Bloggers

20nothing by Sal Grover
Some people cannot but speak their minds, especially over whisky and a cigarette, and especially after sex. Part Candace Bushnell, part Sarah Silverman, Sal Grover is one of these people. This is a woman who, by her own admission, "could spend longer in the gym if only she could smoke on the treadmill," and who warns the people in her life that "if you don't want to be mentioned on the blog, don't interact (or sleep) with the writer". It this simple take-no-prisoners policy—two parts brutal honesty to one part wit—that makes her so endearing. Rumour has it there's a book in the works—a tome of similarly creative non-fiction, apparently—and this site's author will be among the first to buy it when it's finally released. Mostly to see if he's in it, of course, but still.

A Pair of Ragged Claws by Stephen Romei
Romei is the editor of The Australian Literary Review, which appears in The Australian on the first Wednesday of every month. Romei's blog is a worthy supplement to that supplement: his wry, semi-regularly updated musings on Australian and world literature, as well as on film and the other arts, are always excellent food for thought, and the number of blogs and websites he links to in turn are almost invariably worth checking out.

Two-time Walkley Award-winner Caroline Overington is a a senior writer and columnist on The Australian. When she is not updating her blog at the newspaper's website, she is invariably Twittering something or other with characteristic charm and wit. An occasionally controversial figure, Overington (who sits opposite this site's author in the newsroom) is also the author of three books, including the compulsively readable Kickback: Inside the Australian Wheat Board Scandal, which won her the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Journalism in 2006.

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.

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.

Garance Doré is a French illustrator, photographer and fashion blogger whose website is a must-visit for anyone with even a passing interest in fashion. Her site, which is published in both English and French language versions, shares much in common with that of her beau, Scott Schuman, except in two important regards. The first is the addition, on Doré's site, of her airy pencil-and-ink drawings, which add a certain—would it be wrong to say feminine?—charm to the proceedings. The second and perhaps more important is her writing, which is conversational and appealing excitable in tone, and gives the whole affair an air of intimacy not so readily apparent on other such sites.

girish by Girish Shambu
Girish Shambu is to the international film blogging scene what Alison Croggon is to Melbourne's theatre blogging one: the person whose blog has, for whatever reason (and in both cases there are plenty), become a meeting-point, a forum for discussion, and one of the keystones of the whole malarkey. Where Shambu and Croggon differ, however, is on the question of intent. Where Croggon's website has become the point around which Melbourne's theatre bloggers pivot almost by accident, Shambu's posts—which tend to either be long lists of links to invaluable reading material, with exhortations to his readers to post more in the comments, or musings on a theme that almost invariably end with questions and lead to discussions hundreds of comments long—are deliberately designed to generate a sense of community. And with the film blogosphere as amorphous and geographically dispersed as it is, this can only be a good thing.

guerrilla semiotics by Jana Perković
Although relatively new to the scene, Jana Perković is arguably Australia's most fierce and idiosyncratic critic of theatre and dance, as well as one of its most promising young thinkers in the field of urbanism. In addition to posting extensively on her own magazine-style blog, Perković also writes for RealTime and Spark Online, the latter of which she is co-editor. Indeed, only Alison Croggon comes close to matching Perković for sheer output of criticism, a remarkable feat in light of the latter's multitude of other commitments and projects. While her opinions are not always agreeable, and she often seems to play the contrarian for the sake of contrariness, her writing nevertheless serves as a useful corrective to much of the received wisdom about art and culture peddled by the mainstream press.

I Shot Frida Kahlo by Lucio Crispino
It is surely not Lucio Crispino's intention to make the readers of his elusively-titled blog feel less intelligent than he is: his online scrapbook, wraught entirely out images and quotations, is more a generous attempt to share than it is a cynical attempt to show-off. But the sheer breadth of his reading, viewing and listening nonetheless has a tendency to put one in one's place—albeit in such a way that one becomes very excited about all the new books one must read and films one must see, albums one must listen to, and so on. Crispino's project here is essentially Godardian: it is about forging connections between images and words, ideas and feelings, and between the creative intelligence behind this work of montage and that on the receiving end.

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.

It makes somewhat more sense to link to the website of Ming-Zhu Hii than to her latest blog, actual/ideal, given she is the kind of blogger who sheds blogs like a snake sheds skin, constantly reinventing herself and experimenting with the form as she does so. Co-artistic director of The Melbourne Town Players, one of that city's newest and most committed theatre companies, Ming rocketed to notoriety in 2006 with her trenchant criticisms of the Short+Sweet Theatre Festival, and has since cemented her reputation as a polemicist with articles for The Age and RealTime championing cross-racial casting.

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.

Piled Higher and Deeper by Jorge Cham
Anyone considering a PhD in anything should probably consult Jorge Cham's charming webcomic, which has been running since 1997 and which is the best corrective available to those with delusions of academic grandeur. As well-drawn and nicely-coloured as it is (its technical quality having improved with time), the comic's real charm is supplied by its characters: Cecilia, Mike Slackenerny, Tajel and the strip's nameless hero, whose lives move along at a plodding piece, marked by questions of self-doubt, humiliating deference to professors and supervisors, and the much-repressed understanding that there's a very big world outside the laboratory that they're seeing very little of. Anyone who loved Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men, and perhaps even recognised themselves in it, will find that Piled Higher and Deeper has much the same effect: you will find before too long that you are laughing at yourself.

sydney arts journo by Nicholas Pickard
While there are other Sydneysiders working as arts journalists, Nicholas Pickard is surely the most impressive, and his wry and occasionally gossipy blog is one of the primary reasons why. Indeed, in addition to being resident theatre critic for Sydney's Sunday paper, The Sun Herald, for which he also pens regular features and interviews, Pickard has also made a name for himself, both on his blog and in the pages of Crikey, as someone willing to write about what nobody else has the time or constitution to. Not only is he willing to do the research that nobody else has time for—his commitment to covering arts funding and policy is almost without comparison in this country—but he is also willing to run stories that have the potential of making him enemies behind the curtain—which is why his pieces on backstage politics, however rare, are so appreciated.

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.

The Sartorialist by Scott Schuman
There may have been street fashion blogs before Scott Schuman came along. There may have been fashion photography blogs. Or even street fashion photography blogs. But none have matched his for sheer quality, consistency or influence, and not without reason. Indeed, people interested in neither fashion nor photography are nonetheless liable to become obsessed with The Sartorialist, simply because of how beautiful everything posted there seems be—especially the people. While written words, on occasion, do make an appearance, the line-up is predominantly visual, comprising photos taken of everyday people on the streets of New York, Paris and Milan (though Melbourne and Sydney have featured recently, too, so far-reaching has the blog's influence become). The concept may be simple, but the execution is flawless, and as Schuman continues to develop as a photographer, so too does the fashion sense of the dedicated reader become more and more refined. Colour and cut become more important to one's everyday life. Pattern and texture begin to play a role in one's wardrobe. And even the prickly matter of cuff-length becomes something worthy of consideration and even—the true mark of the obsessive—discussion.

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.

Tomato by Ed Charles
The Grand Pooh-bah of the Melbourne food blogging scene, Ed Charles is surly, opinionated and very hungry. He's also extremely generous, both with his knowledge, which is considerable, and with his restaurant bookings, which are plentiful. (He has also been known to advertise for dining companions on Twitter, of which he is a self-proclaimed addict.) Like Alison Croggon in the field of theatre and arts blogging, he is a tireless advocate of food blogging as an alternative to the mainstream food and wine coverage and has been instrumental in cultivating a real community of food bloggers in Melbourne. Just don't call him a f**die.

News, Commentary and Opinion

I work for The Australian, the best newspaper in the country, and am a contributor to The Punch, News Ltd.'s online opinion site. I visit both websites on a daily basis and get most of my domestic news in the course of covering it. When it comes to world news, The Economist, Real Clear World and The Guardian constitute my holy triumvirate, and I read these websites compulsively, often at the expense of sleep. I am a big fan of Foreign Policy as well.

I read The Independent for Robert Fisk; Vanity Fair, Slate and The Atlantic Monthly for Christopher Hitchens; and The New Statesman in order to bristle at John Pilger. I also read New York Magazine, The New Republic and The Monthly, although somewhat less regularly in the latter case, as well as with considerably less vigour. (It could be so much more than it is.)

The sheer volume of content at Eurozine is almost always overwhelming, and any attempt to work through all of it is inevitably doomed to failure. As is any attempt to work through even a single issue of The New Yorker, let alone the magazine's website. I am more discerning when it comes to The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, picking out the eyes of each issue because to read them in their entirety would be madness.

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.) Screening the Past should be better known and more widely read than it is: each issue positively oozes with content, much of it by really brilliant writers. The same is true of Cinema Scope, which sports such names as Olaf Möller and Jonathan Rosenbaum, the latter of whom, of course, has his own website that is fast becoming an indispensible archive of his work. (Which reminds me: When will Adrian Martin's website be ready?) FIPRESCI's Undercurrent, while less regularly updated, is also invaluable.

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.