Remarkable

So post Musashi exhibition, I've been in a kind of slump, I finally found a daily drawing project that stuck though and feel I've turned a corner.

So I'm facing a fact though, success has a lot of vaguries. We all know it, except there is little evidence, even anecdotal that what we think of as success exists. That is, the jury is out on the hedonic payload of 'succeeding' and whether the person who desires success, and the person capable of success can retain the same definition of success.

blergh? Put simply, by the time we are in a position to have what we want, typically we seem to want something else.

Which is by no means a fatalistic stance, can't succeed, don't bother. Rather the whole... you know, it's not the destination it's the journey. Certainly my own notch system represents my own degree of success in things I actually value. (by contrast I only blutacced my latest degree to the wall because I wanted to use the cylindrical tube it was posted in for something else.)

I've made no secret of my recent psychology sessions, one of the big things I had to face was that I may possibly be...

...please believe me when I say, my social conditioning makes it incredibly hard and uncomfortable for me to write this, which is by the way one of the major benefits of seeing a psychologist, you can dispense with ettiquette, social conditioning, conventions etc...

remarkable. I still have trouble believing it. I would probably say exceptional. Like, I realise that I am an exception to many rules of 'how a person normally acts.'

I don't like this notion, that I am in someway special. I have spent years refuting it and being offended by it.

Like all through high school, I never considered myself to work hard. I made what to me seem to be a bunch of ordinary observations, namely 1. teachers won't trust self directed learning to deliver the results they need for their own performance review - therefore you will never be assessed on anything they don't cover in class. 2. I referred to 1% of all handouts ever again, so I took to simply throwing them away as soon as a class was done.

These were my secrets to doing well in school, while doing almost no homework and keeping a remarkably tidy locker, folders etc. I simply had nothing to put in them. I just paid attention in class and did the practice exams. I find this strategy both A) highly effective and B) wholly unremarkable.

I have tried to 'sell' my strategy for educational excellence for years, and years and it is always rejected most commonly because people tell me 'but you are different, you are smart.'

Maybe I am, but not in any remarkable way. Not that I feel.

That I think is why I love Musashi Miyamoto's Book of Five Rings so much, why he had to be the subject matter of my first exhibition. If you read his actual 'invincible' sword strategy, it is WHOLLY UNREMARKABLE. He simply and pragmatically employs what works, while stripping back all the pretence.

Thus the outcome of my psychology sessions is that:

YES remarkable people do exist.

HOWEVER, the dividing line between 'remarkable' and 'unremarkable' is in practice amazingly small.

SPECIFICALLY, remarkable people, just actually try to be remarkable. That is it.

It's why I think the best advice on success remains Woody Allen's:

'80% of success is showing up.'

Met Her For Twix

Let me assure you now, that within almost 100% certainty this post isn't about you, but difficultually is about something I can't write about directly. Unlike Met Her For Ix* which I wrote some time ago and could quite possibly be about you.

Enough with the tauntery! On with the metaphore, which is probably actually a lowely analogy.

Zaman struggles with vowels, so much so that we don't really know if his name is spelt Zaman or Zamin. We both use Zamin, but then the Fitzroy Learning network that introduced us, calls him Zaman. We share a look that we both know as 'we don't know' over the 5 years I have been tutoring him.

He was struggling to spell 'sticky' which seems like an obvious word to use, but to do so just from hearing it - for example Zaman doesn't hear that the 't' comes before the vowel sound, so he will make a mistake spelling like 'sitky'. So in an attempt to teach him the consistent and logical rules of the english language (the trouble with which is that English is a mess, and every single fucking rule throws out exceptions with alarming rapidity) I got him to spell similar words that he is more likely to recognise.

'stop' he spelt 'stap', then 'step' then 'stip' then for good measure tried 'stup' and looked at me bewildered when I told them the vowel was wrong in each case. He had completely forgotten that 'o' is a vowel. Even though it features in the word 'vowel' he just doesn't think of it that way.

Now I could tell him 'you are forgetting o' but why go to the effort of getting him to make the connection between 'stop' and 'stick' (t comes before the vowel in each case and Zamin learns how to spell a common constanant cluster 'st' by hearing it) only to give him the crucial answer to which vowel makes the 'o' sound.

If I don't force him to figure this shit out by himself, he is far less likely to retain the information. He is just more likely to focus on the next opportunity to make a mistake, because he fears mistakes, rather than embracing them as a learning opportunity.

It's hard, it takes time, and I feel bad doing it. But I would do him a disservice otherwise. I think it's why he likes me as a teacher and a friend.

*Some years ago I decided I liked Twix bars so much I developed my own counters that goes 'Ix, Twix, Trix, Quix, Pix, Six - Ixty Ix, Ixty Twix... and so forth. Thus 'Met Her For Ix', is not Met Her For 9 in roman numerals, but in fact Met Her For 1 in my own unpopular, and too obscure to bother using** counting system. But like Superman I or Grease I it is just called 'Met Her For' because I didn't anticipate a sequal.

**unless of course you are me, the patron saint of wasted efforts.

2 things you could change tomorrow and make education better

1. Homework - get rid of it.

At a vegetarian dinner the other week a girl I argued with most of the evening (true to my vices) had earlier (to arguing) said that schools where supposed to neutralise advantage/disadvantage.

Educational reform is hard, because you are never able to build an education system from scratch, you have to reform what we have already. But if schools are meant to neutralise advantage/disadvantage you would get rid of homework.

I don't so much care about neautralising advantage or disadvantage though, I would say get rid of homework because it encourages the notion that there is always an advantageous tradeoff between resources consumed and performence.

Specifically it sends kids home with the message - the more of your time you give up, the better at school you will do. This implicit contract is made with no real expectation of actual returns on the kids behalf.

We are training kids to be like their moron parents who work 'voluntary overtime' in a hangover from an 80's Japanese fad in the hope that their improved chances of getting improved wages will be such an improvement as to compensate them for the lost family time.

Homework simply says, it's okay to run over budget, to keep drawing from the well, to just do more. More = better. Better is better. More is worse.

2. Get rid of group assessment.

More of a plague of Business degrees and higher education, group assignments are just plain bad.

Firstly because of their gross inefficiency and inequity. They are inefficient because they add a whole bunch of compliance costs to an otherwise regular assignment. Like the time taken to arrange and actually meet.

Secondly they become inequitable naturally. Economics 101 motherfuckers. Say you have 4 students in a group. An A student, two C students and a F student. If we assume that the grading of the assignment works in such a way, and that the students work in such a way, that each's contribution is consistent with the grade obtained. Then everybody get's a C when the labor is devided equitably.

Two in the group are indifferent, and simply pay the compliance costs of having to actually meet for the group assignment. The F student is better off, the A student is worse off.

The A student has no insentive to share the work equitably, thus in order to better their grade (presuming they care about grades for reasons I still don't understand) they need to do as much of the assignment as possible. The only thing they can do is buy off the other students to PREVENT them from contributing. Even if they make a (rookie mistake) token effort to get them to contribute, they end up wasting more time reviewing and compiling the contributions.

Instead what winds up happening is that the highest achieving student takes on the whole assignment (thus I have often said a group assignment is an assignment that is work enough for 5 people, done by 1) and then emails a copy to everyone in the group before the due date to make sure everyone is okay with what is being handed in.

Thus 3 people don't contribute at all, and 1 person contributes everything and EVERYONE is better off. Because they A) all get an A grade and B) save all the compliance costs of weekly meetings, arranging weekly meetings, coordinating tasks, chasing contributions etc.

Group assignments in other words are a complete farce. What does the University gain?

I have speculated and inferred, and my suspicion is that they get to pass a whole bunch of students that would otherwise fail and get disgruntled. Group assignments smooth out the bell curve and lower the failure rate.

Having completed two business degrees at RMIT now, I can tell you I used to cry when a week one lecture revealed that assessment was an individual assignment, and tears of joy when they said it was a test.

Group assignments teach you about the realities of the work place, but they are bad realities, like the pareto distribution of workloads. So fucking get rid of them. There is plenty of time to learn to be a team player when you are in an office, with an actual manager in your team.

Get rid of these two things and you have gone a long way to educational reform.

The Future is Futuristic

I have a friend who like me, has a friend. His friend had a thing against advertising, particularly outdoor advertising. He hated ads because he reasonably suspected that if people wanted shit they possess the skills to go out and find it.

Economists too, can't come up with a mathematical justification for advertising. But this was more simple, more basic. He regarded advertising as some kind of offense. Visual pollution if you will, and so would drive his ute up to a billboard get out a roller and simply paint over the ad in flat white paint. If anyone questioned him he would simply tell them he was supposed to be doing it.

The police eventually caught up with him and he did several stints in prison, such was the strength of his conviction.

I don't know how I feel about advertising, I guess some of it is good, mostly passive highly targeted advertising, like the ads in my BMX magazines that relate to BMX. It doesn't necessarily result in me purchasing anything from them, but it raises my awareness of various brands like We The People etc.

I applaud outdoor advertising initiatives like the Chinese governments total ban on it. It's ugly, probably ineffective and more to the point, ugly. Furthermore it is an incursion into the public space.

I read and watched H-Wangs post yesterday and it is interesting you should check it out.

'Thankyou' probably is the future, but this speaker was the first and only thing I've come across since Thomas Friedman's 'the world is flat' that I suspect like the book will catch wildfire amongst business people and amount in the end to nothing.

What I mean by analogy though is that Friedman's book like the keynote speaker seemed to be built up on thorough research and fundamental truths but emphasised the wrong stuff to come to a... I hesitate to use the word's 'wrong conclusion' but I can't think of something else.

For example, Friedman's book talks about the wonders of globalisation, thoroughly like 600-900 pages thoroughly, but he spends only a couple of pages on the shit that must inevitably derail the whole vision of globalisation as a source of good.

This guy, talks about how the key skillsets of success haven't changed in 100 years. (And probably not for most of the history of civilization and commerce) and that I fundamentally agree with. Nothing causes me more chagrin or makes me hate commerce more than it's obsession with modern technology and the constant 'new worlds' we are entering that are yet to produce little if any result.

So I feel compelled to provide a definition of a 'New World' that I feel has specific enough criteria to be validated. Okay being able to buy shit just by thinking about it in the presence of some Wifi device in the future is not a 'new world'.

A new world is when one of the fundamental experiences of being human changes. eg. You don't wake up wondering what it is you are doing with your life and where your life is headed. That is a NEW FUCKING WORLD. And it could be achieved in concievably good or bad ways.

I might write some posts about catching the fake rabbit, but fundamentally wondering how to stay competitive in a changing business environment is nothing new.

In fact even the concept of thanking high value customers isn't new. The keynote speech about 1-1 marketing or customer relations or whatever is I guess new. In that thanks to datamining social media like twitter whereas before thanking high value customers in a personal way required some kind of actual relationship, conversation etc and thus was restricted to Business to Business (B2B), you could employ somebody to find a web customer's twitter account, figure out what athlete they like, go to ebay buy some appropriate sporting memorabilia and send it to the person and they will be blown away.

Today. In three years time when such practice is widespread, they will simply just expect to be thanked. Until eventually big internet shoppers will be treated like IOC or FIFA board members, recieving a constant stream of bribes and gratuities that will not predict whom they will shop with next but most importantly - eat into everybodies bottom line.

And customers follow a Pareto distribution often, which is to say 90% of your sales come from 10% of your customers etc. Certain customers are more profitable than others, so what about the 90% of customers that contribute 10% of your business?

The 60 minute presentation says that Wine-library just gives them a phone call to say thanks. And I agree a business could easily fuck this up by trying to turn a thanks call into a sales pitch. But what if this practice becomes widespread.

I buy some books from Amazon, go over to Dr Jays and buy my attire for the next 6 months, then go to ebay and buy myself a watch. I then get a call from Amazon where a bubbly employee of the 'thankyou' department thanks me for my loyalty and wishes me a nice day. Followed by a bubbly employee from Dr Jay's thankyou department calling me to thank me for placing an order for the spring season, followed by three calls from ebay, the seller and paypal thanking me for bidding successfully, using paypal and shopping with ebay.

Almost everything undergoes inflation, groceries, education and even courtesy.

One of the most mindblowing concepts regarding the internet is that whenever you have an abundance in something (information) it will create a scarcity in whatever that something consumes (attention).

Perhaps I am old school, and again the presenter covered this, but when myspace was seen as a great way to launch your band, it was infact the opposite. Instead of having four people in line to hand a demo tape to the local radio presenter or record exec, suddenly you have a million people in that line. The internet made it harder for your band to break through the noise than it is to win the lottery.

The most successful bands I know at building a following do use the internet. But they also play a fuckload of gigs. Live gigs. At bars, bars that expose them to people.

The notion of 'thankyou' is nothing new, it is infact predicated on the observation that it still costs more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an old one. Look after your customers and your customers will look after you.

The principle would have been taught in business schools from at least the 1960's, maybe even earlier. This speech is about a specific execution, talking about the logistics availed by social media, ebay, secure internet shopping.

Thus I feel a greater service would have been done the audience if it was called 'fuck technology, learn your fundamentals' than 'how to apply tried and tested fundamentals of business in the new world.'

That's what I mean by saying I agree fundamentally, and suspect his predictions and visions of the future will wring true. Many of his observations are totally valid, like the fact that in the past pre-internet and pre-facebook we never would have phoned a friend to say 'mmm mm tacos for dinner om nom' but his notion of 'nobody gives a fuck about privacy' is the underpinning assumption and if you type 'how' into google then within the first 5 autofill search suggestions you'll see 'how do I delete my facebook account' so I think it dubious.

Thankyou departments probably will inevitably come in, the competive advantage value was depreciating the moment the speech was first made. Just like the first company to use telemarketing probably concluded it was the greatest competitive edge they ever had to proactively go after business, until everyone was doing it to the extent that legislature was enacted against it.

And maybe getting sent free shit by companies we buy from will always be welcome, if not paying off for the companies at least we get some free shit. Until ebay customers complain that everything gets bought up by institutional thankyou departments and instead of being able to buy their sporting memoriabilia themselves they had to place a $2000 order for wine and hope the company was reading their twitter feed. Or whether we discover we live in a world where the only way to see Radiohead's concert is to be the customer of some company.

It doesn't even compare to the 'frequent flyer points' competitive advantage, that at least paid off for business. The first company to introduce a frequent flyer points program (United Airlines?) described it as the 'ultimate competitive advantage' when they launched it. Within 24 hours competitors had their own programs up and running. It was instantly immitated.

Which didn't make it folly, by no means. What each program did was errect switching costs for their customers. That is once you had accrued reward points with one airline, you had an incentive to keep accruing with that airline rather than switching to the cheapest one. The switching costs created room for the airlines to raise their prices, and their competitors too.

So really a savy frequent flyer would probably have ended up cash positive by simply buying the cheapest flight available from whichever airline and never accruing frequent flyer points.

Even if it only costs 12c to call a customer and thank them, and abbundance of grattitude will inevitably create a scarcity of good will. I'm not saying it doesn't work and won't happen, just that in the end customers will wind up indifferent. It is why such a practice of thanking people probably dissappeared from practice - it became an unappreciated and insincere formality, so people probably just stopped doing it.

The speakers key advantage and insight I feel is not the specific execution of a thankyou department, or even the humanising of brands (that too isn't new) but his recognition of when people say they wont do something that they inevitably will do. (eg. people who said they would never get a mobile phone that wind up with one. people who said they'd never use facebook but do.) If he truly has a knack for it, then he gets the advantage of being an early mover.

I'm not sure though that this skill can be taught. It equates to 'buy low, sell high' investment advice, that for over a hundred years the bulk of humanity has proved itself, time and time again, to be incapable of doing. His advice may be 'recognise the next big thing while its still small, then get on board before it becomes big.'

There might still be time for me to set up a 'grattitude registry' website, where people cut out twitter and just list things they want companies they do business with to buy them to say thanks for buying shit for them. Then you can avoid double ups and ambiguities and false guesses and people getting freaked out by an audience they didn't intend datamining them and sending them shit.

But I'm too lazy and don't need the money.

Perplexity

I've been hitting people up with the telling hypothetical: 'of the good, the bad & the ugly' which one would you sleep with?

Unfortunately most telling about it is that most people I've asked have no idea what I'm talking about.

A friend who did made the absolutely 100% valid critique of the epic film as 'too masculine' as in '100% masculine' and yes, the whole western genre is patriarchal bordering on misogenistic.

Kind of like the hip-hop industry, albeit that is more misogenistic bordering on patriarchal.

Anyway, the point is that I need to freely acknowledge that a different generation is producing/consuming cool now, my ship has sailed. I don't want to join the club and the club won't have me.

I am joining the proud tradition of model citizens that look upon the problems with the youth today.

Although it isn't really a problem, I am just perplexed.

Like today I was thinking about David Bowie, I have to confront David Bowie soon, but an old flame introduced me to David Bowie, and because I wanted to make out with her, I gave David Bowie a chance.

See much of my life I spent hating the 80's, and one has to admit that the 80's can be best described as 'excess' but better described as 'craptacular'. It's funny though I used to hate the 80's until Bowie showed me that good shit got done in the 80's and I used to love the 90's until hipsters helped me understand why most people hate it.

There is much I don't understand about fashion trends and it's seeming trajectory. Here is just some of those points of perplexedness:

1. Ironic facial hair - what is the irony? that it is so unstylish it becomes stylish again? or because such a visual icon of masculinity is worn by some of the least masculine homo sapiens to carry a Y-chromosome? Does anyone have the answer?

2. Women who feel nostalgia for Madmen - Sure someway, somehow the women's movement was brought to heel to the extent that their are social repercussions for any woman with lhabia enough to proclaim herself a feminist, or even comment to the effect that something is sexist, but Madmen is alarmingly popular amongst women or those who would be visibly mistaken for women. Alarm because they seem fond of, pining for, a past where their jobs were meaningless, the marriage contract heavily assymetrical against them, the need to medicate yourself to allieviate the bordom of day to day living pervasive and sexual harrassment virtually unchecked. And the pay-off? pretty dresses. Madmen is perhaps the single most significant influencer of the past half decades fashions. The irony being that it is set in the 60's following the conservative set that the first generation of teenagers rebelled against. And now the current generation of teenagers idolize the establishment.
What the fuck happened?

3. Skinny guys - In the 90's Neighbours' legal property Toady taught us all that it was better to be a fat guy than a scrawny one. Nobody wanted a skinny man. Infact it was a hall-mark of male privelege that men didn't need to be attractive at all, one could effectively compensate through buying things. Sure opposites don't attract and superficial strategies attract superficial suitors, but nevertheless no man outside of Daniel John's was concerned about their weight. Better to be 'athletic' than fat I need to point out, even in the 90's. But the scrawny guy in class was an oddity, a freak, a statistical outlier. Something changed, I don't know. The cut of jeans or perhaps 'ironic' heroin use. But skinny guys are in.
The hour glass proportions, symmetry as beauty and the men's 'triangle' physique all had origins in our evolutionary gene selection. Skinnyness has no possible advantage on the sub-saharan plains. It indicates an inability to obtain sufficient calories, not even surplus calories. Are those who love men confused? Or has the frontal cortex finally beaten the amygdala into submission and reason (whatever it is) has finally overpowered subconscious cues?

4. Hip-hop culture stuck with winners. Why going by DR Jays' catalogue did all the current irony laden white fashion not come from african-american culture? They as yet haven't touched skinny jeans, and if they do, it won't last. Throw-back jerseys, baggy pants, XL shirts and generally looking like you could handle yourself in a fight have all stayed in. They have been refined, altered etc. But when did white people either A - give up, or B - take misguided initiative when it came to looking to our cooler cousins for fashion trends?

Only the man repeller seems to admit that style is pretty repulsive, but celebrated anyway. It doesn't provide any answers as to why current fashion trends are so popular.

Thus I remain perplexed. Perhaps because these questions have no answers. Perhaps fashion trends can get high subscription without any underlying subscription to philosophys or movements or aspirations to be anything.

Dealing With Shit: Part 2

I'm going to start this one by drawing a rough line connecting financial planners and psychologists.

Note, though that when I say psychologist I am not explicitly excluding 'psychiatrists' I'll treat psychiatry as a subset of psychology. Personally I hope never to see a psychiatrist because none of the issues I have stem from serious chemical imbalances in my brain, but if I was diagnosed with something, I'd seek one out.

I'm going to start by way of analogy with financial planners. There are things financial planners can do for you, valuable services that can be rendered. They can take a holistic view at your financial health and then consider who you are and then do things for you.

Two people can both take $10,000 to the same financial planner and get two very different pieces of advice. The advice will differ on the clients circumstances. Particularly it will almost always differ on what the client can accept -

Joe Common can't risk losing the $10,000 he has scrimped and saved for. He is only going to be advised to put it into a low-risk asset. These will generate low returns, and are as many frighteningly discover, not actually 'risk free'.

Martin Rare can risk losing the $10,000 he is just after the highest potential return. He'll be advised to take on something riskier and more profitable. Thus one of the heartbreaking things about the world is that often the rich are the only ones in a position to get richer.

And so to, I suspect (entirely untested) but the value of a psychologist is going to be in what you can accept from them. Just as the value of a financial planner is what you are willing to accept.

In fact I'll go so far as to say the value of expertise in general is how willing you are to defer to and accept that expertise.

But just as there are good and bad financial planners, there are good and bad psychologists.

The catch of this all is, I don't have any objective standard that I can tell you to determine whether your psychologist is good or bad.

All I would suggest is that while we carry around most of our problems in our day to day interactions, we probably all only seek help addressing them when they boil over into some issue. People, me, you, go to see a psychologist in a state of distress.

If you don't feel a lot more relaxed just from interacting with your psychologist, try another one.

That's all I can suggest on the good/bad front.

Now not sure how to proceed in explaining how getting help dealing with shit is done, I'm just going to list why I like psychologists.

1. They are removed from your life.
2. They have seen it all before.
3. They don't consider the social.
4. They are confidential.
5. They can inform your behaviour.

They are in other words completely unlike your friends, family and colleagues. They have one agenda and that agenda is to give you good advice. (presuming they are professional enough to not give the agenda of running a profitable practice precedence).

So starting with being removed from your life, this means that they don't carry bias and expectation about who you should be, who you should associate with, what you should be doing. Their advice is not going to be tainted with their own vicarious aspiration for you to do law. Their advice isn't going to take into account that they never liked your boyfriend Steve anyway.

They will be honest, and they will need to obtain information about you. Their competency I guess can be judged at how good they are at getting the required info out of you. The value will be judged by how honest you are.

Next is that they have seen it all before. We like to think we are unique and special, and we are. But our problems aren't necessarily unique at all. And as bitter a pill as it is to swallow, YOU PROBABLY WANT TO BE a textbook case of something.

I have no basis for saying this, just a strong suspicion but those I now most skeptical of a psychologists value go in in some form of denial. I can't imagine anybody who wants to be told that they are clinically depressed, bipolar, narcissistic, a victim, in grief or in denial, they value of a psychologist is that they will tell us that we are. Make us aware.

The first psychologist I saw, Joe, met me when I was having uncontrollable emotional breakdowns, was sleeping one hour a day, losing a lot of weight rapidly, completely scatterbrained and unable to escape my own life. He told me I was grieving, then gave me stuff to do.

It sounds strange but what Joe could do that none of my support group could (at that time) was tell me what was happening to me and give me shit to do. All my other friends saw the people, the circumstances and the fallout, he just saw a run-of-the-mill case of grief.

So whatever diagnosis you fear, that is precisely the domain of expertise you should expect from your psychologist. Hope that their is a textbook, and understand that there is no need to join some kind of 'deppressive pride' group and where t-shirts or to reveal that you have an inferiority complex in job interviews. You can keep that shit to yourself, just try, fucking TRY and following the textbook on how to address it.

Moving onto the lack of social constraints in conversing with a psychologist, well I did say I might elaborate on my 'superiority complex' which was not the basis of my recent sessions, nor have I been profiled or diagnosed with such, but I'll let it play.

Suppose I am really great, think of how many people it is possible to discuss the problems that arise from being so great with? In day to day social situations, fucking nobody. Even your best friend is likely to say 'get the fuck over yourself' and these are important social reinforcements.

But in a psychologists office you can relax such concerns, Matt Damon can say what a fucking joke the Harvard Mathematics professor and Fields Medal scholar is and fear no repurcussions. The psychologist is not (SHOULD not) lean forward and say 'oh boy you come all over yourself don't you.'

Similarly it is the psychologists profession and job that you shouldn't have to worry when you tell them about your Gender identity conflicts, your sexual preference, your hatred of the British. You can actually discuss all these things without fear of judgement. Which is to say, social judgement 'do I want to be this persons friend' but they should, absolutely should be appraising everything you discuss' effect on your wellbeing.

And more basically when it comes from the freedom of social conventions, the psychologists session is all about you. It's supposed to be. It is guilt free. You can thus talk about your envy of your colleagues promotion without being conscious of the fact that your best friend's partner walked out on her while carrying his child.

The fact that it is in confidence should need no further explanation.

The biggest advantage is that they can inform your behaviour. I ah... am not ready to discuss what I am supposed to be doing (am doing, kind of) post my latest sessions, but the first psychologist I saw got me to stop focusing on what the person I was grieving for was doing with their life and focus on my own.

I maintain that this was the single most productive process I ever went through in my life. This blog was started shortly after I did those sessions. He got me doing stuff, in control of relaxing, in control of moving forward, in control of rebuilding my life into something I actually wanted to live.

He did this in 3 hour long sessions over 4 weeks. It was the best investment of time in my life.

It will probably take me a couple of years to truly judge how productive my time was with the latest sessions, but even the immediate benefits, of getting me to relax enough to focus on my exhibition and even finally accept what I am, are coming together for me. The rest I still have to get done, but I am dealing with it.

Let's all now take a breath

Now I was thinking the other day about advertising, specifically almost every field of education has an academia-practice gap. And with advertising you probably have one of the best examples of what that gap is.

For all the sophisticated research and theories of how to advertise, how to influence people, how to make great creative and clever campaigns, the thing that is going to invalidate all the knowledge and expertise you are taught is: the client.

The client has the money, and however good you are at making ads to persuade consumers, practice is going to revolve around how good you are at pursuading clients to listen to you and do it your way.

Presuming you are competent.

And I suspect like any industry a (hopefully large) minority of psychologists are actually competent.

But you don't control the competence of your psychologist, you control you being the client that fucks it up by invalidating their expertise.

If you don't want to deal with your shit, it is not on the psychologist to convince you you should.

I imagine somewhere in some psychologists practice they sort patients into 'cooperative' and 'adversarial'. Adversarial are going to be of high value to the psychologist, and of little value to themselves.

If you go in there, with the precommitment to not accept certain diagnosis or even characterisations of your behaviour, then you are making it hard for yourself.

And maybe it needs to be.

I hesitate to talk about this, because while I'm sure my psychologist keeps my confidence in day to day life I don't really keep my own, so I'll hypotheticalise this to protect the innocent -

In my first session with my psychologist say we spoke about a friend's problem that effected me and was not my own. My psychologist hypothetically said 'he identifies as a girl but needs to accept that he is a boy.' and it rang true with me, and it was something I had thought for as long as I knew him/her, and thus such a casual off-hand observation was probably a profound and confronting truth to them.

For them to come to accept the same conclusion we did in my session would probably be a long and emotionally painful process. In exactly the same way as it is easy to say 'stop drinking' and much harder to do when you are dependant.

I'm going to stop shy of saying necessary but will say that just because something is painful and hard to achieve though doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile.

I mean I know I only control myself, and am responsible for my own happiness but it still doesn't mean when somebody is telling me that in their professional opinion I am something I don't want to be, I don't still need to be told 6 times to hear it once.

I know that my inclination will be to resist, but I also know that my quality of life will be improved once I understand the why, and know how to do the what.

That is how you deal with shit.

Very, very few people do. But it's worth trying.

Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest. ~ Mark Twain

Dealing With Shit: Part 1

First impressions last because few people bother to change.

Compounding this we live in a demerit society, one that is increasingly geared towards teaching us to avoid responsibility. It would be another post altogether to substantiate this outrage claim. Substantiate it yourself by listening to a politician answer a question. Any fucking question.

Twelve step programs I do believe are bullshit, though I haven't needed to try one as yet, but allegedly they are about as successful as one step programs aka cold turkey.

But lest I mislead you into thinking that by 'dealing with shit' I mean 'addiction' exclusively or primarily, I am going to cut to the chase.

It is not the first step to admit you have a problem, just there's no way to deal with shit if you are still in denial.

There are a few ways to recognise how people avoid taking responsibility and they are incredibly useful to know, mostly so you can recognise the behaviour in yourself.

Thus dealing with shit can't be done (or at least can be done much MUCH easier) until you achieve two things:

1. You recognise what you control.
2. You take responsibility for what you control.

Hmmm.... and perhaps I should put in a caveat, I am not going to restrict the productive services of a psychologist to simply dealing with shit/emotional baggage etc. There are for example diagnosable conditions that require expertise to detect, it could be useful to be diagnosed by a psychologist even if you go straight into denial.

But let's start with the first THING from above, recognising what you control.

This was the major useful thing as in PRACTICALLY useful thing that came out of my first session with a qualified psychologist. I was grieving so it was a temporary state. This is getting on towards like 6 years ago or something now.

Basically I had been dumped which induced grief. I didn't realise I was grieving, so I simply felt out of control. I was trying to regain control by attempting to control other people.

Here you need honesty in bringing yourself to the realisation that you control very little.

Specifically, few of us control anything other than how we behave. We don't control other people, the weather, the economy at large, legislature, jury verdicts, or where our tv remote is kept.

But controlling your own behaviour is enough. Other than that you just exert influence, and if you really gain control over your own behaviour and concentrate all your energy, intellect and will towards influencing something it can with time feel like you are operating an Etch-A-Sketch from a distance with pool cues while wearing oven mits.

That's the best of us, influence wise. It's an artform.

But in the meantime it is best to just focus on yourself, that is your end of whatever shitty deal life has given you.

In this coming to terms, there are a bunch of bi-product revelation that can serve to focus you on actually dealing with your shit, like she may never come back, he may never apologise, they may never forgive you, you may never know.

Thems the breaks.

Let's move onto the second thing, and let me make it clear that these two things are not a process or sequence, just distinct and codependant you need both.

Here are the 4 most common ways people avoid taking responsibility.

Denial: the simplest, it can be subconscious in which case you need to bring it into your consciousness, this means entertaining the hypothetical that you may actually be responsible for your own wellbeing and giving it serious play in your thoughts. People best deny responsibility for a problem by denying that there is one in the first place.

'Boss, I need you to stop pressuring me.'

'I'm not pressuring you.'

Plain and simple. The owner of the complaint gets the satisfaction of being informed that their complaint is invalid. People may tell you, you have a problem, if they do you should entertain the thought and investigate, seek expert opinion, diagnosis, if you are a particularly wonderful human being ask those people 'what can I do?' straight up.

Blaming: Which is another form of denial, but a common way to avoid responsibility. It is simply to lay the responsibility at somebody else's feet. Others may legitamately be responsible for the problems that effect you, but keeping in mind that you don't control them, apportioning blame accurately does not actually solve the problem, not reliably.

There is but a loose tacit expectation that the 'truly' responsible party may be compelled to take that responsibility and solve the problem.

Apologizing: Aka Rationalizing aka explaining. It's treating any problem as a fate accompli. It simply has to be that way. Infact it's probably the entire repertoir of logical fallacies. From 'that's the way it's always been done' to 'and wasn't it Mussellini that wanted the trains running on time.'

See apology, and 'apologizing' sound like you are taking responsibility for the problem, and you may well be, but you are still avoiding taking responsibility for fixing the problem.

Diversion/Telling A story: Lastly, just taking a problem and changing the subject. It can be done seemingly tactfully by entering a scoreboard situation. Somebody comes to you with a grievance, you greet it with a grievance of your own. The presumption is that your grievance is the one that needs to be dealt with most urgently, but people can be more blaze about it and just talk any old shit, so long as it isn't talk about the shit that actually needs dealing with.

You can't take responsibility for what you control if you are in denial. At which case if you see a professional like a psychologist instead of dealing with your shit, you are going to spend your sessions coming to terms with it.

If you can't do it on your own, then yes see a psychologist, but along with the general stigma against treating mental health, I think psychologists get a bad wrap as being seen as a 'waste of time' because many who do engage them and talk about it, never actually get past their subconscious denial. They are the ones who talk to a psychologist for 6 years and make no progress.

That may be blaming in itself, eg blaming the victims.

But the thing is, I always hated the saying 'your friends probably know you better than you know yourself.' and I don't think this is true at all, But what the bystanders of our subjective experience have over us is emotional objectivity.

That is, what we find so hard to accept ourselves, everybody else probably just assumed about us anyway, because they don't get the emotional feedback we do.

So people who aren't addicted, can easily observe that we are, because it's easy for them to admit. It's much harder for us to weigh up the comfort we get from our vice versus the pain of abandoning it and conclude that it is a problem because we actually experience the pain and the comfort.

But friends present these opportunities to influence us for the better. A girlfriend of mine once gave me Camus' 'The Stranger' because she felt I was emotionally withdrawn or isolated. And I am, I've always felt isolated and even when in a stable and good relationship, I feel alone and detached frequently. (but this is shit I have been dealing with for many years now, long after the book was given).

She may not have known what I actually subjectively felt, but she knew how my behaviour came across and I know my behaviour is something I can control. I'm not a textbook existentialist/nihilist by any means. But her gift was a gift.

Friends can also be enablers as well. Let's say hypothetically (and probably) many of my friends have armchair psychologist diagnosed me with a superioriy complex, some of my 'friends' may feed this back to me not through genuine support but sicophancy. I will probably spill whether I do or dont have a superiority complex in part two of this piece, but I mean if for example all your friends do is drink, and the only place you meet up with your friends is in a bar, or at your house/or theirs via a bottle shop, your friends are perhaps enabling a drinking problem.

Thus my point really is that other people may know the score and tell you 'you have a drinking problem' or other people may infact be the scoreboard 'my god, we all have drinking problems.'

This is the tricky social landscape that needs navigating before you can actually deal with shit. Frankly, alcohol abuse is too easy an example. You need to overcome denial by scrutinising your norms, or perhaps it is to say what your sense of normal is.

I often mix up business theories with psychology, and perhaps even treat them as interchangable, but in quality management, which I'm just going to translate to quality of life, around 5% of problems arise from 'special causes' that is stuff a system has warning lights for them. Fires, power losses, power surges etc. In quality of life terms, maybe 5% of the stuff that drags us down are the easily identifiable events - getting fired, death, house burning down.

They are obviously bad for us. In quality management the other 95% of problems come from 'ordinary causes' which is to say the 'day to day operation of the system.' aka 'design flaws'. Similary I have a strong inclination to believe that 95% of our problems in life, come from our status quo, our day to day existence.

That is why it is so important to overcome our denial and take responsibility for what we control.

Last year, I had my mother and my sister in the house and they were talking in another room. Through the brick walls I couldn't pick up any specific words, but I could pick up the conversation tonally, and you know what? It was the exact same conversation they have been having for as long as I remember. Tonally at least, the words may change but how my sister and my mother relate to eachother has not.

Fortunately my family is fairly functional, and proactive about being functional. I lucked out on these relationships of non-choice.

But we have disfunctional relationships, all of us, that we just assume are the way things are. They cause us grief and misery and we assume there's no way of dealing with them. Not just relations to people, but substances, tasks even. Any interaction with the external world has one input that we control.

That input is how we behave. Gaining control of this is enough. You may still wish that heroin didn't come with withdrawel symptoms and that everyone you ever loved also loved you back, but it is enough to just control how you behave in response to these realities.

If you can accept that, and you have a will to actually deal with it. Then, then it will be highly productive for you to see a psychologist and deal with this shit.

Grey Matters

For the past 8 weeks or so I've been seeing a psychologist. Now my sessions have finished and I am out in the world on my lonesome again.

Much of the headway made in those sessions is just sinking in now though two weeks or so since we wrapped my head back up.

It's been good for me.

Some frustrations though bubble to the surface.

Like, I have issues. But I was able to see a psychologist and pay nothing for 5 weeks for problems that in the scheme of things are minute. If I address my problems, my quality of life should be significantly improved.

If say somebody with a diagnosable personality disorder, or addiction, or actual histories of abuse, sufferring... all the kind of things that really fuck with people were able to draw on the same resources like I can their quality of life would skyrocket.

There is however, I admit, prerequisites to being able to take advantage of mental health services, but what frustrates me the most is how stigmatised mental health is. That's not controversial, nor for such recent sciences as psychology is it really surprising that the stigmatism is still around... it's not a 'it's 2012 I can't believe Sam Newman is still on the air!' type argument I make.

It's more that I don't see any concerted effort by any organisations, politicians etc to actually destigmatise mental health, seeing a psychologist etc. Probably the most progressive pushing of mental health for all message is the portrayel of psychiatry in 'The Sopranos'.

So this week I'm going to post a two parter on 'Dealing With Shit' because while it remains to be seen as to whether I can deal with my own shit, I have at the very least come part of the way, which is more than most manage.

So I'm going to start destigmatising right here.

Ichijoji

I've been putting this off for too long, seems I only use this blog these days to mark my progress to becoming a human being I'm satisfied with.

So on Tuesday the 21st of February my first ever exhibition opened, it was always to be my 'toehold' into the art world but it kind of blew up so much I don't know whether to raise myself one notch or six. It will be hard to top.

I guess I'm most proud of how I did it, It was hard work sure, but it wasn't painful, it involved no sacrifice. It nourished me. I think that is precisely what your art needs to do at its best.

Like I ended up having to drop some work shifts to get it organised in the end, I didn't need the duel stress (nor the money) but I made every single one of my social obligations in the 6 week run up to the exhibit. There was no withdrawing into a cocoon and dropping off the radar while I scratched away going insane in my isolation.

I also managed to post daily webcomics for robot girlfriend on facebook for 31 days (excluding weekends). All while drawing my 70 pieces with the finest materials I could afford and to the best of my ability.

That's what I'm most proud of.

Exhibiting itself, I had the kind of panic when it opened that I've never had before. I couldn't describe it as nerves or jitters or anxiety. My mind just kind of shut down, so I simply had no idea what was going on.

But after two days it sank in. A lot of people actually came and saw my work. I sold a lot of pictures and I still can't comprehend that I could make money from stuff I just made up. It is amazing and magical too me.

Lastly, there is a lot of myself on display up on that wall, like who I am on the inside. Maybe that's why my brain shut down, having almost everyone I know walk past declarations of what a brute, ruthless animal I am deep down.

the thing is, that I started this blog after being introduced to the Johari window and to set about with great purpose to expand the arena of what I know about myself and what others also know about me as wide as possible.

And Ichijoji was another confirmation of my suspision that the things we think we hide so well, everybody kind of always assumed.

I might be one of the few people in the world who's psychologist bought a picture by a patient of a man killing another man. Go figure.

All I know was this exhibition was the best thing I've done so far.

Nerds will be Nerds

and if you know one, you may as well shake them down for their lunch money.

Seriously, when I was like 14 I remember seeing the trailer to 'Blues 2000' a film that Australian Blues Brother's fans (fanatics) helped get made allegedly. The prospect of a sequal had always seemed tantalising, but improbable because well Dan Akroyd was fat and John Belushi was dead.

So that trailer admittedly had it's merits, they found in John Goodman an actor that made Akroyd look thin, and a good actor at that, John Goodman has gone on to bigger and better things. But the moment I saw the kid in blues brother attire I knew the film would ultimately be a dissappointment and was just a money maker and vis a vis not worth seeing.

I never actually saw the film and thus I don't actually know if it was worth seeing or not. But I seem to live like everybody else, which is to say for the most part forgetting it ever existed in the first place, but with the difference of not being able to remember having seen it.

Sooooooooooooooooooooooo, I learned somewhere somehow just recently that DC have announced prequals to the Watchman series.

I've always personally had problems with DC's management of the Watchmen IP. The movie adaptation generated so much hype that I guess it ultimately lead to the now liquidated Borders shelves being weighed down with dozens of copies of the tital and prompted people to read it in anticipation of the film and thus gaining it a much larger audience. In much the same way that HBO's terrible adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire is regarded by many people as so much better than so much television that it created a new audience for the books.

So in terms of adaptations abilities to prompt new audiences to discover the truly wonderful source material, I guess that is their one and only redeeming feature.

I never saw Watchmen either, because my stance was 'at best it can only be a take for take faithful adaptation of the comic. In which case it is entirely redundant and far too likely to dissappoint.' I've never been able to understand why people get excited about the film medium, specifically getting people to dress up and act out a comic...

But get excited they did and pay money to see it in 3D on imax they also did.

And from second hand reports it was as I predicted, kind of a pointless film to make, faithful to the original with a few tweeks and ultimately forgettable. Same can be said of Sin City, and I'd point out that as they go these are probably the 'better' adaptations of comic books. In my opinion the best adaptations of the past decade or so have been Iron Man, and Spider Man 2, the lessons though are never learned.

So too I can record here my prediction for the Watchmen prequals. They won't add much, and potentially detract from the original Alan Moore run, because the Watchmen series whole narrative tool was to gradually reveal the background of the characters taking place in both the stories own past and present.

Furthermore, they will never be considered canon, but they will add an unattractive footnote to the 'legacy' section of Watchmen's wikipedia page.

Nerds though will go and buy the series, some even just so they can be offended by it. They will discuss it much on forums for months to come or until the release date making predictions, some the stupider talking about how excited they are, the smarter their skepticism and others yet talking about their exuberence for 'more watchmen'.

Manifesting in the masses is the same drive that always optimistically speculates on sequals, the human drive if you will for sequals. People who crave and look forward to sequals don't want to see a new movie or read a new story, they want to experience the same story for the first time again.

Optimism is important, but sadly it is why I guess nerds or 'the market' never learns from their past experience of movie adaptations, or getting other writers to create sequals of seminal works.

There's buzz about the names involved in the prequals, but I'm not sold, for one thing, I never watched enough Babylon 5 or read 100 bullets to feel they are 'modern day answers to Alan Moore' and two, people would get a buzz out of Neil Gaiman writing for these prequals even though Neil Gaiman's past efforts to fill Moore's shoes have been dismal and forgettable failures - see his run on Miracle Man (which Moore kind of wrapped up before he got there) or his 'Whatever happened to the caped crusader' special of Batman.

Neither are remarkable and I would contend if Gaiman can't do it, then probably even bigger names like Morrison or Miller can't do it, and let's face facts, Moore probably can't do it, which is presumably why he generally doesn't.

And that's the key. There's no real harm to doing these things, which is to say making money off assets you own. If they don't fly they don't fly, hopefully they make money and like Blues 2000 or Jaws 4, nobody talks about them in a decades time. Furthermore we are all familiar with that annoying quote 'A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.' but what I would suggest is that there is an undervaluing of NOT doing something going on. There is a lack of appreciation for the art of restraint.

You can keep adding paint to a canvas, but there is a decision an artist makes in when to stop. There are peaks and troughs in anythings lifespan, there is an art in knowing when to exit on a high. There is nothing particularly dispicable about somebody fighting their own inevitable decline, but there is something admirable about somebody who gracefully accepts that it is done and over.

Watchmen deserves to be retired, despite our nature that hungers for more that just isn't coming.

I think the Nerds know this, in their heart of hearts, they just can't stop themselves from reinforcing the producers/DC editors behaviour.

Obstacular

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now to turn around and work on it.

The Last Hurrah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's A Guy Thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- cultural identity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Jobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Word.

Prophanity is a legitimate form of expression.

Cool is Cheap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm Sorry, What?

Property buying losing appeal even as prices retreat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gay Marriage

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

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

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

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

No.

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

What is the Mangatrix?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Poverty and Wealth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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