Issue 5

I remember thinking he was really normal.  I met Sam Nivola some years ago at a holiday party in our mutual friends' West Village apartment.  I remember he was funny, kept good eye contact, and understood how to keep “the bit” going. I also remember thinking he was normal.  It’s not that young men aren't normal, you see. It's that young male actors can be fairly egocentric. At past New York parties, I have found myself listening to young men rattle on about the meaning of art

For a country whose culture holds a reputation for cutting down its tallest poppies, it seems to grow an impressive number of them. Australia’s relationship with success and ‘standing out’ is famously complicated, shaped by an ambiguous yet very fine line between humility and confidence. A few weeks ago (and after several insistent suggestions from my social media algorithms), I read the trending Substack piece by Mufaro Mutowembwa, titled Make Australia Ambitious Again . It’

My dad is a visual artist and child of the 70s. The Peanuts mean worlds more to him than they ever could to me, but like he’s conditioned my love for the Yankees, he’s also imparted a sentimental feeling towards Chuck and the gang.  Whenever we watch a special together (at least twice per coordinating holiday month), at every new frame he remarks on the art. It’s the same thing every time, but I let him sing the old tune. These reflections become just as ceremonial as the act

My friend Liam asked to see my mutilated index finger while we waited for our teacher to collect our worksheets. I told him no, I wasn’t supposed to take it out of the splint. I sensed his disappointment. But I’ll draw you a picture, I said. So I scrawled a vaguely phallic shape onto a sheet of copy paper and colored it in with red, blue, purple, and green, and then I slid the whole grotesque patchwork across the desk. I held my finger up next to it in its metal enclosure for

On a sunny November day in Nashville, I found myself with six hours to kill. A friend of mine, whom I was visiting, had to work all day, so I decided to get away from the Broadway antics of tractor party buses and PBRs, and go somewhere a little quieter. For my solitary afternoon, I chose the Frist Art Museum.  I entered the art deco building, with its stony exterior and long, drawn out staircases, with zero expectations. Upon climbing two floors, however, I was struck by a p

If you believe that the creative pursuit is a chosen path, I do not know if there was logic in my choice to pursue one. The adults I knew were not artists by profession, nor was film or theater positioned anywhere beyond the fringes of my childhood. Certainly, special occasions were celebrated with trips to our local South African cinema complexes, and although I recall the sense that these were sacred spaces; movies, and the people who made them existed as mere illusive crea