Will McRostie

Art, ambition & radical inclusivity [email protected] [phone]

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Why I Didn't Go To Musical Theatre School

A lot of people ask me why I didn’t go to musical theatre school.

I’ve been on stages since the age of seven in one way or another, and even today a good portion of my work revolves around performing. As a teenager, I was obsessed with Rent, and Wicked, and Avenue Q like any good protohomosexual of the mid-00s.

But when the time came to choose Uni courses, I didn’t choose what was my passion at the time.

There are two reasons for this, one internal, one external.

Internally, I didn’t believe I was good enough. Musical theatre is for the skinny, the limber and the cut-throat. I had a sense that no matter your work ethic, there were certain essential criteria that I did not fit.

The second reason is this:

I’ve learned a lot about art, culture, class and power since I left school, and I couldn’t be happier about that. I’ve got a lot left to learn as well.

This is the best articulation I can find of what I unconsciously abhorred in musical theatre and its divorce from the functions of art:

Here we have a woman with a voice that has the power to move people to tears; the kind of voice that could profoundly affect hearts and minds. Instead, she is using it to glorify and reinforce the dominant class in return for a hefty sum of money.

Rix sings like an angel, and vaseline-smeared images of crusty old, white, male trainers and smug, white, male jockeys float across the screen in a nauseating montage of privilege, excess, wealth and power accrued as a result of gambling addiction and cruelty to animals.

And all the world will join in celebration And all the world will share the joy you bring And all the power the hope and inspiration In all their glory the nations all will sing

Heroes live forever Heroes live forever Always we'll remember Heroes live forever

Heroes live forever, except for the two horses murdered in sacrifice to the sport, right? Rich white men and their lackeys are heroes, right?

Rix is free to do as she chooses, and we all have to pay the bills. I don’t pretend the ideal of the starving artist is the only path for everyone.

But my respect is reserved for those who choose to use their talents to give voices to the voiceless, to punch up against injustice rather than standing atop a mountain built of misery and violence.

My interests in art, performing and otherwise, are representative and political. How do we critically portray the world we have, the world we want and the distance in between?

Pathos is exciting, and the catharsis elicited by the musical’s surgical manipulation of emotion is what we’re all paying for. But I now understand that there are two ‘Theatres’.

There’s the theatre of my youth, where there were no stars and the act of performing was a communal and collective effort to be greater than the sum of our parts, for the love of it.

And there is theatre of $120 tickets, return on investment and cameo after cameo after cameo by Bert Newton. The theatre of endless autobiographical and historical ‘cabaret’ shows which take no risks, and make no attempt to step beyond cliché, all in the name of a good time.

Reading aussietheatre.com.au and its commenters lavish praise on Rix’s performance without even beginning to interrogate the obvious problems with the song and its context breaks my heart, and is another of the thousand cuts that is slowly killing the artform I thought I loved.

The physical chills elicited by a powerful voice are neither the beginning nor end of the story, and they should be earned in service of something greater.

I know this makes me sound like a snob, and I don’t care.

I didn’t go to musical theatre school because I want to say something worthwhile, and I wish more performers saw their capacity to do something worth more than just earn John Frost another dollar.

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Film – Dallas Buyers Club

Originally published in InDaily 13.2.14

Narratives about the AIDS crisis are universally gut-wrenching to behold.

From my privileged position a generation below, with the advantages bestowed by awareness-raising, education and research, I want to reach into the screen and shake everyone. What are they doing, having indiscriminate sex and sharing needles? Don’t they know?

Oh, wait.

Dallas Buyers Club is the story of one man diagnosed with HIV in the mid-’80s. Ron Woodroof is a hard-drinking, big-gambling, coke-snorting, bull-riding electrician from the Texas oilfields. Played by an alarmingly gaunt Matthew McConaughey, the Woodroof we meet is already a shadow of a man and – to say the least – a prick.

When Woodroof has an accident on a rig, he wakes up in hospital to find two masked doctors with some unexpected news: he has HIV which has developed into AIDS, and an estimated 30 days to live. McConaughey gives a surprisingly dynamic and powerful performance, and has clearly done a ton of work to nail this role.

Despite the grim prognosis and his subsequent alienation from the macho culture, Woodroof’s survivor instinct kicks into gear as he researches the HIV treatments on the horizon. He begins smuggling as-yet-unapproved antiretroviral drugs into the US, eventually expanding his operation to serve the HIV-positive population in Dallas, comprised mostly of gay men.

What follows is a fascinating exploration of the relationship between science, ethics and individuals. Woodroof is in a cat-and-mouse game with the US Food & Drug Administration, which is dragging its feet on getting new drugs to AIDS sufferers, instead focusing on the rigid development of an expensive new treatment – AZT – which is patented by a huge American pharmaceutical company.

I am a passionate advocate for science, and understand how vital staged drug testing is to developing new products. But when caring for the unwitting victims of a deadly pandemic, how can a doctor conduct a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in which half of the participants are doomed to certain and unpleasant death?

Jennifer Garner is wonderful as Dr Eve Saks, a physician who embodies this struggle, and whose faith in the medical establishment is shaken as more patients die while Woodroof lives on his cocktail of Mexican pills.

She is joined in the supporting cast by Jared Leto as Rayon, an HIV-positive transgender woman with whom Woodroof teams up to find new members for the buyers’ club. Leto gives a touching performance, and the development of Rayon and Woodroof’s relationship is one of the most satisfying aspects of the movie. However, as great as Leto is, it would have been nice to see what an actual transsexual person could bring to the role.

I must pause here to comment on the gender and sexual politics at play in Dallas Buyers Club. Woodroof is a mean-spirited bigot, and the movie contains a liberal dose of homophobic and transphobic slurs. This is true to the times and the location. AIDS was viewed as the “gay disease”, and it is fascinating to see the effect of this stigma on a very straight man. I struggled a little, however, with the presentation of Woodroof as a “saviour” for many homosexual AIDS patients. Clients of the club are passive, and it is possible to view the film as suggesting that these people were just not as strong or clever as the assertive, manly Woodroof; that they were content with their fate.

Ultimately, I think the film gets through this construct and manages to portray the group as one thrown together by a shared dire circumstance, and doing its best in the face of corporate and regulatory indifference. Yes, Woodroof charges for membership of the club and access to its wares, but $400 is far less than the $10,000 per month price tag big pharma attached to AZT upon its release. Who is truly profiteering from suffering?

The question the film poses is grand. What is more important: individual agency or collective benefit? Is it okay for 1000 people to die after receiving a placebo in a study that creates a drug able to save hundreds of thousands? Common sense says yes, but facing the terror of a painful, premature death, would you be comforted knowing others will live, or would you fight tooth and nail?

Dallas Buyers Club offers fairly pedestrian direction and cinematography, and director Jean-Marc Vallée has far too much fun with smash cuts every time Woodroof passes out, which is often. But this is one of those movies for which the story, characters, currency and philosophy rise above the craft to create something very compelling.

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Live – PilotFest Brings Vibe to the AFC

Originally published in InDaily 28.1.14

Look, full disclosure, I work at the Adelaide Festival Centre.

Heading into my fifth year as an usher, I can spin some fun yarns about getting vomit on your shoes, or spectacularly broken scenery. I can also offer a purely anecdotal snapshot of the audience that most frequently patronises our fair city’s arts centre: it is old.

Do not read “old” as code for “conservative” or “cantankerous”. They are people who are significantly older than me (22), but they are a marvellous group of people who love the arts, and with whom I’ve had wonderful discussions about the art on display. But it is disheartening, year after year, making social plans following a shift that never involve meeting my peers at the centre.

Programming is only part of the challenge in attracting diverse audiences to a venue. The greatest obstacle is, if you’ll forgive the vague artsy nonsense, the “vibe”. This is one of the trickiest elements to get right in a venue expected to be all things to all people, such as the Adelaide Festival Centre (AFC) – one demographic’s sense of a good vibe does not match that of another.

Marketing, pre-show dining, post-show drinking, car parking, public transport access, bike parking and décor are all accorded different priorities by different groups, and it is difficult to adapt processes, people and infrastructure to build a good vibe for everyone, regardless of programming.

Enter PilotFest, a program of performances by exciting and high-quality local artists curated by Luke Penman of music blog play/pause/play and the team at Pilot Records, who manage a roster of local bands that fit loosely into the definition of “hybrid electronic music”. PilotFest premiered at Arcade Lane in 2013, and was picked up for the AFC’s January Sessions live music series.

The evening kicked off with DJ-wizards No Birds and Slamagotchi performing in the sun-soaked Amphitheatre (vibe), to an appreciative crowd that nonetheless stuck to the minimal shaded areas available. Food stalls including Veggie Velo (vibe) and an outdoor bar (vibe) took up the plaza, and Radio Adelaide broadcast an OB from the foyer (vibe). Are you starting to see what I’m getting at? Vibe.

Moving downstairs into the Space Theatre, a series of fantastic interactive projection art installations occupied the corridor between the stairs and the auditorium (vibe). In the pitch-black theatre, set up with tables around the periphery and a large open standing/dancing space in the middle (vibe), we were treated to sets by Glass Skies, Sparkspitter, Brokers, Odessa, Question Question and Urtekk. The evening was well-paced, with enough room between sets to refill drinks – the $5 beers proving especially popular (vibe).

Sparkspitter, Brokers and Urtekk were particular highlights for me, demonstrating innovative and unexpected combinations of the traditional instrumentation and electronic reshuffling. Each also had a wonderful sense of stage presence and an energetic connection with the audience.Question Question especially could learn from this, with a great musical performance marred by the “stand behind a console and never look up” disease from which electronic artists so often suffer.

My apologies if you were expecting an in-depth critique of the music. They were all great, and some appealed to me more than others: go listen to their work on Bandcamp or see a show and make up your own mind. The true joy of PilotFest was seeing these bands, which I’ve seen before only in pubs or basements, on a big stage backed up by professional kit and world-class techies. It made them sound amazing, look amazing and feel, finally, like competitors on the national and world stage.

And the result of a good vibe coupled with good music? A good-sized crowd of people, mostly 20-somethings or thereabouts, had a good night. I rocked up alone, but immediately met a bunch of friends and acquaintances, and met some new people. We danced, we talked, we bought drinks, we hung out, we went out afterwards. This might not sound like much, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it happen here in four years.

What’s the lesson then? Go hard on collaborations like PilotFest. The AFC, in programming this event in association with Pilot Records and play/pause/play, put its trust in knowledgeable and talented locals and empowered them to create a great vibe and put on a great show. This is a sign of a growing collegiality in the sector between institution, artist and audience that can only improve our cultural experiences and outputs.

Well done, everyone.

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Live – Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour

Originally published in InDaily 16/10/2013

It is the reality of life as a critic that you inevitably find yourself sitting in a room, picking bits of salt and vinegar chip off your lap and being asked to judge people doing things that you could not hope to do yourself in a million years.

Multiply Michael Jackson by a factor of Cirque du Soleil, and it’s pretty much just a parade of people who are prettier than you, more talented than you and have achieved far more in their lives by your age. I tip my cheap, tacky hat to the talents of all the performers showcased.

That said, such phenomenal gifts create phenomenal expectations.

Cirque du Soleil’s latest offering in Adelaide is Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour. On the surface, the match between the Jackson canon and the Cirque universe is strong: themes of innocence, childhood, wonder, nature, growth, unity and all that other squishy, hippy malarky that both circus and pop can convey so majestically.

Jackson was all about transcending social constructs, something which Cirque du Soleil has amply demonstrated through its rigour, humour and commitment to storytelling.

I must offer context here about my own biases: I am a Cirque fan before I am an MJ fan. I remember visiting Le Grand Chapiteau for Saltimbanco and Quidam, both of which are touchstones in my memory of childhood. I remember an utterly immersive experience from the moment the tent rose over West Terrace, to the second we got back in the car. I was thrilled, I was transported, I was inspired.

So with that in mind, please accept my grudging disappointment with The Immortal World Tour.

For starters, the Entertainment Centre is debilitating to any kind of ambience the show is trying to evoke. With all the charm of a particularly dull steelworks, the arena and its industrial sensibility are totally at odds with the intoxicating Cirque I remember and love. Exposed wires, sound and camera ops trundling about and a feeling of flimsiness pervaded the set, which consisted of a two-storey stage behind a long catwalk and small, circular second stage.

The show began with a group of five Jackson-esque dancers in some of the King of Pop’s memorable outfits. They performed a graffiti-themed routine on wires before ceding the stage to the show’s guide and host – a mime in a silver, glittery tracksuit. An accomplished mime, dancer, popper and locker, this smiling man never seemed to be allowed to reach his full potential. This was a feeling common to many acts; constrained by songs and poorly structured “narrative”, the show was never sure who came first: Jackson’s ghost or the performers on stage.

The stand-out acts reminiscent of my early Cirque experiences were allowed to dispense with a the slavish biographical angle and create moments that illustrated Jackson’s songs – women in black, LED-covered bodysuits performing an aerial hoop routine to “Human Nature” in the dark on a backdrop of stars, two aerialists styled as swans performing “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You”, and a pole dancer I wish to hire as my personal trainer for life.

Many of the other acts focused almost solely on dance, and often suffered due to the truncated tracks played. We would just be getting in to one routine and it would skip a second verse or bridge, not allowing the legendary build in Jackson’s songs to occur in full and robbing us of some potentially explosive moments. It seems unlikely that legendary perfectionist Jackson would have been happy with the standard of choreography on stage – imprecise, repetitive and hidden in bulky costumes.

The band looked like it was having fun up the back, but amid rabid and wildly overwrought sampling, the only two instruments I’m sure were being played live were the electric guitar and the cello. The rest were swallowed in a wall of noise that either re-created Jackson’s originals mechanically, or re-styled them using some contemporary electro-dance music tropes that didn’t really fit a show of this gravity and level of resource.

In the end, The Immortal World Tour fails to satisfy either as a Michael Jackson show or a Cirque du Soleil show, and this is disappointing given the calibre of ingredients in the mix.

The producers must have known that blending these two brands and their long histories, mores and baggage would require finesse and nothing short of perfection. What they’ve ended up with, and I wonder if the phrase “direction by committee” might apply, is something aimless and tokenistic with frustrating glimpses of what could be if these two phenomenal forces of entertainment were better orchestrated and integrated.

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Live – One Direction: At the heart of Adelaide’s One Direction frenzy

Originally published on InDaily, 24/9/13

The seething mass of fans greeted every song with piercing screams at One Direction’s Adelaide gig, but what is it about the lads that provokes such hysteria, asks Will McRostie.

It is fashionable to dismiss pop stars, especially boy bands, as being low-brow, culturally devoid and pointless. No slave to fashion myself, I find the cult of celebrity to be a fascinating if unenviable way of life, both in terms of being an icon or an acolyte.

One Direction. What can I say about one of the most successful music franchises of the 21st century? The boy band consists of five British lads aged 19-21 – so all younger than me, god dammit. Each fits the classic boy-band archetype: Harry Styles is the cad, Zayn Malik the bad boy, Niall Horan the class clown, Liam Payne the “street” kid and Louis Tomlinson the “nice” one.

Musically, they are cookie-cutter power pop, with riffs and melodies you’ve heard a thousand times before. That’s not to say they’re bad – their mega-hits are undeniably catchy.

The Take Me Home tour marks the group’s second visit to Australia, and it’s obvious that their so-called international breakthrough has landed. The Adelaide Entertainment Centre was full – full – of rabid fans. I don’t mean rabid as in passionate. I mean rabid, as in a seething, pulsating mass of teen and pre-teen desire. I have never heard screaming like that in my life.

The opening act, 5 Seconds of Summer, was an Australian forgettable all-boy four-piece. The tweenage crowd lapped it up with requisite enthusiasm, but only really as an outlet for the excitement boiling over for the main event.

Once they had mercifully wound down, every beat, every moment, every lingering gap between filler songs was met with piercing screams of anticipation before the main act took to the stage.

What is it about the 1D boys that inspires such a response? They are undeniably good looking, but not more so than the average, well-kempt and genetically lucky 20-year-old. They displayed no particular wit, and their music is not Mozart. The only answer I can think of is that it’s their status as object. They are the object of a kind of emotional intensity not felt at any other point in human development – the first crush.

Projecting such feelings of desire onto abstract things is not a new phenomenon, and it seems natural for young people to invest these feelings into something abstract like a boy band. It will never let you down; it will never leave you; it will never hurt your feelings.

The interesting part of this ecosystem is the reaction from those outside the phenomenon – people like us, dear reader. It is, as I noted, fashionable to heap scorn onto these boys and the girls who love them. I even partook, with a semi-facetious live-tweet session before the gig, likening my journey to that of Orpheus into the underworld.

But what is it about this force that scares us so much? There is no denying the validity of these fans’ feelings – especially after standing in the same room as them for two hours. So why are we so uncomfortable with young girls displaying desire for boys? It seems to speak to an uncomfortable hypocrisy, especially when teenage male sexuality is so readily embraced, and problematic teenage male sexuality is so readily dismissed as “natural”.

To return to the concert – it was, frankly, quite sloppy. The boys seemed tired, and Malik and Styles, in particular, appeared disinterested in the proceedings. The banter was strained, their moves rather rote. Horan carried the show, bounding back and forth across the stage with terrier-like enthusiasm, while Tomlinson lost pitch, forgot the set list and suffered a fall after being squirted with water by Payne. He was refreshingly humble and quick to admit that he’d had a rough show, but it was jarring for those expecting perfect commercial polish.

The boys are obviously good singers and the group is well-balanced vocally. Between Malik’s piercing tenor, Payne’s falsetto and Styles’ solid mid-range, the sound is great when it’s great.

These days, the 1D boys look undeniably grown up. Stubble, tattoos and chest hair are beginning to jar against the “Teenage Dream” saccharine lyrics – even the little narrative video that played throughout the performance seemed to feature versions of the singers from a bygone age. Perhaps this contrast, combined with their obvious fatigue, created the tension I felt from the stage.

Perhaps it was just a bad night for 1D – first show in a new country. Yet there was an undeniable whiff of doom in the air. Maybe I’m projecting, but I would not be surprised to learn the days of 1D as 1D are limited. You can almost see the ambition radiating off certain members, and as they delivered with professionalism and precision, you couldn’t help but imagine their disdain for those still revelling in a freewheeling existence.

The One Direction juggernaut will roll on. Boy bands live and boy bands die – such is teen life. I just hope these five kids can navigate the dangerous waters of The Biz and continue their careers, because I’d love to see what they can come up with off the pop music assembly line.

Meanwhile, we should cut ’em some slack – it must suck being an object of such expectations, such commercial risk and such emotional intensity. And the next time “One Thing” comes on the radio, just dance along.

PS: Niall is clearly the hottest. No contest.

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Theatre – Swamplands by Van Badham

The times - they changed.

A response to Van Badham's text presented on the final night of five.point.one theatre company's fortnight of staged readings.

One of the more elusive issues that I didn't even know I had with museum theatre is the subtle demand that everything be timeless. Institutional programmers do not enjoy the ability to inhabit the present in such a visceral way as five.point.one demonstrated in the finale of their “Reading Sessions” series.

A reading is necessarily ad hoc – the cast, crew and creatives have been thrust together often with only a few days or hours of rehearsal. On this short a timeframe, the production values are going to be less speccy, but I enjoyed the session as a raw moment of performance.

Of course, the text presented plays a huge part in how effective the staged reading medium is, and I can imagine some texts that would be interminable in the format – just as some texts are interminable fully staged.

The final reading session presented Melbourne-based playwright Van Badham's ambitious text Swamplands. It is ambitious in the scale of its timeframes, characters and directorial suggestions, and the author is very concerned with addressing this – the work begins with a lengthy disclaimer that encourages the audience to eschew any expectations of realism. This is a risk – who hasn't seen a dreadful play that begins with smug authorial instruction designed to force the audience to conform to the writer's worldview? Indeed Badham is exceptionally (and at one point literally) present in this piece, but her presence is not an imposition – she genuinely works as a character and thus this presence is a success.

The play is concerned with the turn of the millennium and the second war in Iraq – a relatively fresh wound on the contemporary psyche. What I didn't realise until seeing this text is that the wound has most certainly begun to scab for me; I didn't realise my attitudes had changed so dramatically in the last decade, but they have.

The proto-homo child of left-leaning parents, I spent much of my childhood feeling in the minority; feeling an outward adolescent rage at The Man – at the time, Howard and Bush II.

“Imagine,” I'd effuse Lennonically, “Imagine if these stupid, evil white men weren't in power. Imagine how peacefully we'd all be able to live, together.”

Never having been subject to a non-conservative Government in my own living memory, what proof had I against such a notion?

But here we are almost 10 years later with a woman and a black guy in the roles originated by John and George, and what has changed? There have been overtures of social liberalism, but we are not living in the socialist paradise I had envisaged. Guantanamo is still open, Afghanistan is still a nightmare, refugees are still mistreated, I still can't get married. War is still a commodity, with violence bought and sold like corn futures to shore up economies or opinion polls.

Badham's piece reignited the aforementioned adolescent rage – which is the surprise, as I was unaware it had been snuffed. The great letdown that has been the “left-wing” in power, combined with my own graduation to my twenties, has replaced the rage with a wry ennui.

I will not try to summarise the plot other than to say that what transpires in the play could well have happened in the real world. It would require considerable research to verify, but the basics of the narrative are plausible.

But in the moment of observation as an audience member, we cannot know for certain whether the plot is a confection of the writer's own political and conspiratorial leanings. Instead of shying away from this ambiguity, Badham embraces it to wonderful effect, pushing what could have been a more boring restaging of All the President's Men into a fanciful exploration of power, perception and justice. She does not trying to convince us and preach a political point, but lets the action speak for itself.

The large cast wrangled admirably with the jumpy dialogue – standouts included Brad Williams' reptilian (I'm not being twee – literally reptilian) Dick Cheney and Lydia Nicholson as spy, wife, mother and self-professed 'patriot' Valerie Plame, whose vulnerability and innate conflict encompasses much of the play's conscience. In the same way that it is a joy to see flexible, fast-paced programming, it is thrilling to see actors on the fly – racing to stay one line ahead and without the usual sheen of rehearsal.

One of the story threads does feel underdeveloped compared to the others – a plot line set in a hotel room in Caracas, Venezuela, played between transnational lovers. Each scene in this thread is very short, but its climax functions as one of the play's pivotal moments. Unfortunately, as we've only had limited exposure to the characters, the catharsis is not as satisfying as it could be. The female character in this thread has great potential as one of the few non-western voices in the piece, and I felt her function could be expanded to give more voice to the non-Anglo, as the play is overwhelmingly focused on the internal struggle between Western war-mongers and Western objectors. A slight reprioritisation of the storylines could make her character all the more effective.

Despite the playwright's strenuous insistence that Swamplands exists out of time, the text is not timeless. This is an overwhelmingly contemporary piece that burns bright for the medium future. Its function beyond that may be one of record or preservation, but this is where the play succeeds and subverts. As I've argued, museum theatre is so often the domain of mainstage companies, and thus playwrights who only have this work to respond to seem worried about creating “timeless” work. In doing so, they completely disconnect from their time, their place, their issues and their audience. Swamplands is unapologetically of the now, well-suited to the raw environment of the staged reading and extremely thought-provoking.

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Theatre – Adelaide Festival '13: Postcards from Auschwitz

The most confronting moment of Hotel Modern’s Kamp occurred after the show. Yes, after the tiny puppets gassed and cremated and beat and electrocuted and suicided in their Tonka-truck version of the most infamous concentration camp of the 20th Century.

The three cast members, clad in neutral grey, invited audience members to approach, inspect the set and ask questions of the team. The audience descended with vigor, and many whipped out their phones or cameras.

I was revolted. The act of taking photos of this landscape like a gawking tourist filled me with disgust.

Had we not just borne witness to a re-enactment of one of the most incomprehensibly evil acts in human history? Did this horror not burn itself indelibly enough in our collective mind to render such a weak documentation unnecessary? Didn’t taking a blurry snapshot rob this set of its power and its sacredness?

Our ability to use the lens to control the distance between ourselves and horror was one of the central tenents of Kamp. The production was the documentary we never had about the place that should never have existed. Our gaze is drawn wildly between the macro, as the three performers stomp like Godzilla through this place arranging the next tableau, and the micro, as they used tiny cameras to give us a live feed from hell.

Tiny people with tiny faces, indistinct from above but each with a startling individuality in close-up. Each tiny face contorted with pain and awe. Each tiny body punished for an imagined crime. The lens, used correctly, had the power to give these tiny people back their humanity.

Of course, they are puppets. The puppets, the crematoria, the gas chambers and barracks are all rough-hewn from corrugated cardboard and hot glue. In any other circumstance it would be naff, even funny, but we are met through this construction with the realisation that the Holocaust was hand-made. Human hands built and maintained this place, and human minds built and maintained the ideas upon which its atrocities were committed. So through a man-made set loom three giants, calmly arranging calamity and making us think of God, and his place in all this.

Why did they continue to do it? Do these three actors not have a choice? Why do they place these little glue people into the gas chamber? Why do I sit there, in silence?

None look particularly strong, and I could easily stomp through Auschwitz and tear it all down. Yet there I sat, with 200 others, transfixed and certain that this must play out in a certain way.

Realising this, I felt guilt. Guilt for the comfort of my thirsty and pathetic existence. Guilt that I would not liberate these tiny inmates.

As the camera trained through a tiny mass grave, a twisted heap of bodies, I found myself searching desperately for hope, for redemption, for defiance, for two bodies clutched together at the end. In the barracks I listened through the snores and wheezes for the whispers of a plot, an uprising, a resistance.

Again, guilt.

I wanted these, the most debased and dehumanised people in living memory, to fight back and make me feel better. Me, the guy sitting 10 feet away and not saving them, sipping from a bottle of cool, clean spring water.

My thoughts turned to Nauru. And Papua New Guinea. And Manus Island.

My thoughts turned to what I should really feel guilty for. My thoughts turned to the places hand-made by my countrymen, and legitimised by our ideas.

Ideas about transgression, and about punishment for imaginary crimes. Our lack of self-esteem and our need to punish others for our own failings. The lack of room in our hearts and at our tables for others based on a contorted reality where abundance is not enough and our drawbridge must be raised because…

Because…

I don’t blame those spectators who chose to take a photo. Those who chose to capture the set in its neutral state, after the fact, a sanitised crime scene with a tape outline instead of a corpse.

We crave distance from such horrors, and the lens is one way to achieve that. But we must confront our reluctance to bear witness in the flesh. To experience, not document. To engage, not observe. Though it’s uncomfortable, we must recognise the importance of resisting the urge to put a lens between us and the actions that we are collectively responsible for.

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New shiny!

Hello! Welcome to my new website. Please bear with me as I get it up to date and import all my old guff.

Cheers

Will

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Theatre – Hindley St as you've never met it before

There is a special thrill associated with being in a place you’ve never been before, whether it’s a new country or simply an unexplored aspect of an everyday haunt.

In Adelaide, we are fortunate to be enjoying the latter regularly with the blossoming of the small-bar scene. What, though, of the streets we tread every day?

A single property has only a small impact on the character of a street, and while this effect compounds over time, a neighbourhood absorbs and blurs this change into something gradual and generational.

Thus, a dim, unadorned and narrow basement in the very bowels of Hindley Street is the perfect place to step back and examine the strip through the eyes of its inhabitants. As voices murmur down from the street and venues above, while trickles of questionable liquid leak audibly through the exposed pipes, so does the Australian Bureau of Worthiness filter our perceptions of the strip to show us the things we never see as we rush between jobs or clubs.

I Met Hindley St is a near-verbatim theatre piece by the Bureau, an outfit comprised of artists Emma Beech, Tessa Leong and James Dodd.

The trio, along with a few other guests, have been in residence on Hindley Street since October 22. As part of their stay, each takes shifts around the clock on the street to document scenes, conversations and striking sights. Each interaction is centred around a question: “What makes your day worth it?”

The answers range from banal to deeply personal, but all are interesting in their own right. These answers are then woven into a narrative communicated through performance and illustration over about 45 minutes.

The Bureau effectively has the conversations I wish I had the confidence to strike up with strangers. Though not exactly a hermit, I have a crippling and omnipresent sense that I am annoying people if I talk to them without an invitation or legitimate excuse. At the same time, I am deeply curious about people and their lives. It’s an awfully neurotic dissonance to live within, believe you me.

I must also, if I’m honest with myself, admit that class and convenience play into these reservations. While I don’t think that’s totally unfounded – I was a fat, gay, sour-looking adolescent, after all, and thus a magnet for on-street heckling – it’s also true that I don’t really want to get stuck in a 40-minute conversation with someone who may be deeply offensive, or worse, boring.

So for me the Bureau is a godsend. But sitting with a bunch of other creative types, chuckling drily at more creative types re-enacting conversations with people to whom I wouldn’t ever talk? It’s confronting and made me seriously consider my own self-styled open-mindedness and whether I can comfortably pretend to understand a vast range of people to whom I’m never exposed.

The performance itself is carried mostly by Beech along a narrow catwalk as various stylistic representations of Hindley Street light the walls. Beech is a wonderfully calm, welcoming and engaging presence, evoking the feeling of an effective and well-intentioned bureaucrat. Scenes from Hindley Street are presented with little editorial from the team, which I appreciated – an area already burdened by connotation and often used as short-hand for debauchery doesn’t demand the addition of other layers of meaning.

I have met Hindley Street many times in various states of physical and mental capacity. But I Met Hindley Street allowed me to meet its regular inhabitants – another, less tangible aspect of a street so analysed, so hotly debated and so prescribed. And I’m glad I did.

The Australian Bureau of Worthiness has created a piece in an exciting and inventive space that is charming, unassuming and well worth a visit for anyone curious to meet Hindley Street as they’ve never met her before.

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Classic: Oration exposes angst over reconciliation

A response to the 2012 Lowitja O'Donghue Oration by Michael Kirby. First published in InDaily 1/6/12

SITTING in Bonython Hall under the stern, oil-painted gazes of previous Adelaide University big-wigs, I buzzed with excitement to see Michael Kirby give the 2012 Lowitja O’Donoghue Oration. Supported by the Don Dunstan Foundation, the oration is an annual event that speaks to the theme of reconciliation.

Kirby is a hero of mine, and a villain to many of my friends studying law. His legal mind is near-unsurpassed in acuity and his contributions to progressive politics – “legal realism”, as he would term it – are invaluable.

The oration was outstanding. While I admit to wavering focus during the more legalistic passages, Kirby’s blend of inspirational gravitas and faultless reason were a joy to behold in the flesh.

Following the presentation, I walked past the former High Court justice, feeling too bashful for a handshake, and proceeded to micro-dissect my own reaction to the event. The setting of it all bothered me. Surrounded by heraldry, timber and the conceits of those Euro-centric institutions universities, hearing about reconciliation with Australia’s indigenous people was either poetic or deeply ironic.

This tension in my interpretation of the intangibles bothered me, and continues to do so. Cynicism is, some would argue, my own foible borne of liberal guilt and a penchant for over-thinking. However, I can’t help but feel the air of absolution around events such as this one.

I cannot stress enough my support for the foundation, for the work and legacy of Lowitja O’Donoghue, and the importance of smart cookies like Michael Kirby talking constantly about the social issues Australia faces across all segments of society.

There was a line Kirby used about “knowing the pain of the Aboriginal people”, in reference to his own experience of discrimination based on sexuality. It did not appear in the transcript published by the Sydney Morning Herald on Tuesday, so I can only presume it was off-the-cuff.

Any discrimination is to be abhorred, but with all due respect to Kirby, how can a man who ended up a justice of Australia’s highest court claim to know about the institutional disempowerment faced daily by indigenous people?

In that rarefied atmosphere, surrounded by my fellow Left-leaning middle-class pals, I couldn’t help but feel many were there for their own benefit as much as to learn about the intersections between the First Australians and the law. Rock up, hear the retired justice speak, buy a book, head home. Redemption achieved, see you next Sunday.

It feels like a betrayal to segment off 90 minutes for the plight of indigenous Australians, and then go back to the pub.

Of course, one cannot be all things to all causes, and to indulge such notions would impede progress forever.

My companion for the evening felt a similar twinge, but was less bothered by it. He seemed secure in the knowledge that such feelings were unproductive and not worth validating.

It is easy to feel cynicism over the post-colonial platitudes from oppressive regimes. Who hasn’t eye-rollingly derided some western power for its insensitivity towards indigenous peoples the world over? Yet we remain hypocrites at the core, full of speeches and sound-bites about reconciliation at home but little real action towards equality at an institutional level.

How did such cynicism come to reside in my young mind?

My cohort has seen great highs and lows in the struggle of indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islander people to find reconciliation with post-colonial Australia. From the Mabo decision in 1992, the development of Native Title and the apology delivered to the Stolen Generation by Kevin Rudd, to the shame of the Northern Territory intervention, an ongoing health crisis and deep chasms in quality-of-life measures between indigenous and non-indigenous people.

We have grown up with the scripts of recognition, mumbled welcomes to country, and cursory studies of Aboriginal history and culture in school.

Yet my personal experience with indigenous people has been extremely limited. Admittedly, I haven’t gone seeking such encounters, but the education system as it stood did not seamlessly allow young people access to the perspective of the First Australians.

So, having paid years of lip service to reconciliation but not engaged with indigenous people, it’s no surprise that my lens for viewing events such as the Lowitja O’Donoghue Oration is warped. It stems from my own inescapable feeling that I have no right to partake in such grand overtures of reconciliation when my own actions have not contributed to its realisation.

I do not pretend to speak for all young Anglo-Australians in this, but I’m sure many would suffer from similar ideological concerns.

I feel conflicted over the solution to such angst. Clearly I need to engage more with indigenous Australians, yet even that idea makes me worry about how to make such a connection without being tokenistic or patronising.

To my mind, we will have achieved reconciliation when we have a generation devoid of such racial neuroses, for whom inter-cultural experience and equality is as familiar and organic as discrimination and inequality once were.

Until then, I can only do my best to support the work of organisations such as Generation One, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation, and all the organisations working to preserve and promote our living indigenous culture.

I must also resolve to continue this conversation wherever I can with boldness and without self-consciousness.

As Kirby said: “Hope and fear of failure are the twin companions on this journey.” With luck, I can quietly nourish the former and thus overcome the latter to better stand with and for my fellow Australians.

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Frustration - A Parable

Let me tell you a story.

Starting year seven, I could have exploded with excitement. I was, at last, a Big Kid. We got jumpers, we got first pick of the new library books, we got respect. Teachers and parents and little kids would all have to fall in line and acknowledge our status as elders.

It was around Australia Day that we did some SOSE project that involved colouring in the Australian flag. Now, keep in mind I have always been a lacklustre visual artist and somewhat forgetful. By January 24th I had already lost my dark blue pencil.

"Oh well," I imagine I sighed, "no big deal". Off I went colouring in the flag with a light blue pencil in my clumsy, methodical way.

My new teacher asked that we all come up and pile our worksheets on her desk. I was the last to do so. She picked up my sheet and stopped me in front of the whole class.

"Are you stupid?" she barked, "This is the wrong colour. Everybody, look at this. What is wrong with you, William?"

She stared me in the eye as my face burned. I could feel the class shifting awkwardly in their seats behind me, but nobody made a sound.

"I- I didn't have a dark b-blue...pencil," I stammered by way of excuse. She was not amused.

She flared her nostrils and let out a little "hunf" noise, one I would come to know intimately over the year. She handed back the sheet with a new blank one and told me to take it home and do it right.

I told my parents about it that night through floods of tears.

Over the year, it became evident that this teacher had a soft spot for the athletic. Sport was noble and the good character it automatically dispensed excused the violent, the moronic, the terminally vapid. I was trapped in a world where no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't win.

We took identical spelling tests at the beginning and end of each week. I usually aced both. One week I got 20/20 on Monday and 19/20 on Friday. Again, I was berated - how could I be so stupid? Never mind that I had gotten 95%, never mind that Nick got three right and threw a rock at my head last week. He was on the football team.

I eventually stopped going to school. I would love to know how many "sick" days I took in year seven. I didn't want to be there, and I didn't give it my all. I retreated.

It is with a tinge of bitterness that I feel the same sense of juvenile injustice again today. I have been counselled, again and again, to avoid using metaphors of paternalism when discussing the relationship between culture and government. But it is all I can think of, and it is all I can hope to express to the people who make decisions.

You can lay out KPIs and studies and and forums to try and figure out why people feel and act discontent when decisions are made. But without the emotional intelligence to interpret the results, it is futile.

People spent a lot of time, effort and money to create something out of nothing. They didn't have the right tools for the job and they had very little support. They coloured in an Australian flag light blue because, damnit, it's better than a black and white one.

They were told that it is wrong. Tacitly, explicitly, formally, informally. The thing they made was never legitimised or recognised.

Then, someone on the football team coloured in the flag light blue.

"Wow," it was exclaimed, "How clever, how bold, how revolutionary." They were given a tick and a gold star and a whole new set of coloured pencils to keep being clever and bold and revolutionary.

You stop going to school. You retreat. You transfer.

You build something, someone knocks it down. That's life.

You build something useful, someone calls it pointless, knocks it down and then gets someone to build something more complicated that does exactly the same thing?

That's cruel.

What's the lesson? Legitimise willingly. Recognise early. Consult truly and engage authentically. Dig deep down and try to unpick your preconceptions about makers, artists, art, entrepreneurs, communities, takers, givers and recognise that maybe the flag would look good in light blue the first time someone suggests it.

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Classic: Film Review - Step Up to the Plate

A review of French gastronomy film Entre Les Bras or Step Up to the Plate. Originally published in InDaily November 28, 2012

LEGACY has never been central to my thinking about life. We have no family business and no name to uphold – I have been free to forge my own path. To me, this is extremely liberating. Since Biblical times, the pressure on the son to live up to the father has been fodder for dramas that do not end well for the protagonist.

Step Up to the Plate (French: Entre les Bras) is a documentary about Michel and Sébastien Bras, a father-and-son team at the heart of a three-Michelin-star culinary empire. In a story straight out of parable, Michel is approaching retirement and must begin to let go of the reins of an enterprise built around his own exacting aesthetic and taste. Sébastien – his energetic, equally finnicky son – now faces the challenge of staying at the top of a ladder he didn’t have to climb.

Through four seasons in the gorgeous town of Laguiole in the South of France, Step Up to the Platetakes us into the rarefied yet refreshingly unpretentious world of la famille Bras and its work creating some of the world’s best dishes using hand-grown produce.

Straight up I offer this warning: Do not see this movie hungry. The long, lingering and lush shots of dishes as artful as they are obviously delicious will drive you to distraction. Hypnotic, near-silent sequences of Sebastien experimenting to create his own twist on his father’s signature dishes are stunning, revealing much about the confection of such exquisite edible relics.

We meet the generations, from Sébastien’s children to Michel’s parents, and learn what each has come to think about how such a momentous transition should proceed. Particularly fascinating is Michel’s mother, a character who could be ripped straight out of sitcom. Her breathless stream of commentary and self-righteous opinion is one part Marie Barone and another Sylvia Fine. The conflict between her obviously deep love for her son, grandson and great-grandson, and her insistence that it is the duty of them all to carry on the Bras legacy, is the heart of the film’s drama.

Perhaps inevitably, Sébastien’s own son spends much time cooking with Dad, but Sébas takes great pains to explain that he will not be forcing any choices upon his children. Various parties weigh in on whether Sébas’s current position poised at the top of a dynasty is rooted in choice or fate, and it is fascinating to see the various interpretations from inside and outside the family.

Director Paul Lacoste employs a minimalist, reserved style which reflects well the ritualised and tightly controlled methods of French cuisine. The film spends much time following the family at work – catching yabbies, cooking, running, plating, picking, gardening, managing; all hereditary activities that have passed on from parent to child. In following the work, Lacoste finds where the family truly expresses itself and where its tensions are played out.

It is odd to watch something on screen about cooking that doesn’t follow the hyper-dramatised model of reality shows like Top Chef or Hell’s Kitchen. Indeed, the absence of concocted drama means the film can strike a great balance between the food and the family. Its marketing, however, does seem to oversell the level of angst these characters face – there is no shouting, no breaking down, no catharsis. Gordon Ramsay-style flamboyance has no place in the Bras kitchen.

Foodies will obviously enjoy Step Up to the Plate, but it has much to offer the less culinary-inclined moviegoer. It is well paced, visually arresting and a magnificent ad for the region – I want to visit this gastronomic paradise as soon as possible. With little fuss, Michel and Sébastien set about working through their succession with love and the kind of studied pragmatism that infuses their cooking style. Their openness for the camera is a joy, and their story is compelling as it is timeless.

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Classic: Put adventure back in playgrounds

Originally published Jan 27th, 2012 at www.indaily.com.au.

I AM aware I have abandoned my portfolio as youth commentator over my last few columns, so let’s get real: Playgrounds are of great interest to me.

The same way people in ankle-exposing pants wax rapturous about “real people” architecture, I gush about the design and potential of the play equipment in parks and schools. I am that nearly-six-foot idiot who tries to squeeze through the climbing bridge, extolling how this one compares to the parks near my house and where I grew up.

My fondest memories of play equipment are from Horsham, Victoria: The Land that OH&S Forgot. A sixty-foot slide made of curved sheet metal that had the potential to burn, lacerate, fracture or some combo of all three. Climbing platforms made of once-splintery timber polished smooth by the hands people before you who got stuck. Suckers.

My primary school in the Hills was a little tamer, but the monkey bars and flying fox proved just thrilling enough. I can remember only one instance of a semi-serious injury in eight years there. Not too bad a hit rate.

The thing I remember most, however, is how many different things these playgrounds were in my and my peers’ imaginations. An air traffic control tower, a treehouse, a ship, a shop; we imposed a thousand locales on play equipment, as kids are wont to do. That the ground was always covered in bark chips in these diverse scenarios is of no consequence; it was a stimulating environment.

Today, I am aghast at the two-dimensional foam-rubber hells we call playgrounds. Artificial landscapes, drab equipment, high fences, statements of intent posted on the gate. Hydraulic exercise machines, bench presses and the like have no place in an environment aimed at primary kids. While platforms and slides can be anything you imagine, you’d be hard pressed to imagine a bench press machine as anything but a single-use contraption that belongs in juvie, not a primary school.

A friend recently recalled that her local primary school’s playground had a sign on the wall beginning with the hideously authoritarian “Play should …”

Play should not be anything, least of all prescribed from the top down by grown-ups. Play should be as free and imaginative as kids can make it, while still being safe.

It’s hard to tell where the modern attitude comes from. The SA Government Office for Recreation & Sport’s “Playgrounds Manual” is wonderfully jaunty, leading with the assertion that “interaction with and manipulation of the natural environment, together with simple, inexpensive and introduced elements can provide some of the most rewarding play”.

It goes on to recognise that “playgrounds are often developed as a statement to the community rather than being based on children’s needs”. The inclusion of exercise equipment in a children’s space is clearly a reaction to some manner of ill-conceived criterion developed by boring people to address the obesity crisis or something similar.

Boring people have no place in designing a playground.

Of course, play equipments should meet safety standards and be unable to decapitate, but you can bubblewrap to your heart’s content and “that kid” will still find a way to hurt himself. Children naturally test boundaries imposed on them, so why not embrace that spirit rather than being afraid of it?

Communities should demand quality play spaces for their kinder, whether from councils, schools or government. Tell them to lose the risk aversion and create spaces that respond to the needs of children, not commandments from on high about what the outcomes of play should be.

The outcome of play is naptime.

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Classic: There is Life After Uni

Originally published in InDaily 10/8/11

I AM now a university dropout. A burnt-out sell-out who could no longer cope with the vagaries of the tertiary education system.

I took a full-time job in the industry I’ve been fighting to break into for years and it feels damn good. I approach my new deadlines with gusto, and leave feeling like I’ve achieved something each day.

I also feel I’m doing my family proud, as none of them finished a degree before the age of 48.

The strange thing is, we’re still embarrassingly upper-middle class. The system seems to brainwash secondary students into thinking that admittance to university is the end, the ultimate goal, and the only way to financial security and happiness.

We should instead regard uni as but one means to any number of ends.

The number of pathways now open to young people to help them achieve their dreams is staggering. Apprenticeships, TAFE, VET, professional courses and good old-fashioned working are equally as valid for many professions.

It is true these days that a university degree is just a piece of paper, especially considering the proportion of Australians with a bachelor’s degree or higher has risen steadily since the ’70s. This is admirable, but when more people have the same qualification, the bar gets higher. Post-graduate work and experience are now the yardsticks more than undergraduate achievement. Uni is effectively the new TAFE.

So why do we still place so much emphasis on obtaining the parchment? Arts and humanities education is merely a time-buying mechanism for the uncertain. What about those who actually want to work in the arts and humanities? There is nothing professionally focused for us, just a broad stroke set of wishy-washy curricula that have little bearing on any kind of professional development beyond the highly nebulous “critical thinking” skill set.

Sorry, but if by age 18 you haven’t developed the ability to think critically at the basic level unis seem so desperate to impart, there is little hope.

I constantly hear of young people, especially those with professional parents, being coerced into slogging through a degree they hate through threats of being financially cut off or disowned.

A lot of parents and teachers seem to believe that indecisive kids are in need of a forceful hand to motivate them into a law/engineering/science degree. A “real” degree. But perhaps they are indecisive because they have been led to believe doing that degree is the only way to succeed, and that acting on the urge to deviate is terminally foolish.

Maybe parents need to afford kids the freedom to make their own mistakes instead of punishing them for their own.

In retrospect, it is amazing I was able to make it through school thinking a career in the arts was a viable option, with all the hand-wringing that seems to accompany such a declaration in other households.

Just because a job is going to earn your child a six-figure salary does not guarantee he or she will be happy.

So you’ll forgive me if I ditch my “Bachelor of Showing Up To The Same Place Consistently for Three Years”, but I have some more important things to do.

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Classic: X-Pectations vs. Reality

Originally published in InDaily 1/8/2011

AS FAR as existential crises go, a desire for one to stop playing on one’s own lawn rates pretty highly.

Yes, that’s right, we are the senile teens. The mentally middle-aged kids playing dress-ups in Dad’s suit cupboard. Funny thing is, we wear it more comfortably than he ever did. The garment is not a shackle of the nine-to-five any more, but suitable attire for a casual drink or high-powered business meeting.

I have an ABN, for christ’s sake.

It is the job of kids to identify the traits of our forebears and act in the direct opposite manner. Given the bong-hitting, protest-marching, tree-hugging antics of our parents, it’s not at all surprising that we feel obligated to act with some measure of maturity.

Ms Keen, if that is your real name and not an alias adopted after a radical bombing of a nuclear waste dump, here are my responses to your “criticisms”:

There’s a reason they’ve scrapped NASA: Launching is damned expensive. Unfortunately, Gough Whitlam was ousted some time ago and university is no longer publicly funded. So while you starry-eyed employer-oldies wax lyrical about the mind-altering revelation that was your arts degree, we have to fight a tertiary education system bent on attracting the most lucrative students. These are, and I say this with no judgment, international students pursuing science and engineering.

It is not enough to simply do a degree these days. One must intern, and job around for little to no money. Who has time for stable, paid employment capable of supporting a rental on that schedule? Sure I’d love to bum around Europe every six months for five years, but I have career momentum to consider.

Grant, the first homeowner: Why blow 10 years’ worth of money on rent because you’re too big a ball of post-adolescent angst to settle down? May as well man up and start building your assets now that you’ve secured that graduate position. It’s not like we can rely on social security for our retirement (thanks guys).

“I Do” (pursuant to the following terms and conditions): Marriage is less sacred. That isn’t the gays’ fault, but more a condition of a highly mobile society that is contract-savvy. Trigger-happy celebrity matrimony has made a spectacle out of a once-solemn tradition. Marriage isn’t that big a deal, and neither is divorce, unlike in the post-war era. It just makes good business sense, in the medium term, to form a partnership with someone you can generally stand. When the partnership dissolves, you split the assets. Easy.

Yes the average age of marriage might be dropping, but how many will stay that way till death do they part? My guess is not many.

Branding opportunities: Not being a lady, I can’t really say what would motivate a young woman to take her husband’s name. I certainly wouldn’t. Maybe it’s just that faced with the choice, a disappointingly low (in the eyes of hardcore feminists) number would choose to keep their name. Whether this is borne of inbuilt social pressure on women to do so is a question I cannot answer, but the fact remains that if society’s views have changed as dramatically as I think they have since the ’50s, and the number of women choosing to keep their name has lagged, there is an element of ambivalence at play somewhere.

Highly critical mass: Baby boom. Baby “boom”. It is well known that Australia’s population growth has slowed dramatically since the end of said boom. Perhaps coincidentally, a large number of Australia’s radical social progressions have occurred in that period where the young outnumbered the old. It is a lot easier to create a “movement” when most people can move without a stick.

People get more conservative as they age; it is a fact of life. Idealism is beaten out of humans as they witness how crap the world can be and their views shift right. How are we possibly expected, then, in a representative democracy, to change minds when the media and politicians are hell bent on catering to their largest market: bilious fogies? Old people love to vote and buy newspapers.

It is also worth noting that there has not been a mass extinction of Gen Xers. You’re all still here. If you were so good at leading social change, why are we still so mired on basic issues of social justice like gay marriage? It’s like watching your fat old uncle watching the footy and saying: “I could play better than that in my day”. How about now, Uncle Phillip? Now that they’ve got GPSes and heart-rate monitors and micro-nutrition? I think the bar might be a bit higher.

Seriously, pass the passion pop: We have booze, but we also have meth.

Music: I don’t know exactly why that Leopard is so Def, but maybe it’s because it listens to shit music turned up to 11. Could you turn it down? I’m listening to acoustic orchestral indie-pop on my vintage record player and you’re really drowning out the bottom end.

Would I like to live a flea-bitten existence on a dirty mattress in Melbourne’s north? Yes. But I don’t have time, I’ve got to do my sole trader BAS because nobody will hire me as anything but a contractor. Then I’ve got a meeting with a client and two tutes to get to, from which I can offer the most conclusive proof as to the efficacy of our conservatism in creating highly skilled individuals: Mature-age students.

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Classic: Generation Us

Originally published in InDaily 18/5/11

I REMEMBER in early high school (around 2005, just to freak you out) we had a discussion in English class about generational nomenclature. It has never been a concept I have understood very well. It always feels like an exercise in mysticism along the lines of astrology, which lumps diverse individuals into broad categories of personality for an obscure reason.

Suffice to say, the teacher leading this discussion was a Baby Boomer-and-a-half.

The first two options thrown out for the name of my own generation were the iGeneration, Generation Me and Generation Y. Perplexed, I asked: “Why ‘Generation Me?’”

“Because your generation is so self-centred , of course!” she answered, without a trace of irony.

Only some years later did I grasp the millennial pun of “Generation Me”. I heard the “self-obsession” explanation many times more.

Are we so self-obsessed? Whether we are or not, those who came before us seem to make sport of branding us as such. We primped and preened for Myspace, we primped and preened for Facebook and now we primp and preen live for YouTube.

We are the lazy, entitled brats of the ’80s and ’90s who don’t know how good we got it. So we’d better get off the face-space and do something constructive or so help me God I’ll …

Ahem, sorry.

The idea of blaming someone for his or her youth is an hilarious reaction to ageing. Let’s face it, members of Generation X are worried because they’re middle-aged and don’t get to be radical any more, and the Baby Boomers are clearly just menopausal.

It does seem, to an outsider, that social media is an exercise in self-obsession. Creating a personal shrine to oneself that friends can visit and comment upon seems pathological.

But it is used to amazing ends by the people around me. Those participating in events such “Live Below the Line” and “World’s Greatest Shave” raise buckets of money from friends and family on Facebook. These are personal acts of sacrifice for a greater good.

We also saw during the Queensland floods how Twitter became a source of reliable information and helped many people find shelter or their friends and family.

Free access to the level of information available through the internet has resulted in my cohort being one of the most socially aware generations on the planet.

We had our bogeymen, like the “reds under the beds” or the Kaiser; we had Saddam, Osama and terrorism. However, our ability to research these issues ourselves led to a much more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of the threats than people had in previous generations before. The level of mass hysteria regarding radical Islam is much lower than that which resulted from the “Communist threat”.

We were raised on a diet of 40-Hour Famines, MS Read-a-Thons and Jeans for Genes days, with the ability to go away and research these causes to a degree that no generation before us could.

The name-calling has died down somewhat in the past two years or so. Perhaps that is because now the internet and social media have finally become acceptable tools for everyone, not just teenagers.

Perhaps it is also because people of my generation are starting to finish school, move out and find jobs without much fuss, none of which were predicted by my English teacher, who was convinced we’d all be living at home till we’re 40.

But I’ll tell you one thing – those kids born after 2000? I don’t like them. They’re just so spoiled and irritating with their floppy hair and iPhones and Justin Bieber.

They’ll be the death of us, you mark my words.

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Classic: Climate not a "Youth Issue"

Originally posted on InDaily, 2/6/11

I CATCH the bus.

There it is, out in the open.

What drives me to such desperate lengths in order to get from point A to point B? A roaring sense of social justice, a deep-seated liberal guilt or a general poverty?

Unfortunately, it is often the latter. I wish that my escapades with public transport were the result of some hard-won insights into the horrific realities facing my peers in an uncertain future where Victoria Square may resemble Glenelg. It would certainly make a better anecdote.

However, the truth is that driving, parking and petrol are all hideously expensive and frustrating, so I use public transportation and my legs. I think that for many of my contemporaries facing greater pressures from rising living costs, the answer would be much the same.

Young people are certainly aware of climate change and the risks it poses. The Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) recently celebrated a successful “Meet Your Member” campaign that resulted in 120 young people discussing the carbon tax with their local MP.

But it is far too easy to pretend climate change is a “youth issue”. The success of organisations such the AYCC and actions like ABC TV’s Hungry Beast’s “Who’s a Climate Scientist?” rap or Cate Blanchett’s recent foray into activism runs the risk of branding a global crisis as a Tonka-toy talking point that only kids should worry about.

Meanwhile, in an article on the AYCC, the particularly vehement climate change sceptic website Australian Climate Madness  claims “no young person has any idea of the effect that a carbon tax will have on the economy or our hard-won standards of living”.

“Young people… have frequently never had to deal with the harsh realities of life, working for a living, paying taxes, making ends meet in difficult economic circumstances.

“Many continue to live with their parents for much of their twenties (and even thirties), and have no concept of managing a household or a budget.”

Apparently, no young person (18-30) has ever had a job or a house, bought anything, made a budget or emerged from the privileged cocoon of the leftist young.

I have addressed these generalisations in previous articles, and will not venture further here other than to say they are absurd and insulting to millions of young people struggling to make ends meet and flirting with the poverty line.

It is possible to care about social issues while also battling to survive. It just takes a little thing called empathy. Unfortunately, young people who employ the E-word are often ridiculed as naïve for doing so. If we don’t, and we behave in a similarly selfish way to those who can’t bear to live without a car, we’re narcissistic and foolish.

I do have an idea of what it is like to face the “harsh realities of life” and their accompanying costs.

It’s why I catch the bus.