Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 102 - Jul/Aug 2021 i frankie Magazine

Someone once said “nothing good ever happens after midnight”, but I’m going to call bullshit on that and revise it to 9pm (potentially even 8pm in winter). At exactly that time, my body begins shutting down for the night like an overloaded browser with 100 tabs open. If I’m at a dinner, I start to tune out of conversations, focusing instead on stuffing my face with roast potatoes to prevent my snoozy head from falling onto someone’s shoulder. If I’m at a party, I try to dance it off (even though my limbs feel like marble table legs), until I realise I’m solo-swaying in an empty room. If I’m at a gig, I rest my eyes… just for a bit… until BAM! The encore is over and I’m being swept…

How did you find out about the Saint Lukas medical train? I spent some time during my studies in documentary photography living in the Siberian city of Tomsk. I became interested in the challenges of daily life for the region’s more remote communities. One of these challenges, of course, is healthcare. In many places, there are simply no doctors left. In others, one or two remain, but are overstretched and overworked. The medical train caught my attention as it was a unique solution to this problem: sending doctors from regional capitals – some on boats, others by train – to serve remote communities. Can you tell us a bit more about it? At the time I took these photos, the Saint Lukas train was one of five government-funded medical trains…

Without meaning to completely bum you all out, I’m going to start this piece with the following icy slap of information: you’re going to die. And all your friends will die, and your family, and your dogs (this particular one REALLY isn’t fair, and to be honest, I haven’t completely reconciled it, because dogs are perfect), and your ex-lovers, all of them, even the ones you never got over. It’s such a brutal and painful thing to consider. I know, I know. But even still, I try to remind myself of it constantly, because it’s important. It makes me reflect on the things I’ve never said, the ones that long ago got stuck in my throat because they were too hard or too painful or raw or embarrassing to air.…

Growing up, hand cream mystified me. It seemed to be everywhere: cluttering supermarket aisles, spilling from handbags, crowding bathroom drawers and oozing between fingers. My mother is a hand cream lady. Vaseline Intensive Care is her yellow elixir of choice. She marinates in the stuff, just as her mother did – although Gran was a lily of the valley girl. My sister followed in their footsteps (or handprints, as it were). Her teenage bedroom, a sanctuary I was rarely invited into, was adorned with Body Shop pots and pharmacy travel tubes. Whenever my mum got carried away with an application, leaving her hands too slick to grip a steering wheel or mug of tea, she’d instruct me to hold out my own paws. The excess cream would be deposited via…

Is there a distinctly Auckland sound? I think it’s pretty hard to tell from the inside. Auckland feels like a Goldilocks zone where it’s big enough that there’s a huge variety of music being made by many different music scenes, but it’s also small enough that those music scenes aren’t totally separate from each other. You’re often playing in the same spaces, being played on the same radio stations, on the same lineups, etc. There’s always amazing new music from friends and people I admire, then there’s stuff I grew up listening to that has seeped into my bones without me even realising. Where to grab a bite? When we’re working, we always get dinner from Laojianghu Malatang, a Chinese place in the Lim Chhour Food Court on Karangahape Road.…

Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do. Hey, hey! I’m Katie and I’m the artist behind Tragic Girls! I love retro comics, horror movies, tattoos and lowbrow/pop art. I live with my partner and my poodle in a little apartment in Salt Lake City in the US, and I spend most of my time drawing. What is Tragic Girls and how did it come to be? Tragic Girls is my art and apparel brand. It all started with my love of retro comic-looking pop art. I’ve been making silly comics my whole life, and a few years back I decided I would actually try to get my work out there. I began posting it online and several years later, here we are! What drew you to…

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan’s first dream job – what she wanted to be when she grew up – was a unicorn. “I’m still working on that,” she deadpans over Zoom. Instead, the 19-year-old Tamil Canadian became an actress. And, just casually, she made her professional debut in Mindy Kaling’s 2020 Netflix comedy-drama series Never Have I Ever as Devi Vishwakumar, a precocious teenager dealing with the unexpected death of her dad, as well as all the usual angsty teenage things. Maitreyi landed the role over 15,000 hopefuls after she responded to an open callout on Twitter with an audition tape she filmed at her local library. (Some people might say that’s even more magical than being a unicorn.) She had a little acting experience under her belt – namely a year-10 production…

Dearest frankie, Deirdre Fidge nailed it: the time IS now. In my late teens/early 20s, having discovered adulthood and independence (and a pay cheque), I had a taste for all things expensive. “Champagne-drinker on a beer budget,” my mum often scoffed at me. It all changed at 22 with one dress. It was beautiful, short, sexy and made of a gold, slinky material. I wore it once to a New Year’s Eve party, got it dry-cleaned and ever so carefully tucked it in my wardrobe, still in the plastic and safe for some other ‘special occasion’. A year or so later I pulled it out, having completely forgotten about it. Alas, the moisture generated by the plastic had caused the material to break down, and all the glitzy gold had…

I collect everyday items made in Australia in the early- to mid-20th century. Things I find appealing in some kind of (often inexplicable) way, like Persinware scales, Bakelite ammeters, spectacles, canteens and camera bags that have lost their cameras. Everything has to be handsome, practical and have a place! My biggest collection, though, features 100-per-cent-wool blankets manufactured in Australia between the 1920s and the end of the 1960s. I’ve been accumulating them for just over a decade – more than 500 have passed through my hands, but the current collection sits at around 150. Australia had hundreds of wool mills last century, across every state. The Waverley Mills in Tasmania are still going, Onkaparinga in South Australia is now a museum, and Godfrey Hirst in Victoria just makes carpets these…

As an embryologist, my job is essentially to take care of embryos – the earliest stage of human development. We form embryos by collecting eggs and sperm, putting them together, growing them and transferring them, and there’s also gamete preservation (‘gamete’ is another name for our reproductive cells), because some people come through to freeze their eggs. We facilitate that, and we also do semen analysis. I’m involved in every step of the IVF process: collecting eggs, washing up the sperm, moving them, grading them, transferring them, injecting them, taking cells out – you name it, I’ll do it. There’s no exact pathway towards this job. I fell into it, really. Originally, I was in scientific research – the problem in Australia is that you have to constantly fight for…

Look. Typically, when I see my friends for beers, we exhaust subjects like politics, religion, insanity, constipation, masturbation and trash-talking beloved celebrities in about two hours. It’s a real meeting of the minds, you might say. But there are some limits we try to respect. TRUE CRIME PODCASTS Unless all your friends are women over retirement age, please keep that shit to yourself. True crime is a vortex of voyeurism, violence, fandom and, undergirding it all, thousands of people who Should Have Something Better To Do. Nobody wants to talk about blood-splatter analysis at the pub, firstly because it’s morbid as hell and secondly because it is FAKE! All those CSI techniques are just made-up TV stuff cops use to retroactively justify whatever they’ve already decided to do. “Do you…

Describe Love and Hope in a sentence. A cosy and chilled tattoo parlour that doesn’t try too hard. Tell us about the space. The studio consists of two connected buildings. The waiting room is new, but the tattooing takes place in a beautiful 1900s space with brick walls, a high ceiling, a skylight and a mezzanine. I didn’t want my studio to look like the classic clinical tattoo shop – I’ve given it more of a homely vibe. Our waiting room looks like a lounge and we have plenty of plants. We burn lots of incense and play calming music most of the time. What were the biggest challenges of setting up shop? My biggest challenge was being a new mum while setting up the studio (my son Akira was…

No, I will not speak up. I am a mumbler. This isn’t something I would have specifically called myself, but it’s certainly something I’ve been called by others. Often. Including as part of my wife’s impression of me, which was as illuminating as it was entirely unrequested and impossible to erase from my memory. Apparently I spend a lot of my day walking around the kitchen, mumbling my way through an invisible to-do list and admonishing myself for every task left undone. But is mumbling so bad? Sure, it’s infuriating for anyone having a conversation with me, but it’s already infuriating to have a conversation with me, so that’s just a matter of scale. I suppose I can understand why people don’t like mumbling, though. If we’re talking, you would…

SPILL THE BEANS In Ancient Greece, citizens would elect council members by placing white and black beans in special clay jars. A white bean meant ‘yes’ and a black bean meant ‘no’ (a baked bean was probably a donkey vote). The thing is, voting was meant to be anonymous. Nobody knew the colour of your bean. Unless the jar Clumsycles was holding sort of… slipped and cracked open, and the beans were spilled all over the floor, and they had to start the whole damn thing again. This is possibly where the idiom ‘spill the beans’ comes from, i.e. giving away a secret to someone who’s not supposed to know the secret. But some etymologists have pointed out that people didn’t start saying ‘spill the beans’ until the early 20th…

Adding some pizzazz to your walls is a sure-fire way to make your home feel more, well, homely – but if you don’t have picture rails (and the previous tenants haven’t done the hard yards before you) you’ll need to figure out the best way to hang your art. Take into consideration the shape and weight of the frame, the type of hook on the back, and what the wall is made of. For a heavy piece on a plaster wall, you may need to drill into a stud; meanwhile, sticky hooks will do for lighter frames. If you fancy your art being flush against the surface, there are special wall-mount kits available, too. Below, we’ll focus on the simplest technique: hanging a picture with a basic hook or nail.…

Coming to Australia will always be the thing that changed my life forever. When I was growing up in Tehran, Iran, family from all over the world would visit and tell us how things were culturally limited there. My family is very open and not particularly traditional or religious, so we would talk about these things. We were middle class and had a decent life, but I always had this feeling I could leave and do better, even though there was no war or economic issues at that time. As I got older, I became awakened to Iran’s totalitarian government. I was very observant as a kid. I could see how school life was different to home life. You couldn’t be openly non-religious – school was strictly Muslim. At school,…

Here’s something you might not realise: every year, more than 1000 shipping containers are lost at sea. In February 1997, when a freak wave hit the cargo ship Tokio Express, 62 containers alone toppled overboard, carrying with them nearly five million pieces of LEGO. It wasn’t long before Tracey Williams, a lifelong beachcomber, noticed bits of plastic seagrass washing ashore near her parents’ seaside home in Devon, England. And nearly three decades on, Tracey and other folks in the neighbouring county of Cornwall continue to find little plastic flowers, yellow life jackets, scuba tanks and spear guns down on the beach. (Rather fittingly, much of the lost LEGO appears to have been nautical-themed.) “The ship headed off for repairs, but many of the containers are thought to have sunk in…

Hi Wanissa! Tell us a bit about yourself. Hi! I'm a Bangkok-born designer and academic based in Melbourne. I run a business called Dapper Pupper, creating bandanas and pet portraits of dogs and cats. I'm also currently teaching design and illustration at LCI Melbourne. My work with The Letterettes involved live lettering and customisation, with occasional signage work, murals and campaigns. What’s a regular work day like for you? I often start the day with yoga, followed by a substantial breakfast, then I map out a to-do list. On the days I teach, I love going into LCI in Collingwood. All the other days, I work from home from my apartment in Melbourne’s CBD. I focus best in the mornings, so I aim to get all the bigger tasks done…

You may have spent the past few years watching St. Vincent – real name Annie Clark – bound up in latex, commanding us with icy stares and sharp guitar lines. But her latest reinvention is, in typical style, a complete 180. Out goes the aggressive fetishwear and in come the flared suits, smudged eyeliner and blonde wig. Annie described her last Grammy-award-winning album Masseducation as “dominatrix at the mental institution”. Her latest record, Daddy’s Home, is “glamour that’s been up for three days straight”. Picture a starlet riding the subway home in the morning with dirt under her chipped fingernails – that’s where St. Vincent is now. Annie landed on this vision of grimy New York opulence in the winter of 2019. She was in the renowned Electric Lady Studios…

POWER TO THE PEOPLE Once upon a time, genealogy – the study of tracing your family – was a hobby for the nobility, or anyone who needed to prove they were related to a noble so-and-so. These days, genealogy can help us common folks understand where exactly we came from. Look, you’re probably not royalty. But that’s fine. As you’ll likely find out during your search, regular old plebs can be interesting, too! INTERROGATE YOUR ELDERS No matter where you are on the planet, you should always start your search by getting to know any living relatives. As hard as it may be to think about, they’re not going to be with you forever. Enlist the help of your mum, dad, nan, or even that weird aunt you only see…

There’s power in self-reliance. I remember when I learnt how to rewire the clapped-out fuses in the geriatric fuse box of my uni sharehouse. It made me feel so grown-up. Forget cooking or learning to pay bills on time; it was that minor repair that made me feel like I’d flown the nest. I’ve always had a Leatherman (a multi-tool, for those not au fait with such things), but that was my limit: I could construct IKEA furniture, tighten a screw, change a fuse and clip my nails. I always thought that one day I would work at Bunnings. I loved the large trolleys, the smell of wood shavings and the staff uniform – mostly the tool belt. My Bunnings dream career never materialised, but a while back, I did…