Category Archive for: ‘Issue 35 – Vikki Riley Dossier’

‘This Magazine is for Airing Personal Complaints’ (1983)

In my own city I am but a consumer. I work hard at my designated task, which is to document a personal history of my purchases and stock-take carefully for the future. I have few options – to join the parade of hybrid fashions or declare myself unaffected . Either way, I am involuntarily attached to the umbilical chord of …

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VOLA X (Introduction)

In 1983, a long way before Leos Carax fixed on Herman Melville’s novel Pierre ou les ambiguïtés (as he knew it) for a film and TV project, I considered writing an appreciation of Vikki Riley’s several short Super-8 films of the era, called ‘Vikki: or, The Ambiguities’. (1) Where I found the Melville title was in Andrew Britton’s text on …

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Poetics of Pop: The Titles of Things (1982)

Introduction: I commissioned this text as part of a thirty-minute audiovisual piece titled Poetics of Pop, presented at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre on 6 October 1982: a combination of pre-recorded voice (Vikki’s own), music (by Philip Jackson and Melissa Webb) and slide images (assembled and constructed by me). The images were frame grabs from mainly classic-era Hollywood movies …

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The Canonisation of Junk (1982)

The motivations for this article originally had their genesis in a knee-jerk reaction to the barrage of bad rock journalism that is continuing to pick up momentum here in Melbourne. I will still stick with this intention, but try to present it in a much broader field of criticism whose context and place lay in a more localised history of …

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Caught … Sunless and The State of Things (1984)

Beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can forget. But not because, like other memorable cities, it leaves an unusual image in your recollections. Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and …

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