San Diego Freeway

A Long Time Ago In Another Lifetime

Around the time I left AFTRS, I took a trip out to La-La Land. It was an eye-opener. I hung out for a few days and did some meetings. I got told afterwards that there's something called piss theory whereby if you're in the building of a major Hollywood Studio and you're taking a piss in one of their toilets you're doing something right. I think that pee I took at 20th Century Fox's lot was possibly the high point then. 

At some point I took my rental car down to San Diego and then across the border to Tijuana where tourists go. I had a lot of time to sort of just think about what I had experienced and somehow didn't think about what I was going to do next. That's the problem of being traumatised - your trauma dictates what bandwidth you have to figure out the serious things. One thing I can see now is that I'm incredibly bad at this 'career' thing. 

Tijuana back then was funny-sad, unlike some other places I had been to at that point in my life. It struck me that in life we all carry our heartaches into the next day like some Kerouac novel, and so I ended up with this song. 

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The New New Song

Get It Out

I mentioned iCompositions in the last couple of posts and I have to say at its peak in the late 2000's, it was a pretty vibrant community. What eventually brought it its knees was the mass exodus that took place to Facebook. Facebook stole from iCompositions the very people who were communicative in the forums. With the added freedom to discuss politics and whatever else that was banned on the iComp forum, there was enough pent up energy for Web2.0 denizens to head over to Facebook. By the time 2014 rolled around, you had the feeling that only the die hards for music were still hanging around. 

The pattern with most artist was that they posted one song and were done. I don't know if this is what Steve Jobs had in mind when he bundle Garageband for free with the Mac, but the vast majority of people that showed up to iCompositions had 1 song, and they were done. The  community itself was made up of stayers who had much more than 1 song. The stayers generally had about 30 songs they had recorded which they would bring in and that catalogue would be their calling card. Then, they would either manage to settle into a groove of producing something every week or every fortnight, and maybe get up to 80 or so tracks. Most artists who had the staying power to produce 50, probably had the staying power to produce 80-100. Artists who produced 100 tracks were actually the rarer breed. 200 was very impressive and anything over 500 was probably a cause to suspect OCD more than creative genius.

While one couldn't judge much from just quantity, once could get a sense of the commitment of an artist from how regularly people posted and how many tracks they had piled up. And so, it was like a war of attrition where you were always looking for a new idea, a new angle and a new way to get to a song. I don't know if I would willingly put myself into that environment again - I kind of feel like my modus operandi has evolved significantly enough that it's not compatible with that mode of rushing something new out regularly. That, was hard work

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Living With Regrets Is A Boring Thing

But I've Had A Few

Every artist lives a double life. It doesn't matter if they're good or bad, or working visual media or sound, or something else entirely, the thing about being any kind of purveyor of creative output is that side of you is inevitably a different persona to what you are really like as a human being. It's not really widely understood by the regular punter who does not undertake the messy journey to creator-hood, but when  you commit to making stuff, you essentially grow a second persona inside of you and, that artist self can have a helluva different character to you. 

Anyway, I say that because most artists who are committed to their thing spend a heck of a lot of time in an almost hallucinatory obsessive space to do with their creative work. If you're anything like Modigliani, you spend an inordinate amount your time thinking about curved lines that delineate the female form in various poses. And if you're anything like Frank Zappa, you're busily trying to tweeze out the weird from the mundane and wrap a song around it. The world of creative endeavours is filled with people living these unseen second lives. Then they get interviewed, and the wrong persona answers the questions on behalf of the wild person doing the art. That's why all interviews are suspect - but that is by the by.

The important thing is, with me, I tend to mull over the things I regret just to get to my output. And one day I finally got bored of that being my process. 

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Politics Makes The World Go Around

... And Bad Politics At That

Back in the days of iCompositions, it seemed worth writing songs to communicate concepts about say politics or sex or taxation or ethics in a the lyrics - mainly because I was in the most part talking to my fellow musicians. The music was self-evident, the lyrics were not. And then of course there is a crowd that gets into a song from the lyrics first, even when they themselves are musicians. 

Now that I'm releasing some of this older material, it does stick out to me as kind of out of place to be sending out a song that made more sense in another context (iCompositions) than where it will be found (Spotify). Which goes to show that meaning is indeed context driven and socially determined. On a more pedestrian level, songs like this probably don't mean a whole bunch outside of the iCompositions context. 

This number was written sometime in 2014, so it predates the Trump Presidency, but it does take in the early part of his campaign to win over the Republican primaries. Australia already had the outcome-of-stupid whereby Tony Abbott was elected Prime Minister, so you got the ever-looming picture that Trump was going to be a helluva trip to survive. Maybe or politics has grown a bit more sane since those heady days when Putin was paying his cyber army to sow discord in the west through Social Media. (Yes, Putin really is a cunt - let us never forget that). The upside of all that is that some people grew out of their stupidity, eventually. It's a shame it took the attempted coup to sober tip the Republican base. 

Even all that seems a long time ago now.

As always, come join the fun.

Evil Woman Blues

Evil Censorious AI  

I've been playing with ChatGPT lately. It's quite a fun tool to thrash, but I have discovered it is a moralist and a fairly primitive one at that. I asked it to describe the story of Pony the Orangutan in the style of Bukowski, and it was okay doing that. Then I asked it to describe the story of Josef Fritzl in the style of Kathy Lette and it censored itself. I then interrogated it about its self-censorship, but it would not give me what I asked, on the grounds it might offend people. Of course the joke is, I'm not 'people' that gets offended by content, especially one that I asked it to describe. 

Anyway, here's a totally unrelated song. 

Splitsville With Suzie

 Yep, WhatEva

A lot's happened in the course of the last few months. I apologise for not being around, but when you're looking for a place to move to, it has a way of eating your time and consciousness. The last thing you want to do is blog. The second last thing you want to do is think about blogging. It's that kind of thing. A Lithuanian told me they consider a fire that burns down your house to be equivalent to two houses moved. 

During this insane time in late January, I got approached to join a band, and so in a span of 3 weeks weeks we put together 5 rehearsals and 2 shows. It was pretty manic with everything else going on. At the second show, I ran into none other than Professor AB. I hadn't seen the good professor since... oh when he went off to the USA to do some important things. I don't even recall if it was his Post Doc or a teaching post. Anyway, he'd been back for a while and teaching at UNSW. 

I met professor AB back in first year at university. He was studying Science and I was doing Medicine (or more precisely the Faculty of Medicine was doing me over). I got introduced to him as the resident mathematics genius - and yes, he really was one of those. You can meet a lot of people who can get marks, but not many people who have profound insight into mathematics as a field at the age of 18-19. He was one of those prodigious talents.  

Back then, he was dating one of my classmates who shall only be named as Kerry the Jam-Jabber here. That relationship ultimately didn't work out but for short while our social lives intersected. We both broke up with our *terrible* girls and sort of drifted off into different social circles for a while but we kept running into one another. I don't have any friends from my time at the Faculty of Medicine, but I do have a few friends from my time at the University of Sydney, and the good Professor is one of them. 

It really was a gas to run into him. Anyway... let's see now. The band I'm playing in is called WhatEva, and we play punk rock. Do come and check us out if you see that name. 

In the mean time, here's a song about breaking up with a starlet. 

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Housing Crisis Blues

We Bought A Place

In all this chaos, my better half and I bought a place. It's an apartment in Sydney's Southwest, close to the station. It was time. This blog started the last time I was in home ownership and continued through the years I became a renter again. This blog isn't about housing but over the years the renting thing and the housing bubble made me think deeply about the topic. Until the pandemic I had no idea if I would ever get back into ownership ever again, but then a few things went my way for a change, and I could get something going with my better half. It's not much, but - it turns out it's something-not-nothing.

I didn't inherit my chunk of money. My parents are elderly but still alive. I got it through investing in small cap shares - and boy have I a story to tell there, but that's for another day. All I can say is sometimes you get the breaks and when you do, you really ought to capitalise on them. One thing we're glad is that we got to avoid the hellish rental market. Having pets tends to make you gun shy about applying for a rental. This way we get to keep our cat and birds without too many questions. 

We got told by the strata management that if the cat and birds made too much noise they might be asked to leave the residence. I wanted to ask how about the two screaming kids on our floor? Can they be asked to leave the residence? 

Everybody's Talkin' (About Real Estate)

It just sucks that property is the paramount topic for people to discuss. You go to dinner with some people and eventually property ends up being the topic of the conversation. Back when I was a teen, the most boring conversations were about the weather, quickly followed by property. Weather got interesting over time, thanks to Global Warming; property, has not. 

People in Sydney are aware how absurd prices have gotten. The numbers bandied about in normal conversation for middle class people went over $1 million some time ago, and since then there has been a weird feeling that all of Australia has become millionaires if you could just buy that house in the 'burbs. It's demented. Conversations invariably turn on if it is worth it. In these conversations, worth and price tag does a pax de deux in the conversation without actually drawing a conclusion. People without a mortgage or property then are the outright losers in society, but honestly, that is turning into a demarcation between generations. 

This is in stark contrast to the way things were seen in the past. Back in the day about 30 odd years ago, the great fear was that the majority of the Baby Boomer generation would go into their dotage without sufficient savings. After all Superannuation in Australia came into existence well late into their active careers. Various tax concessions wee designed to shore up the savings for the Baby Boomers, and thirty years later we find they hold a lot of property that is now worth a stupendous amount of money. It is the young who cannot begin to get into the property market without a leg up from their Baby Boomer parents. The two saving graces in all of this is that they can't take it with them when they die, and they will die. 

Which, in a weird way brings me back to the point - that it is weird that we've become so obsessed over the roof over our heads at the expense of all else that life has to offer.

But You Need A Roof

As it turns out, a roof over your head is something that you can't just not have. Homelessness is a terrible thing in a society where we have to own stuff to get along, and we need a box in which to place these things. I have no special love for my refrigerator or washing machine, but they must go somewhere. As do book cases and shelving for all the physical media I still possess. We become beholden to the stuff we own. As with food and clothing (and now internet) we cannot get along without it. We cannot be hunter gatherers wandering from cave to cave across the steppes chasing some now-extinct megafauna. 

The housing crisis that is gripping this land is in its essence a gross miscalculation on the part of the money people where they have commodified the one thing we cannot do without. This has necessarily caused  a homelessness crisis to run parallel to the housing crisis where even people on good money can't seem to get a place to live. Housing as a financial instrument has been nothing short of a disaster. If it was made to help Baby Boomers who came too late to the superannuation party, then the whole property bubble party that's been going for 3 decades has more than made up for their late start. The corresponding expansion in the Gini coefficient can't be ignored too much. 

I don't know how all this gets wound back and wound down. We may be stuck with this terrible situation for decades more. It has only been going for 30 odd years, why would it stop now? Why would it be wound back overnight when so many vested interests are standing guard against real change? 

With A Little Vision

If you look at the current major cities of Australia, the vested interests have locked themselves in tight. There is no winding it back without mass electoral revolt. Neither major party can realistically wind back the advantages, but it can start anew. Each state should look to establish new cities where there is nothing right now - a but like how Canberra was built. They should move the capitals and State Parliaments to the new cities, and take government bureaus with them. The new cities with newer zoning systems built from scratch to make sure housing will always be affordable in the places. They should be planned for medium density with public transport, and maybe even be given some tax incentives to build there. 

If you start with tracts of cheap land, at least you have a shot at housing more people with less money. If you plan for medium density, you have a shot at creating urban spaces that won't accelerate to insane prices as the city develops. It would be a genuinely egalitarian approach to urban planning.  

Of course, it would never happen because our politicians are so attached to the current capital cities in each state and that is why I say it would need a little of that vision thing. The alternative is to keep going the way we we are and further entrench inequality. something tells me this is exactly what the political classes want.