Tag: London
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Adding Oil: China’s Dramatic Rise to Olympic Supremacy
An adolescent youth with a military-style crew cut faces a foreign camera crew, hands behind his back like he’s taking a team photo. He has the dreamy, dissociated gaze of a man who has just awakened from a dream, and looks down at the medal hanging by a ribbon around his neck as something unreal.
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Ice-Cream, Politics & Gossip Girl: What’s Wrong with the Olympics?
Every four years when the Olympics roll around I make a big fuss about “bullshit nationalism,” the government “wasting money on elite sport” and “stupid commentators and awful coverage.” But inevitably I end up staying up till 4am watching ridiculously obscure sports that I would never normally pay attention to like badminton, handball and dressage. I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about why,…
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Review: The London Years at Brett Whiteley Studio
Tucked away in the back streets of Surry Hills is a studio where one of Australia’s most iconic artists, Brett Whiteley, used to live and create in. Post-divorce and in the throes of heroin and alcohol addiction, it was a space Whiteley retreated to four years before his fatal overdose in 1992. It’s a fascinating homage…
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Opinion: London Riots
While the Australian media has been remarkably quiet on the issue, focusing instead on the supposedly impending economic apocalypse, a peek at a map of London superimposed with the locations of all the riots and their spread tells a story worth hearing. The riots are everywhere, they’re dangerous for ordinary people, and they’re being astoundingly…