On My Radar: PHC

What’s the most creative advertising idea you’ve seen recently?

Seeing bottles of water just after you go through customs at an insanely jacked-up price. Create demand by controlling water supply. Clever, I guess.

What website(s) do you use most regularly?

Honestly, The New York Times cooking, for obvious reasons.

What’s the most recent piece of tech that you’ve bought?

In a vortex of laptop t-rexing and lying on your side doom-scrolling I feel like I’m underwater, drinking gasoline, staring up at the world through refractions that become more abstract the I lower I sink. So much so, I feel like the sausage skin that holds my sanity together is going to pop if it’s not pierced buy something tactile. But what inanimate object can prick this skin that threatens to burst and blow my rapidly deteriorating grey matter over my 16 inch MacBook screen? Honestly, a legal pad and a blue Bic pen. Thank God.

What product could you not live without?

Sadly, my phone. I can’t live without the thing that has grafted my consciousness to an external string. Each limb, each hinge of me, is connected to that string that hangs above me, invisible. It's moving me, making me dance like some broken jewellery box to the beat of a drum I don’t understand. I tell myself that I’m above it. I tell myself I haven’t lost. I tell myself that, somehow, I’ve won. Somehow I’ve retained some kind of mini rebellion to the system. But, in reality, when the battery dies in my iPhone 15 Pro, I can see myself reflected, but darkly, through that plastic screen protector. And I look shattered. Better to keep it charged.

What’s the best film you’ve seen over the last year?

Rollerball. For so many reasons. But mainly the pill-popping fops that wear tuxedos and watch James Caan braining people with his impossible frizzy hair and wildly phoned-in performance. Pure comfort.

What film do you think everyone should have seen?

Satantago, by Bela Tarr. It’s grim demagoguery only gets more terrifying and disturbing as the film hobbles on. Purely isolated as one of the most affecting experiences I’ve had on a couch. Everyone should watch it because nobody has watched it in its entirety. Perhaps because it’s seven-and-a-half-hours long.

What’s your preferred social media platform?

Instagram. Honestly, it’s hard to answer this question without wanting to give myself a DIY frontal lobotomy with a rusty coat hanger. Which I think is a healthy response to the wormhole of social media that I, and most of us, are trapped in. The overlords determine what is our preferred social media platform. So, perhaps after the US election in November, we’ll all have a different preferred app.

What’s your favourite TV show?

Does [Krzysztof Kieślowski's] Dekalog count? If not, then Can’t Get You Out of My Head, by Adam Curtis. It came out during Covid and warped my brain for a few weeks there. The magical realism that Curtis swills up in his subjective films is surely some of the most cinematic sequences ever created.

What’s your favourite podcast?

You Must Remember This.

What show/exhibition has most inspired you recently?

My dear friend Jamie Wdziekonski had a show in Melbourne last year. He’s my favourite photographer by far. He gets those moments that you can only get if your personality leads you there. Gotta be born with the kind of innate curiosity that he has.

If you could only listen to one music artist from now on, who would it be?

Let's say Miles Davis. Just because he went through that whack, late-career jazz fusion/ house thing. So there is range there.