A couple of years ago, while he was writing his novel Zero History, William Gibson, as Great Dismal, tweeted: "Your bleeding edge Now is always someone else's past. Someone else's 70's bellbottoms. Grasp that and start to attain atemporality. Very creative people get atemporal early on. Are relatively unimpressed by...

At the end of Sutra the musicians, who've been visible through a gauze screen at the back of the stage of the Sydney Opera House's Concert Hall, playing the melancholy uneastern music of Polish Composer Szyman Brzoska on strings and percussion and piano, walk onstage in suits and...

In February, Alexandra Lange created a storm with an essay on Design Observer suggesting that the New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, is not good enough:

Ouroussoff has an opinion about design, but his reviews offer not much more than that, opinion. His approach -- little history,...

Urban farming changes everything we know about food. To borrow Michael Pollan's phrase, this is the omnivore's next dilemma. Is there a natural cuisine of the city that can be romanticised in the way that the cuisines of Italian villages, for example, have been? If I were still living in...

The Australian musician Robert Forster has a second career as a music critic that he didn't expect and didn't seek. Five or six years ago Christian Ryan, editor for a new Australian magazine called The Monthly, asked Robert to be its music critic. Robert had never...

Grinderman is the first great band of the Anthropocene Epoch. Their music is wild, primal, charming and funky and their lyrics are witty and clear-eyed observations of where we stand as...

I wander around Sydney inventing in my mind new niches for that branch of arts reporting that's like city desk reporting, a granular description of what's happening on local stages and in galleries and bars and life itself. I rented the first three episodes of Season 5 of

The opening of a branch of Reverse Garbage in Taylor Square in Sydney's inner eastern suburbs is evidence of what mathematicians describe as a chaotic system becoming ordered. Reverse Garbage was founded in 1975 in the suburb of Marrickville and passes on materials -- rolls of paper, tiles,...

Australian Jesus. Australia Day cover of the Sydney Morning Herald, 2010. By Chris O'Doherty aka Reg Mombassa

In science fiction, stories are anchored in reality by placing alien monsters, psychological disturbances, mystical events and disasters around an iconic building...

In The Matrix, Martin Place in Sydney's CBD is a boundary between different realities, like the rift in space and time that runs through Cardiff in Torchwood, and the wardrobe that's the gateway to Narnia. It's where Morpheus takes Neo to show him the illusions the machines are feeding...

Every time I watch Blade Runner I want to zoom in on the newspaper Deckard is reading as he waits for a seat to open up at the noodle stand. The headline is "Farming the Oceans, the Moon and Antarctica". I...