Culture

Voula looked around the kitchen. The kettle gathered its breath.

“Where is your dog?”

They waited for an answer.

“In the freezer.”

There was a strange moment between Lance and Voula.

“How long has it been in the freezer?”

“Two years.”

“Dad, I thought the vet took Pixie, after she died,” said Lance.

Mr Harvey shook his head sadly.

Voula slowly rose and opened the freezer door. There, behind a packet of frozen peas, was a large, misted-over plastic bag with a couple of dark paws visible through it. And was that an eye peering out like something left behind in Shackleton’s icy hut? Mr Harvey sniffed back a tear.

For artist Diego Ramírez, John Milton’s charismatic Satan – the central character in his epic poem Paradise Lost – is a deeply resonant figure.

Its sheer scale means Melbourne Now has something for everyone. But the abundant offerings lead to an exhibition lacking focus and a clear point of view.

Metallica’s latest album brings all the energies of the band’s contradictions to a sense of middle-age crisis.

The restoration of Jean Eustache’s classic 1973 film La Maman et la Putain brings a bleak masterpiece back to the screen.

Ruvarashe Ngwenya’s journey to the leading role in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical has been about learning to advocate for herself.

Steph was lying on a hospital bed then or later – a gurney, was it? – like someone in a movie. A male nurse, Russian he said, tried and failed three times to insert a catheter into her left arm. She said she thought a catheter was something you stuck up your urethra in order to pee, and for some reason he found this funny. She was shaking then – rattle, rattle, rattle went the teeth in her head as if she were a skeleton in a cartoon. She recognised her skeleton then, or she understood it somehow, in the same way she had not recognised the finger the surgeon said was hers.