Last night sitting on my bed after a day at school, I'd had a lovely mini-date/coffee with a friend from class, and was feeling tired but good. Dad comes in to tell me about some TV personality who'd committed suicide, we got to talking about how if I ever felt like that again I had to talk to someone. But I'd only just been thinking about how much easier an out it can be minutes before as I was reading about the guys death, which I told Dad, and how I noticed the guy didn't have a partner too, which at his (also my) age, sometimes doesn't help matters terribly much.
And then Dad preceeded to tell me about he'd only just said to Mum the day before about how lonely I must be, here in Perth, in this house, not being able to talk to them about anything, and how nice it would be if I could meet someone. To which the fear of having to talk to people I don't know returned and I started feeling even worse.
I knew things were bad, but I didn't think it'd ever get so far as to attract my parent's pity. Sheesh, I don't think there's an awful lot lower than that.
Except, there is. When your Dad tells you how you can start conversations iwth engineers and tell them about all the interesting things I've done. Which I told him is all well and good, and I know people are interested in me, but unless there's a apark of something interesting about them that they let slip; their passion, or what makes them tick, then it's just another empty boring soulless conversation that I would rather drink myself to death than have.
So you'll forgive me for being rather depressed today then, won't you? To top it all off, I had awful nightmare this morning which I haven't had for ages - yes, they were about running away from scary things or getting into trouble again, of course! - and so with the all-pervading sense of darkness, I start crying when "Shadows" comes on and I realise how much I miss Age & James and how little I will actually see of them while they're in Perth this weekend. I just pictured Age doing his little dance and I burst into tears.
I miss my male friends, I hate not having them here to talk to. I miss all my firends, and all my girlfriends most especially, but there is nothing like the comfort of being with people who love and understand you and want to go out and get drunk and perve on cute boys and DANCE with you. And Age & I do that so very very well.
Where has all the fucking fun in my life gone?
“We used to feel like dancing and screwing are the two things that we are still allowed to enjoy in life, and… we [want] to make music that [encourages] people to do one of those things or both,” Julian Hamilton, one half of The Presets, said recently.
Friends, today is not a good day. I will hopefully see you all tomorrow.
Friday 29 August 2008
Wednesday 27 August 2008
Where's my crystal ball got to?
As an artist manager, the changes in the music industry over the last 15 years - starting with the internet! - have made it a precarious place for musicians and related administrators to be able to make a living. I was horrified to hear hear of the advent and seemingly across-board implementation of the new wave of artist RAPE by record companies a/k/a the 360 deal, so this lifted my heart a little when I saw it today.
I know that despite all the black and pills and what-have-you I am ever the optimist at heart, and it's that part of me that desperately wants ideas like this to become a plausible way of raising revenue and releasing music for artists. Yes, it would do away with record companies for the most part, but distribution co's could suck up the talented people and those A&R peeps still worth their salt would still be seeking out these bright young things to push towards the venture capitalists. After all, that's really all a label is these days and the major's have been for quite some time, a bank.
I have thousands of dollars/pounds invested in artists that I've worked with in the past, maybe if they have the opportunity to sign this type of deal in the future I could claim my % then? Yes, I know I'm stupid for never collecting my just desserts, but unfortunately I was like the venture capitalist at the time. Maybe one day they'll pay off?
Maybe I should be speaking to people to set up something like this hear in Australia??? Yet again, maybe not as I usually dislike people with money ... just a thought though, hey?
I know that despite all the black and pills and what-have-you I am ever the optimist at heart, and it's that part of me that desperately wants ideas like this to become a plausible way of raising revenue and releasing music for artists. Yes, it would do away with record companies for the most part, but distribution co's could suck up the talented people and those A&R peeps still worth their salt would still be seeking out these bright young things to push towards the venture capitalists. After all, that's really all a label is these days and the major's have been for quite some time, a bank.
I have thousands of dollars/pounds invested in artists that I've worked with in the past, maybe if they have the opportunity to sign this type of deal in the future I could claim my % then? Yes, I know I'm stupid for never collecting my just desserts, but unfortunately I was like the venture capitalist at the time. Maybe one day they'll pay off?
Maybe I should be speaking to people to set up something like this hear in Australia??? Yet again, maybe not as I usually dislike people with money ... just a thought though, hey?
Monday 25 August 2008
Paris & Nicole?
You can't tell the difference between me and a famous person sometimes, due to my perfected pose. The family hate it, I oft get into trouble for not being serious enough in pictures, but I don't do toothy photos, so instead you get a pose. If it's good enough for Keira, it's good enough for me, I reckon ...
Finally got the VISA essay done, thanks to Deb for her (shouting) words at lunch today, it certainly did help to give me a good kick up the arse which was most required. Onwards and upwards with the rest now I feel. Well, maybe tomorrow then.
Sunday 24 August 2008
My hero ...
What a lovely day out this would be ...
"Alain de Botton is a philosopher committed to the idea of making people happier. That's why - and there should be no paradox in this - he also believes that we should all learn to be extremely pessimistic. He will deliver a sermon designed to focus our minds on the absolute darkness of human experience, from the moment of birth to our last sigh, encompassing adolescence, marriage, childraising and career. He will take us through the thought of the Roman philosopher Seneca, who advised that one rise every morning and run through all the disasters that might befall one before sunset. Alain will challenge the great bourgeois promise that everyone can find happiness in love and work. While this is of course a theoretical possibility, Alain will argue that the chances of anyone succeeding in both areas (let alone in one) are extremely remote - and that it is therefore peculiar, and deeply cruel, to base our societies around these values. Indeed, in denying a place for misery and despair, the modern world denies us the possibility of collective consolation, condemning us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution. Come to celebrate the particular joys of pessimism. Handkerchiefs advised."
In contemplation, I should really then be thinking myself thankful for achieving both of these "great bourgeois promises" at various times in my life. It's not been that often when I've found myself despairing of the work I have to do, and there have been loves of sorts over the years to speak of as well. I am lucky enough to have a job I love at present, yet no love except for that of my friends, so on balance, things aren't really so bad after all...
Still haven't finished any of those buggery assignments though, WTF!
"Alain de Botton is a philosopher committed to the idea of making people happier. That's why - and there should be no paradox in this - he also believes that we should all learn to be extremely pessimistic. He will deliver a sermon designed to focus our minds on the absolute darkness of human experience, from the moment of birth to our last sigh, encompassing adolescence, marriage, childraising and career. He will take us through the thought of the Roman philosopher Seneca, who advised that one rise every morning and run through all the disasters that might befall one before sunset. Alain will challenge the great bourgeois promise that everyone can find happiness in love and work. While this is of course a theoretical possibility, Alain will argue that the chances of anyone succeeding in both areas (let alone in one) are extremely remote - and that it is therefore peculiar, and deeply cruel, to base our societies around these values. Indeed, in denying a place for misery and despair, the modern world denies us the possibility of collective consolation, condemning us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution. Come to celebrate the particular joys of pessimism. Handkerchiefs advised."
In contemplation, I should really then be thinking myself thankful for achieving both of these "great bourgeois promises" at various times in my life. It's not been that often when I've found myself despairing of the work I have to do, and there have been loves of sorts over the years to speak of as well. I am lucky enough to have a job I love at present, yet no love except for that of my friends, so on balance, things aren't really so bad after all...
Still haven't finished any of those buggery assignments though, WTF!
Saturday 23 August 2008
Pre- yet post- writings ...
I've been writing on Amanda's blog instead of my own with regards to our ridiculously bad attempts at keeping up with our fabulous new buddy system so that she finishes her book and I get my essays in on time this semester. Here's my comments to her first missed deadline post ...
Oh look, I am such a numpty, I never even wrote any, I just THOUGHT I did ... flipping heck. Maybe it really is time to crack on with it instead of attempting to drag up things that DON'T BLOODY EVEN EXIST!
I wonder if my sub-conscious actually knows which of my thoughts are real or not? I really shouldn't be posing questions like that.
RIGHT! Onwards and upwards with those essays then, I really do have no excuses now.
Oh look, I am such a numpty, I never even wrote any, I just THOUGHT I did ... flipping heck. Maybe it really is time to crack on with it instead of attempting to drag up things that DON'T BLOODY EVEN EXIST!
I wonder if my sub-conscious actually knows which of my thoughts are real or not? I really shouldn't be posing questions like that.
RIGHT! Onwards and upwards with those essays then, I really do have no excuses now.
Study Buddy ...
So, Amanda and I have been CRAP at keeping up to our week 2 deadlines, how badly does that bode for future (non-)achievements? Anyhow, I've been commenting on her blog posts when I figured I really should have been writing my own as well, here's a response to her earlier message today ...
"No police as I'm backed up by a bigger authority ... that of GUILT whereby I haven't finished my essays, which is why you havenae received them either! I have been eating rather a lot of cake and purchasing books @ the UWA book sale instead though, and going slightly mental too. How do they stack up against your excuses?"
OK, so why am I still pissfarting around on Stalkbook and writing blogs when I should be finishing my essays, hmmmm?
And the Procrastinator of the year award goes to ...
"No police as I'm backed up by a bigger authority ... that of GUILT whereby I haven't finished my essays, which is why you havenae received them either! I have been eating rather a lot of cake and purchasing books @ the UWA book sale instead though, and going slightly mental too. How do they stack up against your excuses?"
OK, so why am I still pissfarting around on Stalkbook and writing blogs when I should be finishing my essays, hmmmm?
And the Procrastinator of the year award goes to ...
Sunday 10 August 2008
Estates
It's been a while, but after viewing La Haine for my European Studies class this afternoon, I feel moved to write.
The director said he wrote the film to raise awareness of the housing estates en Paris. To be 100% behind the people who have to live on the estates, who know they cannot escape. To be able to film there, they are living in one of the flats, in amongst the other estate tenants. But they maintain they have to lie low during the filming as they're a bunch of middle-class filmmakers and appreciate that people do actually have to live there, and can't escape that existence. Similar estates exist all around Europe and I've seen them in Melbourne as well. They don't really exist here in Perth; I know there are suburbs or pockets of state housing, but when you're not living on top of each as they do in Europe, they don't have the same kind of claustrophobic, desperate, impossible to escape air about them.
I think the film is great, it's an insightful piece of social realism, authentic and true to life. It does have fantastical moments in it, not as many as in Trainspotting which we're also studying, but they are both very real representations of the problems and issues that people living on housing estates are confronted with on a daily basis. In class last week whilst discussing Trainspotting, I volunteered that life on housing estates really is as bad and bleak for people as it is dramatised in the film. My tutor questioned this, I suppose he and most of the rest of the class find it impossible to conceive of people even living in places like that, let alone feeling as disaffected and disconnected as the youths do. But I've lived in these places. I've been poor, living on benefits in the UK, waiting for housing loans to come through so that we didn't have to sleep on a battered, stained single mattress on the broken-tiled floor of the 19th story council flat above London, which had no furnishings, carpet or blinds and the walls were a mix of revolting old wallpaper designs that were ripped back in most places. Thankfully there was hot water, heating and electricity, but no fridge or shower and a bath that took about half-an-hour to fill as there is no water pressure that high up in the sky. People would commit suicide off the sides of the towers, ours was but one of six, and there wer often syringes to be found around the grounds. The lift didn't always work - you try walking 19 flights of stairs with your weekly shop - and people would use them as toilets, many a landing smelt of fish or curry or whatever nationality was chucked in there this week, it truly was "Mile End".
But at the end of La Haine, whilst I was watching the director's commentary, I felt weird. Here I am, sitting in my middle-class parents house critiquing this film, yet his comments of "we had to lie low" insult me. I know he understands "the plight of the estates", being a director the only thing he can do is to make a film about it, and it is an incredibly successful film that has highlighted the issues, yet it all still feels false and hollow somehow. I'm angry that my knowledge of these peoples lives was questioned last week in class, I don't want to have to get up there and tell my life story, but if it wasn't for a bunch of benefit fraud and some nifty shoplifting by my partner whose flat it was, I can't say that I would be back here now able to reflect upon it all. That tower block was the site of my first brush with suicide, the first time I really felt like I didn't want to live. I'd only been in London a year when that happened, I don't think I was even 21. I must have only been on the estate for nine months. Things got an awful ot better, but I can't deny what I felt, as a citizen of that place and how angered I feel now to think of people dismissing my knowledge and my experiences.
It's not something I've ever really talked about a lot though, I don't know if I really want to talk about it much. But I just want it to be recognised, that I've done it hard, that I know what it's like to struggle and fight and not be heard or listened to. Nothing like what most people have, but I can tell you how incredibly removed it was from my middle-class existence of only a year prior.
And I think that all people who live on estates want is for the the source of their Hate to be removed. To have their feelings and struggles recognised, to be listened to, to be provided with opportunity, knowledge and understanding. And most of all, to be treated with respect, trust, civility and fairness.
I don't know why I'm so angry about this really, but writing helps to get it out. Time to go and cook a very middle-class curry instead ... oh, the guilt.
The director said he wrote the film to raise awareness of the housing estates en Paris. To be 100% behind the people who have to live on the estates, who know they cannot escape. To be able to film there, they are living in one of the flats, in amongst the other estate tenants. But they maintain they have to lie low during the filming as they're a bunch of middle-class filmmakers and appreciate that people do actually have to live there, and can't escape that existence. Similar estates exist all around Europe and I've seen them in Melbourne as well. They don't really exist here in Perth; I know there are suburbs or pockets of state housing, but when you're not living on top of each as they do in Europe, they don't have the same kind of claustrophobic, desperate, impossible to escape air about them.
I think the film is great, it's an insightful piece of social realism, authentic and true to life. It does have fantastical moments in it, not as many as in Trainspotting which we're also studying, but they are both very real representations of the problems and issues that people living on housing estates are confronted with on a daily basis. In class last week whilst discussing Trainspotting, I volunteered that life on housing estates really is as bad and bleak for people as it is dramatised in the film. My tutor questioned this, I suppose he and most of the rest of the class find it impossible to conceive of people even living in places like that, let alone feeling as disaffected and disconnected as the youths do. But I've lived in these places. I've been poor, living on benefits in the UK, waiting for housing loans to come through so that we didn't have to sleep on a battered, stained single mattress on the broken-tiled floor of the 19th story council flat above London, which had no furnishings, carpet or blinds and the walls were a mix of revolting old wallpaper designs that were ripped back in most places. Thankfully there was hot water, heating and electricity, but no fridge or shower and a bath that took about half-an-hour to fill as there is no water pressure that high up in the sky. People would commit suicide off the sides of the towers, ours was but one of six, and there wer often syringes to be found around the grounds. The lift didn't always work - you try walking 19 flights of stairs with your weekly shop - and people would use them as toilets, many a landing smelt of fish or curry or whatever nationality was chucked in there this week, it truly was "Mile End".
But at the end of La Haine, whilst I was watching the director's commentary, I felt weird. Here I am, sitting in my middle-class parents house critiquing this film, yet his comments of "we had to lie low" insult me. I know he understands "the plight of the estates", being a director the only thing he can do is to make a film about it, and it is an incredibly successful film that has highlighted the issues, yet it all still feels false and hollow somehow. I'm angry that my knowledge of these peoples lives was questioned last week in class, I don't want to have to get up there and tell my life story, but if it wasn't for a bunch of benefit fraud and some nifty shoplifting by my partner whose flat it was, I can't say that I would be back here now able to reflect upon it all. That tower block was the site of my first brush with suicide, the first time I really felt like I didn't want to live. I'd only been in London a year when that happened, I don't think I was even 21. I must have only been on the estate for nine months. Things got an awful ot better, but I can't deny what I felt, as a citizen of that place and how angered I feel now to think of people dismissing my knowledge and my experiences.
It's not something I've ever really talked about a lot though, I don't know if I really want to talk about it much. But I just want it to be recognised, that I've done it hard, that I know what it's like to struggle and fight and not be heard or listened to. Nothing like what most people have, but I can tell you how incredibly removed it was from my middle-class existence of only a year prior.
And I think that all people who live on estates want is for the the source of their Hate to be removed. To have their feelings and struggles recognised, to be listened to, to be provided with opportunity, knowledge and understanding. And most of all, to be treated with respect, trust, civility and fairness.
I don't know why I'm so angry about this really, but writing helps to get it out. Time to go and cook a very middle-class curry instead ... oh, the guilt.
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