So I left the country…

So for those of you who don’t know, I’ve left the country to search for horcruxes. I will be gone for about seven months, and intend to write about stuff I see along the way, as well as properly trying some other writing that I’ve been talking about doing for ages and have never got around to.

It’s going to be interesting. Especially because I have the practicality of a seven year old child. No lie, I once boiled one egg in a ten-person pasta pot. Granted, I was about seven years old at the time, but things haven’t really progressed since then.

However, I’ve managed to get through the first three days relatively unscathed, despite sitting next to an entire family of gingers on the first half of the plane ride. Upon observation, they seemed to be acting like normies for the duration of the flight, but I believe that my slightly ginger facial fluff that I attempt to claim as a beard prevented them from trying any of their gypsy magic on me.

Then, after a three hour delay in Dubai following an exploding toilet upon touchdown, I was reseated next to a borderline incontinent lady who requested a window seat. Presumably, this was for the express purpose of annoying the shit out of me while I attempted to sleep, but I have no concrete evidence of that, just strong suspicions. Additionally, the only gem of conversation I elicited from my pee-happy companion was when she decided that she needed someone to complain to about how she asked for a lemonade and was given an apple juice. Thrilling stuff, I’m sure you’d agree. We spent the next six hours in silence, pondering how such an injustice could have occurred in this day and age.

After 30 hours of airline food, gingers and sporadic sleep, I landed in London and jumped on the tube, where I learned that despite their ancestors inventing the language, London youth don’t actually speak English, instead saying things like “hewfbuhds fjdsbd worry about it mate dsdbis cjcndsi aiiiight”. After witnessing this, I decided headphones were a better option to complement my trip to a pub called The Village in Muswell Hill. The Village is a pub where a friend of mine, Vivienne, lives (Note: Vivienne actually lives above the pub and works there. She is not a 60-year old, alcoholic Spanish vagrant who talks to herself loudly in Spanish, though the pub does have one of those, too).

Now Vivienne, it must be noted, actually put way more effort into my arrival than I have cumulatively put into every person I have ever had stay at my house, ever. Not only do I have an amazing, king-size blow up mattress (with the comfiest doona imaginable), I also have a little, hand-drawn sign on my door saying “Mike’s Room” and a collage of photos from my own Facebook of my friends, in case I get homesick. I even got a video tour sent to me pre-departure, which is actually the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.

Anyway, day one was spent working out the perfect jetlag cure, which is as follows:

• Sporadic sleep for thirty (30) hours of airline travel
• Five (5) pints of beer in the afternoon
• One (1) nap, of two (2) hours duration
• Two (2) pints of beer, two (2) vodka lemonades
• Sleep at 10:00pm*

Day two was spent attempting to do some shopping (being Easter Sunday, everything was closed), and witnessing the single greatest exaggerated reaction to a supermarket being closed in the history of mankind. The story is as follows:

I walked up to Sainsbury’s and the automatic door doesn’t open. I curse the hardcore religious for messing with my ability to buy meat for roasting, then decide to progress with my day, sans meat. Immediately after, a lady comes up and, obviously missing my attempted entrance to the supermarket, walks into the door. Then, clearly embarrassed by the whole “just-walked-into-a-door” thing, decides to proselytise her feelings, loudly, to the street “Wot is dis? Sainsbury’s closed? How can dis fuckin’ happen? I need my groceries, man! Dis is completely ridiculous! Now I need to get takeaway tonight! That’s absolutely mental”** and so on for approximately four awkward minutes.

Following that burst of excitement, I needed to leave Muswell Hill, for fear of wetting my pants, so I decided to head to the city. On the way, I sneakily sat next to a local giving his family a tour, which was excellent. By excellent, I obviously mean “in Arabic except for the place names”, but I feel that I learned something, and there was great benefit in my eavesdropping. Among the place names, they also repeatedly said “لرجل الأبيض يصغي الينا. كيف فجة”, which I didn’t really get, so any help there would be wonderful.

Then I went to the Tate Modern, which was totally spectacular, but I can’t really write too much about it for you. It’s fantastic though, and you should pop in and see it if you’re ever here. Galleries are wonderful places that are thought-provoking and calming, and you should support them. The only thing that warrants a mention is the look a hipster gave me when, upon looking at a Dali with my friend, Bryce, my critique was “Shit man, dude could totally paint”. The hipster wasn’t impressed, and made it known. Which was rude, because I wasn’t impressed with his stupid hat, glasses and clothes, but I didn’t say anything. Except on a public forum behind his back.

I’m still pretty jetlagged and I haven’t written anything that isn’t PR-y in about 12 months, so cut me some slack with the writing. I hope it’ll get better over time, as the stories become less about people yelling at a Sainsbury’s. I know it could be tighter. Give me a break.

Anyway, London is wonderful so far, despite the fact that they’re obviously getting Australian translations over the phone now (cost cutting in these trying economic times), and they misheard the word “shit” for the billboard in the photo.

I’m here until Friday, then I’m off to Northern Ireland.

From there, it’ll probably be onto Eastern Europe. Any thoughts or recommendations would be appreciated.

Also, I’ve changed the name of my blog. SEE WHAT I DID THERE?! Oh god, I’m going insane.

*Actual figures may vary depending on your weight, height and the wattage of your microwave

**Now, in my head and retrospectively, she said that in an Ali G voice, and I have written it that way. It may not have been like that at all, but run with it. It’s funnier that way. The general vibe of her speech was, however, as written, and all efforts to maintain her contention have been made.

Travel

I am now unemployed, I saw a lady walk into a door, I'm leaving, London, they don't have good coffee here, Travel

April 9, 2012

4 Comments

Australian (for what it’s worth…)

I am Australian, whatever that means. First-generation, born of an Irish-Catholic couple that moved here in the 80s and decided to do so without ever having been to the country before.

I’m proud of it, too. So when I was left without an answer during a discussion about what it means to be an Australian, I was concerned my inability to articulate “Australia” meant I was somehow (God forbid) “UnAustralian”. So I started reading and realised nobody really knows what the definition of what being “an Australian” is, and the opinions on the subject are as vast as the Great Victoria Desert.

I did realise what we aren’t. We aren’t Hoges. Or Julia. We aren’t Albert Namatjira. Not individually, anyway. We can’t be, living in a country where communities from every continent co-exist with levels of relative peace.

When my reading led nowhere, I went to a public lecture in Melbourne, where five panellists (including Waleed Aly and Alice Pung) tackled the conundrum. With various levels of success.

According to Aly, the United States of America is a country based on an idea, with a definition of its  cultural identity built into a Declaration of Independence that celebrates “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. Alternatively, the United Kingdom – birthplace of the Western World – is built on history and institution. And then there’s us: a ragtag bunch of convict descendants, indigenous communities and migrants, with no more of a written definition of what it means to be Australian than lofty, focus-group-honed political vernacular like “mateship” and “a fair go”, which don’t even begin to capture the diversity that lies within the country.

The concepts of mateship et al. describe a Western white land that isn’t the Australia I recognise and love. It doesn’t digest our ability to take the best from other cultures and imbibe it into the fabric of our lives. It doesn’t adequately encapsulate the freedoms we borrowed from the American idea, the history of our indigenous peoples or the rallying we’ve seen behind victims of floods and fire.

We are so much more than catchphrases.

Many think our cultural identity is under attack from an overarching Americanisation of the world (that in some areas of South America it’s easier to find a can of Coke than clean water is enough evidence to suggest US consumerism is far-reaching). Perhaps it is, but as globalisation continues to pervade every corner of the world the impetus is on us to draw an identity and avoid becoming a clone of our major cultural influencers.

We may not have a working definition, but I know we aren’t America, nor Europe, Asia or Africa. We’re a patchwork of their ideals, stitched with the narratives that show who we are, instead of using words that so profoundly fall short of capturing our spirit.

Around this time of year we gather to celebrate our similarities along with our differences, and the fact that we have a People’s March each year showcasing the diversity of our culture – our communal and multicultural pride at being Australian – is a beautiful thing. We are the sum total of every Australian, whether born here or not. We’re not our tourism ads or our stereotypes.

So maybe that’s our definition – we’re indefinable, by words at least. Australia is more easily defined by what we’re not than what we are: the bastard child of all nations, too young to really know what it wants to be when it grows up.

A Flinders University study describes culture as “a way of being, relating, behaving, believing and acting which people live out in their lives” and largely suggests homogenisation. We aren’t a homogenous community and therein lies our beauty. We come from every corner of the globe in pursuit of an idea that is better felt, deep in your gut, than ever spoken out loud.

The fact remains we are Australian, for what its worth – more easily shown than spoken. I’m bloody proud of it.

Meanderings

Australia Day, Australian, cultural identity, cultural imperialism, Melbourne

January 25, 2011

3 Comments

Is Twitter an egalitarian medium?

Twitter is heralded as many things: a dynamic, shifting news feed, a connector to millions of people, a powerful marketing tool, not to mention a chronic waste of time, a pointless exercise and the procrastination tool of students and workers alike. Indeed, the cafe in which I write this post followed me on Twitter which is how I found out about it. Though it struck me recently that Twitter, for all of its uses, is free of much of the superficialities of the world we live in (though it must be said, comes with just as many superficial banalities of its own).

It’s a medium with which people aren’t judged by their external beauty, or their fashion sense, like our day-to-day interactions with the real world. The users are judged by each 140-character witticism, link or sentence they choose to post. Unlike real life, Facebook or the once-useful MySpace (RIP), you’re judged on twitter by what’s in your head and how you choose to express it with the keys at the end of your fingertips.

It’s this, more than anything, that appeals to me (I hear you cry “He’s ugly!” as I type this). Being a young “professional”, I’m constantly being judged on my age or my tie or my $250 suit that I picked up three years ago because I needed something to wear at the races. On Twitter, where most of my followers haven’t the faintest idea what I look like, the decision is based on my writing rather than my appearance.

What a wonderful defining feature of a social media tool. Not only am I not judged, I don’t judge others subconsciously or otherwise. Many of the people I have struck up a relationship with on Twitter are faceless beings (who are a distinctly different group to the faceless men of the ALP). They’re a 150 x 150 pixel avatar, all willing to share 140 characters of themselves with anyone that cares to listen.

I wouldn’t know First Dog on the Moon or Drag0nista if I fell over them in the street, but they’ve all helped broaden my knowledge on politics exponentially over the six months I’ve been on Twitter. There are plenty of people I wouldn’t know who have helped me grasp my career in a way that far surpasses my limited years in the industry, especially in the area of social media. God, I wouldn’t have known how good the coffee is at @65degrees if they hadn’t have struck up a conversation with me.

It’s a medium that fights the first (visual) impression. A bunch of people that are united not by their subculture or age, but their ideas and interests – random strangers conversing in a way that can’t be replicated in any bar or networking evening that I’ve been to. This is because we aren’t plagued by the thoughts of “What happens if they think I’m a tool?” or “What about that guy? He looks a bit weird, doesn’t he?”

Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could do that in real life? Disconnect the immaterial and the superficial and strike up a conversation with someone, despite what they look like? I’m afraid it won’t happen, except for the lucky few that are blessed with the courage and confidence to do so. The fact remains that you can’t be honestly anonymous or free from judgement in real life. You can’t sit there in a bar and spout your thoughts on politics and Junior Masterchef to strangers – these things take time to build up. You need to ease into these things with real human beings as opposed to avatars. The beauty of Twitter, rightly or wrongly, is that you’re free from the constant nagging sensation that you’re being judged.

Twitter remains a (mostly) friendly place, regardless of whether you’re wearing tracksuit pants or an Armani suit, whether you’re 16 or 60, Jennifer Hawkins or… someone not as genetically gifted. Don’t get me wrong, the Twitterverse isn’t paradise or anything, but a world where you are judged on your mind, not your genetics is in many ways better than the one in which we co-exist. Even if it is only 140-characters-or-less at a time.

 

Social Media

Communications, I don't own many nice clothes, Relationships, social media, Twitter, Ugly

November 22, 2010

2 Comments

Defending Generation Y

I am from a generation which, rightly or wrongly, is consistently criticised. Perhaps more, perhaps less, than the generations that preceded us, but certainly vocally. It is a shame that there are still CEOs and upper echelons of business who would swear never to hire a Gen Y, with our three and a half second attention spans and “me-me-me” attitudes. To them I (perhaps arrogantly) say good luck and good riddance.

I am surrounded by charming, affable and talented Gen-Ys. The sort of people who, like an Angus and Julia Stone song, live on a diet of chocolates and cigarettes – pleasure-filled vices which show off our contempt for our youth because we’re all about the pleasure.

Many of us (unwittingly in some cases) stand for many of the things that are righteous and good in this world. We recognise that in the end, we are the only ones who have to live our lives and god damn it, we’re not going to hand them over to our bosses, our work and other trivialities without questioning why we’re doing what we’re doing and enjoying it. We’re going to fight the status quo, make sure that we’re creatively inspired, we’re learning and we’re growing. I mentioned in an earlier post that what drives me the most (and I think drives many of us regardless of generation) is the fear of stagnating and surely that is, at least partly, a good enough reason to push ourselves to succeed. As good a reason as any, anyway.

And we do want to succeed – we change jobs because the new ones hopefully offer us new challenges and take us closer to where we want to be. We are insatiable when it comes to opportunities and just because the generations before us have spent 30 or 40 years in one job, doesn’t mean that we won’t succeed because we don’t stay decades. In fact, I would argue au contraire – we’ll succeed more rapidly due to our broad skill-sets and ability to adapt to technology, workplaces and change.

Many of the most impressive of my ilk are motivated by fear, and what many people don’t recognise is that we’re all still kids in the wider scheme of things. We’re blindly stumbling along trying to work ‘it’ out (whatever ‘it’ is), and while we may occasionally stand up and shout for the things we stand for, we’re still spending a lot of time looking down at our feet and trying not to fall down.

We’re the first generation that has, quite literally, got the world at our fingertips. If I want to know how many different species of penguin there are, I can find it in the 0.11 of a second that a Google search takes (17 species for those of you playing at home). We’re inundated with information – it’s all around us just screaming to be absorbed, from advertisements to research papers, and we have access to all of them without having to take out a library card or pay fortunes for impressive leather-bound tomes.

It would be remiss of me not to mention some of our failings. I wholly accept that we’re at least partly responsible for fluoro tank tops and mobile phone music without headphones and those folk running rampant on Australian streets, blind-drunk and high, punching everything in their path. Yes, we’re the generation who’ll sit on your tax-payer funded trains, surrounded by filth and shit with our feet on the seats at 1am, looking much worse for wear due to the events of the evening – but that’s an unfortunate by-product of our insatiable lust for pleasure. I don’t believe that we’re the only generation to do this, but with the rise of 24-hour news cycles, it would seem that we’re facing a PR battle we just can’t win.

I do believe for the most part, we are a generation of ‘thinking fresh’, determined to work our own hours and who will protest with vehemence when we can’t listen to our iPods while we work. We want flexibility and choice and with the Internet being the beautiful curse that it is, we’ve got it.

We’re “view all 4,360 news articles”. We’re 140 characters or less. We’re instant. We’re now. We’re questions and we’re answers. We’re scared. We’re shitty. We’re sleep-ins and we’re late nights. We’re Friday nights and we’re Sunday beers. We’re ADD and we’re bipolar. We’re chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Above all else, we’re the future, and while I will postulate that we’re really good, we’re also the future, and that’s a responsibility that unfairly plagues every generation at some point. However, we’re reminded of this constantly, like an overbearing mother reminding you that one day it might not be so good and that bad things happen. But here’s the deal, world: It’s bloody good now, and let the chips lie where they fall.

We’re fatally flawed, I admit, but we’re nowhere near as bad as you think, I promise. We work hard, though perhaps not the 9-to-5 that is traditionally accepted. In fact, I’d go as far to say that many of the people I know rarely switch off work – we simply intertwine it with everything else. We have emails on our phones and remote access to servers and laptops and Twitter and facebook and SMS and MMS and Skype and that old-fashioned thing called the phone call which seems moreso than anything to be under threat of extinction. We’re contactable all the time and we respond most of the time.

The tired ramblings of generations before us need to stop. We want your love and affection. Instead of seeing us as know-it-alls and challengers to the system, see us as dynamic harbingers of change who’ll work until we’re bleary-eyed for you on the proviso that we’re being challenged and growing. Recognise that when we grow, you do too. Love us for being the mischievous scamp of a generation that we are – the lovable naughty kid that went to your school and even though they were being a badass, they could make the teacher smile and that got them out of trouble. We’re only acting up because we want attention, and that comes from a desire to be accepted and nurtured by you.

As for the future… Well… That’s far too forward looking for me.

 

A small side-comment: Apologies for not writing anything for the last month or so – it’s been a busy one. It seems that amongst everything else, writing has almost seemed a guilty pleasure for me. I promise I’ll be writing more down the track – not writing has taken far too much of a toll on my mood.

 

The necessities

Bleary Eyes, Generation Y, social media, The Future, Them's fightin' words

October 12, 2010

4 Comments

A topic worth talking about…

A small caveat post-writing this to start the piece: This is my personal blog and this is an incredibly personal topic. It’s been tough to decide whether I put this up or not, and I have decided to because I think it’s worth sharing, particularly as a male who suffers from depression. Depression has not affected me negatively in my professional life, in fact, it’s probably helped me more than hindered me because it’s made me doubly as driven to do something special, lift my game so to speak as I’m my harshest critic. My personal life is a different story, though. Anyway, on with the post:

I’m sad. Quite sad. Have been for the last few days, but I’m coming out of it now. Suffering depression, as I do, has led me to become resigned to the fact that this will almost certainly happen to me on a semi-regular basis for the rest of my life. As REM’s “Bad Day”, Nick Drake and an assortment of Eels songs waft out of my iPod dock, coating my room in some kind of melancholic stench, I question (as I inevitably do, during every one of my “episodes”) why I don’t just hop on the meds and remove myself of the bother of going through all this.

The only answer I can really come to is that I have some kind of perverse attraction to my condition. Perhaps because it makes me feel like I’m different, an individual, perhaps because I like my emotions too much to take a pill to suppress them, or perhaps it’s simply because I don’t like feeling like I don’t have some semblance of control (which is a little laughable, all things considered). There’s a particularly wonderful Eels song, where the opening lines are “Do you know what it’s like/to fall to the floor/ and cry your guts out ‘til you got no more/ Hey man, now you’re really living” – maybe that’s it.

That’s certainly not to say that I enjoy when I feel like this – the gnawing self-doubt, the panic attacks and the three or so hours I sleep a night because my brain won’t shut up telling me I’m a shit guy (not to mention that I’m a royal arse to everyone I know) – more that I enjoy feeling. I enjoy the fact that my semi-regular black spots are generally counteracted by an equally potent bounce-back, and that I appreciate them more for having felt like shit, along with everything else.

The thing is that I don’t actually have too much to be depressed about. I have a wonderful home life, amazing friends and a job that offers me more opportunity than most. I struggle with this every time as I look at my life compared to so many millions of others, and chastise myself for having the audacity to actually get depressed. This doesn’t help the situation in the slightest.

It is really such a horrible place to be in and, without seeking your sympathy, it is simply exhausting. I struggle wondering who to trust, who to talk to, who I should socialise with and lose every confidence in the gifts I’ve been lucky enough to cultivate over my short time on the planet.

To put it bluntly, it’s shithouse. I’ve tried to explain my condition verbally to friends and never quite succeeded. Stephen Fry describes the feeling as thinking that everything’s gone wrong “because you’re a c*nt”, I’ve even heard it described simply as intense feelings of sadness by a rather average psychologist – but that hardly covers it either.

For me the feeling is reminiscent of when your parents were disappointed in you – that gut wrenching feeling that you’ve let everyone down, except the fact is compounded because you’re both the disappointed and the disappointee. It this feeling that you not only could do better, but you should be better. It’s this thing where you realise that you’ve got lucky with all your talents and you’ve gone and squandered them like a miserly old man in the 1900s who carked it, had nobody at his funeral because it was raining and let’s be honest, he was a bit of a prick anyway.

The lucky thing is that I have a way out – writing. When I write (or read writing like this), I’m reminded that there is something in this world which is inherently beautiful and only corrupted by the worst kind of human. That words, when used properly, can be mellifluous from the page – even more so in the mind than their spoken counterparts.

To be honest (as I promised at the start I would be), when I’m in the depths of a hole, I feel that I write better, at least when writing about what’s in my head (as opposed to some kind of document for work) because I’m completely encompassed by what’s in it. I can’t be any other way. You can’t be half-arsed about depression. Similarly, when the up-time arrives, I’m encompassed by the beauty I know will exist on the other side of this.

I’ve gone on for far too long about this (NOTE: This has been edited down from five written pages), but I’ll end with this: Depression is a horrible, beautiful thing to me, and I say that as someone who suffers it moderately (I have unending sympathy for those who suffer it severely). It drives me and it destroys me. It softens me and makes me completely unfeeling. However, it has made me who I am, for what that’s worth. It characterises my relationships with my friends and family and without their support I have no idea where I’d be. So this post, more than anything, is both a call to action and a thank you to the people around me. If you know someone with depression, try to understand them – they do love you, I’m sure. And to my friends, I hope you’re around for many more years of my bullshit.

Uncategorized

August 24, 2010

21 Comments

The Political Personality Game

It would seem that the political game isn’t so fun anymore. I know plenty who do find it fun – the backstabbing, the competing policies, the promise of moving forward to a sustainable future with great big taxes and no boats. All that. There is a distinct lack of personality though.

Gone are the days when our Prime Minister could swear and drink and philander somewhat unashamedly, where they could have lives, hell, even be complete and utter screw-ups in their personal lives as long as they had a knack for running a country. We have entered (I accept we’ve been here for a while) a period where PR people work overtime around elections, crafting perfect little princes and princesses that the public can relate to, as opposed to actually communicating messages of relevance and importance to the public.

It’s unfortunate that, to the public at least, Julia and Tony have the personality of a cardboard box: one a “lame, gay, churchy loser”, the other a quiet woman who likes a glass of wine to end her busy day. When Gillard came out and said that we were all going to see the real her, I was hoping, even praying to the God that neither of us believe in, that she’d follow it up with “Now I’m off to smoke a cigarette, take a punt on Number 10, Race 8, and get on the Bundies and take a night off”. Not because that’s especially what I want from a Prime Minister, but it shows that it isn’t all manufactured.

I know that we should all be voting for policy instead of personality, but there isn’t enough policy being communicated effectively to those who don’t read Crikey or watch ABC. The political debate was a PR person’s key message list memories – it was all “fair dinkum” and “moving forward”. Even Julia’s big “coming out” (in the loosest sense of the word) was little more than her hopping on a media tour bus, because we all do that.

I’m not asking for a reefer-smoking, bad-mouthed, smartarse Prime Minister. I am however hoping that one day we’ll see some fire, some passion – something that goes above and beyond the sound bites these leaders talk in. There’s no doubt that both of the political candidates are fiercely passionate – you’d have to be to take the job of running a country where you get paid like crap (at least for the job that you need to do…) and scrutinised consistently – but it’s all behind closed doors. I’m tired of seeing highly media-trained, well dressed politicians. I’m tired of people in PR restricting the debate and making sure that our leaders are clean cut. More than that, more than all of it, I’m tired of being forced to go to the polls without having seen some real policy, apart from that which I’ve proactively sought out.

I mean, do we really think that whether or not our leader has done drugs, slept around, or once decided that it would be an awesome idea to head to the strippers after 30 cans matters? For god’s sake, at least they’ve experienced something. At least they’re real, they’re not just the figment of a PR person’s imagination as to what the public wants (which is, as mentioned, apparently the equivalent of a cardboard box, a mere shadow of some of their predecessors).

The sooner we get back to having real politicians, with a fiery passion about how the country should be run and a drive to truly better the country, the sooner the PR industry can go back to communicating instead of crafting, policy instead of key messages and substance in the place of style. Then the population can go back to making informed votes, instead of voting Greens in protest, Liberal because they like Tony and Labor because they like Julia.

It would seem that the political game isn’t so fun anymore. I know plenty who do find it fun – the backstabbing, the competing policies, the promise of moving forward to a sustainable future with great big taxes and no boats. All that. There is a distinct lack of personality though.

Gone are the days when our Prime Minister could swear and drink and philander somewhat unashamedly, where they could have lives, hell, even be complete and utter screw-ups in their personal lives as long as they had a knack for running a country. We have entered (I accept we’ve been here for a while) a period where PR people work overtime around elections, crafting perfect little princes and princesses that the public can relate to, as opposed to actually communicating messages of relevance and importance to the public.

It’s unfortunate that, to the public at least, Julia and Tony have the personality of a cardboard box: one a “lame, gay, churchy loser”, the other a quiet woman who likes a glass of wine to end her busy day. When Gillard came out and said that we were all going to see the real her, I was hoping, even praying to the God that neither of us believe in, that she’d follow it up with “Now I’m off to smoke a cigarette, take a punt on Number 10, Race 8, and get on the Bundies and take a night off”. Not because that’s especially what I want from a Prime Minister, but it shows that it isn’t all manufactured.

I know that we should all be voting for policy instead of personality, but there isn’t enough policy being communicated effectively to those who don’t read Crikey or watch ABC. The political debate was a PR person’s key message list memories – it was all “fair dinkum” and “moving forward”. Even Julia’s big “coming out” (in the loosest sense of the word) was little more than her hopping on a media tour bus, because we all do that.

I’m not asking for a reefer-smoking, bad-mouthed, smartarse Prime Minister. I am however hoping that one day we’ll see some fire, some passion. There’s no doubt that both of the political candidates are fiercely passionate – you’d have to be to take the job of running a country where you get paid like crap (at least for the job that you need to do…) and scrutinised consistently – but it’s all behind closed doors. I’m tired of seeing highly media-trained, well dressed politicians. I’m tired of people in PR restricting the debate and making sure that our leaders are clean cut. More than that, more than all of it, I’m tired of being forced to go to the polls without having seen some real policy, apart from that which I’ve proactively sought out.

I mean, do we really think that whether or not our leader has done drugs, slept around, or once decided that it would be an awesome idea to head to the strippers after 30 cans matters? For god’s sake, at least they’ve experienced something. At least they’re real, they’re not just the figment of a PR person’s imagination as to what the public wants (which is, as mentioned, apparently the equivalent of a cardboard box, a mere shadow of some of their predecessors).

The sooner we get back to having real politicians, with a fiery passion about how the country should be run and a drive to truly better the country, the sooner the PR industry can go back to communicating instead of crafting, policy instead of key messages and substance in the place of style. Then the population can go back to making informed votes, instead of voting Greens in protest, Liberal because they like Tony and Labor because they like Julia.

Politics

Julia Gillard, Personalities, Politics, PR, The Game, Tony Abbott

August 10, 2010

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Growing up…

I’ve reached a point where I need to grow up, I think. Not grow up in the sense that I want a couple of kids or a house, but more in that I need to start seeing the world in a way that goes above and beyond what I’m doing next Friday night.

It’s just a state of mind though, isn’t it? A certain… maturity of thought. It’s accepting that you’ll never be a rock star or a TV personality, and recognising that your parents don’t actually have their shit together.  That they’re simply guessing, taking on more responsibility with the same evolution of thought as us all (That “Oh… I should probably maybe kinda sorta possibly get that mortgage/find that partner/have those kids”).

That really does seem so bleak though, doesn’t it? If growing up is all about having more pressure to make money, cleaning up after yourself and considering which political party is most beneficial to the household’s bottom line (as opposed to any sort of political ideology), then consider me Peter Pan. A child of Generation Y whose sole purpose (if the literature on the subject is to be believed) is to drink and cavort, or perhaps simply listen to our iPods while watching TV on our laptops and sending emails on our phone to the person across the other side of the room about how totally passé Facebook is.

Growing up shouldn’t be about that junk though. I mean, really? Mortgages and kids? Ironing and car leases? Surely not! Maybe I’m delusional, but I’m really hoping that growing up is more about appreciation than anything else.

Appreciation of the kids you’ve had, your car, maybe, but also the moments in time where you’re sitting in a seedy bar with your three best mates and feel like screaming out “I love this moment!” ; the time you saw a wonder of the world and you truly recognised that a building can have the power to take your breath away (the Pyramids for me…); or even just looking out at the life you’ve built for yourself over a nice glass of red and saying to yourself that it ain’t all bad.

Because it’s not. We spend far too much time worrying about the minutiae of the most banal things, and not nearly enough time recognising the small details that are simply mind-blowingly awesome.

There was a wonderful blog I read recently which summed it up – how important it is to appreciate something (in this case, Joanna Newsom) for the sheer sake of appreciating something, and perhaps the revelations you can have by taking ten minutes out of your evening to just “fall over and stare at the night sky.”

(It sounds like I’ve had some sort of religious experience. I haven’t. I just realised recently that the bullshit isn’t worth it and my time could be much better spent in other places.)

The necessities

appreciation, Growing Up, I still have tiny teddies with my lunch, I STILL want to be a rockstar

July 26, 2010

4 Comments

Mother-tweetin’ celebrities

I had a top tweet the other day. I apparently made a funny. A terrible, terrible pun which offered me the recognition of over 100 people in the twitterverse, 50-odd new followers and a fleeting hope of being famous (and I mean Nike-ad famous…)

Alas, it wasn’t to be. It, like everything created in the last ten years, was forgotten today, except by one lovely follower who tweeted “ANOTHER GOLD #MASTERCHEF TWEET!” after I made a suitably unfunny joke involving Harry Potter.

She was the only one.

It was a sweet sentiment though, let’s be honest, and it was certainly appreciated. In hindsight, the tweet was really done more because I felt obliged to the universe to give myself another crack at infamy – perhaps fluking another witticism and setting a trend, catapulting me into the realms of prime time TV and radio or something.

Upon reflection though, I never realised how pervasive this technology actually is (social media and all that jazz) – how one stupid pun can go around the world within minutes. Obviously, I’ve read plenty of books, papers and articles on it, especially in relation to how it affects my job in PR, but it never really… clicked. I mean, I’ve given talks to people about how pervasive it is but they were just words that I’d heard, and “Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it”. I guess that applies to intelligence and trend-spotting, too.

Anyway, enough about me (I think that brings it to 900-ish words of narcissistic diatribe out of the thousand or so I’ve written at the point of writing this sentence), it brought me to thinking about what actually constitutes a celebrity in this day and age – where social media is no further than an arm’s length away for most people. Are we going to see a bunch of Perez Hilton-esque celebrities down the track, where the only necessity is to be a little off-beat, perhaps wittier than the majority and in some cases nastier?

I’m not sure how I feel about that. On one (perhaps more persuasive) hand, it gives incredible hope for those whose life dream it is to have some semblance of celebrity, and hopefully leads to more witty, off-beat celebrities. I’m sure a sort of Janis Joplin / Stephen Fry / DeAnne Smith combo exists out there and they’re just waiting to be found. The sort of celebrity who may be good looking, but it’s not a prerequisite for the gig. That would be wonderful! Not to mention a healthy change from the kids from Jersey Shore, whose goal, it seems, is to decrease BMI, increase muscle mass and practice procreating.

Anyway, I digress. The alternative is a lot more dystopian – I won’t go into detail, but the general concept involves a Big Brother (the show, not the idea) style world where every idiot with a loud mouth and an insatiable fondness for being watched takes centre stage. In the cheap seats we sit, whinging about how dumb so-and-so is and how we can’t believe that they would have the gall, the sheer insolence to suggest that blah-de-blah would take the cookies.

That would destroy me, I’d rather not have my mind-numbed by television. Imagine how wonderful it would be if our celebrities were in fact intelligent, witty people. It’s a shame that so few are.

Social Media

Celebrity, I'm phasing out the narcissism, Is intelligent celebrity an oxymoron?, Pass me the remote, social media

July 20, 2010

3 Comments

A little hello.

I don’t like hellos. Or any type of greeting for that matter. I’d rather just jump straight into the mind-blowing conversation (or mind-numbing soliloquy as the case may be) but society dictates otherwise. To understand a person, it’s a necessity to understand what they perceive about themselves, as well as learning the variety of undeniable facts which characterise their day to day activities. This little piece will be a somewhat, and unashamedly so, narcissistic exercise. Essentially, this puts into context the unreliable, somewhat uninformed meanderings of a twenty-something scruffy guy, living in Melbourne with big plans to ship off at some stage.

I work in PR: I also have no qualms about what I do. I struggle, as many people do, with the ins-and-outs of my industry and the moral implications that come with representing somebody’s point of view to a media which reaches thousands of people. But I deal with it. I’m fascinated by organisational culture and the views of Dan Pink wholeheartedly resonate with me.

I am a social media junkie: I am almost the definition of Gen Y. I facebook and tweet and (now) blog for two reasons:

• Because I find the concept incredible: how humans use these tools to get all of their modern day needs: love, friendship, sex, discussion, a feeling of community and news, amongst the many other things this medium gives us.
• And because I, like so many of my peers, have an overwhelming desire to connect and be connected with everyone, all the time.

I would like to believe the internet is not making us less intelligent, but I do have reservations about the impact on the written word.

The written word is a beautiful thing: Throughout high school, university and now work, I’ve always been more comfortable with a pen in my hand than a keyboard. I find a kind of perverse beauty in a completely blank page as it has unlimited possibilities. I love Thomas Berger’s quote “Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.” And while I wouldn’t consider myself a writer, I am deeply envious of those who are. It never ceases to astound me how people throughout history have turned blank pages into documents outlining certain inalienable truths, documents causing war and peace, or documents which have been read and enjoyed by millions of people previously and will be enjoyed by millions to come.

I am constantly curious: I also firmly believe that curiosity, while it may have had unpleasant consequences for the cat, is a moral imperative for us human beings. We have to push ourselves to learn as the alternative is stagnating, and to be perfectly honest, I can’t think of anything worse. I sponge information from wherever I can get it, whether it be reading the news or books, watching a documentary or movie, listening to podcasts or (my personal favourite) talking to people. I enjoy people. I am insatiable when it comes to hearing about other people’s thoughts, their fears, their ambitions and their… shit (for lack of a better word).

I am fiercely passionate about everything: I certainly don’t see this as a bad thing and it has been described previously as endearing, however I honestly can’t fathom living my life any other way. If I can’t get passionate about something then I have trouble committing to it. However, passions often fade and we’ll see how long this blogging experience goes. Who knows, this may just be a testament that I can offer to the nature of fleeting passion and the inability of Generation Y to concentrate on anything for more than 40 seconds.

There are plenty of things which make me up. God, there are always plenty of things which make everyone up. These are just the things which warranted a paragraph in my mind. I’m also a smoker, a drinker, a conflicted little boy and a lover of all music from 2pac to Rachmaninov to the tiny indie rock band you’ll only ever see once at your local pub because, like many of my ilk, they got bored and decided to dedicate themselves to having a million followers on twitter. I’m also a theatre fan and terribly cynical at times.

So I guess this blog is partially an exercise of conceit . I hope it isn’t. I hope that (as Edward R. Murrow put so eloquently) it helps me to “exalt the importance of ideas” like many of my journalistic and communications-based friends, rather than just being a platform for me to bitch and moan about how hard it is to be me. I’ll endeavour not to write it after drinking and will always attempt to marshal my facts to the best of my abilities.

It also is my offering to the “Gods of the Internets”. Our privacy is diminishing so quickly and I only hope that information I put up here satiates these Gods so the things I like to keep private are kept that way. In saying that, this blog also allows me to proactively engage with the concept of privacy and what it means in a world of tweets and status updates, not to mention the rigmarole which inevitably comes with it.

Goodness gracious, for someone who doesn’t like greetings that was one hell of a “Hello, my name’s Mike.”

The necessities

Does anyone read these tags?, greetings, Hello, Ideas, Let's get this started, PR, social media, This is ALL that makes me up?

July 17, 2010

4 Comments