Badbadbad

I am not in anyway superstitous. I find  the New Age retreat from intelligence into crystals, ‘therapies’ and astrology agravating in the extreme. This weekends events however display  a set of circumstances that could well be ‘significant’ for the credulous.
Holding an event in and around April Fools Day could have been seen as a bad move by those who confuse calendars with other than specific cultural significance. So you migjt say that The Bastion Point Demo event got off to a bad start.
On top of the organizer ego, tunnel vision and new age ludditeism we had the death of one of my oldsest friends Jo and the drowning of a tourist on the bar. The latter was imeadiatly blammed on those who appose the boat ramp by those who are in favor.
All this at The Easter full moon.
As Kurt Vonnegut and Nick Lowe said – ‘So it goes.’

LISTAMANIA – Things I haven’t done.

I have a friend of many years who has always kept and published (in various fanzine and publications) lists of favourite films, books, authors, etc etc. I have, up till now, been rather non-plussed about why. I have always been one for getting on with the next thing and the devil take the hindmost. Lately with a personal resurgence in my interest in writing and and a renewal of my impulse towards creating in the plastic arts i have come over all introspective. In my frequent insomniac moments I find myself thinking about the arts or personal issues, local politics, things to do and find myself making lists. They might be priorities or indeed lists of like and dislikes. As far as the latter are concerned i have decided I am doing this to try and specify or refine my tastes and preoccupations to try and find out who I am. They say that as you get older you mentally regress. Maybe I am returning to adolescence. At these times it seems important to find out who i am so i can work out what to do next. It is also a very important way, at the moment, to work out what is important in my emotional, intellectual and action life.
So i am embarking on a list making project. This is dedicated to Bruce G. All the lists are going to be ten items in length and will not be in any priority order except to say, that maybe, the very first ones will be the most obvious and the very last the most agonised over.
I wrote a note to myself about this in the car today while helping a friend move a piano and the example of a good list that first came to my minds was a list of things that I haven’t done. This is curious because I am always going on about living in the moment.
Anyway – here we go – mind the step.

I HAVEN’T –

• Tried hard enough with Patric and Taliesin to help them integrate with school, paid more attention to the preoccupations of their weird brains and helped them to be happier people.
• Been more patient with Max.
• Acted more in my own and my families best interests when allocating my time.
• Been systematic with my community preoccupations to ensure that projects were bought to completion more quickly and easily.
• Been disciplined in regards to my writing and actually finished a major writing project that wasn’t as script.
• Been patient about letting projects and ideas emerge and in my enthusiasm move forward to quickly, been dismissive of others ideas and left everyone behind.
• Worked out how to make and keep close friends.
• Been a better gardener and carpenter.
• Been a more systematic and adventurous reader.
• Fallen in love more often.

My first list. Part of my rules for this project are that once posted I can’t revise a list so I have to be careful. I however must post the list on the same day I write it!

THE START OF SOMETHING

Having spent a great deal of the past 30 year being derisory towards Post-Modernism I am lately finding myself somewhat in sympathy with some of the preoccupations.  The extreme view is of course ludicrous – everything isn’t text and the universe persistently continues regardless of activities on this minuscule dot on a dot on dot we inhabit.  There are general laws operating independently of anything we have to say or do.  More to the point it is increasingly becoming obvious that more is going on then we currently have any notion and increasingly it seems understanding is beyond our particular mental tool set.  We evolved to eat, procreate and die.  Intelligence is an accidental by product of our evolutionary path and it has been shaped by hundreds of thousands of generations of creatures with a very limited intellectual horizon indeed.  Why we suddenly went down a path that suddenly invented civilization is perhaps one of humankind’s greatest mysteries.

Anyway it is becoming clear that a great deal of what we do and are (same thing?) exists  only in the language we use to think about or discus it.  Not the more obvious concepts within philosophy or theology  but the world view that frames these ideas.  What does the Christian inquisitions, pogroms and witch hunts, the Mayan and Inca wholesale daily violent human sacrifices and the story of Isaac tell us about the human religious impulse?  The wholesale violent destruction of individual humans is as universal religious activity regardless of what ever tenants are espoused.  One of the functions of language seems to be to allow society to function unaware of this.  Words and ideas create chains of associations inside separate phase spaces creating distinctions between various sets of ideas and beliefs without making the association shift to the larger phase space that contains them.  The contradictions within a religion (ie the disparity between the hating of Southern Baptists and the notion of a god of love) are seen as misunderstandings or heresies within a religion rather than expressions of what a religion is.

THE WONDER OF WORDPRESS

When i started this nest of websites  all based around WordPress so many people looked down their noses and said how clunky it was, there were better ways to do, lots of web page generating sites on the internet etc etc.  Now things have changed the same people are acting like they have suddenly ‘discovered’ WordPress and are using it in all sorts of different ways.  One ISP company i know builds all their sites in WordPress without acknowledgement and takes the money and runs.

I must say since i got my Galaxy phone blogging on the train is a great pleasure and working on websites in pubs and writing stories on the beach are just way to much fun.  i have just bought a Nexus 7 to make mobile webbing less fiddly and to use it as an ebook.

When i first got interested in all this sort of thing back in the early nineties one of the many things i and everyone else failed to predict was that twenty years on we would be writing web pages in bed.

Tourism is so weird.

Here we have a little patch of the middle of nowhere  called Mallacoota.  Our patch is characterized by hectare upon hectare of coastal forest and kilometers of beach and an extensive estuary system.  It is quiet and beautiful for most of the year except summer.  What happens thousands of people converge here from hundreds of K’s away and jam into tiny camp sites in the shire caravan park.  They huddle in the heat destroying the natural peace of the place, damaging the environment and paying top dollar for food and drink.  They tow (in many cases) huge vans and boats,  burning huge amounts of hydrocarbons and creating road rage and dangerous driving conditions.  When the weather is hot they complain about the heat and when it is cold or wet they complain about that.  Now if they expended the money and energy in working in their own communities to improve the civic life style and facilities – lobbying  government for better community facilities and volunteered in community organizations then there would be no need to travel.

Local traders say that the community depends on tourism to survive. However the people who depend on tourism came to Mallacoota to exploit the tourists and when they have made their pile go away somewhere else leaving the devastation behind them.  Without tourism Mallacoota might be able to concentrate on developing a local economy that supports real jobs that are ethical and socially responsible.

International tourism is even worse.  Comparetivly wealthy national can take advantage of the poverty stricken countries by  obtaining cheaper goods and services than are available at home.  This destroys the local culture,  massively degrade the natural environment, corrupts the bureaucracies and forces the  very poor and desperate into sex slavery,  drug addictions, slum living  and all the diseases these bring.

Tourism is not only weird it is evil.

Entrained

Past Garfield training through sunny mist. Cows and trees and things. Great relief.
According to a sign on shop we stopped at for coffee on the way to the station there is over 36,000
people in Pakenham. Endless houses built over prime agricultural land. All the suburbs out this way are making Melbourne increasing orders of magnitude unsustainable and hostile to the inhabitants. Possibly one of Australia’s greatest oxymorons is ‘local government’. I checked – it’s not an oxymoron it’a a misnomer.

Box Hill

The last time I was here Boxhill was a leafy, sleepy middle class urb. Now the place is like some cyber punk gritty Asian mean-street. Max has dragged us all off to a Laser Zone so Patric has something memorable happening on his 18th Birthday. He is sitting in the car with me listening to an audio book on phones while Max and brother and friends play at ersatz war.
Outside the car Asians and punks of various varieties scurry past, lots of the pedestrians are wearing photo ID of various sorts. The women wear Jiffies and the males brightly colored or grungy sneakers depending on financial circumstances or tribal allegiances. In a restaurant the sign on the window says you can order a Peking Duck Feast if you pay cash. The entre is chicken and ducks feet. Maybe it’s code.
A young Asian walks past dragging a full black garbage bag. He spits on the footpath and then drags the bag over it, smearing it out. It visibly dries on the hot concrete paving.
Hot. The sunlight on the grey is not bright. The photochemical skystain browns it out.
More boys go past spitting. Young girl things with pierced faces, microscopic shorts and saggy tops (falling off pale, toddler soft shoulders) turn into Dark Zone, giggling in anticipation of virtual mayhem.
Patric and I are waiting to be elsewhere. He is dozing listening. I am looking and writing this. Waiting.
Mallacoota is a long way from this nowhere.

Beaconsfield

As usual finding a Melbourne visi horrific. The urban ant heap is displaying it’s usual pointless frenzy. Some how living in a small community where most people directly contribute in some way to community proceedings while being objectivly futile seems much less so.
In the past 90% of the population were either serfs or slaves and produced a meagre but cumulative surplus for the benefit of the elite. Now the ‘slave line’ is raised so the slaves have become consumersf   rather than producers generating profit for the contemporary elite.
Life is less brutish and short but seems hardly more meaningful.