Written by author and critic, Brodie Lancaster.
Art by Olivia Gatt, Art Director, Clemenger BBDO.

When working from the home became the norm, the only thing I missed from my commute was the chance to read for a couple of hours a day. Since I slowly became addicted to my phone, my attention span has become so fried that even attempting to get through a few pages of a book before bed is a challenge of Everestic proportions. Without that time on the bus every day, I had more time to walk and cook and watch Real Housewives of any and every American city. But I didn't know if I'd prioritise reading in a way that I felt like I should. Still, the walls of my apartment are crammed with alphabetised books and magazines grouped according to title or theme, sorted my year and arranged so obsessively that someone on a video conference asked if it was a Zoom background. So it's not like lacking options could ever be an excuse not to get stuck into a new book. While my work as a freelance critic has slowed a little due to a combination of slashed budgets and no live art to cover, I'm still hungry for ways to dig deeper into music, art and pop culture, and keep my critical tools sharp. Here are some of the magazines, coffee table books and oral histories I've been reaching for recently that have held my fried little brain's attention and reignited an urge to get lost in someone else's world for a while.

Beastie Boys Book

Okay I need to be honest: I haven't read this whole thing. I bought it just before lockdown began, and it's been taunting me from its spot on my shelf as I press play on another episode of a reality TV show and don't keep chipping away at its 500-odd pages. I was too young to fully live through the Beastie Boys' ascent as a kid in the '90s, but they have soundtracked so much of my life over the past 20 years, that reading through this tome of photos, notes, anecdotes and recollections of their career is like playing catch-up and getting a refresher of stories I've held onto throughout my fandom.

Carve a Future, Devour Everything, Become Something by Darren Sylvester

This hefty book accompanied Darren Sylvester's 2019 exhibition of the same name at NGV Australia. Darren's work – in that show and this book – speak so clearly and cleverly to the way we exist in the world under capitalism and surrounded by stimulus. Whether it's video work he features in himself, sculptures of psychiatrist couches patterned in vintage McDonald's burger wrappers or highly stylised studio photos of people wearing, consuming or living alongside mass-produced objects, his work triggers a playful deja vu with an aftertaste of existential dread. He recruited a series of writers to contribute essays on his work for this book, but it's Darren's own artist statements peppered throughout that I love most. He's thoughtful and funny, and writes about art in a way that's clear, generous and free of jargon – something the art world needs more of.

Write to the Point by Sam Leith
I've always believed that writing is inherent and can't be taught; that it's a natural asset, not an implant, but that it can be shaped, strengthened and maintained. Maybe that's true or maybe I just never studied it so I feel insecure. Either way, I like to keep a stack of handbooks, style manuals, reference books and guides on-hand to either refer to quickly or read cover to cover. Write to the Point falls into the latter category. It isn't as much a writing manual as it is a map for how to communicate. Sam Leith deals with the classics – the dash and apostrophe and other dots and lines – as well as hashtags and emoticons and the makers of language that have a real, felt impact on the ways we send and receive copy. It's like a firm but kind hand to hold onto as you're guided through the answers to twisty, thorny writing questions. Oh wait, we can't hold hands. It's like a compass, or something similarly symbolic. That's better.

The Lip Anthology
My best friend got me a collection of these magazines for my birthday in 2017, and they've become really treasured objects for me. LIP was “a feminist collective whose fundamental concern is with the cultural conditions and lives of Australian women”, and they made these magazines forty years before I unwrapped the. I'm not sure how many they made in the '70s, but the 4 issues I got feel so contemporary: design-wise, they have lift-out elements and cut-out covers; content-wise they’re filled with articles about women’s work in the arts and representation on stage and screen, and photo series of young 1970s women with their mothers. I know I'm often tempted to assume every idea I have is the first of its kind to ever exist, and it's really essential to know about work like this that's been going on for half a century, and can form an important outline or precedent for work I do now. You can't know where you're going without knowing what came before, yaknow?

Wooooo magazine
I first learned about Jason Crombie and his magazine, Wooooo (thats five O's), not long after I started my zine, Filmme Fatales. I was immediately filled with a curdled mix of admiration and jealousy, and I also ordered as many copies as I could, which was about four. Jason shuttered Wooooo in 2014 after an impressive 11 years, and chucked all his excess copies in a dumpster in New York before moving back to Australia. At the time, I remember being horrified to learn that; he interviewed Michelle Williams in his first issue! Within a few issues he also published interviews with James Murphy and Zach Galifianakis. He had a photograph of James Franco painted bright pink on the cover of an issue! Then there was that one with Parker Posey and David Byrne, or the one with iconic model of the bloghouse era, Agyness Deyn, on the cover, whose mid-2000s hats and tiny vests are seared into my mind but whose name I never want to have to say out loud. Wooooo was iconic and I couldn't believe so many copies of it just got thrown away. But then, years after closing up Filmme Fatales and having weird feelings of self-criticism about the shit I wrote and published in it when I was 22-27 years old, and paying rent on a really small apartment with no storage, I finally understood why he did it. As I lugged half a dozen boxes of zines I poured my time and money and life into, I thought about Wooooo and how its interviews – Jason's interviews – are a really important reminder that you can't do a successful interview if you can't hold a good conversation with someone. I need to work on that.

Brodie Lancaster is a writer and critic from Melbourne. She was the founding editor of Filmme Fatales, a zine about women in film, and is the author of No Way! Okay, Fine (2017). She's contributed to publications including Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, The Guardian, New York Magazine and The Saturday Paper, and was a staff contributor to Rookie.