1st PPP a Student's Response

After the PPP in April one of the callmesquare students delivered a speech to her peers:

I was lucky enough to attend a gathering recently that was called the PPP. Short for the People’s Performance Project. The aim of the gathering was for new writers to read and act out their works, musicians to play their music, and for people to get out and meet new people.

There was a very diverse range of people there including gay couples, lesbian couples, hetero couples, interracial couples and a man named Christian with cerebral pausy. The age ranged from 13 years of age to the oldest being the 67 year old left wing feminist lesbian named Joan.

After we had all had the opportunity to perform our works, Christian then gave a short speech. Although it took him some time to get to the speakers spot and some of what he said was hard to understand, it hit me that it was not what he was saying that was important, the point was that, in this group of 70 people, he had actually been given the opportunity to speak. People had stopped to intently listen to what he was trying to say.

This group of people were getting to know each other, looking past each others’ differences and just being people together.

You’ve all heard debates and speeches where one side will say “but it’s unnatural” and the opposition will say “but we’re all one people” but things like that only skim the surface of the issue.

You can’t force a person to change their mind. All we can do is set an example and educate. The way to combat the problems of discrimination and hate is to give people the opportunity to go out and meet this people that are different to them and to then realise that we’re not so different after all.

2nd People's Performance Project

At the latest People's Performance Project (PPP) this afternoon, there was group dancing (the audience had to get up and dance), circus tricks, spoken word, belly dancing, a slide show and a fury little dog which humped a cushion while a girl read heart-felt poetry (I don't think this was part of the act). Amelia, Tailor and Tess from the first PPP went too. It was so good. The event succeeded in making a private space (the hosts' backyard) public, bridging gaps and building communities by bringing disparate groups together. The last piece was a slide show made by one of the presenters - it was made up of a series typed words and photographs that told a story. Kind of hard to explain but it was such a great way to tell a story - like a silent picture show. Anna from ewash Laundromat was also there (she's featuring in mine and Andrea's trop fest film) and was interested in hosting a future event in the Laundromat.

Network Cities and the Global Structure of the Internet

This looks interesting:

abstract:
Cities have played an important role in the process of globalization as centers for information exchange. Urban scholars note that a handful of dominant financial services centers—so-called global cities—has dominated international telecommunications networks. Yet, these and others have failed to understand how new telecommunications technologies, particularly the Internet, are enabling a far broader diffusion of international interurban connectivity, a far more complex global web than in earlier eras. This article presents evidence on the Internet backbone in which traditionally dominant urban hubs for international communications—London, New York, and Tokyo—are increasingly being supplemented by other hubs within their regions. The global structure of the Internet reflects a shift in the geography of telecommunications networks and the emergence of a network of network cities. To cope with this challenge, urban planners are urged to address three issues: dependency on other cities and urban areas, accessibility to global Internet backbone networks, and proficiency with communications technology.

ANTHONY M. TOWNSEND

New York University

http://abs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/44/10/1697

and for statistics of internet use:
http://www.cybergeography.org/statistics.html

The Soap Box

cartoon sourced from: Bibi's Box

Kermie Pin up

Masters Proposal

I'm still working out the purpose and subject of investigation for my masters of education. I've been running a youth group for a while and have been getting more involved with events at Kew High, thus starting to narrow down my focus:

Key questions:
What are the circumstances in which teenagers find themselves today?
What are the issues, restrictions and expectations facing them?
How do they understand themselves and their world - what are the realities they construct and why?
How do they engage with and respond to these factors they have identified and others such as the media, environmental issues, etc?
If they resist any of these forces how do they do it and why? - what is the nature of this resistance, what can be learnt from their approach? * linking to Naomi Klein's ideas of windows (pockets of resistance) and fences (hostile forces)

I want to write about:
representation and constructions of reality, youth voices and resistances to dominant ideologies/ways of seeing
eg constructions of identity as 'drawn' on the body through clothing, piercing, etc
propaganda and marketing directed at youth, constructions of youth by non-youth

How I want to research this:
- formal and informal group discussions/interviews with members of the callmesquare youth creative arts group (years 9-12 high school students from various schools in the Eastern Suburbs)
- youth creative arts projects in which students nominate community-focused projects to support and initiate. Thus forming very real responses/resistances to social forces and circumstances, validating and providing spaces to express their concerns and interests
- getting the students to develop and use their creative talents for very real audiences and purposes - using some of the material they create as artefacts for analysis
- asking the students to write reflections and co-write some of the pieces eg Emo Punk and Sca as a means to get them talking on their own behalf

End product:
A series of cultural studies style articles (eg Naomi Klein's No Logo or The Cultural Studies Reader) that narrate and reflect, each focusing on one aspect of youth culture or a dilemma facing youth

Main theorists:
* Stuart Hall: representation and meaning making
John Berger: Ways of Seeing
Baudrillard and Barthes: 'Reading' Fashion
Umberto Eco: hyper-reality/hyper efficiency, consumerism, decoding
The Subcultural Reader: subcultural characteristics and practices

Capitalism - Anya Says

ANYA: ..So I've been reading a lot about the good ole us of A. Embracing the extraordin- arily precious ideology that's helped to shape and define it.

WILLOW: Democracy?

ANYA: Capitalism. A free market dependant on the profitable exchange of goods for currency. A system of symbiotic beauty apparently lost on these old people. Look at 'em. Perusing the shelves, undressing the merchandise with their eye-balls. All ogle, no cash. It's not just annoying, it's un-American.

GILES: Appalling. Almost as if they no longer think money can buy happiness.

ANYA: Totally un-American.

Salon Glare

yellow strips like barley sheaves dry and split loop with umber bangs lashings of auburn kiss-curls raven cowlicks and silver manes severed but twisting tangling alive like snakes

hands spindly work transformative rituals of braiding dying slicing reconstructing heads with eyeballs gently covered by cucumber slices lips caressed smoothed by beeswax gloss honey-chi flavoured skin replenishing below thick creams and scrubs of apricot and oatmeal

this is a moment a fragment within a continuum of shifting remakings the specifics have changed through time but the significations and the practices remain the same beauty respectability access power desire at the core of rituals within salons

______________________________________________________

dressing for this adventure you’d donned a hat to hide the regrowth the frizz the fluff the out of fashion style and decided your appearance was acceptable agreeable but now surrounded by dozens of yourself distorted in carnival mirrors you wonder ‘where’d you get that getup?’ the receptionist twirls the phone cord scribbling into appointment books while you wait in front of her reimagining yourself as you are framed here: nose small and neat? bulbous! pores clear? oil wells oozing! wrinkles great cliffs and black pits below your eyes bulging fat pockets poking out in clothes poorly fitting and faded

you are on display splayed open stripped each vulgarity highlighted in lights bright later when you’ve been reworked she may dim the uglifiers meanwhile however I dare you to meet your own eyes in the mirror as Kitty escorts you to your seat…

now what is it that you want from her? a tidy up? a trim? a reinvention? upon departing who is it you want to be?
______________________________________________________

bleached blondes dolled up dulled out you’re one of them might be in fifteen minutes after the ticker has chimed and it’s time to wash your mop in the cold porcelain bowl find yourself blind from neck spasms chemicals bedazzle of beautician wit and the gloss of today’s spectacular outfit

you could get your fingernails done or a pedicure but would you put those bunioned feet on parade? Festy foot stinking skin flaking we can all see your tinea!

______________________________________________________

remembering Laura Palmer head wrapped in plastic treatment healing your dry ends but also trickling slowly into your left ear muffled sounds from the apprentice seep in and itch: something about Jo Mark Spiro Jin sister’s boyfriend cousin’s brother guy next door is a creep and mother is pressuring her to get married and squeeze out the grandkids all he wants to do is meet some sweet guy and settle down the whole white picket fence and a dog and some daffodils bored with that just wants to do the scene the whole glitter and glam shrug off the breeder mentality you know always wanted to travel visit the Taj Mahal Milan Mozambique Alcatraz anywhere that sounds exotic even if it is a prison

better just to close your eyes pretend you’re asleep hope you don’t walk out with a mohawk

a radical definition

What does it mean to be radical?
Paulo Freire provides a definition:

Radicalization involves increased commitment to the position one has chosen. It is predominantly critical, loving, humble, and communicative, and therefore a positive stance.

The man who has made a radical option does not deny another man's right to choose, nor does he try to impose his own choice. He can discuss their respective positions. He is convinced he is right, but respects another man's prerogative to judge himself correct. He tries to convince and covert, not to crush his opponent.

The radical does, however, have the duty imposed by love itself, to react against the violence of those who try to silence him-of those who, in the name of freedom, kill his freedom and their own. ..Radicals cannot passively accept a situation in which the excessive power of a few leads to the dehumanization of all.

p9 Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. Continuum: London, 1974.

Yay Giles

"He though it would behoove me to have more contact with the students. I did try to explain that my vocational choice of librarian was with a deliberate attempt to minimize said contact, but, uh, he would have none of it." (About Principle "Fuehrer" Snyder, The Puppet Show)

"But that's the thrill of living on the Hellmouth! There's a veritable cornucopia of fiends and devils and ghouls to engage. (pause) Pardon me for finding the glass half full." (The Witch)

Scandal is

"A media scandal occurs when private acts that disgrace or offend the idealized, dominant morality of a social community are made public and narrativised by the media, producing a range of effects from ideological and cultural retrenchment to disruption and change"

(Lull and Hinerman, "The Search for Scandal.” In Media scandals and desire in the popular cultural marketplace. Lull & Hinerman (eds) Oxford: Polity, 1997.)

Finding Voice Amid Media Yap Yap

Amid a blizzard of white noise we attempt to make sense of events manufactured as scandal. Interpreting media events, or media fiction, requires the grabbing of short bursts of information and assembling yet another story told on-the-go with barely a backward glance. There simply isn’t enough time, there is too much data and it is always already framed by the medium and perspective through which it is presented.

All media stories are subject to the same fixed range of circumstances, they are representations, back dropped by the same moral codes, made real by and structured within the same mediums through which they are created (television, gossip mags, newspapers, etc all have their own characteristics, qualities and therefore range of possible outcomes). The stories’ scope is determined by, not so much the cultural moment in which they occur (the local or global events happening around them at that particular moment), but rather the medium and ideologies through which they appear.

The stories themselves are never closed, static or fixed. They are ever reshaping, morphing into what appear as new faces, new images, new ideas and new phenomena, but as signs they are all equivalent. It is not the story that is of importance. The story is a sign framed within a structure of media discourse. The performance is the manner in which the discourse occurs or operates rather than the story itself. If the ‘story’ doesn’t fit within the structure it doesn’t exist, if it isn’t considered newsworthy by the media elite, it isn’t news - it isn’t a story, it isn’t known.

Once upon a time, the genre of World News involved the reporting of international events in the international community. Today, however, World News details the actions of Australians ‘in the world’. This shift may seem minor, however, it signals a momentous change in our thinking or, at least, in the ideologies that the media elite choose to present as Truth. Occurring shortly after the September 11 attack on America, when we were suddenly inundated by an endless stream of America news, Other world news was replaced. We no longer appear to receive a world overview from multiple perspectives but rather are given short pockets of pleasant or shocking stories about ourselves, told from an Anglo-‘Australian’ perspective. Most stories, local or international, revolve around set themes including, Australian values, nationalism, safety and threat, invasion, family, home, etc. Bombarded by these themes, it is difficult for ‘us’ to know ‘ourselves’ outside them.

Of course this discomfort does not reflect a shift in truth or reality. The media is not ‘pulling the wool over our eyes’. The discomfort simply marks the shift in our perceptions. Perhaps it is only when we dislike the characteristics of certain frameworks, and the understandings made possible by them, that we finally come to examine them more closely. News was always already framed by the presenter’s judgement over what is, or what is not, newsworthy. It was always already an invention. There is no scandal, there is no world news, only a perception of it. If we don’t like the kind of scandals and news we receive today, it is because the signs have shifted (to fit the framework that supports a new elite), or rather our way of knowing them has changed and we are unhappy with this. All mediums, all methods of communication prioritise and privilege. Perhaps this new framework conflicts with our own principals and values.

Although it is helpful to think that we might gain agency by understanding the method by which these frameworks operate, we must acknowledge that all understandings are to be had within frameworks. There is no one truth ‘outside’ any of them. There are only many truths determined by many frameworks. So a continual question, as we write, talk, kick and scream - engage in social discourse - might be ‘how can we know what we know?’ Although the blizzard of deafening yap yap is endless, it is not difficult to decipher themes. Our task then might be to respond, not to the stories themselves because they are mere signs, but to the over all narratives being passed off as Truth. At a time when one voice has monopolised public communication, counter discourses are imperative.

Giles says

Welsey: Mr. Giles. I'd like your opinion. While the last thing I want to do is model bad behavior in front of impressionable youth, I wonder if asking Miss Chase to dance would...

Giles: For God's sake, man, she's eighteen. And you have the emotional maturity of a blueberry scone. Just have at it, would you, and stop fluttering about.

Wesley: Right, then. Thanks for that.

caught in the vector of spoils/boring as bat dung

Initially, I was interested by the function Big Brother performed - it is a global media event in which so many countries and so many people participate - I was interested in the type of sense we might make of ourselves in this latest representation of 'reality'. There is also the on going feedback loop between viewer and BB housemate. Lines appear blurred - are the housemates characters, actors, real people, celebrities? Are the viewers participants? To what extent does BB shape 'reality'? The show makes a pretense towards social experiment, initially it promised (did it?) to show human behaviour as it 'really' is or 'really' could be. It appears interactive - we as viewers seem to be able to influence outcomes. But so what? What does it mean?

Once upon a previous season, my flatmates and I were participating, by voting, gazing, talking, we were part of a national media vector linked into the BB house in our own house. During eviction night, with the TV on, we watched the Housemates on their couch, gazing at Gretel in the box on the wall, their actions were mirroring our actions. We were all connected and just as they were shaping our lives we were shaping theirs (we could kick them out and they could determine our conversation patterns and personal interactions). Part of the reason we watched with such dedication was that it had wider implications to our everyday lives. If we weren't switched on we weren't switched on. It wasn't 'just' a matter of wondering 'does BB reflect reality or create it?' but rather the intrigue of watching it become embedded in our consciousness', watching it become culture, watching ourselves watching. It doesn't matter if you like BB or not, think it's good or crap, the fact is if you're not watching you have no idea what's going on in 'the world' - you can't participate in 'real' life conversations that involve this show.

As i write this, my new flatmate Matt has switched the TV over to BB and Perri is showering in a bikini and stilettos. Jamie is crying again and Camilla is saying "it was so surreal.." and Claire is saying "I feel like they're dead" (John and Ashley have just been evicted for 'sexual misconduct' whereby Ashley slapped Camilla in the face with his penis while John held her down). And now the three of us Petie, Matt and I are berating them, laughing and agreeing with each other's degrading comments towards these social lepers who, ironically, have lost none of our interest. The camera is positioned behind Perri, we can see right up her sarong and I really don't want to, but I can't stop staring. I really want to leave the room but I can't. If I removed myself from the room I would be removing myself from the conversation, from the interactions with my flatmates that occur around the program. I would also be excluded from conjecture outside my house - in the 'real' world. So, I haven't stopped writing about BB and I haven't stopped talking about it and I keep watching it even though I don't like it or rather i don't like my consumption of it. So what do you do?

Surfaces