In Australia, a model minority can’t flinch when a boss expresses surprise that they’re bad at maths and grew up in the suburbs of Brisbane. They’re supposed to ignore the connection between a myth that casts them as hardworking and self-sufficient and one that suggests indigenous Australians are to blame for their own disadvantage.
– I wrote about the dangers of the model minority myth for Daily Life.
If you happen to be staying in a Jumeirah hotel in Shanghai, London, Dubai or Frankfurt, pick up a copy of Jumeirah magazine – I profiled the incredible Hong Kong gallerist Pearl Lam. It’s the magazine with Pierce Brosnan on the cover!
It’s mildly ironic that adult colouring books, which promise to unleash the creativity you misplaced in childhood, are booming in a world that infantilises artists and whose material conditions make it increasingly impossible for them to make a living from their work. They’re a sign of a culture that repackages the creative freedom we had as children to compensate for the choices we lack in our adult lives.
What our obsession with adult colouring books says about us – Daily Life
But look, the whole idea of “breaking through” is such a crock of shit. If you do nothing else, build a religion around this one fact. Beyond the ability to feed yourself, it doesn’t fucking matter if a million people love you or five people do. It doesn’t matter if you’re 25 or 75. You cannot pollute your life with this fixation. You can feel relevant, you can imagine that you somehow matter in the larger scheme of things, you can commit to being a force in the world, without hitting some arbitrary high score or crossing some imaginary threshold of popularity. I am drawn to the flame of Twitter for some great reasons and for some reasons that spring from some slow, sick, sucking part of me, to quote Pavement like the old fucker I am. But you can’t construct your life around these equations. You can’t try to “reach” some imagined mob of dipshits, molding your work to match their dipshitty tastes. Be a lovely odd duck instead, one who hardly notices if people are booing or cheering.
– Heather Havrilesky killing it in her column for The Cut this week
“It was terrifying because I was leaving a full-time salary and a job that was perfect on paper but when it was the first thing I was thinking about when I was waking up in the morning and the last thing I was thinking about before I went to sleep I knew it was time,” says Eleanor Pendleton, the trailblazing editor and entrepreneur behind online beauty magazine Gritty Pretty. My profile of Pendleton is The Collective magazine’s cover story this month – at newsagents now.
My Sex and the City boxed set is gathering dust in the back of a drawer but I can’t bring myself to throw it out. Ten years ago, a friend and I, jobless and aimless, put on it repeat and watching Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte turn to each other again and again brought our own bond into focus. Now, the telltale pink shoebox feels like a talisman. As Tavi Gevinson writes in her most recent Rookie Editor’s letter, “I find it odd find it odd to characterise romantic relationships as “more than friends.” It seems friendship ought to be the prized jewel.”
From cult photographer Petra Collins, who uses a sherbet palette to capture all the pleasure and pain of female adolescence, to YouTube star Grace Helbig, who gives her teenage fan base make-up tutorials clad in pyjamas, to Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham, who’ve made careers out of mining the female experience and skewering its countless taboos, these creators are less interested in protesting the role of women as sexualised objects than they are in asserting our place as the all-seeing subjects of our own world.
– Are we entering the golden age of the female gaze? – Daily Life
Image credit: Tim Grey
In cased you missed it, I profiled talented illustrator James Gulliver Hancock and his latest book All the Buildings in Sydney for the last ever print issue of Broadsheet – read the whole thing over here.
The new issue of Vault is out! For this issue, I wrote on Sydney artist Clare Milledge and her shapeshifting installations.
An outtake from a whirwind trip to Byron Bay for an upcoming magazine feature last week. I’d never been before but it was exactly how I’d pictured it – like a Slim Aarons photo shoot crossed with hazy ‘seventies Australiana.