Blogroll

Disposable Words by Austin Andrews
Jonathan Rosenbaum once described Chris Marker and Orson Welles as freelance citizens of the world, and Canadian filmmaker and photojournalist Austin Andrews is another for whom such a description might be appropriate. Raised in Calgary and educated on Queensland's Gold Coast, Andrews spent his first year out of university living and working in Vancouver before setting out on a journey that has seen freelance as a photographer in Burma, overstay his visa in both Australia and China, and arrive in South Africa with a vague intention of working as a photojournalist before becoming entrenched in the culture and politics of Johannesburg.

Drifting: A Director's Log by David Lowery
David Lowery is an independent filmmaker and screenwriter from Texas whose observations on cinema and filmmaking are almost as engaging as his compulsively-engaging films. From his hypnotic debut feature, St. Nick, to his remarkable shorts A Catalog of Anticipations and Some Analog Lines, Lowery's films are both formally rigorous and emotionally haunting, lingering on in the ether long after they've finished. With this practical knowledge informing his observations, Lowery's criticism, too, is highly articulate, and offers the reader an insight into cinema that is not always offered by those writers who, although they may have seen a lot, have never framed a shot through the viewfinder or tossed and turned through sleepless nights over the timing of a single cut.

Elusive Lucidity by Zach Campbell
One day, when people mention Zach Campbell in the same breath as Adrian Martin, Nicole Brenez, and other giants of contemporary film criticism, there will be others who nod in agreement from the back of the hall, fondly remembering his humble beginnings as a film blogger. From the beginning, Campbell's blogging has always been a little different to that of other film bloggers. His is a fitful, scribbled blogging, closer to notes in a notebook than to articles in a magazine or journal. He is less interested in offering opinions than in asking questions and less interested in the answers to those questions than in the lines of inquiry they open up. Like the truly indespensible critics, his tastes and interests are almost schizophrenically eclectic, ranging from avant-garde and structuralist cinema to the performances of Anna Faris and back again. And one gets the impression that this is much a political position as an aesthetic one: Campbell's is a necessary eclecticism, a form of eclecticism-as-resistance.

Hand Crafted Films by Evan Mather
In a now-famous epistolary exchange of 1997, 'Movie mutations: letters from (and to) some children of 1960', Nicole Brenez wrote to her fellow film critics that "thanks to the increase and greater accessibility of technological tools [and] the spreading need for images," "a director can find a studio in his own room and create a magnificent œuvre all alone and in complete freedom". The "poet laureate of cyber-cinema," a title once bestowed on him by the author of this website, Evan Mather has, since that prophetic paragraph was written, proven it true many times over, delivering the "magnificent œuvre" in question. With films like Fansom the Lizard and his Trilogy of Tragedy—Vert, Airplane Glue and Icarus of Pittsburgh—as well as his magnum opus, Scenic Highway, Mather has proven himself one of the decade's most unique and indispensable auteur, online or otherwise.

Jotter Notes by David Maney
David Maney is a poet and author (and, more recently, lyricist), and the best friend of this site's author. His blog is exactly what its name implies: a loose collection of notes jotted down in the process of reading and writing and thinking. A window onto its author's literary adventures, it is also a noble attempt to counter the never-ending process of forgetting. The subtitle of Clive James's Cultural Amnesia was Notes In the Margin of My Time. Maney's notes may be online instead of in the margins, but the impulse to make them seems roughly comparable, and the fact that we have access to them now, while his style and sensibility as a writer are still developing, is something we should appreciate. His blog may appear, on the face of it, as a scrapbook, but in fact it is a finely-drawn portrait of the artist as a young man.

Musings of an Inappropriate Woman by Rachel Hills
Rachel Hills is most probably a machine—it seems unlikely that a normal person could acheive in a week what this woman appears to in a day. A quick glance at her curriculum vitae is enough to inspire exhaustion in the rest of us: her hats include those of journalist, editor, researcher and public speaker—and postgraduate student, too, just for good measure—and she wears them all at one and the same time with certain inimitable elan. She is also one of the most level-headed and rational commentators currently commentating, which is no small mercy when you consider that her current topics of expertise (feminism, gender and sex, broadly speaking) are among the least rationally-discussed there are.

The Morning After by Chris Boyd
No critic in the country has more exacting standards than the Herald Sun's Chris Boyd, and none has more exacerbating language at their disposal when those standards are not met. This is a man in the lifelong throes of a love affair with skill and precision: to him, a brilliant idea means nothing unless it is realised with similarly brilliant technique. Such a sensibility might at first seem conservative, and indeed this ponytailed aesthete's penchant for ballet, opera and other white elephant art might at first seem to support such a claim. But an old-school emphasis on training, technique and even beauty seems almost radical in a world where ugly art has become the regrettable norm. And there is certainly nothing conservative about his writing, which crackles and pops with his passion and conviction. More than any other critic in the country, Boyd always seems to be having fun. Even the very best of his colleagues can seem dour and circumspect by comparison.

theatre notes by Alison Croggon
There can be no doubt that Australian theatre blogging would have neither the profile nor the influence it does today without Alison Croggon and her too-modestly-titled blog, which has not only helped to legitimise the work of the blogger-critic, but has also helped to move post-show discussion out of the hermetically-sealed foyer and into something more closely resembling the public sphere. Of course, Croggon herself would reject the charge, at least to some extent: as far as she is concerned, she is but one of many tireless (and mostly unpaid) theatre-lovers using the internet to express and discuss their views, and the last thing she would wish her site to become is that most ossified of all things, an institution. Indeed, in her 2009 Pascall Prize acceptance speech, she took care to note that what she loves most about her site is not the mouthpiece it affords her, but rather the mouthpiece it affords others. "On Theatre Notes," Croggon said at the time, "people can disagree with what I say, or extend it further, or correct my mistakes. Criticism becomes more properly what it is: a conversation. It's this conversation in all its permutations—in magazines and newspapers, in letters columns, at dinner tables, in theatre foyers, on blogs—that makes a culture. Without it, we just have a lot of art." That there is no better conversationalist in the country is obviously a matter for debate. What is beyond question, however, is that we are lucky to have this one.

News, Magazines, Commentary and Opinion

When it comes to world news, The Economist, Real Clear World and Foreign Policy constitute my holy triumvirate, and I read these websites compulsively, often at the expense of sleep. I am a big fan of The Guardian as well, especially its commentators, and the BBC remains a veritable one-stop shop for international news.

I read The Independent for Robert Fisk and Slate for Christopher Hitchens, the latter of whom also writes for Vanity Fair and The Atlantic Monthly. Both of these are excellent magazines in their own right, of course, and both sport excellent websites. This is similarly true of Newsweek, a magazine that always seems to surprise me with its quality.

I read New York Magazine in its entirety at the beginning of each week and then spend the remaining couple of days making my way through The New Yorker. I would read everything posted at Eurozine, too, were the sheer volume of content there not so overwhelming. The New York Review of Books and The New York Times are also regular reads, especially the latter's arts section, which boasts some of the finest cultural critics currently working in newspapers.

Edited by Adrian Martin, Helen Bandis and Grant McDonald, Rouge is my favourite film journal, online or otherwise, though Senses of Cinema still has its charms. (Unfortunately, regularity of publication is no longer one of them.)

Online Comics

Of the various online comics I read, my personal favourites are Karl Kerschl's The Abominable Charles Christopher and Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant. Cameron Stewart's Sin Titulo is developing very nicely, too, and I can't help but read Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield's FreakAngels, even though its story is moving at a positively glacial pace.

Other

Clive James's personal website is a constantly-updated treasure trove of text, audio and video, some of it dating back several decades, and to some extent serves as the model for this one.