While reading The Manual this morning I was reminded of one of my favourite quotes in a Buckminster Fuller book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

The book begins:

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to sat that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

So there’s always a better way, a more efficient, more sustainable, more suitable solution as long as we keep searching. I think this is why ‘designers’ are such a desirable bunch in this age, because this potential is recognised, though not often realised.

This inspiration must be what keeps me thinking there must be a better way a new way to make things usable. The answer that keeps popping into my head is ‘Communication’. It’s such a buzz word I know, to communicate, to network, social networking blah… But I’m thinking more about the power of the grapevine and how it’s made my job so much easier.

The simplest example recently was when yet another returning student came into the library with their old student card asking how to get the printing money onto their new 2012 card. Well… the money is on both cards… and to make matters more complicated, the old card can still borrow books etc… which is why by June-July we’re still getting student cards from the previous year even though we’re not supposed to accept them.

Obviously there’s a breakdown in communication… the Information Office issuing the cards don’t seem to know that the old cards should really be destroyed so students aren’t being issued with multiple cards that can be lost and misused. A short walk over to the Information Office and a quick chat with the most experienced staff member there and the problem is solved (we hope). The old cards will be destroyed when students re-enroll and are issued with new cards. Students will still access printing money from their new cards, pay old library fines and borrow books. The solution took 10 minutes to resolve but more than the three years to act on, because we relied on upper-management (who have better things to think about) to relay these messages between departments rather than breaking down the barriers ourselves.

With friends in different departments, I catch up with all kinds of news, problems, solutions and general offers for help just by going to the canteen and bumping into people. This kind of help/gossip/confiding never happens by phone or email.

And it most certainly never happens in User Testing.

User testing is supposed to be the holy grail which solves all problems in my job. If i just sit 3 students down, set them some tasks on our website, and record their every thought and movement, I’ll find out every flaw in my website and learn everything the students need from our site. The idea frustrates me no end, sure there’s lots you can learn from formal interviews, games, tasks, surveys etc. but nothing beats experience, and if you can’t be ‘on the ground’ where the action is, then you need to make friends who can. The real world flummoxes all expectations, assumptions and critiques. So any way you can get into the real world – watch people actually using your website, be customer service and listen to their needs, earn the confidence of users so they will confide in you their biggest problems- gives you a chance to help, to improve, to streamline and to connect the right people.

The grapevine might be discarded as an old ‘piano-top solution’ but I think it’s part of what knits us all together, and can be a great help to developing more useful tools, websites, intranets and networks in our future.

well it’s taken me years but I have everything I NEED to write and play music now. everything is perfect I even have a little fan to cool me when it gets warm.

the big combo organ was a real treat. I’ve wanted one since is saw minimum chips play (their stereolab phase not their garage band phase) the Yamaha YC-25D is a musical monster which gives the warmth and drones I love so much and. cuts through with it’s sharp bright melodies. and it’s red!!

my latest acquisition is a drum machine so simple and intuitive its like playing a casiotone. it looks like one too! the Roland TR-606 is a brilliant quick and easy accompaniment.

and of course I’ve drooled about the moog and it’s floor throbbing bass a few times now!

the guitars and pedals are separate. they float about the house. you can see there’s not much room here. id make you some music now but it’s really damn hot. I can barely think!

So i’m really looking forward to seeing Melancholia, a Lars Von Triers film. eventually… when it comes out…

But i’m confused because there seem to be two films from 2011 with a nearby planet incidental in the story.

I’m sure I saw Margaret and David on At The Movies talking this year of a film where a woman wins a lotto ticket to move to this other planet and get away from her past where she had killed someone in a car accident.

Only her neighbour turns out to be the husband of the person she killed and in their isolation they must come to terms with eachother.

The performances by the actors in the snippets i saw were incredible…

so it confuses me that TWO DIFFERENT films seem to have planets nearby as part of the story? please contact me if you know the name of this film.

EDIT: Hanney has figured out that the film is Another Earth which doesn’t seem to be on At The Movies review site so I’m not sure how I heard about it, but I’m looking forward to chasing this movie down!

This organ makes my musicness pretty much complete, anything else is just icing now.

overwhelming afternoon! come back from amazing singing lesson (accidentally stole her guitar pick *guilt*) to find my Yamaha YC-25D (its a combo organ from the early seventies, think Stevie Wonder) has arrived with Dad in tow to help me get the 900+lbs bugger up the stairs.

after much huffing and puffing and trying to find new homes for furniture that no longer fits… and keyboards that no longer fit… she’s up and working and sounding good, even through my cheapest of amps. Finally recorded a long lost instrumental, almost no mistakes! casiotone as drum machine of course.

//:.:..Buffalo song 1.8mb MP3 this recording didn’t work out very well, going to redo it tonight. sorry folks.

just wish the neighbours hadn’t told me as i was moving the organ in, that the building has been sold… has put an insecure damper on the evening.

Hi all, it’s been a while!

My brain hasn’t been fully functioning for the last 6 months or so, it’s needed a full diet of television to keep it from thinking too much or just going catatonic, you’d think those would be opposing symptoms, not for me.

But the clouds are slowly parting, I have just seen Professor Noam Chomsky speak and I have a few observations of my own to share with you about why Ming the Merciless is such a persistent idea in our culture.

I’ve talked in the past about the NSA wanting to destroy the free web, they want a walled web so they can more easily monitor us. And our government seems to quite like the idea as well.

This kind of thing seems almost Arch Evil, ridiculous World Domination idealism, straight from the cartoons. It doesn’t make sense to us mere mortals.

World domination has been infantilised by the media, if anyone seriously suggests it exists, they look like a consipracy nut, or some idiot that watched WAY too much TV.

And it’s true, I watch a lot of shows like La Femme Nikita and Spooks, in which puppet dictatorships are installed and the CIA treats the UK like it’s kid sister, to be occasionally brutalised and never told the truth.

Noam spoke about the Changing Contours of Global Order… I wish I’d taken photos when I arrived, there were huge crowds outside, of #occupyMelbourne protestors and other randoms who had no hope of getting one of the 5000 free tickets which sold out within the day. The talk was promoted only using social media, which pissed off many loyal Noam followers who are too dignified to tweet or FB.

The majority of the crowd was hipsters, twenty somethings from Deakin who’d heard Noam was the place to be, you could tell because they’d make jokes about Chomsky’s “Socialist friends” outside, and frankly Noam has always spoken against Socialism.

Chomsky surprisingly gave a talk (we were given the impression it’d be a Q&A via twitter) and at first everyone was bored out of their minds, Noam on American Foreign Policy – well he reigns supreme, but what the hell does it have to do with us in Australia? not much. But actually Noam spoke about The American Empire’s downfall, and how it began post WW2 and how Roosevelt et al. had openly documented plans for world domination at the height of their power in the 1950s. They did indeed install Dictators in countries to prevent actual democracies which might waver from the US political agenda. They actually did believe they ‘lost’ China to communism, as though they ever had China to begin with. The way Noam puts it, the clues are there for all to see, and have been since the inception of America’s independence.

America wanted World Domination.

In many ways it’s not surprising at all, the anti-american rhetoric we’ve grown up with over the last 15 years is proof. On the other hand, to think that ‘great leaders’ like Roosevelt, Kennedy and so on, were actively part of this ruse against the world is shocking. The Media has always told the story their way.

They truly are the 1% against the 99%. They crusade against Cuba despite the majority of the US Population including the corporations wantiing the embargo torn down. Purely because Castro was one of the few dictators not under their thumb, he had defied their World Order, and they could not tolerate it. Noam goes on to cite many more cases such as Guatemala and Chile, examples of varying success.

It does all sound conspiracy theorist. But then the Sunday Age reported yesterday that the Baillieu State Government has a written down plan handed secretly to the Cabinet, to destroy the Nurses working conditions and union. And you realise, this happens all the time, and we knew this, but we kind of dared not believe it, and frankly wouldn’t the media be jumping up and down if all this evil were true?

And then we remember who owns the media.

I now understand why Noam’s essential collection of works is titled Understanding Power it’s not some myth, it’s not just corporate CEOs, it’s pretty much all the people in power. They are seduced by it and they do not serve us democratically, they do what they can to control our opinions, primarily through the media – Manufacturing Consent.

I have a secure job, so I don’t want to be camping out in the streets with the #Occupy movement, but I can see the necessity of the movement to grow, to get its message across, to make people understand we need to take back our voice, for so many reasons many of which I haven’t even touched on. We all think that American Elections are a crock, and we’re all starting to believe Australian ones aren’t much better. Governments go ahead and do whatever they want despite the promises they make. The government I voted for still wants to censor the internet.

My point is that powerful people, people who were voted for, sat down and worked out, and put on paper a plan for World Domination. Just as I’m sure the Kennet and Baillieu governments sat down and worked out how to crush all the unions one at a time. Fortunately, much as Ming the Merciless could have told them, things don’t always proceed as planned. I’m no longer going to perceive these Arch Evil plans as conspiracy theories, coincidences or mere flights of fancy. I’m going to be watching very carefully, and so should we all.

I have been playing a bit with various musical toys, not the least of which is my Monotribe, which is a little dusty, like everything else in my house.

../::. monotribe.mp3 (3.1mb)

I wrote another song last week, that’s two in two weeks, I’ve finished them both off today – the songwriting that is, not the recording – and i’m posting them both here very naked, barely remember the words or chords or tune yet.

But I’m inviting you, the unsuspecting viewer into the process, as I start to build them up into something more finished, from their current super basic 4 chord/2 chord infancy.

Aside from that this is a celebration because I haven’t written this many non-joke/trash songs in i don’t know how long.

.//.. learn something new mp3 [1.51mb]

..//. rum n raisin mp3 [1.37mb]

Chords are in the file names for those interested, yes they really are that simple. I was trying to write a 3 chord song a few weeks ago, so I get a 4 chord and a 2 chord song instead. irony. These songs came out fairly easily, which I think you can tell from lack of complexity.

have had a pretty crap year healthwise, this weekend I’ve had a migraine, i’m sound and light sensitive. But I can’t sit in the dark the whole time, I probably didn’t make myself much better by trying to create a new sewing pattern for Blythe, but it was pretty satisfying to do, especially since it fit perfectly first go.

I don’t think anyone that reads my blog is a fan of my dolls, but the thing about making these dress patterns is the knack of inventing a pattern hat requires as little difficult swing as possible, allows leeway for mistakes, and always looks good. Something easy enough that you could make 15 of them in a day if you had to – mind you my fantasies of an etsy shop filled with things which will make me rich is probably never going to happen. I made more of these keytails, but ended up giving them to friends and family, because really I think the etsy market would look at them and go “oh I could make them” rather than want to actually spend money on them, they are beautiful though, it’s like giving someone the gift of colours and texture.

so I got my little phatty moog over a month ago, but had yet to record anything with it. every time i played with it I only came up with a cool sound here or a nice bassline there, but nothing completish. nothing layered with lots of other things to sound cool and make me feel like i was getting/.creating my money’s worth.

anyway then it occurred to me in a flash on the drive home listening to the radio (listening to music on RRR always inspires me) that i could do a loop performance, just play something, then layer something else and just kind of improv until at the end i have a single little loop melody. Finally a use for my loop pedal which i’ve used twice in 5 years! (bought with hard earned coke bottle labels from some weird promo with Allans Music.)

Anyway it turned out nice and droney and textury and sort of reminiscent of Stereolab et al. – it’s not a song, but it is an opportunity for me to experiment with the textures the moog can make.

..///::../. listen to my moooog-loooop.mp3 (2mb) .\\\:\\.:..

yes i know all this technical, what’s-going-on-in-her-head stuff is very boring for you to read, but it think just putting a loop of synthesizer sounds up with no explanation just encourages people to respond with ‘that’s not a song, what is this rubbish?’ responses. I think the story makes the sound more interesting and things like the fact i got no rhythm matter less.

Also looking forward to the Dr Who Christmas special being on actual telly this year! yay!

Happy New Year to you all!

I’ve quit my second job and all the committees and extra rubbish this year, to focus on my music. While quitting all the other stuff will set me back a little in my career, the reality is that my health can’t handle all that stuff on top of a full time job and then I come home trying to think about songs to write or music software to learn.

My first task was to buy my Moog (display model of Little Phatty Stage I with II upgrade) but then the dreaded lurgy hit me (because i’ve just finished marking for the last time so my body packed it in in protest of working non-stop most of november) so I’ve hardly played with it at all… will get back to you on that one, it sounds AMAZING, redefines BASS!

My next task, now that I have at least one keyboard too many and nowhere to put it, is to set up my computer area as a proper permanent music space… I mean this is what I pay the rent of a one bedroom for; so i can make music without disturbing people. So why not get my gear out and set it up permanently so i’m not having to plug and unplug and string wires all across my living space any time i want to work? so i’ve been umming and ahhing about what to do, thinking about which gear to sell off to make better use of space.

Of course I’m not selling anything, I’m keeping it all, hoarder that I am, and i’m gonna buy just a few more things to get me ready. I’ve drawn out a picture of what i’m thinking at the moment after traipsing through every furniture website in melbourne.

Later I’ll probably also get monitor speakers because my mixes (as seen in last post) are always terrible. So that’s another $300 after the big monitor, and the double keyboard stand and the Micke IKEA desk… which I’ll get first so my Moog has a home finally.

I’m tempted to also get a new computer later next year. then i could get the laptop off my desk and streamline things a little more. But I am unsure. I think there’s atleast another year of life in my current machine, and i hate to waste it just for more desktop space…. I guess mostly i’m struggling with the ergonomics of my desk still… more and more i’m noticing how TINY my laptop screen is when I want to do something serious.. drawback of the lovely big monitors at work.

My biggest challenge today is not to drive up to IKEA and try to buy the desk… mostly because I’ve been overspending during the lurgee in attempt to make me feel better… lets just hope they don’t run out of stock on me… or leave me with some god awful colour.

Finally properly recorded demoed this song… on my cancermaker, imagine me belting out the vocals while sitting in my very dark cramped wardrobe, pissing off my neighbour who clearly doesn’t have a fucking job to go to at 11am on a weekday. Honestly.. she’d prefer I do this after work?? or 9am on a Sunday??

WARNING:
nearly lost my hearing mixing this down, but for you, I have normalised it. lucky you!. Me… my ears will be ringing for a few days yet… in other words… don’t have your speakers on max when you play this! or at least don’t wear headphones with the volume on max… please!

Enjoy!

The Great Balloon Song.mp3 – 3.2mb

I will write lyrics for it one day but they have to be perfect! all about being on a great balloon ride, singing an awesome song and being in love… I think.

“What you are hearing now about the threat of cyberwar is part of a long-running campaign here in Washington to move control of the internet, the technical standards and the openness that we have enjoyed, away from its current model to one that would give the intelligence community and the National Security Agency much greater authority to decide what people may or may not do on the internet.”
– Marc Rotengberg from the Electronic Privacy Information Centre
http://australianetworknews.com/stories/201010/3044527.htm

This is the truth about Australia’s internet filter. It is nothing to do with a lazy attempt to curb child pornography.

To fill out your vision a little on this one, the ABC can tell you a bit about how a Queensland dentist’s website somehow ended up on the blacklist along with several other innocent sites.

And interestingly Wikileaks ended up on the list… what has their site got to do with child porn?? Isn’t that a lot more to do with preventing the public from finding out about the governments of the world’s dirty secrets?

And to round off your reading and find out how all this will happen anyway because we love our iPhones too much. Go read The Wired’s article ‘The Web is Dead‘. Suddenly you’ll find we’ve come full circle back to the “free internet must die” theme that the NSA is toting.

EDIT: Oh and then theres Internet Protoccol V.6 with the internet running out and becoming a class system.

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/crunch-time-for-upgrade-of-internet-addresses-that-are-running-out-20101116-17v26.html

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/less-than-a-year-until-internet-addresses-run-dry-20100726-10r83.html

i love a big hearty breakfast! with all the nutrients a growing vegetarian needs!

• eggs
• hash brown
• mushrooms
• baked beans
• spinach (cook the shit out of it)
• toast (just for looking at)

I’m always too full to eat the whole thing, that’s when you know it’s a pretty good breakfast. when I eat the whole thing anyway, that’s when you know it was an AWESOME breakfast!

I’ve been looking for a place in my ‘hood that serves a good one now for a while. But no luck so far, there’s a lot of very pretentious fetta and honey on toast types of things that I could probably whip up in five seconds at home. French Toast and pancakes are yummy, but i need a break from my non-stop sugar diet for a savoury meal once a week to charge me up ion the proteins, vitamins and irons that my body is craving.

This morning I visited the Temper Trap in Chadstone, not to be confused with the *actual restaurant* elsewhere in melbourne this place does a pretty good breakfast and importantly, you can easily get a table, i hate queing for brekkie cos my blood sugar is already so low by a starving 10am that i’m liable to bite off someone’s head if I have to stand and wait just to sit down, let alone eat!

I have found a few places in past ‘burbs that i’d highly recommend.

• Gutz Cafe, Fitzroy
• Grandma Funks, Richmond
• nope… actually that’s it…

Maybe you can tell me more to add to the list?

It may only be November the 2nd, but I’m quite unlikely to find another great album at this point in the year as good as the following:

Flying Scribble – We’re a chameleon

1 girl drummer + 1 girl keyboardist, mix in soaring vocals, catchy melodies, buckets of harmonies, accordion, a whole lot of alchemy, a little bit of mathrock, and every little bit of indie you can squeeze out of the tube.

Androniki recommended these guys to me when I said there was no good music any more and the Melbourne scene was boring. These guy have the driving beats, the rhythmic keys and abstract lyrics of most Melbourne bands, but they have a HEAP of originality thrown in. Must be from that Brisbane sunshine of their earlier years. Seeing them live was a revelation, they have fun, they do things their own way, they experiment, they have crazy cool outfits and ooze style without trying at all. I’d be completely emerald green with jealousy if they weren’t completely deserving of all the attention they get. Best band in Melbourne.

One One – AoooO

Take the formidable stage presence and popness of Satomi (Deerhoof) add the sweet catchiness of Saya (Tenniscoats) and you’ve basically put Japan’s foremost indie geniuses into the same band. What are you trying to kill me??

Saya never stops humming melodies, she’s a melody-machine. Quiet, sweet and unassuming, still she knows how good she is and has driven the Tenniscoats to places no other band could go, knowing that her musical sensibility is to be completely trusted.

Satomi, leader of the mathrotic Deerhoof, lifts her day-job band from a very boring jammy self-involved experience into entertaining, spiralling death dives from the highest melodic pinnacles, crashing down in LOUDquietLOUD climactic moments, weaving her audience tightly around her little finger with cute JProck dance moves and driving bass lines that defy her tiny size.

These women have no pretence, only music. Putting them together into Oneone is a dream come true, Saya’s sprawly melodies are tightened by Satomi’s sense of timing and drama, their voices combine to make you believe the Siren’s exist, and are two girls borne of Japan. It is sweet, it is catchy, it is purer than the driven aussie sunlight. The only limitation of this album is the instrumentation, I hope to see them grow and evolve to command entire orchestra’s of sound.

Seja – We have secrets but nobody cares

Seja (pronounced ‘see-ya’) and not to be confused with Sia of ARIA nominee boringness. We have another brisbanite, the one behind all the awesome keyboard wizardry on Regurgitator albums. A woman who collects analogue synths and tells me she isn’t much into midi either (love!) she also sews and sells these stuffed toy versions of her favourite synths! She writes down to earth songs, with no affectations (no girly/sexy/throaty put-on vocals), then layers them with the bliss of ELO, Xanadu, Doctor Who, Kraftwerk, Stereolab synthiness. It is mostly in the “oooh-aaahhh” category of synth rather than the “grunty flaming beasty” category, though that sometimes shows its head when needed. But I admire her thorough knowledge and ability to pull it all together into cohesive tracks. The instinct to know what a song needs, and what it doesn’t. This is a rare talent, perhaps partly attributed to the production help of Mirko Vogel.

Unfortunately, she’s not as lo-fi as I’d like. It is all a bit polished and her video’s look like every other solo female nominee for the ARIA’s this year. With the sometimes awkward lyrical themes, and an over-polished feel that makes you wonder if she’s a bit too ambitious to be true-blue aussie, she really needs to fire her stylist and video makers, because if she’d come across more down to earth and lo-fi I think she’d have stolen my heart completely.

I really should change my twitter feed and blog to have an advertising channel because that’s kind of how I feel i’ve been posting lately, I’ve been enjoying shopping and finding things customisable to me. in the past i’ve had to return a lot of things, especially clothing. but lately I’ve had more luck.

This is my online design for a Timbuk2 bag, it’s left handed, has a ‘napoleon’ side pocket which I find essential these days and about a million pockets in general! I liked these furniture coverings as bag fabric, much nicer than the plain nylons, has more texture and feels more home made.

Anyway when it arrive I wasn’t impressed, it was very stiff feeling, and had all those black clip things all over the front and the huge timbuk2 logo at the front – all in black, making the bag look hard edged and unpleasant. i really wanted something that felt more like a carpet bag but had all the practicalities of a decent messenger/cargo/tote bag.

So I got out my unpicker!

and it looks MUCH better! I’ve even named it, it’s called ‘t-bag’!

the interior lining is heavenly! i just want to stare at this thing all day, i keep it near me at all times. We are falling in love!

And look at all the pockets! wow! more pockets than I need… yes.. more pockets than I need!

And I finally found a use for my fuzzy pompoms, which help to soften the rather big clunky strap clip. Giving it a much more homely and customised feel. Much more me.

I think this is what i like best about it, that it was customisable to start with, and then I customised it even more when I got it home to make it just right. The bag looks and feels softer and more feminine, yet is practical. unlike my similar messenger bags, it doesn’t look ‘unisex’ not really. it looks ‘mine’. I feel I can be a bit dressier/professional and the bag doesn’t let me down. I still want to be the utilitarian, rebellious teenager on the inside, but I want to look a bit more… like an adult on the outside!

just don’t call me a hipster or a yuppie! please! i’m not emotionally ready for that…

as i said to a friend recently, i’ve felt so burnt out that the contemplation of stepping onto train tracks seems like a genuine relief.

I was just barely holding on to my sanity a week ago on friday… then i spent the next 4 days marking assignments… sanity was long gone, this of course meant it took the rest of the holiday just to be able to lift my head from a comatose state and see that the world was still there.

i did manage yesterday though, to pull out all my musical toys to play with. had I had more mental space I would have done something other than mumblings. but it was fun nonetheless.

[edit] Here’s two mp3s of the repetitive loopiness, both very different:

/..///… [ looplisten ] casio drums, microkorg and casio sounds looped thru pedal, recorded w/ iphone mic.

///../.. [ casiocasino ] casio drums, microkorg and casio sounds looped thru pedal, recorded on fourtrack w/ iphone. [/edit]

I also went to Seamstress with some lovely friends, hung out at Sticky for all of five seconds ogling the typewriters, and bought a friend a necklace i would have loved for myself in one of the lovely Flinders subway shops.

Going to Flying Scribble‘s album release was also fun, I finally got to see Patinka Cha Cha who were lovely. I’m always a bit jealous when I see bands and think about how effortlessly they’ve just gotten a bunch of songs together and gotten themselves on stage, but with these two bands it doesn’t sting as much because it’s clear how much effort went into the songs. the new Flying Scribble Album We’re a Chameleon is amazing too. Buy it now.

I should expand my horizons and see more bands. Broadcast is coming to town for instance… but it feels like it’s the wrong decade to see them. Trish Kennan’s elocution is beyond compare though… *sigh*

I should be vacuuming or mopping or cleaning the bathroom, but I think i’ll spend what’s left of my holidays trying to do something creative. Hope you’re all enjoying Spring. and glad I skipped the post about the hung parliament.

And if you’re looking to get christmas in order early, perhaps you should visit the bookdepository.co.uk which has FREE shipping to Australia and most books are cheaper than you’d find on shelf here anyway.

I bought:

1. some doctor who books (embarrassingly addicted)
2. isaac asimov – the robots of dawn (heavily into asimov’s robots finally.)
3. louise lawrence – children of the dust (high school post apocalypse class reading – amazing!)
4. secret christmas present for mum! (she knows what it is anyway – Agatha Christie hardcover)

What I think has always plagued a lot of people (me) the most is the way our brains find the most traumatic moments of our history; conversations with ex-boyfriends, nasty comments made by bosses etc… And I came to a realisation the other night that perhaps it’s not an inherent lack of self esteem and self-attack. Perhaps it’s instinctual, it’s the way our brains were built. After all it seems to be such a universal trait.

Think of us as cavemenpeople, it was important back then to think about past dangers in stressful situations, to remind of us of past mistakes and ensure they wouldn’t happen again – how sick you were when you ate those berries, how you nearly died trying to pat an antelope! Whatever! I know that in rush hour when I’m driving home I’m often plagued by other incidents where I nearly killed myself, or have nearly been killed by a reckless action.

So perhaps rather than punishing ourselves it is an automatic instinct. It explains why we focus on the negative rather than the positive. In our modern society, of language, communication, hierarchy and technology the moments of shame, frustration and despair take the shape of conversations and car accidents rather than bad berries and rampaging animals.

This also explains for me why pet dogs often also suffer anxiety, their daily moments become the reprimands, the long hours of being ignored, the frustration of not being able to go outside when they want to, or the neighbours cat teasing them. Their brains are plagued by new more emotional, less instinctual memories which are attached to guilt for not behaving well, sadness at not having their love returned, that type of thing, rather than what their brain is more properly built for, chasing birds, remembering the pain or fear when the bird turns out to be able to fight back!

Obviously I’m not a neurologist or psychologist. But the thought has helped me to calm down and listen to myself more, I worry less that I have a self esteem issue and am constantly punishing myself. I find less need to drown out all thoughts and I start to think it’s a normal protective reaction, instinct, don’t worry, just listen to the message.

Who are today’s philosophers, our seekers of truth willing to see beyond popular thought and find new knowledge? We are so reliant now on science to find our knowledge we have forgotten there are many things which science cannot tell us about the world. It was philosophy which taught us to question the status quo, it was philosophy that taught the French to revolt against humanity’s slavery, it was philosophy which built the dream of liberté, fraternité, egalité, it is philosophy that drives environmentalism.

But in a time of dramatic change in our world, where our communication system draws us ever closer and changes the way we behave, no new philosophies are being born. People talk of guarding privacy, and abandoning copyright, but these are political ideas which pale in comparison with the words of Jean Jacques-Rousseau who realised “man was born free and everywhere he is in chains”.

We don’t think anymore. We surf the net, we watch tv, we work, we sleep, we party. But we avoid the silence. We avoid the taunting voices in our heads which torment us with old conversations and moments of shame, anger, frustration. We deny totally the moments of happiness or joy. We don’t think, we don’t consider. ‘Sensitive’ is an insult. Sensitivity to the world, consideration of it and for it, is out of fashion. Silence is the enemy. Numbness is the aim.

When we can’t achieve the numbness, when the moments that haunt us seep in, we collapse under anxiety or depression, the ones that escape mental illness are the ones with the best systems of numbness. We’ve created so many inputs into our heads, from texting on our mobile phones to reading books in bed.

We shut each other out, sometimes I think this is a symptom of the post-war generations who could not speak to each other of their unfamiliar pains – abandonment, unspeakable horror, cruelty, addiction to adrenaline, boredom bordering on torpor – we keep a stiff upper lip and concentrate on our knitting, fixing the shed, having children, buying more dvds. But I think this has always gone on, just as war has, I suppose.

Our unspeakable tiny pains, which we know to be universal but feel completely unique to us in our own internal worlds, are nothing to the struggles of serfdom which kept the French in chains. We feel we are too comfortable to complain, we watch as the world changes around us, as power shifts further and further away from us and into the hands of media corporations. France would never have freed itself without the free press, the voices of dissent which spread their ideas throughout the nation culminating in society’s complete upheaval. Today our minds, our opinions are controlled by individual men bent on the accumulation and manipulation of power, the disempowerment of governments and independent media.

As an aside, the Howard government attacked our higher education; our ability to think and better ourselves. They attacked our free press and worked to empower the media monster which supported them. The current government has learnt the lesson of crossing the corporations, it lost its leader in a battle against the corporate giants. But we have food and water, rooves over our heads, electric blankets on our beds, DVD players and Foxtel. So we don’t feel justified enough to revolt. It took the theft of their rainwater for Bolivia to revolt. I wonder what it will take for us? I wonder who will be our philosophers?

Some stuff I thought of when I wrote this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/ < — the instigator
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks:About < — an incredible tool
http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/presenter/about < — my hero of the hour
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Consolations_of_Philosophy < — another instigator
http://www.theschooloflife.com/ < — an incubator of ideas
http://www.jamieoliver.com/jamies-ministry-of-food/about < — an initiator

PPS. I was talking today with Dad about how ingenious Britain was in world war two, like for D-Day they made fake tyre tracks and cardboard airplanes to make the Germans think they were somewhere they were not. This kind of ingenuity seems to have died off. I get tired of looking back and glorifying the old days when so little is being done today.

i would actually like to go on a proper stream of consciousness type of thing with my blog, but i’m pretty sure none of you will read paragraphs of ranting raving and mumblings. which is a shame really!

There’s this problem with blogs, where the relationship can become really one-sided, one person blogs all the time and you feel you know them, but of course they don’t even know you’re reading, let alone how you are – this is where the low-commitment of twitter comes in handy.

But there’s this other aspect of blogging where in fact the blogger (me) only tells extremely select things about themselves or always tries to sound cool or whatever, to the point where it becomes alienating or it just stops.

I said ‘no’ to a date the other week, a couple of them actually. This happens about once a year, some nice (or not-so-nice in some cases) guy asks me out… but it inevitably falls apart at the point where we must find a first date venue. A place that is neutral, a place we can both relax etc… Movies is my first date of choice, or a band if you have established that you both like said band.

Galleries are hard for me because I really can’t walk that long due to stupid foot. standing on the hard floors doesn’t work for me, seeing the art does though.

Gigs terrify me even if i’m with friends even if it’s a venue I know, even if I like the band. Even if I’ve been going to gigs regularly for months. I think it’s because it’s a room full of strangers which unfortunately you’re more likely to interact with somehow than say, a cinema audience. Awkward unintentional eye contact, being sized up as to how you fit in the scene, whether I know you, whether you should be there.. I’m sure most of it is in my head. But it has never gone away in the 18 years of gigging.

I think if I did other things, interacted with other groups at some point I’d get more offers for dates than the current annual offers. But I’ve not found a place i’m comfortable that also offers up lovely lads on a regular basis. it also seems to me that the higher density of lads, the less nice they are. eg. Footy bars… not the nicest lads. Librarian conferences, very nice lads, though few and far between.

But even when I’m asked, unless there’s that neutral space to just be, no pressure, relax.. I may as well just sew my lips shut. or not bother showing up. same difference.

And now we move on to the PRIVACY issues I do so love to jump on regularly… because personal dating sites make Facebook look like a bunch of happy-go-lucky linux developers. What I’m saying is, Dating sites are so evil they make facebook look like fluffy bunnies. And look at who owns these dating sites, and how many more are starting up even fairfax want their own dating site… why? because you will tell them everything about you that is real, and they will profile you and target you for advertising. they have no interest in your future happiness. You could get raped and dumped in a ditch for all they care. as long as they get your dating profile. and it’s a catch-22. classic. if i lie on the dating site then i wont get the man of my dreams, i’ll get some other weirdo. so i have to be completely honest and reveal my heart.

MARKETING COMPANY’S WET DREAM!

And speaking of Marketing companies… Hows about the Labour Party! OMG lets take all the rough edges, human emotions and personality out of our PMs shall we? You too can vote for a PR spokesman, oh no, wait… that’s PM Julia Gillard (the #gingeroverlord). Tony Abbott in comparison can be a complete git and actually SAY you can’t trust anything he say, and still come off the better candidate, because we can relate to him more as a member of the human race than the woman who compromises every one of her convictions at the drop of a hat, in a shiny white suit we’re praying she wont accidentally menstruate in.

On the upside there is a Green member for my electorate, so my voting decision has been made. I get to stick it up the government for sticking it up the Boat People, the Kyoto Protocol, and anyone who uses the internet.

But my preferences will still make sure Abbot goes down the toilet along with the silly bitch they put in my seat who nearly didn’t get the job because her party members didn’t want such an important seat going to a woman.

Bet those party members were sweating in their sleep when a woman became Prime Minister of Australia. Don’t let them fool you kiddies, they attack attack attack and say they don’t like Julia for saying she’s going to “get real” or whatever, but we all learnt this lesson from the Americans. Saying you’re not going to vote for Obama because he has a Muslim middle-name is NOT a convincing cover for that fact that you’re a xenophobic-bigoted-misogynistic-mother-fucker-of-a-lying asshole. Atleast half the shit that’s being thrown ad Gillard is because she’s a woman. Step back, take a look, open your fucking eyes.

And speaking of opening ones fucking eyes. You all know what a fan I am of the iPhone cancermaker, well that was before they made the new one out of an aluminium antenna which you have to touch (ruining reception, and probably amplifying cancer toward your brain) and extremely shatterable glass. I’m sorry it’s butt-fugly. I may have forgotten to mention this in my last post way back when, but by the time they proved that the bloody-thing works less for left-handers, I’d fucking had it. There’s actually a long list of things wrong with this phone. And the funniest bit is how iPhone5 is going to come out in a year or so and it’s magically going to look totally different, not that they’d ever admit they fucked up with this one, but you know, it’s not a mistake they’ll do twice. One would think… they did make the ultra pointless iPad…

Still not going to Android though, I’ll wait for a TRUE open source device such as Linux. Cory Doctorow leads the way here, we don’t want our future devices, which will eventually replace our PCs and laptops to be little boxes of advertising in our pockets. Our ‘cells’ as described by William Gibson back in the early 80s of cyberpunk, which would be little pod things which act as our gateway to the world, holding everything we are within them digitally – we don’t want these things controlled by a company which doesn’t let us put files on it, or our own games, or copies of comic books we got from friends. We want total control of these future PC’s we hold in our pockets. We don’t want their spyware, we don’t want them shooting ads through the air at us, we don’t want them to upgrade the OS every five minutes so we have to buy a new piece of plastic just to be able to load our address book before going senile. We would never let them take our PCs or our laptops, so why are we letting them take our phones???

I know iPhone is against everything i’ve just said here, I’m well aware of that. I was aware of it the moment the phone came out. But above and beyond any other phone on the market they understood User Interface. I don’t want to THINK how to write an SMS i just want to bleeding have it written and sent already. THAT they got right. for a PHONE they got it right… for a future PC/laptop replacement they got it ALL WRONG.

And I think that’s most of the rants I’ve been penting up.

Thank you Apple! They are finally leaking stuff about the new iPhone. I’ve been dying to upgrade my cancermaker! Internet sources are claiming they found the new iPhone lost in a bar, while other developers have been given the new OS and quickly YouTube’d it. I think it’s pretty suss, nothing like this would happen in the past Apple is one of the most tight-lipped companies there is.

But I’m glad… I am sick of waiting around, not knowing if I’m going to like the new phone, wondering if I should be shopping around for something else, wondering if the iPhone is going to fall short of my needs. But they’ve brought us:

• forward facing camera
• higher res camera with flash
• background pictures on home screen
• folders on main screen
• multi tasking apps
• battery power stated in percentage
• 5x zoom on camera

And that’s just the beginning. I’m sure there’ll be many more reveals as time goes on. Unfortunately they wont solve my number one annoyance – no Flash in Safari. It seems like a superfluous thing, but when i’m in Wellington next week wondering which bands to go see, i wont have a computer, I’ll just have my trusty iPhone cancermaker, and when I visit Myspace.com all the bands will be listed there, but I won’t be able to listen to a single song. Apple’s justification is that they want you to use iTUnes, but I’m sorry mate. I don’t think Flying Scribble or Paper Ghost are on iTunes.