Nicht Das Papierkrieg

Sort of About Human Stupidity

2007-12-20T15:53:00.001+10:30

I’ve been developing this big rant about how stupid the Robert Bly book ‘Iron John’ is, which connected to some of the research I’ve been doing on masculinity. The basic theory I keep coming across is that a lot of men have issues which are specifically gendered: things like poor work/life balance, an over emphasised link between work and identity and all the usual emotionally stunted stuff that goes with the dominant versions of masculinity. The research I’ve been doing is about Hindley Street, its high crime levels, the fact that the majority of perpetrators and victims are young men and relate to alcohol abuse. The theories I’ve read suggest that Hindley Street is one of those areas certain men go to act out a hyper-masculinity that counteracts their otherwise humdrum lives, but unfortunately also results in them getting in drunken punch ups. Which is sort of obvious I guess. Similarly, I was reminiscing about a story a certain small, cranky friend of mine once told me about this ‘Barbie Doll’ friend of hers. Apparently the Barbie Doll’s boyfriend had a bit of a self confidence issue and decided she needed to be “more feminine” so he could feel “more masculine”. Which begs the question, “Why does her being more feminine make him more of a man?” and, from there, “Does being more manly actually make you happier?” Personally I struggle to see that it does.

Which led me back to Iron John – a book which took the complexities of masculinity and gender and reduced them down to one basic issue “Men need to feel more manly to be happy! They should dress up in loin cloths, gather in the woods with sharp sticks and pretend they’re cave men!” I read Iron John when I was nineteen. It obviously didn’t help me, seeing I’m still a ponce, but it remains one of the key examples that I look at and think, “Why do people believe this stuff? I don’t get it. It seems so insanely stupid.”

Anyway. So I had another big rant about human stupidity. Then yesterday I entered a phase of intense optimism. We heard back from the Adelaide City Council who have approved a grant for us to run stuff as part of the Fringe. It’s a pretty small sum of money, but its enough to do more than we did last year. So now we’re running the annual Zine and DIY Fair, a whole day of workshops and panels and, hopefully, a sort of prototype Bike Film event. I talked to the absolutely lovely people from the Sydney Bike Film Festival yesterday morning, who put me in touch with some film makers and so far I’ve had about four film makers offer to send me their bike related films. The Fringe still seems keen to see everything grow into a bigger mini-festival, so everything is coming up roses on that front.

Then I went to band practice and we’re playing some ‘Laneway Festival’ or something in January and at the Exeter on New Year’s Eve. I’m not really sure what this ‘Laneway’ thing is, but everyone seemed pretty happy about it, and the Exeter should be hilarious. Plus we’re going to the spacious Broadcast studios to “demo” our new album. I’m not entirely sure what doing a “demo” entails, but so far it would appear to entail lengthy philosophical discussions on the nuances of click tracks, and lengthy philosophical discussions on spurious topics are, of course, one of my great passions.

I’ve also spent the past two days doing some boring work for an interesting grant, looking for other federally funded grants on urban renewal in both Australia (funded by the Australian Research Council, which funds research projects that are supposed to be in the national interest) and the ESRC (which does the same in the UK). It’s actually left me quite optimistic. By and large the research I’m dealing with will supposedly go on to have an impact on policy and decisions made at a higher level. The English stuff in particular had a really strong focus on trying to develop cities and suburbs that are socially and environmentally sustainable, looking at the kind of cultural change you’d need to produce better urban environments and how you could begin getting it off the ground. Of course, I’ve had it pointed out to me that good research is easily transferred into bad policy, but its still nice to see.

On Human Stupidity Part Two

2007-12-17T11:38:00.000+10:30

I'm waiting for the coffee to kick in before making another foray into my paper on fear, masculinity and public space (aka "Why there's so many morons on Hindley Street").

Just after the election I went to my mother's house and she was telling me I should be less pessimistic and stop referring to our "Glorious New Centre Right Government" in such a sarcastic tone. She said the ALP was back in power, multiculturalism and reconciliation were back on the agenda and, generally speaking, Rudd can't be worse than Howard. So I thought maybe she was right. Then I stupidly read the letters to the editors page of the Advertiser. Particularly I was struck by a comment from Clive Wallace of Seacliff, written a couple of days after the election:

"The power of marketing spin over substance was clearly demonstrated last weekend. The good voters of Australia and, in particular, Bennelong, have replaced a Prime Minister, arguably Australia's greatest, with a commentator.

John Howard and the Liberal/Nationals, in troubled and difficult world conditions, led the country to a stronger position of prosperity and the lowest level of unemployment in more than three decades.

Many of the young, through their Green-vote preferences going directly to Labor, have swept aside this historic achievement without a second thought.

Voters under 30 have never been out job-hunting in a recession and we hope they never need to. They will judge the new government harshly if it forgets the social cost of mantra without substance and fail to deliver strong government for all Australians. We all hope this is not the case."

This letter is about me and a reasonable proportion of my friends. I voted Green, I'm under thirty and I was out looking for jobs this time last year. Mr Wallace is right. Thanks to changes in the definition of 'employed' I've been gainfully employed since I was 21 or so, making, for the most part, a whopping $11 an hour after tax. And I do owe Howard a great debt, which I'm reminded of every time HECS is taken out of my pay. The thing about this letter isn't that it's just stupid, it's that it operates on a strain of logic which, for me at least, makes absolutely no sense. It reminds me of an argument I got into when I was about 19 with a hard right wing Catholic. Every time I raised a point they couldn't defend, they'd just cite the bible as the final stop point. It was impossible to argue with them because their version of logic was so totally detached from my own.

I remember when the liberals got in again after the children overboard scandal and the decision to go to war in Iraq, I was particularly struck by the knowledge that I lived in a country where I simply could not comprehend half the population. It was utterly unfeasible that anyone would vote for such an overt liar. It was like when I was a kid and first read about Joe McCarthy (who had 50% public support at his peak) and thought "How could you not see he was a jerk?"

It was nice to see Howard get kicked out, but the whole "Kevin 07" thing is having roughly the same effect. People seem overjoyed to have a new Centre Right Government. Why? You don't remember that there was a Gulf War when Labor was last in power? I see Rudd on the front page of the paper and, yeah, he's less obviously evil, but sans mind altering drugs or a severe blow to the head he still looks like a right wing Christian touting economically conservative policies. What's everyone so happy about? I still don't get it. Am I missing something?

On Human Stupidity Part One

2007-12-14T11:38:00.000+10:30

I'm waiting for last night's insomnia to wear off, and today's coffee to kick in before I launch into the final stages of my article. So I thought I'd take a leaf out of Henry Jenkin's blog and instigate a series of entries on a theme. This is the first one:

Anyway. I finally finished reading Sherman Young's 'The Book is Dead' (www.thebookisdead.com) which is a sort of counterpoint to Andrew Keen's hilariously cranky 'The Cult of the Amateur'. Both of them are dealing with a question that I keep encountering post-election.

That question is: "Are people really that stupid, or is it just me being old and bitter?" I have lengthy conversations on this topic two or three times a week.

Keen argues that people are that stupid. His book is about two things:

(1) Blogs are making Disney go broke.

(2) People need 'cultural gatekeepers' because they're too fundamentally stupid to sort things out for themselves.

I don't buy it. Disney is going broke because they've got a stupid business model revolving around blockbusters. And 'cultural gatekeepers' is a polite way of saying editors, journalists and producers appointed by such notably moral media barons as Rupert Murdock and Conrad Black (who just got sentenced to six years for fraud. Ha!).

Sherman Young's book is also about two things:

(1) 'Book culture' is the highest form of human endeavor. Or it would be if people still read books. Apparently the 'average' Australian spends 103 minutes a day watching television and 7 minutes reading a book. Those figures are based on a general average. Most Australians don't spend 7 minutes a day reading a book, it's just that some of us spent an hour or more reading, and thus drag the average up. Case in point: I spent about two hours reading books yesterday, which isn't particularly abnormal.

(2) Kindle will save the book. Kindle is yet another in the long line of digital readers - sort of like an i-pod for books.

Young seems like a nice guy, and his argument hinges on a belief that people, or at least some people, aren't stupid and would prefer to read and write something of greater quality than another report on Britney Spears and her failed attempts to negotiate the virgin/whore dichotomy. He says the thing holding them back is price and accessibility. That said, he also seems to admit that the book has never really been a 'mass' media form, it's always been aimed at a pretty small market, it's just that that market has included all the best people.

It sort of boils down to forms of literacy. Keen focuses on mass media. When you're consuming mass media all the work is done for you and you can just sit there. Hence the high volume of people who will sit around watching shitty TV, complain about it but never actually bother to get off their butts, turn it off and go do something else with their lives. The less of it I consume the more I hate it: mass media breeds a sense of learned passivity - reinforcing the idea that someone else is meant to entertain you. If you focus on mass media its inevitable that you'll think people are stupid. I turned on the television for five minutes last night and saw some sitcom with Charlie Sheen in it. Horrible.

Young, on the other hand, focuses on a medium which requires a great deal of effort to consume and attracts only the people whose idea of a good time involves identifying a book to read, tracking it down and then sitting down and laboriously reading it. It's a high effort past time but the sustained engagement with a single piece of text produces a much stronger affiliation. There's some pretty big value judgments in here, but personally I find it hard to deny that, whatever the content, books demand more of their readers and breed less of a sense of passivity. Unfortunately Young finds that very few people are actually devoting that much time to either reading or writing books. A pretty significant whack of the population is apparently content with Britney Spears and her failed virgin/whore gender performance. They might bitch about it being a bad role model or an example of a fundamentally sexist culture or whatever, but they won't actually turn the television off. Which is depressing.

The toilets at BBQ City

2007-12-12T11:21:00.000+10:30

Hmm. I just tried sending out an invite for our post-post grad picnic, whereby I became completely, completely confused initially by setting up a mailing list through my email program thing, and then by using Facebook. If you didn't receive an invite and you know me, you probably should have. If you received one and we don't know each other, or you live in another country or something, sorry for clogging your in-box.

Anyway. Last night I went to BBQ City with someone or other. We were talking about how the service is always bad and how you always ask the waiters for water and they never bring you any. Amazingly on this particular night the waiter was both relatively polite and remembered the water. Then I went to the toilet. I was in the cubical, going about my business, when someone else came in to use the urinal. As they left they turned out the light. The toilets at BBQ City are totally light sealed. For a moment I thought I'd gone totally blind. It was as if I was in the depths of outer space, lost in a lightless void, except it was an extremely unhygienic lightless void in which one didn't wish to stumble around relying on one's sense of touch to gain some sort of orientation.

Right now I'm trying to work up the energy to write the second half of my paper for work. So far I've spent about an hour looking at the computer and dosing myself with caffeine. I expect the caffeine to kick in sometime in the next half hour. Post-PhD I've started taking my study tips from Black Flag: "Drink black coffee, drink black coffee, drink black coffee and stare at the wall!" or however that song goes.

Celia Lury

2007-12-10T12:13:00.001+10:30

I spent most of last week as a volunteer at the Sustaining Cultures conference. I saw Celia Lury talk, which was exciting for me because (a) apparently I’m an even bigger nerd than I thought I was and (b) she provided one of the most important quotes I used in my thesis. I forget what it actually said, but I remember the occasion very well. I was sitting on the couch in my old house back in Mile End, sometime in 2005, totally stuck and trying to forward one of those points that you’re not allowed to just say, you need to back it up with a citation from someone better qualified then you. I hate those points. So I took a break and went to the Oxfam bookshop on Hutt Street and picked up this old copy of a book on feminist autobiography. I was browsing through it and came across an article by Lury in which she said exactly what I wanted to say, except she’s a famous tenured academic and I’m a lowly post grad.

Damn, that was a great day.

Anyway, so I saw Celia Lury talk, which made a nice metaphoric ending point because I finally handed in my PhD thesis on Friday afternoon. People keep asking me if I feel relieved, and I keep telling them that I feel like one of those old guys that retires and then goes crazy. I went out and purchased a copy of Tom Hodgkinson’s book ‘How to be Idle’ in the hope that it’ll provide me with some ground rules for not being a PhD student anymore. I’m only about fifty pages in and so far he seems to be talking about the importance of taking a long time to wake up in the morning.

Also, Aliese, Evan and I, having all finished our time as post grad students, are having a picnic next Sunday. The details are:

Post-Post Grad Picnic

Sunday 16^th of December

Botanic Park

(Opposite the big metal glasshouse thing/rose gardens)

Bring food, bring drinks, bring stories about how hard it was to finish your three year under grad degree which we will cruelly dismiss.

Me Playing Solo

2007-12-04T13:12:00.001+10:30

Before I forget, I’m playing a rare solo show at the Rocket Bar this Thursday night. I’ll be supporting Pikelet (who is amazing) and Ned Colette (who I’ve never heard of). So all the people who keep bugging me to play solo should come along. I have no idea when I’ll play again but it probably won’t be any time soon.

The Charioteer

2007-12-02T23:37:00.000+10:30

I had a wildly eventful weekend.

Most notably I finished reading this book:

First published in 1953, it's a classic example of gay fiction, focusing on the romantic antics of a Quaker, a naval captain and a soldier in the wake of the evacuation of Dunkirk. Contrary to the opinion you might garner from the cover there's nothing you could refer to as 'overt ramming'. Indeed, if you weren't looking for the allusions to homosexuality, this book would make no sense. After about 325 pages the two main characters have their first liaison, which reads:

'Laurie stood silent. He didn't want to think, there was too much pain in it; only for a moment, resisting foreknowledge, to stand here waiting, his mind's eyes closed.
"Come here, then", said Ralph with gentle arrogance. "Come and say good bye to me."

Afterwards he said, "Are you going to be angry with me, Spuddy, as soon as you're alone?"'

The focus is very, very heavily on suppressed emotion and loaded, complex dialogue. That said, it's still an amazing book, albeit largely because it's a good example of how to write a book about a socially taboo topic, which is quite obviously about that topic, but doesn't actually make many overt references to it.

Also over the weekend, I got my thesis printed and soft bound and threw up.

Tintin in the Land of the Amazing New Centre Right Government

2007-11-28T17:01:00.001+10:30

I’m doing a research project on masculinity and public space, which is so fascinating I’ve almost forgotten to enjoy our new centre right government, and the various points in which it differs from our old centre right government.

That said, the election has brought up another ongoing research interest of mine. Many of you will be familiar with my WWTTD? Theory. The theory is that if one can successfully answer the question ‘What Would Tintin Do?” one will invariably find one’s self on the road to Good Times. This is harder than it seems.

Case in Point: In Tintin and the Broken Ear, Tintin visits a Museum of Ethnography and then gets confused by a parrot. By enacting a particular series of responses he soon finds himself in front of a firing squad in South America, whereupon he gets ‘off his chops’* and, when he sobers up, he’s become a colonel in the San Theodoros Army. How? He asks himself a specific question; the 'WWTTD?' question.

The problem is, Herge’ gives no indication of exactly what question Tintin asks himself to get from point A to point B. I read ethno every day, I regularly visit the museum and I get confused by all sorts of things. I am yet to become a military leader in a banana republic. I obviously don't know what Tintin would do.

Similarly, Kevin Rudd was a shadow minister in a failing opposition. By enacting a particular series of events he finds himself leader of a country. How? Rudd has obviously figured out the secret behind the WWTTD theory.

The media has already drawn links between Rudd and Tintin. There’s further similarities. For instance, during the course of his adventures Tintin went to Tibet and met some high ranking Buddhist monks:

Not to be outdone, in the course of his adventures Rudd met the Dalai Lama, also pictured below:

And the Dalai Lama evidently reads Tintin:

Uncanny.

Asides from that, I have questions:

(1) Can anyone tell me the names of the equivalents of Hindley Street in other Australian cities? The kind of streets where gangs of nerds dressed up in glorified tracksuits strut around pretending they’re in US gangster rap video clips? I’m particularly looking for similar streets in cities other than Melbourne and Sydney.

(2) Nick Xenophon. Has anyone had anything to do with him or is otherwise in a position to pick which way he’s going to swing? And before anyone suggest it, as per usual I’ve looked at his website, I’ve read his statement on his split ticket and I saw him on Late Line. I understand that he’s claiming to be non-ideological and independent. Does anyone know what he's likely to do when it comes to IR? You'd assume he's going to be pro-Work/Life balance stuff?

(3) For post docs/post grads/faux academics - does anyone know if the ALP is going to touch the ARC or make the RQF more Humanities friendly?

*To use the colloquial expression.

Slapstick Teen Comedy + Elections = Pure Gold

2007-11-23T11:36:00.000+10:30

Thanks to the people who've taken the time to write me about the election. In return, here's a picture I just got from Aliese. Supposedly this photo was taken by someone in the Adelaide area a couple or days ago. It sure beats the only other truly witty election poster graffiti, in which the same candidate, Tracy Marsh (who seems primarily interested in pursuing an anti-union-and-standing-outside-Norwood-Shopping-Centre agenda), had facial hair and was, according to the scrawled in comment, 'supporting Movember.'

If you're fortunate enough to have never seen an American Pie film, or you can't remember what Stifler's mother looks like, see if you can find a photo. It's uncanny.

It's not easy voting Green.

2007-11-21T11:16:00.001+10:30

Everyone I talk to about the election seems to think that, no matter which way it goes, it’s going to be totally depressing. I was thinking the other day that, no matter who wins, Les Murray is still our national poet. I’d vote for anyone who’d hold him and his ilk accountable for the blanding of Australian culture. They could run TV ads with a mock up of him in court. A lawyer would ask him, “Mr Murray, I hold before me a poem reducing the complexity of Australia’s post-colonial culture to a series of clichés about magpies and football. Are you responsible for this?” and he’d say, “Yes! And proudly so!” There would be a gasp in the court room and the judge would say, “I don’t need to see any further evidence! To the gallows!” Then a voice over would say, “To see this scene become a reality, vote 1 The Prevention of Blanding in Australian Culture Party.”

Fortunately we still have the Greens. Thank you to those who responded to my comment in the last post. A categorical denial from someone who won’t leave their name, references to the official Sarah Hanson-Young website (nice sound bite, by the way) and a fluff piece written by your friends in the local street press. I’m sure convinced the Greens are still the same old lovable, grassroots party I’ve always assumed they are. Gee, it sure is good to know they’d never patronise me by directing my questions to openly biased sources.

That said, Zzmurgy, your blogger profile links through to www.zane.net.au/blog and the Critical Mass website, which (according to the national Critical Mass website) is run by someone called Zane. Isn’t Zane the first name of Sarah Hanson’ Young’s partner? Who was a Greens candidate in 2004? Don’t you people have an election to win? What are you doing wasting time reading my blog?

Let me rephrase my original question. Sarah Hanson-Young and I share roughly similar social networks, there must be someone who knows about this stuff. Is there anyone I KNOW or WHO ISN’T TRYING TO GET ME TO VOTE FOR THEIR PARTY who has heard anything that can reaffirm my belief that the Greens aren’t just a lefty version of Family First?

Let’s face it, I’m going to end up voting for them anyway. They’re the only party that isn’t openly run by homophobes and they have a stance on cycling. I’d just like to know what I’m voting for.

Greens Confusion and Singapore

2007-11-18T23:39:00.000+10:30

Ever since I read that Silencing Dissent book I've pretty much cemented myself as one of those people who votes against, rather than for, a particular political party. My pre-polling debates tend to be who to put last - Family First or the liberals. Family First are less likely to get in, but this country already has enough raving nutcase Christians and I don't want to offer them any encouragement.

The practical side effect of this is I always end up voting for a losing party, usually the Greens. Maybe that sounds defeatist but I seriously can't see how anyone willing to partake of party politics is going to be the kind of person I want representing me. Unfortunately I had my voting habits completely confused over the weekend when I was assured the Greens primary Senate candidate, Sarah Hanson-Young, is a Centre Right Christian in Centre Left Environmentalists clothing. Can anyone confirm or categorically deny this?

Also, I finally downloaded pictures from my trip to Singapore. This is what I look when I'm 10,000 km away from my PhD:

This was taken at the Raffles Hotel. I am, as per the tourist cliche, drinking a Singapore Sling.

A week after I got back someone asked where my holiday aura of relaxation had gone. In that same week I'd been almost completely deafened by Motorhead at Thebarton Theatre, edited a couple of chapters of PhD, ploughed through a whole pile of readings on public space, started organising the 2008 Fringe Zine Fair and another Academy of DIY, had a case of gastro so bad we had to call out a locum at midnight (he told me to eat a kilogram of yoghurt) and, whilst still recovering, played a show at Fowlers supporting Ben Kweller. I hadn't eaten in three days and everything was really woozy. There were all these enthusiastic teenagers in the front row staring at us really intently. They knew our names. It was totally freaking me out.

Final Days of Post-Grad Hell

2007-11-15T18:09:00.000+10:30

I went up to see my supervisor today. I was, to use the colloquial phrase, 'shitting balls'. Not so much because I thought she'd say something terrible, but due to an instinctive sense of dread and fatalism. I narrow it down to two key factors:

(A) After six years of postgraduate study I'm terrified something fatal will happen in the final moments. I was riding my bike near the markets and went into a panic about how I might get hit by a car and killed before I've got my doctorate.

(B) The post-graduate identity isn't exactly the best identity out there, but I've had it so long I'm not sure how I'll deal with giving it up. What do people do without PhDs to obsess over?

On the upside, my conclusion was apparently so good that my supervisor read it twice in an attempt to find fault with it and said, aside from minor typos, that it was excellent.

Chip Datson

2007-11-08T13:31:00.001+10:30

Extensive congratulations are due to Nic and Claire. Charli Violet Datson – 3.4 kg, born at 7:05 last night. After I heard the news I was thinking about Nic’s claims he was going to call his child ‘Chip’ because he thought ‘Chip Datson’ sounded hilarious. Then I thought, “Isn’t Chip a short, colloquial version of Charles, kind of like Chuck?” Charles, Charli, Chip – it’s close enough to be sort of suspect. For me, Nic defines the term ‘lovable rogue with a heart of gold’. He’s sort of like my own personal Shrek.

Earlier in the same day I assembled my thesis in its full format ready for the printer. I’m still waiting some final remarks from my supervisor on the conclusion and formatting, and I’m a total panic that somehow the file will corrupt and I’ll have to start from scratch or something. I was at Urtext last week and these visual arts students were telling me about their Honours exegeses, which were 3000 words. I resisted the urge to tell them I’d written bibliographies bigger than that. I was thinking it’ d be great if I handed it up at the same time as one of those Masters coursework students who do 20,000 word theses. It’ll be like in Crocodile Dundee. I’ll laugh at them, yank my thesis out of my bag and say “That’s not a thesis. This is a thesis.”

Blogging Resumes Shortly

2007-11-01T13:36:00.000+10:30

I'll start posting again when I finish my PhD, which should be sometime in the next week or so.

If you're in Melbourne, I'll be playing with the No Through Road supergroup at the Northcote Social Club for the Wagons CD launch on Monday the 5th. Do come along. This will be your last chance to see me before I become a doctor and start to consider myself too good for you.

In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of myself and my associates swimming in the Murray River during our recent weekend on the Houseboat of Dreams.

Shortly after this photo was taken we discovered the corpse of a sheep caught in the reeds about fifteen metres away from where this photo was taken.

Newcastle, Singapore and Thesisland

2007-09-25T12:54:00.001+09:30

Lack of updates is due to intense lack of time. I ran into Akira yesterday, who was telling me to stop quitting things. Personally I think I need to quit more things. Next time someone offers me yet another miscellaneous form of either paid or, more likely, unpaid employment I must remember to say no. Likewise, once I finish the PhD, if anyone hears me talking about doing another grad dip or something, please remind me that I’m a fool and foolishness requires no further education.

However, I’m going to be in Singapore from October 4^th till the 12^th or so. Anyone who has suggestions of things I should do whilst there let me know. Likewise, anyone keen for postcards, send me an email or something.

Lastly, sorry to whoever it was whose head I stepped on at the show on Saturday. I was falling over and didn’t want to dent Marcin’s guitar.

Bike Punk

2007-09-17T17:21:00.000+09:30

Here’s some miscellaneous YouTube footage of actual bike punk bands in action.

Chest Pains, doing a song about Marco Pantani:

This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, singing a song about something. Apparently in the US there's been a few incidents of bikes with "This Bike is a Pipe Bomb" stickers attracting the attention of bomb squads and promptly blown up.

Miscellaneous Links

2007-09-12T09:57:00.000+09:30

For anyone else sitting engaged in the gentle art of procrastinating:

Is Not Magazine has an interview with a guy who has decided to spend three years of his life speaking only in quotes. All the quotes are properly referenced.
http://www.isnotmagazine.org/articles/read/64

This is a fan site on “Sheikhs and Desert Love, or Western romance novels with swarthy, Middle Eastern male love interests. Apparently readership has gone up since the Gulf War:
http://www.sheikhs-and-desert-love.com/
There’s an article in the most recent edition of Bitch magazine on the same topic apparently.
Please don’t ask how I found this.

Here’s an article for the Baron:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/jul/13/travelnews.norway
Apparently an Ikea in Norway let 30 'lucky' guests sleep in the shop over night.

And there’s an article at Boing Boing about the US investing in shares in surveillance in China, supposedly including the technology used to keep an eye on pro-democracy protests. Good times.
http://www.boingboing.net/

Or alternately you can watch this amazing video of Paulo Bettini winning Lombardy. Watch him take the first tight corner. It’s amazing. He’s crying at the end cause his brother died a week before the race. I stayed back 45 minutes late after work last night watching cycling stuff on YouTube. I got to see the end of the 1985 Paris Roubaix!

Not about cultural studies or cycling.

2007-09-10T11:54:00.001+09:30

On Friday night I went out with a couple of minor Adelaide social icons and we were sitting around at the Exeter and then I started drinking, which is always the cue that something weird is about to happen. Sure enough, they got a call from another friend inviting them to a karaoke bar down the end of Gouger Street, next to the Director’s Hotel, one of those actual ‘bar’ karaoke places, rather than the kind with the smelly little booths that are always freezing.

So we wandered over there. It was the most intense place I’ve ever been. It was like something out of a David Lynch film. It was pointed out that it was probably a front for a brothel. In fact, there were red lights up around the bar. In the corner were a bunch of old guys who looked like, acted like and probably were Filipino gangsters. Periodically one of them, presumably the manager, would get up and, on a flimsy pretence, would proceed to ‘fuck hug’ one of the bar maids, being all creepy friendly. Horrible. Otherwise the clients consisted of a fat little 16 year old would-be gangster (complete with fake bling hanging down over his tubby little belly) from Salisbury with what I assume were some slightly older members of his family, and a bunch of lonely looking single men who spent most of the time sitting by themselves but who would periodically take to the microphone to croon through heart broken ballads. There were two barmaids who spent the evening picking fights with each other. It started when one of them was singing some ballad and the other one got up on stage and joined her without, I assume, attaining the correct invite. They’d wander around occasionally having these little spats, whereupon the Filipino gangster manager would come over and try to calm things down by acting sleazy, which didn’t seem to work.

At one point I went to the toilets, which had those blue lights so you can’t find a vein. It was amazing but I hope I never go back there.

***

On Saturday I was walking down Rundle Street and some random stranger said hello to me. I couldn’t figure out if they were talking to me or the person behind me, so I sort of half smiled and walked on. I’ve had stuff like that happen before, because I have an extremely poor memory and meet more people than I probably should. Generally I don’t let it bug me. There’s a lot of people I meet once, have a conversation with and never see again and I found it was just easier, and more enjoyably surreal, if I didn’t panic about trying to remember their names. Usually I start to remember names after about the second or third time I meet someone. Then I was at some capitalist themed party on Saturday night, one of those parties where you don’t even know the host. My cousin came up to me and said I’d snubbed her friend that day. Apparently the girl I didn’t know on Rundle Street was a journalism student I’d been talking to for about an hour the night before. Classy.

***

To finish the weekend off the Baron and I went to Ikea and Marion shopping centre. As one does. I freaked out in Ikea. I can’t go there alone, it makes me too depressed. Every time I go there I see at least two couples having a full on fight, a screaming child soaked in their own snot and someone getting aggressive about their inability to obtain their exact preference in flat packed furniture. Ikea makes an excellent attempt to sell an image of social agency attached to the purchase of cheap furniture, but I can’t hack it.

Then we went to Marion, whereupon I got lost in a magical world of theories on privatised public space, and the Baron had some kind of stereotypical female body issue problem brought about by the constant barrage of advertising.

***

Also, Denni Menchov is winning the Vuelta. Cadel Evans is coming second, which is actually pretty amazing seeing it’s his second grand tour this year. He was going to drop out half way through but he was doing so well he thought he’d stay in. At last count Menchov was like two and a half minutes up on him though.

That reminds me I spent Saturday morning in the Orbea dealer on the Parade, asking a wide array of questions about frame geometry. It was fantastic.

The Future of Annoyance

2007-09-06T16:56:00.001+09:30

I watched this ‘documentary’ on The Future. It’s about sub/urban life in the year 2057.

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-6979560348655713314&pr=goog-sl

According to Discovery Channel*, British CCTV’s early 20^th century success in identifying random Brazilian tradesmen for anti-terrorist police to shoot will mean that, by 2057, we’ll all be happy to give up our civil liberties in the name of preventing traffic jams. I’m pretty sure that’s the point of the documentary.

More pressingly, The Future is going to be full of annoying holograms, even lazier drivers and an increase in human stupidity. Based on watching this I would assume that cultural annoyance is going to be the Global Warming of the mid 21^st century. We should start investing research money into preventative measures now. This will be particularly relevant to those of us in my age bracket as we reach the peak of old age and crankiness. Obviously the problems are already in evidence. If we’d put money into it just ten years ago perhaps we would have avoided the Great Citrus Fashion Trend of the early 2000s, Anne Geddes calendars, reality television and any number of over-sexualised teenage pop stars. None of that is anything near as annoying as the blabbering children and their hologram dolphin pals Discovery Channel’s resident future experts have predicted.

Teen Angst

2007-09-05T12:33:00.001+09:30

Speaking subjective media, here’s a link to a page showcasing teen angst: http://getmortified.com/

My favourite story is the ‘Fungus Face” one in the Hall of Lame. But keep an eye out for the line, “How dare you tell me you love me, kiss me, and then pee on my car!!!!!!”

Blogs on riots and the Blog of God.

2007-09-04T13:48:00.001+09:30

Two Links to blogs I’ve been reading.

The first is Space and Culture: http://www.spaceandculture.org/

There’s footage on here of a protest in Canada in which supposed police provocateurs, one armed with a rock, were spotted trying to cause a fight in an otherwise peaceful protest. I remember Joel telling me about stuff like that happening at the G20 rallies; police needlessly driving a paddy wagon through the crowd, locking all the dumpsters and clearing the area of all potential sources of weapons or places to hide bombs, except for one dumpster full of blocks of concrete and steel tubes left at the end of a street in which the riot police cornered the protesters. I was at those protests and they were overwhelmingly peaceful, which you’d never guess from the newspaper reports the next day.

It’s an interesting piece of footage, it captures that sense of heavily politically loaded space pretty well, and the weird mix of inhumanity and aggressiveness the riot police are presumably trained and ordered to portray. Those protests were, from a theoretical perspective, totally fascinating. The way the space and the relationships between the various people in them worked was totally different than you’d normally see.

Every so often I meet people who have a whinge about how blogs and zines are just irrelevant whinging. Then you push them as to what cultural products they choose to patronise and it turns out they watch Big Brother. As far as I can tell, the only difference between the self absorbed whinging of blogs and zines and things like Big Brother is that blogs and zines are subjective, whereas Big Brother has the authority of the mass media behind it, and thus gains some sense of being a master narrative.

So if you’re one of those people who can’t stand subjective media, here’s a blog you might actually enjoy. It’s written by God, the master of master narratives: http://thelordgodalmighty.wordpress.com/

Apparently he’s refusing to take any blame for that plane crash in China because he was watching some little old lady in England.

A Blog Entry In Two Handy Parts

2007-09-03T14:13:00.000+09:30

This blog post comes in two handy parts:

(1) Stuff on Silencing Dissent and Families
(2) Marion Mall and YouTube

(1) Silencing Dissent and Families
I’ve been reading the website for the book ‘Silencing Dissent’ (http://www.silencingdissent.com.au/). They had a Q and A thing a while ago and someone asked a question about the constant government focus on representing Australian families and the idea that the ‘family unit’ is the core demographic of Australian society. They answered:

“It is extraordinary how politicians on both sides bang on endlessly about how various decisions and events will affect "families". The majority of households in Australia are not "families" but singles, couples and group households, not to mention households with children that do not meet the hetero stereotypes. It is as if the majority of the population has been disenfranchised. This trend is indeed all part of a conservative moral agenda that appeals to a yearning or memory most people have of a happy family ideal. There is nothing wrong with that as long as the romanticisation does not become divisive and exclusionary.”

Coming from one of the families that does “not meet the hetero stereotypes” this made a nice affirmation of something I’ve always suspected.

(2) Marion and YouTube
Now here’s one of those mixtures of low brow and high brow I love so much. Like I said, I’ve been looking at malls, public space, media, ‘youth’ and appropriations of space. All high brow. Then I found this prime example of all of those things in action. Apparently when properly combined they produce something decidedly low brow.

Intellectuals, Jimmy Casper, Youth and Gnomes.

2007-08-30T15:34:00.000+09:30

I’ve been wading through yet another blog, namely Culture Making (http://culturemaking.typepad.com/main/)

There’s a big rant on the history of blogs and social networking stuff, which is interesting. Then there’s an interview with Chomsky and Foucault. It’s like watching two cartoon characters bickering.

Or, if you’re not in the mood for it, you can watch my hero, Jimmy Casper, falling on his face. This is the crash in which he tore his tongue.

Apparently the Unibet cycling team (who Jimmy rides for) is closing at the end of the year. And apparently the doctors fixed his face wrong and he needs to get it redone.

Alternately, if that’s not low brow enough for you, I’ve been researching stuff on youth and media. Aliese, take note. This is what I found:

I’ve also been looking at examples of youth, media and Marion Shopping Centre. I’ll put that up next week.

Congratulations Baron

2007-08-28T10:39:00.001+09:30

Congratulations Ashley 'Lil' Rambo' Hurrell on winning a bitchin' job in Melbourne and selling her house. I was having dinner with her last night at this place down in Largs Bay and coerced her into letting me host a farewell 'function' in her honour. She's a bit concerned she has no friends and no one will come. We'll figure out a date and anyone keen to prove her wrong can come along and listen to her various highly entertaining stories about I.R.

Also, last night I hurt my finger real bad playing netball. It's all puffy and stiff with weird bruises. I look forward to telling this story to Nic, who will doubtless enjoy a cruel laugh that I managed to hurt myself playing a non-contact sport.

Last night Ashley and I also ate this really, really salty haloumi. It was so salty I got an ulcer in my mouth from it.

Joseph, Subculture and MySpace

2007-08-27T12:03:00.000+09:30

Hmm. This post is for Aliese, because she's probably the only one who might find it interesting. Or at least a good excuse to put off working on PhD crap. Which is what I'm doing right now.

I was reading the abstract for Joseph Borlagdan's thesis, which was written about the Adelaide music scene I was a part of in the early 2000s (as separate from the one I'm part of now). He writes:

"When compared with other capital cities in Australia, Adelaide has a relatively small population. For the independent musician, this means that their immediate community is distinguished by a plurality of music genres and styles."

I've heard Aliese say stuff like this before as well; that, from our first involvement in the mid-nineties up until about 2003, the Adelaide music scene was marked by pretty massive juxtapositions in the styles of performers. Listening to things like the Hip to Hate "Apocolypse of Boredom" CD, there's this sense that the thing that defined 'local' music was that it was made without any money and for an audience that was, for the most part, made up of people who were in bands. I've been browsing through books on the early US punk scene, things like Going Underground by George Hurchalla and American Hardcore by Steven Blush. Hurchalla says stuff really similar to Joseph. He interviews bands like The Dicks, The Big Boys, The Dead Milkmen and The Butthole Surfers who all talk about Hardcore and Punk being, initially, specific to a local scene and stylistically common more on the grounds of lack of opportunity, lack of audience and lack of money than specific musical genre.

Which I thought was interesting, cause it sort of indicates a common sense of geographic art scene. I think in both those early punk scenes and local music you can see a shift to a wider, more national/international influence and a change in mentality brought about by, on the one hand, greater commercial influence and, on the other, the influx of national media sources, like Triple J and Drum Media and more recently things like MySpace, which is really massively changing the formation of social networks and, with them, the sense of agency (which is what Joseph's thesis is about). It's going to be interesting to read Joseph's thesis as an example of pre-web 2.0 subculture compared to post-web 2.0 subculture.