Omit Needless Words

World’s Biggest Building Coming to Moscow: Crystal Island [ma.gnolia]

2008-04-22T18:21:30-05:00

Sir Norman Foster decides Moscow would be much more exciting with a fantasy crystal volcano looming on the skyline. Funny, that's exactly the thought I had when I arrived.

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Tags: architecture, utopia, russia, city, skyscraper

Kenya: The Land Where Fact and Fiction Collide [ma.gnolia]

2008-04-16T23:29:17-05:00

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, who writes of Kenya like no other on the planet, looking mournfully but hopefully at its slippery foothold in fact and fiction, and how the fierce urgency of now catches it up. An illuminating lament. "The failed 1982 Kenya Air Force coup turned the ‘Big Man’ authoritarianism Moi had inherited from Kenyatta into a dictatorship so vicious (and at times comical) that it once sent police agents to arrest the eponymous hero of my novel, Matigari, thinking that he was a living person committing treason by asking questions about truth and justice."

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Tags: africa, kenya, writing

TED | Talks | Clifford Stoll [ma.gnolia]

2008-03-31T05:06:15-05:00

I've been a fan of Clifford Stoll's since reading The Cuckoo's Egg years ago in one of my hacker-obsessed phases. I sensed his mad-scientist vibe in that book, with a room full of dot matrix printers rigged to pagers keeping an eye on KGB hackers, but nothing prepared me for the mad brilliance of the man some 20 years later. Watching Stoll speak is like watching a ridiculously intelligent hummingbird deliver a lecture on 100 topics simultaneously.

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Tags: science, hackers, tech

Laser attacks common on police chopper : thewest.com.au [ma.gnolia]

2008-03-26T21:26:53-05:00

The journo appears to have forgotten the background paragraph establishing what kind of lasers they are talking about. As it stands, this may be the weirdest, scariest story I have ever read in our local paper.

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Tags: laser, media

Hush now, won't be long

2008-03-23T20:23:55-05:00

It's been a fair while since I've posted anything serious on here. There are reasons for that, but it'll be changing soon, promise guv.

However, it just occurred to me that I never actually post much on here about what I have been doing. It's not like I haven't been keeping the usual level of ridiculous busy (and coming down from mad round-world travel), I just forget to mention it in anything other than Facebook status updates (when those aren't about building sentient robots).

So, here's a couple little websites I've launched this week that relate to larger stories.

Firstly, Cottonmouth. If you've been along to any of the Cottonmouth nights so far, hopefully you're as excited as I am about this one -- I'm on an excellent committee that grew from the WA contingent of the National Young Writers Festival last year. We've packed out the ace little bar we've been having it in, and (surprising to someone who has always considered watching spoken word to be something akin to gargling hydrochloric acid) we've had some pretty damn good readers. Some not so good as well, but we're working on that as we figure out exactly what the night is, and what it can be (and as I threaten people with Gantt charts). Anyway, it excites me. Check the website - there's audio and video (including some of me. ergh.). If nothing else, it forced me to write fiction, which was nice.

Secondly, and slightly less seriously, Novel Badges. Not going to say too much about this one, other than the fact that it grew out of some (possibly drunken) conversations three or four years ago, and we've finally done something about it. Buy some badges!

Plus of course there's still all the radio stuff -- my playlists, shows and interviews should all show up automatically in the sidebar over there, and thanks to my tragic geekery, you can restream any of it from the RTR website (in fact, you can restream any show from the last six months or so). I'm currently presenting Out To Lunch on said station every Monday from 12-3 (Perth time). Not quite so politic as previous involvement, but tune-spinning is always a fun break from the harsh realities of life outside the studio.

The next year promises much in the way of experiment with radio and podcast, particularly some fun ideas in relation to Cottonmouth. My little recording studio is slowly taking shape. Stay tuned/subscribed in your favourite reader.

Workwise, there's been the Laneway Festival site, the FTI redevelopment, and a bunch of others. Much madness abounding in future months on that front, including a website for (sort of) my old high school.

So there, that's a few things, and a reassurance that this blog ain't dead. Now leave me alone, I'm trying to write. Thank you for listening.

'Anonymous' hit Perth [Flickr]

2008-03-15T00:11:30-05:00

ptpittman posted a photo:

I've got nothing to do with these guys, but I did enjoy stumbling across folks in silly costume shouting at the closed blinds of the Scientology building.

Answer for your crimes, cult! [Flickr]

2008-03-15T00:09:35-05:00

ptpittman posted a photo:

L. Ron is quivering before the mighty signs of dissent.

This story's right, this story's true

2008-02-13T07:22:09-06:00

or: What Are Words Worth?

I arrived in Australia in the early nineties as a sprightly 13 year-old. What that kid knew of this country's history, just off the boat from the far reaches of Scotland, was something vague about boomerangs and convicts. I was excited about the fact that Santa Claus came in summer, and it seemed that he rode a surfboard.

It didn't take much time spent in the streets of Darwin to understand, even as a 13 year-old, that something in this society was fundamentally, sickeningly broken. In one of my first Australian history lessons, before I'd even learned about the Eureka Stockade, the teacher played a song to the class that was so unexpected that it changed the geography of the land beneath me - Archie Roach's They Took The Children Away. I knew then that what lay underneath, what Roach spoke in that song, which was then hardly being spoken at all, was the kind of past darkness that could corrupt and break the strongest of people. I knew it would need to be dealt with. I knew that would take bravery.

Well, I can say I knew those things now, but perhaps as a 13 year old, I just knew for the first time what it felt like to have a country and a government break your heart.

I swore my oath of Australian citizenship on Australia Day 2001, on the Centenary of Federation. Stephen Smith -- then an obscure backroom ALP machineman, years later an unexpected Foreign Minister -- shook my hand and gave me my certificate. In the years between, I watched Keating's Redfern speech, young still, but still captive to great rhetoric. Mabo changed the game, and there was a moment of hope. And then came Howard. And then came Hanson.

But though Howard's first five years before my citizenship were already clearly defined by a fervently ideological and partisan shift in governance in the country, it was not until the election of the following year that things became truly clear. Then came the moral darkness, signposted by Pacific solutions, mandatory detention and willing coalitions. My newly-minted passport weighed heavily in my hand, policy and public sentiment slowly killing my deep love for adopted homeland by a thousand tiny cuts.

In those years -- years of wasted opportunity defined largely by John Howard's strangely singular stubbornness -- the gaps between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia widened. Not just gaps of economy or key performance indicators, but gaps of compassion, gaps of understanding, and gaps of opportunity. Things got worse. Obscenely, shamefully worse. Poll-driven politicians listened to the hip pockets of the suburbs, whose concerns lay far away from here. We, as a country, forgot something -- politics, and leadership, is not purely defined as sound economic management. Politics is morality. Leadership is bravery. Both can be honesty.

Last November, the media attempted to spin Kevin Rudd's leadership style as "Howard-lite". For anybody who had been keeping an eye on Rudd for a while, who had read his (well calculated) articles in The Monthly the year before, they would have known (or hoped) something different. They would have seen an idea of politics founded first, and foremost, in morality. Rudd is a man of deep religious faith, but in worshipping the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer's idea of the role of religion in social justice, it is clear that Rudd is a man who begins his governance from the idea of that which is morally just. And that, if nothing else, is a revolution.

The calculated blandness of the election campaign, we hoped, was a smooth strategy designed to defuse the bully-boy tactics of the complacent coalition and their aging leader. It worked, beautifully. This is how we felt on that day in November when our people kicked out a government who, in pursuing a sound financial record at the expense of all else, had let so many sores fester, so many wrongs linger, and, in the end, hadn't even kept a handle on the economy:

Biased ALP kids sure. Inner city suburban well to do's, sure (at least, on the surface of things). But also smart, intelligent people who saw for a moment real possibility, in a country that was voting beyond its hip pocket, that was no longer willing to be lied to. And a country that may be willing to face its past, to search its soul, and to begin to develop a just foundation for the future.

Before this morning, such ideas were mostly hope and highbrow posture. There was every possibility Rudd in Government would be the same as Rudd in Campaign, demure and unchallenging, and a little depressing. But, as we gathered on the grass on the increasingly shabby Perth foreshore (soon to see its own new hope after years of neglect) early this morning, short on caffeine and consequently short on enthusiasm, we felt something unexpected.

The pre-released wording of Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations had hardly inspired tears, being mostly a tick-the-boxes exercise in saying what needed to be said and no more or less, but to hear it spoken -- to hear the words sorry, sorry, SORRY -- had an impact I could not have imagined. And then Rudd continued to speak. And he laid out a moral basis for his position. He engaged with arguments and counter-arguments. He touched on the culture wars and black armbands. He proposed tangible action and serious, ambitious targets. He challenged Australia and Australians to face their own moral responsibility. He challenged a nation to look at its soul. Never were the words "me too-ism" farther from a pundits mouth. And far, far away, somewhere unknown, Howard quietly fumed in irrelevance, the only living former Prime Minister not in attendance.

Around me, people were crying. It felt like a country was silent, in reflection. We were witnessing what leadership could be. Symbolic gesture though it may be, we were at a point of turning in our country's story. We could, for once, feel proud.

The less said about Opposition leader Brendan Nelson's speech, the better. Suffice to say that it was a particularly fascinating shambles, the result of a backroom in chaos and a man with no leadership skills,unable to stand up to irrelevant former powerbrokers who should be going gently with their icon into that good night. The country turned their back on him. In Perth, they turned him off. Despite my deep belief in the importance of full and open debate, I can't say I wasn't glad (and perhaps the slow clap should be introduced as a regular feature of the new Parliament).

We left, speechless but invigorated. We knew that nothing was fixed, but that something was beginning to heal.

CODA

This evening's commercial news attempted to spin the backs turned against Nelson as being in reaction to his statement that there should be "no compensation". Channel Seven edited the story to make it seem as though the selfish aboriginals insisted he be turned off as soon as he refused compo. It was sickening spin, to be sure, but anybody that actually paid any attention to Nelson's speech would know the slow claps and back-turns were for reasons entirely unrelated to compensation. They were for a party and a leader who could not understand. Who refused to be bold enough to accept responsibility. Who spoke an apology that sounded like an excuse. Who mumbled vaguaries about fighting in wars.

According to Channel Seven polls ("The Pulse of Perth" says the promo), 90% of viewers were against the apology. As much as a phone-in commercial news poll is worth, the sentiment on talkback in our state was similar, 6PR callers saying indigenous Australians should "apologise for crime".

Nothing is fixed. But we must now begin to heal.

Sorry.

Ice Cream [Flickr]

2008-02-09T21:14:20-06:00

ptpittman posted a photo:

Tourist Markets, towards Temple [Flickr]

2008-02-09T21:13:47-06:00

ptpittman posted a photo:

Incense [Flickr]

2008-02-09T21:12:57-06:00

ptpittman posted a photo:

sleeveface [ma.gnolia]

2008-01-28T16:27:27-06:00

Can't go past the official site description: "one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion."

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Tags: music

How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

2007-11-26T08:46:46-06:00

Final proof that eco-consciousness is penetrating into all corners of governance. This generally excellent Scientific American article (subscription only, sadly) on the rather misguided attempts by the military-industrial complex and the US government to replace its aging nuclear warheads with a more modern, "reliable" (but untested) arsenal, doing a little end-run around non-proliferation, contains a little nugget that made me spit my coffee across the table this morning.

The RRW1 [reliable replacement warhead] also would eliminate the need for some of the toxic substances often used in weapons, such as beryllium, a brittle, carcinogenic metal that reflects the neutrons released in a nuclear explosion and redirects them back to start a thermonuclear chain reaction. "Because of the release of the weight requirement, we are able to use materials that are heavier but more environmentally benign," says Livermore [a spokesman for the laboratory designing the nukes]... You replace [beryllium] with something that quite honestly you could eat and be healthy....

Gosh, that makes me glad. Do you think that last bit holds true after it's spent that long next to plutonium and uranium? I wonder if I'll have to unlearn my most reliable childhood rule: "never eat yellowcake".

The real question is, are they going to carbon offset the 100 kiloton blast?

(Related opinion piece on the free side of the paywall here).

Last Exit to Nowhere [ma.gnolia]

2007-11-26T06:56:51-06:00

Pretty much the best t-shirts ever. I look forward to the day I see somebody in a Cahulawassee River shirt so I can run like hell.

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Tags: film, clothing, design, geekery

A Paler Shade of White [ma.gnolia]

2007-10-15T00:33:11-05:00

Sasha Frere-Jones makes a muddled, confused argument in the New Yorker about the overbearing whiteness of modern indie. There's half a point in here somewhere, lost deep in an "I like America's old stuff better than its new stuff" argument, pretending like bad lyrics and banality never existed until the mid 1980s, or that the Arcade Fire were the first band to do sturm und drang. SFJ's better when not this smug. You really have to look _that_ hard to find the blues in modern music?

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Tags: music, indie, criticism

On exploding cars and ginger beer: This Is Not Art 2007

2007-10-06T05:00:12-05:00

Train rides home from TINA — I’ve had a few of these, over the years. I find myself using the long, slow decompression—the Hawkesbury expanses and the endless parade of central coast towns— to sort and filter the strange, singular experience. To put me back in balance as I’ve been spun in a thousand directions, seen a thousand different possibilities, felt the rare thrill of being in the company of decent people trying shit that sometimes comes off, sometimes doesn’t. Multiple, crazy random types of shit you’d never have thought of. It throws your life that little bit off the rails. And so, back to the train thing. See?

Newcastle on a long weekend in late September is an unlikely place to find the vibrant, throbbing heart of Australia’s creative culture, as ginger beer is an unlikely fuel. While convinced hallucinogens would save the world sometime in the midst of a mushroom frenzy in the mid 1980s, raveolosopher Hakim Bey wrote of the idea of the temporary autonomous zone, a space created for just a moment outside of the boundaries of society, outside of the normal rules of existence for its participants. In this space, strange and magical events might transpire — the boundless potential, freed from restriction of society’s norms, would translate into social and political possibility and change. And, sex. Lots and lots of sex.

For this one weekend, This Is Not Art throws up the perfect example of a TAZ, and the feeling is tangible. Walk more than a block from the festival’s hub on Auckland Street, and you’re in the real Newcastle — vacant shopfronts, crumbling buildings, bogans shouting well-considered insults from cars with a bass rumble so low you could be forgiven for thinking they were part of one of the Electrofringe gigs. This is a town still basking in the glow of the Pasha Bulker, a shipwreck a source of local pride and thrill. The locals don’t really know what to do with us strange blow-ins, with our asymmetrical haircuts and often questionable hygiene, and we don’t know what to do with them, so an uneasy dance down the ruins of Hunter St ensues, glowers at five paces all the way.

But across Darby Street and within collapsing range of the festival, it’s as though an invisible curtain has been draped. Past stalls manned by cute young Melbourne things selling poetry zines, past Tomas Ford beating a pinata of bad writing hung from a tree, past the quote generator girl who will only speak to you in quotes from television and film (fully referenced, of course), we’re not in Newcastle anymore. We’ve passed not just through Newcastle’s looking glass, but through the country’s (and Tomas may beat this piece hard for mixing my fantasy references, if he pleases).

Against this backdrop of madness and lesbian ferals holding parties in abandoned hotels, you’d be forgiven for thinking TINA was the kind of horrid neo-hippy festival that took over country towns around the country through the seventies and into the nineties. Though many of those people do show up, something entirely different is going on; the people gathered here are a self-selecting crowd of some of the most creative and inspiring folks in the country, from amazing record labels such as Spunk and Popfrenzy, publishers and authors of books that have sold in the millions, innovators of the electronic music scene running workshops on circuit bending, to various workshops on open source and its place in community activism. This ain’t no Earthdance.

The National Young Writers Festival, Electrofringe, Sound Summit and whatever other festivals decide to latch on create a different kind of space. Here, the thriller writers sit and drink beer with the laptop punks, Brisbane zinesters sit on panels with representatives of AC Nielsen discussing the state of the publishing industry from a level footing. Shaun Tan, magical illustrator of heartbreak, depression and wonder, shares a panel with Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, and Henry Reynolds while upstairs, nervous young poets share genuinely wonderful non-performance pieces with an attentive crowd and Community Cultural Development workers share tales from the frontlines of war and disaster and explain how they translate into work with youth on Halifax streets.

There is a common thread that unites the participants of the festival — they are creative people, who believe, generally very passionately, in the idea of DIY, that the practise of any art, be it a solo endeavour or a community cultural development project, is a political act and occurs within the context of a broader community. We’re all working towards the same thing, from a thousand different angles.

There are, for the most part, no wankers here. They don’t come. There are bad artists, yes, and idealistic young socialists. But the hipsters; well, for some reason they seem to stay home. I think they know they wouldn’t be tolerated—the only thing TINA seems to demand of you is that you participate, that you celebrate. That, in whatever it is that you do, you accept that to change the world or to change your mind, you’re going to have to do things yourself.

My first panel of the week was on exactly this topic, how to make a life from “keeping it real" (if you will), living a DIY ethos — a roundtable chaired by Adelaide zine-guru Ianto Ware, with myself, a radical craft activist from Christchurch, the folks from Sticky in Melbourne, Tom Civil (a street artist I actually have time for), and partner in Breakdown Press with Lou Smith.

The room was packed and between the panellists, many fundamentally different, mature and practised takes on the concept were thrown around. The audience, too, joined in — a tradition from the early TINA days of roundtables in pubs over beer, is that everybody has an equal position in a debate, that no one person is more authoritative than any other, just because their bank balance or CV says so. None of this is directed — there is no wan statement of equality that needs to be pinned to a wall (and proofread by the texta-wielding poster grammar checker), there are no directive that need to be laid down. It’s just that, almost without fail, roundtable panellists will fold up the table they’ve been provided, and move the chairs into a circle, and everybody will shuffle up a little bit closer.

Though discussions will, as they do at any festival, degenerate into whinges about the decline in arts funding, there are at least constructive contributions to this debate. One of the most constructive is festival founder Marcus Westbury’s new ABC series Not Quite Art, which manages to sneak a sound and well considered political message about the difference between nurturing the creation of art and the exhibition of it, about the intangible places culture really comes from that don’t tend to cost a lot of money. It’s on sometime in October. It’s really quite good. Even a little bit angry.

There were other panels, equally interesting, equally strange. There were nights spent listening to laptop drone, talking at length about stuff that doesn’t matter, with an overwhelming feeling that it really mattered to do so. There were strange interventions by performance artists during panels. There was public urination, and drinking of same from a cup. There were strips. There was a burning car and a bad indie dance party. There was champagne sweet-talked from barmen at Irish pubs when no other alcohol was forthcoming from the town. There were mercifully few veejays and proponents of rave culture, which made things a litle more bearable than previous years.

Over the course of the weekend, in this strange temporary autonomous space, I was continually struck by how my cynicism was being beaten down in the face of genuine talent, or at least genuine intellect. A poet or a comedian or a guy who makes music from Darth Vader masks and Barbie dolls would take the stage, and I’d be ready to hate. And yet within minutes I’d be enraptured, or laughing, or clapping wildly. These same people I could see on any other night of the year, in any other place, and mutter dismissive sarcasm under my breath, but here, in this space, I couldn’t get enough. It’s the energy of seeing people having fun. Or maybe it’s because I’d been drinking beer instead of water since sometime before lunch. The world is full of wonder until you run out of beer.

It’s tough to put a finger on the precise import of TINA in Australia’s cultural and political landscape — it’s just not that kind of festival. You can’t quantify what it does to you. But, as everybody packs and trundles with their packs towards the train, not quite prepared to burst the bubble and face big city streets once more, something has shifted. Each and every one of us knows that literary and artistic culture is not moribund in this country, and it is not dominated, as is lazily and loudly claimed so often, by elites who float on pretentious clouds above us. It is not owned by the multinationals who bought our publishing houses. It’s right here. It’s with us. It’s in the streets of every town and every city, and we’re taking it back there, renewed once again. Now, have you got anything to drink?

Where's a boy supposed to get a drink at this time of night?

2007-10-04T09:58:17-05:00

Remember how, when the liquor license reforms went through in WA earlier in the year, we were supposed to suddenly be drowning in Melbourne-style alley bars, freed once and for all from the grips of the hoteliers? Have you noticed any small bars showing up yet?

Let's take a little trip to parliament, and pull out this week's Hansard to see where we're at...

2674. Mr M.J. Birney to the Minister representing the Minister for Racing and Gaming

(1) Can the Minister advise the number of liquor licensing applications under the new small bar laws that have been rejected (either formally or informally) by the Department since the passing of those small bar license laws?

(2) Can the Minister advise the reasons for those rejections?

(3) Can the Minister advise how many new liquor licenses have been granted (or old ones amended) under the new small bar laws since they were passed through the Parliament?

(4) Is the department carrying out the will of the Parliament and the Government with respect to the small bar laws?

Mr E.S. RIPPER replied:

(1) Nil

(2) Not applicable

(3) Small bar licences granted - two.

(4) Yes

Two. What Birney didn't ask (and as such, Ripper didn't answer, as a good politician only answers what he's asked) is how many applications there have been for said licenses.

Off the record, informal conversations with those who have applied for the licenses suggest that the issue is not necessarily with the government dithering but with certain nameless councils not quite willing to get with a more modern, radical program. Certain nameless councils that have been far too cosy with entrenched business in their areas, at the expense of the creation and nurturing of culture. Certain nameless councils for which a parade of candidates flood my mailbox with campaign propaganda for a postal election, none of whom articulate policy on anything.

Welcome to our Creative Capital, where all you need to kickstart the city at a time of absurd prosperity is, well, good intentions and zero followthrough.

Cuarón and Klein administer The Shock Doctrine [ma.gnolia]

2007-09-10T19:02:13-05:00

Alfonso Cuarón and friends (including animators the Foreign Office) respond to Naomi Klein's long in-the-works treatise on disaster capitalism, tying together Pinochet, the Falklands, Milton Friedman, Iraq and drowning Sri Lankan coastline.

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Tags: neoliberalism, film, torture, disaster

Continuing Concrete Dialogues

2007-09-08T02:59:33-05:00

It's always strange when something you worked on a couple of years back suddenly starts generating interest, without any particular reason. I've been asked to speak at a couple of different seminars this month on the Concrete Dialogues writing project, a rather mammoth undertaking which has been online now for a couple of years. I can't explain why it's being noticed suddenly, but it certainly makes me happy. There's even talk of developing the concept in other areas.

To celebrate, before I speak about it tomorrow at the Still/Open Online Publishing Forum along with many infinitely more interesting international guests (at the Bakery, info here), I've gone in and tidied and fixed up a few things. I've also removed the ridiculous age restriction that was imposed on us by funding bodies, so anybody can now contribute.

It's still too heavily javascript-dependent, but all good mashups seem to be, and it feels like something I wrote two years ago, which it is, but I'd actually forgotten how much fun it is. And to make it more fun, I've just wasted the afternoon integrating with Google Earth. Just load this file into Google Earth and, in the words of Jobs, "boom". Wicked cool - and freaky as hell when you turn on flight simulator mode.

A Pen for the new American Century (with easy-glide snake oil) [ma.gnolia]

2007-09-03T19:46:29-05:00

Marketers exploiting fear and banking on your naivete to buy their products is nothing new, but the chutzpah of this one raised a chuckle (particularly offering you sound advice on ID theft from Frank W Abagnale).

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Tags: fear, security, marketing

Each week we choose a theme

2007-08-12T19:50:11-05:00

When trying to figure out what one can do with the medium of radio beyond delivering generic dreck for the fictional "average" listener, it's impossible to go past the extraordinary decade-plus output of This American Life. I've never actually blogged about the show, because no analysis or interpretation I could apply might actually reflect the simple beauty and transcendent quality of its storytelling -- I could try and explain how it effortlessly merges the political and the personal, uses the intimate space of radio in a way for which it was seemingly invented, while returning to a storytelling tradition long lost in other more popular mass media. I could talk about how stories of alcoholic mothers and bad memories of summer camp intermingle with tales from Guantanamo Bay and Baghdad, but still, it wouldn't be worth it. It wouldn't explain things any better than Ira Glass's intro, every week: "each week we choose a theme, and bring you stories about that theme."

This week's episode does exactly what the best episodes do - it slips in with an innocuous theme, competitiveness and failure in the art world, only to have you, somewhere between stories of balloon-animal maestros, New York locksmiths, Philip K. Dick and terrible music-based scams of the 1960s, wrenched apart by a simple, common thread: in the creative world, and in every world we live in, people have particular skills and particular talents, yet those are so very rarely the ones we wished we had. Though our balloon animals are incredible creations, we never really saw ourselves as a maker of those. We really play guitar. This is just, you know, for now.

Until we've got the time to give it a serious crack.

Listen through to the last story of a locksmith, a Hawaiian guitar player and a saxophonist, who can't play a lick, on a way to a wedding, down under Manhattan bridge. Try slipping something that simple past a producer round these parts.

One day I'll figure out how to use radio like these guys do. Meantime, here's a new website I made. It's pretty nice.

Technorati Tags: radio

Tony Wilson, Spike Magazine [ma.gnolia]

2007-08-11T23:49:45-05:00

Tony Wilson a couple of years back in Spike Magazine, on Factory, the Mondays, and miserable twats. On situationism: "I was just a fan having been introduced to it by my acid dealer who happened to be the main translator of The Revolution Of Everyday Life".

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Tags: factory, music, rip

Fuck the Average Reader

2007-08-07T20:25:04-05:00

I've been writing a rather long piece, ostensibly about television, also possibly about skewering the snobbishness of an older generation of novelists, but mostly about The Wire being the greatest thing I've ever seen or read. This quote, from Nick Hornby's interview with its creator in the new Believer, couldn't wait for me to actually finish writing. Take the mic, David Simon:

"My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

Beginning with Homicide, the book, I decided to write for the people living the event, the people in that very world. I would reserve some of the exposition, assuming the reader/viewer knew more than he did, or could, with a sensible amount of effort, hang around long enough to figure it out. I also realized--and this was more important to me--that I would consider the book or film a failure if people in these worlds took in my story and felt that I did not get their existence, that I had not captured their world in any way that they would respect. "

Drowning in Green - Ecoconsumerism revisited

2007-08-05T01:45:47-05:00

Sometime it is just not possible to find an environmentally friendly version of the product you want to buy. But now you can ease your conscience by using one of a range of 'green' credit cards to make your purchase.
-- Hey green spender! Spend (and borrow) a little money with these -- The Observer, August 5

I wrote a couple of months back on the slowly burgeoning backlash against eco-consumerism. That was before the great hulking beast of Live Earth spluttered across the planet, pop-stars attempting to make a difference as only they knew how, by asking you to spend money, drink beer and watch Bon Jovi.

Since then, the eco-consumerism juggernaut (biodiesel fuelled) has been gathering pace, creating one of the greatest marketing opportunities of the decade. That quote above comes from a new column launched in the Observer this week devoted to "eco-finance" issues. There are many important issues within this bailiwick, to be sure, and sensible, ethical investment is one of the few ways I believe an individual can have a serious impact on the carbon emissions of the multinationals. So bravo for the column.

However, this (generally very intelligent) paper has fallen for the hype -- "if it is just not possible to find an environmentally friendly version of the product you want to buy", heaven forbid that you wouldn't buy it. Buy it with a credit card that not only gives you great low rates (of course with a slight "conscience" premium) but contributes a token amount to an environmental cause!

The ever-readable, ever-reliable and ever-angry George Monbiot published a column last week in the Observer's weekday sister, The Guardian, surveying the absurdities of this emerging market, from eco-gadgets to free conference junk made from recycled paper:

"Uncomfortable as this is for both the media and its advertisers, giving things up is an essential component of going green. A section on ethical shopping in Goldsmith's book advises us to buy organic, buy seasonal, buy local, buy sustainable, buy recycled. But it says nothing about buying less."

"Green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet. If it merely swapped the damaging goods we buy for less damaging ones, I would champion it. But two parallel markets are developing: one for unethical products and one for ethical products, and the expansion of the second does little to hinder the growth of the first."

Monbiot's article illustrates the inherent class-snobbery of eco-consumerism, and the sometimes even destructive effects of a showboating ecological hobby lifestyle. The world needs the answers to fit within the pages of a glossy.

I was recently researching web hosting alternatives for a client, keeping in mind those reports about Second Life avatars consuming about as much electricity as the average Brazilian (person), and I found a fair few providers proudly claiming themselves to be "carbon neutral". DreamHost even give you badges to put on your site so you can animatedly claim you are a "green site" for being on their servers.

What does this mean in practise? Generally, that they've purchased carbon credits from larger industrial players (via many of the emerging middle men spotting an opportunity) who were reducing their emissions anyway, or planting a few trees (via). It does not mean they've installed ranks of low-power computers all powered by renewables. It apparently doesn't even mean they've stopped using disposable coffee cups, they just use ones made from "renewable resources" (such as trees, I'd suppose). I don't mean to pick on DreamHost, for good intentions are better than none, nor do I mean to pick on those who stick carbon-neutral stickers on the back of their petrol-guzzlers. The problem is not these people, it is the combined weight of industry, and its marketing machine, creating a world where we believe that we can pay somebody else to actually deal with the real issues.

The problem is, carbon emissions and pollution can't be offset by cash. In that marketing focus group from five years ago I discussed in my last post on this, I expressed a certain terror that the introduction of "carbon-offset" energy products, as opposed to encouraging the use of fully renewable energy sources, was nothing more than a money grab wearing the clothing of ethical business. That it would make it somehow okay for me to run the giant industrial air conditioners in my current house non-stop, because somewhere out there a tree is being planted to balance. Good old-fashioned greenwash.

What, though, is the alternative? What is our proposition if we are in opposition? Are we suggesting that one not attempt to be carbon neutral, or use eco-friendly products? Of course not. The parent organisation of this blog will soon be publishing an ethical shopping guide that contains many wonderful suggestions for ethical shopping and consumption, and I'd stand by everything in it as worthwhile and important effort. But (if you'll fire up your solar-powered Melissa Etheridge for a second and pretend this is projected behind her) too many people use environmental branding as a get-out-of-apocalypse-free card, a Prius as a license to drive more, a green credit card as a license to buy more, or Bono as a license to stage a global series of concerts consuming untold ridiculous amounts of resources and generating massive amounts of waste.

Don't outsource your responsibility. That's all.

And no matter what Bono tells you, don't forget this, worth repeating from my last post: as the hype tells you, the responsibility for saving the planet is on us. But not in the way they want us to think. Don't just be a good consumer. Be a good citizen. Don't buy the story that climate change can be fixed by changing the products you buy (though you should). Don't feel pressured to buy coffee table books printed (with beautiful varnish and the smell of fresh petroleum wafting from the ink) in their millions to show you how to replace your chemical cleaners with organic ones. Six months ago, the Australian media was full of politicians talking of their "climate change credentials", and yet now as we get closer to the election cycle, real environmental policy, bold environmental policy, is nowhere to be seen.

Buy the story instead that, insomuch as it's not too late, the greatest impact we can have is by forcing governments to legislate with strength and ferocity against the combined industrial forces of the world, by forcing them to embrace Kyoto and the strategies beyond. By forcing politicians to be bold, to act with vision and reimagine the world after fossil fuel. By telling them we want them to stop exploiting our passive inbuilt racism by blaming China and India. To invest serious money in research and development of viable medium and long-term alternatives, be they nuclear, renewable or breeding a new race of wheel-running super hamsters (I don't know, I'm not a scientist, just putting it out there). They'll only do that when we remind them just where the responsibility lays, and when we remind them that, even though we have a nice new pre-approved ecoMastercard, we won't be buying their organic, all-natural fertiliser any more.

Technorati Tags: environment, carbon offset

Impatience, Resistance, Production and Possibility: The Take, revisited

2007-07-24T06:31:52-05:00

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis have an interesting article in The Nation this week following up on the situation they documented a couple of years back in the extraordinary documentary The Take.

The Take is a document partly of the destructive tendencies of neoliberal capitalism, but more of the forms and structures that emerge in the wake of its collapse. When the Argentinian economy was detonated by a Menem-bomb at the turn of the decade, workers in the factories of Buenos Aires were left jobless, their bosses having fled for higher ground. At the end of every street, factories stood intact but empty. Dusting off the most basic sentences of Marx, workers realised the means of production were right there in front of them.

The story of how collectives formed, broke the gates and began to produce in these ghost factories--some more profitable than they ever were before--provides a strange sort of optimism that we're not used to seeing in the protest documentary. It shows a tangible model for real social change, and a brief glimmer of possibility of a better, fairer world. There's little more inspiring than a vanguard of aging seamstresses, storming a police line, fighting for their right to work and support each other. Nothing more, nothing less.

I had a fascinating conversation with Avi Lewis (son of the equally inspiring Stephen Lewis) a couple of years back which I've always meant to get around to posting. So here's a wonderful excuse.

Technorati Tags: argentina, interviews, politics

No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July [ma.gnolia]

2007-07-22T19:02:01-05:00

I've never been able to figure out why instead of Miranda July annoying the hell out of me, she consistently brings smiles to my heart. Maybe it's websites like this one...

Saved By: needlesswords | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: web, literature, miranda july

I know where the skeletons are in your closet

2007-07-22T02:38:27-05:00

From a time before the victorious rewrote history in their favour, enjoy Keating in his prime.

Let's make the world's stupidest stand and truly mean it.

2007-07-20T22:09:54-05:00

So we saved the Hydey. Possibly. At any rate, the story got a whole lot more interesting.

A couple of days after my last post, I was hosting a fill-in shift on RTRfm's Out to Lunch (hipster new-music show for those not local) and decided to say a little something about the situation and ask for calls. Being used to the phone only ringing when giveaways are on offer, i was surprised to receive about 30 calls over the next hour. What surprised me more, though, was the sentiments of those callers, and how they swayed and shifted over the course of time as I relayed and poked and prodded and provoked responses, having a strange kind of debate where all other participants were only hearing my reflections and refractions.

The first group were the passionate, mad-as-hell impotent ragers. It's not good enough, and we have to take on the corporate whores. That sort of thing. "Do you think you can actually win like that?" I asked them. They believed with enough noise, maybe they could.

Then there were those advocating a long and hard road of government advocacy -- letters to ministers and councillors and investigations into noise-abatement policy. "Great," I said, "but what difference is that going to make to Woolworth's?". If we made life hard enough for them, they suggested, blocking their planning applications and not allowing them to do anything with the Hydey but let it fester, then maybe they'd sell up and move on.

The scene politics reared up from some callers, personal grudges and general anger translating to "fuck 'em and let 'em burn in hell for all I care, I hope they bankrupt, it was better before, and the world was at peace". Valid points, all.

Then there were those who agreed with me. That perhaps it was better to just move on, to believe in the strength of the music scene to outplay, outlast and outwit. That this could be a good thing -- a shit pub is a shit pub, and we'll find another. Some suggested that if bands didn't have the Hydey to take their first few tentative steps in, perhaps they'd be forced to try a little harder at house parties and other venues, and get a little more creative, and in the long run, that might just be a good thing.

Then, finally, there were those who pointed out that there are no other venues like this one in Perth, with both a frontroom of a size that's perfect for local gigs, acoustic or electric, where it never seems empty if there's 2 or 10 or 50 punters, and a backroom that can hold the Perth Jazz Society's grand piano yet is still of the perfect size to host touring artists that will attract a few hundred -- the Will Oldhams, Okkervil Rivers and Laura Veirs of the world. It's just a pub, sure, but if we cared about Perth music, it was one worth fighting for. Shucks.

And then, as I left the studio, wondering whether or not there was any point to any of that conversation at all, the general manager of ALH (the Woolworths-owned company that owns the Hydey) was ringing our talks producer, and the head of WAM was ringing our music producer, letting them both know simultaneously that "due to public pressure": the decision had been reversed and live music would continue.

The interesting part of this story is not that it was a great victory for people power, even as unexpected and easy as it was, but that a corporation was tripped up by its own tactics. As I said previously, Woolworths had every right to do whatever they wanted with the Hydey -- business is business (as my father may have annoyingly said during one of my heated teenage arguments with him). The one thing they did not have a right to do, and did not need to do, was lie to us.

Had they simply told the truth, that they were ending amplified music because they wanted to renovate the pub and turn a profit from it to realise shareholder benefit, they would have faced a lot of anger, but they would have been able to hold out, and they would have done what they planned to do. By framing things in a half-baked lie about noise complaints that did not hold up to the slightest of scrutiny, they were met with a wall of noise, from government, the industry, punters and people from all walks of life, and they left themselves in a position where they could not stand their ground.

When business-as-usual dictates that deception is the most effective method of getting things done, as it does in the big bad world of the high-rises and Blackberries, this tactic made sense. It's Marketing 101 - you'll never get anywhere by telling people the truth. But Marketing 101 also teaches you that consumers are passive, consumers and only that. I'd like to think that maybe somewhere in this messy tale, somebody learned a valuable lesson about that. I doubt it, but I can still like to think it.

So now the Hydey has been saved, at least for the short term. And it hasn't been saved to prove its owners wrong by going on to become a constantly packed venue full of world class bands and punters consuming expensive beer. We've saved the shithole we love, and it gets to stay that shithole, with everything that we love about it intact: creepy dancing drunks, terrible acoustics, no stage, a haze of smoke still lingering a year after the smoking ban. We don't even have to go there to appreciate it -- if it were anything less than empty, well, I don't think this would be a victory, do you?

Technorati Tags: hyde park, perth music, woolworths

A little painful feedback in the ears: On not saving the Hydey.

2007-07-08T00:01:50-05:00

Dear Woolworths,

Re: The Hyde Park Hotel

Let's be clear on one thing, first up: you don't owe us anything. You have no obligation to keep the Hydey open. After all, it's a shithole with few punters and many questionable memories embedded in the carpet. No sensible corporation would keep such a thing running as a loss-leader -- it's not like you really need to be popular in the Hydey's demographic. Our lovable shithole's death warrant was signed a year ago when Paul Higgins sold up to the man (you). I wrote at the time that we'd lost it, and I haven't ever felt that statement was premature.

To make another thing clear, Higgins had every right to sell -- he, also, did not owe us a thing. In fact, all of us -- we punters who watched bands there for the first time, the bands learning what it's like to try and hold a song together while spillovers from the TAB are jostling your bass player, where strange drunks dance vigorously to drone-rock, where bad amplifiers reflect from terrible walls to turn distortion into a weapon of mass destruction -- we owe the Higgins family. They gave us a space for play and experimentation. Where everybody knows your name. And are, occasionally, glad you came. And they had every right to sell up.

So if we aren't owed anything by you, or the Higgins family, what noise then do we have a right to make? I suggest that there is one thing we have a right to ask for: honesty. Don't take us for suckers. That you haven't even fooled the Minister suggests you're not going to get away with this one as easily as you might like.

So, you say there was a noise complaint. I'll be generous for a moment and presume that there was. Was this delivered to council, or to you directly? Was it for a specific event, or for an ongoing problem (it couldn't possibly have to do with the hardcore night recently introduced)? Was it from a resident, and if so, from where? The Colonel trying to sleep in his KFC bucket? Surely not the new development across the road? Most new developments come with caveats for residents that they can't complain about the noise that's already there, so that you don't have to suffer the problems that brought the Grosvenor to its knees, or currently afflict The Bakery. What measures did you take to alleviate the issue? McHale tells us you never asked for money available for sound attenuation that they would have been perfectly happy to give you. Nobody saw sound monitoring equipment being utilised during gigs. You didn't even put back up the thick curtains that you took down after you took over.

But let's still be generous, and presume you've been doing these things and we haven't noticed. Why does this necessarily lead to the cessation of all amplified music? I'm going to be quietly confident and suggest the complaint wasn't relating to the Perth Jazz Society's Monday nights in the back room, where they've been plugging away for twenty-seven years. That history is worth something, isn't it?

It didn't have to be this way. Like I said, you owe us nothing, except the truth. If I can take a guess, it's something along these lines: You bought the Hydey for its bottleshop, which at the time brought you valuable Sunday-trading territory in the inner-city. That's fine, we know that. Nothing else in the venue makes money, and money is why you exist. Changes to the liquor-licensing laws, very welcome changes, meant that a bottleshop that can trade on a Sunday is no longer anything special, so you're stuck with a dead-end asset that can only realize returns now through massive reinvention. You can do the bistro thing, or you can do the giant liquor barn thing, but you'll do one or the other. And you'll make your money. Or you'll sell up.

You could just tell us that, you know. We know it anyway - we may only be punters, consumers, music-lovers, drunks, smokers, lovers, fighters, and pool players, but that damn place means a lot to us. And it's earned that last dying bit of honesty. Beer-fuelled conversations over the last few days with punters and bands alike have shown me that nobody thinks your story stands up to more than a second's scrutiny, but nobody is surprised. You're a faceless, soulless corporation, and you've acted like one.

We don't want you to keep our pub running. We don't want you to look after the bands you'd booked through to November, who now have nowhere else to play. We don't want you to look after the bands still forming in bedrooms and brains right now, who currently have no viable shithole in which to play their first gig to three people. We don't expect these things. We'll survive -- we've lost the Shents, we've lost the Grosvenor, we've lost a hundred other pubs over the years. The history of Perth music is richer, stronger and more beautiful than you. We just wish you'd walk away with a little more decency. That's all.

Thank you.

Tags: hyde park perth music woolworths

World-Wide Labyrinth Locator - Locate a Labyrinth [ma.gnolia]

2007-06-21T03:24:48-05:00

Oh yes. Let's get lost.

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Tags: labyrinth