May 2005 Archives

On Saturday night we had Hip Hop Projections at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, an event to launch a few of the hip-hop-based community cultural development projects at ICE. More photos here.

An event like this was a long time coming. On our World Tour™ five years ago, Lena and I spent a few weeks in London. Flicking through a copy of Time Out one night, I noticed that Community Music were holding a graduation show for one of their urban music programs. “Hey, fuck, this is the outfit that the Asian Dub Foundation came out of!” I said to Lena. So we went, and it was amazing — all these Asian and Afrocaribbean kids going apeshit. We went up to chat to the organisers afterwards, and Lena planted the seeds of many things to come.

So five years later, in a kick-arse venue and supplemented by a backdrop of ultratastic video art, the young artists — most of whom were variously familiar with the juvenile justice system, unemployment, seeking asylum in Australia, or whatever — took my excitement at that original chance encounter in London and dragged it to a new plateau. I’m not one to go needlessly celebrating originality and authoriality, but I do think it’s significant here that the kids involved wrote their own songs — rhymes, backing tracks, everything — and that this was the first time most of them had ever performed. And they were fucking good — I was jumping up and down about how hot they were. Over the last few months I was privileged to catch little snatches of their stuff, observing some of these songs taking shape as an aside to some of my own work, but to experience the whole package in performance was a shock to the system. I’m gonna see if I’m allowed to upload some of the audio from the show.

Other cool stuff of the night: Rebekah LaVauney (you know, one of the final 12 from the first season of Australian Idol) is a tutor for SuburbanSistaSoundz, ICE’s currently running urban music project. When one of the performers succumbed to stage fright and lost her voice, Bek came up on stage and gave her a big squeeze, and just stood there stroking her until she got it back. It was really fucking sweet, and not patronising at all. And then MC Wire showed up unannounced (as he is wont to do) and floored everyone with a deadly spoken word version of his “black secret agent” song. A killer weekend. And I haven’t even gotten to “The First Act of Violence”, our Emerging Communities event at the Festival, featuring two of the excellent Storybox people. I’m reeling!

[ tags: asian-dub-foundation, community-music, hiphop, rebekah-lavauney, sydney-writers-festival ]

Our Suad Amiry event at the Sydney Writers’ Festival was awesome — I don’t think I’ve ever been in the presence of such a generous, warmly ironic storyteller — the amazing one-liners were so plentiful that I was overwhelmed. I’ll have to go through the audio to transcribe the best bits. Bringing Amiry to Australia was the best fucking idea I’ve had in a long time!

Some time ago Anne Galloway dropped a challenge:

as much as I love cultural theories of everyday life, I’m sure they’d be stronger if they included the voices of, say, people living in Occupied Palestine — where urgency and joy take on new meaning.

But is the answer a matter of an implicitly still-Eurocentric body of “theory” “including” the marginal? Amiry’s talk, and her subsequent on-stage conversation with the luminous Rawan Abdul-Nabi, were all about autonomously elaborating the mundanities and extremities of the occupation, and I began wondering whether the canonicity of “cultural theory” was effectively being routed around and reconstituted. A few years ago I invited Rawan, then a teenager, to facilitate a discussion within an anti-racist activist network about how local struggles in suburban Sydney could find useful resonance, despite the incommensurabilities, in the everyday experience of repression and resistance in Palestine. I don’t think any of us were engaged enough for any real dialogue to emerge at the time, but last night I think my hopes for that earlier, aborted event were fulfilled by Rawan, who drew out Amiry’s stories of ridiculous, daily humiliations and their defiant circumvention through irony and humour. It was these stories and their ethics of the “neveryday”, rather than Amiry’s debatable thoughts on statecraft, that challenged me the most.

[ tags: delusions-of-grandeur, megalomania, palestine, suad-amiry, sydney-writers-festival ]

Last night I had an embarrassing dream that I visited Apple’s headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California. There was a huge Apple museum, which featured all sorts of stuff that I must have absorbed from reading Andy Hertzfeld’s Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. I also noticed that all the signage was in the outdated Apple Garamond typeface, rather than in Apple Myriad. I know, you’re thinking, how much worse can this get? But then I’m in the Apple cafeteria, and find myself sitting next to Julia Sawalha — Saffy from Absolutely Fabulous. I introduce myself, and compliment her on her performance in the excellent Doctor Who and the Curse of the Fatal Death. Then I turn around and find that sitting to my other side is none other than Paul McGann, the rather good Eighth Doctor from the unfortunate Doctor Who telemovie. I suddenly have a realisation. “That’s funny,” I say to them both, “you’ve both starred in one-off Doctor Who stories that featured Doctor-companion romance.” They both look at me like I’m on drugs. I really wish my brain would stop working like this. It would be better for all concerned.

[Update: when I published this entry, my blogging client software went into an infinite loop, spewing out an endless stream of “your entry has been published” messages.]

[ tags: andy-hertzfeld, apple, doctorwho, dream, garamond, myriad, typography ]

• fadaiat 2005
  “Second edition of the event dealing with freedom of movement and freedom of knowledge.”
  (tags: borders hackers free-software migration technology precarity cartography tactical-media)
• MakingThingsPublic
  ” The main idea behind this show is that politics is all about things. It’s not a sphere, a profession or a mere occupation; it essentially involves a concern for affairs that are brought to the attention of a public.”
  (tags: art politics publics democracy latour public-sphere)

Blogtalk is winding up. Much better than yesterday, but then again, I nicked off after lunch for Mel’s seminar yesterday, ditching Glen, so who knows?

Feh. I got bogged down with description in my presentation and missed my opportunity for the fucking excellent audiovisual moments. Bah. Then I got nervous and totally fucked up my explication of the paper’s core points. Shit.

Wow: the illustrious Mark Bernstein suggested that I write him a feature for TEKKA magazine. “Finally, someone’s critiquing the digital storytelling form,” he sighs as I blush prettily. (Sorry, Mark, I gave up on Tinderbox in the first hour of use. Steep learning curve indeed.) I brought up digital storytelling’s tendencies towards teleology to relate it to narrative therapy’s presumption of a coherent subject. I’m currently thinking of ways to work the medium with the destabilising insights of blogs as an accretive medium, rather than to succumb to the closures of more teleological narratives. Yeah! Marica Sevelj from the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand gave me a headsplitting bunch of digital storytelling resources for just such an enterprise, which I’ll be following up in earnest.

Mark also just broke my head open with the observation that content aggregation, whether it be via RSS or whatever, is fundamentally unable to capture the meaning that lies in between texts. A possibly obvious point, but when posed in the current context, this points in a really interesting direction for my research project. Oh, and another bite of his, about authenticity: “nobody’s who they say they are”. Huzzah!

Didn’t quite know what to make of Chris Chesher’s identification of the refrain of authorship in blogging. I kept compulsively finding counterexamples to his points.

Katie Cavanagh’s presentation, which was about writing marginality and the space between public and private, was incredibly dynamic. While she doesn’t share any of the bases that I’m working from, and I’m really skeptical of her humanism, but she provided an irresistable context for me to think more.

In the middle of a quite interesting and potentially radical geek critique of monastic authoritarianism and corporatisation in the education system, Sebastian Fiedler just made a really weird conflation between “open, conversational learning” and blog narratives in general. I’m paraphrasing, but he basically said, “Why try to create ways to find marginal stories as a project? If you structure your writing in a certain way that supports the opening of conversations about how to achieve X or Y goal, people will naturally come to you”. WTF?? Talk about the utter instrumentalisation of the Web! Such a conception of value does my head in!

And right now, Rebecca Blood is saying something much more interesting about value anhd publics, as perhaps a corrective to a discourse of “zoologically preserving the Long Tail” (my term) that she thinks Mark and Katie are creating. “‘We’ need them more than they need ‘us’ — maybe not everyone wants to be read by a lot of people.” Hmmm.

[ tags: blogs, blogtalk, blogtalkdownunder, conference, theory ]

Gerard presents his moblogging paper.

[ tags: blogs, blogtalk, blogtalkdownunder ]

The current PowerPoint slide in Mathieu O’Neil’s Blogtalk paper is “The Structural Meaning of LiveJournal Bashing”. Excellent.

[ tags: blogs, blogtalk, blogtalkdownunder, conference, livejournal ]

Just had a nice chat to Gerard Goggin, an old-skool Left Alliance dude whom I’d never met. We even used the words “dialectical” and “capitalism” — in the yacht club! Yay!

[ tags: blogs, blogtalk, blogtalkdownunder, conference ]

We are now listening to Thomas Burg extoll the virtues of just-in-time production, competetive technocracies and “repurposing” content for innovation. I’m raising an eyebrow. I dunno if there’s any point even trying to engage in a dialogue about this, because I think the parties concerned would probably just be talking past each other. Like other geeks, I really am interested in engaging with how our engagements with the technological might sometimes help us, uh, do stuff better. I actually get excited about this. But I guess we need to unveil the entire, unquestioned apparatus that underlies the rhetoric of “productivity” while we do this.

UPDATE: Thomas just revealed that after testing the hybrid social-software/knowledge-management system he was implementing in Austria, 83% of users still thought that such systems entailed “more work”. Ha. Rather than lament that we’re simply in an early adopter phase, in which this stuff hasn’t yet penetrated into daily life, shouldn’t we admit that this is what “productivity” is all about?

[ tags: blogs, blogtalk, blogtalkdownunder, conference, productivity, social-software ]

Glen and I are at a fucking yacht club. At a blogging conference. Weird!

[ tags: blogs, blogtalk, blogtalkdownunder, bourgie, conference, wealth ]

• Chicago crime database | chicagocrime.org
  This is some fucking crazy shit that translates crime statistics into graphical representations via Google Maps.
  (tags: maps mapping google crime surveillance)

• Games and Intensity
  Abe’s paper about video games and the univocity of Being!
  (tags: games deleuze badiou intensity research)

Ooookay, my Blogtalk paper is now online {shudder}. It’s really just a set of fevered notes-to-self and thinkings-aloud — I hadn’t even read it over once when I sent it off, I was that delirious. On rereading, it all sounds reasonable until I start ranting about Grant Morrison and David Lynch. Oh dear:

In The Filth, cat-blogging allegorically retains its nobility as an exemplary effect, but with the realisation that its vocabulary is a partial medium in the occult sense, sometimes sharing storytelling techniques with narratives of genocide.

My biggest task in my presentation wil be to convince people that this has anything whatsoever to do with the refugee bloggers of my Storybox project, which is supposed to be the substantive topic of the paper. Perhaps I should just have one PowerPoint slide that reads, “Because it does, okay?”. Hmmm.

Anyway, despite the lack of rigour and the strange slippages and contradictions that might occur in my sloppy work, I do think I’ve made some progress in my conception of everyday life, mundanity and approaches to “resistance” therein, through what I call “the neveryday” — a minoritarian, virtual space of “occult” enunciation in which languages of volcanic trauma and mundanity modulate or channel through each other in the accretive narratives of the blogosphere. No, really. Bah, I’m going to bed with my Tamagotchi. (I’m minding it for my nephew.)

[ tags: blogs, blogtalk, blogtalkdownunder, conference, storybox ]

I’ve just been informed that I’m the number one result for the Google search “OMG LOL”. Yessssss…

[ tags: google, pagerank, omg, lol ]

Joshua: Look [gesturing at posters of Man City players on the wall], these guys are human!

Me: Really? I thought they were robots.

Joshua: Robots? Noooooo, they are really good soccer players.

Me: But all the good soccer players are robots, aren’t they?

Joshua: [exasperated] Nooooo, because then I would be a robot…

[ tags: cute, nephew, robot, soccer ]

• Backpack Shuffle: 25 random public pages
  Read the comments — with their random showcase of “public” pages created in their new “Backpack” personal information management software, 37signals discover that “public” is a contested concept…
  (tags: 37signals backpack software web public private privacy)

If you’re really going to use the puny earbuds that come with the iPod, Griffin trumpets that you can “enhance” their sound with their EarJams, which convert the plain-vanilla earbuds into in-ear headphones that boost bass/volume and block ambient noise. I’ve always used a pair of huge Sony clams, but they don’t really fit well under my bear-hood when I’m out and about, and they make me look like a fucking Cyberman. So instead of paying for another pair of headphones, I bought the EarJams on impulse. (I wasn’t able to test them instore.)

Unfortunately, the EarJams radically reverse the problem with the iPod’s earbuds: while the bass is boosted about 300%, all mid-to-high frequencies sound like they’re coming from the bottom of a well. Fuck. I’m bloody sick of buying shit that doesn’t work. So I made them work.

• Choosing the smallest of the three sets of rubber ear-pads reduces the mid-frequency distortion, even though this leads to sound-leakage.

• The plastic, funnel-like base that clips around each earbud seems to selectively leak only high frequencies from its loose seal, so I dipped their edges in molten wax before fitting them, thus compensating for the leakage from the loose fitting pads.

• Finally, I modified the EQ profile of every song on my iPod in Tunes, because none of the default iPod EQ settings was adequate. I never knew that iTunes could apply custom EQ settings to particular songs, and that these settings override any iPod EQ setting (except “Flat”) by default. The bass didn’t need that much boosting, but I pumped the treble up way high. I was under the impression that my custom iTunes EQ settings were transferring to my iPod, but I must have been just been hearing the “Treble Booster” iPod EQ setting, which does pretty good job of compensating for the lost treble.

The result has just about the same fidelity as the original iPod earbuds, but with much more presence and a fuckload more bass. I just can’t believe I’m consciously inserting wax in my ears.

[ tags: earjams, griffin, headphones, ipod, itunes, mod, wax ]

Thanks, everyone who told me to calm down about my thesis. The only problem now is that I’ve been given some dispensation to have another stab at my BlogTalk paper, after having previously given up. But meanwhile, Wireless Internet access in the library solves all problems!

+  +  +

The other night I had the most fantastically lucid dream, which completely surprised me with its plot-twists — at the end of this very long, very involved dream, I realised that it was patterned largely after Chris Marker’s La Jetee, or Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys! Just as with those two movies, it involved a man who travels back in time, and is killed in front of his younger self — a small boy, who is forever marked by this traumatic and yet incomprehensible incident.

There were all sorts of clues to this throughout my dream, with the death scene played at the beginning from the boy’s point of view, plus numerous flashbacks, which only made sense at the end. The climax occurred on a freeway overpass, and when the time-traveller was shot, the “camera” fixes on his boy-self in the background, in a dramatic, Hitchcockian tracking shot! I was completely stunned! I told you I was bad at picking plot twists — I’m a completely credulous viewer.

[ tags: chris-marker, dream, la-jetee, terry-gilliam, time-travel, twelve-monkeys ]

Animals!

[ tags: belonging-to-the-Emperor, embalmed, trained, pigs, sirens, fabulous, stray-dogs, included-in-this-classification, trembling-like-crazy, innumerable, drawn-with-a-very-fine-camelhair-brush, et-cetera, just-broke-the-vase, from-a-distance-look-like-flies ]