The drawing: Wendell Pierce as Antoine Batiste in Treme.

Last night: The Voice — has it jumped? Has the shark begun swallowing it? The smoother they polish the contestants the less interesting the circus becomes. There is always the aspect of a freak show when we watch novices and virgins begin climbing the talent pole, with mentors and costumers and staging and musical back [...]

Two major shows are finishing up shortly, at their only venues in Australia. William Kentridge: Five Themes, ACMI, Melbourne Why, why did I wait so long to see Kentridge at ACMI? Partly it seemed to be on for ages; partly I wasn’t sure I liked his work, d’oh. The show is gobsmackingly tremendous; K and [...]

Paul Krugman in the NYT warns us of Eurodämmerung within months, but like the girl in Don’t Dream It’s Over, we turn past to the TV page. To the balm and cocoon of song, of a life’s drama passing by, Live!, in 2.5 minutes of limelight. ‘You owned it! You were hungry! Well done, well [...]

You can lose yourself in one of the great, late Rembrandt self-portraits for an hour, and wake as if from a dream. But it is curious, to me, how a voice can feather you with goosebumps or lay you low within a bar or two, bring you to near to, or, to tears. Short arc [...]

Surfing across My Kitchen Rules I’m often transfixed. Unreality TV This is Unreality TV delivered with frank efficiency. The post-event filmed asides from teammates — It all depended on the pigeon breast; and it wasn’t cooked! — then anachronistically slotted back into the cooking sequence; the cliffhangers — ad break before verdict — are handled [...]

Last week I went for a ride with Peter Temple’s publisher, Michael Heyward, to a warehouse in Footscray. Temple, of course, wrote the celebrated The Broken Shore, and its Miles Franklin award-winning follow-up, Truth. He’s also written four novels featuring Jack Irish, a lawyer turned sometime detective, though it’s hard to quite pin down what [...]

I made this card for a friend, and it seems to suit the times . . . – . . . keeping in mind the rancorous political bandinage on Tony Jones’ Q&A, and especially the spiky and pungent confessions and exchanges on Go Back to Where You Came From, that excellent offering from SBS. I [...]

The footage of the tsunami in Japan is wrenching and horrifying; coming so soon after the Christchurch quake, and the Australian floods, television has become the opposite of its usual dumbly reassuring self. Last night, TV exercised at full tilt another of its metiers — live intercourse with an important public figure, our PM. On [...]

The softer judging style won points and a vastish audience, swerving MasterChef from the reality show delights of humiliation drama. But you just know the director did well in his wizard classes – he kept flinging ‘Crucio!’ at the two contestants. That’s the “unforgivable” torture curse, as in, you know, excruciation, or crucifixion, or something. [...]