Draw, Run, Write.

Obstacular

2012-01-12T14:51:00.000-08:00

So last night I went and saw 'Being Elmo' and it was the most inspiring and moving documentary I've seen in ages. Until yesterday I kind of blamed Elmo for the decline of Sesame street, his slow attrition of everybody's screen time, other characters like Baby Bear, Grover, Telly, Ernie and Burt etc. falling by the wayside as people clamoured for more Elmo.

But then you see what Elmo means to people, and particularly when Elmo is captured fulfilling a 'make a wish' wish for a terminally ill child, Maria.

And Kevin Clash the guy with his hand up Elmo, talks about becoming a puppeteer he talks about the plethora of people that look at something different and offer up 'you might not succeed' and then says 'if you focus on doing what makes you happy, all those obstacles dissappear.'

And finally I feel I can write something about my forthcoming exhibition. Musashi's battle against the Yoshioka school at Ichijoji. Musashi's book is one of the most influential in shaping my dreams, my character, my approach to life. He was an amazing man. Yet he lived in a time of meaningless violence. In 1600's Japan there wasn't the collective memory to imagine the lasting peace of the Tokugawa rule that had begun in Musashi's adolescence, so without knowing it, the martial arts had gone from being a practical lifestyle to literally an 'artform'.

It's on that level the history pulls me back and I can relate. The subject matter is so violent though I doubt that the underlying amazingness of the fued will come through.

It is to me, such a powerful example of individualism versus group think, that surprisingly the advice from Clash 'all those obstacles dissappear' perfectly expresses exactly what took place.

To fill you in, and I have to find ways to be more efficient at this, Musashi brazenly swaggered into then capital Kyoto and challenged the head of the former Shogun's sword instructor's school to a duel. The duel was fought and Musashi won, the head retiring in defeat (purportedly losing the use of his sword arm.) The head's younger brother Denshichiro became head of the school and immediatly challenged Musashi to a duel to restore the school's reputation.

Musashi killed Denshichiro in a duel, head of the Yoshioka school then passed to Denshichiro's 12 year old son... whom also challenged Musashi to a duel. And I don't know how or why, but this duel listed 2nds, that is people to fight in place of the young master (as an aside Musashi won his first duel by killing Arima Kihei at age 13) and these seconds were the (supposed) 70 members of the Yoshioka school.

Thus you literally have an institution taking on an individual. 70 armed men seems like insurmountable odds, that I (we?) can speculate that the intention of the duel at Ichijoji was that Musashi would turn up and be slaughtered quickly or more likely, flee the capital where the Yoshioka would be free to discredit their nemesis as a coward.

But Musashi turned up, and Musashi won the duel. (I won't go into the unromantic details now, but my exhibition will be heavily romanticised)

So you have Musashi, literally cutting his way through a seemingly endless number of obstacles, of institutional thought, champions of the official realities of safety in numbers, security, respectability, reputation... and Musashi, the loner in a single day elevated himself above their reality and cemented himself permanently in both the myth and history of Japan.

For me, Ichijoji represents my views on the debate of what does and doesn't exist, the control we attempt to exert over reality. It is a confrontingly visceral struggle through the obstacle of 'reality' that anybody trying to... just be themselves has to struggle through. And if you just focus on what you believe in, what drives you, those obstacles dissappear.

I can't think of a more fitting subject for my first exhibit.

Now to turn around and work on it.

The Last Hurrah!

2011-11-23T16:34:00.000-08:00

I read someone's take on the press' ridicule of the 'Occupy Wall Street' protests, that the protestors didn't even know what they are protesting - the response was too the effect of 'it's called occupy Wall Street, I think it's pretty obvious what we're against.'

My travels in China made me inclined to call China 'The Last Hurrah' of neo-classical economics. In fact as a graduate of an Economics & Marketing degree I can tell you with some authority that we have known for years that GDP doesn't work. Sometime in the early 00's Clive Hamilton published his book 'Growth Fetish' thoroughly analysing the misguided obsession with GDP growth, the fetish still exists but I would propose that long before the last decade people clinically, empirically knew that money doesn't = happiness.

I believe 'the corporation' has a succinct moment explaining the pitfalls of consumerism. 'The whole system is based on a truth and a lie. The truth: if you take someone cold naked and miserable and hungry, and give them food, shelter and clothing they will go from being very miserable to very happy. The lie: If you give somebody twice as much stuff, they'll be twice as happy.'

This is neither the New York times nor the Washington Post, I don't have fact checkers, but I'm reasonably confident that worldwide one will probably observe most countries that have persued economic growth have also seen a growing disparity between rich and poor. The occupy wallstreet crowd refer to themselves as the 99% and the 1% refers to that disparity in America.

There is also simply speaking, a wider loss of confidence in the worldwide Economic institutions. Movements like occupy wall street are on the one hand, easy to ridicule because people are by and large economically illiterate, or put simply, the average joe on the street has no idea what they are talking about when it comes to economics. But this is true of Capitalisms many supporters as well. I hear mind-blowingly idiotic arguments from both camps. But just because you don't know shit about economics doesn't mean you are wrong.

For one thing, many of those who come out to defend right-wing capatilism - free markets, low taxes, small government, individual bargaining agreements, no social welfare etc. defend a system that represents almost none of these things. As Chomsky points out, many republicans like Newt Gingrich that bemoan social welfare are some of the biggest welfare advocates, only in the form of corporate welfare. The US operates it's 'free market' behind some of the most complex and comprehensive trade barriers around, even post NAFTA. Under Reagan the size of government (measured in staff and ultimately cost) actually increased, and goes on increasing.

Then there's the notion of 'free markets' and 'deregulation' that has yet to produce any results (unless you count The GFC as a result of deregulation). Time recently correlated 'ease of doing business' in terms of a number of regulations with economic growth. Turns out in China it is still incredibly hard to do business, with Bank Loan approval taking an average 311 days or something. Yet it's growth has vastly outstripped the US's.

Obviously there are more factors that come into play, and this is in essence what the protestors on the street are right about without even knowing it. China is a vast country, densely populated that is playing catch up. Nothing new and amazing and wonderful is coming out of China. They are building freeways, apartment blocks, supermarkets, shopping malls, train stations, power plants etc. (Obviously 'nothing' new is an exagerration) but the long and short is, that China's rise in the world is bringing it's people up to a standard of creature comforts they have simply been deprived of for the past 60 years, and that Australians, Europeans, Americans, Canadians etc. already have.

China is not wholly, nor even significantly partially a bold new vision of the future, but rather a collossal stampede to the present. It's public are consuming the truth and lie of capatilism in quick succession, and I have confidence that they will discover as the rest of the world seems to be discovering - that the consumer comforts we desire look good from afar but are far from good.

China's economic growth, is I hope the Last Hurrah of an antiquated way of thinking.

But I introduced a notion of right and wrong, and that is dangerous. Let me see if I can make some definitions that are simple - I warn you though, I'm not confident.

Economics is the science of deciding the best way to allocate resources that are limited to maximise happiness.

As yet, the time frame for that goal is undefined. I suggets over the long term, with limitations. (that is admittedly tricky)

Human satisfaction is as good a starting place as any to measure the performance of economic solutions (allocating resources).

SO, an economic system is 'right' if it allocates resources to maximise both happiness now, but more importantly the opportunites we have to be happy. It is wrong if it doesn't.

Perhaps, oversimplifying I would contend that GDP's perhaps only merit is that it kind of retrospectively proves that opportunity increased, if AND ONLY IF you accept that consumption is a good proxy for happiness.

If your economy grew this year, it means that the previous year set you up with more opportunities to grow. That's what I mean by retrospective, the problem is, that GDP growth is kind of like those Casino games of Solitaire, where you can appear to be making progress for a long time only to hit a dead end, and realise that you made a crucial error, unwittingly a long time ago and now that's it, you've lost.

More over, GDP is about as quick and dirty as my above reasoning as a measurement of wellbeing, an indicator of progress. It has numerous well known blindspots. It doesn't look at how economic growth is distributed amongst the public. The implication of that is that economic growth is good if you are feeding, clothing and sheltering more and more destitute people, but not great if it is all going to providing more food clothing and shelter to people who have plenty already while more and more go destitute.

It also just measures consumption, with no real time frame, so the only thing stopping a country from cutting down all it's forrests and pulping them, is the knowledge that if they do that now, the will get great GDP growth this year, and none from that sector next year. But in essence, itjust means that industries and the governments that regulate them dig incrementally increasing slices of irreplaceable resources out of the ground over time, instead of instantly. You still end up burning through your irreplaceable resources.

Furthermore consumption blatenlty ignores all the empirically proven, on large scale, worldwide, numerous times, conclusion that people's happiness doesn't increase with wealth, problems do. People in 'wealthy' nations can actually be less happy than others.

Why? And if our current system is so wrong, what is right? I will muse on these next post.　My laundry is done.

It's A Guy Thing

2011-11-19T00:43:00.000-08:00

So last night I watched a Japanese special on why women lie about their age at dating events (dating sites, speed dating etc.) in Japan. (At least as far as I could gather it was about that) and they actually demonstrated one of the 'meeting parties' that I guess are like speed dating, with 4 guys and 4 girls.

I'm not sure how staged the segment was, but basically they had 4 japanese guys eat dinner and have some drinks in a private dining room with 4 Japanese girls. The men were aged 22~32 or something, and the women were 22, 36, 36 and 49 respectively.

After some chitchat the women leave and the men are asked who they are interested in. 3 out of 4 picked the 49 year old woman. Then the women come in one by one and reveal their ages on a card. The men's reaction to the 49 year old reveal, was, palpable.

At this stage I was thinking, that it was kind of cruel to the female participants in this experiment. Then there was a bit more mixing, and then the men were asked who they were interested in now. All 4 picked the 22 year old.

Then the experiment was repeated with foreigners, aka whities. Who speak japanese, replacing the Japanes men. Ages ranged from 22 to 34 or something again.

I remarked to my host mother that the guys were all ugly. I will elaborate on this later. Here's the thing though.

When the Japanese guys were dining with the japanese women, they had this unfortunately L-shaped table. The men all sat together on one arm, and the women on the other of the 'L' meaning only one guy sat next to a girl, and two were distinctly seperated.

The whitey's instantly had the group sitting one girl one guy alternating. All the foreigners were clearly fluentish in Japanese and even from that snippet, you could see conversation flowed more easily.

The experimented proceeded the same way, the ladies leave, the guys cast their vote. The foreigners votes were all over the place.

Then they did the age reveal, and then more intermingling. In the first run through the Japanese guys basically socially cast aside the eldest woman, and one made some comment comparing her to his mother.

The foreigners just proceeded as business as usual. Except (and here's where you don't know how staged it was) they showed an increased interest in the eldest woman, the 49 year old. Then afterwards, the men cast their votes and 3 out of 4 voted for the 49 year old.

End story. Now originally I had thought the experiment cruel to the elder women participants. In hindsight it was cruel to the Japanese men.

Whenever I come to Japan I am inevitably asked specifically if 'I will marry a Japanese girl'. and then, less directly what I think of Japanese women, or am told that Japanese women are 'yasashi' literally 'easy' but the cultural nuance here is more in line with 'easy going/gentle' and this is infact precicely my problem with Japanese women, as far as any women or cultures can be generalised.

The issue being that the social contract here is still very much Stepford wives. The men here still work in the office of Madmen, perhaps with smoking now increasingly disallowed.

The marriage contract remains, man provides income, women presumably provide housekeeping, cooking and childrearing services in return. Except women here watch friends and Sex & the City and expect more. But there is no 'womens movement' as such.

What played out in this tv special, staged or not, was women voting with their feet. Japan has been described as 'homo-social' and weekends aside it is true. The city is populated by Women hanging out with women and elderly couples (and me).

The men and women are out of touch, that special illustrated that it is the Japanese man's problem.

I have been culturally conditioned, and otherwise self conditioned to like 'tough-vajajay' women, not ones that exemplify male priveledge as the 'yasashi' Japanese women do. And Japanese men are the big winners of male priveledge, except... except they really aren't competitive anymore.

Again generalising the Japanese men on the program out to the population at large, this is what they have going for them over pretty much any foreigner:

- cultural identity.

And that's it. Now recall I mentioned the foreigners were ugly, I must confess. As I did to my friend Nick shortly before leaving for Japan, that whenever I say a white guy with an Asian/Japanese girlfriend I usually think less of both of them. The man for being a misogenist after the yasashi-japanese girlfriend, and the woman for not having the sense to do better for herself. When I dated a japanese girl, I became highly conscious that other people were probably having this exact reaction to me when we held hands down the street.

The thing is those ugly foreigners, and pretty much everyone I have seen with a Japanese girl on or off camera has this going for them over the Japanese men:

- conversation skills.
- social awareness.
- empathy.
- tact.
- generosity.
- interests.
- travel experience.
- confidence.
- independence.
- kindness.
- body language.
- forethought.
- compassion.

And by that last one I don't even mean that they were nice to say they were interested in the 49 year old, but that they made an effort to rotate around and include everyone, and sit in alternating manners.

Even if the outcome was staged, it also reveals that the white men had the presence of mind to lie on national television and look much much better than the honestly superficial Japanese participants.

If you even on an instinctual level know that kindness is attractive to people (male or female) then appearing on national television as a guy that appreciates wisdom over beauty is going to pay off, off screen by impressing your colleagues and friends watching the show.

The fact this doesn't occur to the men, who answered at face value indicates how divided society must be here, staged or not, the experiment would indicate that the men participating don't socialise with women anywhere.

The problem and the cruelty is all on the men. Japanese men, in the dating game are becoming obsolete, like the Sony Walkman, they need to Wiinvent themselves and quickly. But alas, by and large the culture that stifles them in the dating game also deprives them of time and opportunity.

The workplace still expects them to leave home at 6am and get home at 8pm and work 6 days a week. The office is still male dominated here, the only thing dissappearing are the 'OL' or office-ladies, previously shipped into the workforce to serve tea and basically give workers the opportunity to meet a potential marriage partner.

None of this is new, and there are far better researched and far less partial accounts than I could give, try 'Shutting Out the Sun' for a good overview.

I just saw it played out for me, on screen, in a special that was probably closer to reality than most reality tv.

Steve Jobs.

2011-11-18T18:45:00.001-08:00

In Japan, internet aside I have limited access to English press. Everything I do have access to here, is about Steve Jobs. Somebody I would pay close to no attention to in Australia. In fact, I never did except when it was unavoidable. Much like I imagine a sports-hating-hater must have done when the news reported on 'What Michael Jordan Did Today' both before and after the weather when he took over the world in the 90's.

So I now have the choice of reading about Steve Jobs, or trying to read Japanese menus, and there's only so many times I eat a day (5 times) so reluctantly I read about the late, great Steve Jobs.

I feel the first, last and only word on the significance of his passing is summed up the Onion piece 'Last American Who Knew What the Fuck He Was Doing Dies.'

But to me, while I am moved at how loved the man is, it puts me in mind of the precarious nature of technology. That is, I sat at a dinner party where somebody said 'Just invest everything in Google, nothing is ever going to beat Google.' which has not yet turned into one of those laughable time travel jokes, is still an illustration of how precarious technological innovation is.

The notion that Google, Apple or Facebook are unnassailable market leaders is no different from assuming Yahoo, Sony or Myspace are unnassailable market leaders. The problem is, that with technology, if you can imagine what will actually compete with the dominant technology of the day then you are 99% of the way to already having it.

Steve Jobs was probably the only person that could imagine what would beat out the Sony Walkman/Discman. Zuckerberg was probably at one point the first person to concieve of what would beat out Myspace.

Steve Jobs, is perhaps cooler, but no less remarkable than Bill Gates. The two are different enough to not really hold up to comparison, but similar enough to often be compared. They both simply persued different strategies (customisation vs. standardisation) in a world that contrary to popular belief had room for both.

Will people erect shrines to Bill Gates when he dies of old age? Maybe. Should they? Definitely. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is one of the greatest forces for good in the world, an argument by accident FOR Capatalism.

Mac used sweatshop labor and toxic chemicals to adhere apple stickers to laptops and other products in China. Things are never clear. Gates exploited anticompetitive strategy to ensure his dominance. Jobs found a way to sell us music we used to obtain for free.

There is something short sighted in our faith in Jobs, around the same time the news was covering Michael Jordan every day, you couldn't have a conversation without it inevitably steering towards how much Bill Gates earns per second.

But who gives a shit about Bill Gates now? Windows is probably the worlds highest selling OS, just as I'm sure Brand Jordan's shoes are still number one. We've just stopped talking about them.

Word.

2011-11-18T03:33:00.000-08:00

Prophanity is a legitimate form of expression.

Cool is Cheap

2011-11-16T04:04:00.000-08:00

So feeling nostalgic, I started reading Bikesnob's blog again, which I first discovered by reading an interview with him in a cycling magazine way back in '07 or '08. The first post I read was this: about young people migrating to cities like Portland, and Austin. While the people migrating to cities like New York are old dudes, providing the 'calcification' of cities like New York.

This cycle is not unknown in Melbourne and I feel at some point needs beating. The post linked to Freakonomics, whom are famous for breaking down 'causation' and 'correlation' cases of mistaken identity. But in this case I feel they have got it wrong.

Certainly gravity applies to young people's choice in which city/suburb etc to live in. The more young people in a place, the more likely young people are to live there. However, before this is the issue of rents, something Earthsharing Australia a think tank I am occasionally involved with staged a film comp on just such a phenomena.

They called it 'The Gentrification Game'. Similar to such phenomena as prole drift (which curiously, is not a phenomena in Japan, everyone can consume 'exclusive' brands without an ipact on the brand equity) but more in the opposite direction, gentrification is where a low rent area atracts a bunch of people with dubious incomes.

An area like Saint Kilda in Melbourne was at one stage, low rent, attracting artists and musicians to live there. They inevitably have an impact on the character of the neighbourhood, attracting monikers like 'cool' and 'funky'. Over time these become assets to the neighbourhood, and attractive to people with money.

Thus gentrification begins. Demand to live in such neighbourhood increases, eventually landlords get wise and up the rents. The poor artists, move on to browner pastures (which they again coolify) and people with money move in and displace them. Funky-cool cafes open up on the main drag attracting more uncool people, until young people have to be bussed in to actually be baristas because they can't afford to live anywhere near the clientelle.

Increasingly what once was a happening place becomes a strip with the appearance of being happening but in reality containing only expensive restaurants and cafes.

Meanwhile you see a migration of the cool people towards other cheap suburbs. Brunswick and Sydney Road is gentrifying, I am sure soon to be followed by High Street, Yarraville will most likely gentrify, if it hasn't already, it is too far for me to really spend a great deal of time in, and Footscray and other western suburbs is an open question, because I'm fairly sure Melbourne house prices are going to tank, putting a brief hiatus on the gentrification spread.

I have heard it said that 'Castlemaine' is the new St Kilda, and it isn't even in Melbourne. This is a tragic state of events if the happening places of the future will be in places away from the happening infrastructure.

But then again, I don't see why not, thanks to the internet you can get posted just about anything anywhere. People seem averse to having actual audiances, or viewing anything through something other than a computer screen, so perhaps you don't even need a population to engage in dialogue with.

Who knows, soon it may be desirable to live in Yass, or Detroit or somewhere else with almost know hope of supporting jobs for the gentrifiers. The only defence artists and creatives and coolness has, is that people with Money need to earn it somewhere. You can not earn money almost anywhere these days.

I'm Sorry, What?

2011-11-14T16:54:00.000-08:00

Property buying losing appeal even as prices retreat

From the age. Time for a little Economics 102. The thing that caught my eye with this article was the 'even as' line.

Here we see the complacency or naivete of free press in creating asset bubbles. There are few institutions that employ economists. Research companies, Banks, Universities, Government Departments and one would hope, newspapers.

This headline itself was as I understand journalism, probably the product of an editor and not say, the journalist/economist etc that wrote the article. Because, OF COURSE you wouldn't buy property now, if you expect it to get cheaper.

Rationally, supply and demand curves sustain an equilibrium, where as the price of property goes down, demand increases, and as it goes up demand decreases.

The article itself draws the same conclusion on price expectations that Keynes did during the great depression moving on from Classical Economics (hence economics 102). Quite right, quite right. Only under duress would anybody buy today what they expect to be on sale tomorrow.

The article is still dissappointing though. It keeps referring to 'population growth' as a contributing factor to propping up property prices. I would be surprised if any actual analysis ever actually turned up any correlation between population size and house prices ever. Even somewhere like China where you see huge migrations from country to city, you have a cheap workforce living in shipping containers while they construct high-end apartment blocks that are bought and sold, despite nobody ever living in them.

There is alas a complete and utter truth to Michael Hudson's assertion that a 'house is worth as much as banks are willing to lend for it.'

I don't think the RBA's rate cuts though will upset the downward momentum of Australian property prices this time.

House prices are strange, they sustain their own momentum. I have a half baked theory using economics lingo, that houses are an example of good where the utility curve can't really apply. A utility curve generally maps the relationship between utility (satisfaction, happiness it is both and neither of these things) and price. But with houses the utility is often derived from the price. That is it is a speculative good. In good times the more you pay for it, the better you feel.

Imagine, if there was only one piece of property in the world. The previous owner bought it for $10,000 last year. What most people in a more diluted form do, is buy that has for $100,000 and note it's price has increased 1000%!!! in just one year, and feel enormously satisfied by their wise purchase decision.

Hopefully the ridiculousness of this investment strategy in the above example is transparent. It is less so when dealing with large numbers of buyers and sellers and properties. But basically, the houses get no more useful, bring in no more 'real' income (that is rent) but people pay ever increasing amounts for them.

Why?

Because they expect them to be sold at even higher prices.

This can continue almost indefinitely (although the money has to eventually come from somewhere) because it is a self fulfilling prophecy. You and I could become millionaires (on paper) with the willing participation of a lending institution by simply agreeing to buy the same pen off eachother at ever escalating prices.

What then, when the self fulfilling prophecy stops being fulfilled, it just becomes another self fulfilling prophecy, albeit one with a more concrete bottom than the others ceiling.

People will not buy because they expect prices to go down. Owners on the otherhand will try and rush their properties onto the market 'before it's too late', creating supply demand imbalances that will push prices down. This will cause panic amongst those holding hot-potato-mortgages and reluctance in those that would buy in.

The prices will drop, they will drop at a rate of acceleration akin to gravity and people will get hurt.

Sadly it will be many people who followed the advice of those loved ones that wanted them to never feel such hurt financially.

This is why you shouldn't believe everything you read (in a Newspaper).

Gay Marriage

2011-11-12T04:38:00.000-08:00

Some believe it right, some believe it wrong. If you believe it wrong, you do not want it, and so what need have you for a law preventing you? Suffice to say you feel it your duty to prevent others from doing this wrong, or that it diminishes what? Your achievement?

And in prevention what are you saving? If you believe that such unions cannot work, what harm in trying? Most unions do not work. On the law of average no union should proceed, sooner than heterosexual ones should only.

Turn then to the immortal soul, to the eternity of happiness or despair, it is the despair you would save them from. But this is but belief. You believe it so. I believe it not. Do you hear God speak? As I speak. I think not. He but reveals himself to you, as he does not reveal himself to me. Our beliefs are at odds. For you a feeling of failure as one engages in sin is what you wager. For me, the reading of the law at any law sanctioned wedding. For others the ability to have their union recognised by the state.

Whose grief is greatest? Surely the latter. You would have the law compel your success? You argue that in this the law should prevent those from consenting to your believed sin. What else would you have the law do? Compel us to attend your church, read your scripture and everything else your beliefs command you to.

No.

You cannot, for this state is secular. And on this only can you agree. That no man should marry man, that no woman should marry woman. That the exclusive priveledge of your unions should not be extended. That some should be excluded from the state in this small way for what? For loving who they love.

What is the Mangatrix?

2011-11-10T06:30:00.000-08:00

Kyoto is kind of like Japan's Florence (Firenze) in that it holds much of the classic architecture of Japan's past and artworks from Japan's own renaissance (Although Ironically this was the Edo Period, the old name for Tokyo). But in a lot of ways it is not like Florence.

When you walk through the old districts of Florence, they are precisely that. Kyoto has heritage listed buildings galore, but no real zoning, the old wooden housing long since pulled down and replaced with concrete block architecture, now streaked with acid rain. A large part of the reason for this is practical, in a country prone to earthquakes it makes sense to build dwellings out of materials unlikely to collapse and then burn.

But Kyoto unlike Florence leaves one with an inescapable desire to imagine what it would have been like if the whole city had been preserved. Allegedly allied forced had protected Kyoto from being bombed in WW2, when it was still largely wooden structures. With the advances in Weapons guidance systems and the uglification of Kyoto's non temple/shrine/castle/palace buildings, I doubt it would be protected today.

And it occured to me, I could not live here. Not full time. I mean I could, but I would long for open spaces and clean rain and... pretty much all the settings employed in popular manga. I'm thinking of the open seas and island nations of One Piece, the mediteranian settings of everything Miyazake, even Naruto's open deserts, vallies and forrested villages. All very unjapanese.

Japanese people live in cramped apartments, daily reorganizing their lives in a way that is not unimpressive. They also live I think inside their heads, in the imaginary spaces of Manga comics.

It occurred to me, a beguiling theory of the popularity of Comics amongsts Japanese of all ages, is that the demand for escapism is just part of life. Obviously there are a bunch of titles that are very close to the daily lives of Japanese, set in Japanese cities. But into the mangatrix we go, the Japanese escaping the close confines of living, if for only a few minutes at a time, by escaping to comicbook world.

It's just a thought and probably but one aspect of the many things that make Comics so popular in Japan, but I thought it, now it is here. For posterity.

On Poverty and Wealth

2011-11-07T02:41:00.000-08:00

So I gots to catch up with this travelogue phase. I:m sorry, fucken Communists and keyboard rearrangements.

So I spent most of last week in Beijing. I want to get the negative out of the way first, and briefly:

China's vision of economic growth is so uninspired that it speaks more of poverty than poverty actually does, in the same way that grownass rappers bragging to suburban teenagers about their ability to pay for jewellery, drive a car and get a girlfriend speaks of it. (Check out Kanye's `the good life' if you need to see what I'm talking about.) It's like they have reduced the concept of progress into the apartment block, with brand carrying stores at the basement and just reproduce these block after block after block. The brands consumed also paint a sad picture. After 3 years the Stonecutter's quote 'jealous?' - 'no Homer, we have the same chair' holds up.

But that's it. I enjoyed Beijing a lot more this time round, not just because I got to see Pandas eithermost. Not being a prisoner to indoors on account of freezing temperatures, I got to cycle around Beijing and experience the surprisingly pleasent traffic.

In Beijing no matter what form of transport you use, the pedestrian rules apply. That is you can pretty much ignore any formal rules, it's jaywalking for bicycles and cars. Everyone moves slowly and the car horn, amazingly is not an angry sound. It just says 'I'm here buddy' not 'get out of the fucking way' or 'I don't like what you are doing'. It's calm and relaxed and patient. I never expected that from such a fucked up driving culture that China has.

But really it works much better, Australian's should be ashamed of what angry assholes they are on the road. Patience is a value that is lost in Australia, one that would go miles and miles towards lifting everyone's wellbeing.

I can remember in 2 months of cycling Europe I got honked at once, by a car in Austria that was trying to tell me to get off the road... onto the designated road for bicycles. Beijing is kind of like that but you get honked all the time in a concerned caring way.

The second thing is that last time I was in Beijing I went to Beijing after 3 months in Japan, Japan the cleanest shithole in the world. I was confronted by the mess and couldn't get over it. I travelled in the right direction this time, and I think I got it. Like my mother pointed out to me, while it is confronting to see children just shitting through a split in their pants in the street or literally being hung out the car window at an intersection to go, the world would be ruined already if everyone in China used disposable nappies. The landfill alone would have it's own seat on the UN security council.

The food as per last time was excellent. And stuff is cheap, I got two pairs of glasses made up in 20 minutes, as opposed to the fucking ordeal getting prescription glasses is in Australia, with insurance companies to deal with and fucking waiting for some factory to make them. OPSM probably got their lenses from the same joint I did. I also took my now 10 year old jeans into the tailors and got two pairs of suitpants tailor made to the same measurements. Knowing I have gangsta-ass slacks makes me confident I will not only cream any job interviewers with my contempt for them, but I will probably be hired in to replace my recruiters.

And the optimism, last time I visited it was 6 months prior to the Beijing Olympics, I think this coloured Beijing with an unattractive 'in your face Australia' attitude I picked up on, an arrogance. I believe that and my own arrogance have settled down over 3 years and Beijing and I were able to get along much better.

Also I guess Beijing was the first unfamiliar culture I visited on my round the world trip last time. Now I have been through muggings and experienced better and worse and I guess know how to travel. I have stopped caring, and it has made me better able to appreciate.

I think the Chinese people can get and deserve a better deal as human beings, for a greener and free future, but they seem happy, upbeat, optimistic even despite the rest of the worlds decline. I feel I can be happy for them.

I'm Doing Something Right I Guess

2011-10-30T22:19:00.000-07:00

I'm not good at travel, I always feel like I'm letting somebody down when I go. Because I can never come back and just be 'It's AMAZING, WOW!!! My whole perspective in life has changed!!!' blah blah blah.

My mother, (who worries) is worried about this past behaviour of mine. I've never been the excitable type, but I'm not the type to go travelling like I'm getting some kind of hit.

I'm really emotional and reluctant to leave. Part of this I'm sure is that I am losing my sister to New York while I'm away, I'll probably not live with her again and she will simply be gone when I come back. Another part is that John my coconspirator will have moved to Sydney whilst I'm away, and he will be missed as well.

But I also just miss Melbourne. I've never been able to relate to people who have a desire to leave it. Maybe if you grew up here, I don't know. I find that 'travel broadens you' is fundamentally true, but isn't some silver bullet cure all.

I remember a line from 'In the Lake of the Woods' a prescribed text when I was in year 10 or 11 that read something like 'they moved there as if happiness was a physical place on earth.' which I think many who 'love' travel are prone to thinking.

I also remember in Lisa Pryor's 'Pinstripe Prison' on the lifestyle sale of jetsetting corporate worker's travel experiences 'I think a lot of people who travel want to because they aren't happy where they are.' as in travel is an escape, quite literrarily escapist.

Not so, I. I am also reminded of crappy self help book that's contents is literally on its cover 'it's called a "break-up" because it's "broken"' and think that 'taking a break' kind of implies that you are attempting to fracture or destroy your life by journeying abroad.

This was certainly the case last time I left the country - I literally packed all my life into boxes and within 24 hours had nothing but a passport, a credit card and some pyjama's in a capsule in Osaka.

I'm afraid that this trip will be that trip writ small, that I will have my strange isolated depression that I got in Thailand, where I couldn't force myself out of my hotel room before 1 in the afternoon and then on the pretext of needing to eat.

There is some stuff in my life that needs breaking, but not much. Bad routines I've fallen into. And it will be nice not to have to work. And it will be great seeing all my people's of Japan, whom seldom use facebook, call or think outside the boarders of their own country, whom love me as dearly as I love them.

But I decided to do this trip at New Years, I let them know and gave them my word. My word I take very seriously, but I'm so reluctant to let go of this city, my home.

I love Melbourne, I love its people, I love my life here. I guess if anything my anxiety at leaving even for a relatively short 6 weeks reflects that my home is truly a home and I'm doing something right.

Superfluous H: What could have been and was.

2011-10-30T03:34:00.000-07:00

So superfluous_h had there first and ostensibly last performance last night. This was my first time performing as an artist. The whole thing is a blur to me. The process of drawing is so absorbing that I really was only conscious of what I was doing between pieces and right at the start, just getting started.

Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, like better than I ever could have hoped for, I guess once again proving I'm my own harshest critic. The only thing I found odd was people clapped between each piece/song in our set. I found this strange, getting appluaded for a drawing. Not good or bad, just strange. I guess I clap after each number in a bands set, so I don't know.

At the same time I felt really self conscious. Just like my face was burning up the whole time, it was weird, I don't think I choked or anything.

We played for an hour and did I don't know somewhere between 8-10 pieces in the end. John layed down his tracks really well, and I didn't have a single composition I needed to scrunch up midway through.

For my part, the drawing side, it's been really bizarre and incredibly interesting project to develop. There's a number of challenges in trying to bridge the audio/visual divide and a number of solutions that John and I have been looking at and exploring. Maybe I'll give you a brief run down of the history of the project.

It started with a copy of Japanzine which I read in early 2008, featuring VJ and artist Shantell Martin whom really is as far as I can deduce the pioneer of this 'illustrated music' thing, as in doing it live.

She used digital painting on a tablet projected at nightclubs to avant guard dance music. I don't like dance music, and particularly not avant guard ones, so I approached my sax playing friend from the Skylines about doing something like this, using the terms VJ and sending him some clips of Shantell's work + De La Soul's 'I Be Blowin' suggesting we do something like that together. Sean never responded to my email.

Then I mentioned it to a drummer whom was initially keen, but fell through when I started running wild with my imagination and talking about how ambitious I wanted the project to be and how much work was involved. I also was really getting into 'The Pleasure Principle' at the time, which was far from the preferred jazzy style of that collaborator.

Then came looking for an exhibition space for a solo show. Ironically John came at me with feedback about my unbridled ambitions for the show and suggested I do something smaller and more grass roots. Contrary to his advice on cutting back I asked him if he was interested in doing this VJing thing.

Emails were exchanged and here is where John was for me at least an ideal collaborator. He could at once accept the scope and magnitude of my inspiration and ideas, whilst pragmaticcally drawing everything back to something that could be achieved.

It became this challenge of trying to make an accessible visual/audio artpiece. Drawing to music. The problems being many just to name a few and whether musician or artist I would definitely recommend taking on these challenges some day:

1. With drawing the 'details' or soloing, takes most of the time, the construction or 'rhythm' of the piece is important but takes less time to lay down. Music is the reverse, the rhythmic components of the song, the chorus the melody are 90% of the composition or more, the solo is the least.

2. 14 minutes is a really long song but a really quick drawing. 7 minutes is flying.

3. It is much easier for me to draw any kind of subject matter than a musician to play any style of music.

4. A visual composition is usually fairly linear - foreground to background, left to right, top to bottom. Music jumps around.

These are really the tip of the iceberg of interesting things trying to draw live to improvised music. Then there's how to match musical sounds to an artists repertoir of mediums and tools. What does a sharpie sound like compared to a copic marker? These are different from the more obvious questions of how does green sound compared to blue?

So we just rehearsed, and built up a repertoir of tricks and things and ideas, and many of the quality ones we managed to pull off in new and improvised ways last night for a crowd of 12-15 or so. Which I was exceptionally pleased with.

And yet, it's bittersweet. I'm losing John to Sydney. We really only scratched the surface of what we can do as an act, and that was it, that was our one and only act. I'll definitely resurrect it in one form or another, but John is irreplaceable.

He really was the perfect collaborator for this project. Like me he is largely self instructed in music, we have similar approaches to problem solving.

John is one of those rare people that is both reliable and easy going at once. If he says he'll be somewhere he generally will be, but at the same time, is not anally retintive with holding others to such expectations of reliability. He assumes the respect he pays others but does not expect it of them. Its qualities like these I strive to have, whether I do or not is not my subjective experience to say, but John in my opinion does.

As sure as I am he will read these words I'll also miss him as an evangelical supporter of my creative works.

It'll be hard to work with other people that don't read too much into my highly self-critical (extended to collaborators) approach that he never actually seemed to take personally or attribute any maliciousness on my part. (I just calls it as I sees it). Somebody willing to put in the hours of practice, without acting like I'm putting them under pressure.

They will be literally big shoes to fill.

I wish superfluous h could continue, and play bars with data projectors and fancy drinks and lemon slices in the complimentary water. I wish we could practice performing for 3 or more years till we become a true example of creative synesthesia. It's not going to happen, at least not like I want it to. But what we've done is more than most other audio/visual collabs seem to achieve (John maintains he couldn't find any examples of people doing anything like it, the audience we had seemed to act that way as well)

So this is a notch among my notches on my notch system of self esteem and achievement. And a farewell to John.

John on the guitars ladies and gentlemen...

Writing Again

2011-10-27T14:58:00.000-07:00

I finally started writing a comic script, I have been not doing that for too long. I was reading Rafael Grampa's blog and how he just decided to write a comic one year. He seemed so slap dash about creating his eisner winning debut comic. I don't have his artistic ability yet, but just adopting that mindset of 'I need to make a comic' made me think in a way that I've been putting off.

I actually looked at an idea I've had kicking around, and rather than worrying about it's derivitiveness, it's obtuseness or substantiveness, I just thought 'if I cut out that, quit trying to do that and just get this done it can work.' and sat down to write it.

12 moments helped because I've gotten used to working with other people's scripts that I know where to cut corners in the writing process. Because I'm my own artist and translating my visual conception into a script to then be retranslated back into visuals, I just write things like 'Page 4: A bunch of panels' knowing I can figure out the layout when I thumbnail it.

Still I have only written half a chapter of a 5-6 chapter story so it's early days yet. But expect a new webcomic relatively soon.

Coupon Millionaire

2011-10-24T19:20:00.000-07:00

I have completely forgotten who I was talking to when I went completely off the radar over the extended weekend of drinking and stuff. But I have come to realise that I never wanted money, never have and hopefully never will (since infuriatingly for others, it seems to simply fall into my lap) but I do fantasize about being a millionaire-in-kind.

The things that thrill me, make me happiest are when I recieve some gratuity from a friend, like being put on the door at a gig, or getting taken out for dinner. I'm at the stage where if I can't live off my artwork I can at least eat off it.

This is the future I am building towards, where perplexingly I can be wealthy simply by being a guest of other wealthy people.

But I wish to emphasize that I don't mean to just basically freeload, I feel success to me is being appreciated by the people I most appreciate. Rather than exchanging money, I wish to exchange favors with people I love more than say 'customers'.

As salt 'n pepa said 'The difference between a hooker and a ho and nothin but a fee.' I guess I want to be a ho rather than a hooker.

Gender

2011-10-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

I'm male, white and straight. As my friend said to me 'your stars are all aligned' I have a frictionless path through the norms of the society I live in and thus little to gain by understanding the world through the prism of LGBTIQ issues.

Why then touch anything remotely gender studies related? Well for me the exercise is probably intellectual, reexmining 'gender' is like having your thumb pressed over the hose of a beer bong (hear me out). The social conditioning of gender is so omnipresent in everyday life that the exercise of actually thinking about it is like removing your thumb from the onrush of alcoholic beverage that you have no choice but to swallow and makes you feel confused and disoriented in a short space of time.

I thought though I should post my views about gender before I actually get enlightened so I can go back and compare after the process of reading books on the subject. So here in no particular order is a list of my probably naive and ignorant views.

Lou Gehrig

Malcolm Gladwell is fond of an old Jewish saying 'To a worm in horseradish the world is horseradish.' To which my operating assumption is, to people whom Gender is an active part of their identity... I should clarify what I mean by that. My gender is not a part of my identity, by which case it is, but it's just a box I tick and don't think much about much like my street address or postcode, it occupies the same conscious importance. Although I do feel like a Northern Suburb person trapped in an Eastern Suburb often... so yes.

But for people who are oft, identified as having a Gender Identity Disorder (GID) clinical words not mine, I imagine gender becomes a big part of your identity, not just a box you tick but a constant confrontation. If you don't neatly fit in one of two boxes, that struggle to define your gender can occupy a large part of your conscious life. To be melodramatic it can become your whole life.

Now if you are not already aware or have deduced, pretty much all the thinking I do is of the 'quick and dirty' variety, I argue almost always from analogy, and equivocate things. So to borrow for convenience the dubious GID label, people identified with GID to me are similar to people suffering Lou Gehrig's disease. That is it's A) beyond their control, B) a huge part of their life C) not broadly thought about by society.

I imagine that there are differences as well to having a debilitating condition and GID's for one thing, if you are suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease your family will probably rally round you in support rather than passively or actively oppose your treatment/identity etc. Also, you are probably more likely to be in sync with your families desire to NOT have Lou Gehrig's disease. This is why such thinking of mine is quick and dirty.

Gender is Quick and Dirty

All binary thinking is. And it works, in the same way as a 'rule of thumb' works. Or in the same way that left and right handedness works, with exceptions like Ambidexterity and people with no coordination whatsoever like John Howard.

But when I say 'works' I must admit that it is confronting to think of how few situations where it actually needs to. All of the situations to me involve sexual preference. That is public change rooms, and people's aversion to perverts.

I have a sexual preference, I don't want a cock in me, ever. I'm sure there are many guys that identify as straight that wouldn't mind being penetrated by a ladies finger or taken to by a woman wearing a strap on, I am not as far as yet, one of those guys.

Some people have two preferences, others a whole rainbow spectrum. But nevertheless, women who want women and women who want men would probably neither appreciate me arbitrarily identifying as 'F' and taking a seat in their change rooms. Or even getting changed in their changerooms.

Will the future see more unisex public toilets? This is often the norm in small restaurants, many public parks, some bars and the Ally McBeal office. As someone who quickly and dirtily identifies as male, I feel this would only result in everyone losing. There are a bunch of guys, who piss all over the seats. I don't understand their psychology, I don't think I want to, I don't identify with these 'men' as being in the same gender category to me and often affix 'not-real' to the identifier men.

Aside from that, mens and womens clothing is pretty arbitrary and 'men's and women's jobs' is archaic. Gender shouldn't actually crop up that often.

Real

'Real' is the important qualifier. I most often hear the term 'Real man' and can't think of a time when I heard somebody use 'real woman' more often hearing 'whole-lotta-woman' or 'proper lady'. But real-men is used, by myself and others.

If I had to guesstimate, to anyone transitioning genders or even gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, the issues are mostly centered on the word 'real'. I feel notions of 'real men sleep with real women' and vice versa to be not worth my talking about it, because anyone educated enough to use the term 'zenith' or 'nadir' in a conversation is probably not going to rough up gays and lesbians.

But to somebody born with an Xand Y chromosome that feels trapped in a 'male' body and wishes to become a female faces the uphill battle of ever being acknowledged as female.

This is gender identity issues as far as I thus far understand, these labels that seem obligatory in our society and the difficulty with which some people find to get identified as one and not the other, both or neither.

So you were born, raised as a female on account of your vagina, told you were a female but always inside knew you were male. You manage to consciously articulate this to yourself, then to others, then chose to start identifying as a male, then you told me and I was all like 'dude, you're a lady.'

I reject your chosen gender identity. This is not because I have known you for ever, disrespect you and wish to oppress you, but because your life consists of situations where you are introduced to a stranger like me and my eyes, ears, possibly nose are making quick and dirty decisions about whether you are male or female, and I will come to a (probably) subconscious decision one way or the other as to your gender and in most if not all cases will think it rather than say it.

And that is annoying, upsetting etc. for anybody transgender or 'suffering' from a 'GID'. I after reading up, may come to be less assuming about what one's gender is upon meeting and even now would probably say 'I stand corrected' if my normative assumptions are contradicted by what people report to me.

But seemless, frictionless integration into what my life is like as a 'male' is the dream and the nightmare to achieve by anyone transitioning in the male direction. They can have surgery, take hormone treatments and order a whole new wardrobe, but children 6 and upwards are going to look at them like something isn't right (and some will come to identify with them, which is heroic) in the same way that people don't trust assymetrical faces instinctively.

To my current speculation/understanding surgical solutions to gender identity are imperfect, and in my view perhaps quite imperfect, in the same way that somebody who's conscious experience rejects the 'normal' number of limbs and has a strong desire to have an arm amputated that is mechanically and cosmetically 'perfect' is hard to understand, I'm sure if growing a new 'male' or 'female' body in a vat and then having your conscious transferred to it was an option, almost no gender transition surgery or hormone treatment would take place.

If we could hang our physical bodies on a rack in a wardrobe and switch as easily as we can clothes, almost none of these issus would exist and they'd be replaced with a whole bunch of new ones.

So in summarium of the 'real' man and 'real' woman topic, I empathise with both sides. It is far easier to negatively screen man and woman than it is to come up with a checklist of qualities that make you a man or a woman. Having said that even negative screening is a difficult undertaking.

I chose to identify myself as 'tohm' that's my name. It is annoying and perplexing to see people inevitably pronounce my name 'to-HM' when they first learn of this vanity, even after people figure out it's pronounced 'tom' like 'john' is pronounced 'jon' people often miss the fact that I always spell my name with a lower-case 't' and don't use a surname. Because of all the boxes in society, I am required to fill out a surname for email accounts, jobs, facebook etc.

My choice to identify as tohm is not one I ever expect the world to embrace, that a consciousness raising campaign would rectify and that my wikipedia page wouldn't include 'born Thomas William...' somewhere in the introductory paragraph. It's annoying, but it is part of my identity, and not as actively or passively rejected or confronted as something like gender. But people's insistence on pronouncing the 'h' is what I would call a normative or natural reaction. It is not worth actively getting frustrated with, people get over it and come to accept it.

I imagine one by one, people will accept your gender or sexual preference in time, their ability to do so also becomes their problem not yours. (though yes, there may be real consequences for you).

A numbers game

I have little to say beyond the fact that I believe gender to simply be one of those quick and dirty rules that works for most but not for some. They are clusters though rather than boxes, with overlap and hazy edges, and simplifying them into boxes has come with a huge bunch of problems for a relatively small bunch of people.

I just read that 1 in 2000 babies born has 'ambiguous' genitalia and requires an expert to determine the 'true' sex of the child. Physicallity of sex aside, the number of people who are queer in gender and/or preference must be a significantly larger proportion.

I don't know/don't care to much about the exact numbers, suffice to say I'm sure that any of the LGBTIQ crowd or combined are still a minority. I am a member of a minority myself being left handed, and as a lefty I wonder if that ratio were to hit 1 in 10 or higher (and for LGBTIQ to achieve some kind of actual solidarity, I have seen little of the LGBTIQ but I'm pretty sure it's a capital 'L' a giant 'G' and then diminishing b-t-i-q's in terms of causes identified with by the protest turn outs) then many of these issues would need addressing.

Whether you have the most obscure gender identity issues on the planet, I firmly believe that nobody, NOBODY is worth neglecting, or passive or active rejection from society. Well, fucken antisocial 'criminals' but gender identity is neither anti social nor criminal in my view. But if the numbers were large the issues would probably be addressed.

I was in primary school at a time when I actually had to ask for left-handed scissors and teachers went scurrying off to find the few pair the school owned. They had their own colours and picked me out in class like armbands in a warsaw ghetto. Except primary school bears no real comparison to the holocaust (or Poland), but eventually some genius figured out that it would be easier just to make/order ambidextrous scissors.

I hope increasingly society defaults to pansexual solutions, and gender identity becomes an ever diminishing part of everyone's life. In the same way I hope for a future where it is no big deal for any guy in any bar to approach another guy romantically and for 'sorry I'm straight' to be the response rather than 'get away from me you fucken' queer!'.

Which I guess I'm saying, how I would naturally react when meeting Chaz Bono for the first time in said future, I don't know, I really don't know.

But I should point out that Lou Gehrig's disease is a horrible condition and we should all do what little we can to help find a cure, ease the lifestyles of those who are afflicted with it.

Marathon

2011-10-09T13:55:00.001-07:00

I have run a marathon. It cannot be unrun, it can never be taken away from me, even though my legs might. I ran it in 3:46. It was hard, but I'd still say preferable to a competitive 800m.

One Nice Thing

2011-10-05T20:22:00.000-07:00

6 years ago if you'd asked me would I experience/find true love I would have said 'yes.' And I would have been exactly right for the exact wrong reason. Because 6 years ago I envisioned myself in the arms of some crazy and beautiful woman. Which didn't happen. Well briefly that happened as well...

BUT if you take as a working definition (a behavioural definition) of love 'elevating the needs of another to those of your own.' then yes I have this true love, but instead of some beautiful and crazy woman I have a family of aghani refugees.

You know you have achieved the above definition of true love when 'the line between giving and recieving becomes blurred' and when I took the Nazari's to Imax so that little Fatima could see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2 in 3D I felt wonderful.

I can go and basically see any movie I want any time I want any day of the week. It's not a big deal for me, I have a highly disposable income and am pretty much master of my own time. But to be able to score some free tickets for a family with no disposable income and see them go to the movies together, to give them some respite from the almost constant struggle their lives are, gives me a kind of joy I could not buy for myself.

Well maybe, I felt an intense euphoria when I waved them into the cinema and went back out into the sunlight, probably more intense than anything a movie like Harry Potter will evoke, and I feel it is an achievement to feel such euphoria without taking some kind of opiate.

This is one of those nice things that I think allows me to die having done a good job in life. I would regret dying of course, but much less than if I was just some self indulgent prick...

except when you indulge somebody you love, you indulge yourself. That's the catch isn't it.

Pearls From Swine

2011-09-29T19:59:00.000-07:00

I thought it high time I stop talking about interpersonal shit and got back to the art and artist I am supposed to be becoming. I'm not even sure if I'm even halfway down the road to becoming an artist, but this is the best stuff I would keep from all the advice I have recieved over the years. This is the advice that if not producing instantaneous fame and success, sustains me in my work and keeps me producing.

1. People Want You To Succeed

This was something a manager at Honda said to a colleague of mine making what I presume was one of his first presentations. Technically it is an observation rather than advice but I strongly advise you to consciously acknowledge and accept it. Schadenfreude exists in some rare exceptions, but you can be confident that by and large people actually want you to succeed and do well. They don't want to see a shitty comedian choke, they don't want to see your band's lead singer break down and cry. They don't want to be the only person in the gallary looking at your works.
People enjoy being witness to the risks you are taking that they won't or can't take themselves. They are with you not against you. Feed off that.

2. Deserve, Then Desire

Following from that, this is a variation of Ghandi's old 'be the change' chestnut. I have limited sympathy for people who fret over the poor attendence at their party when you can't recall seeing them at any other party than their own. Mass market shows like the Idol franchise, Masterchef etc. encourage the notion that their is a vertical heirarchy in the creative pursuits and one's success is at the expense of another. Wrong! Wrong I say, there is room for all. For me it is easier to imagine there are people who will willingly support the arts with their time and money if I am one myself. I try to support anybody creating anything, not morally but physically and financially and in any way I can. I don't expect reciprocity, even in a karmic indirect sense but it makes it easier to believe. If you are an artist, support the arts. It is furthermore an enjoyable process, I am yet to drag myself to a gig, or exhibition that I didn't end up really enjoying.

3. All Advice is Autobiographical

People offer advice all the time. I stole this piece of advice from 'How to Steal Like an Artist' by Austin Kleon which is worth reading, but it is important. People give you advice in the context of either A) their own ambitions, which Austin covers or B) their ambitions for you.
Parents often just want you to avoid hardship and harm, their job is to protect you, but avoiding failure is not success. The best advice comes from people who can closely empathise with you, or at the very least admit that they can't. Be selective of the advice you recieve, even mine.

4. Do the Work.

I love Bobby Chiu and his Chiustream interviews, the visual arts is a lonely isolated profession and his interactive interview series allows these lonely people to connect. He asks almost every artist for their advice and thankfully and refreshingly they are always unanimous in saying in one form or another 'do the work.' Jason Seiler probably took it one step further and said that 'talent' is just a word used by his unsuccessful artist friends to describe the high correlation between their lack of it, and the hours spent playing play station. Seinfeld also advised that nothing bad can come from working your ass off. The only acception being RSI or carpel tunnel syndrome. But if you want to get better, schedule in the practice and do the work, taking regular breaks.

5. Achievement Comes Before Ambition

Probably the only advice here that nobody told me before I figured it out for myself. Our society overvalues the prodigy, and often disregards the late bloomer. We would all rather succeed sooner than later, but generally aiming way too high just defeats yourself. You walk into sticky and pick up a zine and say 'I could write something way better than this.' but it turns out that often you can't, or you do and nobody buys it, because nobody recognizes your name. A lot about keeping your ambitions in check is being efficient. You have no track record so you are likely to only generate a small following, even if you do manage to pull off something substantial and ambitious you will dissappoint yourself with the lack of witnesses. Always produce quality work, you want those few people who do pick it up to be advocates, but pace yourself and give them plenty of opportunities to become advocates - even evangelists.

6. Mind the Gap

Following from this, and also touched on in 'How to Steal Like an Artist' are the cognitive gaps. We are our own harshest critiques (most of the time, some people are way up their own arse.) Harvard posted this gem of advice just a few days ago on the gap between what we expect of ourselves and what we can actually produce. In summary people get into the creative arts because they have great taste, but lack the ability to meet their own standards. My most reliable and supportive friend John has for example criticized many a guitar solo for sucking, and he has high standards for them, but he cannot actually solo himself. I feel I should be able to draw finished works like Humberto Ramos and Skottie Young, but I can't... yet. It doesn't mean my drawings are bad. Just not as good as I want them to be. So don't give up, just try to better.

7. Publish/Put yourself Out There

Following from the gap between ambition and ability, unless you publish stuff you can easily lose perspective of how good your work really is. Performing or publishing is also not as self-indulgent as you probably worry it is. The whole notion of having an audiance is based on the theory that they will relate to you. I still feel nervous about publishing stuff, largely because I worry that people will find out how borderline psychotic I am, (I feel nobody appreciates how much effort I exert not invading a South American nation and exploiting their mineral resources) but my experience has been that everybody kind of assumed that about me anyway and nobody treats me any differently once I put it out there. People also by and large appreciate your soundcloud link, photos, drawing or video more for breaking up the monotony of those insipid facebook friends' status updates 'Tacos for dinner... yummy yum yum!'

8. Be Gracious Not Humble

My picture is hanging on the wall, a wonderful friend approaches and says 'it's really great!' and I say 'no, it's fucking shit.' this is an expression of that gap, and it's a mistake. The subtext is, 'if you like my work you have no taste.' where as I was always wanting to be honest and demonstrate a requisite humility. The correct (and honest) response is always 'thankyou, that means a lot to me.' This is the only way to respect yourself and the people who love you.

9. Never Criticise Yourself in Public

I'm really bad at this. (I know that sentence is ironic) I almost never follow this advice, it's just too tempting to not let your artwork speak for itself. It's just wasted energy though and counter productive. More broadly speaking though follow Nietzsche's advice 'When his book opens its mouth, the author must shut his.' male personal pronouns aside, everyone can benefit from this. Your art is like a child growing into adolescence you need to let it go. Ursula Le Guin also said along the same lines 'I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.'

10. Just because you aspire to something better doesn't make it necessary or helpful to hate where you are.

I am dubious of the vaguely defined 'success'. I can tell you as an economist that it is empirically known that wealth and fame fail to make people happy, and contribute relatively little. I know though that many artists struggle below the poverty line. But I would advise people to make a concerted effort to appreciate the upside. The people that support you in the early days truly care, and are far more likely to be people you respect. Bruce Campbell has a great line in Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 'Who cares about the love of your family, when you could have the adoration of thousands of strangers!' Just watch an evening with Kevin Smith to appreciate that famous people don't get to pick their fans. But complaining about the hardships you have voluntarily taken on implies a criticism of the people and places around you. And focusing on how much you hate something has never made it easier to endure, whether it is running a cross country race or making coffees for yuppies.

11. Collaborate Whenever Possible

Your friends are your most obvious and immediate audience, this is true of your friends' friends. If you do solo stuff you will attract a smaller audience than if you collaborate with a friend. Collaboration is natural to musicians who tend to form bands or at the very least have to go through some kind of production relationship with a solo act, but if you're a visual artist or writer it isn't so obvious, do a collaborative project. It's much easier to get into the discipline of working to a schedule, but also is good training for the hard work of compromising and coordinating a work. Plus collaboraters are the most likely to give you honest and inspiring feedback on your works and working process.

12. No Effort is Wasted

You are going to fail a lot and often. Nassim Nicholas Taleb had the great aphorysm 'The opposite of success isn't failure, it's name dropping.' And I agree, as a piece of sub-advice avoid name dropping at all costs, it looks REALLY insecure. But the important point is that failure is part and parcel of success, and certainly not its opposite. I am currently faced with the reality that my audio/visual collaboration with John will not get a venue before he moves, but our reharsals were not wasted effort, they helped me develop so much in technique and repertoir and composition. The very process of trying makes me more likely to succeed in future and indeed the attempt to bridge the audio/visual live gap has been a long standing abortive challange. John is the third collaborator I've approached and the closest I've come to succeeding. It will happen one day though, as Samual Beckett wrote 'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'

13. Sacrifice is Overrated

Creating stuff is hard and time consuming, but masochism is unnecessary. Have a social life, interact with other people and schedule in downtime. Be honest about your procrastination and go to that movie on Saturday, don't refuse because you 'have to work on something' then work yourself into a depressive fit as you achieve nothing at all. Furthermore friendships and relationships and so fourth can actually help you succeed. Very few award winning artists don't thank their partner in their speech, none of them say 'Thanks me, or sacrificing everything in the pursuit of this reward.' Eat, drink, be fun to be around. Friends create opportunities and sustain your energy that you can work. I have never liked my friends less than when they all dissappeared into masochistic self indulgent honors thesis writing. Being acknowledged in a thesis is nice, but not nice enough to remove the (mild) pain of being told we couldn't go out tonight because they had to stare blankly at a screen and experience writers block.

14. Don't waste time on Grammar and Punctuation.

You can pay people to correct this shit, they are called 'Editors'. Focus on actually creating the work.

Folks

2011-09-28T17:52:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend Shona shared with me the thought experiment of 'If you could take your parents and put them on a wheel with every other parent in the world and spin that wheel would you take that chance?' and you know whatever your stance is on probabilities or understanding of worldwide demographics, I think it is useful to comprehend where in the spectrum of really great to really bad parents yours lie.

They have no idea what they are doing

Kids reach some point when the comprehend their own mortality and it is part of forming their identity, I believe in well adjusted individuals there's a similar point of maturation when you realise your parents had no idea what they were doing when they became parents. "The problem with parenting is that by the time you are experienced you are unemployed."

My parents never, I feel, successfully conveyed any real attitude towards money, they never set up a working pocket money system. Despite the relative wealth of my upbringing I spent the first 19 years of my life with no real money. I find it hard to be motivated by money to this day, I either have it or I don't. This could certainly have been done worse though, it is just one aspect of all the things, the values parents have the option of conveying to you in your upbringing. Many children are done a great disservice for example by their parents misrepresenting the importance of money which instead of being something we earn, is in fact the cause of all their sorrows because they simply didn't have enough.

We are all accidents

So many of my high school friends confided that they were accidents that I began to suspect my own parents of lying to me that I was planned. I have come to accept that I was, for reasons I don't understand.

But then earlier this year, I had the revelation that there's just no fucking way my parents could have planned to have had me. This compounds the probability that our parents will mess with our head, on top of their lack of experience, you just don't know what you are going to get. Any second hand experience parents have of parenting from their own are not necessarily going to be useful when it comes to raising their own kids, my own parents ad no useful role modeling for raising a kid with aspergers, particularly since the condition didn't become widely known until well after said kid reached adulthood.

Bad parents can produce wonderful children

When Claire dumped me years ago, it was so rash, so bold, so out of character that I struggled with it. The sudden collapse of a relationship I'd felt in total control of was shocking to me. Furthermore the exciting new life Claire was pursuing made me feel tired and old, old boring news. Serendipitously 'The White Masai' was the latest piece of shit book to be taking the world by storm. In an attempt to understand what Claire was doing, I tried to read it, and found it more than I could bare. I skipped to the end and discovered that leaving your long term boyfriend to pursue a Masai Warrior whose culture and way of life you don't understand ended predictably badly.

I felt somehow vindicated by this, and mentioned it to my housemate Damian, who commented that despite the collapse of the ill-fated marriage to a Masai warrior, she possibly didn't regret her recklessness because it had produced a child that she loved. (this is the author not Claire).

I don't know the details, but however regretable your parents union was, they are still capable of producing and raising wonderful human beings. Individuals can overcome massive adversity, typically parents help when they love their children and are capable of expressing it, they hinder when they don't but an individual can still overcome this setback. There is hope for us all.

It is not a relationship of choice, but it can become one

I don't like the idea of 'family groups' because they tend to blindly believe in the unity of a family. I'd like to see estrangement from parents become destigmatised. I have seen some people thrust back into the clutches of their families when they are the very people destroying their lives.

'It's a shame' when people don't like their parents, but it doesn't mean it is always worth the effort to reconcile. Some parents are just bad, they are parents that are too self absorbed to express their love for their children, nor for their children to ever be convinced they do.

Expressions like 'I'm sorry I was born.' and 'I didn't choose to be born' are seen as childish outbursts, but they are fundamentally true. Children get no say in who their parents are, and almost anybody can become a parent. If parents were wonderful, they are simply living up to expectation, if they are bad they are falling short. But children owe their parents no loyalty or debt, as they mature into adults they can redefine their relationship with their parents as it becomes one of choice. But few consciously make the choice, they just assume they should pursue their parents love for the rest of their lives rather than more worthy candidates of their time, energy and affection.

An Ideal that can be lived up to

I had the opportunity recently to actually intervene in a common parental blunder. I managed to demix a message before it was sent from father to son. Basically the son had confessed he had screwed up his life, and the father wanted to express both concern and anger/dissappointment in response. I convinced him to cut out the anger and just send the concern and love.

I would agree that parents have little influence over their children except for the worse, but here are the achievable ideal qualities of a parent:

1. They love their children, and leave them in no doubt. - My observation is people who don't doubt their parents love tend to have a natural resilience to adversity, failing doesn't daunt them in the short term.
2. Convey a sense of optimism about the future - This was pointed out by the book 'Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart' my parents are not great at it, but I no doubt cause them a lot of stress. If you believe that things can work out okay, you are less likely to become a victim of circumstance, fatalistic and a reader of Andrew Bolt columns.
3. Take responsibility - in case of divorce, avoid blame games and concentrate on moving on, avoid at all costs bringing your children into it.
4. Be present - My own father does this really well, he is not an expressive or emotional person. Yet he came to all my basketball games, he didn't convey any enthusiasm or passion for my performance. He just watched quietly and exuded a warmth. Despite his stoic demeanor I've never doubted that I can't call him up and he wouldn't be there for me. It's a call I've rarely had to make, yet take risks knowing I can.

And that's it. Pretty simple, and pretty achievable. And all things an individual, as parent can control.

Comicpocalypse/Comicgeddon?

2011-09-28T04:50:00.000-07:00

So Disney bought Marvel Comics, presumably for the movie rights as comic book adaptations have gone from being big news to standard fare in the box office over the last two decades.

Allegedly Disney's top brass have made Marvel comic title's more family friendly, reversing from the 'gritty realism' that dominated western super hero comics since basically Frank Miller did his Daredevil/Batman: Year One runs in the early 80's.

There was nothing 'real' about the grittiness that comic nerds so craved, and I feel in Marvel's case particularly lead to some poor decisions like cladding the X-men in black leathers for the movie franchise instead of their vibrant original costumes. Grittiness may suit characters like Batman, but he is one of the few characters that really hang out in the noir spectrum of comic book kind.

But family friendly? Marvel, marvel, marvel (or rather Disney, disney, disney...) basically since the 80's you had the first generation of comic book fans that grew up with their comics. Previously you read comics through your childhood into adolescence and then cast them aside. Why? because the stopped having relevance to the readers real lives.

Until writers started innovating with the famous Iron Man issue - 'Demon in a bottle' where Tony Stark battled alcoholism rather than some communist threat. You had Alan Moore deconstructing shit producing the killing joke, watchmen, V for Vendetta etc that humanised the previously one dimensional characters. Prior to that you had Stan Lee adding two-dimensional characters (a huge innovation, now forgotten) in Spider Man/Peter Parker the adolescent struggling to get a date that had to take on super-hero responsibilities at the same time.

This is like a return to the censored years of Batman, where violence was removed and thus Batman had to escort Robin around to solve ridiculous crimes with farcical gadgets that had no bearing to reality at all. (These years were the basis of the 60's live action Batman series)

But this time it's Marvel, Batman survived censorship, I'm sure Marvel's franchises will too, but let's hope it doesn't take a decade.

On the flipside, DC decided to reboot all their comics, to get rid of the burdensome continuity they had accumulated over 60+ years. In some ways DC were always on the fronteers of comics, no one else had to deal with the icons of Superman and Batman being in continues publication for over half a century. How do you keep it fresh whilst retaining the identity? How does such a narrative evolve with so many writers and artists?

I personally fucking hated Grant Morrison's recent reign of terror on the Batman titles, and was sick of the constant 'events' like the rise of the Black Lanterns and shit that went on for ages and got churned out with increasing frequency.

They were shit, and trying to bolster the sales of a bunch of struggling DC titles by tying them into the continuity of the two performing titles (Superman and Batman) was kind of just pathetic, it brought everything down rather than alevating anything else, but alas getting rid of all the continuity?

Neither companies have the answer, I think honestly Marvel was always ahead, except DC was kept alive by it's ownership of the only 2 icons in the comic industry Batman and Superman. Marvel basically throwing away accumulated generations of readership to go family friendly and attract one generation of readers at the expense of three is I feel questionable mathematics.

DC on the other hand, have possibly 'stolen defeat from the jaws of victory' by rebooting their universe. There are always going to be story arcs that we wish we could undo, but usually these are undone by the short term memory of comic book readership, more accepting of retconning and say two face constantly getting his unlikely facial injuries repaired and disfigured again and again.

But clearing out all the crap in one fell swoop is only useful if you don't immediately replace it with new crap, and that is what DC have done.

DC needed to just expand the Kevin Smith - Green Arrow model. Get an actual good writer and give them reign to write good comics. Maybe create 5 year plans and minimise interaction between titles.

This approach makes no sense in terms of short term profitability though. We shall see a bunch of fool collectors buy evry single print of DC's new #1 titles, then watch as sales go tumbling down.

Bruno

2011-09-26T23:56:00.000-07:00

Since my sister returned to Uni, she's been bringing home DVDs of Grand Designs. It is interesting to observe the variation in sympatheticness of the owners. By far the most sympathetic, the most loveable is Bruno.

Bruno and wife converted a water tower in Kent into their new home, but their attitude, their sheer lovability just tells you how much they have succeeded in managing their lives. Like their schedule falls behind and thus they go over budget which they were averse to take on, effecting their retirement, yet they never compromise or crack the whip but just put their complete faith and trust in their architect, and main contractor and watch.

They as a couple take pains to not get involved in problems that they can't solve themselves. And you can tell, they are going to be okay.

Over the past week, I felt angry, not righteous indignation as say I feel when looking at Climate Change or Asylum Seeker issues, but felt angry the regular way. Like angry with people. It has been a real novelty to look at people with this emotion on my mind. Like wanting to give them a piece of my mind.

It was on my mind, allegedly, and my experience tells me it is fundamentally true that our brains favorite 'downtime' activity is contemplating social matters. So I was thinking of how to express my mild anger and frustration at people I actually know, then I saw Bruno and realised...

I want to be happy, I want to be a nice, beautiful person. I want to create, not destroy, I want to help people, not bring them down.

Bruno just says things like 'Now I have 3 things to look forward to when I get home from work, my wife, my dogs and now the water tower... she smiles at me too.' that's who I want to be when I retire from this world.

Give Divorce A Chance

2011-09-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I read in some kind of news printed on paper, that family groups were up in arms over some course on offer to help couples divorce quickly and cheaply. Within 2 hours supposedly you would leave with the papers drawn up for the family court.

Why do 'Family' groups get up in arms about something designed to make the unpleasant business of divorce more painless. It smacks of the same mentality of Abstinence only groups blocking vaccines for potentially lethal STI's because the lethality of STI's is scene to discourage premarital sex.

I am not opposed to getting married, but I wouldn't marry just anyone, and thus I hope to marry somebody I am not likely to divorce. I do not wish to get divorced, but having made all this clear, I think divorce is a good thing.

Divorce needs to progress in being destigmatised, it needs to get cheaper and easier and less ugly. Obviously divorce will always carry with it emotional costs, even in the case where a family consists of two people, it is still the case that:

While it takes two people to sustain a relationship, it takes only one to end it.

One party may be the unwilling recipient of divorce, none of us ever know. Children probably almost always are, because only the parents really get a say in whether the parents stay together.

But in the dawn of this new era, almost every alternate model to an 'atomic family' needs to be destigmatised, including same sex couples, same sex parents, polyamorous and open relationships and even the basic notion that some people are best suited to having a life of short term relationships with a number of partners, and never marrying and never having children.

Divorce is a good place to start.

We are in a painful transition, from an era where it wasn't very important to pick a good life partner because people didn't get divorced. Yes counter-intuitively, I believe the ability to divorce, (and easily) has actually made the decision of who to marry harder. Before if you wound up with an alcoholic or abusive or negative partner, your marriage was cemented in, you couldn't leave and you just sucked it up. But now, the threat of divorce demands more of ourselves and more in our partners and we just don't know what to look for.

The media and often our peers are not good at teaching us to identify what qualities are important to look for. Our parents, mostly from the first generation to really have divorce as an option, and our grandparents whom really lived out their marriages without the option of divorce, provide poor guidance as well.

So its natural that so many divorces are so fucked up at the moment, so messy, so sudden, so unpredictable. But I'm confident that society will get better at divorcing and it will be widely regarded as possibly the greatest thing to happen to the institution of marriage and the emotional well being of individuals, since the dropping of arranged marriage.

Arranged marriages had their benefits, they took the stress and responsibility of the most important decision many are likely to make out of their hands. But on the downside they took the stress and responsibility out of the individuals hands who had to live with the consequences. To borrow the Japanese expression 'Love Marriages' don't guaruntee happiness and true love to people who choose their own partners, but it gives them the potential to do so, and do so for themselves.

Divorce similarly completes the migrtion form arranged marriages to marriages of choice, because it acknowledges that we are able to make mistakes, that our amygdala, the low conscious section of the brain that generates 'love at first sight' and the cocktails of drugs that our brain is addled with in the early days of a relationship are not so reliable at choosing lasting fountains of happiness.

Furthermore, it provides recourse to those who marry out of convenience and urgency, considering biological clocks, or figuring they have no real reason not to.

It's just there's so much we don't know about how to manage the fallout of divorce. But we'll get there and hopefully this shit will start being taught in schools, along with how to identify good partners.

I know of divorces that were straightforward, simple and amiable and others that were messy, protracted and far more damaging than necessary. The difference will one day be determined. I have some broad conclusions I have drawn, like those who make an effort not to make an adversery of their ex nor criticise them publicly tend to have better outcomes. Those where the parents leave no ambiguity as to how much they love their children tend to achieve good outcomes.

But there's other stuff that is still contentious, like apparently just a few decades ago, conventional wisdom was that a loveless marriage SHOULD stay together for the sake of the children, now it has moved quite quickly to the opposite, do what you can to remove emotionally toxic environments from your kids.

And so on and so fourth.

We'll get better, and divorce will come to be regarded as the best of a bad situation. But people make mistakes, and we should be allowed to.

What I Like About Dogs

2011-09-20T16:05:00.000-07:00

Three-legged dogs still wag there tails. They move as if they haven't noticed that they have only three legs. They just get on with shit. Their dog nature is unchanged by permanent injuries, they never pause to be all 'well this is the rest of my miserable life' and thus are not miserable. They accept the facts and move on.

Dogs are very stoic. I like that.

I Am Not A Malicious Person

2011-09-17T01:07:00.000-07:00

Upon reflection, my dooring experience taught me something about myself. I will always have a skewed perspective, when I dislocate my shoulder sweat pours from my head and I go white in the face, so I'm not sure how calm I actually am.

Like most people, I suspect I indulge in violent fantasies, less occassionally than sexual, or even social fantasies, but they usually have involved dooring when the subject of fantasy is violence. As in what I would do if somebody doored me.

If ever there is a time in life to be justified in being malicious it is after being doored. After being almost killed by somebody, and I discovered on Wednesday that I am not malicious at all. I didn't feel any impulse to anger, I have trained it out of myself.

I am pleased.

I also realised that it is hard to fuck over a nice guy, it is hard to get angry at somebody nice. If you are nice, you are kind, things work out okay.

Man I Love Musashi

2011-09-15T17:09:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I reread 'The Book of Five Rings' by Musashi Miyamoto, pretty much the only thing Musashi and I have in common is that we are analogous thinkers. His path of 'Heiho' or 'the way'.

I got more out of this reading than past ones, I felt I understood more of what he talks about, it really is a well structured, well written and timeless book. Even though fuedal Japan and Musashi's way of life has been illegal for two centuries now.

But really he subscribes to an: approximately right trumps precisely wrong. I imagine for many his sword school is dissappointingly vague and lacks any impressive technique, just simple stuff like 'walk as if you are walking down a road' when describing footwork, and yet his narrative conveys a unique sense of mastery, supreme confidence, not bravado.

It is truly a unique narrative to read. I recommend it, it does take imagination to extrapolate out though.

Doored

2011-09-14T16:01:00.000-07:00

Dooring is incomprehensibly evil. If people could comprehend it, they wouldn't do it.

To explain dooring simply, it's when somebody opens a car door into the path of an oncoming cyclist. It requires parralal parking, low awareness and bad timing.

Certain St's are hotspots for it, Sydney Road and Victoria St for example are ideal, because the inner lane is occupied by parallal parking spaces, the bike lane runs underneath it, and thus bikes are forced to ride about 50cm out of parked cars.

One of the sales clerks at my preferred bike store smashed up all his front teeth from being doored on Sydney road. A kid died last year on Glenferrie road when a sudenly opened door resulted in him dodging it into the path of an oncoming truck.

Most people pop their door first and then swing it open, a few though just emphatically thrust it open in one motion. This is the dangerous way to open a door. As a cyclist you learn to spot the warning signs like changes in brake lights, movement through the rear view mirror etc and take the necessary precautions like slowing down and giving a wider berth.

But shit happens, and yesterday afternoon I got doored. It was close, I almost made it. I was on my BMX Luciana, I had 4 or 3m notice when the door just opened up in front of me. The BMX only has a rear brake so it doesn't have the greatest stopping power. I'd been the last through a changing light so I was lucky to have no traffic behind me. I swerved out and almost cleared the door but my left handle bar grip just clipped the door and I lost control. Some wobbling, some over correction and then I hit the deck.

It would have been fine except I landed and rolled on myright shoulder which took it out of the shoulder.

But dooring's on balance the best outcome is to clear the door completely, no collission, but this can put you in the path of an overtaking vehicle resulting in severe injury or death.

You are unlikely to die from just running into the door, but it is going to hurt. You can go over the handlebars, which for me would probably result in both shoulders dislocating, smash through the window and destroy your face and teeth. Put an arm through the window and require reconstructive surgery. Or bounce off the door into traffic and die. But probably, crashing into the door is on balance less potentially lethal than going around it.

I didn't make a judgement call, the nature of being doored means you just don't have time to do it. I just tried to avoid the obstacle in front of me I could easily have put myself in front of an overtaking vehicle and bean mushed out of existence.

Having my arm in a sling for the next two weeks is an inconvenience but I'm lucky to be alive really. I plan on riding again, I don't plan on being doored, ever again.

If you own a car, please, when paralal parked, pop your door, then swing it open. I can handle the rest.

Some Kind of Monster

2011-09-12T21:01:00.000-07:00

This year at soundwave I discovered that it was over, I had moved on. Metal Drummer's and their double kicks were boring, they bored me. I was bored. The line up was way too Metal heavy, and punk seems to have evolved into some wannabe metal branch. I was wondering if I'd been hanging around Jazz drummers too much, and had somehow been afflicted with the Jazz musicians course for liking only inaccessable music.

Then One Day As A Lion came on, one of the redeeming misfits on the roster along with Primus that made the ticket actual value for money. One Day As A Lion's drummer is Jon Theodore, I have looked, searched, scavanged on Youtube, but Alas, no Video really captures just how... how... how incredibly explosive he was.

See that video, that video DOESN'T capture the explosiveness. It was like watching an athlete instead of a musician. His breathing, his feel, just how hard he hits the drums. I'm sure it's unnecessary. And it was hot, aparantly back when he was in the Mars Volta Jon Theodore would be naked, he plays barefoot, so he came out in like green slacks and a shirt, and left drenched in sweat.

That energy is just missing from almost all popular music, an entire emotional spectrum denied even in 'Alternative' music, which really should be a one stop shop. The bands I go see regularly in Melbourne don't have that kind of energy, even though they are diverse and different and often commercially unviable (as well as many that are), from the Bombay Royals to Texel Rising to The Nymphs.

Where did the energy go? Where did the anger? It is possible there has never been a time were a human being could be more angry than now, rich or poor anywhere in the world. We all just seem to be fucking each other, and not in the good way either.

I was conveying my impressions of Jon Theodore to John, my comrade in arms for Superfluous H, whom also doesn't play explosively, and he said 'That guy is a MONSTER, breaking drumsticks all over the place' and it just struck me as such an apt description of what my search has failed to bring me: A monster. The sort of thing Ancient Roman's first erected stadiums for and hoped to see when they pitted man against man, and beast.

Obviously for ethical reasons, I'm not going to suggest a return to gladiator pits, but what I mean is, I wish there were more correlation between people who like sports and people who want to be athletes.

If Music was sport, then right now the music scene would be lauding Mark Price's and Jon Stockton's and Tim Duncan's. That is precise and solid performers, reliable, with certain grace and economy. That is what music seems to be right now. BUT, I crave the days of Kemp and Jordan and Barkley, MONSTERS of the game. The dunk may be a 'No-Brainer' and costly energy wise, but as one Seatle Super Sonics fan pointed out, when Kemp dunked a massive alley-oop the crowd got to it's feet. It energised them, it brought the audiance into the arena and made them part of the game. He energised them and they energised him, better than gatorade. MONSTER fucking dunks.

That's what I'm searching for, hoping for in Music, some kind of monster. One Day As A Lion are a start, I crave more. I went to a dance on friday, and the DJ dropped this track:

See that's not angry, but it is explosive. I think it convinced me, ironically, of Gandhi's call for us to 'be the change you would see in the world.' the only way to guaruntee I see what I want to see is to become a monster myself. This will take some time, but I intend to do it.

I don't have to be good, just a monster.

The Type

2011-09-09T14:32:00.000-07:00

I remember the first time I fell in love, in grade 2 my first year in Alfredton Primary school, I became instantly enamoured with a classmate one day on a wet weather time table, confined indoors the teachers chose to entertain us by having a dance session. She threw herself at the twist with a reckless ambition that one me over. It was not love at first sight, I fell in love upon seeing this.

It was all very confusing and I remember wandering listlessly around the school oval for what in my short lifetime seemed like years but was probably weeks when suddenly she was moved away by her parents never to be seen by the likes of me again. I don't even remember her name, yet I feel as though I remember exactly what she danced like.

Since then the people I have fallen in love with have been less mysterious, and distressingly for me, appear in my life less frequently. I do have a type, I know it when I see it, but find it hard to describe.

The first time I realised I had a type was the week after schoolies, in my final summer in Ballarat I began dating a girl in year 11 from another school cross town. Our set up had been... awkward, when I picked up her best friend (which was awful) she told me after our session that her best friend was into me and 'what did I think of her?' somehow we then managed to start dating. In our second phone conversation I fell in love with her, the instant when she suggested our first date be at the pancake parlour.

That's my type. See my problem? Anyone could suggest a date at the pancake parlour, but that's not it at all. My type of woman is the type that would suggest a first date at the pancake parlour.

Obviously it's so much more, but there's no hard and fast rule to these things. All I can say is, generally I have made up my mind from the first conversation. It only just occured to me, but as somebody with an Audio preferenced learning style (ie. I can sit in lectures, take no notes and recall most of the course content) it now makes sense that my biggest interest cue is verbal.

I guess the one quality I look for in not just partners but all my friends I willingly spend time with is an ability to surprise and delight me. I am yet to meet any magician whose ability to pull unexpected objects from my ear, or their sleeve overcomes their conversational shortcomings, thus most of the time this quality is embodied in their style of speak.

I mean it sounds a bit like an 'it' factor where I am sorry to say people tend to have it or they don't. Perhaps egotistical on my part, but it has become perhaps the primary dealbreaker that has now kept me single for years. Times were that I could date a girl based on physical attractiveness, intelligence or other qualities I was socially conditioned to admire. And whilst some physical attraction is essential, the others have sort of gone by the wayside in importance, or tend to correlate anyway. I've dated 3 women that didn't speak my language, and I've learned my lesson now.

I think they all had an appreciation for how I speak, and that is flattering and kind of reciprocally attractive, but my experience taught me that time spent with them exclusively was boring, claustrophobic and now generally I avoid such partnerships because I have too big a guilty conscious to emotionally handle one night stands or even dumping people I knew I wasn't that into in the first place.

I have had the luxury now of having a relationship with people whom it is a delight to spend my whole day with, day after day after day. To have had it once was great, twice I know I am luckier than most, to have it again would be perhaps more than I deserve, to be that person for somebody else would be I feel my life well lived.

Which I guess I could, I come across women in much greater numbers that appreciate my style of speak, yet have not the style of their own. I am not pessimistic (or "realist") enough yet to settle for that one way street, I am optimistic that I will meet somebody eventually whom is my type and will feel mutually.

I do despair though for those women who just get it wrong with me, I feel bad about it because there's no graceful way to just drop on somebody 'sorry but you're not my type' unless they ask you out, which women generally don't. I feel safe in saying that no women whom give me the impression they are attracted to/flirt with me actually read this blog, but I'm surprised at how amazingly unconscious women who get it right with me do so, and how painfully conscious it seems for the women who get it wrong. It feels like a train wreck speaking to them, like torture, like I guess seeing a salesman's pen leak into their front pocket during their sales pitch.

And sure I may not be your cup of tea, but if you are ever drawn to somebody by their humour here is my advice from my personal experience:

1. Funny people crave 'looping' too. The neural synchronisation so annoying in teenage girls on public transport, but so, so good when you find it with somebody else. Yes they are trying to make you laugh, but what they really crave is for you to go with them and take conversation to new and unexpected places. It requires a similar or greater level of intelligence, reaction time etc.

2. Don't mistake an education for intelligence.

3. The easiest way to destroy a looping opportunity is to comment to the effect of 'you're funny.' Just laugh. It's really that simple. (ironically one of my longest standing and closest friends pretty much said nothing but this throughout the year 7 class we first sat next to eachother. But he had science and art to fall back on). (also another close friend of mine, doesn't really laugh, just says 'that's funny' in the flattest tone imaginable. Like what you would sue a Doctor for if they told you 'your son is dead.' in the same tone. She made me fight so hard to impress her.)

4. You may not be funny, but almost anybody can be offensive, just try hard to offend them. But remember 'the epitome of wit is to insult people without offending them, nerdiness the opposite.' There is nothing more genuinely offensive than being boring and predictable to some people.

I Was Wrong

2011-09-08T19:29:00.000-07:00

Apparantly Christopher Hitchens debated Tony Blair, on the topic of 'Religion does more harm than good' at some prestigious debate in Canada or something. You can buy a transcript of it, or watch it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfCbjYsRbT8

Hitchens and Blair convinced me I have been wrong. Religion is small and petty and not the originator of the behaviour that threatens our welfare. On the whole, religion is a force for good, most religious people (that I meet) are good people and arguably less harmless than the average individual. Which I guess for my social circle is probably a big call. But it is no bigger than the general observation, that I believe: 'People are basically good.' you take the incidence of bad things (theft, murder, assualt etc.) and divide it by the number of opportunities to do those bad things and you'll find that badness is rare.

So so for religion, for every individual member of a religious organisation that molests a child, there are a bunch that feed and clothe the poor. But don't get confused, this is neither an argument for nor against religion. It suggests that religion is largely irrelevant.

The basic behaviour that is protected and sheltered and fostered by religion is the source of almost all of man's inhumanity-to-man, Us-Them thinking. But this is no different than that fostered by sporting competition (at it's most negligible) and nationalism (at it's most damaging).

I am now probably entering a phase of undedicated thought to foster an understanding of what should actually concern us, that narrative goes something like this:

We have a tendancy to organise around capable leaders, people who put simply - use resources efficiently. To put it slightly more complicatedly, are better at taking resources and producing for us, than were we to employ resources for ourselves as individuals. If you can identify such benign people it makes sense from self interest to strip down resistance or friction to them employing their faculties.

Then ultimately these leaders are succeeded, and the succession process is vulnerable to corruption by wilful or subconscious self-interest. Namely some tools employ the organisational structure to parisitically consume more resources. They do so freely, because the organisation consists of people who have formed a habit of trusting their leadership and, perhaps in a truism, follow their leaders.

But there are still things to be said about God, that I feel like saying, burying, leaving behind now. They are pragmatic issues.

Omniscience and Inscrutibility

For me the debate over matters metaphysical needs to go here. One means by which the god meme survives is his inscrutability, his designs are not apparant from any real world observations, we must trust that when bad or meaningless tragedies happen to good people it is part of some greater design that we can't possibly comprehend.

This allows us to believe in a benign and sentient entity, because he knows all we can have faith that things will work out great over eternity. We have faith that no matter what, ultimately we are headed towards some meaningful and rewarding destination, all of us, part of it.

This requires a vast intellect, but suffers from practicle problems. There are so many (known) variables in the universe that to optimise our destinies, means that by definition omniscience requires an understanding of the impact of every single one of those variables. There is a debate as to whether free-will really exists or not, but nevertheless to us, individuals it is a convincing illusion. Omniscience suggests that beyond contemplating every quantum outcome of electron movements to optimise our spiritual destiny, god has contemplated every possible act of free will.

That is, there will be one optimal dimension, one actual Universe, that we presume to live in, and then every single other alternate version of reality that god discarded as sub optimal. But by definition, god's knowledge of those alternate universes must be complete, so thoroughly complete that how are we to know our entire existence isn't within the discarded thought experiment of god. We have no way of determining whether we are just the 'thought-output' of god's omniscience or living in some inscrutable 'reality' that is the ultimate output of God's thorough optimisation of our universe.

The fact that god's designs can't be scrutinised through observance of the natural world leaves us unable to tell whether we do or don't matter, whether we are mere thoughts of some omniscience or some reality external to god's omniscience (if that's even possible).

How unsatisfying, this is the kind of dissatisfaction that religious apologists seldom understand, and thus keep debating athiests at a very low bar. They (apologists) don't understand that under the sheer complexity of what omniscience entails, that atheism is in fact both a simpler explanation, and more comforting. Reality is what it is, some brilliant and glorious accident, some natural phenomena that we were lucky enough to have happen, for no reason at all. A true windfall.

Omnipotence

Omnipotence is far less of a metaphysical headache than omniscience, it suggests that god can do anything. Thus, the afore mentioned known variables are in fact accepting that omnipotence entails miracles, not even worth describing. Everything is a variable to god.

This is what creates the necessity of inscrutibility for god to survive in our minds, god is omnipotent, not impotent and thus worthy of our reverence and appeals to his better nature. The reason then that prayers (for new limbs, to walk again, for people to love us... etc.) keep going unanswered, we must accept that getting what we want isn't what we need, is not in our best interests and thus a life characterised of losing everything we have while being ravaged by schizophrenia is somehow in our best interests.

But apologists will happily sing along to vapid lyrics 'God is limitless, he can do anything' but when evidence is demanded to substantiate the claim, the demander is told 'you just don't get it.'

Omnipotence is a claim with practical problems though, for example - free will allows for unethical behaviour, simply defined here as actions that reduce other people's well being. Our omnipotent god simply lets it happen. Here polytheism is more satisfying than omnipotence and monotheism, because you can compartmentalise the influence of each god, and put them in conflict, much better explaining the diversity of outcomes. Yet homeric god's have perished and monotheistic beliefs survive.

Thus you have to accept things like forces of evil, or demigods even if metaphysical in nature (such as Satan or... ah the Galactic overlord of Scientology) must by necessity of definition of omnipotence must be part of their design and optimisation. An omnipotent god MUST create evil agents to do harm, that ultimately are in our best interests.

It becomes practically hard to say how we should spend time scrutinising teachings and offerings of institutions that claim to represent the omnipotent and the inscrutable. Furthermore coming to such lessons and devoting time to learn about these dieties, comes with obligations to behave in a certain way, and even privately think in a certain way and failure to do so comes with punitive measures - punitive measures that can be executed precisely because we are lead to believe that that is an optimal use of his omnipotence.

Here it moves away from inscrutibility to the tantalisingly scrutible. An omnipotent and omniscient optimiser like God, delegates authority to certain people that can then offer explicit answers as to what he has conceived is best for all of us. And unavoidably we can observe that those that receive this delegated authority, are also often materially rewarded, nor appear to need to practice what they preach. (CEO's and Bankers and Economists and Nationalists tend to do the same).

Ultimately though, omnipotence puts an onus on religions to impress us. Those delegated the authority to defend this stance and even up to date with how impressive the universe of 'no god' is. Which is strange because the first material houses of worship were constructed in a time when electric lighting didn't drown out the night sky. I am put in mind of a Carl Sagan quote that once heard is hard to forget:

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."

Omnipresence

Omnipresence just takes god from any reasonable claim to being a simple and elegant explanation of existence to being practically hard and cumbersome to comprehend.

If you think of reality as some membrane, god's omnipresence combined with omniscience and omnipotence creates every single quark of matter, and dark matter etc. a point of articulation, a point of contemplation and habitation.

What a miraculously complex being this god is, infinitely massive yet smaller than anything science can comprehend. And thus, god's presence everywhere requires us to believe that he feels that when a designated authority to speak on his behalf fucks a child, it is for the best. Or is it? Are we meant to act, presumably not, because god also lives in our heads, whispering to us, what? It would seem 'get outraged' to some, often secular, which seems part of his plan and thus an act of free will and others 'just ignore it/defend it and the church' to others.

It all becomes a practical mess.

The Debate Meanders On

Whilst writing this I indulged in listening to the debate between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens, and what strikes me about this debate and Dawkins versus Amiable-Irish-Christian-Mathematician nobody, is that it is very easy for the athiest side. They never ask somebody like Tony Blair to explain shit like omniscience and inscrutibility and how anybody can derive authority from such concepts. Instead it is the same claim 'science can explain how, religion can explain why.' which isn't substantiated and has as of Sam Harris been moved on to an evidence based claim that science can answer questions of 'why'. Otherwise it is the same definitional retreats.

It's just sad and old, and hasn't even progressed since Bertrand Russell answered all those existing arguments that keep getting trawled up in 'why I'm not a christian.' And frankly I won't participate in theological debates unless my theistic opponent has read that book at least, and wants to debate interesting questions like how omniscience works.

The Attraction to All Things Uncertain

2011-09-07T16:41:00.000-07:00

I guess in a way it is everybodies job in life to become good at evaluating how mentally and/or emotionally stable people are (including ourselves) and there are glaringly obvious extremes as well as hard to pick borderlines, people that surprise us with an unexpected departure from their normal stable facade etc.

But to me one observable gender divide: I simply can't explain, can't even begin to speculate as to why, I mean literally everything I ever wondered about evolutionary imperatives and social conditioning doesn't serve me here in furnishing an explanation is:

Women's social hierarchy's tend to center around the least stable personality.

The kicker is, my brother pointed this out to me, and he has aspergers. The manager-tools dudes frequently point out that people form hierarchies in almost any context (if you put twenty people in a room, they don't emerge with a committee) we naturally tend to explicitly (in organisational contexts) elect a leader, or implicitly (in social contexts).

It is rare to find somebody who doesn't have any head candy to chew through, but my personal experience confirms that generally male social groups tend to follow the lead of the guy who is relatively emotionally and mentally stable. The guys with the biggest esteem issues are left to tag along or isolate themselves.

I'm just observing, not evaluating (well not much) but as much as my outsider perspective can ascertain, in female social groups the role of who calls the shots versus who tags along or is left behind is reversed.

Perhaps the best public example there would be is the dynamic of the 4 central characters in Sex & The City, where SJP (I can't recall the characters name) was clearly the biggest head case of the bunch, that was followed by the relatively stable Miranda, and even the remarkably consistent Samantha. The other character was also admittedly a head case with her pursuit of the perfect marriage and baby or something, and also SJP needed to keep sabotaging her own relationships and making bad decisions and what not if for no other reason than to keep the show going for another season/movie.

I mean I don't really believe in any pressing need for girls and guys to socialise seperately, I imagine it just occurs through social conditioning and laziness. But in high-school at recess Girls and Boys tend to cluster together. Outside of any female only social context though, my brother's observation doesn't hold up, because instability is not viewed as a desirable quality in any other context.

But I am left to wonder why, why oh why does this behaviour seemingly exist. Is it an illusion, do the women I respect cluster around the women I don't respect out of a pitying sense of charity and caregiving, rather than an endorsement that they may have something valid to say?

I don't want to get anybody in trouble, nor stir up any paranoia but I have also observed a possibly related gender divide of women who have friends they simply hate. They don't like them, as people, yet spend time with them, schedule them into their busy lives, speak on the phone with them, go to clubs with them and buy gifts for their birthdays, and they don't like them. They find them annoying, they often have very astutely judged their character and are willing to divulge this evaluation to third parties such as me.

This only adds to my perplexedness, because it shatters the easy explanation that a misogynist/loser would fall back on 'women are poor judges of character', nothing in my experience says they are, generally they will privately confide that they know somebody is a train-wreck but then gather around and hang on their words as if they were a wise or something.

Perhaps its just a morbid fascination with train wrecks.

I literally don't know. But I am 80% certain this is a general phenomena.

Drugs

2011-09-03T03:26:00.000-07:00

Sooner or later, son, we need to talk about drugs. In the last week I have seen the second friends family embark on the distressing journey into having a family member fight against substance abuse.

Last night Louis C K described drugs as 'such a complete solution...they are wonderful...' he went on for quite a bit about how great drugs were before making perhaps, the obligatory concession that they were such a complete solution that they 'destroy your life.'

Lisa Pryor I noticed has written a book about the whole drug debate I haven't read, who also wrote 'the pinstripe prison' which I did read. But I did read the blurb, where she points out many people use drugs and are fine.

To be honest, I DO begrudge people's choices when it comes to drugs, but I've been trying to do less so. I have come to accept that people can, do and indeed have to make their own choices and my harsh judgement of these choices perhaps is of benefit to nobody.

I guess for reasons I don't think about I got annoyed in the 90s at how drug taking seemed to be mandatory for artists. So ever being a contrarian I refused resolutely to take any... Plus like my dad didn't drink alcohol until 3rd year uni or something, so I tried to emulate that... Oh and I have a relative that has schizophrenia, which was beginning to be suggested that drug use could trigger it in people predisposed, so why take the risk?

But experiences like euphoria, love and shit, can be stimulated by drugs, opiates. I had these painkillers when I had kidney stones in Spain and they were magnificent, I still have a stash of them that bring me immense comfort and sometimes I kind of wish I'd get injured to have an excuse to take them again, because I'm terrified of getting addicted. Anyway, I imagine heroin in terms of stimulating chemical reactions in our brain normally reserved for falling in love or whatever is 10 x better than those painkillers. (I can't read the ingredients, my spanish pain killers may for all I know contain heroin, morphine).

I don't know much about drugs, I've never come close to taking an illicit substance. And so in the particular style of people talking about things that are ignorant I'm going to say...

There's two kinds of people in this world. People who when told 'drugs can accurately simulate the feeling of love whenever you like.' see an immediate problem, and people who don't. Which is perhaps, what Louis C K meant when talking about drugs as a complete solution. I am one of the first kind, and I believe this is the majority of people. A minute proportion of the population is the latter and perhaps goes to the additional extreme of finding comfort and hope in the knowledge that drugs can stimulate the same chemical reactions that evolved to reward attracting a mate etc.

Like falling in love is, unrequited, pretty easy to do. Being loved is kind of hard. Buying a drug and smoking, snorting, licking or injecting it is relatively easy. And addictive, I have a number of friends that have used drugs to a variety of extents with varying degrees of success.

By that the variations range from 'harmless' to 'disastrous'. The disastrous are the number of people I know who used drugs and wound up with some form of psychosis. I don't know if I'm unlucky, but it is close to 80% of my WEED smoking friends. Crucially I am yet to come across a 'benificial' or truly 'benign' outcome from drug use. I remain highly skeptical about drugs ability to improve people's lives. I would take a hardline stance too, I'm not talking about illicit substances, I would find it hard to justify ultimately any benefits for painkillers, alcohol, coca-cola etc. all of which probably have a hidden-in-plain-sight social cost higher than the illegal drugs.

I have for example read Aldous Huxley's (or most of anyway) 'Doors of Perception' where he chooses the most common interpretation of drug apologists for the mind altering state induced by drugs that makes ones pants the most fascinating object in the room, that he has reached some higher plain of perception. Whereas there's an alternative interpretation available that is almost never taken, that the drug has impaired and narrowed your perception to the point that trouser material seems miraculous and fascinating. In the same way that retards find 'Two and a Half Men' funny or Nascar an exciting sport.

I have been impressed and surprised and inspired by things said by people who are sober, educated and intellectually curious and never in my experience by people under the influence of some drug. I mean when people are drunk, depending on how drunk they are, they are capable of being intelligent and insightful, whilst more relaxed than usual. Somebody like me generally gets much dumber and obnoxious after ingesting a relatively small amount of alcohol.

I'm aware though of artists that use drugs and manage to produce great works, but:

I find it hard to accept such direct causation, when you look at artists like Hendrix, Clapton, Cobain, Brett Whitley, Amy Whinehouse etc. regardless of their relative talents, you see a high correlation of depression/personal problems/absentee parents etc. that correlate highly with drug use as well as suggesting a familiarity with the human condition at an extreme that may also have caused their artwork to be meaningful. This suggests that somebody like me, whom through no fault (and no merit) of my own grew up in a stable and secure home with an absence of any known mental illnesses may not have been aided in my artistic pursuits by taking up a drug habit.

I also notice that many of these artists whilst creating works that are truly immortal have a tendency to die, usually from complications of being extremely depressed, unhappy and insecure. This suggests to me that perhaps creating a great and lasting work is rather meaningless to the individual without establishing a foundation of all the other shit that makes us happy. If you were charitable (to drugs) you might point to Hendrix and say he was killed by stupidity rather than depression, but I find it hard to entertain that the decision to take enough sleeping pills to sleep through the entire next day in a house full of relative strangers is not one often made by happy and secure people.

Then there's the afore mentioned survivors of drugs, Clapton being an example, Perry Farrel, Anthony Kiedas, Dave Navarro, John Frusciante, etc. are 'survivors' of heroin, there are myriad more for drugs like marijuana. What can never be determined is if they would have succeeded without their drug use (unless of course they develop the habit after producing their seminal works) but one thing is clear and that is generally they have stopped using. Quitting heroin is to my understanding a very unpleasant and difficult thing to do. Thus I find that in their evaluation, it was not worth continuing... a powerful argument that drug was not crucial or even positively correlated with their general sense of wellbeing.

But ultimately I can only speculate. One of my friends that was institutionalised with psychosis from the use of 'benign' marijuana, left me with a lasting bias that it is hard to defend drug use as even a balanced risk to indulge.

I will gladly, happily concede that drug use is made worse by many of the social stigma's sorrounding it, the fact that drugs have to be bought from criminals, and parents destructive reactions to the percieved personal attack/failure in a child's drug usage serve to make a poor decision a worse one. But the unfairness of drug use as judged by society don't make it a better decision for an individual to make, it just increases the downside.

I think much of what I have written naturally comes from a place of ignorance. It is all speculative and I have no motivation to do the kind of Gonzo journalism to discover what drug use is really like. I'm generally against it, though I don't believe the prevention of drug use is managed well.

I also think almost none of my speculation is controversial. I got to experience from the parental side, the emergance of yet another child admitting they have a drug problem this week. (not my child, but my friend's child) what was clear (though not to the parents) that the user knew that getting addicted to drugs was a bad idea. Their admission was one of error. They had made a mistake. It suggested to me a compelling desperation to find the kind of love and care and wellbeing from drugs that they felt they lacked. Fortunately we got to intervene in the parental response and edit out the anger and upset from the response and keep it loving and supportive.

I am not comfortable concluding that all drug users have some emotional deficiency that they seek drugs as a synthetic solution. My experience doesn't disconfirm this view though, I have friends who are emotionally stable and mature that use drugs even in the Aldous Huxley sense of intellectual curiosity and trying to open doorways of perception. Most commonly these friends maintain their use of marijuana, and am yet to hear any profound insights they had from smoking it, or indeed anything at all remotely interesting about marijuana itself. Otherwise they flirt with pills and shrooms and whatnot and stop using them quite quickly. These drugs encroach little on their identity or the time they spend with myself and others. These I guess are the many of drug users Lisa Pryor refers to in her latest book that use drugs harmlessly.

I am probably more anti-smoking and drinking than the other more glamorous and illicit drugs, and I haven't mentioned pills because I find it hard to identify with anybody who is a fan of raves and probably take a darwinian stance on the use of pills. Instead I will turn to the words of Dr. Gordon Livingstone and his approach to combating drugs to conclude, written I presume while sober and quite profound in his approach to drugs:

Fear, while effective in the short term, is not useful in promoting lasting change. The use of it as a motivator for behaviour ignores the fact that there are no more powerful desires than the pursuit of happiness and the struggle for self-respect. If means can be found that move people in these directions: better jobs, education, the chance to improve one's life, and a sense of fairness and opportunity, the seductive and short lived bliss provided by drugs will lose its appeal. Punitive emphasis on the "supply side" has not worked. Reducing the demand by emphasizing treatment and social alternatives to hopelessness offers the only prospect of winning this struggle between transient pleasure and lasting satisfaction.

(my emphasis)

A Certain Style

2011-08-31T17:17:00.000-07:00

I will admit it does take a certain amount of energy and restraint to keep in a positive frame of mind, and this investment on the whole pays great dividends. But in a departure from that I'm just going to use this space to rant and gripe for a while, here in the safety of the 'blogosphere' where 'never before has so much been said, by so many and read by so few'.

My sister is into fashion, I think apart from IT types resigned to the safety of jeans and white sneakers, everybody is but admits it to lesser or greater degrees.

For years I have felt the victim of a kind of societal 'informed ability' regarding high fashion and the vaguelly defined 'style'.

The ones that were hard to ignore unless you live under a rock are hopefully obvious - like SJP from sex and the city being regarded as 'sexy' and often making it into best dressed lists. More recently there is the phenomena of Ann Hathaway, being thrown in my face constantly as somebody who is meant to be sexually appealing, but to me seems badly out of place. This is not to discredit her as an actress, just as a sex symbol. Casting her as Catwoman is to me, somebody emotionally invested in Batman and thus holding Selina Kyle up as a lofty ideal of sexiness, is frankly a slap in the face.

The same goes for my inability to pick which aspiring 'models' will do well/win shows like America's Next Top Model, Britain's Next Top Model etc. I sit there and say 'well that girls the most attractive by far, she's a shoe in.' then a bunch of judges I can't understand at all will tell somebody who is otherwordly beautiful that they are dissappointed, and that they just don't have it. Only to then have a girl who is anemic and translucent and with the posture and grace of sesame street's Big Bird how much they love their picture and they cruise through.

And through the everyday exposure to style and fashion that one cannot avoid in this society, I just was afraid to admit that for a long time, long beyond reckoning, I just haven't understood women's fashion at all.

Then this week I stumbled via my sisters open webbrowsing session the Man Repeller and to me, a man, a straight man, her style is by-and-large repulsive. Light travels faster than sound, and she wears the kind of outfits that could kill a conversation between us just by observing each other across a room.

But refreshingly, liberatingly she admits this limitation of 'style', she owns it. The clothes she loves to adorn herself in, buy, design, research and read about have little to no appeal, nay are actually offensive to myself, to mankind.

I feel calmer and more relaxed, having had somebody finally acknowledge this. I don't hold a double standard as such, there are thing I and other men wear that are chosen purely to impress other men. I think this is good and healthy, what I always resented was having women in repulsive outfits (to me) pointed out to me and told 'isn't she gorgeous' expecting me to acquiesce.

What is troubling is that this admission isn't more embraced and more widespread. The 'informed attractiveness' of so many style icons doesn't do favors to people who are trying to attract and believe purchasing those items is the way to go. I know of few men, if any that truly care or appreciate how 'well' a girl dresses. It is if mentioned at all, a bi-product of their attraction, not even the icing on the cake, more like the dusting of cinnamon. A 'oh yeah and she knows how to dress' after all the other desirable qualities sought for by straight men - physical attraction, confidence, intelligence, kindness, humor etc.

The problem being that there are no hard and fast rules, no objectively clear path, no verticle heirarchy to attractiveness... YET there is a pervasive desire innate in most (if not all people) to be accepted and validated by membership to something large. A primal 'safety in numbers' attitude many rely on. They try to express themselves by signalling most loudly through their clothing membership to a particular group. (This phenomena is beautifully documented on Exactitudes)

High fashion, following the 'trends' out of Paris, Milan, London and New York, reading Vogue and following the Sartorialist is simply a form of expertise in a language of clothes thats utility is self contained. That is, not everyone speaks or appreciates the language.

The most obvious reason being that not everybody (and most of anybody) puts 'sophistication' and 'stylishness' high on their list of desirable qualities when looking for a partner. Fashion is a world that feeds and sustains itself. It is a complex artform, and fashion designers are some of the rare artists that will make most of their money while still alive. But it isn't attractive and can quite often be repulsive.

Few would equate a keen interest in World of Warcraft and Fashion, but I guess this is the point I am trying to make. Imagine talking to somebody at a party and you ask them what they are passionate about and they begin a long monologue about World of Warcraft, the limitations and advances it has made as the game evolved, the various expansion packs and the qualities of each and what exciting new developments Blizzard promise to keep the game fresh and new and worth the subscription.

If you have no interest in World of Warcraft, they have conveyed a sense to you that they spend a lot of time and energy on something you don't appreciate and don't understand, and furthermore think its important. Fashion is exactly the same, except with the downside of while Computer Game enthusiasts are unlikely to A) be at a party and B) speculate and evaluate other people's gaming ability, fashion enthusiasts will hold everyone who wears clothes to their standard.

If you love fashion, this is something to keep in mind.

Supportive

2011-08-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

First Angle:

In late february Janice and I had lunch and an argument. It was the second such confrontation in as many months. Janice had had a habit of second guessing, and critiquing my decisions in life ever since I had gained the necessary consciousness to start making them. Basically every time I made a decisions about where to live, what to do with my life, how to spend my savings etc. she would approach me with 'have you thought about this?' and 'what if you want to have children someday what about then?'

This post though isn't about Janice, she just made an assumption that lead to behaviour that is unsupportive. The rational Janice, and many people, including myself share goes like this: "Isn't there value in me finding possible holes and weaknesses in your plan, so you can then make more informed and therefore better decisions?" this is known as the 'Black Hat' in Edward De Bono's '6 Thinking hats.' or more commonly as the 'Devil's Advocate'. There are situations where one has a position forced upon them where it is better to have somebody try their hardest to shut you down to be better prepared for future possible resistance.

We can also assume that many people who pursue their passions are driven by a constant desire to get better, to better themselves and thus welcome criticial feedback. Thus I myself played devil's advocate for years as my preferred form of 'giving support'.

The limitation of all these assumptions is wrapped up in the support-givers ego. We flatter ourselves by thinking we are that rare honest and intellectual friend whose criticism can be delivered as a breath of fresh air amongst a sea of sycophancy.

The truth is, Devil's advocates are common as dirt. For one thing, most people with rare exceptions, extremely rare exceptions are there own worst and most ruthless devil's advocate. Openly supportive and encouraging people are so rare they are to be cherished.

Much of my life's greatest achievements are the fact that I have surrounded myself with these rare gems of these people.

We must trust that people re better qualified to criticise themselves and more willing than we will ever be. In playing devil's advocate we are supporting the the side of them that holds them back and hesitates. As mentioned before when somebody takes a position in life that isn't voluntary or is unfortunately necessary, trying to shoot down that position in a safe environment is of value. But more often people are taking some kind of personal risk, when people are taking a risk, that risk will weigh enough on their minds already, success and happiness requires risk taking and here we should be encouraging, using our intelligence and honesty to point out how the downside risk is not as big and ugly as it appears.

Second Angle:

If somebody supports our free expression and noble pursuits they are a supporter. If they support our self destructive behaviours they are an enabler.

These two terms have been designated negative and positive meanings arbitrarily they re one and the same thing. Lorenzo Di Medici was as much an enabler of Leonardo Da Vinci as Nancy was a supporter of Sid Vicious.

The limitation of supportive people, is that often they are unconditionally supportive. I mean most partners will get angry if you undertake something obviously self destructive like using heroin, but I mean they support you taking a job, then support you quitting it. They support you, no matter how inconsistent your approach to life is.

The genuinely supportive people are somewhat astringent, they have an opinion about what is best for you, because they (if not you) have observed enough of your behaviour to know what makes you happy and what makes you unhappy. Their support is conditional that you exert energy on the useful stuff.

They create a secure base from which they encourage you to go out and take risks. The most common form of support though can be the kind that has you slowly decay into misery.

This is the support that encourages you to stay in your comfort zone, to do whats easy. It is the support that says 'it's okay you can work this job a couple of years and just save money' and 'So you gained a lot of weight, I still love you!' here instead of acknowledging that the individuals wellbeing is best served by finding a chalenging career and maintaining some kind of fitness regime, they are encouraged not to think or worry about their own mortality, and that we only get one shot at achieving true happiness in this life.

Third Angle:

When I am supportive I am self-serving, in part. I think life encourages largely through our education system and economic models a view that success is a competitive venture, that one person's success is by default another's failure. Only so many people get into Medicine and Law courses, the lesser's must content themselves with Dentistry and Actuarial studies. Only one person 'wins' Australian Idol, only one team can hold the premiership cup aloft, the other sits on the oval crying with their head in their hands.

By and large I reject this view. I have a karmic approach to success (though I also know I need to succeed based on my merits, the intrinsic merits of my work that is.) I try to support anybody who is producing something, that makes something, that is creating something of themselves that they offer to the world. I try to accept these gifts whereever able.

I was not always this way, I seldom exerted the effort to go and see what the bravest and best of us were producing. I don't know when or why but one day I just started holding myself personally accountable. I needed to feed my own optimism.

Have you ever been to somebody's party where there was a poor turnout and they fretted more about who wasn't there than who was? That has been me, eventually I realised that I myself generally never bothered to attend parties, and thus had no real right to expect people to attend mine.

In the same way, to believe that I can succeed as an artist, in drawing comics I need to believe that my audience can and does exist, that there are people who will make the effort to come and see our performances, and buy our wares. Once I became such a person, it was much much easier for me to believe that people like me do exist.

I genuinely want people to succeed, sometimes supporting people is easier than other times, but even if I can't relate to the subject matter, that particular expression of that particular artist, I still want them to succeed, I try to think of friends who would enjoy their stuff or help them better than I can.

I don't even give my suport with reciprocal expecttions, I assume this will happen, but the people I support are not necessarily the people who will in turn support me and become my audience.

I just strongly hold the conviction that we have no right to expect support if we provide none of it ourselves. We cannot hope to succeed if we don't help others succeed also.

There is room enough for all of us to be better more productive and creative people in our lives, thus we shouldn't look at the people that can potentially enrich it as competitive threats, but that there success is in some way ours.

Thus win being supportve we should encourage and enable people to be the best of themselves, not the least.

The Hammer is Amazing

2011-08-29T18:17:00.000-07:00

I remember watching edumacational videos in physics (or perhaps in the earlier years of 'Science') that claimed that there where really only two 'tools' in all of human history - the lever, and the wheel. Then everything else mechanical is just a variation/combination of the two, pulleys, corkscrews etc.

One thing about drawing is that it puts me in touch with tools and materials that have changed relatively little since Da Vinci and Michelangelo were studying in florence. Shit like pencils, rulers, charcoal, erasers. Sure erasers have evolved from gum, paper from vellum, the mechanical pencil instead of a stick of charcoal. But there is still a myriad of technicue you can wring out of a small array of tools, mostly being pointy things that can create a mark or impression.

I love them, I love experimenting and toying with them. I love figuring shit out and I feel like I only understand the tip of the iceberg that is everything you can do with a pencil.

Then you have Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft. Tech companies, that need to innovate constantly and try and compete with each other.

Evidently, having a blog, I also have a gmail account, a gmail account I never use, apart from logging into blogger and google reader, and occassionally providing to websites that require an email address that I never wish to hear from again. The reason I never use google, is because my hotmail account does the job I require of it, it sends and receives emails. In the past 15 years, the only innovation I have appreciated as regards hotmail, is that they added a search function to the email. Otherwise every other innovation has proved annoying.

Before my hotmail I used start.com.au, my address was bonut@start.com.au I wouldn't have changed that to hotmail except for the fact that start went broke.

Now I recieve invitations from people to join google plus. Tellingly, these invitations come from people who have (or have in the past) deleted their facebook accounts, most (both) being people who deleted their account rather than from a mounting paranoia that they had shared too much, simply shared too little to make it worth having a facebook account. And now they want me to join them on google plus. They advocate 'features' of google plus too to try and coax me over, like the increased security and privacy or some shit, shit they never really needed to worry about with facebook.

Why are we such suckers for technological innovation? Why is it so fucking persistant for companies and people to think that meaningless features sell, rather than benefits?

My only complaint about facebook, similar to hotmail is that the owners feel a constant need to innovate and 'improve' it, making changes to the interface and shit. There are major ones that were good, in the past, namely making the newsfeed home and your own wall secondary. But now it works, and it works fine. You don't need more innovation, you need it to be like a hammer - a tool for the job. The job of facebook is to create a platform you can bleat or broadcast to anyone who cares enough to pay attention, and also for organising and publicising social events and shit. That's it.

Much muchly, apparantly most people use less than 1% of microsoft words features. When I think about it, I would use 'New' 'Save' 'Save As' the word count tool 'Copy' 'Paste' and 'Undo' as well as the font and font size selections 9000 times more often than the rest of the features combined. That is saying, if you released a version of word that just had the commonly used functionality - it would have around 10 buttons. 20 at the most. But it would look inflexible and crappy, like note pad. It would be hard to justify the added expense, it would look like it had been developed as a garage project by somebody who plays WoW, not the best and brightest.

So vis a vis, Google, Microsoft, Facebook et al. I don't need one company running fucking everything for me, I don't need some omni tool I can pay off in 12 easy installations of $24.95, I just need a hammer so I can beat your fucking heads in.

A Vague Post about the Vagaries of Success

2011-08-28T23:02:00.000-07:00

Travel is often advocated as a way to 'broaden oneself' a hypothesis testing that is the premises of 'An Idiot Abroad'. I think travelling is to some extent, not the experience it was pre-internet. Specifically pre-"globalisation", that is if you have money, to stay in hotels and shit, cuisine aside (and decreasingly so) countries are remarkably similar - as a consumer experience.

It all depends how deep you can dig (into a given culture, rather than your pockets). But one thing I discovered from travelling is that you get in situations, where you only exist, because you have money. I fucked up transfers between bank accounts, or got burgled on occassion and thus discovered that whilst being broke in say - Melbourne, where I have this social network (not facebook, but actual people who know who I am and wouldn't think twice about feeding and clothing me and possibly offering me shelter) is very different from being broke in Dusseldorf, a city where I know nothing and nobody. When you have money you can participate at a level that is superficial, you can buy the local cuisine. You can get somebody to repair your bike, you can find a roof to shelter under.

This experience of existing or not existing on the cash in my wallet gave me an insight into whether success is 'having a lot of money' I think superficially it solves a lot of problems. Money can for example secure you (as much as anything can be secured) permanent accomodation arrangements, but as the Sarah Silverman Show proved to us all, we are just one set of lost keys away from being homeless.

I went to school and I got a great ENTER score, that was .5 away from getting me into a doouble degree at Melbourne University and my first preference for accomodation on a crescent based college that year (2002 I think). For the amount of emphasis placed on the importance of my education, the awards I recieved and the post secondary colours I recieved to adorn my pocket, my education whilst sometimes stimulating is almost wholly irrelavent and inconsequential to my life as a pursuit of happiness.

One of the earliest 'Chiustream' videocasts by Bobby Chiu, he spoke about his early days as an artist when you struggled to publish your own art books to take to conventions which you loaded up in boxes with your friend into your second hand station wagon and drove across country and how even then, in the tough/make no money phase of your artistic career, that he would look back on those days and recall them as 'the good times'. I find myself sentimentally agreeing with Bobby Chiu, even though I am similarly projecting forward what I will look back on.

I just feel that 'fame' is a hollow and intrusive state, you are able to utilise it to solve certain problems, but it is more so than being rich, riddled with downsides. Like you can't just have friends. I imagine it is like the assymetry of running into an old friend that reads my blog, and facebook posts and yet publishes nothing themselves about their lives. We know eachother, but they know how I've spent the last 4 years, I don't even know which country they live in.

I imagine being famous is that x 10. I like just performing and creating for my peers, and I have these friends in a band that now tours and regularly plays festivals and even their local shows they 'headline' on a list that runs till 2am. Which is past my bedtime. Do they think nostalgicly of the days when they played the Tote, and knew everybody in the audience some how. Now I am anonymous amongst a bunch of people that I don't identify with watching them play, and they seldom emerge from backstage before or after the show to just say high.

Selfishly I preferred it when they did residencys, not headlining. They make money which solves other problems, but do they enjoy the gigs as much?

I don't know, people who do know are unable to define what success is (here's a hint, Economists don't know).

I will consider myself successful if I feel my existence is validated by people I respect and care about, and if my interactions with them are rich enough for me to go to bed and wake up each morning on the whole feeling positive. How to achieve that is a recipe that can be improvised by each of us. I'm pretty sure it doesn't require social media though.

Actual Reasons I Need A Girflfriend

2011-08-24T19:19:00.000-07:00

Walk into a sleepy melbourne cafe, and Bryce will have asked me about my sex life before we are even seated. Many of my friends take the view I don't even need a girlfriend, I just need to get laid. Maybe they're right, what would I know, but for me getting laid is the least of my concerns. I don't think I'm single by choice, not my choice at least. I feel though I do 'need' a girlfriend again though for the following actual reasons.

#1: Lazy Sundays.

I woke up last Saturday at 7:47 AM and got up, then was hit with the sudden revelation that I haven't slept in for like 4 years. Not even the last time I was dumped, but the time before that when I was working full time and shit, my psychologist put me onto enriching my life and getting to like my own company.

As a result, I am busy, I am busy all the fucking time and I cannot stop. I have tried to relieve this busy-ness in the last week by playing computer games, but alas I still get up at 8:30 at the latest.

I feel my life is rich, enriching, I am a supportive person and well supported. What I need now is that person that makes me want to call up and cancel work on a Sunday, lie in till twelve and then go have breakfast at one of those 'breakfast all day' cafes. I don't think I can actually put the brakes on myself. I need somebody to slow it all down for me, I need to rest, after 4 years of sustaining myself, I feel I am getting low on fuel.

My relationships thus far have felt like being on a seaworthy vessel (the relationship) then it capsizes, sinks, or I am swept overboard (the dumping) then I tread water, swim sidestroke for ages (singledom) then you get hauled onto terra firma (a new relationship) only to discover it is not terra firma but yet another vessel on a vast ocean. Which is alright, and I'm aware, I'm aware that some people are my age and have had, no relationships. But fuck it, I'm tired, I'm tired of supporting myself. I'll keep doing it, but I'm tired.

#2 I need a hit.

Most recreational drugs exploit the neural systems reward centers for forming relationships. Dopamine, oxytocin, the good stuff. You can get some pleasure from anticipating a relationship, but I would like, very much the full cocktail of love drugs. Oxytocin, which builds attachment gets released in the 'cuddling afterwards' and it's highly relaxing, dopamine, I can get when a woman I'm attracted to looks at me, it's pretty good and I forget the rest but basically I'm looking for those hits as evolution intended them, and a steady supply.

#3 Testable hypothesis.

Since I don't know 2005? I have put a lot of effort into becoming a better person than I was. There is much in my nature that is still bad, takes a lot of effort just to mute, and certainly there is a long way for me to go. But I feel I am doing something right, I suspect I am much better boyfriend material now than I was say 2 years ago. I suspect my ex's like me more now as a person than they did when I was dating them.
Also, from the aforementioned #1, there is a wonderful thing about exclusive relationships of two, and pretty much any positive, supportive relationship - they create their own energy, as a carry over of both reasons #1 and #2 - When in a blossoming relationship I was able to stay up till like 4am bowing and performing tea ceremonys and shit, then get up at 5am cycle across town to my home, get changed for work at 9am and still have more energy than everyone else there, despite having more late night plans.
I don't just want to recieve that kind of energy and support, I want to give it too. I think honestly, that I am a much more supportive, tolerant, honest, kind, humourous and optimistic potential boyfriend than I was before.

You know if I don't draw all day, I will usually need to sit down at work, or schedule the next day to draw. I need to express myself in that medium. Writers block is never a problem. I have a need to actually express my love, caring and support, I can in numerous platonic avenues, but it's kind of like only having a greylead and a school desk to draw on. I would like to have that outlet in an actual relationship.

#4 Singular Identity.

I feel sadly, that I have been single so long that it is becoming part of my identity, I feel anxious at the prospect of actually not being single anymore. This is a trap, a hole I will struggle to crawl out of. I don't want to become somebody that pushes others away.

Further more, on like Monday or something I had a rare misanthropic tantrum, where being such a supportive person I felt almost as if I had become the pillar of my social network that everyone could safely ignore. Like the doctor who gets sick, or the leader requiring some leadership, or the you get it you get. That is to say, because I appear to have all this energy to support people in their various pursuits of happiness, doesn't mean I'm doing that having captured lasting happiness myself.

On reflection there was little evidence to support my spurned feeling. I had just garned up the perception that I was all alone, and exerted a bias on my surroundings.

But this is part of being single, I have these periods where I just want rescuing from myself, tired of having to rescue myself all the time - which eventually evolves into the revalation that nobody is going to rescue me but myself, then I end up rescuing myself.

#5 Too many variables.

In the same way that having brakes on a bike can make you faster (providing you have to turn corners etc.) having a relationship provides a secure base from which you can explore the world. Particularly since I have now spurned most other forms of 'security' and as per my swimming-from-shipwreck-to-shipwreck metaphore, true security is an illusion. But some forms of security exist, and to get really romantic, although I agree that the idea of monogamy is overemphasised as the ideal, arguing for polygamy, open-relationships, polyamorous etc as superior smacks of the same 'works on paper' argument that classical economists applied to flexible wages.

Most people want to be employed on a contract, to build a degree of certainty into their future, that enables them to then make decisions. In the same way, I'd like at least to have a stable relationship, that I can then work on the myriad other decisions I have to make in life.

Which isn't to say there is anything inherantly wrong with being single. Having spent a 5 year period jumping from long term relationship to long term relationship, this can be unhealthy as well. I think a well trod path of unhealthy relationships is where you have two people supporting eachothers unhealthy lifestyles. Where one or both partners maintains a comfortable status quo and wastes years of their life not venturing out into the world, until the other becomes dissatisfied enough to shake things up with a break up.

But as Ted Roosevelt said "It may be true that he travels farthest who travels alone; but the goal thus reached is not worth reaching."

Met her for

2011-08-21T18:07:00.000-07:00

I just want to crash in a bed that sags in the middle, covered with blankets, with my head on a pillow, looking up and out at the stars, through a window of a sturdy weatherproof cabin, perched on the precipice of a ridge, on a mountain in a vast unknown wilderness.

Rethinking Education Part 3: The Innocent Stop Protecting the Guilty

2011-08-19T15:59:00.000-07:00

Any time you talk about educational reform you inevitably have to talk about schools and subsequently teachers.

Earlier in the week when I concieved of writing this post I tried to think of the names of all my various teachers over the years so I could try and figure out a ratio of good:bad teachers.

I was alarmed at how many teachers I can't even recall. I must have done 8 subjects a semester through highschool, and sure many teachers teach multiple classes, but I can maybe recall a handful of teachers, and only the good ones.

The rest, not only the teachers are largely forgotten, but the whole subjects they taught, With some effort some come back to me but really it highlights something.

Even those of us who claim to have a good memory, only remember interesting (and perhaps important) stuff, the rest is forgotten.

But we need to mention the elephant in the room: Many teachers are just plain bad. They are bad in multiple ways. They are place holders, 'fillers', unmotivated and uncaring.

They inspire aphorisms like 'those who can't do, teach.'

The earliest blog I ever read Bob C Cock's weekly rant had the memorable phrase 'some of the most boring and uninspiring people I have ever had the displeasure of meeting have been teachers.'

Once out of the education system, your mind probably exercises a similar bias to mine, it simply forgets all those painful hours spent with teachers who taught us nothing at all. Instead when asked about our high-school (those who had no traumatic experiences in the locker rooms) will probably recall instantly our beloved Physics, History or Music teacher outshining the other 60+ members of staff we scratch to even remember the face of.

And I went to a good school.

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani said in his book that 'the education system exists to protect the jobs of those who work within it.' and this grim admission is applicable almost everywhere. It shows up in the way education is reformed or revolutionised.

Acceptable ways to reform schools:

Build buildings.

Buy computers.

Fund teacher training programs.

Unacceptable ways to reform schools:

Insist on staff transparency. (starting with management, down to teachers)

Raise prerequisite qualification standards of teachers.

Merit based pay.

I went to a high school where students were mandatorily required to have a laptop. My laptop died in early year 11 and I just stopped using one. From my personal testimony I can say laptops and computers contribute nothing to the quality of education and quite possibly detract from it. (we mostly used our laptops to play computer games in class, I can vividly recall how to beat every level on skyroads and almost none of what was taught me in year 9 science).

Year 12 our fancy technology was next to useless, we couldn't use them in exams and we spent most of our times practicing under exam like conditions, even SACs had to be handwritten.

Our laptops were an expensive piece of flashy sophistication, with little substance to back them and they 4 kg piece of shit antiques we used (top of the range for the day) probably caused back problems.

Putting computers in schools recieves a disproportionate amount of attention in complaints about schools being underfunded and under-resourced. I already know what every teacher is going to say -

'we live in an information age, most business and professions use computers and to be competitive in the job market students need computer literacy.' my mother a literacy coach for teachers alluded that 'the information age' is now even taken into account in text book design, explaining those annoying 'pop up' boxes that punctuated text books.

I suspect part of the bias towards putting computers is an accident of history, adults learn differently to children and subsequently there is an esoteric reverence for 'computer skills' being difficult to learn late in life that is projected onto teenagers.

I suggest that what is widely regarded as 'computer literacy' is a misnomer, it is a far more fundamental transferrable 'soft skill' which I will liberally call 'search skills'. Anytime an office worker purchases and installs a specialist piece of software and gets somebody from the IT department or a colleague whom ALSO has never used it to demonstrate how it works, that colleague is employing search skills.

That is they know how to find information and teach themselves, much of my former job involved looking up excel functions on google and through excel's inbuilt help function to find solutions to all the weird things executives will demand their spreadsheets do.

I have even had to program shit in VB, I am not a programmer nor have ever studied programming, but I know how to find shit out. You can teach students these skills with Mechano sets or lego, or ikea furniture, you don't need huge expenditure on quickly obsolete IT.

But this inevitably is where all the funding goes and any talk of reform must head. Australia builds a Broadband Network to help our rural cousins keep pace with the city folk. To me internet access arguably should become more irrelevant to education, with smart phones and wikipedia we are reaching a stage where everyone can carry around pretty much all the tacit knowledge known to man in their pocket. Having access to information in an information economy will not be the key differential. It will be, as it is and always has been a persons richness in soft skills.

Skills modelled by the secure base, the parental figure and role model that is their teacher.

I read somewhere that many doctors cannot accept as fact (in fact a truism) that half their graduating class were below average. Something that must mathematically be true. It is a relative scale, but in absolute terms we need to admit to ourselves that:

On average, teachers are average...

...At an elite school like I went to. To say Private schools chief advantage is their superior funding is a cop-out. Private schools are businesses, and follow a simple business principle - customers pay for value. Thus their chief advantage is that they can fire bad teachers and reward good ones. They demand results and people pay a premium for them.

Admittedly the results are pretty foolish, ENTER scores that are relevant for about 2 months and then do little to prevent anyone from derailing their life with a general lack of motivation. But nevertheless the private school system attracts dollars largely because the teachers do what they are paid to do, teach students how to score well on exams. Elite schools go a step further and directly intervene in subject selection making sure students learn useful and more importantly generously scaled subjects like 'Latin' and 'Hebrew' and 'Specialist Mathematics' that not only will contribute to a generous ENTER score but prove practical for the rest of their lives when time travelling or dealing with imaginary numbers.

Yes the good schools weed out the 'bad teachers' who inevitebly end up in greater concentration in public schools, their lack of interest in their students education creates a surplus of energy that can then be channeled into internal staff politics and making other teachers lives miserable. Their distaste for their profession may even be so great they set their sites on becoming a vice principal or principal so they largely don't have to deal with them anymore unless of course they are punishing them.

The unmotivated teacher is only one kind of bad teacher, there are also teachers who are just plain stupid and not really qualified to be teaching anybody. My mother was coaching teachers at a school where the principal held up as a role model to all a teacher that had graduated from the school with a study score of 17, but thanks to government intitiatives, loop holes and what not had been able to become a teacher and help shape the next generation of under achievers.

Then you have teachers who are passionately bad at their jobs. They think their authoratarian style harks back to some golden-age of teaching and they think they are doing an excellent job, loading their students up with massive assignments and homework schedules. Keeping them on edge by picking students at random to perform difficult calculations on the board in front of their peers at risk of humiliation and locking students out of class for being late. All serving to increase the brains production of cortisol inhibiting the hippocampus and thus their students ability to learn, a few students cool under pressure shining, the teacher rests on his laurels as having produced such stars, in the same way that exposing thirty lab rats to radiation until only 2 - the strongest, survive albeit much much weaker than they were before the radiation bombardment.

All these teachers are bad, and worse, entrenched in our education system. I forget where I read it, it was either Goleman's 'Social Intelligence' or 'Freakanomics' or some similar science type book, but a good teacher generally in objective terms will impart 1.5 years of course material to their students, whereas a bad teacher will impart just 6 months of course content to their students. (How this stacks up with the Chicago study that said we all retain less than 7% of our high school education, I don't know).

I went to both a public and private secondary school, the public school I went to had a good reputation despite being really large. From my brief experience there I would say the proportion of teachers that are good is roughly the same as private. Private schools seem to be populated by good and average teachers, where public schools have some good, some average and far too many bad teachers.

I feel I need to lay down a chunk of text from Goleman's 'Social Intelligence' before going on:

The power of an emotionally connected teacher does not end in first grade. Sixth-graders who had such a teacher earned better grades not only that year but the next year as well. Good teachers are like good parents. By offering a secure base, a teacher creates an environment that lets students' brains function at their best. That base becomes a safe haven, a zone of strength from which they can venture forth to explore, to master something new, to achieve.

The most critical thing you can do for your education, is get a good teacher in front of you. Good teachers exist, but trying to obtain one for your child in the public system is like playing russian roulette. It is also quite hard to get one in the private system, at least though you probably won't have the teacher who instructs their kids to read from their textbooks queitly for 50 minutes while the ensure silence through threats of detention.

On the one hand, much of our inability to reform anything can be explained away by the political trade cycle. In Australia a government has 3 years to make plans and execute them, they cannot guaruntee they will still be in charge to reap the benefits of completed construction processes. Thus it makes sense that if you need to improve education, you throw money at laptops and buildings - things that I'm sure have been proven to have little impact on students education and success in later life.

If you watch grand designs, complex builds that run over schedule and over budget still only take 2 years or so to become water-tight and habitable. That's not even using commercial building techniques like prefabrication and concrete, concrete! concrete!!, buying a bunch of computers involves negotiating a lease contract or purchase and then rolling them out in such a way as to sew seeds of envy and suspicion amongst staff and students and ensure that they are almost obsolete by the time the last has been delivered.

But yet these are the kind of 'reforms' that can be implemented in 3 years and achieve almost nothing.

Reforming the teachers themselves takes generations, and there is a social responsibility to actually take care of those useless and destructive teachers that have been implicitly endorsed by the education system that exists so they don't drink themselves to death in a caravan somewhere.

Firstly you need to build an environment that is attractive to high perfomers, and high performers are motivated by performance. Thus you need transparency, accountability and a system where good and bad performance are duly rewarded. In fact it is probably more important to any good teachers retention that you get rid of bad teacher colleagues than it is to necessarily reward their good efforts.

Then you need to raise the standards, the requirements to become firstly a principal (so good teachers have the necessary support) and then a teacher. You need to make those peg holes round so the square pegs can't get in in the first place.

Of course, these are not radical suggestions. Governments (including the current one) have tried to implement just such reforms.

What holds these reforms back?

Good teachers.

The most bitter irony of all. The innocent come out in force to protect the guilty. Things like the 'Myschools' website are seen as an attack on their integrity. Passionate teachers call up John Fane and tell stories of the differences they have been making for years whilst being underfunded and underappreciated.

Students exerting the same bias my memory does, call up and talk about their shitty school's one teacher that made a difference in their life and now will be punished by the damning report of 'MySchool' for all to see.

But what I have come to admit, is that if you fired 100% of the teachers we don't remember, and 20% (the bad ones) that we do, we wouldn't miss them when they are gone.

Rethinking Education Part 2: Choice and Responsibility

2011-08-15T17:27:00.000-07:00

Today I'm going to flesh out just one aspect of the kind of fundamental lesson that has a large impact on wellbeing. Decision making.

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." ~ Yogi Berra

To avoid the sprawling directionlessness of yesterday's post however let me clearly articulate the problem with education as it stands.

Problem: Current education is geared towards an ideal of eliminating risk, or risk aversion. Students are encouraged to expend as much effort as possible to obtain higher marks and subsequently keep as many options as possible. This leaves students averse to making decisions that involve dilemma's and poor at them, worse, many members of society fail to identify where they have made a decision.

For example, I read in a newspaper article around the time 'an inconvenient truth' came out, long before ETS or Carbon Tax discussions were going on, where a Latrobe Valley worker was asked their thoughts on getting rid of the coal fire power plants and he said something to the effect of 'at the end of the day we all have to turn the air conditioner on.' I can't say if this was poorly worded, but air conditioners are a luxury item, nobody is compelled to use them, they are not mandatory yet the notion that they somehow were ostensibly informed the person's attachment to coal fire electricity.

In a more everyday sense I used to come across many people who had bought a house for security reasons, only to discover it had mainly 'secured' their profession for them. That meant they felt unable to leave their job because they were dependant on the income stream to make their mortgage repayments. Many people in this position lack the imagination to create a contingency (whilst also having made an uninformed decision in the first place) - selling the house or defaulting on the mortgage are options, thus you are not actually trapped in your current profession, it just may be unpleasant to leave it. If the consequences of losing the income stream are more unpleasant than continuing to work, you are making a conscious choice.

It has been my experience that few people appreciate choices they make. They feel their life is dictated to them by external circumstance. It is a common trait of depressives, and I feel is something that can be unlearned.

Here is how one might set up the lessons in teaching decision making, with one caveat Economics could be described as the study of decision making and certainly it does provide a theoretical framework however it is materialistic and often abstracted from the lives of those studying it, I would not present 'Decision Making' as a subject in the form of making Economics compulsory:

1. Resources are limited.

Economics does a poor job of teaching what this actually means. Many managers and executives I have come across in my careers, wanderings etc. don't have a full grasp of what limited resources means.

We have to make decisions because resources are limited. If resources weren't limited we could simply DO EVERYTHING. But we can't. Students would learn in the early phases of decision making that we can only spend our time one way or another before considering other resources such as monetary, budgeting etc. The chief purpose is to illustrate that decisions have to be made, with time it will be spent whether you do something or nothing at all.

2. Opportunity Costs.

These are very economic terms, but students then learn to appreciate that a decision to do something is equivalent to deciding not to do anything else. Thus students learn to take conscious ownership of opportunities foregone. The student should appreciate decisions such as 'by deciding to go on exchange for a year, I decided I would not graduate the same year as all my friends.' or 'by deciding to study Accounting I decided I would not spend time studying science anymore.' or 'by committing to the rowing crew, I decided to give up my weekends and mornings to rowing for three months.' or 'by deciding to go on holiday to Europe at the end of the year, I decided to stay with my job until I leave.'

3. Dilemmas

Opportunity cost is all very well, students then graduate onto gaining an appreciation of situations where decisions have to be made where neither outcome is desirable - choosing whether to escape death row by crawling through a tunnel of barbed wire or a tunnel of sand paper. It has practical applications for when life doesn't go to plan and helps people identify what power they do have in undesirable situations. From banal situations like getting dumped 'do I shut this person out of my life and miss their company, or do I expose myself to the emotional pain of our changed relationship?' to medical treatment 'do I undergo the surgery and risk damage to my organs, or do I undergo chemotherapy?' to losing your job 'do I sell the car to save money and ride everywhere, or do we keep it and rent out the guest room to a student?'

4. Identifying options

Few choices are as simple as dilemma's and students can also learn to identify 'bogus dilemmas' that is where you are presented with a 'with us or against us' choice when in fact you don't have to be either. But making decisions well requires some amount of researching what choices are available. Students learn to consider the choices they make rather than leap into them, as well as identifying the time constraints that come with a particular decision. 'The boss offered me a new job, I asked them how long I had to make a decision. They wanted an answer on the spot, but admitted they could wait a few days.'

5. Dealing with uncertainty.

Here economic models would be not entirely wrong but misleading and largely fruitlessly abstract. The temptation is to deal with uncertainty in terms of probability where the odds are known. Rather students learn to identify the possible outcomes of each course of action they may decide to take eg. 'If I take out a loan and buy a house, the house prices may go up making me money or the may go down leaving me in negative equity. If I don't buy a house my money will sit in a bank making 4% interest, interest rates may go up or may go down.' Here students are taught to appreciate the possible consequences of their decision making and thus what possible consequences they decide to avoid, or allow in order to obtain desirable ones. Here students learn about fundamental risks, and making decisions while acknowledging that 'the worst may happen.'

6. Power.

Here is an appreciation of what choices a student actually has, in any situation. Ultimately the students learn that their behaviour for the most part is the only thing they really control, but that this leaves them with choices in almost any situation. 'My partner cheated on me. I decided to react by ceasing the relationship and contact with them.' vs. 'My partner cheated on me, I posted abusive comments about her online and made threatening phone calls to her to make myself feel better.'

7. Responsibility.

Here students learn that the price of being able to choose is to take responsibility for their consequences, even when choices are made under uncertainty. 'We tried a new restaurant and the portions were meagre and the service terrible, but we chose to do something new, we just won't go back there anytime soon.' to 'I'd heard some bad things about heroin, but I decided to try it to try and aleviate my depression. Trying to break my addiction was not worth the high, and it has compounded my problems. I took a risk, I have to live with the consequences.' A big part of successful decision making is being able to live and adapt to the consequences.

Much of today's problems come from an aversion to taking responsibility for the decisions we make. This is I feel viewed as a way to make our lives easier and thus happier. We act like we have no choice about the unpleasant circumstances we find ourselves in, or that problems we create are somebody elses, or that we have some kind of tacit permission from a higher power to act the way we do.

I have observed little to convince me that this actually makes people happier. At the very least their are great benefits in becoming conscious of decisions we make reflexively. People who feel cheated by life and the world make for unpleasant company, their stories of everyone out to get them grows boring very quickly. Bad decision making at least on a social level restricts our future choices and thus our personal empowerment.

I feel 'Choice and Responsibility' are one of those fundamental lessons that once appreciated pay exponential dividends throughout life and also expedite future learning, appreciating where and where we don't have control is fundamental to learning and problem solving, it is a highly transferable skill.

This is but one example of the sorts of stuff I feel 90% of our mandatory education years should be spent on, it is relatively easy to then pick up and learn a very specific expert subject like specialist mathematics, once you have learned how to learn.

Rethinking Education Part 1: Fundamentals

2011-08-14T17:19:00.000-07:00

When I think of all the crap I learned in highschool, it's a wonder I can think at all. ~ Simon & Garfunkel, Kodachrome

Most of what we now teach our children is irrelevant to their future success as human beings and they know it. ~ Gordon Livingston, M.D.

Both quotes I took out of Livingston's book 'How To Love' an immensely descriptive and practical title that is sadly, new-age sounding when you don't have the book in your hand.

The posts I plan to do this week are simultaneously rehashed and a long time coming. They may form the draft of a letter I plan to send to my Alma Mata about various issues I have with education.

On one of TED's most watched talks Sir Ken Robinson says that he finds everybody is interested in education, everyone has an opinion on it. Opinions on education are like arseholes, to use Salt N Pepa's analogy.

Here is one more. I plan to do 5, but I have no clear plan on what those 5 will be. Todays initial one was inspired by the overemphasis our society has on expertise, and how it has pervaded the education system, and made it remarkably ineffecient.

The Air Jordan shoes for example is an expensive and professional piece of equipment, for the models released during his playing career Michael Jordan wore them himself, winning 6 NBA chamionships, a Slam Dunk contest, 5 MVP awards and is widely regarded as the greatest of all time.

Of all the people to own and wear Air Jordan's however, only Michael Jordan himself won 6 NBA championships, 5 MVP awards and is widely regarded as the greatest of all time.

Our education system has become like the Air Jordan shoe, we buy the expensive, high quality component and ignore the combination of mental fortitude, physical conditioning, fundamental skills and genetics that contributed 98% of Jordan's achievement and focus on the 2% differentiated product.

Expertise makes sense from a differentiation point of view. In business there are two broad strategies - penetration (price/cost competitiveness) and differentiation (avoiding competition). In developed nations a person who can read and right and add and subtract is not very competitive, but somebody who can design hydrodynamic structures is competitive in the job market. If you need a hydrodynamic builiding designed you are going to have to pay for the necessary expertise.

School broadly speaking is now engineered towards putting people into these differentiated nitches, with the societal objective of trying to maximise compensation for our labour and create a form of material security.

Admittedly, it isn't done efficiently - our education system cannot perfectly match the nitches that demand expertise with the nitches of expertise it produces. Somewhere in Australia somebody is paying for an expert from Scandanavia exorbitant amounts of money to consult them on the use of mobile sustainable waste management systems, while an expert in Flemish Poetry goes working in a retail bookstore.

But this I am not so concerned about, it is more in the spirit of the opening quote from Dr. Livingstone, expertise is fine says I provided we don't just assume away the 90% of fundamentals common to all professions that make for good and bad employees.

Here is my bold proclaimation: EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA HAS ASSUMED AWAY THE FUNDAMENTAL SKILLS WE NEED.

This post was dually inspired by a reflection from Rod, the training manager at my former employer and one of my mentors, apparantly in total quality management circles it has been found that only 10% of problems have what are described as 'special causes' these things have alarm bells and red flags that sound and go up when something goes wrong, that is your warehouse is on fire, a gunman is taking pot shots at people from the building adjacent, the unexpected and rare event.

These account for just 10% of the waste and ineffeciences in any business operation. The other 90% comes from 'ordinary causes' these have no warning bells and that is what makes them so damaging, they are the waste and ineffeciencies that are part of the business operations already.

For example, it used to take a long time to check in for a domestic flight. Whether you had luggage or not to be checked, you had to use the same system. Instead of getting out of your cab, getting a boarding pass from a computer, you had to arrive early and wait in line with everybody else to get allocated a seat. It was a much more resource intensive process and it annoyed customers. That process driven ineffeciency is an 'ordinary cause'.

NOW similarly 90% of what makes an employee a 'good employee' are fundamental skills I have heard referred to as 'transferable skills' many are associated with leadership, but...

BUT!!! but most of these qualities are actually identical to what make somebody a good friend, teacher, colleague, lover, teammate etc. in that way 'transferable' is a highly appropriate name.

These skills are typically evaluated in the first 2-3 seconds of a job interview before anybody has started asking questions because they are quite transparent in how we comport ourselves.

These are some of the skills that I would describe as fundamental to our success not just career wise but in all aspects of life: decision making, risk taking, communicating, skepticism, reasoning, care giving, stress management, emotional management, how to avoid negative people, how to sustain positive relationships, dealing with contingencies, listening, budgeting etc.

It isn't really an exhaustive list, but these skills are transferable to almost any context, anywhere where we are required to interact with people. I have referred to them as 'transferable' but they have also been called 'soft skills' because they can be adapted to any situation, whereas thermal engineering cannot easily be applied to running a bachelor auction the same way communicating can.

The saying is 'soft skills are hard to teach/learn and the hard skills are easy.' As somebody who struggles daily to listen to other people, I can testify that creating an Integrated Marketing Communication plan and finding the equilibrium price of a monopolistically competitive firm operating in two price discriminating markets is EASY to pick up compared to the skill of listening.

Literacy and numeracy are the only soft skills our education system gets right, otherwise we are left to a more darwinian education where we pick up these skills for our own survival... or we don't.

Organisations, communities and families across Australia are populated by people who can't make decisions effectively, don't listen, can't communicate their concerns in a way likely to get them addressed, can't spend within their means, manage their own stress and broader emotions, empathise effectively, sleep and eat right and do their job.

Their is a huge potential for society wide benefits if education refocused on these fundamental skills for day to day living.

Tomorrow I will write about 'choice and responsibility' as one of those fundamental things that could be taught to people in school that would probably eliminate most of the germaine experiences that people struggle with day to day unable to relieve themselves.

But consider the trajectories of two individuals, one we will call 'House' after House M.D. and the other we will call 'Luciana' after my beautiful beautiful BMX. House possesses a high degree of specialised technical expertise, but very little interpersonal or soft skills, Luciana is a beautiful human being with excellent interpersonal skills but nothing technically beyond the core competencies.

It is my experience that in observing the two career trajectories, with both starting at entry level positions in the same organisation that sooner rather than later Luciana will be managing House, as well as others. House may well end up well compensated for his expertise, but Luciana is management material and far more crucial to the operational success of the organization. Largely because organisations consist of people and Luciana can deal with people where House cannot and has deliberately engineered his career to try and avoid having to.

Management consists almost entirely of soft skills, managing a team of doctors at a fundamental level is not much different from managing a team of brickies. There may be trade specific jargon to learn, but these can be picked up much quicker in either direction than the fundamental skills of coordinating and managing people.

Our education system is geared up to produce House's not Luciana's. In reality, because soft skills I find tend to correlate (people who listen good are generally genuinely intellectually curious) that you don't tend to find extremes like House and Luciana. You still get extremes, but I find it to be people who lack both soft and hard skills and people who possess both soft and hard skills. Tragically life is more turds and eagles than porcupines and puppies.

I feel I need to move away from the animal analogies and quickly. Because so much of our success and enjoyment of life stems from our mastery of fundamental and transferable skills I feel as a priority these skills need to be allocated a similar emphasis in curriculum. Admittedly much of what I know of soft skills comes from academic organisations, crammed into the optional elective one off seminars, guest lectures accounting optimistically for around 3% of the time I have spent in class.

Many of these skills are taught (or at least referred to) in leadership seminars, tragically delivered to students whom have already been identified as leaders by their peers, that is they naturally posess many of the soft skills through the darwinian selection. (As an aside, I should admit at my own highschool year to year their were leadership positions allocated to people with no leadership skills, as a reward for parental participation in Parental associations like school boards and committees that may have benefited from these leadership seminars).

But this is nothing like the number of hours allocated to differentiation. Numeracy and mathematics are transferable, there are many occasions where problems we encounter can be modelled mathematically and worked out on paper without the need of trial and error. But differentiation measuring the rate of change is highly specialised and covered in physics where in engineering and other professions where one is likely to use these skills and have studied physics as a prerequisite. Otherwise it is rare to think anybody will need to calculate the area under a graph and change in angle of tangents to a curve.

It is unlikely that the hours I spent on anti-differentiation, imaginary numbers, geometric proofs etc. are likely to have any real impact on my wellbeing over the course of my life apart from the natural satisfaction of studying them compared to the 0 hours I have spent in schools learning how to identify a good romantic partner, something that has caused me more anxiety than any geometric shape I have come across (except perhaps in drawing, but I do everything free hand anyway).

Yet specialist mathematics was held in high esteem by my secondary institution, despite the minimal impact it has on both our wellbeing and careers. Having been to my 10 year reunion I can say that even ENTER scores are a poor predictor of future financial and emotional wellbeing at least over a 10 year period. (in case you are from my high school and reading this, what I mean is from what I can recall of the enter scores I knew of, there is no discernable pattern).

Even university doesn't do it's students many favors. Graduates jump qualification hurdles but even with internship/workplacement initiatives an overemphasis on group assignments etc. few graduate even with a firm grasp of what they are supposed to know and even less prepared to operate in an organisational environment. Group assignments are assigned with very little education or training on how to actually manage a group assignment. They simply must be done, creating the practice whereby one individual completes the assignment and the other four sign their name to it. A good student thus learns not to delegate to people you don't trust, creating at best micromanagers to be the stars of the Australian workforce and then a bunch of people who don't actually know what their qualifications say they do.

Even then, these technical experts can be easily outshined by a salesman with incredble interpersonal instincts and no formal education or qualifications to speak of. It can and does happen and that is a failure of the education system at large.

There is nothing wrong with expertise as such, it is important, but the fundamentals, the general skills are just not being taught. To close this out with more of Dr. Livingstone, here he reflects my attitude to that 3% of time in academic institutions when I have been really engaged in something useful and interesting:

It is not surprising that most parents fall back on a series of restrictions and proscriptions, things one must not do, relating mostly to drugs, sex and driving. It's as if our fears for our children's survival overwhelm our sense of what they need to navigate happily through lives.
I think young people would respond with interest to these subjects. My experiences with teenagers in therapy is that they generally value the chance to have a conversation with a non-judgemental adult about subjects germane to their daily experience.

There is always time to go back to uni, but in Victoria at least a sense of urgency is fostered amongst 16-17 year olds to choose a specialised path of study (despite almost no university courses having a pre-requisite beyond a study score of 25 in english) and plan the rest of their lives around this.
Few graduate or leave highschool possessing an adequate grasp of something as fundamental as how to make a decision, they have made a decision that potentially wastes years of their life without any instruction as to how to make it.

Prior to 16 their are few choices a child can make in determining their own lifestyle. Most of the big fundamental decisions are made by their parents or gaurdians. 90% of the focus of education in the time leading up to this age I feel should be spent equipping them to make these decisions and manage the subsequent results of them. After that you can start specialising, and by no means finish it.

Obnoxiously Drunk

2011-08-13T00:38:00.000-07:00

Last night I got obnoxiously drunk. Nowhere near my worst by any means, but near enough for me to regret it. I was a little overexuberant because I got my solo show booked in for Feb 2012, I have a space, now all I need to do is create the artwork.

I don't know why I felt I should personally and privately celebrate this premature victory that could turn into bitter defeat by getting drunk, but I did.

I also have less than 2 months to train for my marathon and my weight is going up, not down. So that is it for drinking. As of last night/early hours of this morning my drinking is done for both alcohol and soda pop. Too many calories.

As of tomorrow, I will start cutting out all the crap I eat. I eat a lot of crap.

What is Anarchy?

2011-08-11T18:16:00.000-07:00

We live in interesting times, for one thing Australia has a Prime Minister for which opinion polls have no meaning, sway or context. I think Julia Gillard is a moron and not fit to be called a world leader but due to the balance of power her government may be the exact freakish collision of low probabilities that Climate change needs. Whilst posessing none of the qualities I desire in a leader - intelligence, courage and astringency - she behaves as though she does, why? Because her choice is simple, capitulate to the demands of the greens and the independants or NOT BE PRIME MINISTER.

Don't get me wrong, Tony Abbott is a disaster that our best hope resides in history simply forgetting him, behind these two leaders stand Wayne Swann, Joe Hockey, the cream at the top of a list of people you probably wouldn't want running a milkbar. But it is refreshing, even invigorating to see somebody just selfishly choose to be prime minister and damn the rest to hell... and subsequently wind up doing the right thing. Australia will have a Carbon Tax, it will actually for once in its history be a world leader. In under twelve months time the average 'punter' will recieve $15,000 grand more tax free threshold the carbon tax will come in and - nothing will happen.

Well not nothing, big companies will reduce their tax liabilities by reducing their carbon emissions. They will refrain from causing the mess they didn't previously have to pay for.

That's interesting. Also interesting is this news story that is not a news story, journalism has been readily ignorable for years now. I have lived without reading any news, except on sports for 3 years and I have suffered no penalties for being 'uninformed' largely due to the fact that 'journalism' now days is not informative. But the London riots, they just fucking happened, no catalyst, no moral, no story. Details emerged, but that's fucking it. They are just happening.

For the first time in months I went to The Age's website to try and read an article about what Bishop's assasination or electoral result had triggered the riots in the UK and found nothing. Not only does this confirm there's no real need to read newspapers, but I saw shit described as 'Anarchy'

I am an anarchist and a lot of people expect me to believe that riot's and such, societal breakdown are the anarchist ideal. I would contend that what you see in a riot is usual a bi-product of authoratarianism. The violent and destructive outbursts are a reaction to the rule of law.

On the rule of law, I am not so committed to Anarchy that I don't for example believe in some kind of legal structure - the public perception of how an alleged peadophile should be treated I think indicates that when a mob of mothers think somebody only suspected of a crime should be gelded then murdered, you need some kind of mechanical judicial process to intervene and protect the potentially innocent even YES even at the cost of letting some genuinely guilty people get off easily.

But Anarchy is really, really simple:

Anarchy is the belief that people don't need to be told what to do.

It's pretty much a belief in the communities ability to govern itself. With an uneducated community, I couldn't hold this belief. Yes, my own community is not ready for Anarchy, because it is so uneducated. Each year hundreds, if not thousands of students graduate from high school that are functionally illeterate. I would suspect more go out into the world innumerate. I suspect the vast majority of people graduating high school will fully grasp terms of governance like 'tyranny of the majority' and 'innocent until proven guilty' 'burden of proof' etc.

My work in a call center exposes me to enough examples of people who assume what the law is without any actual knowledge at all. The number of people that lack the imagination to concieve that 'dinner-time' is going to vary household to household, if indeed any household actually follows a fixed schedule at all.

Here is my simple test of a societies 'readiness for Anarchy', that is when the dumbest member of society can still appreciate that a single queue at KFC is the fairest and most efficient way to queue.

Relax

2011-08-09T17:03:00.000-07:00

For a while I was worried I was burning out, which was most worrying because I felt I'd been too unproductive to burn out already. Then I realised it was because the heating at work was putting me to sleep at 5 in the afternoon.

But I have decided to follow the path of least resistance with my drawing, to overcome the lack of productivity. I have been procrastinating when I set myself arbitrary deadlines to do the 'important stuff' and thus achieving nothing at all.

Now I'm off to draw.

Q&A

2011-08-08T20:28:00.001-07:00

Q&A the ABC's answer to... something, brings out the misanthropist in me. It singularly depresses me where no other program succeeds in doing so. I really, really wish it didn't exist.

I honestly can't handle more than 5-10 minutes of the show at a time. You could criticise channel ten's 7PM project for dealing with serious issues in an off-hand way, but is anybody going to confuse a panel featuring Charlie Pickering and Dave Hughes as a source of legitimate information? No.

But they could with Q&A, the one show on television ever, that I literally can't handle - here is my general experience of the show from the snippets I get before I reflexively change the channel to something that I may actually learn and grow from (last night it 2003's SWAT featuring Samuel Jackson and Colin Farrel on channel GO! a thought provoking movie.):

A young liberal planted in the audience reads a lengthy, loaded and prepared question out directed at the token Labor politician.

A politician bleats out some bleating message that over/under whelms me with its factual dubiosity.

A token comedian says something close to sensible.

Tony Jones redirects the question to a Liberal/Labor party member who proceeds to bleat.

A panalist who's opinion must surely by now be regarded as invalid (eg. John Elliot) voices their opinion.

Some left leaning member of the audience makes a statement-in-the-form-of-a-question.

Those are pretty much all I see coming out of Q&A, which arguably would be better called 'Q' to dispel the misleading notion that any of it's participants may be in possession of Answers.

The show is no Insight, which I also stopped watching, but was in the least insightful. Q&A is not.

Q&A puts punters, pollies and pundits together in the studio to thrash out the hot issues of the week.

It's about democracy in action - on Q&A the audience gets to ask the questions.

It doesn't matter who you are, or where you're from - everyone can have a go and take it up to our politicians and opinion makers.

Energetic and opinionated - Q&A brings Australia's egalitarian and larrikin spirit into the studio.

Q&A is about encouraging people to engage with politics and society.

Q&A is hosted by one of the ABC's most respected journalists - Tony Jones.

Q&A is live to air - it's happening as viewers watch.

Interrestingly, the 'About' page for Q&A doesn't make any claims to impartiality and refers to Australia's 'egalitarian and larrikin spirit' which is quite the opposite of an impartial point of view.

I think people are kind of addicted to argument in some way, but they shouldn't carry misconceptions about how unconstructive the process of argument is.

The intellectual stimulation of creating new ways to defend the stance your ego is invested in can be intoxicating. But argument and 'debate' is an emotional process rather than an intellectual one.

My principal use to make me groan inwardly when he described 'debating as a sport' but nowadays I think he was probably exactly right (if not for the exact wrong reasons). But debating had us defend stances we were arbitrarily assigned for the gratification of winning. I remember shamefully after some debates we lost having sleepless nights thinking about what we should have said and how dumb some of the opponents arguments were.

Similarly what you see on Q&A is people defending and attacking positions that are largely arbitrarily assigned by the ovarian lottery. People tend to defend their moral-geographic-cultural-economic circumstances all of which they had little say in they were just pushed out of a vagina into that life. Few possess any domain of expertise that may make their opinion valid, yet they field questions that demand expertise.

This may go some way to explaining why Q&A (and the media in general) allocates a fuckload of time to issues that are not being resolved by the media on an ongoing basis like the Carbon Tax, Assylum Seekers and the Economy at large.

I feel the audiance comes to Q&A too invested in their opinions to actually be swayed by anything said by anyone on the show, do people watch it with some sadistic bloodlust hoping to see the otherside's champion fall? If so, they must feel some base animal anticipatory gratification watching the show and walk away week after week feeling dissappointed, like pursuing a relationship with a narcissist.

More worrying is anybody who does feel informed or swayed by what they see on Q&A, the logical tactics and strategies employed by the panel members of Q&A are an indictment of either the ABC's audience or the Australian Education system or both. If people with no expertise can convince people to take a stance on such issues one way or another, then perhaps those 'punters' that embody the 'Australian egalatarian and larrikin spirit' should not be engaged and participating in our democracy.

My First Poster.

2011-08-05T15:26:00.001-07:00

So this week my first ever gig poster went up in a store window. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. and by that I look at it and see mistakes everywhere, it was certainly a design not in my comfort zone and I have new found respect for that billionaire who drew the Hello Kitty design.

But it's a step forward for me, my name is on it, if you wander through Bar Open it is prominently displayed. It feels good, also I was paid in kind, and got to feel like a big-shot being on the door for a gig finally.

I've made it!

Ballarat or Japan?

2011-08-03T16:44:00.000-07:00

Seems like an easy choice, but I'm seriously contemplating detonating my life by moving to either for a year. And then on the other hand, I love what Melbourne has going on culturally and the opportunities it presents, it just seems action packed to the brim of shit you can do. Balifornia is only an hour's train ride away though and when I ran around it on Sunday (almost literally) it had views, hills, Mt Buninyong, a big reflective lake, Gold Rush era architecture. One things for sure, living in Ballarat certainly beats the shit out of living in outer suburbs. To paraphrase my friend: I could be a big fish in a shot-glass in Ballarat.

Conversely I never did actually live in Japan, as much as the country feels like home, as much as I feel my host families are just family to me, I never actually lived there. I remember walking down happiness street in Shizuoka and thinking it was Japan's answer to Sydney road. I could live in Shizuoka, I could live in Nagoya, I could live I think in Osaka for a year at least. When I return there this year I might sus it out. The real catch is whether I would push myself out of the artistic scene and opportunities by relocating to Japan.

I don't want to spend a year not growing.

Flexibility

2011-08-02T15:13:00.000-07:00

Hey I made it, managed to crank out 10 posts in some kind of fortnight. The last value on the list of ten is flexibility, an odd one to finish on but I think it highlights some wisdom in choosing friends and partners.

Flexibility is extremely practical character trait to be drawn towards. I had a teacher in high-school that said 'organised is the only way to be.' I disagreed with him then and I disagree with him now.

Flexibility is one's capacity for coping with uncertainty. So it is different from tolerance, the ability to appreciate difference. It is basically how well somebody reacts to you being late, or calling them late at night for a lift. Their ability to find time to see you, or their reaction to a change of plans.

Some organisation is okay, perhaps even desirable. Somebody entirely spontaneous is highly undesirable as Chris Rock said in Never Scared: 'Relationships are boring, the only time relationships are exciting is when you are in a bad one. Bad relationships are unpredictable - you just don't know what he's gonna do next, throw a bottle at your head, sell your engagement ring...' okay Chris Rock never said any of that but I feel I captured the gist.

I never let inflexible people get close enough to me to have any meaningful relationship, but these are the people whom in an attempt to impose order on the chaotic world that surrounds them encroach on your quality of life.

These are people that label stuff in the fridge in a share house, count the change in their dashboard console, plan daily itinaries before embarking on an overseas holiday. They build rigid systems to govern their lives and give them an (ultimately) false sense of security.

Attempts to throw out these systems are tantamount to attacking their person, they get offended and angry. By contrast, flexible people are the ones who can go with the flow, they split the bill in the way that is easiest rather than fairest and save themselves time and conflict.

They give you free reign of their fridge and pantry, you feel inclined to drop in on them. Their houses feel lived in, you feel relaxed and comfortable in their presence. The difference between the flexible and the inflexible is the difference between sitting in a hammock and sitting in an ergonomic chair.

In Japan people can be described as 'Yasashi' which is literally 'easy' but in context means gentle. The use of easy is a reference to this easygoing nature of the flexible.

Do I need to say anymore? Not on flexibility, but I should probably give these 10 attractive qualities a wrap. Starting at the end, flexibility is probably not one of the great virtues that will ever have conceptual statues dedicated to it out the front of temples of the human spirit - but it's just one of those qualities that is desirable because traits in our peers and partners tend to become more annoying with time rather than less.

It may be that we can overlook people's imperfections for a time, have coping mechanisms, but in the long run when you are building something as nourishing and useful as a support network do you want to seek support, nourishment and love from people you have coping mechanisms for?

I am optimistic enough to believe people are capable of making changes, and great changes. In 'Social Intelligence' by Daniel Goleman, the chapter 'Genes are not destiny' finds that science has shown that we are indeed capable of changing ourselves.

This is different though from entertaining rescue fantasies, deciding we love somebody with some crucial piece missing from making them somebody we can live with. Our love does not have transformative powers. We can only change ourselves.

And that is where it begins, with ourselves. I am not a paragon of any of the virtues of the 10 qualities: kindness, optimism, courage, loyalty, tolerance, honesty, humour, intelligence, beauty and flexibility. Most are learned behaviours. But I try, I try, and in trying for the past 6 years or so those paths have become easier and more reflexive to follow.

I foster these qualities because they make life easier, they create their own energy and I hope to be worthy of recieving these qualities from somebody else.

Our love can't magically transform people into these things though, and certainly the easiest and luckiest thing is to find or attract someone who already possesses them.

Otherwise there are no guaruntees, and infact even though people are capable of change, few bother to choosing instead to blame the world. All you can hope to do is provide contrast, to deny such pessimistic views of the world by living in a way that exposes that as a lie. We can influence yes, inspire yes, but not magic peoples problems away. That has to be done by them.

So be kind, be optimistic, show courage, tolerate differences, be honest and true to a fault, be loyal, approach things intelligently, don't lose it when plans go awry and for fuck's sake laugh.

Beauty

2011-08-01T17:27:00.000-07:00

Mmmmhmmm, you know I'm going to take the easy way out on this one, say 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder, skin deep, inner beauty' that sort of thing, so why write about it at all?

Physical attractiveness counts for something, there is a deviding line between people we want to be around to drink and talk shit, and people we want to hold, brush their hair back over their ear... all of that. And it is like one tenth of the forces that attract me to people.

There are for example, some peeps that I love right to the bottom of their souls but fundamentally lack the chemistry to make me want to be with them, physically. I see no point denying this.

Having said that, being attractive gets you not far. We have ultra-fast firing spindle cells that connect straight to the Amigdala or whatever, that make decisions about everyone we come across in literally a fraction of a second. Whether we want to fight them or flee or fuck them or quite possibly eat them. BUT we then have like our orbital frontal cortex that processes information and this, our thinking mind is very capable of overriding our hair trigger impressionistic mind. Both are capable of being wrong. One works by rule of thumb, the other by careful introspection.

So the advantage you gain by being physically attractive is a slight boost in the quick and dirty evaluation done by the reactive brain. This is not enough to overcome your personality.

I have no problem with physical beauty, I'm quite a fan of it, but it's a 'nice to have' rather than a necessity. It makes a poor investment, like property people are often naivelly over-invested in their outward appearance. Make-up I will begrudgingly admit can give somebody confidence to go out and face the day, but only because they've been made to feel ugly in the first place. That sort of shit.

Now, let's start sidestepping. Over the weekend I was at my 10 year highschool reunion, due to last minute date changes and short notice and shit, many people sadly missed out. But it was a great night, I had a great fucking time, and everybody looked more beautiful than they did on our 5 year reunion. What the pop-corn?

My former brother in arms at shared earth whom we shall call Captain Kirk made the call to me when I was around 22 or so that 'all of my friends have just gotten hotter when they turned 30.' Which I was skeptical about, but Kirk was sizzlingly hot himself, so I entertained the thought and now at 27 I must concede, he has a very good point.

At the 5 year reunion, myself and my peers were going through an awkward adjustment phase, more awkward than adolescence. It was too soon for us to come to terms with the realities of ageing, that you go bald, your metabolism slows down and your body starts falling apart.

Crucially, people were playing the hands they were dealt - poorly. This is a crucial element of beauty, ownership. I am attracted to people who fucking own their appearance. They express themselves, they are in control, they are not beholden to external standards. They carry their weight with dignity, the abandon their dignity with confidence and deliberation. These are beautiful people.

I have also always maintained, that in my personal case, personality carries an 80% swing factor. Which is probably extreme, and personality is probably a vague and ambiguous term. In part this reflects that 'beauty' is just one quality amongst kindness, intelligence, humour, tolerance, courage, honesty, flexibility, optimism and loyalty.

Another thing I should probably tidy up is that personality is an assumption I make about people based on the behaviour I observe, and behaviour can be seen.

I remember Honda hired some douchebag image consultant that bastardised the 'communication breakdown' of 7% of communication is the words we say, 33% is the tone we employ and 60% is body language. He took 'body language' and changed it to 'how you look.' So let me do the reverse, since behaviour can be seen and evaluated 'how you look' consists of 1. Actions you undertake. 2. Words you say. 3. How you say them.

These are all behaviours, that I and everyone observe and evaluate. I have met some 'good looking' people in my time in the narrower sense, that have invested a lot of time, energy and money into the physique, complexion, hairstyle and attire and just completely fuck up everything else about their appearance which is the vast majority.

Does somebodies body language make you feel welcome, comfortable and confident? Do they make eye-contact? Do they make you feel interesting and beautiful?

I am yet to come across a person who is so physically arousing I can forgive their other defects in personality.

You can become wealthy enough that you can treat people obliged to treat with you like shit, but... why? I don't think you can be attractive enough that people can overlook how you treat people, nobody you'd want to attract anyway.

Which makes me think, in any given room beauty shouldn't be some pie to be divided up by it's occupants. It isn't about taking out the competition, it's about bringing a platter of beauty to share.

Somebody truly beautiful builds confidence, and confidence makes people more beautiful. Few people look better frowning than smiling. People look better yet laughing. Beautiful people make others feel better not worse.

Intelligence

2011-07-31T20:17:00.000-07:00

This is the one in my series of ten that I have been most dreading. I have one to come on Beauty that has a similar problem, that is a brand identity problem as an attribute to be attracted to and to cherish. But at least with Beauty the thinking individual can see a vocal body of protesters out there contending the traditional interpretation.

But intelligence? Fewer buck the conventional interpretation of intelligence and many carry around the preconception that if I were to say 'I find intelligence attractive' they would think of being good at maths and debating and school and shit.

Alternatively people would also find this statement the conventional 'lip-service' treatment of intelligence, one of those qualities you miraculously find wherever you happen to want to find it. If the girl is hot, she is suddenly also intelligent, and has a big pair of 'personalities'.

So fuck that, fuck that shit. Under either convention I don't find intelligence attractive (but do find hot girls hot). But rather than say what intelligence isn't let me say what it is with some distinctions and then all these below, what follows I find attractive, if you are capable of putting them in a gift hamper in your mind and calling it intelligence then I guess I would find that attractive.

So firstly, there's the smart kind of dumb and the dumb kind of smart. A lot of people that make me hesitate most when describing intelligence as desirable are the smart kind of dumb. They have extensive vocabularies, are often informed of topical events and capable of useful work. Yet they tend towards having a lot of faith in 'intellectual-constructs' that don't really exist.

The dumb kind of smart for example, take as an article of faith things like 'what's good for business is good for everyone.' and 'these rules were designed to protect us.' and even 'religion does more harm than good.' and 'schools are educational.' that sort of thing. They are often well adapted to their present environment having landed there through near darwinian natural selection, but like a dinosaur, even while being perfectly suited to their current environment have a brain the size of a walnut that is incapable of the ability to imagine an ice age, or adapt to any dramatic changes.

Unattractive, by contrast the smart kind of dumb, the archetype idealised in movies like 'Forrest Gump' don't really need to know anything specific, are not particularly invested in any idea or way of life yet show remarkable wisdom and an ability to surprise that facilitates the much more attractive quality of 'humor'.

One of the most attractive people in the world to me thought that if I left the fan on at night all the oxygen in my room would be eaten and I'd die and that if my fever reached over 100 degrees my sperm would die forever and I'd be unable to have children. The dubious medical knowledge was hilarious and relatively unimportant (neither I nor my future children have died yet) but she is one of the most intelligent people I know, whom I would readily go to for advice on numerous topics.

For one thing, I am attracted to people who posess critical thought and a healthy dose of skepticism, that can entertain the possibility that their knowledge is incomplete, that they are able to be surprised. They need not be obsessively so, like on the point of some mental breakdown wondering how to truly be skepticle about skepticism, it is more the attitude that they operate on assumptions much of the time not real knowledge. They don't get offended when the stark truth of reality crushes some belief of their's underfoot.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. ~ Mark Twain

I have been told that I often comport myself with much epistemic arrogance, or at least don't show enough epistemic humility, I blame it as a hangover from debating which teaches you to speak authoritatively on subjects you know nothing about - but this was told to me by people who show a great degree of epistemic humility, and these are people I would describe as the elusive and rare 'smart kind of smart'. This humility as regards ones own knowledge (epistemic is the shmancy greek word for knowledge) is an attractive quality to possess.

Another trait that is intelligent is simple curiosity if for no other reason than curious people tend to find you interesting. Think of the last party you were at where you were talking to somebody with an occupation completely at odds with your own (or perhaps the appropriate term is 'irrelevant'?) that really grilled you on the nature of your profession, what you enjoy, what the challenges are etc. You liked them didn't you. You were flattered by their fascination. You found it easy to suddenly talk about how fascinating it is to try and find an open source program that can be adapted to ship unique warehouse items without RDI tags.

I'm told I am bad at flirtation, largely because my mindset is 'what's the point' I had an incident with Shonesy at a chinese restaurant where a girl I let out from the table our party was blocking was flirting with me and my witty banter. But I was all like 'alright, goodbye' with my back to her. Thinking that was nice, but you never pick up anyone who is leaving the restaurant you are still eating at. (which in the spirit of epistemic humility probably isn't true) And Shona told me off, I was like 'what's the point? I'm not going to pick her up?' and Shona rightly pointed out that that's not the point. If someone is flirting you flirt back, even when nothings going to happen.

Curiously and inconsistently, I am always interested in other people's work, even if it has nothing in common with mine. I love talking with people about their field of expertise. I don't go 'what's the point? I'll never have to weld boilers.' as a devotee of Heiho (the shmancy Japanese word Musashi uses to describe 'the way') my knowledge is largely generalised and analogous and I'm always looking for new ways to connect ideas and convince myself that the premis of heiho: by truly knowing one thing, you know all things, is true or at least plausible.

So curiosity and skepticism I find attractive, even from illiterate and inarticulate people. But there is a third aspect in the tri-force of what I would call 'intelligence' if it were to be interpreted the same way by everyone else that like Link's courage perhaps overcomes the other two -

Reason, and specifically a persons ability to learn. It is the most attractive aspect of intelligence, it's something ideally you would want not just in everyone you've ever met, but everyone you haven't met as well. Reason is attractive because it allows one to adapt their behaviour, it makes a person capable of change, it is the very opposite of the walnut-brained dinosaur. These people are worth giving a second, third, fourth and fifth chance.

People capable of employing reason, to overcome their emotional brain when it is letting them down, these people can entertain hypothesis, project them into the future and learn from the deviations (mistakes) they make. If past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour, people who can give over to their rational mind and overcome their fears, addictions, misconceptions, assumptions etc. are the most capable of surprising us and delighting us.

This, this tri-force of skepticism, curiosity and reason - that's what intellgence should mean in your mind but doesn't. We confuse the details with the picture. Intelligence is an approach rather than a body of knowledge, if they have the bookshelf and the means to stack it, I care little about the poxyness of the current collection.

Humour

2011-07-27T18:02:00.000-07:00

Your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand. ~ Mark Twain

To me a persons ability to laugh and make me laugh is so obviously attractive it barely needs to be extrapolated upon.

Did you know children are naturally drawn to adults who will tickle them?

Probably the one great force that threatens us most often throughout our lives, threatening to crush us into our graves is boredom. But when you are in the presence of somebody funny, the most dreary godforsaken shit hole can be fun.

I didn't even know I had a 'type' until I was already 18, that was when I dated the first girl that made me laugh. I fell in love with her so quickly, she called me up to ask me out and then I asked where we should go out to. She said 'The Pancake Parlour?' and that was it.

She called the remote control 'the travolta' and acted if it made sense, and her peadophile name was 'Mrs. Bubbles' which may seem disturbing, but we lived in Ballarat and you never know when you'll need one of these things for a job interview.

Then there's people who just appreciate humour. One girl I loved made me truly laugh only a handful of times in the 3 years we dated. One involved her impersonation of a Cornish woman, you would have had to be there. But still it was good to just sit around in the mornings watching cartoons, and homestar runner and we still share a mutual appreciation of the innocent childish humour that populates the better offerings of TV and the internet.

I don't find myself funny as a general rule. It's impossible like tickling yourself but I have picked up older pieces of my writing and glimpsed what other people seem to see in me - 'a magnificent douchebag' maybe. But being able to make somebody else laugh, I mean we are surrounded by sultry come hither looking models on pages of glossy magazines, it is not the look I enjoy evoking most, it is not the look that I find most attractive. Laughter is.

And having said all that could be said on this topic without going into a very, very white analysis, there is nothing so important to me in seeking a potential partner than their effortless ability to make me laugh.

Honesty

2011-07-25T17:51:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I should have clarified earlier that I don't hold myself up as a paragon of any of these qualities I've been writing about, I do aspire to have them though. For example my views on religion often bring me into the sphere of intolerence, as with my views on economics and finance, my kindness I feel is nurtured rather than my nature and a relatively recent development of the past 5-6 years. But honesty - this I feel I can say is part of my nature and something that I (often painfully) beholden myself too.

And I find it attractive too. I find dishonesty unattractive, confusing and upsetting. I do talk a lot of shit, for example I often grossly misrepresent Ballarat's character as my home town, being a place where white folk marry their cousins, brush their hair with a fork and 'chaw tabacco. Whereas Ballarat in reality is a beautiful mono-cultured town more akin to an Eastern Suburb of Melbourne than a set of Deliverence.

So hypocritically, I tell tall tales all the time. But honesty for me is about maintaining the essential integrity where it counts.

Genetically I owe my very existence to my ancestors and for better or worse every coupling that preceded the birth of my parents created the opportunity for me to be alive, but as it's told my maternal Grandfather when courting my Grandmother promised her diamonds and pearls and all manner of luxuries he could never deliver to win her hand in marriage. Once one he slapped her on his wedding night and told her he was the boss, and thus my mother grew up in a miserable and disfunctional household thanks to a time and place where to accept somebodies misrepresentation of themselves was an intractable error that severely reduced my Grandmothers quality of life for some half a century.

But the genes at least can recover and I grew up in a happy home. But my Grandfather's attempt to make a lie of himself probably still effects me even though he is a distant stranger of time to me and subsequently the one time I proposed to somebody I made sure I fairly represented that I have nothing, and can't guaruntee I'll have any more. (She said no, but probably not because of that and reasons more cultural/geographic in nature her own father was a house husband - that's the life for me, alas).

Similarly looking outwards I was fortunate to be born with a straightforward sexual preference, and given the tragic intolerence of the world was not presented with probably the most justifiable reason for living a lie across the developed world. I used to feel insulted by closeted homosexuals, bisexuals etc. as far as I felt I could know better their sexuality than they did (which sometimes was possibly true) and it was a long overdue lesson that the feelings of a liberal snob like me are insignificant compared with the consequences of staying in the closet or coming out to a person's relationship with their parents.

My personal values, and if I had a personal choice - the threat of disownment that might serve to keep me in the closet would be pointless, if my family couldn't live with me as I was and expect me to live a convenient lie for them, they were disowning me anyway. Of course their are concerns that are practical as well... but any lie is a problem, it needs to be fed in order to be maintained.

This is equally so for lying about your capabilities or qualifications in your job interview, or about your interest in cars for the sake of a friendship, or about taking a sick day. Honesty simultaneously makes life more effortless and harder.

There is something fundamentally courageous about honesty, being willing to lose a job rather than promise something you can't deliver, or lose your parents rather than restrict your social and sexual preferences, or lose a friendship rather than lie about the nature of it. And it's hard, it exacts a toll financially, physically and emotionally.

But the decision making is easy - tell the truth. I asked one of my bisexual friends whether he'd come out to his parents and how they had reacted, and he illustrated the hardships and benefits of honesty beautifully 'I have, and now that's their problem.'

I guess that is one line you need to draw with telling the truth - you are responsible for what you said. If you tell your boyfriend you don't love them anymore, you are responsible for telling them that. How they (and the world) reacts is their responsibility.

But people who show such integrity when it is hard to tell the truth shall ever be cherished by me. Honest people's words have currency - their compliments mean something, their feedback is instructive and their nature cannot be denied. You can lie about a lier, but somebody honest is hard to not accept.

Furthermore people who are honest with themselves carry the hope that they can actually change, people who lie to themselves don't inspire this optimism in me. I take the view that no matter how rosey somebodies life seems, they will have problems and in some way we are all broken by something. We are social animals and the web too intricate for any tragedy to happen in isolation.

The key difference between the friends I cherish and admire and the friends that remain mere aquantences is whether they have acknowledged themselves as broken and are trying to fix it, or whether they think the world is broken and collapsing on them.

Lastly, you can only really appreciate the value of an honest friend when you do not trust yourself.

Tolerance

2011-07-24T16:12:00.000-07:00

Okay an easy and thus potentially boring post. Let's be optimistic shall we and spice things up with an ANECDOTE!!!

So once riding shotgun in the car of a friend and boyfriend of a friend I overheard a semi-passive aggressive conversation/makings of an arguement. I being one of those blessed people whom know that people always want me to volunteer my opinion even when unasked for gave my friend (and friend's boyfriend) some advice on picking battles and giving feedback taken from management advice dispensed by manager-tools podcasts.

I recieved several opinions in return and some feedback on how relationships aren't management. To which their are many merits to this point - management is pretty unromantic, unexciting and rote. I would never advocate a relationship be 'managed' per se. Perhaps my mistake was in revealing my sources.

The manager-tools podcasts could be described by a pie-chart I can't be bothered drawing as consisting of 80% feedback the 'breakfast, lunch, dinner of champions' and given so much airplay I can't help but have the feedback model and 'behavioural' approach to relationships dominate my world view.

Why I offered the feedback model up as unsolicited advice was that it describes behaviour, and not attitudes, intentions etc. Thus it neatly removes 'judgement'.

Can you see yet, why I raise an anecdote about confusing management and relationships yet? Particularly in a post on the attractive quality of tolerance.

Early in my working suit days I had the revelation that the real first hurdle of 'management' was whether you could accept the notion that other people think differently than you do. Many are called managers in this sunburt country, few are. Again there's an importance in not confusing behaviour with titles.

And that's the essence of tolerance, it is being able to recognise that other people have different priorities, circumstances, beliefs etc and that its okay. I don't like going negative but it is easier to make a point of how unattractive intolerant people are by contrast though tolerance is a positive quality to be beheld.

One sure fire way to disenchant yourself to me is in how you treat the help, more so than any other situation that arises, when I witness people abusing a waiter (or if you are an intolerant person you may refer to this as making a 'resonable complaint') over some inconvenience I say 'never again' and have generally stuck to it. I am myself fairly non-confrontational in customer service situations, but people who abuse airline clerks, waiters, fast food employees and the like evoke a super un-sexy sense of entitlement and overinflated sense of self worth.

Intolerant people interpret slights against their honor and violations of their rights where there are none, and work up emotions in themselves that are unwarranted, who wants these people around when there is really bad news.

There is a stupidity to intolerance as well, they are the person who bleats out what we are all thinking, not in a courageous manner, but when we are stuck in line for hours feel the need to make a show of saying 'this is ridiculous'.

Enter the hero of this piece, the tolerant person. This person makes an effort to empathise, to understand and does not judge. They don't impose their internal reality on the external one. When the map doesn't match the ground, the map is wrong. These people you can productively have an argument with, because they are willing to accept that they don't know everything.

In practice tolerant people are incredibly hard to have an argument with, because they don't wrap their ego up in their position. They create a space for interpersonal movement, they remove conflict from your environment, it doesn't mean they are a pushover they just create a means by which you can give and recieve kindness.

Tolerant people are the people to go travelling with, they bend like a reed and don't snap like a twig. They can forgive a place for not meeting their expectations and go with it. They will try new dishes, eat with their hands, and take their shoes off in holy places, even if they are vested in not believing.

A tolerant person is an attractive employee, they are the ones who will notice that some folks are listeners and others are readers (think about whether your friends prefer phone calls generally or whether they prefer texts and emails) they will know that some people care about tasks and some people care about people. They will know some are boisterous and outgoing and some are reserved and observant. And they will accomodate all as much as they can.

I mean a relationship is not about 'settling' or compromise, nor should it be based on some kind of give-and-take power struggle. Like tolerance is not about overlooking the things that make somebody unpleasant to deal with. Tolerance needs it's limits, it is not passivity, it is not 'roll-over-and-tickle-my-belly' it is simply an expression of confidence that you don't need to defend and enforce your world view from a hostile world. It is a refusal to be hostile. A tolerant person generally I have observed won't tolerate intolerance. That is one battle they tend to pick.

Perhaps the best way to surmise the admirable and attractive trait of tolerance is to really look hard at the sentance: they have a sense of priorities.

That is tolerant people can sense others priorities. They will understand when somebody is berieved that that is the focus of their world, just as they won't cut in line because they can sense that everyone else has the same priority to get themselves served. Most importantly their sense of your priorities means they don't take things personally, even when they perhaps should.

Furthermore they have a sense of their own priorities. To the intolerant person I suspect their priorities are hard to rank. All priorities are one, a tolerant person can at least differentiate between their wants and needs. 'I would like the last piece of pizza but I don't really need it.'

Tolerance is subsequently easy to understand as an attractive quality in a manager, friend or partner - would you rather choose to spend time with somebody who knows they want you or with somebody who thinks they need you?

Loyalty

2011-07-21T17:05:00.000-07:00

As alluded to in the first post on Kindness, this list of values is not my own, and todays topic - Loyalty is probably one of the more contentious ones yet nevertheless hopefully is therefore ergo vis a vis of some interest to write about.

To me it's contentious because I generally don't advocate loyalty as a life plan - particularly to: organisations, disfunctional families, religious institutions, sporting teams and shitty bands.

My problem with loyalty is that often it is sold as this one way virtue - you should be loyal, a philosophy that permeates Japanese culture, devote yourself to the company/country because that's what good people do and we won't necessarily give you anything in return. It also happens to be this very manifestation of loyalty that is buffetting the countries culture currently with the advent of generational change.

Yet fundamentally loyalty is desirable, security is experience tells me an illusion, yet the optimist in me drives me to seek it somewhat. You want a relationship that is at some fundamental core, reliable and predictable. It's this brand of loyalty that kind of underpins the Classical Economists vs. Keynesian debate.

For example, classical economists being rational morons always expected prices and wages to be flexible, Keynes observed that generally people are reluctant to lower their wages or their prices - that seems a backwards step and they are trying to move forward. The Keynesian promoted reasons as to why prices (& wages) were rigid downwards (that is they can move up easily, but never down) and one of them was the fact that all people need to make some kind of plans for the future.

So rather than renegotiate the terms of our employment day to day, not knowing if we will earn tomorrow what we did today (and thus not being able to form any long term plans) we enter contracts that stipulate our hourly wages, our term of employment how often our wages will be reviewed (implicitly upwards) etc. thus enabling us to take loans, have children and other long term plans that require at least an illusion of security to take those risks.

Sticking with the economics debate analogy for one more paragraph - the Classicists do have a point though, many recessions theoretically would be easier to deal with if prices and wages and everything else were perfectly flexible, that is if we didn't look for loyalty and fairness in our institutions and employers and instead could meekly accept sacrifices for the greater good. Such flexibility is more able to deal with the inevitable change that volatile markets and unpredictable environments bring, the fundamental unpredictability that makes all security an illusion - but to draw the lines for you - just as there will ever be a debate about flexibility and security in how we structure our economy, the debate between being loyal and self-respect (or not being exploited) is an ongoing personal one we all have to answer for ourselves.

But I have to concede there is something magnificent about those who choose to be loyal, security may be an artificial intellectual construct, but we live in another one anyway - society. Both are illusions, but illusions and dreams are where the party is at. Think of people you know that are loyal, there is that lovable stupidity of optimism in loyalty, they assume their loyalty will be rewarded BUT they don't necessarily expect it. And that's courageous, another correlation, the loyal's heart is made for breaking, they trust enough to be dissappointed and exploited.

With a healthy normal level of narcissism, you can't help but love the loyal, and feel guilty at any inability to reciprocate. The people that consistently make an effort to turn up to your crappy parties even though they aren't the person you were really hoping would come. Those that allow your workplace culture to get a foothold and grow into some kind of surrogate family. Those that are simply present.

Loyal people are dear, and precious and rare and should be looked after.

Courage

2011-07-20T14:09:00.000-07:00

Ooooooooooooooooooooohh tough one. It's easier to launch into a diatribe of wht doesn't constitute courage, which I mean may be valid because I can think of plenty of contexts where courage is overused - say newspapers, sports broadcasts and the military.

A lot of currency has probably gone out of this word as hero status is bequethed on people who undertake the normal risks to be expected of their job. Some jobs contain more risks than others to be sure, but that is not really a quality of character that makes somebody attractive so much as a fetish for somebody in uniform.

So it's voluntary courage, a demonstrable ability for somebody to step out of their comfort zone and do something with no particular compulsion to do so.

Our society cannot ask the person on the street to run into a burning building on the chance somebody might be trapped inside, it can put this down as an obligation in a job description and that is a chief distinction between real courage and a tough job. An extreme distinction to be sure.

I am attracted to people who are courageous in their principals, who apologise when they are not obliged to. Who stand up for people that are unpopular to defend, who risk social scorn and embarassment to do what is right.

A simple but effective model of learning is to draw two concentric circles one within the other, the small inner circle is the comfort zone. The larger outer one is not, we learn by occupying the non-comfort zone until it becomes comfortable and then both circles expand.

And similar to kindness, courage makes life easier. I like people who stick up for themselves almost as much as I like people who stick up for others. There's no time I loath myself more than when my moral courage fails, there's no time I love a girl more than when she is telling me what I did wrong.

Just as everyone wants some kind of shelter to sleep in, somebody with courage breeds courage in me. Courageous people are good to have around, to set examples.

Furthermore like the optimist (and all these traits tend to correlate) they make things possible. No two people on earth would ever get together if one didn't have the courage to approach the other. In that way it is one of the most fundamental qualities of attraction.

Optimism

2011-07-19T17:23:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote about optimism already this month possibly. I don't know. I'm optimistic though I can revisit it again because it's in this series of ten most attractive attributes.

Pessimists are rarely dissappointed and a source of almost constant dissappointment to me. Largely because they pretty much gauruntee failure. My life recently and rapidly progressed from exciting to daunting, and I was going to have micro-meltdown when in a timely and serendipitous matter I had Mark Twain's quote shoved in my ears 'Often I have felt sad at my lack of success, but never have a I felt ashamed of trying.' this is the cold hard beauty of optimism.

Easily dismissed as unrealistic, optimism has as its price dissappointment. The fridge of my soul is stocked to overflowing with the ingredients of dissappointment and heartache, but these are also the same core ingredients of great joy and accomplishment.

It makes sense that our evolutionary history has allowed indivduals to survive that greatly overestimate their odds of success. People who opperate on the assumption that they can and will succeed carry their own kind of exciting energy, momentum that crushes dissappointment under foot.

I used to be obsessed philosophically with 'why?' until one of my more influential mentors pointed out the really exciting concept was 'how?' and my life permanantly shifted for the better in the direction of how. The mentor was Rod the training manager at my former job, and conversations with him were some of the most humbling I ever enjoyed.

That's the audacity of how, the energy that is exciting and enamouring and beautiful to be around. It springs from kindness too, for to suspend your disbelief that something can be done or not and just assume it will is one of the kindest and most reassuring things people can do.

Almost daily I encounter people who hold far more belief in my abilities than I do, and it feeds me. It makes me doubt my doubt, and if you have never had the experience of walking into somebodies office with a seemingly insurmountable problem and just had them launch into a discussion of all the options and possibilities and how to get it done, you have been missing out on the sexiness of optimism.

Then there's the simpler and more pragmatic view of being optimistic about people, it is probably the easiest thing in the world to find fault in others, to do so astutely and expect the worst. It is as such not an admirable skill.

It is more difficult to find reasons to believe in other people, to expect the most and be confident in them. I have friends that reason makes me feel that they will ultimately break my heart. There is no profit though in expecting this, so I hope for the best, I look for the signs that they will in fact turn around. I have one friend I spoke to recently that I could have written off years ago, but those qualities that first drew me to him won out in the long run and now it makes me intensely happy to see what he has done with himself.

Profit = Reward for Risk, and where risks are highest is where the profit lies. The optimist ultimately has a loveable kind of greed, an insatiable appetite for the big profits and thus ignore the collosal risks - except they aren't even.

Optimists don't take the kind of mindless risks that may hurt some body, they are more the people that humbly bet pennies to win dollars. Pessimists fearing the odds of failure tend more to bet their dollars to gain a slow trickle of pennies.

Tomorrow belongs to the dreamers, it always has. Many optimists will enjoy a steady diet of dissappointment, but this is more than counterbalanced by the sheer infectious joy of living in a world of dreams.

Kindness

2011-07-19T03:40:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to gather momentum on writing again, I'm going to write a post about 10 of the most attractive qualities people can have. It isn't my own list, but just my reflections on them.

Starting with kindness. There are many and varied views on kindness, altruism and why as social animals it seems important to us and why those who wax nostalgic about the good old days seem to feel it is short supply. I find the pursuit of genuine 'altruism' the purely selfless act a pursuit not worth bothering with. Just be kind, be kind, make an effort to be kind.

There are two broad views on kindness and generosity. Here they are in summation:

"The only true generosity is that rendered on an ingrate" these words I paraphrase from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whose book I read recently, not recent enough to remember the exact wording, and I'm too tired to go look it up. But basically this is the view of 'pure' altruism, not giving to recieve. But I have to say when I am kind to an ingrate or in a more long term sense have to dish out tough love, the kind of treatment where you have to refrain from the condescention of 'one day you'll thank me for it' I still get a satisfying sense of bemusement. I think even being nice to somebody rude, reprehensible or worse is not truly a selfless act.

The second type is garden variety altruism, it is where you do a favor to build good will and you can assume, (but not expect as granted) kindness in return.

Overarching this you can take a type of Karmic view that kindness and altruism will be rewarded through a vast web, and not necessarily directly by those aspects where you exerted your good deeds. Thus you be kind to somebody awful who doesn't appreciate it, and be rewarded by somebody else who does, for observing your efforts. Or you can be kind to somebody who does appreciate it, but cannot practically return the favor and be rewarded by somebody else who can.

I probably take the view of all three, just to be safe. But I will refrain from any further talk about being kind, generous, charitable or altruistic for the positive returns it may generate.

Fact is every interaction you have with anybody will leave you feeling either a little better or a little worse. Kindness is the conscious effort to make sure anybody who interacts with you feels better.

Because life is hard, life is fucking hard and brutal and unfair. Life has a way of stressing and burdening people who enjoy abundant material resources, our social dependance and need for interaction means no matter what company we keep we are never in control of all we care about.

But we are in control of ourselves, and we can direct our behaviour to make other people's lives easier. Where and when we find opportunities present themselves.

Take for example a bus ride from a city to a country town. You sit down next to somebody, you can pretend they aren't there, aren't a person, don't exist and absorb yourself in a book, shut out the world with head phones or just gaze out a window at the country side. Or you can acknowledge them. It doesn't require a conversation, nor much energy, nor does it come naturally to all of us. But it can be done. And it is a kindness.

Or I recall Brenton taught me in year 8 or 9, in an enlightening lesson to be kind to employees of a business. I always put my notes and coins down on the counter, the employee of McDonalds or whatever would pick them up, count them out and put them in the register. Brenton one day told me 'pick it up, and hand it to them.' and I have done so ever since. A small kindness.

Shona taught me that people are interesting, and started me on my path to learning how to actually listen (I am still in the steep part of that learning curve), unlike Brenton there was no direct incident. This was the product of years of observing. I could never get why Shona enjoyed socialising so much, always wanted to go to parties. If I suggested we catch up, inevitably it would be seized upon and hijacked into some multiple social engagement rather than one on one, as I intended. Eventually I deduced that while I could stand back and deduce whether I was interested in somebody or not (I don't mean romantically, I mean, interested-period) it was actually far more interesting to ask people what they thought of themselves. There is a disparity between what can be observed and overheard about a person, and who that person thinks they are. And no part alone makes the whole picture. Giving people a chance to speak for themselves and contribute to your impression of them again is a (not so simple) kindness.

Then there are the more obvious forms of kindness: helping somebody move house evidently makes their lives easier, less stressful and more social. Bringing cake to work makes people momentarily happier. Raising money for charity, makes people feel noticed, feel good and helps a charity. Volunteering etc.

But what is the attraction to kindness? 5+ years ago, I thought it was always obvious who I was romantically interested in - they were the only person I was nice to. It was better than being an arsehole to everybody, I guess but insufficient. The attraction to kindness for me, is that it breeds energy, it is easier to interact with somebody kind. Selfishness and other negative traits take energy, defences need to be beaten down. Kind people may be vulnerable to exploitation, but like discovering a really great hole-in-the-wall eatery, inspires in me the kind of energy to protect it from exploitation.

And everything else flows from kindness, the ability to empathise makes argument less frequent but more constructive, it builds friendships that produce diverisity and entertainment to break up the monotony of life, it generates tolerance, and honesty and patience and beauty and humour.

It makes my life easier, the more kindness I recieve. One of my early mentors that I haven't really stayed in touch with made the point 'use your friends because they are your friends. Don't make friends to use them.'

I once said to another mentor after paying for a meal one time, 'You'd be surprised at what a generous act, accepting somebody else's generosity can be.'

So be kind. It's hot.

Who am I trying to impress?

2011-06-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

One would rather have the warm tongue of a critic licking his asshole than the tongue of his spouse. It gives him a sense of validity and power. He seems to defy gravity. ~ Mike Patton

"The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers; painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail." ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There are no easy answers, or perhaps there is a whole spectrum of easy answers... in fact for my question there will be an answer certainly that is observable by my behaviour. 'Who should I try to impress?' is perhaps the most valid question, but do you ever hear anybody verbalise that? I don't know.

What? Oh yeah, the first quote by Mike Patton is one of my favorites and most memorable, in his essay 'How we eat our own young' and it's relevant, I assure you. The second one put me in this mindset from the bed of procrustes it is an aphorism I will stretch and cut like the books legendary namesake to suit my purposes.

I have a deviant-art account which has no artwork on it. I have a facebook account which has most of my recent artwork on it, and I have some webcomic pages. Having studied marketing and economics and finance and gone to a school where the year twelve art class students could be counted without taking your shoes off, my social circle consists of few practicing artists. Thus thusly, my facebook page exposes me to an audience of 'lay' people when it comes to art.

I used to think that I could be encouraged by the positive feedback I recieve and then 'graduate' onto DeviantArt an online community of artists once I was producing artwork I was happy to share with other artists. That is my personal question - should I be making art to impress people, people with jobs and money and their own distinct lives? Or shoud I be trying to impress other artists?

As John said to me when discussing our gestating-foetus of an art project "I definitely get that you need to find the balance between masturbating onstage and giving the audience the reacharound now and then." because we are pursuing a holy-grail type challenge.

That's me. I see a lot of live music over the course of a month, and look at hundreds of pieces of art every day. The question of who to impress informs how accessable our work will be. I have been trained in public speaking and presentations, and most processes (at least all the good ones) emphasize that the first step of any presentation is to identify and analyse your audience. The most recent presentation I did was preaching to the choir, and thus almost a complete waste of time. It's objective was to reassure in essence that we were still doing stuff.

But broadly speaking, before performing in any capacity you need to know who the audience is, who matters and who doesn't. Magnanimously you could say 'everybody matters' and yes they do, due to the unpredictability of life in general, but then it also depends what you are trying to achieve.

For me I adopt Seinfields attitude 'I just want to be one of those guys' for me though I'm not so sure if it's about impressing artists and performers as being accepted by them and identified with. That is what I am working towards.

At the same time researching for an exhibition sort of fills me with resentment, that it's almost obligatory that I become part of an 'artistic community' here I am at my most hippocritical. I exert a lot of energy trying to lure collaborators into becoming part of a scene, but my ego prevents me from trying to join an established one. Maybe I just need to lead, and it prevents me from following. I have to reconcile this, but not here.

I see bands though where they are sustained by gimmick, but that seems to judgemental. What they do well is perform. PERFORM. Seeing them play is not like attending a recital, which is a recitation of music, music that was composed by some of the most gifted improvisers in history now forgotten due to the formality which constrains 'classical music' which is the other extreme, still a performance but so formalised that the audience is part of the performance in a way that standing on beer stained carpet in Pony trying not to collide with a skinhead is not.

That is to say, that music aside if I was (and I will kill myself the day this actually seems like a good way to enjoy music) to draw up a scorecard, technical ability, composition, execution etc. would be criteria alongside banter, stage presence, costumes etc. That is I see bands that get some of these things right, some that get none (though this is very rare) and some that get all, and they are usually bands I have to line up at 7am to wait for a ticket vendor to open at 9am and hope my order can get processed in 30 seconds before 50,000 tickets get sold out.

The point being that performance is holistic, and in this context it is easy to distinguish between 'musicians' musicians' and I don't know how to articulate the alternative. But I have seen performances where the performer takes the attitude 'let my music speak for itself' and then literally not spoken to the audience. Sometimes, given some peoples ineptitude at banter this is appropriate, some times it actually destroys the performance. Much like watching somebody eat a snickers bar between courses at an accliamed restaurant would.

I've also been to exhibitions where I spent most of the time reading the explanatory plaques on the wall, because they were sadly more interesting than the artworks. I've also been to exhibitions where there was no explanation whatsoever. I don't know which is better, or which is which but there are elements of holistic performance even in gallary spaces and exhibition layouts.

Everything effects the impression we give, and we should tune these elements to the people we are actually trying to impress.

Who am I trying to impress? I still don't know yet. I would like to say myself, but that would be dishonest. Probably some girl.

Enough Preaching

2011-06-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

Some art, I'm looking at doing get going on some animation projects.

For some reason I like taking on lost causes. I don't think it's masochistic as such, though I do think I certainly have masochistic tendacies. But I mean there are these 'Holy Grails' out there, that just the dreaming of achieving fills me with excitement.

For example, drawing a cute girl with a prominant nose. Leonardo managed it, once and I can't be bothered inserting a picture of the sketch where he pulled it off. At any rate I feel a little defeated everytime I have to go back and erase the bridge of a girls nose in a picture to 'fix' it. It's a challange that captivates and perplexes me, because in my time I have met many beautiful women with quite defined noses.

Another is doing good animation with realistic characters. In many ways the 3D computer animation is 'catching up' with 2D because they build models with realistic proportions and it is only the past couple of years that most have realised they should go back to the simple geometric constructions of traditional 2D animation, particularly Golden Era.

But if anybody came close to pulling off that holy grail, it was Milt Kahl with his dance sequence in Disney's Sleeping Beauty. The old school Disney Animators were the fucking shit, and I've read some of them wound up living in caravans and stuff, which is a tragedy given the lasting legacy and beauty of their work.

But I mean that's what I love about Art, we've been drawing on cave walls for over 32,000 years or something and there's still all these frontiers with something as simple as putting lines on paper. Since everything in a 2D image is an illusion, as pointed out beautifully in the below Magritte painting:

The french reads 'this is not a pipe' which is true, it's a painting of a pipe.

I remember seeing maps of the world as a kid, and as was replicated in the Truman show, thinking 'man, everywhere has already been discovered.' and you know looking wistfully at history when you had frontiers of the unknown, trails to blaze and a whole 'New World' as stumbled upon by Collumbus. That's the when I wanted to be in (though not to butcher and infect indigenous populations) but just to go somewhere where you had literally no fucking idea what was over the crest of the next hill.

When I look at all the artwork I want to do, it's full of Holy Grails, and Everests that I must attempt to climb 'because it is there'. Simple things like drawing a nose on a lady, or animating somebody that is built like a real person, it is a wild and untammed country.

Decider

2011-06-26T18:31:00.000-07:00

This is no post for false modesty, in my brief working life I have recieved advancements and promotions relatively quickly and frequently.

I have in my time turned down two promotions, one recently and one many years ago. And in both cases I made the right decision.

I'm thinking about these incidents because today I decided to take my dog for a walk and read this:

"You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept." ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

I have a feeling NNT wouldn't like me, or my blog. But I do feel rich, there are times when I contemplate seeing a psychologist about money's inability to motivate me. I have read somewhere else that people enjoy being flattered even when they know they are being flattered. In a similar manner, I think many people enjoy taking a promotion without really thinking about whether it would be good firstly A) for them, B) for their career C) for the company.

The first one is distinct for the second because it is holistic, work is but a facet, an important one for life but as it starts to usurp your time outside of it you need to consider that even though my career may advance my life may be deteriorating.

The first time I turned down a promotion it was at hurdle B, and admittedly A, and probably C as well. The company needed somebody to fill the role of shipping clerk, which for an importer was pretty crucial, and the departing employee was highly valued for their expertise and intimate knowledge of a crucial excel document. (That I hope has been replaced). I was in the sales department, sales is not my natural forte (I am an introvert and find social interaction exhausting, though I've gotten better at it), and this may blow your mind, but most companies are organised in a pyramid. Slow down egghead! What's with the geometry, well if you built a highway like a pyramid it would be very ineffecient at getting people to where they want to go.

There is the lane though on this pyramid highway that goes to the top, and that lane ran through the sales department, not shipping and logistics. So while the promotion was genuine, it was a dead-end one. After that there was one more step for (logical) advancement. There were other factors as well, it takes time to build up relationships with customers. After 6 months in sales, I still recieved calls from wholesale customers that weren't aware I had replaced 'Nic' my predecessor. The sales mangers were happy with me, and shifting me after only 6 months and forcing them to have to get used to a new person was possibly not in the best interests of the company.

The point is, companies can make mistakes when offering promotions as well. In this case I think they saw an urgent, but in the long run, unimportant position to fill and felt I was the quickest fix. But really it was a job where you talk to almost nobody and quietly dick around with an excel sheet in a corner and your view is of a wall. It would have been bad for me straight out. I remember helping them for a week and it nearly crushed my soul completely. I was ill suited to the work, and the work was ill suited to me.

More recently, I was offered a promotion that for most people would be an easy decision to take it, and subsequently was difficult for me to turn down. The thing is, that I didn't need extra money, and thankless (actually that's not true, you would be amazed at how many people thank me during the course of a shift, the ratio between thank-yous to 'fuck-offs' is in excess of 100:1, I've never really thought about that before) though my job is it has its advantages. The first is that it rotates me through interactions with amazing people that in perhaps one of life's greater mysteries even a prestigious job would struggle to recreate. I don't know whether I will be sitting next to an actuary or a musician from one shift to the next and sometimes a person can literally be both.

Before I got this job I was in a slump of an existential crisis. I had no direction or structure to my life and was living off the considerable savings of my former career (where I also turned down a promotion). The primary benefit of my job is the social opportunities it provides. In the context of the actual job I do, looking at the base isness of what it is - conducting repetitive surveys it is easy to dislike. The benefits and enrichment the work environment brings my life, more broadly I find hard to ignore and thus it is hard to resent my job.

In a sad irony, working in a call center has brought me more opportunities for happiness than the supposed 'real-job' I had. I am fitter, more social, happier (whatever that means) and more relaxed than I was at 23. I am more productive and achieve more of my won goals. In my particular case I identified my own needs and found the job that suited them. The dream can't last forever, I know, but it would have ended prematurely and foolishly had I accepted a promotion that isolated me from the primary benefit I recieve.

The promotion was real, it was more pay, more responsibility, more job security etc. But I don't have my job because of the pay (I can earn more full time), the responsibilitys make it harder if not impossible to overcome alienation from my peers and the job security is false because security doesn't really exist.

These decisions I have made, and I can never really know the features of the road not taken, but the money I refused tasted delicious.

Optimism

2011-06-23T18:04:00.000-07:00

A friend at work gave me this sketchbook she'd hand made using tracing paper instead of regular paper. It has 48 pages, and I have this idea of how to fill that many pages with a coherant illustrated story.

I don't wish to give too much away but in essence it will progress from page 1 to 48 going from my shallow superficial facade into my depths and what they are and how I try to represent them visual. Like a metaphysical anatomical guide for an aspiring surgeon of the subconscious. I probably gave too much away.

Anyway of necessity I am going to have to include those aspects I don't like about myself. My negatives. I am as prone to engaging in irrational behaviour as probably everyone, and by everyone I mean 'the norm' probably not say substance abusers or peeps with actual personality disorders. The substance I do abuse is food, my diet is aweful and I probably should arrest the behavior that has me consuming my own death.

That is a negative I possess that I could get rid of and not really bat an eyelid. Sure maybe once a year I will be drawn to Sydney Roads KFC for the artistic installation it's bad service and worse food is, but I can probably live quite happily without junkfood in my regular diet.

There are other negatives though I find curious as to why I keep them, I mean I keep them suprressed, I don't act on them (any more) and in accordance with the two-dogs proverb I learned from a Daredevil comic 'There are two dogs fighting in each of us, one that hates and one that loves. Do you know which one wins the fight? The one you feed the most.' my 'bad' nature I haven't fed for years. Yet I can't bring myself to kill it, nor am I sure I can. Maybe controlling our worst behaviour is the best we can do short of a lobotomy.

But I'm in a strange looping loopness of negativity. One part of my negative nature is that I can be quite ruthless, and I have been kind of ruthless in removing negative influences in my life. And by 'remove' I mean 'not spend time with' but I'm not sure if fighting negative with negative is the right way to go.

Some clarification, by negative it is based purely on how somebody makes me feel, I don't mind if people are arseholes to me (it is literally part of my job) and I subscribe to the view of conflicting emotional states, that the most consistent state wins out. At work when I call somebody who is pissed off, I am more or less constantly in a positive frame of mind, and I find that people come up to my positive state almost 99% more often than I sink down to theirs.

The qualities I'm talking about are people that are infectiously pessimistic, selfish, angry, boring, foolish, distrustful etc. it is not just that they are in a bad mood or act annoyed when I annoy them, it is integral to their world view.

I am optimistic when it comes to people including myself. Optimism lends itself to dissappointment sure, but what of it? Finding reasons to dislike somebody is the easiest thing in the world. I am not naive enough to think that people have any difficulty finding reasons to dislike me. What is not much harder though and infinitely more rewarding is finding reasons to like and love people.

Miki taught me this, and is truly master of it. Within 10 seconds of meeting Miki you are gaurunteed to recieve some massive compliment and find yourself feeling warm and fuzzy inside. I remember her meeting my former housemate Sabine and after the usual formal introduction 'Miki, Sabine, Sabine, Miki' she turned to me and said 'Wow! you are SO lucky to have her.' Such exuberance I am unlikely to be able to pull off and sound genuine like Miki did. And certainly Miki is capable of having negative opinions of people, however she is never and I mean NEVER particularly invested in them and these are deviations in her nature that always trues towards her entrenched habit of finding reasons to like people.

And getting entranced by sentimentality is also a trap, Miki has shortcomings (that like everyone else are easy to spot) just as I do. But what I admire about her is that she also possessed a tough, ruthless core. I am starting to suspect this is the secret.

What I mean is, if you take a pessimistic view of people, 1. it's easy. 2. you expectations will almost certainly be fulfilled. Reliable people are rare, but that doesn't mean some slim minority is worthy of your optimism, people let me down, even people that I love. But what of it, I'm not going to deny them the chance to come through for me, and when people do let me down...

it's no big deal. They will have their reasons, and fundamentally - I am optimistic enough about myself to know I will survive and thrive despite let downs. That's the secret, true strength isn't erecting an impenetrable barrier of defence against harm in life, it is being open to attack and just not caring. These are the people who cannot be hurt, those who cling to the defence of pessimism I have generally found to be much better at hurting themselves than almost anybody* else could be.

*the exception of course being dictators, tyrants and sociopaths.

The Oath.

2011-06-19T20:35:00.000-07:00

Kate was the first I heard to believe in me. I heard it third hand through our mothers gossiping mouths.

She and her mother had been walking the lake and she remarked 'Tom's* going to be famous isn't he?' with as much fidelity as three people's memories can provide.

And her mother said 'Tom* is famous he is on R#$e Ar&^nd the C#rn@r.' and then Kate said 'No. I mean really famous.'

I'm not sure if fame is what I seek or something even worth aspiring to, but I took that as a faith that I was worth paying attention too.

I woke up today to my first Monday as a full time aspiring artist, the day has been mostly clerical but I did make a list a few weeks back when going through a down faze of the people that really, truly believe in me and want me to succeed.

I'm sure it's not an exhaustive list, but it is list enoough to start with and more than any individual has a right to in ten lifetimes let alone one.

The number and calibre and amazingness of the people that believe in me humbles me. I am conscious of your support and thus this is what I swear to you:

I vow I will do my all to do your faith in me justice.

From this day forth I am going to dedicate my energy to realising your belief in me. I am going to believe in myself. I believe in myself as you believe in me.

*this was what I used to be called.

Tough

2011-05-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

I drew up a list of positive and negative influences in my life. Thankfully for me and years of working at it, my list of negative influences is very very short. My list of positive influences is inexhaustibly long. So for the most part it doesn't represent a dramatic reorganising of my life.

Just before Christmas last year I had the unpleasant task of telling my mother she was borderline negative influence on my life. She had returned home with the impact of an atom bomb, I can only speak for myself but I had survivors guilt (I moved out of home for the summer) and decided the only right thing to do was address it directly. So I told her she was a borderline negative influence.

She took it well, she approached me shortly afterwards to tell me it was the single most hurtful thing she'd ever heard in her life. I gave her a hug. I didn't get upset though to see her distress, the fact was that she had well and truly picked up the 'vibe' of it anyway.

Anyway that's in the past and now is now, after 4 months back overseas my folks have returned yet again, this time for 10 days. It's pushed me to the brink of sanity. I was going through a down period anyway and am in the middle (quite literally) of completing assignments. Because they are here only a brief time I am stuck in a dilemma.

Ideally I would just be able to suck it up and wait it out. Except Janice is in my hair, I can't live like this. I can't hack it I can't take it, it's killing me. Within 6 hours of her arrival I was ready to get all Meatloaf to her Gary Bussie.

I need all my self control to study, not stop myself from telling Janice where to go. She senses the cold shoulder though (which is as good as I can manage. Emotions are hard to hide) and has an almost pathological need to confirm it is there. By asking me inane questions which in turn is more infuriating and distracting and...

and...

I have tried being direct but nice and informing her I have assignments to do and if she would kindly leave me be, get out of my hair I would appreciate it. That didn't work.

I've fallen back on passive aggressive tactics, like describing how much I appreciate unsolicited advice. That was met with unsolicited advice.

I don't know what to do, but I'm afraid I'll do something, and it won't be pretty.

Ted Talks

2011-05-27T23:26:00.000-07:00

So where's my life at right now? Let me tell you with the words of Theodore Roosevelt (See what I did there, with the title Shonesy knows what I'm talking about)

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

Death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one.

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

I have already lived and enjoyed as much life as any nine other men I have known.

In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

It may be true that he travels farthest who travels alone; but the goal thus reached is not worth reaching. And as for a life deliberately devoted to pleasure as an end — why, the greatest happiness is the happiness that comes as a by-product of striving to do what must be done, even though sorrow is met in the doing.

mmm...thematic.

...

2011-05-27T21:32:00.000-07:00

Today I went to Slutwalk, and I was thinking as I walked along 'I really should do more research into who organises these protests and what they are actually about' I specifically had in mind the 'International Draw Mohammed Day' campaign, which though I fully believe in artist freedom, freedom of speech and that no body has the right to enforce their beliefs on others with violence, it was also a platform for hate that the organisers tore down (from facebook).

So I felt a bit worried I might be turning up to a protest that was endorsing the wrong brand of feminism - the sexuality is our power - type of feminism that isn't really feminism at all but an apology for the porn industry, run largely to benefit men (Hugh Heffner comes to mind).

But it was one of the best protests I've been to. There were good speakers and no terrible ones. What was said effected me. That I think is why I go, to learn and be affected, many of the causes I supposedly support I am actually woefully ignorant on.

I also just think nobody on earth should have to endure a substandard of life, not by design anyway.

There were a lot of women there. And there's something about standing in a crowd full of women that makes it different when you hear '1 in 5 women report having been victim of some form of sexual assualt by the time the are 16.' or something like that, I'm not sure about the age but I am certain of the ratio. Anyway, it made me realise that I was in the presence and probably always am, of women who have been sexually assualted in some way.

I can think of only one time in my life I called a girl a slut, and I didn't use the words just implied it to her. I loved her, she wasn't a slut, she was a cheater that was all and unlike most victims of sexual assualt I had brought that upon myself. So I really regret even implying that, that time, and that was the only time. It hurts me to think about it, but even then I don't think I ever actually believed that such a thing actually exists.

That is to say that somehow a woman's worth is diminished by how 'promiscuous' she is, that she loses something with every partner she takes on. It doesn't make sense to me, we gain something from every partner we have in some form or another.

I think a search of this blog may also turn up a post entitled 'something something insecure sluts' but even then, that word doesn't exist, that was a description of a self destructive emotional trap. Man or woman could easily stumble into such a trap, the trap I described was an abortive pursuit of love.

Slut's not a thing, it's a fairy tale. I apologise, for what it is worth, to everybody.

Assignments

2011-05-25T19:24:00.000-07:00

I'm fucked. I'm completely fucking fucked. I'm totally fucked. I am, absolutely, fucked.

I've always claimed to never get stressed, yet I find myself now having to calm myself. But what are the symptoms if I am stressed?

I get hit with an intense wave of fatigue, I just want to give up and accept the negative consequences of my inaction feeling certain they cannot possibly be as bad as doing the work.

I look for distraction, 'productive procrastination' something to watch or read or anything that will allow me to avoid sitting down and doing the work I need to do.

Eventually I will sit up, take stock, maybe take some of the fallout on the chin, the consequences will not be so bad, I will gain a sense of purpose, of forward momentum and then just stop.

When I took my dog for a walk this morning the song my ipod was on was 'Falling to Pieces' by the time I rode home from work last night I evidently had lost all consciousness of what I was listening to.

Yet the song is entirely appropriate, my life is falling to pieces, I want it to fall to pieces, I want to get this last chunk of assignment done and out of the way.

But it is a crushing, brutal obstacle. For a subject of dubious value and a task that reflects a career path I have no desire to pursue (researching financial models) I have to reference and write and justify my point of view. These are just some of my most hated things.

And it's onerous, and complicated, and I just don't care. That's the worst part, my only motivation is to pass this subject. Every other subject I learned something from, found interesting, pleasant. This one was vague, demoralising and confusing.

It is eating my soul.

This is the melodrama I am sitting in right now, like a shallow bath that has turned cold.

Experience tells me I will sit up, pull myself together, remind myself I'm smarter than the average bear, put pen to paper get my momentum up and at the exact moment my confidence is restored I will take a break until I am stressed again.

But fuck it. I don't care. It has helped me realise what I actually care about in life, and studying the behaviour of other investors in order to try and make a profit off them is something I just don't give a flying fuck about.

There goes my hero...

2011-05-20T21:54:00.000-07:00

The calibre of people that believe in me sort of obliges me to become something. Anything less would be to injure them, and they are amazing people that unprompted seemed to come forward all at once and tell me that they believed in me.

Having said that I went to check if Takehiko had given up on Vagabond which hasn't gotten past it's 300th issue. So I went to his website to see if he had announced any definitive break on the project and found his journal of working on a commission to draw a large folding screen portrait of a famous monk for a famous temple.

have to finish by tomorrow morning.
But it's already later then expected.

There was no more time to wait. Upon viewing my painting and realizing my
own shortcomings, I was extremely angry.

That's ego. My ego is not confident and is lashing out. I can do
something better. I have no time. I don't have enough experience. Leave
me alone when I'm drawing. I really can draw better. (I don't think)
that's the right image. It's somebody's fault. It's something's fault.

...

My lack of confidence is running wild. The design is messed up. I can
see all sorts of things wrong with it. My pride is telling me that my
skill will be questioned. Won't they laugh at me? Won't it embarass me?

That's ok. This wasn't to be called skilled. People can say what they
want. I don't know the rules. I drew with my own rules. Revealing the
person behind it is all that was done. Is that the type of person he is?
But that's ok. But if I do have my own true essence, deep inside, it
will be connected to other people.

There's only a little bit left. I'm excited. There's nothing like it.
Only I can complete this painting. I can make it even better. Only I can
do it.

I call for help from my pride. There's not much time. My ego is where I
get the power to make it through times like these.

I don't need a beuatiful painting. But one that will reach people's
hearts.

I'm going to work on the painting. The answer has appeared from within
the drawing. It doesn't matter even if it doesn't look too skilled. It's
a start.

If I worked twice as hard as Takehiko Inoue and wound up half as good I would not consider my life wasted. It's such a relief to know that an artist like him goes through the exact same emotions as I do when drawing a piece.

Thus like he, and the amazing people that believe in me, I have to start believing in myself.

How to succeed?

2011-05-14T05:09:00.000-07:00

All advice is autobiographical.

My degree is coming to an end, and I have quite literally 0 motivation to even look for a job in the profession. I just look forward to having time up my sleeve after graduating that I may draw, draw and draw some more.

The best advice, the advice that works for me actually has mostly come from Jerry Seinfeld. I'm not a particular fan of observational comedy, I was a big fan of the show, but mostly for George Costanza. Nevertheless Seinfeld has twice given the best advice I've heard in how to succeed.

A large part of what advice is right for you depends I guess on your definition of success. My definition of success is wanting to get out of bed in the morning and do your work and dreading the approach of retirement. If I could have that mindset on waking regularly I would call myself a success.

Money, fame etc don't really matter so much to me. The way I figure it, we are going to spend most of our waking hours in life at work, if you can enjoy most of your time in life (by enjoying what you do) then you don't really need much else.

Seinfeld first articulated this for me in his documentary 'Comedian' where he came into contact with Andy Orr the young aspiring comedian the documentary also followed. Andy was telling Jerry he was starting to question his career choice when he saw all his friends getting married and buying houses and stuff. Jerry couldn't believe it and told the story of some 'Big Band' group that were flying to a gig somewhere in winter and their plane was forced to land out of town in a snow covered field. The band dressed up in tuxedos had to tramp through the snow to the road and try and hitch a lift to their gig in the freezing cold. On the way soaking wet and freezing they passed this farmstead and looked in the window, there they saw a man with a beautiful wife in this Rockwellian scene cooking up a big family meal for their kids in their nice warm home and one of the band members commented 'man, how do people live like this?'

That's an anecdote I'll probably take to the grave. For me when I realised I want to draw, I also realised that to pursue any other path is moot. I cannot be happy, I could have a pleasant, comfortable life, but I can't be happy. Spreadsheets will never excite me the way drawing does. A nice home will not be enough consolation for having to leave it and go to a job I hate or worse find boring. Even if I love my children, I will never consider myself a proper role model if I hadn't pursued my dreams. They say 'don't have a plan B' this is generally good advice, I would only contend that you can't have a plan B.

I have described my failure in life as being a future where I have a high paying job in the finance industry. This isn't a plan b. This is failure for me. I'm not making a joke, I believe I can be well paid and a failure.

But can I be poorly compensated and a success? Here was Jerry's pearl of wisdom number two, on the HBO special 'Talking Funny' hosted by Ricky Gervais, Jerry was talking about his motivation for becoming a comedian. Specifically how after dying on stage the first time, how he got the motivation to go back. He said that he 'just wanted to be one of those guys.' He wanted to be a comedian, he wanted to associate with the group. He didn't care if he was a good or a bad one, he just wanted to identify himself as a comedian and that meant he had to perform stand up comedy.

When I look at Cheeks Galloway, Humberto Ramos, Francesco Herrara, Scottie Young, Takehiko Inoue, Eichiro Oda, Tim Sale, Bill Pressing, Matteo Scalera, Jake Parker, Alberto Ruiz, Alessandro Barbucci ... etc I just want to be one of those guys. I don't really care how good or bad I am, I just want to call myself a comic book artist. Or pin up artist, or even visual artist, illustrator.

You can make money being a 'bad' comic book artist. That is drawing one of Marvel or DC's lesser known titles and not blowing anyones mind with your artwork or style. That lifestyle would be success enough for me. Just to know I'm going to get up and draw a comic tomorrow, even if it is a contrived and poorly written 'Green Arrow' spin off series. Okay, maybe I misrepresent myself, what I mean is, so long as I'm drawing artwork to a standard I am proud of, and can live off that, that is success. I don't care if I'm not the greatest in the world, or most popular etc.

I just want to be one of those guys*.

*women can be comic artists too, they can even be phenomenal comic book artists, they just coincidently don't happen to populate the style of illustration I aspire to. I would like to be associated with women as well.

And What To Make of It

2011-05-01T21:44:00.000-07:00

Looking at the crowds gathered outside the white house triggers memories of newscoverage of Palistinians celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers back in 2001, if I were president I'd find it hard to take pride in an office bestowed upon me by a people who rejoice in death whoever they are.
Another pointless war where two sides expend considerable human costs to trade symbolic victories and go nowhere.
I hope it means the relative non-threat of terrorism can begin to be forgotten today.

Obama's speech was neither stirring, inspiring or moving. It was clinical, which is probably appropriate.

Miasmic Therapy

2011-04-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

An associates councilor gave them the following advice regarding friendships:

"If you use the word 'should' you probably shouldn't."

I think this is good advice, duty and obligation do not the basis of frienship make.

There is shit that eats up my time that I resent, like school assesment, that unfortunately you can't get the education (and qualification) without doing the minimum obligatory amount of assesment (which I still find onerous) but if a friendship or any relationship becomes a drag on your time and energy, betteroff alone.

Another piece of sound therapuitic advice to be plucked out of the air is this excerpt from a book I just read regarding people to avoid. I'm pretty good at avoiding the company of psychopaths and addictive personality types and the other obvious ones but this is worth taking note of as well:

"A group of people to be wary of do not fit any specific category of personality disorder. They do not, in general, seek to manipulate or disadvantage others. They are not necessarily self-absorbed or unkind, and their intentions are usually benign. And yet they are hard to be around for long. They are seldom insightful or reflective, though they may be intelligent and capable of useful work. They tend towards a loquaciousness and are not often good listeners. The quality of their thoughts combined with an irresistable need to communicate them are defining characteristics. They are fools." ~ Gordon Livingston

I am a pretty bad listener, having persisted through most of my life thinking I did listen by observing and remembering, without engaging or asking questions. Or for that matter even acknowledging people. But I try, and I shall endeavor not to be a fool.

Epiphanies in Summary

2011-04-11T17:06:00.000-07:00

These are the epiphanies that have changed my thinking and hopefully subsequent behaviour in life. Summmarised and presented in neat autobiographical order for you:

1. Parents have no idea how to be parents.

As a post grad student mixing with pre-grad students I see the same sort of behaviour. It's a trust or assumption that the academic teaching you knows what practitioners are like. For me though red flags go up when a lecturer tells me 'in a professional business report, referencing is REALLY important.' my experience tells me this is a bold faced lie. In a professional report, the executive summary and/or the accompanying presentation is important. The rest of the report is just an insurance policy, and the frequency with which real decisions are made, means that they hardly if ever get read.
Similarly it was only when I became aware that there was a great disparity in parenting styles and outcomes that I had the blinding flash of obviousness that neither of my parents had gone to school to learn how to be a parent before having my older brother. They like most parents were just winging it, their foreknowledge of parenting was from the perspective of being a child and impressionistic observations.
This epiphany both increased my admiration for my parents and simultaneously destroyed the reverence/faith I had in their ability to parent. I'm lucky my parents did a good job of parenting. This doesn't mean they are or were infallible though. There is shit they messed up. You need to hold your parents to account, and as you mature increasingly hold them to the same standard as anybody else you choose to associate with. Some parents are bad, some parents are good, the import of the epiphany is that YOU don't have to become them.

2. Other People Don't Think Like You Do.

If I had any clout in management schools I would call this the the one hurdle criteria for being a manager. Some people, and honestly the least admirable, pleasant and desirable people in my experience cling to a belief that everyone thinks the same way they do, value the same things they do and everyone else is just getting it wrong.
It liberated me from a lot of frustration, anger and viscousness to realize that some people are introverts, some people are extroverts. Some years later I learned of Jungian personality types, Myers-Briggs is probably most famous and pretty cumbersom there is also the DiSC model which is pretty user friendly.
The ability to empathise, to put yourself in somebody else's shoes removes a lot of hostility from the world. Quite literally, you realise people aren't trying to frustrate annoy or destroy you, it just doesn't occur to them that you value different things, operate a different way.
Before you can put yourself in somebody else's shoes you have to first acknowledge the fact that other people wear different shoes in the first place.
Every environment seems hostile until you understand it, like playing a video game where an obstacle at first seems insurmountable, then you figure out the sequence and it becomes easy as pie. I can't guaruntee other people will become easy as pie once you understand them, but you will become kinder and it takes the edge off.

3. You have to live with yourself.

This was really productive for me, and it actually came probably before number 2 but who cares. I had 5 years where I was single for 2 months. I had had one girlfriend for the last 3 years of that period and then she dumped me. For the first time in my adult life I was confronted with myself and I didn't like it.
Thus I had to learn to be kind to myself, proud of myself and like myself. I actually made a conscious decision not to reenter a relationship until I had learned to do all these things. It took a lot of effort and I had to do a lot of stuff. But I did it, had another relationship and it was much better because of it. Instead of being a draining parasitical partner, I actually brought stuff to that table. I think the relationship was mutually beneficial and enjoyable. It still ended, but it was fun.

4. The Answer is not another person.

This had the same catalyst as above, but really broadly speaking, everyone is broken in some way. Everyone is messed up. Nobody is 'normal' it just doesn't happen. The people in life that have their shit together are the ones that realise something is broken and make an effort to fix it, and fix it themselves.
What I had been doing wrong was using other people to try and validate me and give me esteem. I eventually learned that self-esteem needs to be generated by me and is actually sustainable.

5. Truth is external and robust.

I have recieved much feedback in my life that I come across as a know-all. The incidence hopefully has been dropping over the past few years.
I used to think there was some greater truth, some universal meaning I could internalise that would give me some edge over the rest of humanity. I persued knowledge, I needed to be right.
I have given up on this notion. I still have genuine intellectual curiosity, and I revere the scientific method of learning about our world. But truth is external, it is the universe itself. It does not require our belief or understanding of it to feel validated and go on existing. It is in our interests to apply our full faculties to touch on that truth where we can, and we are all part of it.
But it is simply to large to ever internalise, thus we shouldn't wrap our egos up in it. We can be wrong, it's okay. We have a perfect right not to know things. We should even be willing to doubt our own knowledge and change our minds when confronted with new evidence. If the map doesn't match the ground, the map is wrong, not the ground.
I will now back down from arguments that I adopted without much thought, the old me was trained through the questionable academic darling of debating to defend arbitrary positions to the death. That so long as people thought we were right then we would be respected. Debating is almost the opposite of a life skill.

It's not much but I'm still young.

Graffiti

2011-04-10T18:50:00.000-07:00

So I just walked through the alcove that joins two crescents near where I reside and there are a crew of workers 'cleaning up' graffiti. Known I believe in graffiti circles as 'buffing.' One of them asked if I wanted to help paint over the graffiti, and it occurred to me that I couldn't imagine a bigger waste of time and resources than cleaning graffiti.

There isn't really any good graffiti around Kew anyhows, it's at best throw-up bubble lettered outlines, and mostly just shitty tags and scrawls. But this:

1. I used to be one of those philistines that said things like 'I don't mind good graffiti, but these tags and stuff are just bad.' But then I became enlightened, or at least had a blinding flash of obviousness and realised this is the equivalent of saying 'I enjoy good music but I can't stand these kids that are just learning to play.'
That is the status quo mentality of the casual graffiti observer is to think that good graffiti is produced by the visual arts equivalent of Mozart like prodigy, they aren't. It takes dozens of shitty pieces to get your head around the tools of the trade and work out your compositions.
Thus I don't really mind bad graffiti these days, because I understand you need it to get the good graffiti. And these aspiring graffiti artists need space.

2. Robert Doyle or Ted Ballieu or one of those liberal douchebags instigated this 'initiative' of cleaning up Graffiti, and while being sure to protect Melbourne's heritage listed and tourist attracting laneways, whose pavements are beaten daily by photogrophers with little talent photographing some of Melbourne's best art, and some glued up posters by Shephard Fairey, they pushed for removal of this 'vandalism.'
I could almost guaruntee, if the genealogy was possible that every featured artist in Melbourne's famous laneways, at St Kilda Junction station etc. have some crappy bubble lettered graffiti thrown up on the side of an abandoned milkbar in Melbourne's burbs somewhere sometime.
What would be nice is if these artists in the making could do their throwups freely, and indeed on top of one anothers. To put some method to the madness of where they choose to practice their graffiti.
If I was a council douchebag, a lord mayor or otherwise I would address graffiti with a piece of policy I call 'fair game.'
This can be observed from almost any of Melbourne's metropolitan train lines - Buildings are built that have slab concrete fronting onto our field of vision. Factories and what not.
Beyond railway facades, these buildings are everywhere anyway, footpaths with sheer concrete walls, 70's mustard coloured brick faces. Footpaths cutting behind a printers shop. It costs money to build pretty, and many build ugly 'direct to public' pasta and bubble wrap factories. These low cost utilitarian ugly facades I would have declared 'fair game' meaning if somebody wants to paint on a wall the property owner didn't bother to paint themselves then they are free to do so. At no risk of incarceration or community service, indeed they need not even seek permission to render a community service.
And if it's bad graffiti people can just paint better pieces over it. If the owner demands a certain standard of graffiti they can commission an artist of their liking to do it, and once painted it would no longer be 'fair game.'

3. Today Tonight or ACA or one of those garbage news programs ran a special report on train graffiti vandals, even from the promo (I didn't watch the story) laying blame at the feet of the graffiti artists for delays to our regularly scheduled train services. To me villafying graffiti artists seems pointless. This is a design challenge.
Metro opted for corporate branding that looks like a prepackaged microsoft office theme. They kept the cream interior and geometric upholstery of connex and added a geometric corporate blue exterior to the trains. They could have decorated their trains with colours and designs that would in effect make it very hard or time consuming for a graffiti artists work to become visible. Graffiti camouflage if you will.
Or again just commission graffiti artists to acctually paint your train. That way you can ensure a certain quality and specify shit like 'don't paint over the windows.' Graffiti artists for the most part seem to respect eachother, and you don't paint over another artists work, or crews tag lightly.

That's all I have to say on that.

Impostor Syndrome

2011-04-06T17:03:00.000-07:00

The impostor syndrome, sometimes called impostor phenomenon or fraud syndrome, is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. It is not an officially recognized psychological disorder, but has been the subject of numerous books and articles by psychologists and educators. The term was coined by clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978.[1]
Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.
The impostor syndrome, in which competent people find it impossible to believe in their own competence, can be viewed as complementary to the Dunning–Kruger effect, in which incompetent people find it impossible to believe in their own incompetence

That was the most liberating thing I got out of this blog post.

I certainly suffer from this. I was talking to ah... Benjamin Beaumont yesterday about how some friend was my 'straight man' in the comedic sense and he remarked that I was his 'straight man' in the sexuality sense, but I think it's true in the comedy sense as well. Benjamin's run hasn't started on conversating (it's two months away) but in all of the runs I find myself to be the straight man. I say what is boring and predictable - to me at least.

In all honesty, I don't think this is imposter syndrome per se, I think I genuinely aren't as funny as Sarah, Benjamin and Bryce. But humour illustrates particularly well the foundations of imposter syndrome.

Humour is largely based on surprise, it is a pleasurable surprise our brain finds amusing. But when you are the author of a comment you have priveledged 'insider' information. Whatever you say or write or whatever seems quite predictable. When I think about that, and I believe it I don't really know how I can ever commit to trying to be funny - I guess over the years I have developed strong suspicions as to what I suspect other people will find funny. Curiously I also know when I've said something really obvious and not funny.

With my drawing though, I definetly have impostor syndrome. I feel like a complete fraud, again because of the priveledged information. I feel like I'm copying, stealing and impersonating other artists, even after the hours and hours of study I've put in and the leaps and bounds my style has created.

I can for example draw pretty cool pictures now with no reference material in front of me. But this still feels like stealing to me, I've internalised the reference. I can understand that if somebody was watching me draw, (a lay person, that is or non-drawer) they would think I have some skills. I probably do, but I find it hard to believe. The reason being I know exactly what the competence consists of.

I guess it's because no ability is magical. Other-worldy. When you are good at something it feels ordinary, the precise opposite of special. Straight forward and logical and consistent. It feels natural, whereas those 'real' artists you believe to be actually competent execute in a way that seems supernatural to you.

So is it any wonder I feel like a fraud. That I am not yet a 'real' artist? I guess I just have to believe in myself, and as I have said before believe other people that think I am competent.

Pantheon

2011-04-04T21:43:00.000-07:00

Let's begin by talking about my mother. I bought Janice a book for christmas called 'All My Friends are dead.' and I read it while having dinner with the fams one night. It's a picture book and contains many funny pictures.

I liked the one of a baker that reads 'all my friends are bread' I find it especially tragic.

But then I turned to a page that had two bearded castaways sitting on a desert island.

I think it read 'All my friends are Ted.' and the other dude said something like 'thanks patrick.'

Then you flick the page and have the same image, but this time patrick is saying 'The only "ship" we need is friendship' and now Ted has his heads in his hands crying.

Sometimes an image speaks to you, and looking into Ted's cartoon desolation I felt an empathic epiphany:

This is what it would feel like to be stuck on an island with Bryce.

I immediately thought it would make for a good if odd daily comic, to just document life on a desert island with Bryce but stuck it on the backburner reason being I had twelvemoments comics to finish (still unfinished), a pile of commissions (still unfinished) and schoolwork presumably to do.

Much of the creative process though I have come to realise is just scaling a project back until it is doable.

The thing with Bryce is, that I love and hate him. I love unprofessional Bryce, 1am Bryce, Balifornian Bryce. But I can't rely on him being the Bryce that I love, so often he is the epiphany of charm and professionalism.

1am Bryce is unpredictably unpredictable. Something I cherish, someone surprising. For a long time this Bryce of the early hours of the morning that made me laugh messily into the face of Suzanne at the high school party we first made out at, was the only unpredictably unpredictable person I knew. Furthermore I thought it was a temporary state.

Time passes and I have since collected a grand total of 4 unpredictably unpredictable people I can call my friends. Furthermore I did not know such a thing could exist With Bryce I have 4.5 friends that I don't understand, can't understand and don't want to understand.

People whom I have to adopt a zen like mindset to converse with, to sway in the breeze like a suple reed rather than fight it like a brittle ah, stick.

If people can be divided into three categories: the predictably predictable, the unpredictably predictable/predictably unpredictable and unpredictably unpredictable. I feel I fall in the middle, I have tried to actively dissociate from the predictably predictable but sometimes they can at least be flattering if not surprising.

These are the people that routinely (and predictably) say: 'Man, what are you on?' to me as if I'm speaking in tongues. I fear for them as they seem to think my mind is complex and labrynthine, which to me seems consistent and rational.

But they are to me as I am to my 4.5 people whom I just don't understand, but admire. These people make me feel smaller in a good way, an inspiring way. A way that fills me with hope that universe is not as grey and drab as I fear it may be.

Somehow I roped 2.5 of them into my latest project, it is my pantheon of the highly unpredictable. I hope my 2D effigies give them the glory they deserve: lostartofconversating.wordpress.com/

Shepard Fairey VS MIC

2011-03-27T03:22:00.000-07:00

I've been taking public transport, and yes I have to say it is as bad as they say it is. Even in the eastern suburbs. But that's not what I want to bitch about today. Looking from the 109 tram windows as you leave the North Richmond station end of Victoria St heading up to Saint V's, Smith St, Brunswick St etc. somebody had plastered a section of some wall with Shepard Fairey's Andre the Giant posters. Walking down Swanston St I saw them again outside Crossroads or some other restaurant. Near the skate shop.
I'm fairly certain, but not completely certain I have seen them from the train line plastered on fences and concrete walls that back onto the tracks.

I mean I'm not really surprised, offended, or impressed by them. What makes an impression is that they seem to have appeared recently.

As in, it's 2011.

Why is anyone putting up Andre the Giant 'Obey' posters in 2011?

Shepard Fairey created the Obama 'Hope' poster for Obama's 2008 campaign, shortly afterwards it was widespread and imitated. Fairey was not exactly unknown to people 'in the know' before the Hope poster.

So what is the fucking point of putting up his now well known 'Obey' posters on the streets of Melbourne.

It just doesn't make sense to me. Why would somebody in Melbourne go out at night, spot locations and risk paltry fines to stick up somebody else's art that is already well known? It just doesn't make sense.

It only just occured to me in the writing of this, that it may be just 'viral marketing' by whoever owns the distribution rights to Shepard Fairey's Apparel, and they are trying to create brand recognition, and also treat their consumers post purchase cognitive dissonance by convincing them that their apparel is cutting edge underground street art.

But that kind of ruins my hypothesis and gripe. My hypothesis was that somebody actually thinks it is a cool idea to print out Shepard Fairy poster's on mass and glue them up in primo locations around Melbourne. That this person somehow thinks they are enriching the underground art scene by doing so.

This is the full extent to which I would ever concede they have a point: My art teacher in high school Vicky, on her first class with me informed myself (and every other student) that the art by students had been taken down and replaced with good art because we needed a certain quality of art to inspire us and make us strive to achieve more. Shepard Fairy certainly is a good artist, his work deserves to be displayed somewhere.

But consider MIC. If you live in my town you know his work. This is his work:

Indeed when I first learned the artist's Moniker I remember reading that you really need to travel all of Melbourne's trainlines to appreciate how extensive and prolific his work is. You can see his faces on the Upfield line, the Glen Waverley Line, at St Kilda Junction, the Epping Line, The Belgrave, Lillydale lines, pretty much everywhere you go in Melbourne, you will see MIC's faces somewhere.

I am concerned some idiot will plaster over these individually hand painted local artists' work with a mass printed 'OBEY' poster.

I have written before about the ever increasing fidelity of trends through globalisation. And atrguably that post is more interesting than this one. You can read it here.

So rather than rehashing my explanation of how it works, scalability and stuff I thought I would expand upon my problem with it.

There is something unrespectable about the cringing servility of saying 'Melbourne is a backwater, New York is cool. We should cover Melbourne's streets with images of New York.' Like it is just plain pathetic.

Certainly I buy all my clothes from Dr. Jays and wear african beads. But that's different. Black People are much cooler than white people. Art is something else all together.

MIC and Shepard Fairey are almost opposite ends of the spectrum. MIC is relatively anonymous, he recycles and scavanges all his paints and painting materials and paints each of his faces individually in an almost obsessive compulsive manner. Shepard Fairey is not anonymous, I don't know how he creates his original images, but he then just prints them onto desired medium and then pastes or sticks them up. Each a carbon copy of the next.

The prolific spread of MIC's faces, given that they are all unique is impressive. The prolific spread of Fairey's Andre the Giant 'Obey' stickers is not. Shepard Fairey is a talented artist. But he doesn't need more space, to invade our public spaces like Windsor Smith shoe billboards furthermore, I don't understand why space in Melbourne's heritage listed Graffiti laneways has been dedicated to his posters:

Go see them and appreciate, just how unimpressive they are pasted up next to beautiful unique hand painted murals that sorround them. That visual experience is probably the best counter-argument I could produce. You would realise that you don't need to be in one of these fashion capitals like New York, Paris, London or Tokyo to produce something new and quality. You could be in Chadstone for example and still produce great art.

I have said before, it was no accident that Florence produced Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Botticelli (and yes, Donatello) it wasn't some random coalescing of the stars. Florence simply decided to support it's local artists, and with that support and public space and funding, it produced at least two of the greatest artists ever to have walked the earth. They two were not immune from globalisation or derivation, the Renaissance was a return in many ways to greek and roman classicism.

What they didn't do was take prestige space like the Plaza where David stood, and fill it with copies of Greek Sculpture. Case in point, Shepard Fairey resides in Los Angeles and was trained in Rhode Island. He wasn't part of the New York street scene in actuality. When you are talking about one of the most reproduced artists coming out of America's smallest state, you may as well believe Melbourne is capable of producing good artists too.

But really the finger has to be squarely pointed at the artists themselves. MIC does his own thing, my concern is with the peeps sticking up the Obey posters. Do you really think you are ever going to achieve your own great work of art, by hanging pictures on walls for other artists. Pick up your paints, your sharpie, your own feces whatever and make something. Quit trying to import a street scene, be the street scene.

Why We Buy Property

2011-03-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

Good news! I dislocated my shoulder which means I can't draw for a while and shall have to return to my lazy love of writing.

I have plans, big plans of writing a letter to my university that will change the very nature of education, and so today I thought I'd write about one section of it as sort of a first draft. There's so many concepts I don't know how they will all fit together yet.

My university like many others has adopted a practical bent, the focus of it's course structure, subjects, assesment etc is all geared towards preparing us for work. 'This is something you can use.' one will often hear of an assignment, a formula, blah blah blah.

I have graduated and worked once, my experience is that the soft skills (communication, reason, curiosity, feedback, time management etc.) are what gave me the biggest practical advantage, the hard skills (multiple linear regression, integrated marketing communication, gap theory of customer service, om's retail gravity law etc.) range between useless to a graduate or easy to learn on the job if they are necessary.

Whilst many institutions competing in a global education market have stressed practice over theory (at least in their marketing materials) I think (and this may be contentious) that having a strong theoretical or philosophical underpinning is actually the most practical thing a student can graduate with.

In simpler language, universities are now emphasising the HOW at the expense of the WHY. For some reason in my first degree many lecturers would seemingly boast that 60% of marketing graduates couldn't supply a definition of 'brand equity' one of the centermost concepts of the marketing field.

I feel in economics and finance, many graduates could not furnish you with a definition of 'investment' nor could many differentiate it from 'speculation', almost none would understand 'rationalization' and few after having sat through the subjects Investment and Risk Management would be able to define risk in non statistical terms.

These four terms alone though depending on a graduates understanding of them would powerfully transform the way they practice. I personally feel that it would be worth spending a semester hammering these four terms into students heads if not integrating them into the governments educational reform to teach financial literacy to children.

To illustrate the effects of such an underlying philosophy of investment I thought I'd look at one of my favorite pet peeves - property.

Straight up is property an investment? Well that depends on what your definition of investment is, if it is something you can spend money on then yes. But that is a broad and sufficiently meaningless definition of investment, by the same definition a sandwich is an investment.

What is an investment? Well an investment is an asset you can buy that will generate some kind of income stream. Thus an investment can be a factory that produces pies, that can be sold and if profitable that 'investment' will eventually pay for itself. It can also be a share in such a factory, these investments are referred to broadly as 'equity' and your share in the business will pay you some dividend from the profits. Or it can be an assett that pays interest or some other fixed income like a bond or debenture. And yes, it can also be property that has an income stream of rent.

So it probably isn't a shocking revelation that property is in fact an investment class. This is uncontroversial, what is controversial is the suggestion that property is only an investment because it generates rent.

There is a broader definition of investment that is fuzzy, that is it is hard to differentiate between a painting as an investment and a sandwich as an investment. It is to say that something can be an investment if you expect a capital gain.

A painting has no income stream. (As opposed to a museum) but may be expected to appreciate in value. These are referred to as 'greater fool' investments, because by purchasing an 'asset' that doesn't generate any income, you are a fool. Your only hope to profit from the purchase is to sell it to a fool who is willing to pay more money for it than you foolishly did. Hence 'greater fool'.

Certainly capital appreciation exists, particularly in property, but when is it as a result of sound investment and when is it a result of greater fool investment?

Enter pricing, enter - Business Finance. Here you learn to price all manner of assets through discounting. For example you can price a bond by discounting it's income streams to net present value. You simply take the Face Value, the coupon rates, the present interest rates (or yield) throw them in a formula and determine the net present value of all future cash flows.

You can do the same (albeit more fuzzily) with Shares. The net present value of a share (the price you should pay) is the discounted value of all future income streams. You can use some constant growth dividend formula to estimate a price for a share.

NOW for some reason with shares we assume rationality amongst purchasers, that is we don't factor in 'Capital Gains' into the constant growth dividend model because we say the price of the share is always determined by the future value of all dividends. That is a share can't appreciate in price without it being a direct reflection of expected growth in future dividends.

This does not however apply to property. I don't know whether to scratch my head at the Finance fields bounded rationality or applaud them for observing what happens in practice - but if you were treating property as an investment then you could determine a price for it based on the discounted value of future income streams - rent.

So you have a property that earns 10,000 rent per year, the interest rate on government bonds gives you the current yeild, you can calculate a fair price to pay for a house based on constant growth in rental income and prevailing interest rates. You can also use a simpler method of price/earnings ratio. That is you take the price of the property and divide it by it's projected (or historical) earnings and you will come up with a ratio that will tell you how long it will take to pay for itself. That is how good an investment it is.

No examples in my, or I suspect any course have ever applied these models to property. Why not?

Enter the importance of understanding speculation. One may assume you could fail constantly in the course by saying things that earn a rebuff from the professor 'that's not investment that's speculation.' Speculation rarely if ever has been mentioned in my course and sadly usually by students.

Being generous speculation is a type of investment, but is not really investment. It's a bad type, highly risky and profoundly irrational. It has more akin to gambling than investing. It is basically disregarding the underlying investment and focusing solely on changes in price.

In the case of property it is expecting prices to increase because they have increased. Most people would know speculation as 'investing for capital gain.' You are just betting on price changes. One can speculate on stocks of course, the internet bubble was an example, people were willing to purchase companies that had Price/Earnings ratios of 600 (this means for every dollar you 'invested' you could expect to be repaid via dividends in 600 years). Phenomenally over priced. People were buying these shares not because they had 600 years to wait for pay dirt or anticipating explosive growth in the companies earnings (though they may have told themselves so) but because they thought that tomorrow somebody would come along and buy that share back off them at 700 times earnings.

Property currently works like this as an investment, that is it is heavily speculative. Few people that own property cannot furnish a reason (that is a rational reason) why their property should appreciate in capital growth. Investing is intrinsically rational. It may not always be correct, and there are certainly good and bad investments because the world is unpredictable. But it is rational, speculation is not. Speculation is blind.

If my lecturers were to start to price property, what would they do? They would probably look at the rents, but they know that this would be a purely theoretical exercise. How could they look at capital gains. They would have to say 'Okay we expect the capital gains to be 10% per year...' WHY? We of course observe this happening 'out there' all the time, which I assume is why my educators have steared clear of touching property with any of our rational, reasonable pricing models.

Certainly 'investors' 'invest' for capital growth when it comes to property. What we want to understand is why would I pay a higher price for your investment than you did? Go on, just fucking try it.

I'm going to try it rationally. That is treat it like an actual investment, so let's look at the rental income. Even if you occupy your own property, there is still rent in the form of savings. The simplest thing to do is look at the rental income stream, typically a regular cash flow that comes in on a monthly basis. Now Net Present Value is the value of ALL future cashflows, so you have to estimate basically an infinite amount of rental income.

This may sound like no price is too high for property, but you are also discounting these infinite cash flows by an infinite number of time periods making such future earnings almost worthless. The time frame compresses, but basically I would need to make some assumptions about the future growth of rent income to put a price on the property.

Now rationally, I know that if I increase rents faster than household income, I am simply going to price myself out of tenants. Just as long term a companies 'constant' dividend growth can't be larger than projected global GDP growth because then we would be anticipating the company to grow larger than the worlds economy - which is by definition impossible.

So logically rents should follow wages. We can be greedy/optimistic and assume that rent will always be some fixed percentage of household wages (eg. 30%) or we can be conservative and assume that household income will grow faster than rents. (Which is reasonable because if rents grow faster, everyone will prefer to buy their own home than rent, a landlord has to provide some value to attract customers).

So all this is so we can price our property, thus logically the price will grow in line with growth in rental income, which will grow in line or follow growth in household incomes.

Who thinks (rationally) like this? Fucking no-one that's who.

We know in practice that over the past 16 or so years, property prices have grown faster than rental income, which in turn has grown faster than household income. The only way this sequence could be rational would be if it were reasonable to anticipate some massively transformative restructuring of the Australian economy resulting in widespread sudden appreciation in household incomes and subsequent rents.

Instead we have negative gearing, that is, you buy a house. You borrow money to do so, you get some tennants. They pay you $170 per week in rent (the prevailing market rate) and you in turn pay $200 to the bank to pay off your mortgage. Which is to say in purely rational terms, some joe is giving you $170 of their wages per week to live in your house. For the priveledge of having them live there you take an additional $30 per week out of your own wages and then take all their rent and pay it to the bank.

I would not be surprised if almost all rents in Australia wound up being paid to the bank. Certainly there are cash flow positive properties (where it pays more to own the property than it costs) and these are indeed 'investment properties' But if there were no hope of somebody paying to take that property off your hands, having a negatively geared property would simply drive you bankrupt.

The equivalent would be owning a business where you had to work a second job just to keep that business afloat. Few people who owned a milk bar would keep it if they had to pay $200 a week just to stay in business. You would sell it off and get out in a heartbeat. But people do the equivalent all the time with properties.

Similarly, even if you are quite wealthy and buy a house outright for say $3 million dollars. And that property earns $24,000 per year in rent ($166 per week for a 3 bedroom home) you have a price earnings ratio of 125. That property will pay for itself in 125 years! By contrast you can buy shares in Google at 21.35 times earnings. (as at today).

As per Peter Schiff said 'you don't invest to break even, Government (US) bonds are yeilding 3-4%, if you can't earn 6-7% on rent then why bother investing.' Few people make more income from rent than they would on an online savings account. Many more through borrowing lose money.

So why do people buy property? For the capital gain. But there is no rational reason for property prices to appreciate. That is the prices don't reflect the actual income generated by the property, just an anticipation of further price rises.

Few people would have the stones to admit that they expect property prices to go up because they have gone up. That is pure irrational momentum, but that is what they do.

Enter rationalization - According to the DSM-IV, rationalization occurs "when the individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by concealing the true motivations for his or her own thoughts, actions, or feelings through the elaboration of reassuring or self serving but incorrect explanations."

That is you observe a phenomena - property prices increasing, you then furnish this phenomena with an explanation. The correct one in my belief was that banks loaned more money and people foolishly bid up the price of houses. The prevailing explanation is that Australia's population is growing faster than its supply of housing.

According to the 2006 Census data on the ABS Melbourne had 119,624 dwellings that were unoccupied. This represents 8.1% of the total housing supply of 1,471,154 dwellings. In 2001 Melbourne had 101,251 dwellings unoccupied representing 7.53% of the total housing supply of 1,344,624 dwellings. That means that between 2001 and 2006 (boom years globally) the surplus of housing actually increased. There are more empty houses now than there were before.

By contrast in the same time period the population only grew by 254 thousand people or 7% the supply of dwellings grew by 8%.

Thus the excuse/explanation/rationalization that has been popular for the past 5 years has no empirical justification. It is factually false. Australia has plenty of housing, population growth is not driving the prices, it is not a supply demand situation.

The importance of 'rationalization' to any prospective investor is crucial, in two regards. One the underpinning of almost all economic theory is in people's rational behaviour, rationalization is a topsy turvy kind of rational behaviour that is consistent but incorrect. Reason occurs when you observe an ice cube turn into a puddle, rationalization is observing a puddle and assuming an ice cube is there.

What is crucial is understanding how powerful rationalization is. The Census is the most statistically complete and reliable data available to Australians. It is available to the public for free, including journalists, business commentators, your parents, finincial advisors and government officials and yet its findings are emphatically ignored.

I observe academics that spend full time hours reading journal after journal to keep up to date on their thesis topics spout the same rationalisation of population growing faster than housing supply. I have only looked at Melbourne, but it is an Australia wide trend http://www.bubblepedia.net/tiki-index.php?page=OverbuildingByLocation

How can so many people be so wrong? People who are supposed to be experts on this very subject? The short answer is I don't really know. The longer answer is because rationalization is all pervasive and very powerful.

Every bubble requires a 'new era story' that is an explanation of why things are different 'this time' - these were arguably more credible in the internet boom of the 1990's. The prospect of conducting business electronically, where products traded where software, where you didn't have the need for warehouses anymore and some kid in his garage could concievably take on Microsoft where plausible if improbable. It is hard to disprove something purely hypothetical, particularly with the speed of technological advances in the 1990s. E-business had literally never been seen before.

Property bubbles are harder to explain, they occur almost routinely. Neo-classical economic theory, and every model of investment cant explain why somebody would buy a property with a price earnings ratio of 250 and then supplement that income with their own to pay back a bank instead of just buying a bunch of shares in Google and reinvesting the dividends.

What it really really cant do is explain that even though assuming such irrational purchases occur in the first place, why people are rewarded with capital gains, or why somebody would come and pay an even higher price to lose even more money on the same investment whilst bailing out the last fool.

Furthermore, nobody can explain that while you can shove the raw data down somebody's throat or have it so readily accessible it is routinely ignored and the converse is accepted as fact, as gospel.

How can you have the school of Economics, Finance and Marketing and have Marketers sitting across the hall who believe that 'you can't tell somebody what "everyone knows is false"' without that rubbing off on Economists that believe that people are 'rational profit maximisers.' How do they coexist?

People buy property for a number of reasons, most of them emotional and very few rational. Property is simple, physical, you can go and touch it, walk through it, inspect the carpets and survey the ceilings. The numbers, the monies are abstract, people only observe the buy price and the sale price. They don't look at the returns of the rent, the maintenance costs, the depreciation of the physical premisis, the council fees, the taxation, the mortgage repayments, the risk of vacancy. They don't notice that unlike a portfolio of shares, you sell the whole house or keep the whole house, you can't liquidate part of it.

Property is for most people a terrible investment, the best that can be said of it is that it is a forced savings account. Your actual returns will if lucky probably track inflation, some make money by timing the market right, but in the end you will probably sell it for the present day equivalent of what you bought it for just like depositing cash and withdrawing it.

But many feel it is their paths to riches, and that is where the heavily statistically laden theories of 'risk' let us students down. Risk is much broader, comprises of both chance and consequences and is somewhat more than historically observed volatility and correalation. It is even contentious as to whether statistical theory is valid at all.

But in property again to illustrate, you have prices going up, how far will they go? If the market is characterised by speculation, there's no way to tell. Put simply, if there is no reasonable explanation as to why people are paying the prices they are now, then we can have no reason to expect somebody to pay a higher price tomorrow. Rationalization steps in and seemingly fills that gap. But it is just a story nothing more. The 'causes' of the phenomena are not actually occuring. Which means you cant turn to them to make predictions about the market, what I am saying is: if Australia's population actually started shrinking tomorrow - experts wouldn't bat an eyelid and still predict growth, because they haven't been looking at the population anyway.

The prevalence of stories to explain irrational market behaviour makes property risky enough for me simply not to touch it. I don't know how long the boom will continue, because there was no reason for it to get this high in the first place. Similarly, I have no idea when it will end - because there was never any reason for it to start, why should it need a reason to finish.

But consider this: If you saw a basket dangling in mid air and you couldn't see what held it up, Would you put your baby in it? Many parents are doing exactly this when they urge their children to buy a house right now.

Climate Action

2011-03-08T00:09:00.000-08:00

This Saturday at 11am there is a Getup! organised rally in Melbourne to support government legislative action on Climate Change. It is in response to an anti 'Carbon Tax' rally organised by conservative tools.

You should go. If you are unconvinced please read on, and hopefully my writings actually persuade you to go.

Worth Getting Wrong

"In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing."

- Teddy Roosevelt.

You should go because this is a moment of decision. This is a moment of decision between doing something and doing nothing. The naysayers are opposed to doing anything, you should support doing almost anything to actually address climate change in some way.

So what if the Carbon Tax has flaws, or emission trading schemes haven't yet led to a reduction. Doing something, is what is needed. Even if in a years time it is a massive cock up, there will be something on the drawing board to go back to.

Australia does the world a disservice by doing nothing. Not only because the effects of climate change are global, but because it parasitically looks over the shoulder of governments actually actively doing something, flawed or functional to try and learn the solution whilst bringing nothing to the table. This behavior is not befitting of a nation that aspires to global significance and leadership.

The naysayers seem to feel that failure to implement the right solution is catastrophic, irreversible and a dead end in terms of learning. They urge more discussion. This is legislation, not a constitutional referendum, the oppositions dilemma is 'bogus' discussion can continue even after implementing a carbon tax, carbon trading scheme or even rationing. The only difference being that discussions occuring with some kind of action in place will be significantly more informed than discussions without climate action.

Those in opposition urge compliance to the old addage 'when all is said and done, more is said than done.'

Opposed sure, but what do they actually stand for?

Take the Kyoto Protocol. Destruction of the environment is not only rational; it's exactly what you're taught to do in college. If you take an economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market. The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody participates and therefore it's called democratic. Well, suppose that we believe what we are taught. It follows that if there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational, because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy. If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.

~ Noam Chomsky.

You should go because climate action is positive. The opposition stands FOR nothing.

What does the opposition actually stand for? Why do the feel so strongly opposed to Climate Action? Who are we protecting?

I find the anti-climate change stance disturbingly vacuous, and perplexingly passionate. But there are clear losers from the introduction of a carbon tax - polluters.

Currently there is this terminology called 'externalised costs' say I'm eating KFC, it's a pretty likely scenario. Once I'm done eating I can put my rubbish in the bin. This costs me some time, or I can leave my rubbish, my mayonaise smeared wrappers, my greasy chickenbones on the table. This costs me no time. An employee instead or an impatient future diner will clean it up for me, I've externalised this cost, shunting it onto some other individual. KFC can absorb the cost (and probably does) in its prices, because it has little recourse. Generally I clean up after myself, because it costs very little.

Currently a company can spew shit into the atmosphere with no obligations to pay the costs of cleaning it up or mitigating the consequences. They clearly lose out if they have to pay the costs of the environmental damage they are doing. Currently it is free, they don't have to account for the damage and this saving can just be factored into their profits.

Some feel the cost of paying for this pollution caused by their processes or products would be so onerous, they wouldn't actually be able to operate anymore and thus have to move jurisdictions or shut down operations.

In essence this means the oppositions argument follows thusly:

"If we had to pay for the damage we are doing, then we wouldn't be able to do the damage."

Which I would hasten to point out is exactly the same argument of those in support of climate action. I make no bones about it, I want these industries to fail and dissappear or at the very least move offshore.

How can the argument be the same for both sides and conflict arise? Let me clarify, climate change effects everybody regardless of their station in society or geographical location (although the higher above the sea level you are the better off long term). The argument breaks down to 'who pays?'

Those in opposition stand for you, you as a human individual paying, and as Chomsky alludes to - your grandchildren. People who aren't even born yet should pay for the environmental damage caused.

There is no 'nobody pays' option. There is only a choice in how we pay. One way is for the industries with direct control over polluting to pay within the framework of their business operations (basically what is being proposed) through a tax or trading scheme. Another way is to simply tax citizens directly from their pay packets whether they are emitting greenhouse gases or not, which doesn't really discourage institutionalized pollutions, (they would have externalized this cost onto society in general).

Lastly there is simply leaving through the environmental fallout of climate change in full effect, this involves mass starvation, rising sea levels, weather based natural disasters, extinction of species, the collapse of whole eco-systems and in one form or another the collapse of civilization as we know it.

There is of course a gamble involved - climate change may be a bogus science, concocted by meteorologists with far less vested interests than those opposed to climate action. Isn't there some scientific debate?

Science is not Democratic

"Whenever we are talking about facts, certain opinions must be excluded. That is what it means to have a domain of expertise."

- Sam Harris.

You should go to get yourself informed.

'Science' is a word charged with meaning. It means "an enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world." Any fact about the world that you get to have an opinion on is an unknown and as yet untestable fact. Then you are engaged in speculation.

Here is what I know and it is enough scientific knowledge to convince me that climate change is probably man made.

1. Denser materials absorb more and retain heat for longer than lighter materials. Due to thermal inertia.

2. CO2 is denser than O2. CO2 is released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels in man made activities.

3. The effects of a warmer climate are cumulative. A warmer climate will melt ice caps at an increasing rate due to the loss of a reflective surface (the polar cap) and a warmer ocean.

These three scientific facts are enough for me to accept that climate change is probably happening and the consequences are probably dire.

What is the scientific debate? And whose opinions are valid in this debate?

I'm not a meteorologist or a climatologist, neither is Tony Abbott. But amongst people who do fall within this domain of expertise there is consensus. Scientific consensus.

What this means is that it doesn't matter what Tony Abbot, Barnaby Joyce or I think as to the likelihood of climate change occuring. Climate change will or wont happen regardless of our opinion. But in terms of any climate debate, there are opinions that are simply wrong, invalid and should be excluded. These are the uninformed, misinformed and just plain stupid opinions.

Science is not democratic, we don't get to vote on whether climate change happens or not, we simply get to vote on how we pay for it.

The Risks

"Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can't afford the risk of inaction."

- Rupert Murdoch.

You should go because it's probably the right thing to do.

Being generous and presuming that the scientific community may be wrong about the consensus they have reached that climate change is occurring, consider taking action as insurance. We can pay something now to ensure that something that may occur definitely doesn't. Or we can do nothing and risk the most catastrophic and unpleasant event that could happen to our species short of a Nuclear Winter.

The costs of climate action are really for most of us, quite insignificant, relatively cheap and only increase the more we delay. By contrast the costs of climate change are really, really, really, really expensive.

Thus follow Warren Buffett's advice - don't risk something important to gain something unimportant. The savings from doing nothing are not important, and it is being suggested you risk the planet, that I feel is important.

Democracy is not scientific

"In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party. Both represent some range of business interests. In fact, they can change their positions 180 degrees, and nobody even notices. In the 1984 election, for example, there was actually an issue, which often there isn't. The issue was Keynesian growth versus fiscal conservatism. The Republicans were the party of Keynesian growth: big spending, deficits, and so on. The Democrats were the party of fiscal conservatism: watch the money supply, worry about the deficits, et cetera. Now, I didn't see a single comment pointing out that the two parties had completely reversed their traditional positions. Traditionally, the Democrats are the party of Keynesian growth, and the Republicans the party of fiscal conservatism. So doesn't it strike you that something must have happened? Well, actually, it makes sense. Both parties are essentially the same party. The only question is how coalitions of investors have shifted around on tactical issues now and then. As they do, the parties shift to opposite positions, within a narrow spectrum."

~ Noam Chomsky.

You should go because your interests are being subverted through deliberate misinformation.

Kevin Rudd lost his office trying to introduce a taxation on abnormally large profits earned by corporations with no national allegiance from the sale of irreplaceable resources they didn't create, that would redistribute that natural bounty back to the community it rightfully belongs to and invested for the benefit of future generations.

It was this community that punished him for acting in their best interests, because it didn't bother to avail itself of the facts, whether it be the fact that BHP and Rio Tinto's share prices or profits didn't suffer at all while the Super Profits Mining Tax was on the table, nor did they concern themselves that even if those profits were redistributed away from shareholders, directors are under no obligation whatsoever to distribute profits to shareholders at any time in the form of dividends and would never be as generous as the government would have been anyway. They were convinced by the $120 million dollars spent daily on ad campaigns that had little factual basis convincing them that Australia's economy would go to hell in a hand basket if they weren't entitled to keep profits in excess of 40%. (or whatever).

Conversely Tony Abbott despite having the majority of seats in the lower house was denied office by a group of independents (and one Green member) who actually demanded of him to produce a budget for his proposed spending plans. Some described this as undemocratic. They were right, because neither the press or voting public bothered to subject him and his policy to even this basic level of scrutiny.

Democracy is not scientific. One can broadcast a message that has little to no factual basis whatsoever and influence democratic outcomes.

Wretched though it is, economics is scientific. The Super Profits Mining Tax would have been more beneficial to every average Australian than the compromise Gillard agreed to. This is the case no matter what Tony Abbott or any voting individual thinks. As Sam Harris alluded, certain opinions on economic well being are simply invalid, incorrect. The personal opinions of a mining magnate will not change the facts of what is actually in your best interests, but you can let it sway you. You already have, and it didn't even need an election, just opinion polls.

The same is happening with climate change right now. Climate change is scientific, not democratic, by that I mean that its the sort of thing that will happen whether Tony Abbott or anybody else personally believes in it or not.

In the domain of science we don't get to choose what we want to believe. We can only do this in democracy.

The point Chomsky makes is this, democracy can be swayed by opinion, and the vested interests in the private sector can simply outspend the government in making sure which opinion is prevalent. They need not present an opinion that has any factual basis whatsoever.

Scientifically it is my understanding the 'debate' on climate change is 95% of meteorologists believe it is happening and man made. 5% express some doubt as to whether it is primarily man made.

Democratically speaking any debate that conflicts with the private sector will be 95% opposed media spending and 5% in favor. Your elected representatives simply cannot defend themselves against the coffers of the businesses they are attempting to regulate.

They are subverting your democracy to serve their own interests. But democracy is still by the people, if not for the people. It requires your ignorance, complacency and unwitting support.

This is a direct challenge to the functionality of your democracy, and subsequently beyond doing the right thing, a reason to support a carbon tax and go to the rally on Saturday is that it is devaluing your democratic rights.

Do the right thing.

The business of business is business.

~ Alfred P Sloan Jnr.

You should go because even if it won't work, its the right thing to do.

There is a cliche in parenting pertaining specifically to doing the right or wrong thing. 'If your friend jumped off a bridge would you do it?' it is intended to teach the child to follow their own moral compass, moral imperatives and ignore infractions by others. I have little doubt that most parents and particularly parents that describe themselves as 'conservative' would agree with me that it is wrong for a child to steal other children's property, just because other children are doing it.

Yet we gladly suspend this thinking when it comes to climate change, one of the few things that could actually result in mass starvation and potentially extinction of the human race. At the very least an end to human civilization as we know it. Here it is wrong for Australia to act on climate change, until every other country (particularly bastions of functioning democratic and humanitarian leadership China and India) follows suit.

The logic being that we will export pollution and jobs to other countries.

Firstly, I would remind people of what ACTION on CLIMATE CHANGE actually is supposed to achieve. It is supposed to achieve the cessation of activities that contribute to climate change that fall within our countries jurisdiction.

The haters of climate action though, give those employed and invested in the industry no credit and demonstrate a distinct lack of imagination. Because jobs disappear does not mean they cannot be replaced. We already subsidize a large and unprofitable automotive industry, we can easily do the same for a large, emerging technology of the future such as solar. We can employ as many people as we like in this industry because there would be demand for its output even if we gave it away, that would render real benefits upon our society (free energy).

The naysayers claim to represent business interests and the market. This is complete fucken bullshit crap. They are just lazy people who would rather carry on doing what they've always done because it is easier than change and they lack the imagination to imagine a tomorrow. They are children trying to do whatever they can get away with, and that is kind of their job. But they are not representing a more informed view of what is good for business, good for the economy and good for you.

For a more informed view of what is good for business, good for the economy and good for you, take it from Drucker who LITERALLY wrote the book on management. the following is an excerpt from the effective executive and is I feel fittingly an effective criticism of the stand against climate change based on protecting the polluters' industries:

Du Pont has been doing so much better than any other of the world's large chemical companies, largely because Du Pont abandons a product or a process before it begins to decline. It does not invest scarce resources of people or money into defending yesterday...
...the need to slough off the outworn old to make possible the productive new is universal. It is reasonably certain that we would still have stage coaches - nationalized to be sure, heavily subsidized, and with a fantastic research program to 'retrain the horse' - had there been ministries for transportation back in 1825.

~ pgs 101-102 The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker.

Sound familiar? Because it is in essence the governments plans to invest in 'clean coal' research and carbon sequestration, rather than solar. I guarantee that pretty much anybody reading this book cannot claim to understand business better than Drucker.

Consider how passionate you would feel about defending the right of your parents to feed you (an infant) cheeseburgers for dinner every night, because cooking you nutritious meals incurs an increased cost in time.

Business has no right to a market, no right to profits, no right to customers. The market is a jungle designed to chew up business and spit them out for our benefit. As a society we have no obligation to protect the value of natural deposits of coal, asbestos, oil or anything else that somebody currently makes a buck out of. The stance of the opposition is in essence the same argument that would say 'Apple should be banned from releasing the iPhone because Nokia currently makes a profit from selling the Nokia 5160'.

Industries have a responsibility to themselves and their shareholders to invest in the future, don't give up yours to protect their past.

Metal, I don't love you anymore, but we'll always be friends.

2011-03-04T17:59:00.000-08:00

Today I woke up and took the dog for a walk. It's nice. I reflexively thumbed the click-wheel of my ipohd and selected 'the roots' for my walking music. It felt like a refreshing relief for me.

I often talk up metal-crowds as the nicest crowds you will ever be a part of. Most of my encounters with metal fans are with big friendly fuzzy care-bare characters dressed in black t-shirts, denim jackets and the occasional studded accessory or chain. If I ever needed a hug at a concert at 2am I would hope I was in a metal crowd. That was my general experience.

But yesterday I discovered there are two types of metal fans. There are the aforementioned that are secure in who they are, don't care about changing trends or fashions or exerting the effort and financial commitment to following them and have found a happy dark place to call their home.

Then there are the type that are frightened, scared and angry, possibly bullied and feel ugly and possibly feel incredibly weak. Instead of addressing these issues though they cluster in a crowd of like minded people and far more aggressively than necessary say 'fuck you' to greater society.
I can only describe what it feels like, but it feels like imitation, it feels hostile and it feels pitiful. I imagine prolonged exposure would leave me full of either compassion or contempt and I hope its the former.

I guess the best analogy would be 'cornered animal', this brand of metal doesn't eminate strength but does seem dangerous. Like the whimpy kid in the trenchcoat mafia, you would never describe them as 'strong' but that doesn't mean they won't shoot you to prove a point. Like Fred Durst would probably stick a smashed glass bottle in your face if you called him a pussy, even though the conflict wasn't necessary and the action would only serve to prove that he was less than a pussy (possibly a dick).

As an artist, you often have the experience of picking up something you drew a while ago and your like 'man I drew this.' and not in a flattering sense, but this is good it means you have grown as an artist. Yesterday I saw a lot of bands I was into when I was 16 at Soundwave and some were awesome to see, others though I didn't even feel nostalgic, I just felt ... shmeh.

First and foremost Metal has gotten married. What I didn't witness yesterday but kind of felt - was the disturbingly holy matrimony between metal and christian rock. I saw Red playing on Conan and mentioned to then housemate Phil 'there's something not right about these guys... they feel... Christian.' I realise a lot of people are Christian. Most I know are Christian agnostic, never go to Church and literally don't sing about it. So what I mean about Red and what I kind of felt at Sevendust was this Gospel vibe, an incredibly shallow and unempowered emotional spectrum that says 'I'm hurting, somebody save me.'

I recall a lot, it makes me seem like a stalker most of the time, but I can't recall what I liked about bands like Sevendust, Mudhoney etc. the pre Nu Metal bands of the early to mid-90's. These weren't my favorite bands, I spent most of the time listening to Primus, FNM, RHCP, RATM, Tool and some others, but still I can't recall what if anything actually resonated with me.

But I think Metal and Gospel should get divorced, its a bad match and reflects badly on both sides of the coin.

The second matrimony is that of Punk and Metal. Sum 41 were the only recognisable punk band I checked out at Soundwave due to the schedule, and as my brother pointed out - 10 years ago they would have been the headline (I think they would have been alloted just before Blink 182) but Punk has - forgive me, somewhat died. People seem to forget pre-ok computer 90s often but the Tony Hawk days were huge, massive and I never got into the Punk Revival. The only band I could claim to truly have enjoyed from those days was Green Day whom were around long before Punk took over and are big long after (almost) all the punk acts have died.

But as Tenacious D sang in the 'Metal' you can't kill the metal. And I think that whats going on in Punk right now is trying to crossbread this genetic indestructability into itself in a desperate attempt to survive. It always seems to me that punk fans are numerous, but apparantly not numerous enough, they vocal and drumming traditions of Thrash/Death Metal seem to have particularly been misappropriated into Punk Rock. The use of double kick is profuse and the singers go off into screaming tangents. It's so metal it could hardly be called Punk, not even 'Punk Metal' as a meaningful genre.

I was looking for variety yesterday at Soundwave, and though I eventually got it, let's just say it was not to be found in the Punk Pavillion. Punk and Metal should get divorced because they are slowly suffocating each other and need the space.

Now as a snot-nosed kid I would have parochially stated that Metal drumming was some of the best, this is perhaps the biggest 'shmeh' thing for me that I experienced yesterday. It kind of started with Primus though. On Primus' discography you have two prominent drummers - Tim Alexander and Bryan 'Brain' Mantia.

Tim Alexander recorded for most of Primus' hey-day and is probably considered the 'traditional' Primus drummer. He was stadium rock style with two kick drums and a whole bunch of toms and I'm told 'very technical'. Back in the day I would have been all 'Tim Alexander is the shit'.

But getting psyched up for seeing Primus live I'd been listening to Brown and I'm not sure what changed in between now and 2000 but I was all like 'Brain is the fucken shit.' I think personality wise he was more of a fit for Primus and I have fond memories of the jerky and crap videos of early internet access days of Brain's antics posted on the primussucks website.

But I think in the same way that Southpark made the statement 'just because somethings complicated doesn't make it intelligent.' I think my easy reverence for drummers who play massive kits and play 'real fast' has dissappeared, and seeing live music probably helps because the beat is what you can dance to.

Somewhat hypocritacally this doesn't really apply to Tim Alexander so much, his beats are texturally interesting, and his return to Primus took them in a prog-rock direction that creates these sprawling rambling hypnotic sets that are head and shoulders above any other live music experience to be witnessed at Soundwave (in my opinion).

But the beats hammered furiously out by all these double kick weilding metal and punk-metal drummers are just... plain... boring. I don't get it anymore, it isn't impressive and it's no fun to be in the crowd to witness. It's just these long winded chops, and a beat you are supposed to jump up and down to but due to sheer physics you can't.

I'm sure the happy-metal fans would tell me that I was just seeing crap bands like Bullet For My Valentine, Stonesour, Sevendust and Rob Zombie with 'shmeh' drummers. And they are probably right.

My day was made though by the metal fan that yelled out between 'One Day as a Lion' numbers 'Play some real music' that relieved much tension and embarassment I had about hanging around white people. They just don't get it. Jon Theodore had a basic 5 piece drum set, made up Bonham style with one rack tom and two floors, and he just owned, schooled and fucked every other drummer there.

There is vernacular that you don't even need to describe the metal drummers - feel, groove, dance and perhaps even 'beat' but the key difference is this - the better the drummer the more you want to shift your weight from side to side in the audience and the less you want to jump directly straight up and down.

I don't want to make this a race thing, but the drummers at Good Vibes put the dance in the music, it's pretty easy to let all the Soundwave drummers wash over you impassively. Jon Theodore created so much space, this is something that now drummer of Primus Jay is pretty good at too, it is a pleasure to watch the Primus band members talk to eachother like jazz musicians through their instruments without ever losing the shape of the song. But Jay is a bit of a Tim Alexander replacement rather than having a distinct feel to him.

I no longer know where this post is going, it has become an ignorant persons discussion of drumming, but a glance at the post title tells me I should move on to the 'we'll always be friends' part.

There are metal bands that have plenty to offer, Tool and particularly Danny Carey on the drums has so much to offer and longevity as well I'm sure I will be listening to Aenima in my 50s. Sepultura with their Afro-Brazillian influences are great, again particularly for the distinctness of the drumming. Pantera tellingly are described as 'Groove-metal' and you can groove to it. Even Nu Metal can be appreciated with Irony like a bad sweater.

I will always have a fondness for metal, but like getting over an old love, you are never really aware of when it happens, but one day you just realise you don't occupy that same emotional space. I think this can only be a good commentary on my emotional constitution these days. I feel I am in no danger of being mistaken for a type 2 'Sad metal' fan, because thankfully I just can't relate to the insecurity in numbers. I lack the commitment and taste buds to be a type 1, but I don't begrudge them.

Iron Maiden were the headline at Soundwave and Iron Maiden were the crowd. I can't conclude that the crowd was in the same headspace as the band, but Iron Maiden are clearly happy guys that live securely in their own happy Iron Maiden world. They do wonderful things and you can tell are full of love for what they do and people in general. That's the kind of metal I can always be friends with, even if nothing about the band is easy on the eye - from the horrific artwork to the aged band members, they play face melters and they love it. They rock stadiums and they love it. They pack their elaborate sets into their own airplane and they love it. They love their fans, they love their sound, they love eachother.

I think that's what we all hope to achieve in life. But there are many different roads to get there, mine lies elsewhere.