trouble keeping up with everybody in class. Moving around didn’t help – I went to three different schools. I did wood carting in winter and then worked in a sheltered workshop. I was there for nearly 20 years. I also did volunteer work as a firefighter and had my own radio program at a community radio station. A cousin worked there so I went in a few times to see how it worked. One night he let me do his show for an hour. I just loved it. After that, I had my own program. I did a request show, sometimes a quiz. It was fun. I was married for four-and-a-half years and I’ve got two boys. Both are in high school. Unfortunately, I don’t get to see them. It’s a bit of a long story but the last time I got to spend time with them was at Christmas at my sister’s house on the Gold Coast. I spent the week with them; it was really lovely. A vendor I used to be good friends with got me into The Big Issue. I’ve got a bunged-up shoulder and can’t do any physical work, so I thought I’d give The Big Issue a go. This was about two years ago. One day I didn’t have money to get to my regular pitch in the city so I rang The Big Issue office and asked if I could sell down in Redcliffe instead. That’s my pitch now. I love it. Everyone knows who I am. It’s a lovely spot. I look right out over the ocean – I call it my office – and the community there is really friendly. I’ve even had a few English tourists come up to me and say they haven’t seen a Big Issue since they left England. I had a really interesting conversation with one because he used to be a vendor over in England. The money I make from selling The Big Issue has helped me a lot. I can buy stuff and I can go out for dinner. And I’m hoping to save up to get myself a car or a scooter so I can get around. But the biggest thing I’m trying to save up for is a cruise around Australia. But I might need to wait a while for that… I haven’t really thought about the future. I’ll stick to selling The Big Issue and see what happens. I just take it day by day. Anything could happen tomorrow, if you know what I mean. I just go with the flow.
Streetsheet
Stories, poems and pictures by Big Issue vendors and friends
Lovely to Catch Up LIG HT SO CC ER SP OT
-BROWNE SCOTT WILSON
My customers have been ringing me and it’s been so lovely to have a chat. Darren, Jackie, Liz and Kate – I want to say thank you to you all. I’ve really missed work and seeing people every day, and this would have been a much lonelier time without them to chat to. It’s great I can catch up with my friend, Chris U – he’s also a vendor – now, too. I’ve really missed seeing people, so being able to catch up a bit is great. STEVE ELIZABETH QUAY I PERTH
Take This Seriously!
06
THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU
SCOTT W-B (IN RED) WITH JOHN, SCOTT C AND ADAM
The Big Walk
O
n 28 May, I took on a challenge to raise awareness for The Big Issue’s Street Soccer program in Ballarat. The goal was to walk nine laps around picturesque Lake Wendouree. That’s 54km in one day! Why 54km? I turned 54 on the very day of my walk and coincidentally started as the Ballarat coach on the same day seven years earlier. I started at 6.30am, in the dark, with Street Soccer player Scott C. The morning was calm, clear and fresh. Spirits were high, the friendly banter lively and the pace steady. When the sun came up, we got clear blue skies and hardly any wind. It was the perfect day. Throughout the day, I was joined by family and friends, as well as Street Soccer volunteer John. We got text messages and calls from Ballarat players and head coach George. Nine laps and 54km later, after plenty of water breaks, a few pain killers, a change of socks and many bandaids for blisters, we finally crossed the finish line at around 5.30pm. The feeling that moment was incredible. While I was exhausted and in pain, I was just so happy it was done. By the weekend the excitement had died down, and I was left with so many conflicting emotions. What next? After a huge high it was humbling to think about people who experience hardship every day. I did it by choice but what about everyone who has it rough? The walk made me mentally stronger, but I couldn’t have done it without the support of family and friends and my fellow Street Soccer players. SCOTT W-B IS THE COMMUNITY STREET SOCCER COACH FOR BALLARAT IN VICTORIA.
I don’t know about you but I’m so glad to finally be back at work. That said, I’m also acutely aware that the major problem of our time has not been cured nor stopped in its tracks. The fact is SARS-CoV-2 is a nasty, insidious virus that has long‑term health implications, and in my humble opinion, not enough people are taking it seriously enough, especially in regard to quarantine and social distancing. I have to giggle when I see someone break social distancing to chastise someone else for not adhering studiously enough. But I believe this is something we will adjust to as a species; it’s the more immediate quarantine issues that worry me. Now here I’d like to point out something, with love and affection, not judgement: most people are as weak as balsa wood when it comes to enforced loneliness. I can tell you from personal experience that after a month locked in a room on your own you tend to develop unhealthy coping strategies. But that’s a whole month, with nil contact save someone throwing food into the room twice a day, without any media or internet or distractions. Really, compare that to being stuck in your home with every conceivable amenity and
distraction and you’ll see my point. Is 14 days of quarantine really so bad when it could well save not only your life but also the lives of so many community members? Food for thought. CLAIRE LYNEHAM I CANBERRA
Ronnie’s Funnies Q: Did you hear about the guy who moved from North Korea to South Korea? A: He did it for a career change! RONNIE CNR CREEK & EAGLE STS I BRISBANE
Great to Be Back! Yes, after three months of not being able to sell our magazines on the streets, us vendors are so delighted
to see our customers again. We love what we do best with a passion, which is to sell our magazines and have conversations with you all as well. Through the pandemic, The Big Issue has been selling digital copies online. On behalf of The Big Issue and the vendors, I would like to thank each and every one of you who has bought digital copies online or taken out a subscription. We appreciate your support, which means the world to us through this tough situation. Now, all of us vendors have completed a COVID-19 training safety course. Each vendor nationally had to go through this procedure before hitting the streets to sell The Big Issue again. Your safety – and ours – comes first. Myself, I like
to count my lucky stars to be back at work. I have a positive attitude: I’m more energetic being out there selling. There are times where I see it’s still tough out there. That’s why I’m happy to be back, to make a difference in this community. I know that the economy has changed dramatically – people are still working from home, or might have lost their jobs. But I believe we can change, that we are strong. Thank you for your support and understanding. Please note that a) vendors accept card payments and b) back issues are available to buy if you missed out on a few editions. Lastly, enjoy reading this copy and have a fantastic day. DAVID L SUBIACO FARMERS MARKET I PERTH
Out of the Wood
07 AUG 2020
CHRIS V IGA HILTON I PERTH
ARES C H R IS B E S T ! H IS C H
ALL VENDOR CONTRIBUTORS TO STREETSHEET ARE PAID FOR THEIR WORK.
07
I visit the Men’s Shed in Bicton every Wednesday. I have helped build a chest, shoe rack, a spice rack and hotplates. To build the chest I used recycled pallets. We took out the nails and put the wood through a plane machine. We then glued and stapled together and then I finished it off by painting it with leftover paint.
Hearsay
“
Andrew Weldon Cartoonist compiled by Michael Epis Contributing Editor
Given the size of the stones, they must have either been dragged or moved on rollers to Stonehenge. We don’t know the exact route but at least we now have a starting point and an endpoint.
David Nash, a geomorphologist at University of Brighton, on cracking the 4500-year-old mystery around Stonehenge’s origin – they’ve discovered the sandstone megaliths come from a site 25km away. A classic case of rock and roll, ancient-style. ABC
“I thought she was very impressive…but I know nothing about her.” US President Donald Trump on why he was retweeting a tweet about a Dr Stella Immanuel, who falsely claims that hydroxychloroquine cures COVID-19, falsely claims that face masks are ineffective, and also that the Illuminati are using a witch to destroy the world via abortion, gay marriage and children’s toys. On the balance of probability, the last claim is false too.
08
THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU
THE WASHINGTON POST I US
“The Truth will set us all Free… This woman is my hero.” Madonna, also tweeting about Dr Stella Immanuel. So maybe that bit about the Illuminati is true after all? TWITTER
“Rationality will reappear from someone at some point.”
Microsoft founder and latter-day philanthropist Bill Gates (making up for his sin of inflicting Windows on the world), speaking at the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy about the worldwide response to the coronavirus pandemic, and in particular the US. Wonder who he was referring to… FORBES I US
was one of a trove of correspondence between the two during those tumultuous times, just recently released, after much delay. NAA.GOV.AU
“From its accidental birth after the supercar ban to its decades in a shed surrounded by chicken wire, to its colour scheme that honours a local chocolate company, it’s a uniquely Aussie story surrounded by rumours and legend.” Grays classic car specialist Rian Gaffy on the 1973 Ford Falcon XA GT, painted in the colours of an Old Gold chocolate bar, which was kept in a barn covered in chicken wire, riddled with rust and rat droppings – and sold for $300,909 at auction! There was no guarantee the car would start. NT NEWS
“Gee, didn’t I get it wrong about Johnny – not. They were trying to be smart-arses. Just treating the whole thing as a joke. They had no regard for the law as they had no regard for biosecurity laws.” MP Barnaby Joyce on revelations from a trial in the UK, where actor Johnny Depp is suing a newspaper for defamation. The court has heard about Depp’s headline-making visit to Australia in 2015, when his then wife Amber Heard illegally smuggled in her dogs, Pistol and Boo – who Joyce threatend to euthanise. HERALD-SUN
“From your point of view, this would have been a real bouncer and not at all easy to play.” Martin Charteris, then private secretary to the Queen, to then Governor-General John Kerr, on 8 October 1975. Charteris was discussing the difficult position Kerr would have been in had the then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam asked him to sign into law appropriation bills – granting the government money – that had been rejected by the Senate. The letter
“I can honestly say, looking back on my career, I don’t think anybody really cared to help us. I don’t think anyone jumped in to ask us if we were okay. As long as we were performing, I don’t think anything else really mattered.” US Olympian Michael Phelps on feeling like a medal-producing swimming machine, during the time he won a record 28 Olympic medals across five Games. THE NEW YORK TIMES I US
20 Questions by Little Red
01 How many countries are in Africa:
41, 54 or 85? 02 Which plant family do apples, pears,
quinces and peaches all belong to? 03 What is said to be the first feature-
length animated film in full colour, released in 1937? 04 Which team won this year’s FA Cup? 05 What is the only kind of bird that
can fly backwards? 06 What is the current minimum age of
criminal responsibility in Australia? 07 What name is Robyn Fenty better
known by? 08 What kind of cargo is a collier ship
designed to carry? 09 What does the Indonesian word kopi
mean? 10 Which US city has now become the
Overheard by Jimmy of Melbourne, Vic. It’s bad being behind the eight ball, even worse being down the gurgler, but gee, it’s tough being behind the gurgler.
steps of the hotel.” Yaraka Hotel owner Chris Gimblett on why emus Kevin and Carol have been banned from his western Queensland pub for bad behaviour. They’ve been stealing visitors’ toast, drinking their coffee and even broke in behind the bar. CNN I US
“The bizarre thing about what we do is that we use the exact same tanks and methods as you would for brewing beer – it’s just for a different purpose.” Angus Irwin, managing director at biological fertiliser company Neutrog, on plans for a tourism centre at their SA plant, so you too can view the brewing of the perfect
blend of bugs and chicken poo. Thankfully there’ll be no tastings. THE ADELAIDE ADVERTISER
“Using shorter, cooler washes is a simple way everyone can make their clothes last longer and keep them out of landfill.” Dr Lucy Cotton (yes, really), from Leeds University, on a new study that will have you in a spin cycle – and make your clothes last longer and help the environment at the same time. THE INDEPENDENT I UK
focal point of Black Lives Matter protests, with clashes between protestors and the military? 11 Which 1982 animated musical film
starred Mia Farrow, Jeff Bridges and Alan Arkin? 12 What is the second-biggest city in
France? 13 Who was the teddy bear named
after? 14 Which film was Olivia de Havilland
best known for? Bonus point if you can name her character. 15 How many days straight is AFL
being played in the new rejigged schedule? 16 According to the ABS, what is
“This quiet period is likely the longest and largest dampening of human-caused seismic noise since we started monitoring the Earth in detail using vast monitoring networks of seismometers.” Dr Stephen Hicks, from Imperial College London, on why the planet hasn’t been shaking so much since lockdown. The lack of human activity during lockdown caused a 50 per cent drop in human-linked seismic activity between March and May.
the median age of the Australian population? 17 Which musician recently performed
a show titled Idiot Prayer, on their own at London’s Alexandra Palace? 18 Who is the Chief Minister of
the Northern Territory, up for re‑election in August? 19 How many noses/tentacles do slugs
have? 20 The name of which well-known
song means ‘Come By Here’ in the creole Gullah language?
SCIENCEDAILY.COM
FREQUENTLY OVERHEAR TANTALISING TIDBITS? DON’T WASTE THEM ON YOUR FRIENDS SHARE THEM WITH THE WORLD AT SUBMISSIONS@BIGISSUE.ORG.AU
ANSWERS ON PAGE 43
07 AUG 2020
“We’re really behind the gurgler.”
“When they finish breakfast at the caravan park they come down to the hotel, and last week they figured out how to walk up the
09
EAR2GROUND
My Word
by Katerina Cosgrove @katcosgrove
M
y first grey hair – shy, springy, with a life of its own – became visible when I was only 20, gallivanting around Europe, the Middle East and North Africa with an enormous backpack, destroyed sandals and dark masses of curls. It was a new travelling acquaintance who spotted it, right in the centre of my forehead, then promptly took it between his thumb and forefinger and pulled. I wanted to leave it there. I liked the idea of being somehow older and wiser than him, though I was neither. Yet as I grew older and more and more people commented on my greyness, I engaged in a constant battle with it. Some years I experimented with leaving it be, until it became a silvery-white halo worthy of a medieval saint. No, not a saint. Crone, hag, witch... these were the words I’d internalised. Other years I doggedly forged on, with henna at home, shop-bought dyes and then, when those didn’t work, eye-wateringly expensive appointments every three weeks – a sacred religious rite in the salon. In 2016 I was done. My sister had died six years earlier, of the same cancer I’d been diagnosed with, and I was sick of the time and money I spent, as well as the niggling fear that all the chemicals on my scalp were hastening my own end. I kept going back to my hairdresser and each time she would look at me with sympathy and say: “You don’t have to keep going with this, you know.” This was the time when I looked like a skunk. The next stage was even more horrific. She tried to soften the process by using balayage and colouring my ends an orangey, brassy blonde, “so that the grey will blend in”. Regret is too weak a term. “Grombre” – grey and ombre – it was not. I actually looked like a bleached orangutan. Enough. The year-long transitional period passed and my hair is now gloriously grey. Not only grey, but silver, pearly, luminous and shimmering. My hard-won acceptance of my raw, unadorned self has been a
boon in this time of COVID-19. Many salons are open, but lots of people are cutting and colouring their hair at home. There’s been a surge in how-to videos on every aspect of taming your tresses. Before the virus hit, my grey mane had become an easy way to meet like-minded strangers as I went about my day, like towing around a cute baby or a white fluffy dog. Silver-haired sisters would stop me in the street to exclaim over my hair. Even middleaged women without silver locks asked me how I did it. Men of all ages complimented me. I was surprised and charmed. It’s a long way from the wasted decades of being disgusted by my stubborn, wiry grey hairs, of seeing them as markers of age, illness or death. The week before my sister died, she had a hairdresser and beauty therapist at her home to colour her greys and eyebrows. She said she didn’t want her family to be ashamed of her when she was in her coffin. Before her funeral, I sat in the salon chair, in an empty, silent shop, looking in the mirror. I felt the familiar stinging of hydrogen peroxide on my scalp. I didn’t know whether my tears were from pain or grief, or both. My loyal hairdresser opened just for me, so I wouldn’t have to face the indignity of going to my sister’s funeral with white regrowth. I didn’t seek to question my own feelings at the time, the illogical shame I shared with my sister. My overwhelming need, even in mourning, was to make sure I was acceptable to the gaze of others. Yet this is the culture we come from. Where the normal, natural stages of ageing are hidden, erased, underground. Now, in isolation on my rural property, nobody sees my hair except my family, trees and native animals, the farmers at the local markets, the delivery man. They don’t care. Or is it that I don’t care? I really don’t care anymore. And what a freedom this is. My teenage daughter still seems a little bemused by my hair, especially as it’s started growing past my shoulders into a wild, luxuriant, messy mane. “Mum, you’re starting to look like a witch,” she says. I pause, stare at her. She smiles. “A lovely witch. Trust me, that’s a very good thing!”
Katerina Cosgrove is the author of two novels and two novellas. She has written for local and overseas publications and co-judged the Nib Award since 2014.
11
Katerina Cosgrove is gloriously grey – silver, pearly, luminous and shimmering – and it’s been a pandemic boon. But, she admits, it took a while to grow on her.
07 AUG 2020
50 Shades of Grey Hair
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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU
KATY PERRY NOSE WHAT SHE WANT S
is learning to be herself After a dark few years, Katy Perry Smith about pregnancy, rah Sa to up s en op e Sh . ain ag er all ov rning to smile once more. mental health struggles and lea by Sarah Smith Music Editor
appropriation and reinvention fixation, Perry – born Katheryn Hudson to Pentecostal pastors, Mary and Keith – faced a loaded backlash upon the release of her last album, Witness. During that cycle, Perry told press that she was ready to reveal the real Katheryn Hudson and, with a fresh new pixie cut, went about promoting the more “conscious” version of Katy that had apparently been hiding away beneath the bubblegum aesthetic. To do so, she launched a Big Brother-style live stream event called “Witness World Wide”, where 49 million viewers watched Perry eat, cook, sleep, do yoga and hold a therapy session in which she candidly discussed battles with depression, alcohol and her difficult childhood. But the world didn’t buy it, neither figuratively nor literally. Neither did the critics. While Witness debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, it soon fell away, selling less than one million copies. More tellingly, though, the record’s singles ‘Chained to the Rhythm’, ‘Bon Appétit’ and ‘Swish Swish’ simply didn’t connect, none of them reaching No. 1 in the US. When you’ve achieved the kind of success that Perry did so early on in her career – equalling Michael
13
aty Perry has an uncanny knack for making you feel like she’s your best friend. “I want to know about you Sarah – Sarah, question: what have you been craving?” Only a handful of minutes into our interview Perry, who is almost full term in her first pregnancy when we speak, wants to know all about mine. Eschewing the distant diva archetype in favour of gal-who-might-just-crash-your-Friday-night-Zoomparty (something she did in May to surprise fans for the launch of her single ‘Daisies’), Perry consistently finds connection beyond the kitsch. It’s a skill that has cemented the singer as one of the biggest pop stars of our generation, and helped her maintain a fierce and loyal following of fans – the most hardcore of which are known as KatyCats – that have stuck thick, even when things have not gone to plan. Like, in the wake of her ill-fated “purposeful pop” reinvention of 2017. No stranger to controversy, having been accused variously over the course of her career of cultural
07 AUG 2020
@sarah_smithie
AD Y BE A S KATY MA A LS O T SHE’S U B , N W E CLO N O L U F A HOPE
Jackson’s record of five No. 1 singles off the one album for 2010’s game-changing Teenage Dream – it’s hard to maintain those dizzying heights. But the soft response to Witness felt more personal. After a decade of adoration, the world had seemingly turned on Katy Perry. “I think [back then] I was still getting really high off of my own supply,” Perry laughs when reflecting on the last album. Speaking to The Big Issue from her home in Los Angeles, which she shares with fiancé actor Orlando Bloom, the singer admits that the reality check was a long time coming – one that led to a period of intense self-reflection, and her new album Smile. “I was really at the precipice of my own personal change when I was putting out Witness and I was, like, Man, I don’t know if I can go on this trajectory anymore. I felt like I was stuck in this loop of sorts: write a record, go on tour, fans, audience, validation, celebrity, more, more, more!” she says, with both a hint of humour and despondency. “I don’t really have that [desperation] anymore because my expectations weren’t 100 per cent met last time and that was what kind of caused the shift in me. And it was a necessary shift…the time between Witness and Smile has pushed me to evolve into a more dimensional human being than just a thirsty pop star.” But this personal evolution came at a price. In addition to temporarily splitting from Bloom in 2017, Perry slipped into a deep depression as she dealt with the reality of failure. “A lot of Smile is about growing through that pain. And now, obviously, I’m hopeful [about the new record], but I think I’m not putting everything of my worth into this basket.” Perry attributes this shift from thirsty pop star to satiated singer to re-prioritising what was important in her life, and also the support of Bloom, who she says is always there for a reality check. “I have a great partner who is very real with me, and isn’t with me because he is a Katy Perry fan. Obviously we support each other, but he is interested in my spiritual, mental and sometimes physical evolution,” she laughs. “And that’s what we are to each other – we’re really real to each other. So that was very helpful. But this shake forced me to get grounded.” Staying grounded when you’re one of the biggest pop stars in the world is easier said than done. The fact is, Perry has a new record to promote and that means talking to strangers, like me, for hours on end about every aspect of her life. At the time of our interview a quick google of her name reveals hundreds of headlines speculating about Perry’s due date, her baby’s name, whether Jennifer Aniston is godmotherto-be. The idea, then, of having to maintain two
versions of yourself – one private (Katheryn Hudson) and one public (Katy Perry) – makes sense as a kind of survival mechanism. Although, these days, Perry says the two versions are closer than ever. “I think that they [Katheryn and Katy] are both now a little bit more grown up so they can hang out,” she muses. “I think, when I started singing at nine and essentially started grooming my Katy Perry life I was really trying to escape a reality I didn’t really love.” That reality is one she has spoken about at length over her career. Perry was raised in an ultraconservative Evangelical family, who picketed rock concerts and didn’t allow popular music or literature in the household. Her first “conversion” of sorts came upon hearing a Queen song, age 15, at a friend’s house. But the spectre of such an upbringing has loomed large over her adult life, and while the world watched Perry evolve from Christian pop singer through countless versions of “Katy”, she has been undergoing her own personal processing.
cover art for Smile is a tempting one: dressed as a clown – replete with red nose – Perry is slumped forward, head resting on her hands, staring glumly at her fans. Katy Perry is the archetypal Sad Clown. But the image, she says, is more hopeful than that. “I think that this journey is about getting my smile back and getting my playfulness back and getting that purity back,” she says. “A smile is an incredible physical indicator of your wellbeing and you can read someone by the way they smile… [With the cover] I’m not going to shove happiness down anyone’s throat. It’s more of hopefulness – it’s very melancholy, but I’m very aware of the seriousness of your mental wellbeing and how you have to look after it. I can’t visit fantasy land as much as I could in my twenties, because the longer you live the more real life gets.” And Smile is a hopeful album. The early singles – ‘Never Really Over’, ‘Smile’ and even ‘Harleys in Hawaii’ – recall, both musically and in their simple themes of gratitude and triumphing over adversity, her most
ubiquitous hits like ‘Roar’ and ‘Firework’. It’s territory that’s always been kind to Perry, and in that sense it’s both a return to something familiar and an attempt at realising a more evolved version of herself. While there is kitsch and playfulness aplenty in the imagery and film clips, there are no songs about cunnilingus or Taylor Swift. It’s a nod to the past, and a step towards the future. While Perry is adamant she is no longer thirsty for validation, she is human, and still seeks an authentic confirmation of her decisions. Although, these days, the singer tells me that acknowledgement is coming from all the right places. “When fans write me letters and tell me what these songs mean to them or how they help in whatever circumstances – fuck a number one. Who cares! It’s about that – it’s about changing a life, not hitting a number and that’s become really real to me and that’s how I measure my success. I measure my own success on my own happiness and the resonation of the songs with the listeners.” KATY PERRY’S SMILE IS OUT 28 AUGUST.
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“Not to be dark, or anything,” she continues, “but that’s why you see a lot of artists that don’t live to be Grandma and Grandpa. Like, they have unfortunate endings a lot of them, because eventually the pain that helped them start creating turns against them. But if you don’t fucking deal with it – it’s not going to help you write the songs. It’s one of those things that I learned in the last two-and-a-half years: that I don’t have to stay in pain to be what I feel is a valid contributing artist.” Perry is a notoriously hard worker in an industry that is insatiably demanding, especially for women. Ever since Madonna vogued from Modern Marilyn on ‘Material Girl’ to Saucy Lapsed Catholic on ‘Like a Prayer’, the expectations on female pop stars to constantly reinvent themselves has become normalised. Album cycles blur into one another, as world tours and media blitzes stretch out over years. The pressures of this lifestyle were captured on Perry’s 2012 documentary Part of Me – one of its most memorable scenes sees her pre-show crying uncontrollably, quite literally up until the very second she is spat up onto the stage via a scissor lift, beaming beatifically at her screaming fans. The emotional link between this moment, and the
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PHOTOS BY EMI MUSIC
It’s one of those things that I learned in the last two-and-a-half years: that I don’t have to stay in pain to be what I feel is a valid contributing artist.
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FR IE N D, M Y B EST ‘H E WA SY SO U LM AT E’ M N BOB B O W EN O – JA M ES
MAIN PHOTO ©LOUISE HAYWOOD-SCHIEFER/LHSCHIEFER.COM/2017. INSET PHOTOS BY GETTY, INSP, DIMITRI KOUTSOMYTIS, CLINT IMAGES AND THE BIG ISSUE FOUNDATION UK
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Rest in Peace Bob James Bowen was sleeping rough on the streets of London, battling drug addiction, when he was adopted by an injured stray cat. He named him Bob. As James nursed the ginger moggy back to health, he found a reason to get up in the morning. They became inseparable – and local celebrities, busking and selling The Big Issue. Their tale was turned into a series of bestselling books, a film and a cartoon series. Here, James pays tribute to his best friend Bob, who died in June, the cat who saved his life.
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have said my final goodbye to Bob. He’d been at my side for 13 years, since I found him injured in the hallway of my building in Tottenham, North London, one evening in March 2007. He has passed away at the age of 14 or so. But of course, I never knew what his actual date of birth was. What really mattered was that Bob became much more than a cat or mere companion to me. He was my best friend, my soulmate. My brother, almost. Two slightly broken souls, we transformed each other’s lives. So it has been very hard to accept that he will no longer be around. I still can’t quite believe he won’t be a daily presence in my life, purring away at my side always. But as the realisation that life will now go on without him slowly sinks in, so too does something more positive. All of us suffer loss at some point. It’s inevitable. Death is a part of life. But as we grieve we also start to see that in losing our loved ones we can gain huge consolations. During these past few heartbreaking weeks, I have come to see that Bob left behind many of them. Loss can throw a spotlight on the sometimes unexpected depth of love people felt towards the one who has left us. That’s certainly been the case with Bob. To say he was loved is a gigantic understatement. The outpouring of emotion that
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1 JAMES SELLS WITH BOB 2 BOB GETS A ROYAL PAT FROM KATE MIDDLETON 3 HIGH FIVIN’ BOB 4 ON THE PROWL 5 JAMES AND BOB WITH LUKE TREADAWAY, WHO PLAYED JAMES IN A STREET CAT NAMED BOB 6 BROTHERS, ALMOST
Another thing I’ve seen this past month is how moments of sadness and personal grief have the capacity to bring out the best in people. Everyone who has suffered a loss knows this. There’s always someone who steps up to the mark, who emerges as a surprising source of strength. In this case I’ve been blown away – not just by the personal support I’ve had from friends and fans all over the world – but by the way in which Bob’s memory is already inspiring people to do good. For instance, I was touched beyond words to learn that, in the wake of Bob’s passing, a Japanese activist and cat lover, Tsuyoshi Inaba, who is a co-chair of the board of The Big Issue Foundation in Japan, has announced his intention to create Bob House, a homeless shelter where people and their pet can stay together. I can’t think of a better way to honour his memory. Bob saved my life; it’s a solace to know that he may save others. Bob never failed me. by James Bowen with thanks to Garry Jenkins
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Aussie Bob I read on Facebook that Street Cat Bob had died, and I felt really sad. I feel sorry for James Bowen – he’s had Bob for 13 years or more. He’s not going to know what to do without him. Bob was his whole reason for being – he helped James turn his life around because he was something, someone, to look after. When I was first diagnosed with depression, I was living by myself in a little room and selling The Big Issue. Kirstie in Vendor Support told me the story of Bob and about James, and I thought Well, okay, all the other vendors have dogs – I’m going to get a cat! And that’s why I got my Cougar. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. He’s good company, good for me – and pets are good for your mental health, it’s a proven fact. Cougar knows when I’m upset and comes and sits with me – he senses when there’s something wrong. Cougar doesn’t sell The Big Issue with me anymore – he’s retired because he’s 10 this year – but my other cats do. Missy is seven this year, and Oreo will be three. They join me on pitch in a pram, and they love it. They go to sleep or watch the customers go past, waiting for their pats. The customers love them, too, and the cats improve my life heaps. Bob rescued James, and James rescued Bob. That’s pretty much like Cougar with me. I met James when he came to Melbourne a few years ago, and dropped into The Big Issue here. He signed my copy of his book: “To Australia’s cat vendor!” Cheryl sells The Big Issue in Melbourne, alongside Missy and Oreo.
07 AUG 2020
I hadn’t truly appreciated how much of a paw print he had left on the world.
C H E RY
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COURTESY OF THE BIG ISSUE UK/BIGISSUE.COM. FIRST PUBLISHED IN EDITION #1418. PHOTO BY JAMES BRAUND
followed the news of his death was immense. I received tens of thousands of messages online, so many that it will take me months to read them all. The offices of Hodder & Stoughton, who published A Street Cat Named Bob, the first book about Bob and me, back in 2012, were inundated with cards, flowers and gifts in Bob’s memory. Almost all of the messages talked of how deeply Bob had touched their lives, how much joy he had brought them. How he had inspired them. Some left me shaking my head in wonder. One lady wrote about the impact Bob made at a prison in the US. Reading about his – and my – redemption had helped inmates rehabilitate themselves, in many cases by finding work with animal charities or rescue centres. I hadn’t truly appreciated how much of a paw print he had left on the world. What a life he led as our book became an international bestseller, then a movie. What things he saw, what places he visited. Foreign book signings, starring as himself in two films – the second, A Gift from Bob, will be released next year. Someone reminded me a week or two ago of an old saying: rather than crying that someone’s life is over, we should smile at the fact that it ever happened. They were quite right, of course. It won’t come immediately, but one day I will be able to think back on what happened to me and Bob and smile the broadest, most brilliant, smile. It was a miracle really.
The Big Picture
Face to Face Whether we are young or old, rich or poor, living in the grandest cities or the most remote locations – our shared humanity unites us. These photos – from the Portrait of Humanity 2020 shortlist – prove it. by Michael Epis Contributing Editor
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s the world around us adapts to this new normal, humanity, our shared humanity, has never been more important. Individuality, community and unity are on proud display in the shortlist for the 2020 Portraits of Humanity photo competition. A selection of the shortlisted entries, published here, demonstrate the ways we are different, but more importantly, the ways we are the same. Since the days when all of humanity would gather around a fire every night, religion has been a uniting force (although two religions can divide people), and that has never been more true than for this extraordinary church in Ethiopia, Abuna Yemata Guh, built into the side of a mountain. Keshi Assefa Hagos is the priest, celebrating mass in the church cave, continuing a 1500-year-old tradition on the site. The priest is barefoot, as are all his parishioners, who have to take off their shoes before they make the arduous – and potentially fatal – 45-minute climb up the sheer mountain face and into the secluded church. One legend has it that the church was carved into the mountain so that the devotees could be closer to God. Religion comes in many forms, and Eustorgio Payaguaje (see over) is a taita – a yage shaman, yage (or ayahuasca) being a hallucinogenic plant in South
America, which brings him closer to God. The plants have been a part of religious life in Colombia for even longer than Abuna Yemata Guh has been around. “I would only believe in a god who knows how to dance,” German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote – and dancing is what these halmonis (Korean grandmothers) like to do. Dancing can be communal (like a corroboree), it can be couples cheek to cheek, or it can be grouped individuals (a strange phenomenon that started with hippies in the 60s), but any which way dancing brings people together. These New York Korean grandmas know that dancing will put a smile on your face and a spring in your step. Speaking of smiles, there’s no better smile than one that comes from a shared moment, all the more so if it is shared across the generations, like this one captured between a young woman and an older woman in Chennai, India. And when it comes to shared humanity, just look to the kids in Napoli, who can gather and have fun at a moment’s notice – with or without crazy dress-up Carnivale costumes and face paint. FOR MORE, GO TO PORTRAITOFHUMANITY.CO.
photo by Mauro De Bettio
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Keshi Assefa Hagos leans against the wall of his Orthodox Ethiopian church, carved into a mountain overlooking a valley.
Korean grandmothers dance the night away in New York City. photo by An Rong Xu
Two women share a moment in Chennai, India. photo by Udayan Sankar Pal
Taita Eustorgio Payaguaje, a Colombian shaman, holds an ayahuasca ceremony. photo by Daniel Fernรกndez
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Children dressed up for Carnivale in Napoli, Italy. photo by Tiberio Sorvillo
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Maxim, 16, is a member of the Ebony Horse Club, in the unlikely locale of Brixton, London. photo by Vivek Vadoliya
Letter to My Younger Self
It Felt Like a Distant Dream Singer Christine Anu on turning 50, her three decades in the music biz and Black Lives Matter. by Anastasia Safioleas Contributing Editor @anast
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s a 16-year-old I was a very sheltered person living in central Queensland. I was shy – quite insecure – living in a household with a lot of turmoil and waiting to find out how I could get voted “off the island”. Like in Survivor. I really wanted to leave because I didn’t want to go down the rabbit hole that results from living with domestic violence and not having many opportunities in the community you’re raised in. I was always on the lookout for ways to chase my childhood dream of being on the stage and performing. Was I equipped for that? Absolutely not. I never went to a ballet class. I never had a singing lesson. I never picked up an instrument. Are there any musicians in my family? No. It felt like a distant dream. I have two siblings that weren’t raised by Mum, and then the five of us that were raised together, so two brothers and five of us girls. It’s a lot of different personalities. When you have siblings and you get to certain moments in life where all of you come together, like when Dad passed away, everybody experiences that moment in a very different way and it becomes a point of contention between every single family member. It’s great when you have a big family – at the core is always love and understanding – but it has its moments. The turmoil [in our household] was witnessing lots of arguments and quite a
TOP: IN MOULIN ROUGE! BOTTOM: AT SYDNEY'S 2000 PARALYMPICS
07 AUG 2020
and be not dependent on government welfare – “sit-down money”. Until I had my son, I didn’t realise I had been striving for that. I joined Bangarra Dance Company the same year that Rodney King happened. [King, a Black man, was beaten by police in Los Angeles, sparking deadly riots in 1992.] A year after the riots, it was The International Year for the World’s Indigenous Peoples and we were touring LA. There was still a curfew, and I just remember how scary it was. We’d go into parts of LA where the riots had happened to use dance studios there and it was frightening. Fast forward to what just happened with George Floyd. I cannot believe history is repeating in my lifetime. It’s still here. It’s real and it’s still in my life. When I was a little girl in Brisbane I remember going to the 1980s version of Centrelink with my parents. I was only little but I could hear how the people behind the counter would speak down to my parents. I would feel belittled for them. As a child, that’s a big thing to feel like that for your parents. [Today] my son is darker skinned than me. When he was a little boy we’d go to the supermarket in Redfern. He would treat every trip to the supermarket like a child does, as this big excursion, so he’d run up and down the aisles looking for the Milo tin or the Tim Tams. The security guard would follow him around the aisles. This would happen every time we’d go to a supermarket. How old was he? Eight! This has happened throughout his life. He used to be a bit of a smart alec but I think he’s had enough of these experiences where he’s learned to just, you know, tone it down a little when he’s talking to authority because they don’t like it when you’re being a smart-arse. He’s numb to it. He says, “This is the society we live in Mum.” I don’t find it acceptable. This is why Black Lives Matter – I live it and my son lives it. When I turned 50 it was like, Do I retire? Men get a bigger advantage in this industry than women. Am I going to be judged on my appearance and not be able to get my next gig because I’m looking too old? Do I worry about that? Of course, I do! But I’m also against ageism in this industry. I loved my parents dearly but when I turned 22 I was just like, Who are you? Then when I had my son and my daughter, I understood that human beings aren’t perfect. Yet I’ve given myself such a hard time about having to be this perfect person. My early life as an artist was fraught with not knowing who I was. But having hit 50, I’d say Don’t worry about it 16-year-old Christine. It’s okay. No‑one’s perfect. Everything’s gonna be alright.
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PHOTOS BY FERNANDO BARRAZA, ALAMY, GETTY
lot of harm being done to people that you love. It was constant. You never knew when it was going to happen, so I was living on adrenaline – that fight or flight response. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I was diagnosed with anxiety. I had a nervous breakdown and went and did these classes with other people who were also going through a breakdown. I remember thinking, Oh my God, I’ve actually been going through this exact thing since I was 16. I started dancing when I was 17. The day I finished my HSC exam, Mum and my sister and I hopped on a train to Sydney so that I could audition for NAISDA (National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association). I ended up being there for five years. People who dance start when they’re three years old and I started dancing when I was 17. I then went straight to Bangarra Dance Theatre and then signed a record deal with Michael Gudinski at Mushroom Records. Singing with Neil Murray was my first time as a singer. He saw me singing at school and gave me a job as backing vocalist in his band Neil Murray and the Rainmakers. I did that for eight months, then I graduated and Neil’s manager introduced me to three different record companies. When I signed with Mushroom, I had only been singing for eight months. I look back on my career and I look at where I am now and I’m still that same person. I’ve done so many different types of media and entertainment [including movies Moulin Rouge! and Matrix Reloaded, the musical Rent and performing at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics], but my story is still the same. I’ve always had the same message, regardless of where you see me. I’ve always been a Torres Strait Islander woman. And I get blown away that my music and my performing and my storytelling can still have that effect on people no matter their age. That is worth a whole gold nugget. The value of that is so enriching. That’s why I do what I do. I love that. I wasn’t in a really great relationship with my son’s father when I found myself expecting. My son was about four months old when I decided to leave. I had to have discussions about how this was going to affect my career. But the main thing for me was, could I afford my baby if I was going to end up being a single mum? That’s what I was concerned about most. By that point I owned a house, I could support my business and, most importantly, I could get out of a domestically violent relationship and raise my son where he wouldn’t have to see how I was being treated. So that was a big moment for me – being able to be that independent. At that point, I think I was the only person in my family to actually own a house
Ricky
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The higher your household income, the higher your chances of baking sourdough.
by Ricky French @frenchricky
Let Them Eat Banana Cake
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ust when we thought it was safe to stop baking, Melbourne put on its second lockdown. For six weeks from Wednesday 8 July we were ordered to the kitchen to take an urgent inventory of flour, baking powder, caster sugar, vanilla essence, chocolate chips, eggs and butter. This is serious stuff. The other day I came home from doing the shopping and was admonished for buying too small a packet of flour. “Five hundred grams? Is that all you got? We need WAAAAAYYY more than that!” I’ve noticed that the intensity of baking strongly correlates with social status. The higher your household income, the higher your chances of baking sourdough. Sourdough is aptly named. It will fight you at every step. Maybe coaxing sourdough to rise is a bit like getting that old car you’ve been tinkering with in the garage to start: one has a starter, the other has a starter motor. For the record, during lockdown I have tried to start neither old car nor bread. Like most of the boring middle class, our household is more devoted to banana bread – the metaphorical white bread of suburban baking. Everyone loves making it, and we used to love making it too, until we started arguing over the recipe. I decided to try a new one and found that I liked it quite a lot. The recipe I found was about 95 per cent sugar. “That’s not bread,” came the howls of protest. “That’s cake.” “Well, so what if it is?” I replied, feeling chastised. “Listen to yourself: you’re telling me off for making cake!” “At least I’m being realistic. You’re emptying a kilo of sugar and some squished banana onto a baking tray and calling it bread.” See what lockdown has brought us to? Times are tough, alright. Melbourne has decided that schools are safe, kind of, except when they aren’t, and we’re finding it hard to keep up with the latest proscriptions. Are we supposed to send our son to school this week,
or is it remote learning? Or is it school holidays, or was that last week? Oh, the holidays were extended. Yes, just like everyone’s holiday from life as we knew it – it’s been extended. The upshot is my son and his two cousins are here this week playing Minecraft, under my official watch as caregiver. “You shouldn’t let them play computer games all day,” I’m told. “Get them to do something productive.” I agree entirely. That’s why the kids and I have a deal. I let them play Minecraft all morning then they do something productive: they make me lunch. It’s a good arrangement. The menu is fairly consistent. Toasted sandwiches. Suits me fine. They know my order: baked beans, plastic cheese and a mix of chilli and barbecue sauce on the side. The routine has become so entrenched that the cousins now show up to our house in the morning with their own loaf of bread. They also possibly do that because as far as I can tell the only foods they eat are bread and pasta. To get a bit of variety into their diet I’m going to take them to McDonald’s for lunch tomorrow – drive-through of course. There are only four reasons to leave the house according to our Premier Dan Andrews, and getting a Big Mac is definitely one of them. We all know the drill: work, shopping, exercise and care-giving – that’s the law, as I keep reminding the kids. “What about checking the mailbox?” one of them asked. It’s a good question, and I’ve put in a call to the Premier’s office. The truth is I love having the kids around. I love my toasted sandwich and I love pretending I know what Minecraft Bed Wars is. The dog is entertained, the cat gets plenty of attention and I sit in the study wondering why they’re so quiet all of a sudden. They better not be making sourdough.
Ricky is a writer, musician and baker.
by Fiona Scott-Norman @fscottnorman
PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND
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bstract question, but work with me here: if being caught mid-pandemic was a colour, what colour would it be? Nothing vibrant, that’s for sure. Not a K-Pop princess pink or high-vis tradie yellow, not the bad-boy come-hither green of absinthe nor the funky 70s kitchen orange of a free-range chicken egg yolk. Oh no. Nothing with promise. It has to be bland with an undercurrent of existential threat. It’s got to capture our blank evenings spent scrolling Netflix. The turgidity of infinite snacks. The inertia of a stalled economy. The neck sweat of unemployment. The sheer Kafkaesque horror of the Japanese funfair executives demonstrating how to ride their 70-metre-drop roller-coaster in the time of COVID (wearing masks and silent as the grave), accompanied by the exhortation to “scream inside your heart”. This requires quite the mood board. Morrissey black? Purgatory puce? Stasi beige? Death-eater greige? I think I’ve invented the world’s most dismal Pinterest account. You’re welcome. We are all goths now. But you’ve got to do something to keep your pecker up. It’s dawning on us all that this thing is going to drag on forever, like The Bold and the Beautiful. Continuously unfolding, updating every day, emotionally overwrought, hinting at resolutions that never come, and chockers with deeply weird plot twists which would never happen in The Real World. We are all searching for stories. Ways to order our thoughts and time. To wrest comfort and meaning from dreary chaos. One delight on Twitter is 2020 Bingo, where the sheer apocalyptic nuttiness of the year is contextualised by tweets like: “Did not have Madonna endorsing the Demon Sperm doctor on my 2020 Bingo card either.” I mean, who did? Also keen on how folk are popping out synopses for hypothetical COVID-themed Seinfeld episodes. This is from @LostSeinfeld: “Jerry must decide which acquaintances are
‘bubble-worthy’. Elaine wants to ask out a barista but has never seen him without a face mask. George hires an actor to pretend to be him on Zoom calls. Kramer’s seasonal allergies make him a pariah.” I kiss my fingers. Straw into gold. What a great take. I’ve got my own stories running. I’m absolutely reframing myself as some kind of warrior mermaid hero because I’m swimming in The Bay (current water temperature around 10 degrees. Thank you. Yes, I am epic). I’m an explorer, roaming my new neighbourhood and uncovering vast swathes of green amid the urban decay – and last night found a fresh section of pavement in which someone had dug out not their name for posterity, as is traditional, but “COVID sucks”. I’m an entertainer, frocking up to teach a Zoom writing class in my mother’s lemon yellow and white 1970s crimplene safari suit, because it’s easier to keep people’s attention if you’re a clown, and it’s easier to clown in a costume. Grandiose? Oh my goodness yes. But so what, eh? I’m choosing my own corona adventures, because I’m not mad‑keen on what’s on offer. Go bespoke, because the current off-the-shelf narratives are fear-based rubbish requiring you to panic, judge, pop on a tinfoil hat or (apparently) run without a mask into Bunnings, abuse staff and rabbit on about your “rights” while endangering people’s lives. Or talk over police at a checkpoint, blah blah “rights”, and drive through while gloating. What colour is that? White Girl Privilege. A classic. So yes. Pick your colours. Choose your mood. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gold, perhaps. Maybe Wonder Woman scarlet. Or – happy to share – Norah Scott-Norman lemon and white.
Fiona is a writer and comedian who loves a bit of colourful language.
07 AUG 2020
Colour Me Goth
We are all searching for stories. Ways to order our thoughts and time. To wrest comfort and meaning from dreary chaos.
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Megan Washington
Music
Holy Batflowers Megan Washington has granted herself the freedom to go batshit crazy on her third album, a serendipitous COVID collab. by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a VietnameseAustralian writer based in Melbourne.
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egan Washington’s new album wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for COVID-19. She had been working on the record for some time, in between composing music for film and TV, and voicing a character on the beloved ABC Kids show Bluey. This album’s story, though, really started last November, when she was in Los Angeles for a workshop. There, she met up with her friend, the producer and songwriter Rabit, to lay down a track, which she then brought back to Australia to work on over Christmas. In February, just before the world transformed completely, she flew back through LA on her way to Berlin with her husband, film director Nick Waterman, and had an unexpected opportunity. “We booked our tickets via LA because at the time coronavirus was only in Asia,” she says. “Of course we missed our connection because our plane was delayed, and so I had 12 hours in LA. So I rang Rabit at 11 o’clock on a Saturday night and said, ‘Surprise, I’m in Los Angeles, can I Uber to you and can we track the vocals for ‘Batflowers’?’ So we tracked the song, and then I flew to Berlin, and then the world shut down.” Arriving home to a new reality, Washington
realised that, strangely, there were suddenly fewer barriers than ever – and that the serendipity that allowed her to record the title track of her third record didn’t have to stop there. “I was like, ‘It was amazing that song happened and I should try and honour that – I should just keep going,’” she says. “When lockdown happened I thought, ‘Okay, hypothetically, it’s the end of the world, and you have to make a record and everybody in the world is in isolation – who would you want to work with in the whole world? Why don’t you just email them?’” So she assembled a dream team, including Grammy-winning producer John Congleton and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, and got to work. Also titled Batflowers, the album – her first in six years – was recorded from California to Switzerland to her lockdown location on Stradbroke Island. She’s a resourceful woman – some vocals were tracked in a rental car. “The record is such a collaboration between so many people and it involved so much communication because of how it happened,” she says. “I could only have made it because of this time and what it is.” The result is an album that’s more freeing than anything she’s done before – the sound of an artist letting go. With the dread of the world everywhere we turn, Washington wanted to create something positive. “What people need is relief and retreat,” she says. “I want to be helpful, and I feel like the way that artists can be helpful in this time is to provide joy.” From down-tempo jazz to electro-pop dancefloor fillers, Batflowers traverses a spectrum of sound. Drawing on a wide range of influences, from David Lynch to Anne Sexton to her therapist, the album is a varied, reflective tapestry of experience – but the artist says the beauty of it is that it can mean different things to different people. “It really is a collage of my experience, and it has its own ecosystem and landscape,” she says. “But the record itself is kind of a Rorschach – like, I think it’s about the cosmos, but you might think it’s about your ex-boyfriend. A song has to make sense for me but it also has to make sense for the audience – if it does both, then I think it’s a good song.” Washington – who markets herself under a mono moniker these days – admits that in the
past, she took herself too seriously as an artist. With Batflowers, she allows herself the liberty of being whatever she feels like being – something made easier by the fact that she took the reins on every part of the album’s creation, down to art direction and engineering. She even drew and hand-animated the lyric video for lead single ‘Dark Parts’. “The idea that I could be more than one thing was always too outrageous for me – that I could be a singer and a visual artist, and a director and a dancer,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed in my brain for some reason. But then I realised that I
I worked out that for me to do good and to feel good, I need to be very, very, very serious about being as stupid as possible.
BATFLOWERS IS OUT 28 AUGUST.
07 AUG 2020
have a lot of aesthetic opinions. It’s been really interesting to use my eyeballs, and to realise that the story that you tell with the eyes can be different to the story that you tell with the music. I wanted it to feel like a journey. The record is kind of a musical – it’s like audio cinema. It’s my eyes and ears together.” Batflowers marks an exciting new chapter for the artist, and a shedding of self-consciousness to embrace all the wonder of being a proud weirdo making art for the masses in one of the world’s strangest collective times. “What I’m trying to share is a feeling of goodness and wellness and funness,” Washington says. “And I worked out that for me to do good and to feel good, I need to be very, very, very serious about being as stupid as possible.”
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PHOTO BY MICHELLE PITRIS
MEGAN WASHINGTON
Coded Bias
Film THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU
Slave to the Algorithm As Shalini Kantayya’s new documentary Coded Bias makes clear – contrary to popular opinion – technology is not neutral. Its biases are working their way into every part of daily life, and the consequences are not good. by Cher Tan
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@mxcreant
Cher Tan is a writer in Birraranga/Melbourne.
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n March 2016, Microsoft released a bot that made its debut across apps like Twitter. The technology company hoped the bot, named Tay, would gain “conversational understanding” – meaning that the more a human being chatted with it, the smarter it would get. But as a result of Tay’s programming (Microsoft did not implement key safeguards), it proved easy for people to feed it offensive content. Within 24 hours of its launch, Tay was shut down as its content morphed from “Humans are super cool!” to dozens of misogynistic, racist and fascist tweets. While Tay remains a rudimentary example of how AI can backfire, a bigger question lies in whether technology is able to detect biases inherent within its own codes – particularly if they are created by a group of people who don’t reflect the diversity of the global population. As software algorithms become increasingly all-encompassing, who will end up bearing the consequences of their discrimination? Enter Coded Bias, a new documentary by the award‑winning Brooklyn-based filmmaker Shalini Kantayya, which highlights the insidious ways technology further entrenches racial- and gender‑based prejudices already present in society.
gets a longer prison sentence. It’s already making such important decisions about human destiny. Computers are not unbiased and we’ve sort of put them in the position of being our gods,” Kantayya says. Numerous case studies in Coded Bias underscore this. In what is referred to as “algorithmic determinism” – where an algorithm makes uniform decisions regardless of its variables – it saw Daniel Santos, a schoolteacher in Houston, receive a damning evaluation despite a consistent track record of excellence. Further afield, a facial-recognition trial deployed by police in Britain saw Black teenagers get mistaken as wanted felons. In China, a burgeoning social credit system threatens to take over every facet of a citizen’s life. Through what O’Neil terms “algorithmic obedience training”, facial recognition is required for even mundane activities like shopping and taking the train. The system delivers a “score” – and “rights” can be withdrawn depending on the score. The fact that there is barely any regulation around the inner workings of AI is cause for concern. “We don’t have basic understanding and literacy around these algorithms that we use every day, and how they impact our lives,” Kantayya says. “The truth is that we actually need the space to be regulated
the way television is regulated.” Indeed, if structural inequalities such as racism are “becoming mechanised, robotised”, as apartheid historian Patric Tariq Mellet says in the documentary, what can individuals do to reverse this? Kantayya has her answer: “I think the only way is through laws. A small group of people can make a difference. I’ve seen that with my allies in the making of the film.” It’s undeniable: the rigorous campaigning that Buolamwini engages in throughout Coded Bias saw its fruits in June this year when the United States introduced legislation to ban federal use of facial recognition. AJL’s work has also resulted in Microsoft recently stating that it will not sell facial recognition software to police departments until laws regulate it, and Amazon setting a one-year pause on the sale of facial recognition code. “This is a sea change that we never thought was possible when I started making the film,” Kantayya continues. “And it happened because of the women in my film. We owe them a debt of gratitude. “I hope this is what people glean when they watch the film: that a small group of people can make a big change.”
CODED BIAS IS SCREENING VIRTUALLY NOW AT THE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL. GO TO MIFF.COM.AU.
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“All of my work as a filmmaker explores how disruptive technologies make the world less or more fair… [But] I don’t think I was prepared to fall that far down the rabbit hole,” Kantayya says when asked about the impetus behind her documentary. “It really was this incredible discovery.” Coded Bias takes viewers on this same path. It follows the journey of MIT computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, from her shocking initial discovery of the flaws inherent in Amazon’s Rekognition software (where she had to put on a white mask for her African-American face to be detected) to her founding of the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), an organisation that works to highlight the social implications and harms of AI. This is juxtaposed with talking-head interviews with data rights experts such as Safiya Umoja Noble, Zeynep Tufekci and Weapons of Math Destruction author Cathy O’Neil, who are engaged in similar battles for a freer technological landscape. The documentary makes plain, Big Tech has a hold on everyday life. Often marketed under the guise of “connection”, “community” and “convenience”, platforms such as Facebook and Google (to name but two) harvest individual data to then be sold to advertisers, government institutions such as the FBI and other corporations. “And algorithms can impact things like who gets hired, who gets healthcare, who gets into college, who
07 AUG 2020
Computers are not unbiased and we’ve sort of put them in the position of being our gods.
BE RM UD BA HA M AS ? NA H, VI CTA? OR IA HA NN IS SO M EW AN HE RE NE AR BR UN SW IC K
PHOTO BY ELIZE STRYDOM
Victoria Hannan
Books THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU
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Love doesn’t always look how you imagine it’s going to.
by Kirsten Krauth @kirstenkrauth
Kirsten Krauth is an author and arts journalist. Her bestselling novel Almost a Mirror, shortlisted for the Penguin Literary Award, was published in April.
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t’s not an easy time to launch your debut novel into the world. As I talk to author Victoria Hannan, whose book Kokomo won the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, she is back in lockdown in Melbourne’s inner north, confined to her home. Given the concept of her novel – a widow Elaine who hasn’t left her Melbourne house in more than a decade since her husband died – Hannan now finds herself in the curious position of life imitating her art. When writing the book, this idea of self-isolation was a strange and surreal concept. “One thing that was in the back of my mind was wondering whether or not people would be able to empathise with her and what it’s like to lock yourself away for love,” Hannan says. “Essentially what we’re doing now is trying to keep everybody safe by locking ourselves in our houses.” Kokomo sets itself around the central character, Mina (“a very thinly disguised version” of the author), who returns from overseas when she hears that her mother Elaine has been spotted outside the house. After years of trying to understand her mother’s motivations, Mina attempts to reconnect. Like Mina, Hannan had a great career in the UK and returned to Australia for family reasons – and she has often wondered how her life might be different if she’d chosen to stay abroad. “People will hopefully empathise with Mina and that claustrophobia that she feels when she comes back home. For Elaine, the house is her safety net,” Hannan says. “But, for Mina, it’s the last place she wants to be. That’s one of the many things that they can’t understand about each other: Mina’s desire to leave and Elaine’s desire to stay.”
KOKOMO IS OUT NOW.
07 AUG 2020
Victoria Hannan could never have foreseen how the real world would mimic the storyline of her debut novel, Kokomo.
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There’s a Place Called Kokomo
Coming from South Australia, via Brisbane and London, and with a background in advertising, copywriting and photography, the author grew up in a house filled with books, but it was only after she saw her name in print while working at the University of South Australia newspaper that she developed a passion for writing. Her original dream was to be a music journalist, and she played in a band, presented a community radio show about music and even had her own record label. Music provides the underlying tension in the book, most noticeably in its title, taken from the Beach Boys’ 1988 track. She says she loves the word Kokomo itself – “it looks good written down” – and the idea for the title was inspired by a friend singing the track at karaoke – something that also happens in the novel. But when Hannan looked into it, she discovered that the place as imagined in the song doesn’t exist at all. “There is actually a real Kokomo, which is a small, industrial city in Indiana… I’ve looked at lots of pictures of it and it’s the complete opposite to a tropical paradise,” she says. “I got really fascinated by that idea of how the song came out in the 1980s and that whole time I imagined that there was a tropical paradise called Kokomo, but it was just something made up.” For Mina and Elaine, love remains an elusive concept, often out of reach – in the romantic and erotic senses; and also in the familial sense of what’s shared between mother and daughter. Mina’s ideas of love are filtered through the corporate world, where her object of desire, Jack, is exposed as ruthless, both on the job and off. And for Mina and Elaine? “Love to them is Kokomo, this non-existent paradise, and they both learn throughout their lives that love doesn’t always look how you imagine it’s going to,” she says. “Maybe writing this book was a bit of free therapy…where I worked through my own ideas of my relationship with my family, my friendships and my romantic partners. It was catharsis and trying to understand love by writing about it.” Island life has had a profound effect on Hannan’s work. In 2017, she started Kokomo and wrote three drafts very quickly, each at a residency on an island: the tropical Ilhabela, off the coast of Brazil; in Tasmania, in a beautiful house overlooking a lagoon, an hour outside of Hobart; and a small town in Iceland close to a thermal lake and volcano. In a COVID world, her descriptions are evocative and fill you with longing. Hannan launched her book from her loungeroom early in August, in a Zoom event, with her cat. While it’s been a rollercoaster ride and some days she just wants to get into bed and watch Gossip Girl, she’s busy on her next book. “I’m finding a little bit of solace in the fact that I’m writing about a world in which COVID doesn’t exist,” she says. “It’s actually another book about grief, but even though I’m writing about these very sad people, at least they’re sad about something other than a global pandemic.”
Film Reviews
Annabel Brady-Brown Film Editor @annnabelbb
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appening now through 23 August, the Melbourne International Film Festival has radically rejigged itself for the digital landscape to present MIFF 68½, a virtual festival with talks and Q&As streaming alongside a global array of big-ticket films. Of course, it’ll be a very different MIFF experience to the one I dreamily look forward to each year, which is as much about what happens around the marathon of films as it is about the films themselves. The silver lining is that in 2020 the rest of the country gets to join in too (via miff.com.au). Highlights of the 113 titles on offer include opening nighter, the highly anticipated Australian premiere of First Cow by American Kelly Reichardt, one of the most beloved filmmakers working today. (For anyone wanting to play catch-up, Reichardt’s last feature, the phenomenal Certain Women, is streaming on SBS.) Her new film is a disarming tale of friendship between two men in 1820s Oregon seeking their fortunes, whose lives are changed by one very photogenic cow. Also on the line-up: Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s dance drama, Ema; a lauded documentary about the pioneering all-girl band The Go-Go’s; and the world premiere of Steven McGregor’s Looky Looky Here Comes Cooky, which presents a First Nations perspective on the arrival of Captain Cook’s HMS Endeavour, with oodles of guest performers and host Steven Oliver. Happy MIFF! ABB
ORION LEE AND JOHN MAGARO, BUT WHERE’S THE COW?
THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND
LA BELLE ÉPOQUE
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Victor (Daniel Auteuil) is a man who refuses to move with the times, a floundering French newspaper cartoonist adrift in the modern world. For his wife Marianne (Fanny Ardant), his stasis is reason enough to mock him in public and cheat on him in private. But for Antoine (Guillaume Canet), this makes Victor the ideal client for his business, where actors and carefully crafted sets can return a person to the past – for a hefty fee. In Victor’s case, he seeks the 70s cafe where he first met Marianne, now played by Margot (Doria Tillier), to recapture that feeling of fresh romance. But who exactly is he falling in love with? Writer-director Nicolas Bedos’ film operates flawlessly on multiple levels thanks to a genius central conceit that spins off into a touching love story, a thoughtful examination of nostalgia, a salute to the magic of performance and a very funny French farce, without skipping a beat. This is a joy to watch. ANTHONY MORRIS
MADE IN ITALY
This is an inoffensive and wholesome flick that’s part home renovation, part parent-child rapprochement, and part love poem to Tuscany. London artist Robert (Liam Neeson) and his estranged son Jack (Micheál Richardson) return to Italy to fix up a once splendid but now decrepit villa that had belonged to Robert’s late wife. While they repair the pile, their own relationship is mended – the story is that simple. There are tears, embraces, romance and creative re-awakenings for them both. Neeson and his real-life son Richardson give solid if not remarkable performances. Kate (Lindsay Duncan), the grim-faced real estate agent, and Natalia (Valeria Bilello), Jack’s gorgeous love interest, round out the cast. The script is serviceable but doesn’t demand much from any actor. If you’re after sun-drenched escapism sans surprises but with plenty of romantic tropes specific to La Bella Vita (gesticulating locals, operatic soundtrack, verdant hills, risotto and wine foodgasms) then Made in Italy is for you. THUY ON
PHOTO BY ALLYSON RIGGS/A24 FILMS
Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson leads (and co-writes) this loafing, semi-autobiographical tale about growing up in the sleepy New York City borough of Staten Island and the death of his firefighter father. Struggling to fill the void left by Dad, Davidson’s alter-ego Scott is a sweet-hearted millennial manchild who still lives with his mother (a marvellous Marisa Tomei) and daubs tattoos on any of his slacker friends stoned enough to surrender their skin as canvas for another butthole joke. The bromance is less endearing and the laughs are quieter than in many of the outré comedies by producer-director Judd Apatow (2007’s Knocked Up, 2005’s The 40-Year‑Old Virgin) – there are no quotable lines likely to trickle into the pop culture lexicon here. But as the film patters along, it sinks into the pleasures of spending time in Davidson’s gawky, cartoonish presence. This is a story about finding your way in the world. Rather than the journey, I’m more interested in what Davidson can do next. ANNABEL BRADY-BROWN
Small Screen Reviews
Aimee Knight Small Screens Editor @siraimeeknight
EXTRAORDINARY VOICES FOR EXTRAORDINARY TIMES | PODCAST
THE AMAZING JOHNATHAN
| NETFLIX
| DOCPLAY
It’s 1963, and the apocalypse is coming. Again. Like its characters, scattered across 1960s Dallas, season two feels stylistically muddled until everyone comes together and focuses. But aside from the occasional questionable font choice and needle drop, there’s enough fun and intrigue to make up for it. Newcomers are vividly drawn (see fishbowl-head-man AJ), while old favourites are drastically altered. Klaus’ (Robert Sheehan) cult-leader transformation feels like a nod to the character’s fans; Diego’s (David Castañeda) turn from vigilante to fool critically examines his heroic self‑image; and a civil rights storyline offers compelling moral dilemmas for Allison (Emmy RaverLampman). The anchor: child actor Aidan Gallagher’s indelible presence as Five, convincingly embodying the role of a 58-year-old assassin tasked with saving the world. Rather than simply recycling season one’s threat, Umbrella’s second apocalypse highlights the precariousness of life – reminding us that the world is always on the verge of ending. IVANA BREHAS
In the words of Joan Didion, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In the words of George Costanza, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Both truisms apply to this muddled documentary, which starts as a quirky travelogue on the road with has‑been illusionist The Amazing Johnathan. In 2007, Johnathan was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy. In 2014, he told fans he had a year to live. In 2017, he’s still toiling on the mortal coil, and director Ben Berman starts to wonder whether his subject – a magician, comedian and provocateur – is, perhaps, an unreliable narrator. At this point, for a variety of dubious reasons, Berman loses access to his protagonist and, to save the show, takes a hard left into his own long, dark night of the soul. As the making of the film becomes the film itself, this initially intriguing study of audacity, hubris and fear becomes gonzo journalistic farce, falling victim to the narcissism it (seemingly) set out to critique. Truth is stranger than fiction, but this contrived stunt leans too heavily on the latter. AIMEE KNIGHT
I
t is possible that, in the undetermined future, we may run out of TV shows – well, new release series, at any rate. It sounds silly, given that the medium has been defined by its relentless superfluity for quite some time, but if sets remain closed over the coming months, delayed production schedules will inevitably take a bite out of our binge-watch buffet. As such, filmmakers have been responsive to the pandemic’s strictures, creating stories that speak to the surreality of the times, while respecting stay-at-home orders. Netflix’s Homemade collection features shorts produced during quarantine by Gurinder Chadha, Nadine Labaki and 15 other international directors. In Australia, the first remotely shot narrative comedy was Retrograde, which premiered in July. Created by Meg O’Connell (whose 2019 viral satire Content was set entirely on a smartphone), this snappy sitcom sees a bunch of thirty-somethings exorcise their existential crises in a virtual bar. Video‑calling hallmarks like glitchy screens and a failure to mute are used to terrific comic effect. Join the party on ABC TV and iview. When you’ve whizzed through Retrograde, check in with its romantic older sibling, Loving Captivity. Developed during lockdown, and produced while Stage 3 restrictions were eased in Victoria, this tender web series watches on as a will-they/won’tthey relationship plays out over text messages and Facetime calls. Intimate and endearing, Loving Captivity is on YouTube, Facebook and IGTV. AK
07 AUG 2020
THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY
RETROGRADE: SEE YOU AT THE VIRTUAL BAR
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Co-hosted by Ellen van Neerven and Omar Sakr, this monthly podcast spins current events into powerful poetics. Part responsive writing project, part poets-in-conversation series, the format invites guests to write a poem within a time limit, alongside the host, before unpacking the work’s real-world resonance. The debut episode features van Neerven with Eunice Andrada, author of Flood Damages, whose poem ‘Nature Heals Itself’ explores how events outside our control threaten the safety of communities. Van Neerven’s poem ‘2023’ imagines a world in which people are “narrating joy instead of survival”. Andrada and van Neerven have a warm and inviting chemistry. Their transparency in revealing the personal experiences, correspondence and thought processes that made these works possible offers a rare behind-thescenes glimpse of the writer at work. Here, poetic verse exposes the structural inequality of living through natural disasters and a global pandemic. Unguarded and hopeful, Extraordinary Voices is for anyone who misses the poetry column in The Saturday Paper. NATHANIA GILSON
Music Reviews
W
Sarah Smith Music Editor
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hen we look back at the music produced in 2020, what will it tell us about the year? We’ve already had entire albums inspired by the social isolation of a worldwide pandemic. But, more significantly, we’ve also had previously underrepresented stories elevated thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement. In the last edition of The Big Issue, Sose Fuamoli reviewed the extraordinary debut from Pitjantjatjara and Torres Strait Islander woman, Miiesha. On Nyaaringu she shares deeply personal stories of life as an Indigenous woman. While the timing of its release was coincidental, the truths of Miiesha’s stories have resonated with an added significance. For Sydney-based rapper Ziggy Ramo, the BLM protests in Australia compelled the artist to release his debut album, Black Thoughts. Written in 2015, Ramo wrote on Instagram that he didn’t put the LP out at the time because he knew “as a country, we weren’t ready to listen”. His message continued: “A lot of you have been asking what you can do to support change during this time. You can start by listening.” On Black Thoughts, Ramo weaves larger political and cultural conversations through his own experience growing up Indigenous in Australia. Over sparse beats, tracks like ‘Black Face’ and ‘Empire’ play back the racist treatment of some of this country’s most high-profile sporting stars. The title track and ‘White Lies’ both hit especially hard. It’s time to listen. SS
ZIGGY RAMO’S DEBUT RECORD HITS HARD
@sarah_smithie
OBJECT PERMANENCE HOOPER CRESCENT
Hooper Crescent apply the prickly repetition of post-punk to a more poppy framework, slotting in nicely with angular indie rockers like Cate Le Bon and Parquet Courts. The Melbourne five-piece are all about compact interplay, yielding a procession of tight-knit flourishes from two guitars and a rubbery rhythm section. Kate Allan’s keyboard parts are more subdued by comparison. But that softens what might otherwise be overly cerebral workouts – especially the Devoesque ‘Touchscreen’ – as does a tendency to leave enough room for swathes of clean-cut jamming. ‘Bible Studies’ opens this debut album with a full minute of instrumental exchange before Sam Cummins’ spiky vocals emerge, while ‘I Fell Backwards’ does the opposite, finishing with a chewy rumination. Bassist Gemma Helms provides a pulsing through-line on layered lead single ‘Logos’, whereas ‘Constant Fascination’ slows the guitars’ staccato melodies and Television-style cresting right down. Fitting for a band named after a street on which several members live together, there’s a communal back‑and-forth to everything Hooper Crescent does, pulling us in too. DOUG WALLEN
WOMEN IN MUSIC PT III HAIM
HOMEGROWN NEIL YOUNG
It sounds like an insult – or a backhanded compliment – to call music “breezy”. But the cap fits Haim. The sister trio, on their third album, deliver a set of smooth studio sonics, sun-kissed by California weather and ruffled by a gentle wind, and rewriting yacht-rock with feminist self-possession. The frisson of Women in Music Pt III, embodied in its ironic title, is in seemingly non-threatening music carrying a sense of threat; these slickly produced tunes are blessed with lyrical bite. The thesis song is ‘Man from the Magazine’, a repudiation of entrenched music-biz sexism. But there’s prickliness even when singing of booty calls (‘3AM’), independence (‘The Steps’) or dependence (‘Leaning on You’). The songs sway and saunter through languorous environs, be it ska-tinged devotional (‘Los Angeles’) or sax-dappled, Lou Reed-loving strut (‘Summer Girl’). It’s an album of warm weather, salty sentiments and posi vibes, the sound of a band grown comfortable, and confident, in their own skin. ANTHONY
Last year, the Godfather of Grunge posted an apology on his website for not having released Homegrown back in 1975 when it was freshly baked: “I should have shared it. It’s actually beautiful... This is the one that got away.” Recorded between June 1974 and January 1975, much of Homegrown sees Young processing heartbreak as his relationship with Carrie Snodgress (mother of their son, Zeke) deteriorates. Of this set’s 12 tracks, seven are previously unheard, the trippiest of which is ‘Florida’: a spoken‑word piece accompanied by the ghoulish sound of wet fingertips circling the rims of wine glasses. Then from Young’s stoner storytime it’s back to ‘Kansas’ (“I feel like I just woke up from a bad dream...”). From pedal‑steel‑enhanced opener ‘Separate Ways’ to closer ‘Star of Bethlehem’, Homegrown, described by Young as “the unheard bridge between Harvest and Comes a Time”, is an enlightening listen. For completists and casual listeners alike. BRYGET
CAREW
CHRISFIELD
Book Reviews
Thuy On Books Editor @thuy_on
T
THE INNER SELF HUGH MACKAY
A slow, twee opening leads into an engaging story about far-right politics in the sleepy English Midlands. Jasper Fforde’s new novel could be read as a mash-up of Orwell’s Animal Farm and the television show Midsomer Murders. Following an unlikely event, in which a number of animal species are suddenly anthropomorphised (yes, made into people), the UK government has decided to round up the rabbit population and intern them in a concentration camp in Wales. Our protagonist, Peter, is a low-level fascist flunkey who swims with the political current until he runs into an old flame. Constance Rabbit is the opposite of Peter – lively, sexy and full of opinions about equality that drag Peter and his daughter, Pippa, into joining the rabbit underground resistance. Through rabbits, the most vegan of creatures, Fforde explores sustainability, responsibility and racist policy in Britain. The novel shows humility, and works hard to avoid neat solutions and white saviour tropes without sacrificing a good ending. RAPHAELLE RACE
How and why do we hide from our true self? Social researcher Hugh Mackay devotes his latest book to that question, unpacking the “top 20 hiding places” we use to avoid confronting ourselves in what Joan Didion called the “well-lit back alley” of the mind. While some places may seem obvious in our current age (busyness, materialism, nostalgia), Mackay finds fresh revelations. The section about being glued to our phones rather than engaged with those around us is poignant, as are real-life accounts of addiction. This is as much popular philosophy as broad self-help, citing both Dolly Parton and the existentialists. If the book feels a bit sanctimonious at times, Mackay usefully calls out the increasing necessity – in the face of climate change and a global pandemic – “to make personal sacrifices in the interests of the common good”. Everyone will recognise themselves here, and it may just spark an internal conversation that you’ve been putting off.
INTO THE SUBURBS CHRISTOPHER RAJA
This melancholic and uninhibited memoir recounts Christopher Raja’s experience of moving to Melbourne from Kolkata in the late 80s and navigating his adolescent years as a migrant. It explores themes of assimilation, belonging, family and growing up. Its strength is the way it depicts the tension between setting down new roots and feeling unmoored. A particularly powerful moment comes when Raja’s Australian school teacher tells her class that “passion” is the word of the day. It comes immediately after Raja’s father, also a teacher, says, “You can never really advance in a place like this...you have to work harder than everyone else just to keep up.” Passion, which privilege makes easier to pursue, is often at odds with expectations and duty throughout the book. At times, the simplistic descriptions of some female characters, too often featuring an assessment of their breasts, were fatiguing. And some anecdotes felt unfinished. Still, Into the Suburbs is an engaging read. It’s an emotional experience, heartbreaking yet hopeful. RUHI LEE
DOUG WALLEN
07 AUG 2020
THE CONSTANT RABBIT JASPER FFORDE
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HELEN GARNER: GETTING YOUR ATTENTION
he Melbourne Writers Festival (7-16 August) looks a little bit different this year. For one thing, it will all be online. Yes, I know, it’s not quite the same thing as turning up and listening to your favourite author in the flesh, and having a few choice words with them as they sign your copy of their book after their event, but having a digital festival means that instead of schlepping to Melbourne, anyone with an internet connection can listen to the guests hold forth. The theme this year is “attention”: what holds our attention; what fails to do so and why; and how we are all managing with divided attention. This year the organisers have set up a pay-what-you-can model ($5, $10, $20 or $50 per ticket, or even make a free booking). As they say, “We don’t want money to be a barrier to accessing the program, but we’re also making it possible for audiences to be generous where they can, to keep MWF going strong.” As for guests, the line-up is a strong one, including a mix of local and international names like Helen Garner, Julia Gillard, James Bradley, Christos Tsiolkas, Claire G Coleman, Kevin Kwan, Elizabeth Strout, Charlotte Wood and Tara June Winch. For further information go to mwf.com.au. TO
Public Service Announcement
by Lorin Clarke @lorinimus
Those two feelings – giggling and raging – maybe aren’t as far apart as they seem, both of them a gut instinct from a body attempting to relieve anxiety. The internet is full of videos of people screaming at each other in shops, raging furiously at strangers for a range of clearly ludicrous reasons, and we find these videos equal parts horrifying and hilarious. To be fair, recently, there have been plenty of reasons to be furious at the universe. Rage feels powerful because it’s about asserting yourself, and let’s acknowledge the importance of that sometimes. But here’s the thing: it takes a hell of a lot of energy to rage, and if rage is a reaction to stress, then giggling isn’t a bad alternative. Feeling furious? I bet it’s real. I bet it’s serious. I bet it needs you to focus on it. But first, call a person who makes you laugh. Watch a YouTube video of the funniest scene in your funniest movie. There is a scene in a Jacques Tati film that I keep thinking will one day
not make me laugh anymore. That day has not yet come. A friend and I once watched someone fall off a treadmill in such a way that we could barely breathe for laughing. How’s this: my mate, when he’s furious with someone he loves, focuses on the person’s hands. Reckons he finds it “really hard to be angry at someone I love when I’m looking at their hands. They’re the hands I’ve loved this whole time.” Could be their hands you find hard not to love. Could be something else. I once realised I couldn’t be furious with someone because, mid conversation, she turned off an electrical switch with her foot. Couldn’t leave that electrical switch unswitched for a moment longer. No siree. The therapeutic benefits of a good walk can cool the heat of rage surprisingly well. I know this because I have met the Worst Person on Earth. She works in a government department. While it is true that we should be very glad she doesn’t run the most powerful country on Earth or anything (heh), I did need to take that phone call while walking. I was concerned that otherwise my anger might become actual fire. As I walked, the rage abated. My anger remained but it waited its turn. Earth did not catch fire that day, because I was able to walk and talk. Give it a go. Generally, that not-heat-of-the-moment rage is about the same thing all the other rage is about: a feeling of anxiety often linked to a lack of control. So, yeah. We can’t control things. Haven’t we been taught that lately? We can’t control our health or even our wealth or our beauty or wisdom as much as we’d like, but we also can’t control translucent jellyfish ebbing through the ocean. We can’t control the way rain chases itself in drops down the car window. We can’t control the fact we love our favourite people’s hands or that we giggle when someone we love laughs. Public Service Announcement: rage is ridiculous. Appealing sometimes, but ridiculous. Be the adult that laughs at their own rage.
Lorin Clarke is a Melbourne-based writer. The second season of her radio series, The Fitzroy Diaries, is on ABC Radio National and the ABC Listen app now.
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W
hen I was a kid, the worst thing you could do to me was laugh at me when I was angry. Rage feels so powerful – the Most Real Thing in the World, steered entirely by you. To have someone – a powerful someone – laugh in your face right in the middle of it is a breach of all that, and many other things besides. Sometimes, as a child, I would betray myself and giggle when laughed at mid-rage, which would lead to re-rage. The reason I am telling you this is that last week, I laughed at a child’s rage. I swore I would never do that. Such a cruel and deliberate betrayal of a child by an adult was not even something I could contemplate. But here’s the thing about the rage of a child: kids often don’t know quite what it is they’re enraged about. They think it’s the fact that there were puddles here yesterday and today there are no puddles. They think it’s about the porridge not tasting the same. They think it’s about the fact that their brother is the worst. It is rarely these things. Often, it is that they are hungry, or wearing a scratchy jumper, or the sun is in their eyes. Public Service Announcement: rage is kind of ridiculous.
07 AUG 2020
The Raging Giggles
THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU
Tastes Like Home edited by Anastasia Safioleas
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PHOTOS BY CHRIS ABBOTT
Tastes Like Home Guillaume Brahimi
Bresse Chicken, Mushrooms, Paris Mash Ingredients
Paris Mash 4 large desiree potatoes, approx 600g in total fine sea salt 200ml milk 250g cold unsalted butter
Method To start the mash, place the unpeeled potatoes in a large saucepan and cover with cold water. Add a pinch of salt and bring to the boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 25-30 minutes. (Test potatoes by piercing them with a sharp knife. If they are ready, the blade will come out clean with no residue.) Drain well. Pre-heat oven to 180°C. Meanwhile for the chicken, heat oil in a large skillet frypan on medium heat, season chicken pieces with salt and pepper and add to the frypan. Seal chicken until lightly golden brown then turn. Scatter the thyme and garlic in the pan. Once browned, add diced shallot and sweat down for 4 minutes. Add butter and heat until foamy. Deglaze with white wine and reduce by half. Add chicken stock, and again reduce by half. Add cream and gently bring to the boil. Transfer chicken to the oven and cook for 30 minutes. While the chicken is in the oven, peel the potatoes while they are still hot, using a tea towel to protect your hands. Pass the peeled potatoes through a mouli (or fine sieve) and then a drum sieve into the same saucepan. Use a wooden spoon to stir the mash until all moisture is removed (you want the potato to be dry to the touch). Bring milk to the boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. Place the mash potato over low heat and add 50g of butter, stirring until combined. Add 50ml of milk and stir until combined. Repeat until all of the butter and milk has been added and the mash is light and creamy. Season with salt to taste. Add mushrooms to the chicken and cook for 2 more minutes. Remove from oven and finish with chopped parsley. Season to taste and serve with Paris mash.
Guillaume says…
W
hen I was a very young kid, school was not my forte and I was always petrified when my parents received my report card. I remember walking home from school absolutely dreading their reaction. But then I’d open the front door and I could smell Bresse chicken in the oven and think Everything is okay. It doesn’t matter what happened at school. It didn’t matter what my maths teacher thought of me, because Mum was cooking Bresse chicken and the smell was incredible. It’s amazing how important smell is to me. Smell brings me comfort, security and happiness. I remember we had school Monday, Tuesday and only in the morning on Wednesday. On Wednesday, my mum used to make mince steak. It’s called steak haché, and she would make Paris mash to go with it. So every Wednesday after school at 1pm, I knew I was getting my Paris mash. It was just simple mash potato with butter and milk, and it was delicious. I used to love getting the wooden spoon and using it to eat the mash. I would fight with my brother for that wooden spoon. There’s something unique about mash potato. You can eat it when you’re young, and also when you’re much older. And the mushroom side, it goes really well with chicken. You pan-fry the mushrooms and add cream – that’s the way we used to do it when we were growing up. In autumn and winter, mushrooms are one of my favourite things to eat. I always follow seasonal produce. This is the ABC of French cooking – follow seasonal produce! In France, we go to the markets every day and buy what’s in season. I love mushrooms in autumn and winter, and I try to incorporate them as often as I can. PLAT DU TOUR SCREENS 29 AUGUST DURING THE SBS BROADCAST OF THE TOUR DE FRANCE.
07 AUG 2020
600g mixed mushrooms (200g each of shiitake, Swiss brown and oyster) 1 medium bunch flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped sea salt freshly ground black pepper
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2 tablespoons olive oil 1 Bresse chicken or Barossa free-range chicken, size 16 and cut ready to be sautéed (ask your butcher to do this for you) 1 small bunch thyme 1 head of garlic, cut in half 4 shallots, peeled, finely diced 250g unsalted butter 100ml white wine 500ml good quality reduced chicken stock 600ml pure cream
Puzzles
ANSWERS PAGE 45
By Lingo! by Lauren Gawne lingthusiasm.com AUSLAN
CLUES 5 letters American sweet Boogie, bop Official ruling Wild yellow and white flower Yellowish‑beige 6 letters Keep in custody Pour off (wine) Reliably firm Small and delicate Succeed to (the throne) 7 letters Compactness Fate, one’s lot in life Poison 8 letters Aloofness, reserve
A
I
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E D N S
Y C
Sudoku
by websudoku.com
Each column, row and 3 x 3 box must contain all numbers 1 to 9.
3 2 9 1 2
8
2 3 4 5 3
5
7 3
2 6 5 1 8 2 3
7 6
8 4 2
7 1
Puzzle by websudoku.com
Solutions CROSSWORD PAGE 45 ACROSS 1 Goalposts 6 Chaff 9 Anthony Albanese
10 Envy 11 Averages 14 Taxidermy 15 Itchy 16 Lucre 18 Vegetable 20 Practise 21 Glib 25 Takes for granted 26 Yards 27 Skedaddle
DOWN 1 Grave 2 Antivax 3 Plot 4 Styx 5 Solo voyage 6 Chairlifts 7 Anergic 8 Freestyle 12 Advertises 13 Provisions 14 Telepathy 17 Cracker 19 Belated 22 Badge 23 Ogre 24 Data
20 QUESTIONS PAGE 9 1 54 2 The rose family 3 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 4 Arsenal FC 5 Hummingbird 6 10 years old 7 Rihanna 8 Coal 9 Coffee 10 Portland 11 The Last Unicorn 12 Marseille 13 Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt 14 Gone With the Wind (she played Melanie Hamilton) 15 20 16 37 17 Nick Cave 18 Michael Gunner 19 Four 20 ‘Kumbaya’
07 AUG 2020
Using all nine letters provided, can you answer these clues? Every answer must include the central letter. Plus, which word uses all nine letters?
by puzzler.com
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Word Builder
Auslan is the sign language of the Australian deaf community. It is related to British Sign Language (BSL) and New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL), but is its own variety. There is over a century of Auslan in Australia, but the name Auslan was coined only in the 1980s by Trevor Johnston, who published the first dictionary of the language. Auslan is not the name of the language in Auslan itself. While it is possible to use a manual alphabet to spell out English words, there is an Auslan sign for the language. Auslan is not the only sign language of Australia; there are also Indigenous sign languages used by a number of different language groups across the country.
Crossword
by Chris Black
THE ANSWERS FOR THE CRYPTIC AND QUICK CLUES ARE THE SAME. ANSWERS PAGE 43.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Quick Clues ACROSS
1 Football field feature (9) 6 Husks (5) 9 Leader of the Opposition (7,8) 10 Jealousy (4) 11 Means (8) 14 Art of preserving animals (9) 15 Irritating (5) 16 Money (5) 18 Edible plant (9) 20 Rehearse (8) 21 Slick (4) 25 Fails to appreciate (5,3,7) 26 Enclosures (5) 27 Flee (colloq.) (9)
9
11 13
14
15
16
17
18
DOWN
19
20
21 23
22
24
25
26
27
Cryptic Clues
Solutions
ACROSS
DOWN
1 Sticks with Spooner’s bar spirits (9) 6 Scrap half of cha-cha, repeat foxtrot (5) 9 Political leader from Lebanon hates any stranger
1 Dangerous sniper eventually gave cover… (5) 2 …against shot from moving taxi van (7) 3 Hatch patch (4) 4 Pick up twigs and mythical flower (4) 5 Jessica Watson did this crazy Oslo trip (4,6) 6 Fiscal Right reforms after Greens leader
(7,8)
10 Nevada said to be gråeen? (4) 11 Temper contained by ways and means (8) 14 Eat dry mix, nuts and stuffing? (9) 15 Irritating audition for one in Japanese (5) 16 Funds members of counter culture from the East (5) 18 Green vintage jacket can be procured (9) 20 Jimmy catches Canberra train (8) 21 Pat’s big on retirement when over fifty (4) 25 Rock god rents fake art that doesn’t appreciate
(5,3,7)
26 Lots to say about doctor on reflection (5) 27 Desk jockeys confuse split (9)
1 Earnest (5) 2 Eschewing inoculation (7) 3 Scheme (4) 4 River in Greek mythology (4) 5 Unaccompanied adventure (4,6) 6 Ski resort features (10) 7 Failing to react (7) 8 Swimming stroke (9) 12 Promotes (10) 13 Supplies (10) 14 Thought transference (9) 17 Small biscuit (7) 19 Overdue (7) 22 Emblem (5) 23 Beast (4) 24 Information (4)
lost swinging seats? (10)
7 Grace in trouble, failing to respond (7) 8 Re-introduced to Yes , left New Order
for Australian Crawl (9)
12 Assortment of sedatives includes the
ultimate in ear plugs (10)
13 Supplies foresights to the audience (10) 14 Let the pay negotiations become mind games (9) 17 Beauty, joker or clue solver? (7) 19 Overdue book is animated (7) 22 Mark’s awful gaberdine coat (5) 23 Giant block in progress (4) 24 Dope a little backward? (4)
SUDOKU PAGE 43
3 6 9 7 1 2 8 4 5
2 4 7 5 9 8 3 1 6
1 8 5 3 6 4 7 9 2
9 1 2 4 5 7 6 8 3
6 7 4 1 8 3 5 2 9
5 3 8 9 2 6 1 7 4
4 2 1 6 7 5 9 3 8
8 9 6 2 3 1 4 5 7
7 5 3 8 4 9 2 6 1
Puzzle by websudoku.com
WORD BUILDER PAGE 43 5 Candy Dance Edict Daisy Sandy 6 Detain Decant Steady Dainty Ascend 7 Density Destiny Cyanide 8 Distance 9 Syndicate
07 AUG 2020
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10
Click words by Miles Davis photo by Getty
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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU
26 AUGUST 1959
Miles Davis
L
et jazz great Miles Davis tell the story of when he was beaten by police – then charged with criminal offences. I had just finished doing an Armed Forces Day broadcast, you know, Voice of America and all that bullshit. I had just walked this pretty white girl named Judy out to get a cab. She got in the cab and I’m standing there in front of
Birdland wringing wet because it’s a hot, steamy, muggy night in August. This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on… “Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis,” and I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights. He said, “I don’t care where you work, I said move on. If you don’t move on, I’m going to arrest you.”
…I didn’t move. Then he said, “You’re under arrest.” He reached for his handcuffs…he stumbled and all his stuff fell on the sidewalk. And I thought to myself, Oh shit they’re going to think I fucked with him or something… A crowd had gathered all of a sudden from out of nowhere, and this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming. Blood was running down the khaki suit I was wearing. …I look up on the wall [of the police station] and see they were advertising voyages for officers to take to Germany, like a tour. And this is about 14 years after the war. And they’re going there to learn police shit. It’s advertised in the brochure; they’ll probably teach them how to be meaner and shit, do to n—s over here what the Nazis did to the Jews over there. I couldn’t believe that shit in there and they’re supposed to be protecting us. I ain’t done nothing but help a woman friend of mine get a cab and she happened to be white and the white boy who was the policeman didn’t like seeing a n— doing that. Now I would have expected this kind of bullshit about resisting arrest and all back in East St Louis, but not here in New York City, which is supposed to be the slickest, hippest city in the world. But then again, I was surrounded by white folks and I have learned when this happens, if you’re black there is no justice. None. …That incident changed me forever, made me much more bitter and cynical than I might have been. It took two months for three judges to rule that my arrest had been illegal and dismiss the charges against me. Later I sued the police department…[but the lawyer] forgot to file the claim before the statute of limitations ran out. – From Miles: The Autobiography.