NYC live

By far and away the best thing in NYC is my sister. Following her is the shit to do at night.

First though the bad news. For the foreigner unused to prices displayed not reflecting how much you will actually be required to pay, New York can be annoying. So you buy a ticket to see an internationally acclaimed artist at BB King's Steakhouse on 42nd street and think it a bargain at $28 where in Australia you would pay something like $80. You take a seat in the seated section (closest to the stage) and the table informs you the club policy is a minimum spend of $10 per set, plus you have tip 20% and your credit card charges you $3 for the transaction, so your bargain kiind of diminishes.  And even for smaller live venues, it's pretty common to have cover charge - per set eg. you don't just pay to enter the band room, but they kick you out between the support act and the headline and you have to pay to reenter, then have waiters that seek you out and inform you of $10 minimum spend rules again.

I mean if you aren't used to it, it just feels like the old scammola or false advertising. But it applies to any meal where you sit down and have a waiter, in the US's convoluted low minimum wage - social obligation to tip system. So that when you see a $16 meal on a menu, American's I'm sure read it as a $20 meal because that is what you end up paying. I find the American level of service annoying, but I have to admit, it is almost universally better than the fucking disgruntled people you are forced to deal with in Australia, it's just overbearing.

So! The NBA is just... it's just fucking incredible, and yes I may have a different impression if I had just returned from 3 weeks in Minnesotta or Cleveland or one of the small market teams, but I went to see the Nets host Celtics in Brooklyn, at a brand new stadium and it was fucking incredible, even though the Celtics lost, Rajon Rondo was out and Kevin Garnett played hardly any minutes. It is incredible. Just fucking amazing. This was 50,000 people packing out a stadium on a thursday night one month into the season. The flags were marched out, the American Idol runner up did the anthem, fireworks flew up towards the ceiling and then it was game on.

My sister and I were second row from the back, up in the nosebleeds and the only thing ubstructing our view were the tall guys incessently standing up in front of us. Which the tallest actually apologised for. Here is another downside to US live events - Americans are fucking annoying audiance members. An inability to stay in one spot, my sister and I paid $55 for our seats, which given dollar parity and wage rates in our respective countries, if I find it expensive Americans should too. But that didn't stop heaps of people from missing 3 quarters of the game and turning up after half time and often in the 4th quarter having watched the game from the refreshment stands elsewhere in the stadium. And it's always the people with seat in the fucking middle of a row that do this, so you are constantly standing up to let them pass.

But seriously, I know Melbourne hosts some 8 AFL teams, but they only play on weekends, and it's actually rare for the MCG to sell all 60,000 seats. The NBA has 30 or so teams, sells out stadiums (at 30,000 or so capacity) on the norm and plays an 80 game regular season, with best-of-seven 4 round finals series. The money, the attendees and the sheer availability of world class sport is mind blowing. And sport is fucking great, as improvisational as jazz, as emotional as a drama and community based, sport is fucking great and not the enemy of live music that say - facebook or itunes or youtube is. I would just about kill to have season tickets to an NBA team. I fucking love that game.

NOW! it was also NYC's equivalent of the comedy festival, and nobody gave a shit and you couldn't really tell it was on. Melbourne's comedy festival takes over this town when it is here, it is great, a great, great cultural event. But here's the thing. NYC doesn't need a comedy festival, unless it was a 'british comedy festival' because apart from Ricky Gervais, there's no brit-comedians really in New York. But yeah, as I just wrote, NYC doesn't need a comedy festival.

When the north-easterly hit, my sister and I braved the snow and went to the Comedy Cellar (as seen in Louise) on a wednesday night, we saw mostly Letterman-appearance comedians, but there were hosts of TV shows, SNL writers the works in the one and a bit sets we stayed for. I would compare it favorably to the comedy gala, instead of having 30 comedians though do 2-3 minutes of their safest material in what is really a promotion for their festival shows though, 8 comics did between 10 and 15 minute of material. And they were generally the Melbourne Comedy Gala standard or better, albeit all American. But it needs to be said, this was available to us during a snow storm, on a wednesday night, with no booking and a $14 cover charge plus two-item per head minimum order quanitity (plus tip for the waitress). So it's like a $25 per head night out. For a better night of comedy than the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Gala. The Comedy Cellar I presume is probably the best comedy club in NYC because Louise CK features it all the time in his HBO show, and Louise CK is the reigning best stand up comic in the world. The tables are all dotted with signs pointing out the two-item minimum purchase requirement, but also signs indicating that you do not fucking heckle the comedians. That is great, because hecklers are shit.

When my sister and I walked in, the host asked us if we wanted to sit up the front, to which I instantly replied 'I'd prefer not to' and it was a wise move, the only thing to be wary of, is that the MC that hosted between each comedian did the picking on the audience thing. And he was funny, but it would be embarassing. Still he pointed out much of what exactitudes studies - how remarkably good people are at putting on uniforms, the MC managed to pick 'Pat' who recieved most of the ridicule all night long from the MC and the comedians as a Romney voter, and my favorite was when he asked this guy 'did you enjoy vegan yoga in the village today?' and he got all pissed off and the MC said 'what you dressed that way.'

If I lived in NYC I would hit the comedy cellar like at least once a fortnight. It was fucking great, extrapolating on the quality of comedians would be approaching plaguarism, so just trust me, it is definitely one of the highlights of NYC.

As for live music, that's the tricky one, I went to jazz clubs, an 'after broadway' gay bar where the broadway actors come and sing showtunes and I guess Indie-clubs. I also went to see internationally acclaimed artists, though many of the big acts managed to time their performances around my visit, I saw Gran Wizard Theodore along with Black Sheep and ATCQ spin-off 'Evitan' at the Zulu Nation 39th anniversary concert, and that was a combo of local hip-hop show and international standard, but overwhelmingly depressing and dissappointing too. I saw Victor Wooten, who is a virtuoso Bass Player, and Ani Di Franco.

I only really have two things to say about NYC's access to big international acts. 1. It isn't much different to seeing the act in Melbourne, there is simply just far more opportunity to see said acts, in a 2 year period of living in NYC you could probably cross every 'to see before I die' performer off your list. 2. There's a 'localising effect' that is hard to describe, but the thing is that Dres is a hip-hop icon in Melbourne, but just another fucking MC in NY. Just as Q-tip suddenly has all the lustre of say Powderfinger when you are in Brooklyn, because he grew up here. Your gods become mere mortals in NYC, and I don't really know the truth of it, but the other thing is that you never quite know with an artist like Q-tip whether you are paying to see him do an actual solo performance or whether it will just be his dj-set.

Jazz though was fucking great, and it's so quintessential to the look and feel of New York, yet I suspect a fuckload of tourists (and residents) can go to NY and never here any other jazz than what a cafe plays for them. But there is certainly a lot more Jazz to be had than I suspect is in Melbourne. And here is the thing, just like I almost never go to the NGV yet will go to 2-3 museums and galleries a day in NYC, I have only been to Bennetts lane once. I have a bunch of friends who play jazz to varying degrees of avante-guardness, but I can only speculate that the $20 monday night lineup at smalls jazz club in the West Village is of a higher standard than the $30 Bennetts lane friday/saturday night line ups. But I don't know for sure because I never go to Bennetts lane or check out jazz really in my hometown.

The Stone, does avante garde jazz, and it is my kind of venue. Pitch black, $10 a set, it serves no drinks and you can just take a seat quietly in a row of fold up chairs. It would definitely be my 'go to' place for any weeknight where I faced the prospect of checking facebook at home or going out and doing something. As it turned out, I did so much this trip, I never needed to fall back on the stone. The East Village, I suspect if I had more time, would be where I spent most of my time in NY if I lived there. It has all the indie venues. And the stone, and it is dark and seedy still.

But the stone is avante garde jazz venue that has 2-sets a night every night of the year just about. And it's affordable, and has incredible musicians. I don't know what Melbourne's closest equivalent would be, but I suspect it is just something that genuinely doesn't exist, the closest perhaps is Bar-Open's Make It Up Club on tuesdays every week. But Make It Up Club stands a better than 0.5 chance that you will just see god awful noise generating crap.

The only Indie venue I got to was Arlene's Grocery, which is a very cool retrofitted Grocery store. The indie scene is the most similar to Melbourne's live music scene, the producer of the band who's album launch I stumbled into was in fact an Australian, but from the one set I saw, I really couldn't comment on NYC's indie scene, except that I don't think Indie, Alt-rock and Pop is NYC's strong point, I think the West Coast kind of owns white people music in America, with notable exceptions like the Ramones, the Drop Kick Murphy's and of course, country music, the California Bay Area up to Seattle was where America's kingdom of white rock stars where born and bread for their heyday in the 90's.

The only thing was that the band I saw played a 2 hour set. When I got to the place, there was a sign saying 'Men and Whales 9pm' and then the next act were on at 11 or something, and I thought 'well at least they are honest about their soundchecks' but the band got started at ten past 9 and played right up to 11pm. For a $10 gig in Melbourne that is unheard of, and I didn't really have the stamina to cope with it. But 'Men and Whales' I doubt will be setting the world on fire, though it was nice to fucking hear regular guitar solo's this decade and can only hope this is the next big thing to come out of the NY music scene - music where the skill is in composing and playing, rather than producing and mixing. The crowd too was annoying here.

But my rational deconstruction has to come in at some point. A couple of months ago I was walking with my friend Sarah along Smith st and she commented that 'in what other city in the world can you walk down a street and see bands playing in the window' I don't know, but Melbourne is one of the best gigging cities in the world, and for the amount of times I heard Gotye on the radio and stores and speaker systems, I suspect he is more popular there now than here, but here is the thing.

The basic human stock is the same where ever you are. I believe this. A person born in Shepparton is just as capable of being a shit hot world class jazz saxophinist, pianist, drummer etc. as one born in Buffalo New York. Greatness can come from anywhere, this too I believe. It is hard for me to knw though whether for a genre like Jazz that I don't really understand, you need a population hub as large as New York to actually support it. My same friend Sarah yesterday told me Texas has one of the world's leading Jazz schools though, so I suspect that it is also true that if you support something (as a community) it can succeed anywhere.

NY doesn't need to bread a lot of home grown talent, it's contentious yes, but not by much as to say that New York is where Hip-Hop began, I don't know where Jazz began, whether it was New Orleans, Chicago or New York, I don't know. But the vast majority of New York's great talent migrates there or is called there. There is nothing special in the water, there is simply a market.

The comedy scene is clearly robust and strong, numerous and popular enough that New York can produce world class comedians in sets of 8 three times a night in at least one club, every fucking night of the year.

But I hold that Melbourne is still an amazing city, and I resent people who claim to be bored in it. I suspect but only have the Lonely planet as my guide - that when it comes to Indie/Folk etc all the music that is similarly popular here, New York with it's population of 8 million plus has about the same number of music venues for this genre as Melbourne does with 4 million less. And the thing is, that every night in Melbourne some thousands of performers are performing, and they may not pack houses, but tens of thousands of people are out supporting them. That is fucking amazing.

Melbourne's two real drawbacks are this - most of our talent wants to be somewhere else, they aspire to hit the hubs of New York, London, Berlin etc. they want to be in the center of the action, feel unloved at home or more likely simply fetishise the offshore market, that sucks that we cant keep them here greedily and selfishly. The second being that Melbourne artists, if they don't want to move overseas, look to New York, London, Berlin etc for inspiration and to imitate, there is an inferiority complex, even though nobody is putting anything in the water that makes Grand Wizard Theodore develop scratiching techniques on the turntable, or African Americans to reinvent the way we approach english, they are simply doing it because they ARE creating rather than watching what New Yorkers will do and imitating them.

That's it. My father came out at some point with the mathematical truth that 'Success = Failure - A Good Excuse' and I think too many Melbourne artists don't appreciate this equation, the real advantage New Yorkers and Londeners have over Melbournians isn't a better scene, but the fact that they don't blame the fact that they don't live in a 'World City' for their lack of success/creativity/community support. They don't know they have an excuse to be anything less than world class (and probably a more realistic appraisal of how obtainable 'world class' is) and so they get on with the business of being world class.

The day I arrived back in Melbourne, I went to the VCA graduate show which was not up to the standard of previous years and previous exhibits I have seen there, but still any of those artists could have work purchased by the Guggenheim based on what I saw in NYC, and then that same night went to see the debut of Margeret Fulton: Queen of the Dessert, a new and frankly Broadway standard (but not broadway budget) musical developed here in Melbourne by people by and large under the age of 30.

NYC is an amazing fucking city, but so too is Melbourne, for different and perhaps less glamorous reasons, still you have no excuse to be bored, and no excuse not to succeed in this town. Could I live and work in New York?

For sure, but I think I am going to wait till New York calls me. That's what makes sense for me. It may be different for your chosen medium of creativity.

Xenophobia

I am so over it. I am so tired of hearing about, and yet it never fails to make me angry.

Our nation, Australia is still talking about boat people. An issue, that is barely worthy of anybodies attention, let alone the nation. The average Australian should be outraged that our political leadership are devoting time to the issue. The issue is there, but in scope and impact it borders on a complete non-issue.

Unless of course, you are arriving in Australia as a refugee on a boat. Then it is an issue.

But otherwise in proportion to problems boat people cause for the average Australian, boat people is not worthy of our time and attention. Certainly not the time and attention it recieves. And the costs of paying it so much attention are far more consequential than addressing the problem at hand.

Firstly, the time spent debating boat people is time not spent debating far more pressing and important issues - like the economy, environment, civil rights ... the ordinary shit that has the most impact on peoples' quality of life.

Secondly, the solutions proposed such as offshore processing - simply increase the economic costs of the problem.

Also, since we are defiance of UN conventions that we are signatory too on the rights of asylum seekers, we lower our standing and diplomatic 'soft power' in the eyes of the world.

Furthermore, these people are refugees, they are fleeing HORRIBLE FUCKED UP SHIT, the capacity of a nation like Australia to create sufficient disincentive to travel here in the face of the HORRIBLE FUCKED UP SHIT is laughable. The best (and by that I mean worst) we can do is create the horrible psychological reality of isolating refugees from their families and leaving them in limbo. I find this unnacceptable action to take on the most vulnerable people on earth, but nevertheless most refugees will suffer through such psychological torture on the sniff of a hope that they will secure a better future for their children and grand children.

So why then, is such disastrous policy so popular, why do people who will for the most part never meet or even be effected by the intake of refugees, and particularly those that arrive by boat so passionate about stopping it?

Racism. Xenophobia.

Nothing more, it will never be anything more, because the facts or reality support no other excuses to care about the prevention of boat arrivals.

It is not illegal to seek assylum, the vast majority of assylum seekers arrive by plane, and hold visas that they simply overstay, of those that arrive by boat some 98% or something are found to be legitimate refugees (which shouldn't be surprising, because it costs some $15,000 ~ $30,000 to take the boat, the boats are overcrowded and dangerous, it would take probably a decade or more for an employable refugee with Australia's living expenses to replenish those savings, repay those loans.) Australia takes in proportionately far less refugees than most other contries, there is no real or effective queue in place that boat people can be said to be 'jumping', we are signatories to the UN convention on the rights of refugees.

We as a nation, a predominately white nation, with predominantly United Kingdom based ethnic roots and highest levels of migration coming from the UK, simply unwilling to share the great unearned bounties of Australia most of which we are simply born into. Furthermore we fear some decay in moral standards, or that people fleeing war, torture and rape will bring war torture and rape with them.

War is up to the discretion of our very white leadership, as for torture and rape, well my beloved melbourne has over the past few months become somewhat famous for abducting, raping and murdering women. I say that referring to two cases, with two victims in a city with a population greater than 3 million. In both cases there was evidently little our society could do to prevent the perps from committing their heinous crimes. But our law enforcement was effecient at identifying and capturing both perpetrators (although the guilt of both is as yet to be determined by the courts).

But in both cases the accussed, the accused both look like me. Young white males. They look like me because they look like most of the community of Australia. Their physical appearance and backgrounds are far more similar to the average australian's than they are to those seeking asylum who were born on foreign shores.

And yet, while there were calls for more security cameras in public places, there were far more calls for women not to go out at night or walk themselves home along busy public streets. But nobody suggested that ASIO start monitoring the facebook activities of caucasian men between 15-50. Nobody was suggesting that officers show up at my door (or any other caucasian male) whenever their Facebook relationship status changes from 'Married' or 'In a relationship' to 'single'.

Because the Australian community knows that most dissaffected young men don't cope with their troubles by abducting and murdering women, but instead by getting drunk with their mates, looking at porno on the internet, going to the races, hooking up with other women in bars, going to stripclubs and masturbating. Those are generally the worst things most men do. And many of them seek councilling, join a gym, join a club, go travelling and other quite positive responses to their problems.

And yet we fear somebody with brown skin, bad teeth (which is entirely due to a lack of access to healthcare), beards, whom have young children of their own and who wear trousers all the time and regularly attend religious services and other community based activities of somehow harming our way of life. And we treat them like enemies as if eager that they should become them.

Yet, the person who is most likely to kill you and/or your children actually is the person you agreed to marry in a ceromony that you both these days outlayed large wads of cash to undertake. Followed by them is your father or another close relative, or relative of your spouses. And even though we know most women killed by the actions of another human being are killed by their partners, most abductors of children are known to the family, and that swimming pools kill more children than guns, and if a child is killed by a gun or other weapon the most likely weilder of that weapon will again be their parent... the thought of somebody who looks different is what causes us outrage.

The same, by the way works in reverse, the most likely person to be the victim of a crime by a refugee is a member of the refugee's immediate family, followed by members of the refugee community. In fact, the track record of mandatory detention in Australia, shows the most likely person to be harmed by a refugee is himself, protesting the inhumane treatment of Australia's detention centers.

But even when refugees come from communities where practices like forced marriage, honour killings, domestic violence, marital rape are socially accepted and perhaps even legal, and as reprehensible as we should find these practices the least likely way to discontinue them is to encourage perpatrators to return to places where the practices are legal and advised by the community.

It is far more likely that the intake of refugees into Australian society would see them adopt our societal standards and norms than the reverse.

So I'm over it, I'm fucking sick of it. We worry about the wrong things, we shouldn't be divesting any of our mental energy worrying about the impacts of boat people upon our lifestyle. It costs you more economically to buy a wedding present for your friends that will divorce within a year of the ceremony than it costs you in tax to process and resettle a refugee family.

NYC: Art Galleries

As of today I have now seen all the galleries I intend to see in New York and it's surrounds. And I have to admit, I don't go to galleries in Melbourne, just exhibition openings of local artists, I've checked out a few free exhibitions at ACMI I think, and seen about two NGV shows (Dali and Tezuka)...

I don't know, I should say upfront I kind of hate galleries > not the art on display in them, but how they are displayed and the crowds they attract > and haven't figured out how to interact with them yet. For example, I personally find information plates and other devices that offer 'intended interpretations' an usurpation of the observers role/a confession of failure by the artist. Although obviously art is necessarily undefinable as it is, art need not always communicate or engage the observers in any other way to be called art. A concept that isn't even worth struggling with, but the thing is that most artists create art with the intention of communicating or otherwise engaging an observer, they make their art to be seen/heard/interacted with. It is rare for me to come across a piece where I would say 'fair enough' on the divide between what message is apparant from the piece and what the information card/tour guide/audio guide says they are about.

BUT sometimes those cards just carry information about the place/times/history etc of the piece that put it into context and further your appreciation of the piece, or enable me to appreciate a piece that on first impression didn't.

Anyway, I elaborated on all that because the world is for all types and you can obviously discount my views on the basis of how I approach art. New York city plays host to heaps of 'Modern Art'.

There are some amazing gallaries, go find them. Or if you really intend to check them out and think my opinion valuable just ask me before you go. But you know... they are there, and New York has plenty of gallary space dedicated to modern art.

1. You don't see people sketching at galleries here like you do in Europe. This is because Modern Art is iconoclastic, not focused on the technical abilities of creating the works themselves, they are largely conceptual. Perhaps the most common reaction to modern art is 'I could do that' and that is because on a technical level - many people could, they simply don't. It's not an ignorant critique, it is intuitive.
2. Art is hard to write about, but a large part of modern art and a recurring them is that it challenges the preconceptions of what art is. Much was apparently shocking at some point. Van Gough's Starry Night may now be one of our most entrenched concepts of what art is, but when it was painted it was highly challenging because it didn't look like a classical landscape. But walking around galleries that play host to Modern Art, you never encounter 'shock' or even any bodylanguage that suggests a person is being challenged. I read far more 'good job me. I'm so progressive' body language. The art appreciation equivalent of 'oh you're gay, that's cool my uncle is gay.'
3. Another facial expression I see a lot of here is - 'is this what inspiration feels like?' that I feel is a response to overvaluing obfuscation and 'challenging' ways of representation that has progressed to the point of art being produced that's intrinsic meaning or objective has been obscured away beyond retrieval. The art is meaningless, a shape, that creates no impression and yet I pick up an 'emperors new clothes' vibe of people wishing to contemplate up meaning that simply isn't there.

Anyway, it has all been very inspiring, particularly many of the gallaries 'recent acquisitions' sections, and I am motivated to return to melbourne and produce art, perhaps even a modern-art inspired piece.

I have also seen here one of the best gallaries that I have seen anywhere in the world. Come check out NYC's galleries some time. Just take it easy when you do. It is not a test.

NYC Eating

So, I have been eating three meals a day (a novelty for me) for the past week, well pretty much as soon as I discovered the NYC marathon was cancelled, what can I say of New Yorks Food?

Well, what I can't comment on is the fine dining, I can't afford it, I can't imagine being into fine dining, I don't do fine dining back home, and frankly I don't care about fine dining here there or anywhere.

I am a man of the people.

Another limitation of gastronomical experience is coming from cuisineless Australia, thus the novelty of having Chinese, Italian, Japanese eateries at my disposal is kind of lost on me, my strongest impressions of course of course, come from the NYC specialities...

Pizza by the slice, there is nowhere I have been that does it better. It's the greatest, the fucking best thing, Manhatten is the only place, other than Japan where I am able to adopt a 'walk-and-eat' lifestyle, walk by a sandwich from the deli, walk some more buy a slice for a dollar, walk some more buy a snickers ice cream. I love this lifestyle though ultimately know it to be unsustainable.

And the deli's, NYC has a love of the preserved vegetables and the savory meats that is probably not found except in small regions of Europe and the UK, but with none of the convenience, home cooked I presume. I don't know. But that's the big thing, the pickle, mustards, the use of vinegar, the pallet is vinegar heavy here. I like it, I fucken like it. You can't really get that in Melbourne.

Here too since I don't have much time to do shit like blog, is the kicker, I know Australia hosts the least affordable land, or real estate in the world now, but I'm pretty sure Manhatten costs like $53 per square foot - rent is high. yet food, food is cheap. Pie Face is next to CBS now, I don't have high hopes for the meat pie kicking off in NYC, nor a business as shitty as pie-face, the two eating dicks said it so it must be true. But while I can't be bothered ducking in to see if pie face has preserved Melbourne's unreasonable pricing model, that shit just wouldn't fly here.

Food is cheap, I walked past Jamba Juice, which is what an Australian brought back to Australia as Boost Juice, and I bought waffles last night from a food van in the west village, I understand Melbourne has a 'Gumbo Van' or some shit, here is what I sense the all too familiar pattern is.

Australian entre-preneurs go to NY, Los Angeles, Tokyo etc to see what is on trend because ironically they are risk averse, then they bring it back to Australia and release it as sterile tasting, polished decor overpriced novelty and we lap it up.

But NYC doesn't have to compare to any Melbourne food as far as the pallet is concerned. It isn't sterile and it is cheap. Today my sister took me to the Williamsburgh food market, and while Williamsburgh is dissappointing even to me whom was expecting something bad, it is probably one of the best food markets in the world, if not ever. I had a Brisket Roll, a Vanilla Bean Shake and fucking ace doughnuts for under $15, it was all sickeningly good, and as I commented to my sister, in America expensive or cheap there is one thing you never fear here: stinginess. You will always get a decent serving. I never realised it but this is my most common fear eating in Australia, the defining criteria for a place I like or dislike.

I never fear stinginess here, I hand over my money I know I am going to get as much food as I can handle for my dollar, from the pizza slice to the 'Medium' soda at the movie, it is going to be, perhaps unreasonably large.

But food, food in our cultural heritage must above all else be generous. Maybe this generosity is only possible thanks to the economic strangulation of South America or Unsustainable Borrowing from China, but whatever the reason - that ability to be generous with a plate is what they mean when they say you can taste the freedom.

NYC streets

When I meet a woman, beyond some superficial evaluation of their physical attractiveness, I generally form my opinions as to their appeal based on the activity one would engage in most with any partner over time: conversation. I think I need less than a minute of conversation to tell whether somebody is my type or not. 

For cities it takes longer, but similarly the most important impression is made by that which I imagine will always be the activity one engages in most in any city - walking its streets.

So after a day in NYC, I haven't taken in any of the nightlife, the museums, the broadway shows, the live music, but some of the food, I have walked a lot of streets.

Could I live in New York? Yes. Do I love New York? Yes. But not as I love Melbourne, the city love of my life, in fact one of the things that impresses me most about New York, and let me be honest - Manhatten the only borrough I have spent time in (and thanks to Hurricane Sandy, the only part I am likely to), is how similar it is to Melbourne.

Firstly New York passes my two-fold test for liveability. 1 - people Jaywalk, New York may well be the birthplace of jaywalking I dunno. 2 - there is rule of law, but not zero tolerence.

In short, if you can jaywalk in front of a cop safely, then I can live there.

Now, walking the streets of NYC is pretty nice, for one thing, people talk like they are on a tv-show, or as John and Damian called it 'TV land' because we are so used to hearing people talk like this on our TVs and not in our lives. But there is another kind of musicality to New York streets again, in three city blocks today I overheard conversations in Italian and then Russian, the equivalent could happen in Melbourne by overhearing greek conversations on Lonsdale and then cutting through tattersal lane and overhearing Cantonese conversations in China town. But I get the feeling that in NYC the odds of it occuring anywhere on manhatten are much higher.

The mix is same but different, I think my friends have pointed out that where you have Asian people mixing it up in Melbourne you have African Americans breaking the white wall in NYC.

NYC is a great place to feel the downside of globalisation as well, because on the whole people in NYC dress pretty much like Melburnians, it is certainly less exciting for fashion than Japan (anywhere) and of course, people in NY aren't dressing like Melburnians, Melburnians are dressing like people in NY. Can NYC pretty much ever be different? Probably not, thought I today. Because if they adopted some new 'national dress of New York' something wild and exotic and totally different, it is just an Amazon.com shipping date away from being what people wear everywhere.

More exciting than being a tourist in New York, must be the experience of being a New York tourist, going to see the comical and strange ways people are attempting to emulate you all over the world. 

But what makes a great city great? It is almost certainly not the tourists. And what makes the locals so great? hard to say, hard to say... immigration for sure, but that can't be all there is to it. Did you know that England has no official language? It was on Qi so it must be true. And I totally understand, France needs an official language of French because French is under threat from English, but English is under threat from nothing, and so the English feel secure that no policy is needed to preserve their language for future generations.

In the same way, I feel New Yorkers must be relieved from the excuse that they don't live in New York, and thus it is easy for them to conclude that they are responsible for having a great time in their own city. But New York is also kind of just a big city, thus everything I love and hate about Melbourne is ampliphied as well. While obviously many people achieve much and create much great shit walking these streets and riding these subways and retiring to their private corners to create, there are many more that only achieve greater mediocrity in a greater city. 

I would have to have a compelling reason to come live here I think, more than my sister had. NYC is just not different enough, I mean it is totally different and yet, what is your complaint about Melbourne? Are there not enough people using laptops in starbucks? Does Swanston St simply not take long enough for you to walk down? Is the live music you don't go out to see in Melbourne too inferior to the live music you wouldn't go to see in New York? Does Federation square lack the touristy cheese that Times Square delivers?

For me, just based on walking the streets, the cuisine is for the grab and go variety of food superior to Melbourne's, but not so to Japan. Dollars go further which is great, and New York is populated by remarkably kind and considerate people, the goodwill is evident in a lot of places, the cops far more approachable than those of my city, I dunno.

Melbourne is special to me because it is mine, but the shit that annoys me about Melbourne - it's hard to understand until you are in New York. Do New Yorkers line up in self-demeaning displays when a Zara store opens? I assume they don't, because New Yorkers don't want to be New Yorkers, they are New Yorkers. The assholes of course are bigger here than they are in Melbourne, which doesn't really have them that much, but there's a slice of 'whinging New Yorker' I have picked up remarkably quickly that is more frequently portrayed as a trait of the british. There are also a lot of phenomenally uncool people the Sartorialist isn't taking pictures of on the streets of this city. 

Just as New York produces more great art, music, athletes etc than Melbourne does, so too does it produce far more mediocrity. I think when you are outside New York looking in, you are exposed to a selection bias of only seeing the best, just as job interviews paint a rosey picture of your future employer that never matches the reality of working for them. Movies and TV do not capture for obvious reasons the many lives of New Yorkers that are just not worth writing home about. Probably the closest is Seinfeld at capturing some aspect of the every day.

Cities are great, they are loaded up with opportunities, but I think we all have fantasies of waltzing into a foreign city, sitting down in some bar or restaurant to fatefully strike up conversation with our 'discoverer' somebody who finds our mundaness fascinating and opens up doors that remained closed to us at home. In the end though, this is just a rescue fantasy like meeting your soulmate, or curing yourself by taking a pill.

For me the unlimited potential of NYC has little appeal, partly because my chosen medium is a solitary one, I work from a studio and publish via the internet, it matters not where I do this. And also because I barely use 3% of Melbourne's potential. I have friends that have more thoroughly exhausted the scenes Melbourne possesses to support them, but I can't justify moving to a city with 100 times the opportunities than the 97 opportunities I haven't even utilised back home.

Or rather I can, firstly one of those opportunities could call me here, like getting offered an editing job at DC or Marvel comics, but that would no doubt be the product of using more of the opportunities of Melbourne. Secondly, I could follow somebody here, I could live in NYC for the right girl easily, I would chase her here, not let her go. It is similar enough to Melbourne to make that decision easy.

You know it's so hard to do anywhere justice when travelling, unfairly we are burdened with a bogus dilemma that we must love and hate a place, when most often, it is true that we do both. Japan is most annoying because you are labelled a 'Japan basher' or a 'Japan lover' and nothing in between is tolerated. My Japanese friends don't understand my ability to criticise so much about Japan and still claim to love that beloved country. But what I truly would bash is fetishising, which is to gloss over the fact that life is hard no matter where you live it.

The fact is that I could probably live anywhere, because I could live with myself. But NYC would be one of the easier cities to do so.

Watch My Mouth

INTP's "are sometimes surprised by the high esteem in which their friends and colleagues hold them." I am learning the hard way, that I have to increasingly watch what I say.

I have always observed and assumed to be self evident, that people are different, you and I are different. It seems to me the most apparant and obvious thing in the world. Everything needs to be interpreted and evaluated in the context of your own ambitions.

Thus when people share with me their opinions there is a bunch of discounting and appreciating that goes on. But ultimately it is important to me what other people think only as far as our objectives converge.

eg. if I draw a picture that I want to communicate some particular message, then almost any person's opinion matters (except those whose opinion reflects an intent to be malicious/sycophantic regardless of the context, eg disingenuous opinions, these opinions never matter, except where they give rise to holocausts.) because it is a test of encoding/decoding and whether my message is obvious enough to be recieved, yet opaque enough to be rewarding/maintain interest etc. for example.

When I'm dishing, rather than recieving though, I generally make the error of assuming that people understand my feedback equates to nothing more than 'this is what I think' to be evaluated against what the artist or creator wanted me to think. But nothing more. nothing more than that. So I assume that people assume that I am not an authority on what they are trying to do, on being a playwrite, drummer, band manager, producer, actor, writer OR even visual artist.

I am only an authority on what I think. But as my friend said to me 'how many times can you say "it's just my opinion"?' And I guess it's just that, to some people it is just an opinion. To others though, an opinion is a big deal.

These are the unfortunate truths regarding opinions though, that we all at some point have to learn to live with.

Everybody has them.
Most are made subconsciously.
They are not always expressed.
They need not be factual or even rational, but opinions are facts.

Take heart though, how you choose to react to opinions once expressed is entirely your choice.

Back In Therepy

Why? Largely because I could.

There was no real incident that precipitated going back. Whereas the first time I hilariously obtained my doctors referal in such a way as to have nothing more than the bullet point 'delusional stalker' on my medical record (I have been found to be neither) this time I hilariously found a strange lump that I couldn't squeeze like a pimple, went to the GP with all those skin cancer ads on my mind and was told 'it's a pimple' leaving us with 13 minutes of nothing to talk about, so to kill time she referred me for another 6 sessions.

I had that referral up my sleeve, and well I can't really go into detail in the public domain of why I decided to finally cash them in, but the essential epiphany was this:

I got everything I ever wished for. I just got caught out by how little I enjoy losing.

I had the epiphany on my ownsome, so now I'm just fleshing it out with my therapist. It's been really productive, and it's illustrated how consistent my approach to everything is.

I always thought it was a shame that most people (if ever) only seek therapy when shit has boiled over, where much of that boil over could be prevented simply by observing our daily behaviour.

Unlike every other time I have turned up to therapy struggling and go out feeling great, this is the strongest I've been going to therapy and it's been really constructive.

Commissioner

So a few days ago I took delivery of my first commissioned work, by Sarah McConnell of the unupdated Serial Multiplicity. Very talented artist, I took a risk asking her to draw a pheonix, from looking over her shoulder at work and peering into her sketchbook back in the early days where she used to sketch in a sketchbook all the time at work, I knew she was capable of drawing it in a technical sense, but in most of her finished art I'd seen to-date definite forms as subject matter aren't typically what she does.

Anyway, I loaded her up with reference and set all my terms and she did this:

I think I accidentally got a steal of a deal, because I asked for 'drawn and inked at least' but since 99.97% of all the art I look at is by comic book artists in my mind that means 'pencil drawing, then inked with a pen' whereas to Sarah a fine arts graduate from the VCA 'inked' probably meant 'painted with inks'

Anyway this is but the first small step for me towards 'Melberenze' and my first act as patron of the arts myself. The big worry of course was always that I would fulfill the stereotype that 'slaves make the worst masters' when it came to me commissioning artists, so I am overtly self conscious of not doing all the things that have made my own commissions transform from exercises in mutual goodwill to bitter experiences that I now have to somehow translate back into positive experiences.

So I did this by:
1. making clear what I expected, and that my commission was based on my belief in the abilities of her work to date (of course with the exception of what I mean when I say 'inked', but this I think produced a delightful outcome)
2. relaxing the 'personal meaning' of the subject matter. I just asked for a pheonix, and didn't elaborate on what it meant to me.
3. Set a price and translated that price into how many work hours I expected to be spent on it.
4. Set a short deadline.

These sorts of things are what I am, going forward, going to set up for my commission policy, I have one remaining commission that is none of those things, and though I am excited to finally be doing it, this excitement is outweighed by the stress and anxiety of doing it. I have simply accepted that I probably won't be getting paid for it, that is the only thought that relaxes me enough to do it.

It's a lot more fun being on the other side of the equation, I have commissioned Tim Molloy next so expect more artwork on this blog soon.

By Accident Not Design

My own drawing journey has ended up more or less exactly like this.

Cryptozoolacalafragelisticexpialabullfuck

One thing that surprises people about me is when I tell them I hate surprises. Probably because I enjoy being confounded, caught off guard, outwitted, out played etc. but these are all processes that I am actively engaged in.

Whereas yesterday I had a cryptic day, and being cryptic (even unintentionally) annoys me. It started off with a contextless notification from facebook to my email that I had been mentioned. Here was the mention: 'tohm ******?' the stars are blanking out my last name, I don't mean to be hypocritically cryptic, I just don't like putting my last name up on a blog. When I went to facebook though, there was no such notification of such a mention, creating the exasperating illusion that this contextless message was made in a context worthy of deletion. I'm sure it's nothing, but this is the kind of cryptic bullshit that drives 'facebook anxiety' the most powerful argument for getting the fuck off facebook.

Then later in the day my phone goes off to notify me I have a message on voicemail, even though my phone didn't ring. I checked the message to find 'hey tohm, this is Misaki. You know what I'm going to call you again later?' I haven't spoken to Miki-swan since I left Shizuoka last year. Furthermore since breaking up the responsibility of who has to carry the load of keeping in touch has always been unambiguously on my shoulders since she is the kind of masochistic workaholic that puts my masochistic workaholia to shame. So her calling me must be for some reason.

Now watch my mind unravel. Has her father died from his lung cancer? Has her beloved Grandma died of Alzheimers? Has she gotten engaged to one of her suitors? Has she misremembered my birthday? Is she coming out to Australia? Has her business folded? Is she pregnant (not mine)?

There simply is no fucking information as to why the fuck she is calling me for the first time in a year. Her tone was perfectly neutral as well. Miki isn't deliberately trying to stress me out, she speaks her own brand of English and lives in her own brand of reality.

Now I have to carry my phone with me at all times and keep it by me when I sleep because I have no idea or indication of when she will call again (or even if the call will actually come through or go straight to voicemail) but just in case it's one of those unhappy scenarios...

I don't believe in appetisers, I see them as pointless, just serve the main already. I find it a pity Russian service has displaced French service worldwide. I am not tantalised or intrigued by mystery. A good story is one that is captivating without obfuscation in my book. I don't mind making decisions on limited information, or gambling, or risk taking. But I like to be able to participate, these half-sentences and contextless messages just get under my skin and drive me insane with speculation, knowing I can't actually know what they are about until somebody condescends to tell me.

Hate is such a strong word, obviously, Miki is really important to me, somebody I will naturally worry about when there is any doubt as to what is going on. And I should state, the contextless facebook notification and Miki calling me on the same day are totally unrelated. Most of the time I just find cryptic shit annoying and or boring, like the cryptic crossword puzzles.

I hate cryptic days though.

Commission #1

So last week some time I finally finished my first commission. I was commissioned exactly upon October 14th, 2010. So I just made it within two years overdue. Here was the original brief:

My favourite book of all time is ‘The Prophet’ by Kahlil Gibran. I consider it my soul on paper and it is very special to me. The basic premise is that a wise prophet. Almustafa, has been living in a community for 12 years waiting for a boat to arrive to take him home. The book begins with the arrival of the boat through a thick mist and as he makes his way to the sea wall the townsfolk ask for his wisdom on various topics such as love, justice, death, pleasure, beauty and sacrifice. There is a woman, Almitra, a seeress (prophet) who has a deep love for Almustafa. At the end of the book she stands on the sea wall and watches the boat disappear into the mist. She knows he must go: ‘our love would not bind you nor or needs hold you’. I want a picture of Almitra standing on a sea wall. In my imagination she is very beautiful and from Lebanon -otherwise it is up to artistic interpretation. I want it to be at least A3 in size.

Because of the delay, I blew it out to A1 or 4x A3. But I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk about what I have learned about commissions by doing them/not getting them done.

1. I work best under pressure and short deadlines. Which was reinforced by working on hairspray. The longer I have to do a task, the larger I make the task in my head. And then there's just straightforward procrastination issues. Flexible deadline meant there was no urgency and hence hendersforth, as soon as any other project came up, the commissions dropped in priority.

2. On procrastinating, I believe it be perhaps a necessary phase in a profession like visual art etc. that almost inevitably the people that support you early on will be people near and dear to you. And there's a temptation to treat a commercial transaction as an act of charity. That is to say, you are so grateful to get the commission that you just want it to be the best piece ever. This drives the '3 Ps', perfection, procrastination, paralysis... of which there's a great write up to be read here. And I mean you can read the commission above, I am bringing to life my benefactors 'soul on paper' of course I want it to be perfect, and this overwhelmed me for ages. I didn't spend two years on this piece, but it did take me two years to get enough knowledge of what I was and wasn't capable of drawing to come up with the above representation.

3. There are many types of artists, I'm not most of them. Two years ago, I was literally taking on any project, fuck, six months ago I would take on any project, and did, without doing really basic research. I had only the vaguest impression of what hairspray was when I agreed to do it. I draw pictures of people, in a very comic inspired style, but even then the comic style is away from the 'realism' end of the spectrum. And that is almost exclusively what I have been drawing for the past year and a half. And yet with this and all my other commissions, I've accepted tasks that don't reflect my existing skill base... I think... my next commission (almost as overdue as the first) seems so foreign to me that thinking about it feels like this memorable seen of George Costanza's career:

I am going to throw myself at it though, and be inspired by my commissioner whom just takes on tasks and lets them evolve on their own. But in future I am going to put a policy on the subject matter, because asking me an illustrator for example to do a sculpture or oil painting requires me to learn whole new skillsets, which is fine and valuable and good, but do I build that time consuming past time into the price? I haven't even learned perspective yet.

4. Pricing, pricing, the most stressful part of it all, for commissions #1 and 2# prices have never been discussed. Originally I thought this was smart, a risk reducing strategy for both parties since I felt they were dealing with an unknown. Meritocratic payment. My first two commissions also pre-date my exhibitions so I had no reference point. In hindsight though, this is one of the major things that blew my mind out into the pieces needing to be perfect, a notion that my clients would given their love for me, probably overpay hence I needed to make the pieces so perfect they couldn't possibly overpay. Which when you write it out and read it sounds completely fucken crazy, but when it's just in the back of your mind (because despite whatever philosophy you adopt, more money is always useful) it plays you. Whereas if you have a fixed price like my 3rd commission then you can quantify just how much work and what quality is expected of you to put in. It's easy to share an understanding of meaning in that case. You can even reduce it to an hourly rate - if you are getting paid $400 and you put 10 hours into the piece then you are a $40 an hour artist, I'm not a $40 an hour artist, I think I remain a $20 an hour artist, and of course there's materials etc to take into consideration. But a firm price agreement I think reigns this shit in.

In summarium, it's about keeping the task real, understanding that you are being commissioned based on the work you have done, not on the work you imagine you are capable of. Not idealising the commission itself, but gaining some perspective on just what you are expected to produce and capable of producing. A commission should be rigid rather than flexible. At least for me, and how I work. I don't think I am the kind of artist that people want to go away and just wait on to get around to doing the best possible piece. At least not yet.

Vergo

Permit me to nerd out. I fucking love Eichiro Oda, just fucking love him. One day oh I wish, I wish, I wish I could just sit in his studio and watch him draw. To my knowledge he has no DVD like Takehiko Inoue (the best in comics probablutely ever). But this is good, it gives me impetus to try and make something of myself so I can be the kind of person that just calls up and is all like 'moshi moshi, Oda san? hai! ore wa tohm desu. eto ne, moshi chance ga atara anata no studio ni kitemoiidesuka?'

Anyway, Eichiro Oda is the fucking best in just a totally different way to Takehiko, Vagabond, Real, Slam Dunk, these speak to the deconstructionist in me, they are very much about the human condition in a way that brings depth and understanding. Oda is all heart, both appeal to me as an animist, but the difference to reveal myself as a fantasy dorkas malorcus (as the latin scholars say) but the difference is the same as Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin, GRR is Takehiko, you feel vulnerable, art imitates life, you project all your hopes onto a character only to be confronted by the reality that nothing works out as you expect. Deconstruction of the narrative tropes that create our expectations not just of how stories are supposed to be, but how life is supposed to be. Cruel and caring at the same time. Oda is like Robert Jordan, he gives you exactly what you want.

And right now, it's just a great time to have Thursday's in the week, where I wake up and 4 times out of 5 the new One Piece has come out, and right now, there's this character Vergo that has just captured my imagination.

It's just a constant smack down. I should say, I have a really anti-intellectual bent, I don't know why, but around the time that my friends were discovering the masters of film like Kubrick and Coppolla, I had reached the resignation that I just wanted to watch Jackie Chan films and then, largely for the last 40 minutes of final fight martial art choreography.

Gesture is something that dominates my own artwork, and in the character of Vergo, Oda is just doing week on week all the shit I wish I could capture, and delivering it beautifully. Vergo is 'hard' literally 'hard' the character has an unyet unnamed ability to harden himself up into iron or something. But he's also a master martial artist, and I just like the unrelenting way he says stuff like 'I will have to destroy them', ultimately his hubris will come undone, Luffy will get to Vergo eventually. But over the past three weeks he has gone up against Sanji (always just a visual delight of gesture when Sanji fights) and the two of them fighting, it was like the best thing I've ever seen. Then Vergo took out Law this week, and it was just perfect, perfect exposition of this guy as a physical quantity, and this fight was preamble for Vergo taking on his betrayed subordinate Smoker.

You know, I just admire so much about Oda's storytelling, I can remember exactly in the Skypia arc where I just went 'woah' at his ability to foreshadow and create real emotional impact in such a tried and tested genre as 'the hero with the thousand faces'. He is really advancing a field that you just thought as one of the oldest stories to have been told, couldn't really innovate any further.

But Oda just has this incredible foresight, the late Robert Jordan got caught out by constantly expanding the WoT universe until the story got away from him and his own fanbase got frustrated with the 3 or so volumes of his epic that were just boring sidetracking. There are often times where you become convinced that Oda is doing the same, (the series has already gone double the time he imagined, but he stated he was simply 'having too much fun' and the readers are too) but every questionable character he introduces, he just makes work until I question how I can ever doubt him.

Vergo is an excellent case in point. He seemed so poorly designed, I thought he was a 'waffle' man because he just wears a quilted coat, and appeared to have some kind of waffle armour piece on the side of his face when introduced. The waffle stayed there for three weeks before another character asked Vergo if 'he liked hamburgers' and he replied 'yes they are my favorite' and it was revealed that he had a whole hamburger patty stuck to his face (which he then ate). Just the fact that an artist goes to that effort for a gag. A fucking gag, just makes me love Oda.

It's also that way of blending the visceral excitement of a 'intelligent thug' archetype (like Bane from Batman) and keeping him a light part of the universe by illustrating such a simple character flaw like forgetfulness. 'Where is my sword?! I must have misplaced it!' ... 'But Vergo, you aren't a swordsman?' ... 'Oh yeah!' I just love that ability, that accessibility Oda brings to the intricate mechanics of good narrative.

I just fucking love him, and wanted to document that right now is a great time to be a One Piece fan.

Chipper

I went to a chip music gig last night, something about chip music speaks to me. Also my friend Kikuyu was playing who technically isn't chip music, but certainly electronic. I don't know what it is, certain things get into your head and just pluck the neurons as if they are high tensile strings. I think it's shit from way deep in my childhood memories, like the closing credits of Turricane and stuff, chip music sends me to a safe place.

Doing one of the most popular pieces from the Black Exhibition 'Physics is Great' I listened to Gary Numan's pleasure principle all day, and it was one of those special moments. It's strange but just stringing together a bunch of electronic beeps can just pierce through all your conscious noise and create moments of great peace and stillness.

Case in point: there's a refrain at like 4:19 of celloesque music that is really quite special.

room for both

The Shawn Kemp piece I did for the black exhibition, I tossed up between several ideas to put for wording on it. But one was about Hip-hop being the only musical genre that really truly embraces sport, as if b-ball were the unofficial 6th pillar of hip hop or something.

Sometime sometime I 'liked' a facebook status to the gist of 'thumbs up to those enjoying live music tonight instead of football.' this is a common sentiment, not universal some kind of 'arts vs. sports' sentiment, I mean it's generally probably a minority opinion, but amongst artists it is (allegedly) common. My former colleague Ollie was a huge footy fan, but as a muso felt he copped shit if he was open about his love of the game.

This took me aback. What are we fucking morons? music vs sport or art vs sport is a bogus dilemma, perhaps more ignorant than a disbelief in bisexuality. perhaps... I guess I come from a meritocratic schooling system where you generally had high achievers and no achievers as the dilemma, overachieving snot faced pukes like me with all kinds of artistic, sporting, academic achievements embroidered on our blazer pockets, and then kids with none. I actually hated the colour system and was furious when my mother made a 'scab' out of me by getting my blazer embroidered when the school posted my achievements to her.

But I digress, my point being that people going to the footy on a friday night are not the enemies of people going to the northcote social club on a friday night. Sure one person can only be at one event at one time, but the real status update that I feel deserves 16 thumbs up is 'thumbs up to those enjoying live music OR sport and not staying at home tonight.'

My artistic friend Bryce wrote a wonderful piece on how much community theatre had to learn from community sporting clubs in their ability to engage a whole community, that unfortunately seems to no longer be available. But really, both exemplify a way to get out there and connect and contribute to people pursuing dreams.

I get as much mental stimulation out of following NBA and AFL as I do from listening to music, they are really different and really the same. I mean sport is where true improvisation occurs, season after season, game after game, you will never see the same basketball match twice, it's what makes a great game so great, where you clasp your hands to head in the glory and despair that you will never again witness Ron Artest sink a championship winning 3 and turn around and thank his psychiatrist.

Music is probably more obvious, particularly live, the venue changes every time, the crowd, you have the vicarious euphoria of an album launch to the intimacy of a quiet residency gig on a tuesday night. Admittedly, the AFL provides a number of people with a perfect excuse to sit at home and watch the game in HD rather than going out. But having booked in two exhibitions, I can say, it isn't the people who don't come because of clashes with other concerts, birthday parties, housewarmings, sporting comps, or other exhibitions, it's the people who don't come because they just can't be bothered that have a bigger impact.

It's not music OR sport, it's something vs. nothing. Those people kicking a ball round a field are just as much the kid of proud parents as the kid behind the bass guitar, drum kit etc.

Look I am a jealous and competitive person and I say there is room for both, I can joke about having nemises and rivals but the fact is, there's plenty of love in this city to go around. So much in fact I could use a whole heap more competition. Most of my friends I suspect have attended 1 art launch in their life - mine.

So it isn't the families clogging up the train lines on weekend decked out in the woolen colours of their favorite team, that are lapping up 'free' posters in the herald sun and making the copies at the McDonalds restaurants well and truly more well thumbed at the back that bother me, it's the people streaming breaking bad, game of thrones (especially since if you bothered to read you could read something truly great) and any infinite number of activities you could do just as easily in Donolly or Yass as you can in Melbourne's inner suburbs that twist my dick.

And at the same time, I don't care at all, they are an anonymous silent mass, not even notable in their absence from the cities culture. We don't think of them, hence how we can be suckered into thinking it's art vs sport.

But the point is there's plenty of room for art and sport and all the people sitting at home to get out and enjoy this city.

room for both

the black exhibition

still haven't grabbed my photos from h-wang. but let's just say, the best thing I ever did with my life. even though I've done a notch for a solo exhibition, this gets one too because this time I financially backed it, upping the risk.

Inspired

It seems all the bands I love are waking up from their winter hibernation and gigging again, and I for one am super glad. For some reason seeing bands more than anything else just fires up my inspiration, makes me see solutions and just want to rush home and get to work.

I really can't recommend seeing live music enough. There is some great shit going on out there, and you don't need anybody to hold your hand, you are achieving so much more just by being there than streaming HBO shows in a socially accepted solitude.

Permutations

To quote the now defunked Mr John Blog's 'if you want a good explanation of game theory read Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene"' which isn't a quote at all but a paraphrase because I couldn't be bothered looking up the post (I think it was about Pascal's wager) on game theory type stuff.

Anyway, the prisoners dilemma, the old chestnut of game theory, let's review for those who don't play games or alternatively think playing Angry birds makes you a gamer.

Two friends are held prisoner. They are kept isolated from eachother. They are each offered the same deal - if you cooperate and testify that your friend is guilty we will reduce your sentence to a year. If you don't cooperate, you get 10 years, BUT the thing is that they have no hard evidence on you or your friend, if neither of you testify you both walk free.

Here are the various outcomes.

Both cooperate - 1 year sentence each. AKA lose-lose
One cooperates - 1 does 1 year, the other 10 years AKA win-lose, lose-win.
Neither cooperate - both walk free AKA win-win.

Accept presumably justice, these win-lose evaluations are all from the prisoners perspective.

The thing is that because neither prisoner knows how the other will react, game theory predicts that their desire not to be the 'sucker' - the one who naively cooperates while their friend is ratting them out for a 10 year sentence, they will cut their losses and cooperate, so both cooperate and both lose a year of their lives.

But what I like to believe, and law enforcement has discovered with organised crime and such - is that cooperating is rarer than you would think. People are far more trusting, or you will discover have crazy value systems like 'they would rather do 10 years in prison than betray a friend' making processes like waterboarding and 'going to the dentist' popular.

But anyway, the point is that you have all these permutations of outcomes of the various 'games' we play. Dawkins applies it to evolution, many apply it to gambling/investment (it's hard to tell the difference these days, gamblers though tend to be less superstitious) but I had like an epiphany yesterday of no practical value, just descriptive value. You see -

win-win
win-lose
lose-win
lose-lose

these are the outcomes. Believing people to be good and decent, you could say that everybodies 'golden rule' in life is to create win-win situations. Of course, some people get trained into the naive belief that somebody winning entails somebody losing, but this is not what has built all the good shit in our civilisation.

That's one except, but it occured to me that most people act on the assumption that people want to 'win' and generally in interacting with others we defend against 'win-lose' or 'lose-win' situations and aim for 'win-win'.

My housemate of yesteryear wrote a whole honours thesis on whether somebody could have agency over an act they genuinely believed to be wrong, and now I will do him a slap in the face by just asserting that somebody may actually want to lose. That is what fucks you up, throws you off your game.

Of course, I don't believe, or choose not to believe that people who play to lose, or tank, have agency over it. They simply have no concept of the winning paradoxes.

Salient in my mind, almost always are Mark Horstman's 'Avoiding failure is not the same as seeking success' (failure and success have pretty much identical preparation processes a lot of the time) and Dr Gordon Livingston's paradox 'the ultimate risk is taking no risk at all'

and I think ultimately, those that to me appear to be playing to lose, are most often actually playing 'not to lose' in their own minds, not realising that playing 'not to lose' ensures losing.

And remember those hypothetical people I asserted that say things like 'I would rather do 10 years in prison than betray a friend' they fuck up the game because to them, their friend winning is equivalent to them winning. These people live in a world where almost every game looks 'win-win' to them, and are genuinely the most wonderful people. Economists tear their hair out trying to figure out 'rational incentives' for them to play the game.

But when these people meet somebody who plays to lose - they get caught out by the lack of permutations. When you are playing with somebody who plays to lose you only have:

lose-lose
lose-win

This causes economists AND real people to tear their hair out. It's a crazy fucking game. Your friend is sitting in prison, and you have to accept that the moment the guard tells them 'you're free to go' they are going to throw themselves down and confess, anything to keep the security of prison around them. So what the fuck do you do?

2.38 pm

It's 2.38 pm, today I still haven't made it through my morning routine. I'll write about the exhibition and stuff later, but for now, I just want to I dunno, something. I'm thinking now that between this and I think the last post where I was trying to watch 'The Sitter' while writing a blog post I have written two sleep deprived posts in a row.

I hope you don't get the impression I am suicidal or some shit, quite the opposite. This is 'good tired' the tired I imagine climbers of everest feel when they make it back into base camp after summiting. Or the tired a soldier feels when she is sent back from the war for a little R&R.

It's the tired that follows great productivity. Last week I was getting up at 6~6.30am and going to bed at 12~1pm and then lying awake stressing for at least 2 of the hours I would refer to as sleep. A sleep where you can't recall losing consciousness, but instead wake up to the alarm clock already stressed out and knowing everything repeats again.

I went to strange place in my mind last week, and it wasn't till about 6.20pm saturday that everything was finally in place and I was able to relax. And that lead to a couple of hours of 'normalcy' then around 11pm when everything was done and the exhibition was packed up, I sat down on a couch and immediately felt my body shutting down for hibernation. it was the first time I could comprehend having nothing to actually achieve the next day in like 8 months.

Despite procrastinating early on in the hairspray process, I really came out of my first exhibition with hairspray weighing on my mind, and that just got heavier and heavier from march thru to July, then as soon as I was done with it I was already onto my second exhibition. It was crazy, and I only really have this month off.

But I had Jordan on the brain or something and was up again at 7am on Sunday, rode to the beach on a beautiful father's day and did a 12km run from St Kilda to Brighton and back.

Riding home the long way round the Merri Creek trail I ran into a primary school friend who was doing a 32k practice run for Melbourne Marathon, which is only two weeks before the New York Marathon, from memory I was always faster than Swanny in primary school. But in highschool he became a real meat-axe, a Ballifornian rower type. I felt incredibly bad about stopping him with 5km to go, and he put me to shame. I have to step up the training. He's running with a hydration pack and looks like he has about 10kg's of muscle on me.

So this morning I did a 25k circuit, it was fucking hot and I lost most of 2kgs in fluid in the process, but I've been wrecked since. Moral of the story, I'm going to bed.

Life is good.

Beautiful Artists

Not so much for their work, which is beautiful, but because they are beautiful people:

Bobby Chiu

Sean 'Cheeks' Galloway

James Gurney

John Martz

Tim Sale

Skottie Young

Humberto Ramos

Francesco Herrera

Bill Presing

...

there will be far, far more. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I am to one day own originals by all the above artists and have them where I work, and to emulate their lives and careers.

I am so fortunate to live in a day and age where the 'com-poo-tah' can bring them into my world.

Playlists

What did I call this post? I forget why I called it that? I'm incredibly tired. it was a good productive day. I was up really early after doing shit really late last night, pictures. I drew a lot of pictures, Nietzsche, they were all good. Now I'm watching a movie because I want to go to sleep but I don't want to wake up too early or sleep too late I'm now not sure what my fucking plan is. I'm watching the movie now, and it has Sam Rockwell in it. so I will stick to it with the end. I'm actually really struggling to put together sentences, I won't be drawing any more tonight. I was already putting typos into a bunch of my desktop is covered with ink. Its going to take a lot of time to scratch off.

Ted Roosevelt said '  In life there is no reward greater than working hard at work worth doing.'

there are greater rewards, but they are not readily accessible. What the fuck is this? I get distracted by the movie all the time and then I can't get my eyes to read back further than whatever I'm writing.

this is a trainwreck. Should I press publish now? No, trebuchet is a fun word to say. now.

State of the Art(?)

The bias that immediately degrades all arguments I may present here, is ... I don't know the name for it, but I suspect it is cousin to 'recency' bias. That is the last argument you heard carries most weight.

You see, I'd love to have a gripe about the 'art scene' except, when I think about it, the art scene is dominated by artists like me. It just doesn't feel that way. I use Google reader, of which I track about 5 friends blogs, only 2 of whom update on any semi-regular basis, and I would guesstimate in the order of 400 art blogs.

One art blog that pops out to me is in itself an agregator like google-reader. That is a blog that scours the internet looking for art and collates it into one RSS feed. This blog is Collossal and it is actually well worth checking out. You'll probably love it.

The thing is, this is but one blog of 400 art blogs I look at on a daily, and sometimes twice daily basis. Firstly, as an agregator, it is far more likely to update than the blog of somebody who like me, tends to go months producing nothing, then gangbusters for a month, then dissappear for months again. Secondly, it stands out because it is markedly different to the other 399 art blogs I follow.

Collossal's 'About' page doesn't really shed any light on it's selection criteria. Just the preferences of the editor. And it's fair to say, our preferences differ. And because of this difference, I feel like drawing the sweeping conclusion that the kind of art featured on Collossal defines the trends in the art scene. Combining this with the kind of art I am seeing being done in Melbourne, I have an impression of the art world that with conscious thought I can surpress.

You see there once was a VCE Studio Art student (not me) who sat in a chair and looked up and saw a fellow students work and remarked 'I like that.' and their teacher asked 'why?' and thereupon, the student could not really fashion an answer. Or so was told to me, another art student. And on the one hand, I don't think you need any reason whatsoever to ever validate the statement 'I like that.' but on the other hand it was a valuable lesson, because although the piece looked nice, it was completely vacuous just a reproduction of another image, because it looked nice. The piece of art in question bears no resemblance to what I probably feel unfairly is the stuff trending in the art 'world' at the moment.

The only similarity, is that for the exact opposite reasons, I think a lot of art that springs to mind when I think of the word 'art' is similarly vacuous.

But here is what I caught myself doing almost immediately. I discounted the other 399 blogs.

But first go check out wikipedia's page of 2010 in film. Not all of it, just the top 10 grossing films for 2010. You may note that 5 out of the top 10 were computer animated features, including Toy Story 3, the number one grossing film of the year. Then if you include movies that used 3D animation like Iron Man 2, Alice in Wonderland and harry potter and the Deathly Hallows, then 8 of the top 10 highest grossing movies of 2010 employed a lot of concept artists.

Concept artists make up probably 30% of the blogs I follow. Then a whole bunch are comic book artists, which I naturally discount because that's what I want to be, and it's easier to anticipate failure if you believe the industry is downtrodden. The rest are painters, illustrators and 2D artists.

Most of the 'art' world infact are gainfully employed artists for movie studios, doing concept, animation, storyboarding, character design, sculpting, set construction etc. or Game Developers (doing much the same) or comic book artists (many working on creator owned stuff, touring conventions and/or employed by DC, Marvel or Image). I mean sure, the aren't winning $200,000 prizes for portrait competitions, or selling works at Auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But so many I know are selling their daily warm up sketch for $120 a day plus shipping and handling. If I could make $120 clams from 20 minutes work a day, I probably wouldn't get round to doing anything else. I wouldn't need a $200,000 cash prize either. But for these artists it's kind of pocket change. I mean sure they are world class, but the fact is they are drawing a paycheck most of the time or getting preorders for their next graphic novel.

It's a word association error I make that I suspect I am not alone in. When you say the word 'art' I think of 'gallery' 'instalation' 'AV instalation' 'large scale reproduction of other image using interesting material' and particularly 'government grant' etc. etc. I don't think of the vast majority of practicing artists that are working on products that are commercially viable.

Furthermore, I'm acutely aware of my preferential bias, I like sentiment, I like narrative, I like accessibility. I am an animist first and classisist second. The artists I find it hardest to relate to are the 'iconoclasts' even though I don't know anybody who is a bigger deconstructionist than me. To me Marcel Ducamp's 'Fountain' is an all encompassing statement that Art cannot be defined. I love the piece, but most of what I see iconoclasts do I feel is simply an inferior reiteration of the same statement. Like I find most of iconoclast's works paradoxically, incredibly cliche. I get the originators, like Andy Kaufman, I'm a big fan of his body of work, but I feel no need for the world to have 'the next Andy Kaufman' in the same way as I see the need for 'the next Groucho Marx' or 'the next Mark Twain'. Same with the Sex Pistols, I loved the statement they made about music, but now that it has been made I don't feel any strong desire to get deep into punk culture. Although of all the forms of iconoclasts, punk musicians have probably produced the most stuff I actually appreciate, but I'm not sure if they are iconoclasts when you have bands like the Vandals producing one of the best drummers on the planet.

Anyway, I am at least aware of the trap I could fall into, that is, misconcieving that the art industry doesn't welcome an artist like me and feeling like it is out to get me. That's all in my head. But I feel the art 'scene' isn't aware of the same trap. The best argument I heard is that much of what I dislike about the scene is actually rationalised failure. Art cannot be defined, and it IS perfectly legitimate to produce stuff that almost nobody can relate to, that breaks all conventions of aesthetics, perhaps even mediums, and you can put it on display and if I or anybody else don't like it, that's okay. It's even okay if nobody likes it.

The success or failure boils down to intent. But if you intend to communicate something, and it doesn't get across, that is your failure. Communication is what the listener does. People who blame the listener for not hearing them I regard as, well to put it bluntly, fools. Success or failure isn't so bad in itself, as long as you are aware enough to learn from it. In fact one could even be encouraged to pursue failure, as you can be fairly certain about what doesn't work relative to figuring out what does.

But what I call 'blaming the audience' is just 'loser talk' and far less acceptable than 'well I came with nothing...' and 'I can say that I tried my best...' So whether you succeed or fail doesn't matter so long as you give credit where it is due. What kind of artist can ever succeed when a couple of people shuffle around their piece and shuffle right out again? How is it constructive to say 'well they just don't get it.'

I suspect the vast majority of artists actually do employ an approach of 'my purpose as an artist is to create an audience' and a significant chunk think 'my purpose as an artist is to create customers.' and find in these approaches very little compromise of artistic integrity.

Just as Islam is now dogged by the impression created by a small number of men on September 11th 2001, I think at least in my mind my impressions of the art world are dogged by the very small number of artists that exhibit in gallery space.

Anyway, I'm going to try and correct my word association so that 'artist' is associated with all the things I am into. Even gainful employment. I mean one has only to go to Italy and see that all the Renaissance Masters were essentially 'concept' artists for the Church and Wealthy families. And they are better remembered than their patrons.

Catastrophies and Blessings

I've finally got into the drawing zone, and seem fingers crossed to be able to combine it with the Marathon regime, so now I am doing both ludicrous amounts of exercise and ludirous amounts of drawing. The bad news is if you are a friend reading this, you probably won't hear from me till the flipside of my exhibition. The good news is, my masochism is relearning that you can draw so much you litterally can't grip a pen anymore!

But I had a minor catastrophe last night, got home from work, couldn't find the Major Tom's gig I was supposed to go to and resolved to stay in and draw all night. I had refilled my fine tip 1mm marker that morning which has been doing most of the heavy lifting, and I'm using these 'graffiti' inks that are 'buff' proof in 'paint markers, that come stock in 2mm tips but I had bought a pack of 2 x 1mm tips to sub in, which is the finest line I can get with uniformity of ink and especially blackness. I can't stand non-uniform blackness in my inking utensils.

Anyway, for some reason I have been getting progressively worse at refilling the pens, and yesterday morning was the extreme of which, rather than the exception to that rule. As far as I can figure, I had overfilled the pen and this had caused a bunch of ink to leak out of the valve and dry into crappy bits that were small enough to be sucked up by my fine tips but gunky enough to block the flow of ink once in there.

So my fineliner stopped working.

I panicked.

Then I was all like 'calm down tohm, you can use the spare one...' then I turned around and realised I'd made the foolish mistake of cleaning my studio. I had no idea where I'd put the spare tip, now everything was clustered into neat arrangements rather than a spatial constellation that is easy to memorise.

I began turning my room upside down, going through bags of old markers looking for the tiny ziplock bag with the tinier spare nibs in it. To no avail, I became so desperate I picked up an innoucuous bag that has been sitting in the room since Janice moved a bunch of my shit into it, it seemed to be filled with random crap. In this innoucuous bag was another innocuous bag, which seemed familiar, and then I opened it up and it was in turn filled with heaps of tissue paper, which seemed almost too familiar, that I hastily but tenderly unwrapped to discover the object not of my desire, but that I thought I had forever lost and was cursed to a life of misery and isolation because of which, I'm not going to go public on what the item is, but let me say, even though it is a purely symbolic object, it made my fucking night, it made the past 4 years all much much better.

I found the spare tips in a cupboard. But foolishly I took my one precious spare tip and put it in the pen that had gunked up the last one, and it gunked up too. That's when I figured out what had broken the first one.

So after a few hours of trying to cleanse them to no avail, I just did as much pencilwork as I could.

Thought I had to Share

ironic failure does not equal actual success.

Foreboding

All you need to keep grounded is a .txt file somewhere you can access it. Janice told me about some 'choice' theory that is A) highly theoretical and B) merely being floated now that says a lot of 'mental illness' is in part a choice made.

As in the theory posits that you develop depression/ocd/anxiety even schizophrenia as choice rather than dealing with whatever stimulus drives that choice. I mean the potential for such a theory to be highly offensive I will openly acknowledge, because I in part find it offensive. I really like Livingstone's definition of mental illness as 'mental health requires freedom of choice'.

And I don't know much about this 'choice' theory, but I imagine it doesn't naively claim that people are merely 'pretending' to be depressed, anxious, schizophrenic etc. but I suspect it refers to the possibility that our own minds are capable of building up a resilience to falling into these mental states. Certainly I imagine there is documented evidence of how to avoid many forms of depression. There is even a book urging people to move away from dealing with depression via anti-depressants.

Anyway, my psychologist tells me I have a clean bill of mental health, and exhibit no signs of any kind of mental disorder. And she is more qualified to make this call than I am.

So apparantly I'm not at risk of falling into depression, anxiety etc. Indeed in my new years thankyou I remarked at how impossible it is beginning to seem for me to stay in a bad way for any period of time. My lifestyle, and subsequent life seems to pull me upwards whether I like it or not.

At the same time there are situations that make me anxious, a couple of months ago, I had a situation that induced almost instantaneous panic attacks, and that situation I feel safe to say, resolved poorly, but it's not that bad, as I knew at the time either way it would be fine, and it is. But back then, just the transition from possibles to certainties induced perhaps the most sever panic attacks I can recall.

I like most people am prone to superstitions. My brains hardwired predisposal for looking for patterns, my human failings that lead me to rationalise, and the denial that is an almost universal coping mechanism for life's dissappointments lead me ever onwards into superstitious behaviours.

Good superstitions (lucky underpants) that build confidence in turn helping one to succeed are counterbalanced by bad superstitions (bad omens) and in time these can come to dominate. This is as close as I get to unravelling mentally - 'choosing' not to cope.

And the easiest way to cope I find is to just record the superstitions, the feelings of foreboding in a document whenever they arise. Think of it as a very brief, very succinct diary. Every time I get one I can put it in, and naturally I will turn to reading back over past incidents I have felt foreboding and conclude ultimately, that my sense of foreboding is one of the least effective predictors of whether something bad will happen.

The upshot to overcoming garden variety superstitious behaviour is the positive bias of doing so. What I mean is that you realise all your successes weren't generated by some magical rule of the universe (if it rains I am going to have a good day) but were attributable to you. You gain the benefit of the lucky underpants without having to wear them. But also you dismiss any notion that fate is hampering you, you become more confident in spite of the patterns you percieved lead to your downfall.

It is hard for us to admit how much of our life is determined by opaque randomness, but very rewarding.

The Upside of Smoking

Smoking is a completely irrational undertaking, ultimately it is adopted for emotional rather than cognitive reasons. A need for affiliation, or simple indoctrination by the habits of ones parents. The one single life extending decision a person can make is to quit smoking. Yes, not much good can be said of smoking.

But I will say this, at the risk of sounding like a 70 year old academic, we live in a time of great social disconnect. In every organisation I have belonged to, smokers have been the bridges between clicks. The non-smokers do not step outside during winter, nor will they interact with anybody there job discription doesn't force them to. But something about smoking is very communal, smokers share lighters, papers, even cigarrettes. When trying to suck a cigarette down in a 15 minute alloted break, they engage eachother, talk to eachother, find out about eachother, and the only necessary common ground is that they smoke.

A smoker is somebody we are conditioned to recognise as a person of ill repute, a peer pressurer, a passive murderer trying to suck you into their world of cancer. But health, expense and inconvenience aside, smokers are often the friendliest people in an office or at a party. The easiest to approach, engage and initiate conversation with.

My grandfather took up smoking to make himself a better salesman. Back in the day, the social advantages to smoking were obvious. Nicotene may powerfully compel people to smoke, and spend money and time on the habit, but it is alsoa powerful compeller to be social. Ironically the increasing restrictions on where and when one can smoke have pushed smokers into this social cohesian. I wonder if the advent of smart phones, the omnipresent excuse to never be engaged no matter where you are will impact this one last upside to smoking?

Or will regulations kill it first? I'd like to argue we should all learn from smokers, that non-smokers should take breaks with people they ostensibly have nothing in common with and take the time to expand their social horizons, but I just don't see how, I don't see how anything can replace smoking as an arbitrary introduction for who can be your friend.

I mean, I'm a non-smoker (and an introvert) and I make a collossal effort to engage everyone I can, and so often I discover that for all my efforts people have effortlessly befriended a smoker first (not that being a smokers friend excludes you from mine, but that they just do so with ease).

I've Taken Risks

Is a phrase you never hear. Nobody ever exclaims it, nobody, but nobody who takes risks seems to ever be in a position where they have to whine about the risks they've taken to get where they are.

I'm a true believer that risk is the only way to be rewarded in life, and that most people are truly risk averse. And I know I'm skating back into the negatory territory, but I've just always found the claim 'I've worked hard for blah blah blah' to be laughable. Sadistically laughable.

Because generally people work hard to avoid risks, that is where the majority of our societies efforts are channelled. But life doesn't reward hard work, our society doesn't reward hard work, well I mean it does, but not nearly so much as it rewards the risk takers.

I find the nature of the generally accepted notion of 'hard work' paradoxical, generally when ever people are encouraging you to work hard, it is n the service of some mythical 'risk free' future. In almost every case it takes the form of subscribing to an institution of some kind. The most common is studying really hard to get top marks to advance someday to a well paid salaried position. Whether it is a legal monopoly (medicine, where licenses and training colleges limit the supply of doctors, as well as ensuring quality) to landing a lucrative sallaried position at a top law firm, investment bank, consultancy group or global brand.

The tone of upset, distress and betrayal when people exclaim 'I've worked hard' evokes limited sympathy in me, in that they usually bought (and were sold) a lie. A lie that any instution can offer certainty and security. I have no problems with people sweating and toiling for a salary, allowing somebody else to take the risk. But all instutions are ultimately hypothesis being tested to see whether they match an ever changing reality.

Ultimately the uncertainty has to be assumed by somebody, and these people, the risk takers are the ones who recieve most of the rewards life offers. Furthermore they are unlikely to ever whine when the tide turns against them, because there is no lie in taking risks. They knew the die could come up snake-eyes.

Nothing can offer you true certainty, true security. They may resemble it for long periods of time, but the point is that you need to portion some small part of your psych to accepting that your world may one day crumble about you, that others may en masse think differently to you, that everything you have is a privelege and not an entitlement, so you aren't devestated into unbecoming victimhood when the institution that promised to protect you fails.

Gordon Livingstone's observes that many paradoxes apply to our lives, the greatest risk is taking no risk at all and perhaps even that we gain control by relinquishing it. The people truly in control of their destinies are the ones that signed no contracts with their life, that so and so would pay them so much for whatever services they may render. They simply render the services and hope somebody values them enough to pay.

Fortune favors the brave. Simply working hard can be an act of cowardice.

Nolan

So I got round to seeing TDKR, and I said this blog was going to be positive and I'm known as a hater of the Nolan Batman adaptations, which I don't think is true, but inevitably because I take an adversarial role in critiquing them and almost everyone else I talk to will assume the defensive, I guess this is how it's gotta be. So let's get the negativity out of the way:

1. Nolan needs to learn the 'show don't tell' principal in dialogue, nobody else seems to notice that Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises consist almost entirely of characters delivering a constant stream of dissertations.
2. Act I = Act II minus the hubris (as I will concede to my brother) alternatively Act II = Act I minus the humility. The scenes where Alfred implores Bruce not to go up against Bane in Act I reminded me too much of Jimmy imploring Rocky Balboa not to go up against Clubber Lang, it was like Rocky III had been sandwiched into the film.
3. It could be my personal dislike of Ann Hatheway, and the fact she is constantly presented by Hollywood as a 10 when she is at best a 6, but I picked up no sexual chemistry between Catwoman and Batman.
4. Less is more, I didn't care about the inevitable twist, in my view you could have cut Act 1 completely, lost the entire league of shadows, focused it on Act III (Gotham under siege) and it would have been a better film.
5. I've never waited longer in a movie nor wished harder for a character to die than Blake. I would have ditched his character completely, he necessitated sidelining the compelling James Gordon so he had something to do and is furthermore just an annoying fucking twerp.
6. Transformers 3 and the Avengers all had the same 'Act III' city under siege, hereos go to war under the threat of Mass Destruction, and Nolan didn't do it better, even with the virtue of having better characters than those franchises. The cops charging the league of shadows for me is Nolan's second attempt to recreate those moving scenes from Spiderman 1 & 2 where the New Yorkers rally around their hero, and he just fails to hit the emotional frequency Raimi did.

Done, and longer than I would have liked. Here then is what I like and admire about Nolan.

Firstly, and most significantly, while not a fan of twists Nolan has created a new way of introducing twists specific to the comic adaptations. The twist in TDKR caught me geniunely by surprise, but the thing is that to most of the viewing public, the twists should come across a bit deus ex machina like, because I think most of the viewing public would never have heard of Bane, he is a second, if not third string villain in the Batman Rogues Gallery, and similar to Doomsday in superman was litterally pulled out of somebodies arse to fulfill a marketing function.

The first thin Nolan does, is create twists in the world of IMDB websites, and constant cast leaking by officially listing actors as playing characters they are not, namely in Batman Begins listing Ken Watanabe as Ra's Al Ghul and Liam Neeson as Ducard, as far as I know this is the first time such a tactic has been pulled that feeds directly the fanboys desire for sneak peaks into the film during the production phase. You got a bunch of photos of Ken Watanabe dressed up in a very traditional looking Ra's Al Ghul costume.

The Dark Knight, saw the first cutting of film clips to conceal the movie you were actually seeing, all the promotional photos, posters and trailers showed a film that was purely and simply Batman versus Joker. Then when you went to see the film, Joker was kind of incedental, a cog in the machine, you can still call him primary antagonist in terms of screen time spent as an antagonist, but the climax was centered around Two Face, the plot all driving towards the creation and destruction of two-face. The story was ostensibly Tim Sale and Jeph Loeb's 'the long halloween' but simplified to the point where Joker played the function of the entire Rogues Gallary, the mystery of Holiday was dropped and essentially it was the Batman, Gordon and Harvey Dent alliance that caused Harvey to go off the rails and become a very short lived Two Face.

TDKR combined both, I think by now you should have been able to actually see the film, but in case the twist functions around screwing with your knowledge of Bane's origin (a child born in prison) and the fact that it isn't a faithful adaptation to succeed, as well as miscasting. Then also combining this with trailers that feature footage almost entirely from the 3rd act, the city under siege such that the film I saw was not the film I expected to see, and the twist caught me off guard.

All this is to say, that the tactic is new, it probably has limited application to adaptations of comics that skew towards realism (and thus reinterpretation of characters that by necessity have to break cannon). I personally don't like twists, and the twist in TDKR caught me off guard, which was beautifully done, and with so much investment and foresight in order to do it, but alas ultimately elicited the response of 'and why do I care?' which is why I could have done with at least an hour (and two characters) being cut out of this film entirely.

Second, Bane is probably the most compelling villain I've seen post original Starwards Trilogy. Or Colonel Kurts in apocalypse now, and I like him because he is incredibly simple done well. He achieves what George RR Martin achieves with Gregor Clegane in A Song of Ice and Fire (Now better known as 'A Game of Thrones') in that Tom Hardy's performance of him makes you feel sick and anxious whenever he is proximate to any other character.

The opening 'signature' scene didn't have the impact of Bane's (I think) second appearance where you immediately know what you are dealing with when he crushes the throat of one henchman with almost no warning and instructs the other to 'search him, and then you will die' which the guy complies with. Bane is in essence a 'Type B' villain, being a strong thug, that DC tweaked into a 'B+' by giving him nefarious scheming powers, and in the comics, he is fairly crap. Bruce Timm in the excellent Animated series of Batman reinterpreted Bane well by actually reducing him to Type B, and just made him menacing and kept his appearance to one episode ever.

Tom Hardy and Nolan succeed in creating this menacing incarnation of Bane, that you just don't like characters interacting with at all, because you don't know who he is going to hurt or kill. Furthermore, structure wise, he's an improvement on the Joker, because it's established early that Bane's followers are fanatics, whereas I found it implausible that the Joker from TDK would inspire loyalty in anyone given that in most scenes he needlessly killed his own henchmen and indeed his motiv was killing people for fun, where your chances of being killed increases with your proximity to him. With Bane you got the sense that for his henchmen it was an honour to die in service to his cause, or alternatively be justly killed for displeasing him.

All my favorite scenes involved Bane, the best probably being when he reveals to his rich backer that he was never in control, Bane was. Even the dissertations made sense from Bane, he was the character to lecture becuase he was the character with the most far reaching agenda.

Thirdly, vehicle designs, I don't give Nolan enough credit for his vehicle designs, they are a highlight of the films, The Batmobile, the Batbike and the Batwing are all just way out there, way cool interpretations. The Batmobile as 'Tank' I'm sure comes from the least credited inspiration for Nolan's trilogy 'the Dark Knight Returns' by Frank Miller, but I mean it took guts to choose this reimagining of the most iconic car in comicbook history, and kudos to him he did.

The second movies revealing of the Batbike and the thirds Batwing, the give you something truly new and impressive to fire the imagination.

Fourth, while The Wire can be forgiven for it's finale montage, TDKR would have been improved 40% if it had cut the last 5 minutes of the film, but I'm glad that Nolan at least used the opportunity of a concluding film trilogy to give us all hope the Bruce Wayne could escape his own grief and achieve a life of normalcy, in that he let Bruce have Selina. And even though I find Ann Hatheway unappealling, it's a kind of relief Tim Burton denied us with the tragic ending of Batman Returns, (and the more tragic continuation of that franchise) it makes me happy, because in terms of mental health the neverending holy war of Batman against crime in Gotham makes for a poor role model for children, and induces pessimism. I'm glad he got to find some happiness.

I also look forward to Nolan working on his own intellectual property, so I can enjoy it without emotional investment.

Perfect Days

I had two whole perfect days last year.Perfect. Days where you can go to bed and drift off with the whole 'I could not have spent today any better.' And to describe what constitutes a perfect day for me would I'm sure fall short of describing a perfect day for you. Just that I thought I'd note that it's an extreme privelege, it's a lot. I'm sure there are people that get more, I'm sure that there are people who are still waiting for one in their lifetime.

But consider, if life is indeed a Hobbesian nightmare of struggle and suffering, the alternative (death) is an experience of no sensation at all, I don't believe life is struggle and suffering, but assume it is, if you just get a perfect day to enjoy here and there, it makes it all worthwhile. It makes it ALL worthwhile.

I certainly enjoyed those two days, I'll remember them more than any others of the year.

Right Here, Right Now

Don't judge me, okay, we all have our problems. But this song has been on high rotation lately, high rotation is an understatement, it's one of those songs that is both rousing anthem and yet never really takes off, so you can listen to it and be left feeling hungry.



and yet as the lyrics seep into my skull, it does highlight one of those wonderful truisms, that despite our penchant for reading horoscopes, tarot cards, tea leaves or worse the financial sections of the newspaper, all these desperate attempts to gain knowledge of the future... I love the future being opaque.

The future is the first and final frontier, you can imagine times you'd rather be alive, like when Rachel Welsh was wearing a fur bikini, but ultimately all you really need is a fundamental ignorance of what is going to happen today, and it's potentially the best day of your life.