Good Soldiers, Bad War - on David Finkel in Iraq
- Nick Terrell
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
Scribe. 287 pages. $Au 35.00.
In the final sequence of HBO’s Iraq War mini-series, Generation Kill, the troops from Bravo 21 gather around a laptop. Their deployment has come to an end and the mood is celebratory. One of their number has just finished editing together a retrospective package from the footage he’d shot on his handi-cam during the battalion’s time in theatre. Not everyone in the squad is keen, but the majority assemble excitedly. To the accompaniment of Johnny Cash’s octogenarian end-time rumble, the grainy cut and paste of troops skylarking, bonding, waiting, shooting and smiling begins to play. Read more
Michael Borremans - A Victim of His Situation
- Elizabeth Prater
Belgian Artist Michaël Borremans insists that his figurative works and portraits do not depict individuals. He aspires to the archetypal, the generic and the anonymous. Identity is a retrograde myth, social function and structural determination are the defining human conditions. So it goes. But Borremans’ figures invite a kind of sympathetic response which undermines his arguments against the dignity of the individual. Read more
Monkland - Meanjin, Autumn 2010
Nick Terrell
Meanjin Quarterly - Autumn 2010 (vol. 69, no.1)
Melbourne University Press. $Au 24.99
Here come the spectres, here come the tempting voices. Is this the desert? Is this the devil, whispering in the wilderness? Read more
HEAT 21 - Without a Paddle
HEAT 21 - Without a Paddle.
Giramondo. $AU 24.95.
I lost my way. I forgot myself. I walked into a mirror.
In retracing my steps I’ve mapped out a journey that starts with primal self-assertion, passes through the ‘night-shadowed tundra’ and the ‘thin shadows of nothing’ and arrives, in one form or another, at a negotiated compromise with self-consciousness and the life of the mind. But first, let’s acknowledge the colours we’re travelling under. HEAT 21 is ‘Without a Paddle’ and Jon Campbell is ‘Up Shit Creek’. Popular vernacular, verbal and visual. A highly contrived naïvete. Nostalgia, romance - flat sign-writer surfaces, flat palette. Evocation of the hand-made and make-shift – simple signs - colour, text, composition - the primitive essence of vis. com. coercion (see right). Read more