Murdoch Qualms

Some times I forget exactly how pervasive the internet has become. Case in point: I've been contributing to a friends start up blog The HyperboleMachine, on it one of the contributers [a fellow murdoch student herself] had a bit of a rant about West Coat Blues and Roots in which she took both sunset events and Murodch to town for a few different reasons. You can read the post in question here. To Gerry's article you can see that I left a fairly scathing reply which focused exclusively on Murdoch and where I think it's been assing up. It went something like this...

Murdoch really really really need to stop trying to “capitalise on the new media opportunities” and “speaking to young adults on their level” and realise that they are a fucking university. I don’t want you on my god damn level, murdoch. I want you to be the shining beacon of everything I’m not, I want you to be the institution that chews me up and spits me out, if I’m lucky, with a degree that’s worth more than the paper it’s printed on. I want you to make me admire you, not suckle at the teat of whatever new ploy your young marketing staff has come up with this week.

If you want to capitalise on the “new media” I’ll let you in on a secret, you can’t make it work for you. The new media is us, it’s this, right now, what I’m doing here, what people are doing elsewhere. It’s said that markets are now conversations, and I’m under no illusion that a university is a market driven entity, but here’s the genius part about markets now being conversations, you can’t direct them. You can’t fool us, the new media, with gimmicks and shiny baubles. Sure, you might catch what vestigial features are left of the old school mentality, but the bright minds, the committed thinkers, the people you should be wanting to attract, all you are doing is leaving them with mud to throw, buckets and buckets of it.

Pick up your game, lead by example, stop pandering to the lowest common denominator. You are a higher education institution, start acting like it. *IF* you do, we the media, will start saying nice things about you again, but I won’t lie to you, it’s going to take a while

Now, the reason I started off by saying that the internet is pervasive is that a member of the marketing team at Murdoch, one of the same ones that chose me to be an endorsed blogger. The same ones who have given me cool free stuff like tickets to blues and roots. They emailed me because they had seen my comment on this other blog, one I have never linked to here, and asked me, very politely, if there was anything in particular I had issue with and that the team felt they were doing the best they could to give prospective students a window into uni life. So I thought I'd take an opportunity now to clear up what I meant in my criticisms.

My issue isn't with the marketing team at Murdoch, online or otherwise. In fact I have a fair amount of respect for them, both professionally [thanks to t.v. ad campaigns like the "I want to try" ad, which I can't find a video online of unfortunately] and individually [the online marketing team that I've had the most to do with actually seem to care about stable of bloggers and students they've got helping them out, something that is pretty hard to come by in the industry, believe you me]. No my issue with Murdoch is not with the marketing team, it is with the upper management directing them. For too long now Murdoch has become the last thing in the world is was ever envisioned being, a degree treadmill. This is especially hilarious as Murdoch isn't even a predominantly teaching university, it's a research uni, and of the two, research uni's make significantly less money.

Now, the upper management will go to the grave saying that it is for this reason that Murdoch, as an institution has had to make some of the hard decisions that it has over the last few years. I know this because I conducted an interview with one of the bigger mucky mucks about the executive's side of the story in last years pay dispute. He said that Murdoch is run extremely close to the line and that there is very little surplus money for things like paying teaching staff more. A very useful excuse to use when the financial operations of the uni are not transparent, meaning open for scrutiny. Now, I'm not an idiot, I am fully aware that a company should not reveal it's financial decision making process to it's stakeholders because stakeholders have NFI how to run a business. The only problem with this is that Murdoch is a Public University, and as such, not only does it in part belong to the staff and students who teach and attend it, it belongs to the community as well.

This is the crucial facet of the approach the Murdoch Executive has towards conducting itself which I feel is essentially flawed. Yes, Murdoch needs to be financially ship shape and able to support itself. This however does not mean maximizing profits and receiving the best return on your investment. Especially when part of that means selling false promises to prospective students. Your marketing campaigns are wonderful at invigorating people and stirring up their social motivations and desire to not be a part of the crowd, unfortunately I've studied here for three years and I am yet to see the innovative thinking and outside the box approaches that you sell.

At the end of this semester you will lose two of your best and brightest from the media department to Monash, a crushing loss for those of us in the media school. A friend of mine started uni as a mature age student this year and despite being a switched on self reliant young lass I have had to wade waist deep into the quagmire of bullshit that surrounds simple tasks like, enrolling, or, signing up for tutes, the administrative staff being unable to offer her the solutions to her problems because they were either over worked or had no real experience with the online systems. Murdoch has a policy of not allowing fliers or posters on columns of bush court or the poster pillar near the main car park [which funnily enough is called such because it's sole purpose in life is to act as a home for posters] which they claim it to keep the uni neat and nice looking... it's a university you morons, it's supposed to be covered in fliers. Couple this with the fact that students are not allowed to set up food vending stalls and tables outside of very strict guidelines for fear of unfair competition with the food hall, [us crazy students having the proclivity to partake in activities that provide services without generating profit] are just two of many examples of measures the executive has undertaken which, deliberately or not, leave the Murdoch student culture a malformed still-born year after year. The list of failing goes on and on, and while I would dearly enjoy being self indulgent and listing them all [it is a blog after all] I fear I'm already starting to lose your attention so I'll anchor all of these symptoms to the root disease.

Murdoch is being run as a entity with it's financial prospects as the huge and overwhelming priority, other benefits such as quality of education and staff conditions are externalities and considered as factors in an economic equation. I have an alternate view to propose, what if students, staff, and research where the combined goal, and financial sustainability merely a way to best maximize returns to that goal. As I said in my quoted comment from the other blog, markets are now conversations. We are reaching a point in social organization where anything BUT quality product [and your product in this case is a vibrant, healthy, and happy university] will get you nothing. You can still try and run the ship with the old school headspace, and that will most likely work right through to the end of your respective tenures, but what then? You will leave the next round of administrators with a university with no student life, dissatisfied and underpaid staff [if there are any good ones left at that point] and shitty research culture, and in this future, when a shiny media campaign has become irrelevant, how the fuck are you going to sell Murdoch to us then?

P.S. once more to the marketers at Murdoch, I really have no beef with you guys, you've always been super lovely to me, despite me being an arrogant douche bag, which is really rather nice of you. And like I said, I got the mad respect for you, having successfully polished a turd.

P.P.S. If you like what you've read here, quote it, link it, and spread it.

Nationalism. Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love my country.

I’m in Helsinki. I’ve been here for about 2 and a half months now, and I don’t miss Australia. You know those people who know the second verse to Advance Australia Fair [or hell, even all of the first verse for that matter] and who actually care about the medal tally or whether Mark Webber is doing good this season? Yeah, I’m not one of those people. In short, I don’t love my nation, I am neither patriot or nationalist. But this does not mean that I think either of these things are bad, or evil. Oscar Wilde may have said that patriotism is the virtue of the vicious, but I don’t think that’s a declaratively true statement [and besides, he was like, totally gay]

In the course of “education” I’ve had more than a passing interest in politics, and by politics I mean political science, you know Totalitarianism and Democracy, the role of ethnicity and god, that sort of thing. Nationalism is a prominent feature of almost any conversation about change within a nation, because time after time we can see that the quickest way to mobilise a people is to stoke the fires of their nation-love.

But why? The idea of the “nation” and by extension “national identity” are fairly new concepts, they’ve only been around for a few hundred years, and lets not forget that until about 150 years ago [give or take half a century depending on who you look at] small lineages for fairly inbred people controlled most of the world through empire rule. Yet stand in the deep south of the US or on the river foreshore on Australia day for that matter and utter the phrase “fuck this country” and you will attract some violence pretty quick.

How have we become so caught up in the idea of the national family that we will attack members of that “family” for criticizing it? And why, in Australia at least, does it seem to be a province of the young [younger than 30]. I will allow that in the Australia day scenario booze would play a large factor, but when Alan Jones whipped that merry band of savages into a frenzy over in sydney, most of them weren’t on the piss.

The answer, for here and elsewhere, seems to be anomie. Anomie is a cognitive dislocation, a kind of social disconnect that leaves an individual rudderless in a storm. Anomie can be born of many things but from what I have observed one of its principal causes in western society seems to be the rift between expectations and reality. We expect to be successful, we expect to be rich, we expect to be famous. I’m not saying everyone is deluded enough to think that one day they will be Paris [or even Perez] Hilton, but the fact remains that we are sold on the idea of moving into the class above us at some point in our lives. The realisation that this probably isn’t going to happen, that dairy section manager at the local supermarket is about the best that’s going to come your way*, results in an anger, a formless, unexplained dissatisfaction that an individual is not aware of and cannot solve.

It is into this spiritual and emotional hole that some of the “answers” float. These answers might be God, Drugs [In Australia Booze, Weed, Meth. In order of impact] Love, or as is pertinent to this article, Nationalism. It gives us comfort knowing that we are a part of something bigger than ourselves. It makes us feel victorious when members of our family beat members of rival families in contests. And it makes us feel righteous when some of these other families behave in monstrous ways. We can say to ourselves, much as your actual family may have done when you were little, “I’m glad we don’t behave like that”. I am glad our women have the right to vote, our citizens don’t have their ethnicity on their passport/identity card, and our citizens are free to criticise. These features of our country are good features, but I am not proud.

I am not proud because the facets of my nation that should arise pride are not representations of my families elegance or intelligence. How many of these qualities that I hold so dear would still be around if left to the constantly shifting discretion of my “family” members, rather than enshrined into law? Our nationalism revolves around a schema of exclusion, that is, we feel good by comparing ourselves to others. This I feel, is a crucial mistake. If we look at ourselves critically we will see a population of commodity driven worker bees. We make a big song and dance about people coming and trying to get in on the good life that we’ve all works so very hard to build, but Australians haven’t worked hard to build anything, other than our own personal fortunes. We think that because we’ve contributed to the economy in some kind of thrice-removed abstract sense that it not only absolves us of further effort but entitles us to claim the whole nation for ourselves?

What about this, what about we actually live up to the slogans and the t-shirts. What if we actually, as a people rolled up our sleeves and gave a shit. We stopped trying to accrue our sad little piles of stuff on patches of sand where every house looks the same. I’m not saying that the everyone has to become some kind of social welfare zealot, that’s the true absurdity of the situation, all people would need to do is to look around themselves and see the mechanisms in our society that are already in place but could use another set of hands once a week.

Australia is already not half bad, I mean, given how useless it’s population is, it’s kind of surprisingly good. Imagine what it could be if everyone actually started caring. Imagine if our nationalism revolved not around “this is ours, not yours” but around “We’re working hard, you’re welcome to work beside us”.

//Ben

*Note. I do not for a second think that being the dairy manager at the local supermarket is a degrading or “low” job. Two reasons, first of all because I don’t think it matters where a person works, you can always bring pride and sincerity to your job, and secondly, sometimes I really fucking need a man who knows his cheeses. KnowwhatI’msayin?

Uni Lessons

So, the good people in the Murdoch chancellery [aka. the kremlin] were all like "you should totally talk about stuff you know now which you would have liked to have known back before you started uni. I thought on this a bit and didn't really come up with a whole lot, so I asked some of my mates to think of some things as well.

As you guys may or may not be aware I'm on exchange in Helsinki at the moment, so I thought I'd record my suggestions with the city as a backdrop.

The Great Internet Firewall

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Step One: Become A Murdoch Endorsed Blogger... Step three: Profit!

Woo!

The fallout from being involved in the Murdoch blogging competition of last year [which that horrid wench Jess Eaton won (a note, I'm a friend and fellow radio dork with Jess, so I'm allowed to call her a horrid wench, also, a slattern, trollop, scarlet jezebel, and a fast young woman)] is that I'm now an "endorsed" Murdoch blogger. This means I get traffic to my blog and a $200 voucher to the Murdoch bookshop...

I'm so going to buy a lifetime supply of the greatest pen in the world.

Now, I don't normally indulge in "rants", but I gotta vent on a particular issue. Like so many issues in a students life, it has to do with Centrelink [Australia's welfare organisation, for my international homies]. I'm in Finland at the moment, on a special international exchange, a situation that makes Centrelink more than a little antsy. I had to get the chair of my program back home to write a letter about what the GEJI scholarship is to be used for. Once obtained, I called up Centrelink on skype to see how I can email it to them. The following conversation is virtually verbatim.

"Hi, my name is Ben Ainslie, I was wondering what the email address is to mail you guys a document that you need from me"

"You have to fax it."

"No but it's been given to me via email. So if I could just send it to one of you guys..."

"We don't do that."

"But... why not?"

"Because it's so easy to forge things on the computer."

"..."

"Sir?"

"I'm sorry, I was just thinking about how to respond to that. You guys want me to print out this digital document, and then fax it, because that will be more secure?"

"That's correct."

"*The sound of my brain doing a backflip and then exploding* may I have the fax number that I can call from Finland?"

"Oh, uh, I don't think there is an international fax number, just try the normal one."

"Thank you for your help"

So now I've got to track down a fax machine in Finland. To put this in perspective, the fax machine was created in a time when the graceful pterodactyl still gyred in the skies. From what I understand it was invented sometime after fire, and some time before the concept of universal suffrage.

Now, I've never used a fax machine before. Ever. Do you put the document in first and then dial, or the other way round? Do you have to listen for an automated message that will ask you a series of riddles, of progressive difficulty? And where am I going to put the virgin blood that no doubt powers these arcane devices... not to mention that my voodoo dancing skills have really lapsed in the last few years, ya know?

And I have to find one of these machines in Finland. This nation is the home of the most successful mobile telephone manufacturer in the world, Nokia. Ancient telephonic instruments don't exactly hang around in this country, I'm basically looking for a telegraph bipper in the headquarters of Google.

What I love most of all though, is the mental image of some dank, pipe laden, basement in the bottom of a shabby building. Dark ranks of hulking facsimile machines spewing out an unending stream of documents attesting to the voracity of the work ethic of Branden McGee's and Dwayne Paulsons's. Shuffling gholum like attendants ripping off segments of feed and filing them in some kind of cavernous storage centre.

I found one though, and a man [who no doubt has his own industry specific honorary title, like Deacon, or Headmaster] tasked with the negotiation required to manipulate this foul device, and we managed to get it humming and whirring to our collective bidding, the parlays with the ancients having taken place.

Seriously, fax machines, you guys are dicks.

Assignment Three - 10 things. [ - I hate about you. Man, I love that movie.]

This assignment was the opportunity to share the things I dig about Murdoch. When I first started here I was a very cynical young man, I never thought I'd grow fond of aspects of the campus. Over time I've come to really love some parts of the Uni, like the sunken garden for example. Other little eccentricities have always tickled me, like the soviet hallway [if you don't know the soviet hallway just have a watch.] and there was even a hidden thing or two I've found, some I'll share with you, and some I'm still going to keep just for me.

Fortunately for me I'm good friends with Nigel Fopmorth III, one of the world's foremost documentarians and host of "Urbane Naturaliste" one of the premiere webtv shows on the internet. I invited Nige to come and use Murdoch as location for his latest episode, and share some of the gems I love about the place.

Here is the episode he made.

Dying hurts

Profuse apologies for the extended radio silence valued readers, I've been sick.

The word sick doesn't really seem a fair description to me. I wasn't sick, I was dying, I was hunched in a foetal position on my bed in a puddle of my own sweat, cradling my bleeding ear and nose, praying for death.

Sickness is never welcome, but when you're like me, a total moron who's commited himself to far too many things, it really really sucks. Cause the only thing that happens is you end up either letting people down who are relying on you, or letting go of things you don't want to let go of [such as blogging]

As of today I'm feeling a lot better though, I mean, I can't hear out of my left ear, I have an infected pink right eye, and breathing through my nose is labourious at best, but I feel like I can actually get things done.

Which is rather handy really as it's one movement this weekend and I have interview duties. I'll be interviewing Ashley Sellers, CEO of Inertia. I'm looking forward to the chance to talk to one of the major players in the Australian [good] independent music scene. He'll be talking at 11:45 on sunday at a panel on lisencing in the digital age. You don't need a ticket to go check out most of the panels, so if you consider yourself interested in the world of music, here's your chance to go learn even more.

Time for links!

This was a Tee worn by a Norwanese [Norwegian] librarian to the Internet Librarian International in London. Apparently it was created in response to the US patriot act, the latin reads, "We know what you're reading, and we're not telling." Don't mess with the Librarians man. [From Boing Boing]

So apparently there is this awesome animator called Nick Cross, who's style is deliciously old school, reminiscent of the start of the cartoon Renaissance in the early nineties [think Ren and Stimpy] He has done a really dark political animation. Check it out. [From Boing Boing]

Yellow Cake from Nick Cross on Vimeo.

Staying with wicked sticks animation this is from a cool little outfit in melbourne-town. Voice by Nick Cave. [From Clusterflock]

The Cat Piano from PRA on Vimeo.

More from my ongoing linkroll to prove that we do actually live in "The Future". This is an amazingly informative video on how you make a remote control blob do what you want. [From Boing Boing]

Sticking with stuff from the future-now, this is some pretty amazing work into robotic balance. [From Engadget]

Two related video's in a row here. They are interesting because they both seem to bring the playfulness out of people. The first is a really really cool installation art/A.V. Piece in london. [From Clusterflock]

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

The second is a interactive staircase in Sweden designed to get commuters off the escalators. [From Boing Boing]

Staying with musical stuff, this guy is the business, and he'd want to be with a name like Final Fantasy [not the game] [From Clusterflock]

Coolest House ever? I think so. This guys is some kind of Lumber and Construction tycoon in Russia. [seriously] [From Kottke]

Coolest massive sculpture of a bull fart rocketing a man into a wall, ever. [from August Animals]

It really doesn't get any cooler than this [From Clusterflock]

Link Post

Just a few of the rad-tacular things I've found this week.

First off I guess I'll throw the link up to the podcast I'm listening to, D-sides and Glitchmob? Daddy like.

Staying with thing electronica, Dancecult is a new online journal [like, peer reviewed academic-esque journal] on "Electronic dance music culture". Volume one is available, some good reading in there if you're in too deep like me.

I want to work in a place that paints stuff like this on the walls [from Boing Boing]

So, we actually live in the future now. Soon these will be mounted on the pilotless drones so that a man sitting behind a desk in tennessee can fire a laser at a tank from kilometers away in an unmanned remote control plane thingy. Jesus. We're too smart for our own good. [From engadget]

OMG. New feature from Paul King, director of the mighty Boosh. Squee [from Dangerous Minds]

Lol. Married to the sea are great.

I love chess. I'm also a [closet] car nut. This chess set is the absolute win. A rad tinkerer who has a flickr account knocked it together. [from Lifehacker]

The digital devide to which anchorwoman Leah refers, is a very real problem, one that the OLPC movement looked to address [incidentally, netbooks also came out of the program, don't let people ever say that aid can't have positive externalities]. It's efforts like this that remind me that while we have a long way to go, we're making progress. [From Rocketboom (why the hell are all of rocketbooms presenters hot young women? I thought we were better than this now?)]

Sometimes I forget that the states has an absolutely amazing public broadcaster. PBS, which gave the world Sesame Street, has compiled an hour long web video for kids to help them come to terms with the economic recession [which believe me, is pretty rough for a lot of people in the states] These are kids who were accustomed to a lifestyle of videogames and toys and now their folks might be struggling to pay the rent. It's a big ask to get a child younger than 10 to understand that sort of shift. Bravo PBS, Bravo.

Man. Not many things stir my emotions. This did. There is hope. The person I nabbed this link from sums it up best

For an educated adult living in a developed nation, designing and building a wind turbine that generates electricity is something to be proud of. For a half-starved, uneducated boy living in a country plagued with drought, famine, poverty, disease, a cruelly corrupt government, crippling superstitions, and low expectations, it’s another thing altogether. It’s nothing short of monumental.

[from boing boing]

This one courtesy of imgur

Found on 4chan

Blogging Assignment 2: Slogan

So, for those of you unfamiliar with this one, it was a challenge to come up with a little quip, slogan if you will, that I would have liked to have been told when I was considering my choices for uni [and I went out on a limb and extended that to life in general, post high school]

Despite the inherent cheese factor of reducing any advice to the length of a slogan, I liked the premise of this assignment. While I don't think any one liner is going to offer help in life direction, what they can do is promote thought, and hopefully, a conversation about it. I gave thought to this one and at first I'd settled on a very simple "work hard." and while I mentioned this in a previous post as still probably the most valuable piece of advice for a uni student, it doesn't in any way help those who don't really know what they want to do, and where they want to go in life.

Back to the drawing board I went, this time actually thinking about me back then, fresh out of high school, bright eyed and bushy tailed. Without going into what is an interesting but unrelated life story, the long and the short of it was I did a fair bit of humming and haa-ing after school. Periods of backpacking interspersed with resitting year 12 at a senior campus, as well as a year of a science degree at UWA means that there was definitely advice I could have used.

What I realised eventually, the thing that made me settle down and stay on a course, was that there are things in this world that I'm good at. Whether it's natural talents like my people skills, which I've just always had, or acquired traits such as my penchant for performance or my abilities with a lot of tech, there were things that I did and do well. Essentially, what I did, and what I think other people should do when trying to decide where to go in life, is to "play to your strength"

My slogan and how I presented it are a testiment to playing to your strenghts. In the assignment it said that we should decorate the letters of our slogan. The problem with this for me, is that I am not arty in any way. I learned what the primary colours are literally 4 months ago. I'm 23 for gods sake. I knew I wasn't going to be able to compete with the no doubt significantly more creatively minded kids I'm up against. What I do well though, is working hard, and techy things. The idea came to mind that if I painted my slogan on a wall [where no one would mind, nothing annoys me more than idiots who munt up peoples houses and businesses] I'd be able to create a short time lapse video that would look great. I played to my strengths and I am incredibly proud of that came out of it.

It must be said that all of this would not have been possible without the the aid of my housemate and rogue photographer josh, who had the mind numbing job of doing nothing but pressing the shutter every 30-40 seconds. Fortunately he, like me, loves where I was planning to do the work. He snapped off a few more great shots that I'll share with you to highlight why I choose where I did.

The second part of the assignment was to put up my slogan somewhere that was significant to me. I chose the abandoned powerstation in South Fremantle. It's one of the most magnificent places on earth for a number of reasons. Frist of all, it's huge, like really really huge, it's size can be somewhat comprihended in the following shot.

Up the top there you can see another reason the powerstation means so much to me, those are two young schoolies we ran into as we were doing our project. There is this perfect golden mean of knowledge about the station, enough people know about it that there is some of the best street art in the state there, and you're always likely to run into some cool crew [we ran into 2 other pairs of people with camera and tripod] as well as some more young explorers like the ones we met above, but it isn't filled with heaps and heaps of tools looking to cause trouble for anyone.

Playing to your strengths has worked for me, whether it's for this assignment or for life in general. If you're one of those people who doesn't think they have any strengths all I'd say is don't compare yourself to others. In this networked world finding someone who is better than you at whatever you think you're good as takes about 2 seconds on youtube. Have some confidence and use what advantages you have.

I'll leave you now with some more of the shots Josh took while we were on this mission

Passion?

Sometimes my peers at uni depress me. Not in an, "oh my god everyone sucks and man that new album from Third Eye Blind speaks to me." kind of way. More of a queer bafflement really, a kind of bovine lack of comprihension, about what motivates a lot of the kids I see cruising around the place.

It's always kind of interesting to me, as assignment deadlines approach, how often I'm asked for help. It's not the asking that interests me, but the questions. If, for example, it was a question about the implications of one of the theories brought up in a recent lecture or reading, and how that might relate to an almost finished essay? Not only will I give you what help I can, I will probably thank you and talk to you far longer than you would have liked. This is because the overwhelming majority of the questions I fence are not questions of this nature. Instead they are to do with elementary things, things that transcend a mere lack of understanding and sit squarely in the realm of ignorance.

Now, allow me to be abundantly clear here, I am in no way a perfect student. I usually have a number of side projects on the go, be it my radio show, this mental blogging comp, a girlfriend, and a social life. All these things must share a finite amount of brain power and it's a zero sum equation, if I put more effort into one thing, other things must loose out. And studies don't always come first.

However. When I'm at uni, it's on. On like Donkey Kong. I am interested in picking up as much as I can. Addmittedly I'm doing a very practically based degree [Bachelor of Mass Comm] so learning tips and tricks about the industry will serve me much better than say... someone in neuroscience. Even when I was doing a science degree though, I was surrounded by people who weren't into it.

Wait, that's not fair, I was one of those people. I was slack, I passed notes in the back of lecture theatres, I had horrid grades, and was infinitely more interested in my girlfriend of the time. The crucial difference between me then and the contemporary analogues I see around me, is that I dropped out. I realised that continuing a degree I wasn't interested in, and wasn't trying for, was purely absurd.

Now, armed with this knowledge I consider perhaps that the people I see around me now, the ones who seems lost and disinterested, might merely be like I was. This seems unlikely though, I'm in second year, doing a few third year units. I'd always been led to believe that, like myself previously, people would naturally drift away from that which they did not put effort into. I'm not handing judgement here, I don't condemn the people for being slack, I just don't understand.

I feel like shaking them, fight club fantasy style, and yelling "Don't you want to be great, aim to be the best, to take joy from the thing that you do, and try and push that thing further than it has before?!" I know this reeks of idealism, rich fetid waves of pungent naivety. The paradigm goes; the realities of life in the big bad world will over power this [clearly immature] desire to do something you're passionate about.

I would encourage everyone to challenge this. I'm not talking about breaking down cultural walls, dropping tools and seizing the means of production, or any other revolutionary tosh. All I mean is don't be ok with just getting by. Don't study something because you like the idea of it, because some source of authority said you should, because your friends study it, or indeed for any reason other than it fascinates you. Nothing facinates you that you've found? Don't go to uni. Find something, anything, that you love, and chase it.

There is a misguided conception that holding a mediocre degree will get you somewhere in the world. The sad reality is that we don't need more professionals in our society. When we leave uni we enter a competition based market in all but a few select professions. How well do you think you will fare when you're up against someone who is passionate about what they do. They will get the corner office, or industry specific analogue, and you my friend, will be in a very drab cubicle.

Earthdance 09 Redux

Alright, now that I've had a chance to shower, and sleep [literally for about 20 hours] I can make a nice big post about Earthdance this year and share some of my favorite pics.

This year went incredibly well, we had an enormous turn out [a few hundred more than we were expecting] and it was insanely hectic, with most of the organisers pulling 36 hour shifts at one point or another. My official job was "gate coordinator" which essentially meant that I was here

for the overwhelming majority of the festival, administering entry to the party.

Come Saturday night thought, when the gate had slowed down enough to allow me to stick some volunteers on it, I had a shift at running the festival. We broke it down into shifts so that we could all finally get some rest. It had the added advantage for me of giving me the opportunity to actually see the festival, which I had not had a chance to do yet. [other than seeing Oxygens set on friday night, which was rad]

It's easy to forget when you're an organiser that you're surrounded by people having an incredible time. All we tend to see are the problems that need attending to so that everything travels smoothly. It's kind of like a duck on a pond, it glides along serenely, but under the surface it's kicking like mad.

To combat this I made a point of going around asking punters how they were going and if they thought there was anything that needed seeing to. The overwhelming majority of people were happy, and having a grand old time boogying, or chilling with mates, or going for a bushwalk.

This does not mean, however, that there were no problems.

First of all, I'd like to register my supreme distaste for people who cant handle their drugs, illegal or otherwise. Now I recognise that I helped put on an electronic music festival, and as such, there was always going to be people getting sideways at the party. But seriously, to all the people who have ever gotten so drunk, high, stoned, ripped, zonked, or whatever other contemporary nonmenclature you wanna use, that you can no longer a] control yourself, and b] have any higher level knowledge of what you're doing. Take a good, long, hard, look at your motivations for doing the things that you are doing. I hate the fact that people simply retreat into a land of substance abuse to avoid dealing with the world without asking why first. I've mentioned anomie before, it's a concept I've come across only recently at uni, but it's one of the very few things I've learned that seems to be hugely applicable to the problems of the world. Booze and drugs seem to be one of societies go to fixes for anomie.

Another issue I had with the weekend as a whole was the police. Now, up until this weekend I'd always tried to maintain respect for the fuzz. They're one of the professions in this world that should get the most respect [alongside teachers and nurses]but seems to get the least. After last years Earthdance the police informed us that they would not support us coming back, this year they did everything in their power to ensure that we will not return next year. Roadblocks into and out of the festival [which they did not inform us of, a courtesy normally afforded festival organisers] with sniffer dogs and drug checks. There were also roaming squads within the festival itself randomly searching people for drugs and age checks for drinking. They also endeared themselves well to the private security we hired, yellow stickering their car on the way in [again, not hugely professional to do that to the men who you'll be liaising with all festival and who are your first port of call for behavioral troubles all event]. They also did things like drive their cars around the dance floors with lights on, just to really intimidate all our punters. The thing that troubles me the most though, is that I can fully understand them not wanting a bunch of tripping city slickers in their neck of the woods, but their behavior and organisation was not designed to minimise impact, or keep as many drugs in the city, or anything of that nature. It was to bust people, as many as possible. After the behavior of the police this weekend, I have lost ALL respect for the members of WAPOL, and going forward into the future will do my utmost to undermine their authority and thwart their plans.

On the plus side though, the security I mentioned previously... amazing. The guys we hired for this event, although stretched over their limit, did an amazing job, professional, understanding, severe when the need was present, but otherwise concerned with avoiding trouble rather than stopping it. Something the police could have taken notes on.

Finally I'm going to share some of the pics I took that I really enjoyed.

This first one is of my amazing friend Justine [left] and my amazing friend and partner Alia [right] around the campfire late on Sunday night. They were incredibly patient with me asking them to hold really still for the 4 second exposure it took to get them this clearly.

This is of Al Star, old school member of the doof scene and a pretty awesome sonic engineer, it was his system that we used on the second stage. He's also a mad good DJ/producer.

Lol, this one was taken after Alia [who is a barber by trade] had given me a shave with her cuthroat razor in the bush. The water is all blown out and over exposed, which adds to the look that I'm being redeemed by some kind of whack televangelist minister.

This final shot is of bad quality, but the composition pretty much perfectly sums up the feel of earthdance.

That's all for now folks, if you like the shots you can see more at my picasa page

And remember guys, if you like this stuff, vote for me like mad. I can win an internship at sunset events, something this post should prove I'd be pretty keen on.