Latest news with #UWantitDarkerMurray
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
A darkly funny look at artists – their egos, failures and bad behaviour
SHORT STORIES U Want it DarkerMurray Middleton Picador, $34.99 In U Want it Darker, Australian writer Murray Middleton returns to the short story form that composed his Vogel-winning debut, When There's Nowhere Else to Run. One of the stories follows two comedians — one working a boring shift at the electoral commission, the other roaming through Berlin — as they seek to translate their mundane lives into stand-up routines. In these stories, contemporary artists experience moments of crisis in a world hostile or indifferent towards their creative endeavours. Artists, we all know, are a moody gang, prone to flights of self-loathing and hyperbolic despair. As a result, these stories, by virtue of their subjects, are reflective, wistful, despondent. Last year, Middleton published No Church in the Wild, a novel about disaffected teens who lived in an inner-west Melbourne housing commission estate. The novel, polyphonic and vast in scope, was an example of empathetic social realism. It affixed its characters to the prejudices of education and law-enforcement systems stacked against them, portraying institutionalised racism, migrant experiences, and the soft bigotry of low expectations. The weighty and expansive reach of No Church in the Wild is a counterpoint to the intimate and cloistered portraits in U Want it Darker. We encounter artists – documentary filmmakers, musicians, actors, playwrights, photographers, writers – in varying states of antipathy and creative frustration. They are often found at a crossroads, staring back at some early period of creative productivity and looking upon their conventional existence as a type of failure or fatal compromise. The dramatic situations are characterised by a collision of two irreconcilable desires: the impulse to create art with the spiritual toll and untenable economic realities. These are the lands of the crestfallen bohemian, where dreams of artistic success cast long shadows over everyday living. In Between the Wars, for example, a visual artist yearns for the naive enthusiasm that drove her formative years in a shared art studio, all the while looking upon her expensive apartment and ordinary job in despair. The story in U Want it Darker documents an older actor's inflamed, almost hysterical sense of triumph for a two-minute appearance in an indie film. There's the influence of grunge lit upon Middleton's stories. Writers of this genre presented squalor and marginalised ways of being in the dirty, countercultural corners of urban worlds. Here, we inhabit dim lit dive bars, wander alcohol-drenched streets at night, fall into chemical romances with strangers. The passage in U Want it Darker in which our ageing actor spends many nights with a younger girl engaging in sex acts that involve performing different characters, reads like a homage to this era of late 20th-century realism. The tortured artist stereotype is energised by formal inventions. In House With White Fence, the art of pizza making, and the unhinged man behind it, is judged by a chorus of online reviewers. Likewise, the majority of Where We Come to Fall Apart is narrated as a text message exchange (typos included) between a concerned sister and her brother, whose wife has prematurely given birth. The exchange grows darker as the brother, a playwright, begins to conceptualise his next dramatic spectacle, drawing from the real-life struggle.
The Age
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
A darkly funny look at artists – their egos, failures and bad behaviour
SHORT STORIES U Want it DarkerMurray Middleton Picador, $34.99 In U Want it Darker, Australian writer Murray Middleton returns to the short story form that composed his Vogel-winning debut, When There's Nowhere Else to Run. One of the stories follows two comedians — one working a boring shift at the electoral commission, the other roaming through Berlin — as they seek to translate their mundane lives into stand-up routines. In these stories, contemporary artists experience moments of crisis in a world hostile or indifferent towards their creative endeavours. Artists, we all know, are a moody gang, prone to flights of self-loathing and hyperbolic despair. As a result, these stories, by virtue of their subjects, are reflective, wistful, despondent. Last year, Middleton published No Church in the Wild, a novel about disaffected teens who lived in an inner-west Melbourne housing commission estate. The novel, polyphonic and vast in scope, was an example of empathetic social realism. It affixed its characters to the prejudices of education and law-enforcement systems stacked against them, portraying institutionalised racism, migrant experiences, and the soft bigotry of low expectations. The weighty and expansive reach of No Church in the Wild is a counterpoint to the intimate and cloistered portraits in U Want it Darker. We encounter artists – documentary filmmakers, musicians, actors, playwrights, photographers, writers – in varying states of antipathy and creative frustration. They are often found at a crossroads, staring back at some early period of creative productivity and looking upon their conventional existence as a type of failure or fatal compromise. The dramatic situations are characterised by a collision of two irreconcilable desires: the impulse to create art with the spiritual toll and untenable economic realities. These are the lands of the crestfallen bohemian, where dreams of artistic success cast long shadows over everyday living. In Between the Wars, for example, a visual artist yearns for the naive enthusiasm that drove her formative years in a shared art studio, all the while looking upon her expensive apartment and ordinary job in despair. The story in U Want it Darker documents an older actor's inflamed, almost hysterical sense of triumph for a two-minute appearance in an indie film. There's the influence of grunge lit upon Middleton's stories. Writers of this genre presented squalor and marginalised ways of being in the dirty, countercultural corners of urban worlds. Here, we inhabit dim lit dive bars, wander alcohol-drenched streets at night, fall into chemical romances with strangers. The passage in U Want it Darker in which our ageing actor spends many nights with a younger girl engaging in sex acts that involve performing different characters, reads like a homage to this era of late 20th-century realism. The tortured artist stereotype is energised by formal inventions. In House With White Fence, the art of pizza making, and the unhinged man behind it, is judged by a chorus of online reviewers. Likewise, the majority of Where We Come to Fall Apart is narrated as a text message exchange (typos included) between a concerned sister and her brother, whose wife has prematurely given birth. The exchange grows darker as the brother, a playwright, begins to conceptualise his next dramatic spectacle, drawing from the real-life struggle.
