Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 115 - Sep/Oct 2023 i frankie Magazine

It could be the taste of your mum’s homemade spag bol. The kitschy tea towels that don’t quite match your kitchen, but remind you of your nan’s place. The TV show that you’ve seen every episode of multiple times and continue to rewatch whenever you’re feeling blue or ill, just because it soothes your soul. And yeah, it’s healthy to try new things and leave the warm, safe blanket of your comfort zone every now and then. But there’s nothing wrong with relishing the delicious familiarity of all the stuff you already know you love. (We are creatures of habit, after all.) In this issue, we meet a bunch of people who are embracing the familiar – and are all the better for it. Like writer Rhiana Jay, who reminisces…

When Leo Tolstoy wrote, “art is a human activity … that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through,” generative artificial intelligence was still more than a hundred years off. He might not have bothered to write all 1225 pages of War and Peace had ChatGPT been just a few clicks away. Now, it’s nearly impossible to scroll the internet without seeing mention of AI and its potential impact on humanity. High schools are clamping down on students using AI to write essays and, to much outcry, the top spot of the Sony World Photography Awards was recently taken out by an AI-generated photograph. Programs that can generate artworks using AI are easy to find and use – OpenAI’s…

When I was a kid, I stayed at my dad’s place every second weekend and we’d go op-shopping. He’d hunt for antiques, rusted tools, records and movies – and I’d hunt for copies of Goosebumps . I’d rush to the kids’ books section and as soon as I spotted the familiar pastel spine, the dripping ‘ Goosebumps ’ font and the hacky title of a scary story I hadn’t yet read, I knew I was in for a great night. I’d often find a Goosebumps or two, but sometimes, I’d hit the mother lode and come home with 10. As soon as I was back in the car, I’d pick the book with the scariest cover and start devouring it. I’d stop reading just long enough for…

What prompted your series Time Spent That Might Otherwise Be Forgotten? I was thinking about the relationship between photography and memory and the gap between reality and photographic representation. The project was also inspired by the nature of photos increasingly being looked at on screens, which led me to return to the idea of the photograph as object. I was thinking about the way photo albums are often carefully curated into performative collections meant to tell a specific story, and how these constructions become the remembered reality. Where do you source your photos? These are my own photographs, from 1976 to the present. The images from my childhood were most likely taken by my mother, while the more recent photographs are my own family and travel photos. A lot has…

learn something new VAMPIRES Vampires spring a few tropes to mind: a thirst for human blood, pointy fangs, Robert Pattinson. But variations on bloodsucking ghouls who have an aversion to sunlight have appeared in legends across the planet for thousands of years. The Mesopotamians, Ancient Greeks and Hebrews, for example, all had distinct versions of the now-popular Halloween costume. While the root of the vampire myth is contested, it’s commonly put down to a general human ignorance about disease and how bodies decomposed way back when. However, some researchers have suggested that a 1720s rabies epidemic that ravaged Hungary could very well be the culprit. Rabies is a deadly virus transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected animal, and symptoms include biting, insomnia and a hatred of strong…

If you’re thinking rice pudding is a bit of a nanna dish, think again. Enriched with coconut cream and swirled with the tang of sour cherries, this is a very adult version of a childhood favourite, right down to the bitterness of the dark chocolate on top. If you make the rice ahead and refrigerate, it will become quite thick and creamy – just adjust the consistency with a little extra cold milk. Luxardo cherries in their own syrup are a blessing to have in the pantry – they last forever and are brilliant with ice cream, as well as in fruit cakes, tarts and puddings (and especially in one of our favourite cocktails, The Last Word). INGREDIENTS For the creamed rice Makes 900g – 95g jasmine rice – 220g…

You’re from Melbourne, but you’ve travelled all over the globe. How has that influenced your art? For the past year I’ve been living in a different place every one to two months. This has become my art practice – my collections are based on the places I live. I’m never sure how they will come about before I get there, but that makes it all the more fun. How did Black Water begin? My husband and I rode motorbikes through Vietnam for two weeks. Through the backcountry, there were times when there wasn’t much food, but there was always coffee – the famous Vietnamese cà phê, the most potent stuff I’ve ever tasted. We grew obsessed with it and it also became one of the only ways we could connect…

Tell us about your travels through Western Australia. Where did you go and what did you see? Last September I picked up a campervan in Perth and travelled solo for two weeks along the southern coastline of Western Australia to see the many wildflowers of its springtime. I headed straight down to Smiths Beach for a few days where I hiked two parts of the Cape to Cape track, met one of my favourite artists, and explored Gracetown and the main street of Margaret River. I then headed to Denmark and spent some sunny days hiking among profuse pink and gold wildflowers and explored the Greens Pool and Elephant Rocks. I would’ve loved to have stayed there longer but the weather forecast for the coming days was gale-force winds and…

Tell us about where you live. I live in Lewisham, Sydney, in a little 1930s art deco apartment block. I bought the apartment in 2020. It was during the pandemic, when everyone was realising how much their home affects their mood and how important it is to have a space that you feel comfortable in. I think that feeling has inspired my decorating over the last couple of years. What does comfort mean to you aesthetically? In essence, my decorating style is romantic. I always seek beauty in my music and all of my creative pursuits. And that doesn’t mean that something has to be fashionable or expensive – it’s finding beauty in all sorts of things. Like, obviously pink velvet curtains are lush and beautiful, but so is a…

AUTHOR, PHD CANDIDATE AND ONLINE CREATOR ESME JAMES WANTS US TO REMEMBER THAT HUMANS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A LITTLE BIT FREAKY IN THE BEDROOM. It’s all too easy to think of our historical ancestors as uptight, prudish individuals who only ever managed to get their rocks off by accidentally looking at someone’s fully clothed ankle before dying of disease at the ripe age of 32. After all, medieval peasants were probably more concerned with surviving the latest plague sweeping through their villages than exploring their own sexual preferences, right? Not necessarily, according to Esme James, who aims to challenge our modern beliefs about historical sex by reminding us that human horniness is as old as time itself. The Melbourne writer and researcher ironically first started studying theology and the history…

By Jack Vening Spend long enough watching weird history YouTube videos or spooky TikToks and eventually you’ll find the story of Paul Kern. Kern was a Hungarian World War I veteran who found fame as the oldest of old-world icons – the medical curio – after he survived a mid-battle bullet wound to the head, woke from the resulting coma, and never slept a wink again. The damage caused to his brain was so precise that it apparently eliminated both the ability to fall asleep and, somehow, the need. He lived another 28 years fully functional, if a little isolated. Doctors were baffled, scientists were disturbed. This was an age when people thought cigarettes were explicitly good for you, but even they knew you had to sleep to live, right?…

When did you learn to knit? I learnt to knit in middle school – I did a couple of basic projects and then forgot about it. I learnt how to make the kinds of things that I make now in 2018. I used what I already knew with the help of YouTube. What does the process of creating one of your tapestries involve? There are two ways: if it’s a freehand piece, I draw a little sketch on a piece of paper, then start knitting while looking at the sketch. In knitting, the colourwork technique is kind of restrictive when it comes to detailed images, so I try to recreate the details in the sketch with stitches. For other works, I make a pattern beforehand. I usually make an image…

How did you get started in fashion? I studied textile design and my first job was as a textile designer for Jakob Schlaepfer, where I was designing fabrics for ready-to-wear and high fashion. I started designing my own hand-painted and hand-pleated garments. Over time, people became increasingly intrigued by my work and were asking for more. After winning a prize for my first collection, I realised that I had created a product that people found compelling enough to buy and wear. That’s when I decided to pursue my own path. How do you create those mesmerising pleats? Shibori is a Japanese dyeing technique used on textiles to create patterns that spread unevenly across the fabric. What’s special in our case is that we don’t use it for dyeing but for…

sister rosetta tharpe When most people think of the founder of rock’n’roll, chances are they’re not thinking about a queer black woman born in 1915 in Arkansas. Raised in a family of cotton pickers, religious singers and evangelists, Sister Rosetta Tharpe (then Rosetta Nubin) picked up the guitar as a child and soon began touring and performing spiritual music with her mum. From there, Tharpe continued to grow and explore musically, eventually developing her signature style, blending gospel with jazz and blues. But it’s Tharpe’s distinctive voice and heavy distortion on her electric guitar that tie it all together. This was still the 1930s, though, and a black female guitarist was far from common. While Tharpe’s roots were in gospel and the church, her lyrics and themes began to stray…

SCENTS AND THE CITY Smelling like the city might conjure nose-wrinkling recollections, like the unpleasant odour of exhaust fumes, restaurant kitchen grease or overflowing rubbish bins. But during Melbourne’s pandemic lockdowns, Sophie Marcoux honed in on the far more romantic and aromatic side to her city, developing a line of scents dedicated to the place she loved and missed. Ficifolia fragrances include Intermission (a warm and spicy ode to Melbourne’s theatres), Rose Street (a floral celebration of eclectic Fitzroy) and Out of Office (a juicy, spritzy reminder of post-work drinks along the Yarra). To delight your olfactory senses, take $190 to ficifolia.com ANIMALIA PARAPHERNALIA *David Attenbrough voice* Behold the majestic presence of Kiwi brand Hej Hej’s large linen scrunchie, its clever design mimicking stripes common to the animal kingdom. Nothing…

When Jennifer Coolidge won Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series at the 2022 Emmys, she thanked The White Lotus creator Mike White for reviving her career. Had you just met Coolidge through her immaculate portrayal of lonely ageing heiress Tanya McQuoid in White’s series, you might be forgiven for thinking that’s true. Maybe. But the Coolidge stans among us know she was selling herself short there, as she’s been the star of many classics – and our hearts – long before Mike White was even a contestant on Survivor (look it up! It’s true!). BEST IN SHOW (2000) Master mockumentarian Christopher Guest’s first film was This Is Spinal Tap in 1984, but many of us elder millennials know him from his Waiting for Guffman /…

CHALMERS – GOLD FIZZ God, remember Passion Pop? Wine’s horrid little stepchild, created in a lab to make sure Schoolies revellers are too unwell to organise into an army. It cost pennies and tasted like someone stole the syrup tank out of a slushie machine. Chalmers Gold Fizz isn’t quite that, but there’s something about it that triggers one’s muscle memory: fruity, easy drinking, almost dessert-wine sweet. With a five per cent alcohol content, it’s less than half the strength of an average wine, so you can take it to the picnic and find your way home afterwards. And as someone who has stolen a slushie machine syrup tank and gets lost on their way home regularly, that’s fine by me. JV SHADY LANE – PÉT NAT PINOT If I…

Listening to Babe Rainbow is like hopping into a time machine. The band’s groovy, psychedelic soundscapes, which conjure images of flower children and peace signs in technicolour, are straight out of the 1960s – you’d be forgiven if you thought the music was actually of that time. But despite their retro aesthetic, the quartet are actually from Byron Bay and making music right now. True to their hometown roots, singer Angus Dowling says the songwriting process is more coastal than jammy. “It starts on a nylon acoustic guitar – really chilled chord progressions, completely unamplified,” he says. “That’s usually how every song begins, just around the fire or something, and then it’ll grow into a groove with percussion and bass.” Angus and his high-school friend Jack Crowther first had the…

Making the momentous decision to uproot your life to a new city – or rural hamlet, for that matter – and then actually following through is no easy feat. Between securing work, finding somewhere to lay your noggin, and taking care of all the pesky logistics that accompany a move, you might forget all about friends until you get to your destination, look around, and realise no one’s there with a welcome sign. If you’ve lived in the same place your whole life and have never really had to exert yourself to make chums, the realisation that you’re flying solo can be a shock to the system. But don’t despair! Finding *your people* in a new city is a simultaneously thrilling and humbling opportunity to observe your behaviour in new…

anna cordell THIS MELBOURNE CREATIVE DESIGNS TAILORED SUITS FOR MUSOS AND FASHIONABLE FOLK ALIKE. How did you get started in fashion design? I studied philosophy and music at uni, so I wasn’t intending to get into fashion, but it kind of took on a life of its own. Years ago, I was collecting all this vintage stuff from op shops, so I started a reworked vintage fashion label. It originally started in a market, then it was stocked at a few stores around Melbourne and in Sportsgirl and General Pants. It grew really quickly. I had four kids by this stage, so I stopped everything to be home with them. But then I got back into music, started gigging and had a corduroy suit made to wear on stage. Other…

How did this photoshoot come to be? Em Jensen and I wanted to collaborate on a project where the designs were immersed in the background and decided to build the set and outfits around this textile design. As soon as we hung the fabric it felt like we were dressing a familiar lounge room – the textile print becoming the wallpaper, the oversized wristwatch that hung in my grandparents’ loungeroom for 40 years, the fringed lamp that Em thrifted on a trip to country Victoria, and a plant stand salvaged from council pickup. The result was a space that you feel like you’ve been in before. Model Dominik Shields could seemingly be camouflaged in the wallpaper, relishing in the activity around her while preserving her solitude. Talented hair and make-up…

This past Christmas my brother gifted me a few toys that we’d see on ’90s infomercials, like Floam, B’loonies and Lite-Brite. As a lettering artist, I looked at these toys and couldn’t help but think about turning them into tactile letters. I already had a few toys to start with, and that really helped set the tone for the whole series. It only got difficult with the last few letters because it was so hard to narrow down the toys – I didn’t want to disappoint anyone by leaving out their favourites. Ultimately, I decided to do a few polls and let the people decide. The Etch A Sketch was definitely the most challenging toy to use in the series. I had a vision in my head, but couldn't quite…

When you find yourself out and about – be it in the park, camping, making your way through the suburbs, at the river, beach, or on a road trip – encourage yourself to notice details of your surroundings. Birds are going to be around you; it’s just a matter of reminding yourself to observe them. While a pair of binoculars will make things easier, even just watching from a distance can give you enough information to identify (and appreciate) a species you encounter. When I spot a bird I’m unfamiliar with, I try to stand quietly and observe the bird for as long as I can, and I avoid going straight to a bird guide, as it usually distracts me from the bird itself. Instead, I like to soak in…