Smoke Social

Smoke socials were a form of social entertainment in late-19th and early-20th century Australia. Groups, usually exclusively male, would gather together, light up their smokable object – cigarette, cigar, cigarillo, or pipe – and while away the evening, sharing stories and trading jibes.

In the spirit of the smoke social, I’ve launched a newsletter: reportage and commentary from the streets of Melbourne.

New pieces are published at 6am on Saturday morning, every fortnight. Sign up with your email and they’ll be delivered straight to your inbox.

24.04.16

“It took, for example, a closer inspection to see that a 1934 letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald discussing his main literary influences was sent not from 1307 Park Avenue, New York, but from 1307 Park Avenue . . . Baltimore.”

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The New Criterion
‘What’s the story?: On the 64th annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair’
journalism

24.04.15

“Adams may have seemed a worthy Greenberg acolyte, bustling intellect and all, but she was too single-minded, too idiosyncratic, too discrepant to ever cohere in that category — or any such category, for that matter.”

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The New Criterion
Review of ‘Pat Adams: Work from the 1950s and 60s’ at Alexandre Gallery
art criticism

24.04.11

“Glazer’s camera obsesses over its lead talent, whose technical sophistication is matched only by her sheer no-fuss watchability.”

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Document Journal
‘Scarlett Johannson delivers Shakespearian lines in the latest campaign for the Prada Galleria handbag’
journalism

24.03.21

“This was a man, after all, who came back to New York in 1908 wearing the same suit he’d left in three years earlier. Who would have, indeed who could have guessed it would be such a momentous landing?”

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The New Criterion
Review of ‘Max Weber: Art and Life Are Not Apart’ at Schoelkopf Gallery
art criticism

24.03.20

“The archives, kept intact, have finally been excavated, the designs have been photographed, the essays have been written – and Berger’s work has proven, indeed, to be worth it.”

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Document Journal
‘The Singular Vision of Otti Berger’
art criticism

24.03.13

“Like the bird-and-flower paintings of the Tang Dynasty, their strength lies in their terseness, opening the viewer up to the glories of texture and fluidity produced when pigment mixes with water.”

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Document Journal
Review of ‘Russell Sharon’s Wildflowers’ at Hal Bromm Gallery
art criticism

24.03.12

“Spectators took one look at the great orb suspended from the ceiling and knew they weren’t here for cutesy little pleasantries.”

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Document Journal
‘Best in show: PFW Fall/Winter 2024’
journalism

24.03.01

“This particular kind of billowing elegance also had a couple of unusual bedfellows: British ’80s workwear and aristocratic selleria.”

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Document Journal
‘Best in show: MFW Fall/Winter 2024’
journalism

24.02.28

“This latest collection recalled Rothko with its layering: a contrast of colored horizons, with the drama localized at those points where the blurred edges inevitably meet.”

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Document Journal
‘Best in show: LFW Fall/Winter 2024’
journalism

24.02.20

“It was a touch just subtle enough to be charming but not mannered; in Altuzarra’s latest collection, nostalgia perfumes every look.”

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Document Journal
‘Best in show: NYFW Fall/Winter 2024’
journalism

24.02.12

“Capaciousness abounds, both in his generous silhouettes and rich materials, which coalesce in downward-flowing garments that, along with a certain playful tone, are textbook Chavarria.”

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Document Journal
‘Backstage at Willy Chavarria’s last supper’
journalism

24.02.12

“Wesley’s paintings are funny, sexy, sometimes profound, and always pleasurable. Any adult with a libido and an eye for color can enjoy them.”

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The New Criterion
Review of ‘John Wesley: WesleyWorld – Works on Paper and Objects 1961-2004’ at Pace Gallery
art criticism

23.10.26

“If the members of Generation Z (this reviewer included) were bearable for more than ninety minutes at a time, then Matthew Gasda’s new play Zoomers would be a knockout.”

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The New Criterion
Review of Zoomers by Matthew Gasda (Brooklyn Centre for Theatre Research)
art criticism

23.09.10

“... the exhibition itself is compelling for the way it narrativizes the painter’s common struggle: that of incorporating, over a lifetime of work, one’s many influences into a clarified approach to the canvas.”

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The New Criterion
Review of ‘Ruth Miller’s Enduring View’ at the New York Studio School
art criticism

23.05.29

“Rajan, though clearly opinionated on her subject matter, isn’t a skilled enough a dramatist to build the story to a moment of meaningful conflict or catharsis.”

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ArtsHub
Review of Crocodiles by Vidya Rajan (Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre)
art criticism

23.05.19

“... a poor facsimile of West Side Story cloaked in contemporary language, with politics inoffensive enough to bore you senseless and shallow enough to insult your intelligence.”

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ArtsHub
Review of I Wanna Be Yours by Zia Ahmed (Southbank Theatre)
art criticism

23.05.15

“If the show can at times feel a little anachronistic, it stems only from the fact that the ragged, scummy, morally ambiguous club scene of the early 1990s no longer exists in Melbourne, a town rampaged by relentless urban renewal and moral absolutes.”

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ArtsHub
Review of Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas and Dan Giovannoni (Malthouse Theatre)
art criticism

22.11.16

“To understand Oskar Kokoschka, and indeed Expressionism as a whole, we must understand sight. ‘My role is to see,’ he would say, and ‘to make others see.’”

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The New Criterion
Review of ‘Oskar Kokoschka: un fauve à Vienne’ at the Musée d’art Moderne de Paris
art criticism

22.08.22

“But there are many impressionable outsiders who, refusing to believe in any distinction between a life imagined and a life enacted, find the self-evident superficiality of the myth to be scarcely a problem at all.”

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Astra Magazine
‘I Hate Summer’
personal essay

22.01.31

“Frankel, while accurately laying out the great figures behind the film’s production, can never really unlock what exactly makes it a classic. He can only draw out what makes it dark, and this does not require a book to do.”

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Senses of Cinema
Review of Shooting Midnight Cowboy by Glenn Frankel
art criticism

21.12.22

“Yet more proof that just because you put an ‘I’ before a verb doesn’t inherently make the voice authentic, nor sonorous nor alive. It needs contours. This is a stylistic point Down seems to have overlooked.”

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ArtsHub
Review of Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down
art criticism

21.12.15

“It’s all pitched at too high a register, begging for the audience to feel something in a way that, by the end of the play, becomes rather unseemly.”

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ArtsHub
Review of let bleeding girls lie by Olivia Satchell (La Mama Courthouse)
art criticism

21.12.11

“Columbo is by any measure a serious achievement in network television, a product of its inventive, uncouth, and decadent epoch, and fans have expressed a great deal of enthusiasm that its story is finally having its time in the sun.”

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Bright Lights Film Journal
Review of Shooting Columbo: The Lives and Deaths of TV's Rumpled Detective by David Koenig
art criticism

21.11.23

“A wistful tragedy underscores their every moment together, given that idealism has, in different ways, broken them both. The trouble is, neither of them know it until the play’s final scene.”

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ArtsHub
Review of Prayer Machine by Eric Gardiner (Red Stitch Actors' Theatre)
art criticism

21.10.08

“There are those who understand the difference between what we’re told to behold and what we actually behold, and then there are those who don’t.”

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Independent Australia
‘LNP turmoil illuminates the power of institutional narratives’
opinion

21.09.04

“But it doesn’t seem to square anything; as is so often the case with legal proceedings, the moral revulsion of the crime cannot equate with the exigencies of the system.”

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Independent Australia
‘Richard Pusey: The ‘most hated man in Australia’ walks free’
journalism

21.08.27

“Perhaps we can be buoyed by the fact that Tarantino chose to filter what I consider his cinematic masterpiece through the novel form, whose death-knell seemingly never stops being sounded.”

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Antithesis
‘How far can nostalgia go?: Notes on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the novel’
art criticism

21.08.24

“‘What is the price of great art?’ is the question that Death in Venice, both book and film, poses to its audience; it is the more interesting question, and the one which Lundström and Petri refuse to ask.”

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Rough Cut
‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World is a pornography of suffering’
art criticism

21.08.09

“Good fashion is a question of finding outfits which are not only beautiful, but are truest to the person wearing them.”

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Fashion Journal
‘The ongoing appeal of TikTok’s dark academia aesthetic, and how to wear it right’
art criticism

21.08.08

“Transparency is the greater quality, and this is precisely what Didion embodies.”

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3:AM
‘An Implacable I: review of Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion’
art criticism

21.07.30

“Building and development remain the great tectonic force of Melbourne, both financially and otherwise.”

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Independent Australia
‘Melbourne architecture won’t benefit from group thinking’
journalism

21.07.27

“Two great forces — one which wants to usher in the new order, the other sticking fat to its erstwhile influence — are warring.”

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Centrethought
‘FriendlyJordies and the War of New Media’
cultural criticism

21.06.08

“There came a point when I realised that aesthetics had gone too far, and it was when I discovered dark academia.”

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3:AM
‘The Trapdoor of Dark Academia’
cultural/literary criticism

21.03.12

“All of this is hardly surprising from a duo whose very lifeforce, like pastors and prophets from time immemorial, is drawn from the misapprehensions of others.”

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Agora Magazine
‘Still Minimalist After All These Years’
personal essay

21.03.12

“‘Bathing Express’ is, at its core, an attempt to employ the experience of communal bathing to connect people on a deeper, more humanistic level.”

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Agora Magazine
‘Bathing Express’
journalism

21.02.22

“My contention is instead that, even with our understanding of their effects, there has never been a time when cigarettes are better for you.”

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Agora Magazine
‘Those Smoke Rings I Love’
cultural/literary criticism

20.12.29

“Yet a great filmmaker believes in his audience, and amongst all that we can say about Christopher Nolan, we cannot fault him for not believing in us.”

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Rough Cut
‘The Joys of Not Understanding Tenet’
art criticism

20.08.25

“I think all we wanted was consolation; instead we got fake crowd noise for the footy, and more empty make-believe gestures.”

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Interior Journal
‘Heavy Sleeves #9: Verge’
audio essay

20.07.26

“Over the years, when asked about his relationship to his contemporaries, Bogdanovich has consistently responded rather lukewarmly, ‘we didn’t get along.’”

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Vague Visages
‘Easy Riders, Paper Moons: The Trouble with Classifying Peter Bogdanovich’
art criticism

20.05.07

“They all sensed the reckoning, the splitting open of the glossy skin, that was headed for the Big Apple.”

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Grattan Street Press
‘Escape from New York’
personal essay

20.01.22

“Indeed, the film’s funereal tone seems to apply to more than just its characters; Scorsese has crafted an elegy for cinematic ambition.”

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Rough Cut
‘What Scorsese’s The Irishman Tells Us About Film in 2019’
art criticism

19.11.27

“Terse. Pellucid. This is Carver’s method. This is his style. And I cannot bear to read it.”

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The Dog Door Cultural
‘Things We Find in the Book Section’
art criticism

19.10.17

“In rolling sheets of tepid blue / sweeps the land from the crown / of this white brick house / hill-top and overlook. My head rises…”

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Turn It In Journal
‘Winter Sweeps Across the Land’
poetry