Fiona

Last year, during the great forgetting, I took an online solo jazz-dance class with Ramona, my favourite teacher, who moves like sunshine on water. It had been a year, more, away from swing dancing, and I creaked through it. Rusty? Shove me in the garden and call me a rustic sculpture. Lindy Hop is a joyous hyper-social partner dance that makes you sweat and puff like a buffalo, and was cancelled about 10 seconds after COVID announced itself as a thing. Ramona and I mourn the live scene. I miss…dancing.

I posted a photo of my partner – The Lovely Greg™ – sitting alone in his dressing-gown, eating his dinner alfresco in the backyard, next to the open kitchen door. He cuts a distant figure, seemingly banished like a naughty dog, since I’m clearly eating inside. But the distance is deliberate. It means we eat “together”, and can both watch Mad As Hell. He has COVID, I do not; we’re trying to keep it that way.

One of my friends, concerned by the optics, frets in the Facebook comments: “Shouldn’t he be inside? He’s the sick one.” Ahaha no. COVID is an aerosol. COVID is airborne. Greg is huffing pathogens 24/7 like an automatic, plug-in, frangipani-scented air-freshener. Greg – who reported appreciating the cool breeze on his fevered brow, what with some COVID symptoms being menopause adjacent – absolutely sat outside. We waved, and settled in to watch Tosh Greenslade inhabit the skin of Peter Dutton.

There is, it transpires, a dance afoot. The dance of dodging COVID, even though it’s officially Behind Us. Doneski. “It’s over!” shouted one middle-aged white guy at a mate of mine outside Melbourne’s Arts Centre. “Take the fucking mask off.”

Define “over”. Australia is crawling with virus right now; it’s like ants on a dropped chunk of picnic chicken. Today’s time-of-writing snapshot is 35 deaths, 43,000 infections, and the third-highest daily per 100,000 infection rate in the world – go us – and my socials are awash with photos of RATs with two lines and sad face emojis. We are trying to ghost COVID by telling ourselves it’s over, but girlfriend, you’re fooling yourself – we are very much still dating.

And sure, COVID feels inevitable now – it’s more everywhere than Eddie McGuire in his heyday – but why are we framing it as equivalent to a cold or the flu? It’s… not. Omicron is labelled “mild”, but it’s not mild mild. It’s not “the cheese you give your four-year-old because it has no flavour”. Omicron mild is measured against how likely it is to collapse the health system. “Mild” translates to “a manageable percentage of cases will need admission to ICU, intubation, and the phone number of a funeral home”.

There’s no immunity with COVID; you can catch it multiple times. There’s a dumpster of reasons to not dismiss it as a cold, but the biggie is that it makes us underestimate recovery. Regular COVID – not even long COVID – can come with a side order of fatigue and brain fog that can last for months. It’s your body siphoning energy to deal with the viral damage. This is the new normal. Remember the Codral “Soldier On” ads? Everyone popping some tabs and back on deck to service capitalism? Do not do this; you will hurt yourself.

It took 12 days for Greg to test negative. Bog standard. I dodged it this time. We’d kept the doors and windows open, I slept in the front room, and we had one masked outdoor “date” dusting chicken cloacae with anti-mite powder.

Still dancing. A lot of us are. You will know us by our N95s. And the trail in our wake of people screaming for us to take our effing masks off.

Fiona is a writer and comedian, who could well be The Masked Avenger.

by Merryana Salem

@akajustmerry

Merryana Salem is a Wonnarua and Lebanese Australian author and culture writer.

While the pandemic has laid low much of the arts in recent years, Moses Ingram has quietly laid the foundations for a stand-out career. After graduating from Yale School of Drama in 2019, Ingram landed a role in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, where her breakout performance as the whip-smart Jolene, childhood best friend of chess genius Beth Harmon, promptly earned her an Emmy nomination. After playing Lady Macduff in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021), she’s now entering the ever-expanding Star Wars universe, becoming an integral part of the long-awaited series Obi-Wan Kenobi.

For someone four years into their professional career, it’s a glitteringly varied résumé. When I switch to the Marvel universe for a moment and joke that she’s collecting roles like Infinity Stones, Ingram laughs: “I say that all the time; Infinity Stones is exactly what they are.”

As diverse as her CV is – from dramatic biopics to Shakespeare to space operas – Ingram consistently binds her characters with a determination to find their humanity.

Her turn as the mysterious Inquisitor Reva – a former Jedi who has turned and now is tasked by Darth Vader to hunt down Jedi Knights – is no exception.

“With her being an antagonist, she doesn’t believe she is one,” Ingram says. “She just believes she’s doing what’s necessary.” But there is only so much Ingram can say about her character – she is sworn to secrecy on the juicy details of Obi-Wan Kenobi. “It’s tough,” she smiles coyly. Disney protects its intellectual property fiercely – as fiercely as Star Wars fans follow developments. It’s they who have begged for more of Ewan McGregor as the younger Obi-Wan, ever since Disney acquired the Star Wars franchise a decade ago.

The enormous scale of the show and its fan base breaks new ground for Ingram.

“This is by far the biggest set I’ve ever worked on and therefore so many more people to interact with. [I particularly learned from] Ewan and Hayden [Christensen], who’ve been a part of the franchise for so long and know what it’s like to be the new kid on the block and figuring it out and really getting out there in front of the people,” she grins. “Everybody across the board was really great.”

Her praise extends to the series’ director and co-writer, Deborah Chow. She lights up at the chance to gush about Chow giving her creative control over Reva. “When we started, she told me she wanted me to be a part of developing the character and, of course, sometimes you think people are saying things. But she meant it – she cared about what I thought and there were so many conversations about who Reva should be.” That went as far as her character’s appearance – especially her hair.

As a Black actor in an astonishingly popular family franchise, Ingram’s thoughts are with kids of colour who will see her. “Our department head had a specific vision that I didn’t align with, and Deborah immediately asked me what I thought and defaulted to [my thoughts] about my hair,” she explains. “Thinking about kids at Halloween, all of these little brown girls and Black girls who have to wear these blonde wigs at Halloween every year…I wanted to be a character that inspired little girls to rock their thick natural hair.”

Ingram is well aware she’s about to be seen – and judged – by one of, if not the, biggest and most zealous franchise fandoms. After four decades and a dozen films, comics and spin-off shows, Star Wars fans have a unique fanaticism – and a way of treating newcomers with red-hot scrutiny. On whether she’s worried about racist backlash, which has recently plagued actors of colour in the Star Wars franchise, Ingram pays it little mind.

“[Reva] was not written using the colour of anybody’s skin, she was just written and then given to a person to embody,” she says. “And that person is me and I happen to be Black. With this character, if people have a problem, then I think it says more about them.”

Ingram does, however, admit to finding the sheer size of the fandom daunting: “It’s large and I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t make me nervous, you know? It’s millions of people and if they like it or for some reason don’t like it, I’m gonna hear about it.” But, she says, there’s also a thrill in embodying something completely new: “I was able to have so much freedom because I didn’t have to try to live up to something that was already presented to people.”

Ultimately, Ingram hopes she’s part of something that Star Wars fans, old and new alike, will enjoy. “The thing about these shows is that it means so much to so many people,” she says. “All one really wants to do is make the audience happy.”

TOP: WITH JOEL EDGERTON AS OWEN LARS MIDDLE: EWAN MCGREGOR AS OBI-WAN KENOBI BOTTOM: RUPERT FRIEND AS GRAND INQUISITOR

by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

@giselleanguyen

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen is a Vietnamese Australian writer and critic based in Naarm/Melbourne. A t the peak of COVID-19 lockdowns, Cate Le Bon’s partner, the musician and artist Tim Presley, painted an abstract, lone figure. When Le Bon saw it, something awoke within her. Some sort of stirring, though she couldn’t say exactly what.

“Tim said it was a painting of me, and at times I could connect with that, and at times it felt like something so ancient, and at times it felt like something so futuristic,” the Welsh musician recalls over Zoom. “It was almost like this flare had come from Tim, and he didn’t have any notion of where it had come from either... It was really profound.”

A photorealistic interpretation of the painting graces the cover of Le Bon’s sixth album, Pompeii. She attempted to translate the feeling she had from seeing it for the first time to her music – or as she puts it, “the fluidity of one medium to another”. The idea of being at once primordial and new ripples

through the album, which is awash with both despair and wonder.

Le Bon, who calls the Californian desert home, had initially intended to make the record “somewhere very remote like in Chile or Norway” with her co-producer, Samur Khouja. But the pandemic had other plans, taking her from Iceland, where she was producing singer-songwriter John Grant’s record, back to Cardiff, where she had lived 15 years earlier. It was here, living with Khouja and Presley, that Pompeii came to life.

The album was written primarily on bass guitar, after Le Bon connected with the instrument in lockdown. “Playing bass had become meditative for me when everything was going south,” Le Bon says. “I would spend the evenings after work trying to learn Talking Heads basslines, just for something to occupy my brain so that I didn’t have a total meltdown, and it was something that I really, really enjoyed.

“I wanted to make a record that felt like it had the same road from start to finish…a constant fluid going to happen, but once you acknowledge that you really don’t – that no-one really does – that friction disappears.”

Le Bon named the album after the buried ancient city, which she saw as a mirror to the strangeness and uncertainty of the modern world. “Someone mentioned Pompeii on the radio, and I became quite fixated with it and this idea of how it plays with our perception of time – these final moments that are permanent, and these really private moments that become so public,” she says.

“We’re constantly living on the precipice of some kind of disaster, and we’re trying to find a balance knowing that, and trying to live a life that’s somehow meaningful or not encumbered by that knowledge, because it’s just part and parcel of living.”

Now in her second decade of making music, Le Bon has found solace in another artform: furniture making. The musician spent 2017 studying at the acclaimed Waters & Acland furniture school in England’s Lake District, which reinvigorated her approach to music.

motion and propulsion, and a groove. At a time like that, I didn’t want anything to be in danger of flatlining, because everything was pretty bleak.”

Capturing the fluctuating atmosphere of apocalypse, Pompeii typifies Le Bon’s esoteric art-pop sound, from baroque opener ‘Dirt on the Bed’ to the chiming echoes of the title track. She plays all the instruments herself, other than saxophone and drums (the latter contributed by Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa). She will be accompanied by a full band when she returns to Australia in June, performing for VIVID Sydney, Dark Mofo festival in Hobart, and gig initiative Always Live in Melbourne.

Though Le Bon has never shied away from experimentation, here she leans even further into the absurd, creating a kaleidoscopic view of the contradictions of existence: “I’m not cold by nature, but this could bring me to my knees,” she sings on ‘Running Away’. But then, on album closer ‘Wheel’, “I could resign to the opulence of abstract optimistic love.”

“The record is more of an exploration than anything declarative,” Le Bon says. “You hold on so hard to this idea that you know what’s

“I had been on this cycle of writing a record, making a record and touring a record for eight years or so. Music is something I love so much, and I was getting a bit worried that my motives had been shifted during that time,” she says. “I wanted to make sure that it was heart and not habit that was keeping me in that cycle.

“A year of eight until six every day in the workshop doing design stuff was exactly what I needed to give myself the perspective to evaluate my relationship with music. It’s lovely when the onus isn’t on one thing – you have a much better relationship with it, it’s a lot more fruitful and you hold onto the reins less tightly.”

Back to Presley’s painting, Le Bon saw it as a starting point for a continually evolving story. “It was a reminder of the ambiguity and the absurdity of something which allows a conversation to be continued, allows something to change and allows something to grow and move with you,” she says. “That’s something that really resonates with me.”

Britain’s favourite posh folk are back with A New Era – and the cast let us in on another decorously dressed, exquisitely mannered and engrossingly gossipy jaunt back in time.

by Adrian Lobb The Big Issue UK

@adey70

Since 2010 viewers have marvelled at the witty, wise and extremely wealthy Crawley family and their domestic servants on their lavish Yorkshire country estate. And now, after six seasons of entertaining TV and a blockbuster 2019 film, Downton Abbey is back on the silver screen.

As the Wall Street Crash and subsequent Great Depression loom large in The New Era, clouds could soon be on the horizon for the landed gentry. But fear not – sexual intrigue, mild peril, culture clashes and exquisite one-liners are in no short supply. We caught up with Elizabeth McGovern (aka Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham), Dame Penelope Wilton (Isobel Grey – aka Lady Merton), and Joanne Froggatt (Anna Bates) – to find out how the newest Downton instalment continues to connect past and present.

Elizabeth McGovern: It’s a funny thing, because when it started, people felt a real nostalgia for the era that it took them to. And now I think people feel a nostalgia for the era that they were in when they first started watching the show. So it’s nostalgia, but it’s kind of morphed into a different thing because the world is changing so fast.

Joanne Froggatt: I think the second movie is even better than the first. It is funny, it is poignant, it looks beautiful – it’s got all those things people love about Downton. It feels like you are getting a warm hug. And I think that’s what everybody needs right now, after the last few years and with what’s happening in the world.

Penelope Wilton: What’s going on at the moment is just so upsetting and so terrible – in Ukraine, particularly – that it is hard to focus on anything else. But I think it will be diverting for a couple of hours. With everything going up, and fuel prices and everything, people are really up against it in so many ways, so I hope it will give everyone a lift. It’s a highly entertaining story.

JF: Julian [Fellowes, creator] has always been very good at connecting the stories in the historical time with what is going on in our time. He tends to weave those parallels very subtly. I can’t say why, but the parallels are not economic or political necessarily in this one, but emotionally the parallels in this story are universal. It’s got such a big heart, this movie.

EM: I don’t get many chances to work with Simon [Curtis, her husband of 30 years, who directs the new film], so it was a privilege. I was nervous because it’s so difficult to come into something that is already up and running, but I was so proud of him… He managed something very difficult – he imprinted his own personality on it.

PW: I think you’ll see in the next film what the family do when they’re up against it, with their finances becoming depleted. Because, of course, it’s terribly expensive. You couldn’t run a house like that one now. Nobody could. It would be impossible, especially now – how could you heat it?

EM: The new film? It’s everything that everybody has come to expect from Downton Abbey but I feel like in this one, the detail and richness and texture of the plot is at its best. Because the thing Downton Abbey does well, which is the clash of the old and the new, Julian’s found a very clever way of re-exploring that dynamic. It’s always on the horizon, this sense that modern life is slowly eating away at the life they’re enjoying.

PW: Maggie Smith and I have a very, very, very, very good relationship. And Julian wrote wonderful scenes for us – it added a sharpness to the whole thing. They really rubbed each other up the wrong way but finally came to admire each other, although they would never give in to one another. They have different views about things and both stick to their guns. So we got a lot of fun out of those sparring matches. I’d live in the hope that he would let me win, but she usually got the upper hand in the end.

EM: We’ve all gone through something together and grown up a little bit… I feel so proud of everybody. For the first couple of years, Michelle came to my trailer and I forced her to sing. Now Michelle and Michael [Fox, who has played Andy Parker since series five] are singing together, doing their own thing. There was always a big music element among the cast.

PW: It was a bit like a theatre company because there’s a group of people of all ages and you work with them over a period of time. So you get to know one another very well and also get very close to the crew. We have a driver called Orest, who is Ukrainian and is at the border at this moment, trying to bring his wife and his mother to safety. So we’re sending him messages. I’m hoping he will get through.

EM: My big issue? I have a real passion that people should be getting out and supporting theatres, supporting dance, supporting live music. People are really suffering in those worlds. We learnt about first responders, about the primary care workers that are of such value to society. And we have to now look again at the value of live arts to society, and people’s spirit and mental health and that sense of sharing and community.

PW: My big issue is the standard of living in [the UK]. I was on Tottenham Court Road and people were living in doorways. When we hit the pandemic, we seemed to be able to do something about homelessness. It seems ridiculous that you can’t continue something that was working quite well.

JF: How many homeless people could live in Downton Abbey? That is a great question. Wow. A lot – and it’s actually a really good idea. Although I think the family might have something to say about it. But thousands. Because it’s enormous. Including the whole estate, because there are other houses on the estate. I haven’t even seen most of the house because most of the upstairs is cordoned off even to us. But you could fit a village in there. Maybe a city.

TOP: SYBBIE AND GEORGE LEARN FROM MRS PATMORE, THE COOK MIDDLE: WIDOWER TOM BRANSON AND LUCY SMITH, THE MAID, GET HITCHED BOTTOM: LADY MERTON AND THE DOWAGER COUNTESS OF GRANTHAM ARE NOT BEST PLEASED

by Doug Wallen

@wallendoug

Doug Wallen is a freelance writer and editor based in Victoria, and a former music editor of The Big Issue.

Since debuting in 2008 with his Booker-shortlisted epic A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz has delivered his next two novels at seven-year intervals. That’s ages in today’s high-turnover literary world, but it’s always worth the wait for the Sydney native’s distinctive brand of mind-bending dramedy and rapid-fire irreverence.

After 2015’s Quicksand, which detailed the exploits of tragically unlucky Aldo Benjamin, Toltz has returned with a high-concept dark comedy about mortality. Here Goes Nothing opens with career-criminal-turned-husband-andexpectant-father Angus Mooney narrating from the afterlife. He’s been murdered at age 42, and while he navigates a mundane purgatory that’s painfully similar to our own, he pines for his surviving wife, Gracie.

Adding insult to injury, Mooney is forced to admit that his scepticism about all things spiritual was – pardon the pun – dead wrong. “It amused me to have this laconic non-believer wake up in the afterlife,” says Toltz. “Mooney’s voice became quite central to the story.”

The author is chatting over Zoom from his front porch in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Los Feliz. He relocated to LA in part to write for television, where his high-energy,

dialogue-driven style makes him well suited to acerbic gems like the Kate Beckinsale series Guilty Party and the US version of the Aussie police comedy No Activity. For someone who pens such sentences as Mooney’s declaration “My mind was a tour de force of what the fuck,” a hectic writers’ room is an ideal sandpit for his trademark cheekiness.

“Writing fiction is very solitary, and you’re writing all the time,” says Toltz. “Writing for television is 90 per cent brainstorming and 10 per cent writing. And it’s social: you’re in a room full of people. It’s like being paid to be at a dinner party.”

Ever since A Fraction of the Whole, Toltz has been singled out for the commitment to comedy in his books, which revel in ambushing belligerence and other zippy extremes. “I write by hand,” he says, “and the pen is a bit faster than the brain sometimes. So I guess I’m trying to amuse myself as I write.”

Writing by hand means that when Toltz reads his work aloud to transcribe it onto a computer for editing, it’s like having an extra editor as he catches mistakes and repetitions. That added step helps him to hone his pointed flourishes all the more.

Fans of the TV series The Good Place will no doubt appreciate the afterlife’s bureaucratic machinations in Here Goes Nothing, while Toltz cites a longtime love of afterlife movies like Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941) and Defending Your Life (1991). He examines faith in the book through Mooney’s chequered childhood as an orphan, but he says writing this particular story didn’t transform his own views on what might await us beyond this life. He’s open-minded, but doubts the existence of a literal heaven and hell.

Though the afterlife seems like a fresh chance to start over, his characters mostly bring all of their baggage with them. Here Goes Nothing is also about worrying what others think of us, which feels ever-present thanks to social media. As Mooney’s effusive widow Gracie holds forth to large swathes of online followers and delivers wildly off-colour commentary as a wedding celebrant, it’s a reminder that we’re always creating content of one kind or another.

“I think we’re all in deep trouble,” Toltz says of technology’s grip on modern life. “We’re a planet of addicts. I don’t know a single person who has a healthy attitude towards technology.”

Another bleak-yet-true-to-life plot device in his new book is a dire pandemic that far outpaces COVID-19. Toltz actually researched and wrote that element back in 2019, partly to have something urgent happening outside of Gracie’s intimate drama at home, and then decided to keep it even after a real-life pandemic arrived. Beyond providing high stakes for the world outside Gracie’s doors as she waits

to welcome her baby following Mooney’s murder, a raging pandemic meant that the afterlife could be flooded with an unprecedented influx, staging what Toltz calls as “a trans-dimensional refugee crisis”.

As if Gracie doesn’t have enough on her plate, she’s also dealing with an unwanted house guest in Owen, a doctor with a terminal illness and absolutely no bedside manner. Even for a writer who specialises in potentially unlikeable characters, Owen is a combative, seething antagonist who rankles at every turn.

“I thought it would be fun to have an old-fashioned villain,” says Toltz. “There’s no greater pleasure than writing someone who is just a really shitty human being. There’s a freedom that comes in writing a character like that.”

Given his track record of indelible characters, it comes as no surprise that Toltz doesn’t subscribe to the idea of making his creations likeable just for the sake of it. Much like the outsized situations he depicts in his books, these figures often end up brashly appealing, if only as cautionary tales.

“If you put that much work into writing something, it will come off well,” says the author. “You can’t help, as a reader, connecting in some way.”